A Day of Small Beginnings (27 page)

21

N
ATHAN WAS SHOCKED BY
R
AFAEL’S CONFESSION, BUT HE COULD
not make sense of it. He could accept as fact that if Rafael was three in 1906, he was eighty-nine now. But to comprehend
that Rafael had known his father, that the story of Jan the peasant’s death was true, required more imagination than he could
immediately summon. He said nothing.

Rafael smiled. “I have remembered your father all my life,” he said. “Itzik Leiber came out of the night like an angel—an
angel with no meat on his bones.” He pointed to the other side of the room and shook his finger emphatically, as if Nathan
should be able to see Pop there as clearly as he did. “He did not have to save us. He was safe, hidden in the dark. But he
ran to our lantern, to that
cham,
Jan the peasant.” He shook his head. “Ach! You should have heard him. The man laughed like a devil. I was the first to see
Itzik coming to us. Even in that dark, I saw he had a fury in him, a fire. How such a skinny boy could refuse to be afraid,
this I would never forget.”

Nathan tried to imagine it. But the only fire he’d ever seen in his father was when Pop argued that one-note philosophy he
called socialism and reduced every situation to the same equation. The strong oppress the weak. The weak have a duty to organize
and to throw off the tyrants’ yoke. Increasingly, Nathan had found his father’s views intellectually irritating. Once, he
stood up and left the room when Pop started in.

“What? You think this has nothing to do with you, Mr. Big Shot Professor?” Pop had called after him.

Rafael reached over and grabbed Nathan by the wrist. “Like this your father stopped Jan from bringing the whip down on me!”
He yanked the startled Nathan’s arm above his head. “The horse went up on its back legs, took the wagon with it. Jan fell
under a wheel. It crushed his head. He was finished. We couldn’t believe it. Itzik said run, so we ran. We left them there,
Jan and him. Two dogs tied at the tail, yeh?” Angrily, he waved the thought away, releasing Nathan’s wrist. “I never saw your
father again.”

Gingerly, Nathan touched a corner of Pop’s handkerchief and, with some difficulty, said, “He never told me about you or this
man, Jan.” A truck rumbled by the house, briefly blanketing the room in shadow. In the closed, dusty corner where they sat,
Nathan felt a chill. “I’m sorry,” he said, adjusting his glasses, “I had no idea, and it’s hard for me to see my father the
way you describe him. He became a very different sort of man. As long as I can remember, he always had plenty of meat on his
bones.” He cleared his throat. “Pop argued with radio announcers and at the newspaper he read. He talked as if his socialist
propaganda was going to change the world, but he never stood up for anything or anyone in public. When he wasn’t working,
what I remember him doing most was sitting at the window.” He paused, recalling the image of Pop in his chair, like a photograph.
His face burned with embarrassment as he realized how inappropriate it was for him, at this moment, to reveal the level of
his bitterness and resentment toward his father. Nervously, he flicked the soft tassels of the checkered cloth around his
fingers, anxious at how Rafael would respond.

“Freidl always said Itzik had the soul of a potato,” Rafael said quietly. “So it seems his soul didn’t grow in America. It’s
a
shonda
—a shame. A man may only have one moment in his life when a spark flames in him. If this he doesn’t protect, it dies. But
even so, Leiber, what your father did for me was the lesson of a lifetime. That a man must have courage to do what is right
in the eyes of God, no matter the cost.”

“But my father didn’t think in terms of God,” Nathan insisted again.

“Yes, he did. He was one of us. It is in our bones to think of God as the Measure of Righteousness. Maybe Itzik would not
say this, especially after he met Hillel, but that is how he thought about it.”

“Who was Hillel?” Nathan wanted to know. “Someone from Zokof?”

Rafael frowned. “Your father never told you about Hillel?”

Nathan shook his head. The only Hillel he knew was Hillel Gelbart. Gelbart was now a well-known MIT physicist, but to Nathan
he would always be the gangly kid who hid out at the Leibers’ to avoid practicing the violin. Hillel Gelbart was the only
one of his childhood friends who Pop joked with and listened to, a fact that Nathan somehow held against Gelbart, despite
all his achievements.

Rafael clasped his hands patiently and recounted, at length, how Itzik and Hillel had met at the Warsaw train station.

“Where did you hear this?” Nathan asked.

“Freidl told me,” Rafael said, with a confident shrug. “This was the part of Itzik’s story that made her laugh. She told it
to me many times. ‘Imagine,’ she said, ‘Itzik the Faithless One and Hillel the Socialist walking the streets of Warsaw, with
me singing Aaron Birnbaum’s tune in Hillel’s ear!’” Rafael sat back in his chair and laughed. “What a group! ‘Better a Jew
without a beard than a beard without a Jew.’ That is what she said about Hillel. Ha!”

The afternoon sun lit the curtain sheers until they appeared opaque. Nathan gazed at them, thinking Rafael had now lost all
restraint about Freidl, as if he had secured Nathan’s confidence to the extent that he could speak of his conversations with
a dead woman and expect to be believed. A slow, painful pounding began at his temples.

“She said Hillel took Itzik to find Mendel the Blacksmith, a cousin of your grandfather’s. He lived near Plac Grzybowski.”

Nathan’s heart leapt. “Plac Grzybowski, is that spelled
G-R-Z-Y?
”

Rafael nodded.

“I was there the other day!” he said, glad for a means to direct their attention away from Freidl. “I found a synagogue. The
name begins with an
N.
”

“ No
yk, yeh. The last synagogue in Warsaw. By the No
yk Synagogue your father became a socialist. Hillel told him a synagogue
is a place where weak men run to hide.”

“My father used to say that all the time! How did you know?”

Rafael shrugged again. “I told you. Freidl.”

Nathan knew there was no point in arguing. “What happened to Hillel, after my father left Poland?”

“Ach! Stalin’s gulags.”

“Did my father know?”

“In America? Nah! When a man went to America, it was for us like he fell off the earth. And during the war, Itzik wouldn’t
know what happened here.”

Nathan noticed that Rafael suddenly looked distressed. He asked him why.

“I once had a photograph of the two of them, your father and Hillel. He was such a handsome boy, Hillel.”

“Where did you get the photograph?” Nathan asked excitedly.

“During the war.”

“You came across a picture of my father taken in Warsaw, during the war? That’s unbelievable.”

“Unbelievable? Nah. Always, my life was full of coincidences about your father and that night Jan died.” He touched his yarmulke.

“What do you mean?”

“In the beginning, it was just small things. Once, when I was a boy of nine or ten, I saw Jan’s old horse in a field. No one
around. I tell you, that animal looked at me and went up on its back legs, just like on that night. Now, I think she did that.
God knows how. She left me signs, put things in my path so I should remember Itzik.”

Nathan was becoming annoyed that Freidl was showing up at every turn in Pop’s story. But, not wanting to insult Rafael, he
played along. “Why did she want you to remember Itzik?”

Rafael gave him a reproachful look. “Understand, I didn’t go looking for Freidl to be in my life. I heard the story about
her frightening the Poles away from Itzik in the cemetery, sure. Everyone in Zokof knew it. But I didn’t believe it. I was
there that night, remember. I saw him, full of his own strength. He had a chutzpah. I thought he made a commotion for the
Poles, to scare them—threw a rock, made sounds. Of our cemetery, they were already afraid. It wouldn’t take much for him to
do it.”

Nathan was relieved to have some of his confidence in Rafael restored.

“But you understand, Leiber? After us boys ran away—Tzvi, Chaim, and me—what I heard about him I heard from Freidl. No one
else heard nothing—
gornish
—after he left Zokof.”

Nathan didn’t want to conjure with that statement. Instead, he considered how to delicately steer the conversation back to
the photograph of Pop and Hillel. The photograph, at least, offered some kind of evidence of Pop’s history, by someone other
than Freidl.

But Rafael persisted. “Think what you like about Freidl after, but listen to me. Most of my life I have felt someone with
me, putting people, things, events in my way. A thing like this you don’t talk about. You live with it.”

He pulled at his vest. Nathan noticed several buttons missing on the shirt underneath, and realized how uncared-for Rafael
was. It made him ashamed to try to take away his faith in Freidl, and his apparent companionship with her. He toyed resignedly
with his glass of tea and hoped Rafael would not detect his disbelief.

“I’ll tell you how it was with Freidl,” Rafael said. “Until 1939, these coincidences she made happen didn’t matter so much.
Then, the Nazis were at our doorsteps. I got Polish papers, which wasn’t easy, with this Jewish face of mine.” He displayed
his profile with a weary playfulness.

Nathan wondered how well his own looks would have protected him if he’d lived in Europe at that time.

“The night I got the papers, I put some clothes in a bag, a few zlotys in my shoes, and I ran. I escaped to Soviet Russia,
Byelorussia they called it then. The plan was, my wife, Chana, would follow with the baby.”

Once again, Nathan was stunned. “Your wife and baby? You had a family?”

“I wasn’t always an alter kocker, Leiber. I was a young man in those days. I had a family.” Rafael wiped his face with his
cuff. “What did I know it would happen so quick after I left them? We had a plan to meet later. How could I take them to live
in the forests? With what food? What shelter? You can’t imagine what kind of people they had running around in there too.
I was hiding in haystacks in the fields, all the time moving east, away from them in Zokof.” The corners of his mouth tightened.