A Day of Small Beginnings (28 page)

Nathan touched Rafael’s arm to comfort him. “I’m sorry if I upset you by asking,” he said. A painful stillness settled on
the room. He squeezed the old man’s arm lightly and felt the bones.

Rafael nodded appreciatively, now restraining his emotion with obvious difficulty. “Even now, I see my daughter Sonya’s fingers
pulling at my jacket. Just them, the little fingers.”

He stood up and shuffled to the wardrobe near the window. He pulled a small wrinkled piece of paper from one of its drawers
and handed it to Nathan. It was a photograph of a big-cheeked baby in the arms of a dark-haired young woman. Their features
were obscured by the scores of folds in the paper.

Nathan studied the photograph with all the horror of knowing he was about to hear that something terrible had happened to
this mother and her child.

“Every time I thought I was finished, some coincidence came my way,” Rafael said. “One time, a Russian caught me stealing
eggs. He raised his gun. I don’t know why, but I said, ‘Have pity on a father. I have a daughter, eighteen months old.’ ‘What’s
her name?’ he asked me. I told him, ‘Her name is Sonya.’ He put down the gun. ‘My sister’s name is Sonya,’ he said, and he
walked away.”

Nathan returned the photograph to Rafael, who put it back in the drawer. “Things like this happened to me all through the
war. Two years I wandered through Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, wherever the work or the trains took me. In October 1942, I came
across some Polish partisans in the forest. These sorts of fellows I knew. Sometimes they turned in Jews, so I hid from them.
But I stayed close to catch what news I could. I heard them talking about Zokof, my town. And the news! My God! The Nazis
had taken all the Jews—rounded them up from a ghetto they had made there, shot them in the streets, drove them like cattle
to the trains. My Chana and my Sonya! That night I lay facedown on the forest floor like an animal, my open mouth full of
dirt, not even free to howl my grief.”

With slow, careful control, he folded his hands. “For my family,” he said, “there were no coincidences. They sent my wife
and my daughter to a killing place, deep in the forest. Treblinka. The ones who went in there didn’t come back.”

Nathan couldn’t bear to look at Rafael. He imagined himself, an urban intellectual, alone in a forest, hearing that his girls,
his Marion and Ellen, had been taken away and murdered. But hard as he tried, it was impossible for him to get the feel, the
depth, of such a loss. His best guess was a sense of insurmountable helplessness against ongoing pain. He wondered how a human
being continued to live after that.

Then he thought of his father, who never knew what had happened to his family in Poland, but who had managed to carry this
burden alone all his life. He wondered if a monstrous protectiveness had kept him from telling his children about his past.

Rafael returned to his seat. “After I heard what they did in Zokof, I joined the exiled Polish army in Russia. They had a
general there who was looking for recruits. I wanted not to feel anymore, to be frozen, to take orders. What better place
for me? The Poles made me an officer, put me at a desk. For me, it was a blessing not to be
the Jew
for that time. They knew, but they never said.”

Nathan cringed at how the word
Jew
could be one’s most significant trait in the eyes of other people.

Maybe Rafael saw this. “You are your father’s son,” he said. “You know the Four Sons we tell of at the Passover Seder—the
Wise Son, the Wicked Son, the Simple Son, and the Son Who Doesn’t Know What to Ask?”

Nathan admitted he vaguely recalled reading this in the Reform Haggadah from which his family freely skipped whole sections
in their flight toward the meal.

“Freidl always said Itzik was like the Wicked Son who asks, What does this night mean to
you?
Not
us
—as if he does not belong to the community.” He smiled. “She said the same thing about me too, after we got to know each other.
You see, we have all been Wicked Sons, Leiber.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Nathan said. “But tell me, what’s this all about, this business with Freidl?”

Rafael sighed. “Yeh, it’s time. I will tell you. One night in Russia, I was on my way from one camp to the other. An old man
in rags stepped out from the shadows. He spoke to me in Jewish, quietly. He told me I had to help him. He was starving, and
the local people were treating him rough. Why waste food on an old Jew? I said all right, I would bring him food, but he would
have to meet me outside the camp because if anyone saw, we would be shot for certain. He thanked me. Then, he said, ‘He who
saves a life, saves the whole world.’ You know this expression?”

Nathan said he’d heard it before, but it hadn’t meant much to him. A platitude.

“I was in no mood for pretty words either,” Rafael agreed. “I said, ‘You’re talking to a man whose world is already dead.’
And this man, half-dead himself, takes me by the arm and says, ‘I also had a wife. I had four children. We are not here to
make a perfect world, just a better one. That is what’s required. That is why, even in the gulag, I played tunes on my guitar,
and when there was no guitar, I sang.’

“I did not want to know from his tunes or his gulags. I told him, ‘A guitar you won’t find here. I’m done with believing human
gods. I’m done with Karl Marx.’

“This man said to me, ‘Marx? Are you meshuggeh? That’s Talmud,
chaver
—my comrade, my friend.’ Then he made a face. ‘But, what’s the difference?’ he said.”

Nathan remembered their earlier conversation about Marx and the Talmud. This time he didn’t argue.

“Leiber, I tell you, right then, in the middle of an open field with nothing but snow for miles around us, the idea of Marx
and Talmud as the same, it was like God’s idea of a joke. We fell on each other, this man and me, like we were lost family.
We cried and we coughed until we were bent in two. I gave him the crust of bread I had in my pocket, and he gave me his name—Hillel.”

Nathan got white as the curtain sheers. “The same Hillel as in the photograph with my father?”

“The same. And it was no coincidence. It was Freidl, making a
shiddach
—a connection between us.”

“What kind of connection was she trying to make?” Nathan asked.

“I didn’t know. I fed him. I did what I could to get him a roof over his head. We were a comfort to each other. He always
had a tune. But later that winter, he was finished. Before he died, he gave me the three photographs he had kept with him
always. There was one of his family, and one of an Indian warrior in America, a proud face. The last one was of your father,
with him. I recognized Itzik, of course. I asked him, ‘How did you know this boy?’ He told me how he met Itzik and how Itzik
went to America. Even with the war, all the disorganization of our lives, where I thought nothing could surprise me anymore,
I was left without words, to hear this man, Hillel, bringing Itzik Leiber back into my life again. It was fantastic. Impossible.
What was I to think?”

“Where are his photographs now, the one with my father?”

“I’m sorry, Leiber,” Rafael said. “They were stolen from my coat on the way home—a story to itself. It’s a shame. I would
have given it to you.”

Nathan’s hope for hard proof sank. “Thanks anyway,” he said.

Rafael took a sip of tea. “I am not yet finished. You asked me about Freidl. There is more to tell. After the Annihilation,
I came back home to Zokof. I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Maybe, I thought, there’ll be someone left, someone I know.
You have no idea how hungry I was to see a familiar face! Five thousand Jews we used to be here. There had to be someone.

“The first night, I hid in the forest near the cemetery. You see, we returning ones, we were afraid. We heard stories about
Poles killing Jews when they came home. This happened. I knew people who died like that.”

Nathan believed him.

“The next night, I crept like a thief to Jewish houses in town and saw Poles were living there. For three nights I made my
inventory. On the fourth night I knew I was the only one left. My life wasn’t worth a sucked egg.” He sighed.

“That night, while I slept in the forest, she came to me. Freidl. A beautiful woman, with such a voice—so strong and full
of feeling.”

“An alto,” Nathan said absentmindedly, remembering his dream.

“‘Do not leave Zokof,’ she begged me. My heart bled. To hear the sound of Jewish for the first time in months and here, in
my hometown. ‘Who are you?’ I asked. She answered me with words I remembered from my childhood.
Lamentations,
it is called in English. What we recite on the holy day of
Tisha Bov,
the day we remember the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.” He checked to see if any of this registered with
Nathan.

Nathan only nodded at Rafael to continue.

“Freidl said to me:
‘He has blocked my ways with cut stones. He has made my paths a maze.’
I knew the words well. I said,
‘He has walled me in; I cannot escape. He has made my chains heavy, and when I call and shout, He shuts out my prayer.’
”

Tears began to roll down the crisscrossed tracks of Rafael’s face. “This woman knew what it was to suffer. She knows the dark
night of the soul. By morning she was singing tunes to me. The old tunes.
Little Zokof,
we called our town.”

Nathan sat up straight. How could it be? How? He could hear the song Freidl had sung in his dream and at the cemetery. His
ears once again felt as if they were filled with water. He felt unbalanced, faint.
Little Zokof, little town. How I miss you so.

Rafael did not seem to notice Nathan’s distress. “I was so glad to have her there,” he said, “someone to keep me from a loneliness
you cannot imagine. There was nothing I could do to thank her, a lost soul. The stones, you understand, they were blocking
the way to her grave. She could not rest. There was no peace for her.” He paused, stroked his beard. “She said she always
knew that I would help her, for Itzik’s sake. But I was too young when Itzik left for America. She had to wait, and follow
me. And now, it was time.”

Nathan was so moved by this, his resistance to Freidl, to the idea of her, began to weaken.

“You understand, something prevented her from going to America,” Rafael said. “I never knew what. But it seems I was her only
connection back to that night, back to her gravesite, to peace. I did not know how to help her. I said to her, ‘I am angry
at God. Please don’t ask me to appease Him. He thinks His people are so weak they require suffering to remain true to His
word. Just because I remember the words of Lamentations from my childhood does not mean I say them today as a man who bows
his head before God.’

“She said, ‘I am a woman who had to wait until I was in the grave to meet a child, and a man, whose lives I could touch. But
still I believe in my God. And you must believe also.’ These were her exact words. I remember, because they made me weep.
She tried to comfort me. She said, ‘You were saved by a boy named Itzik! Itzik means
laugh.
’ And she laughed and laughed until I laughed too.”

Nathan smiled, and continued to be drawn in, even charmed, by Rafael’s story.

“The next morning, she found a way to bring Jerzy to me. You remember Jerzy? We went to his apartment yesterday.”

“Yes, I remember. The apartment at the end of the hall,” Nathan said.

“‘You’re still here?’ Jerzy said to me. I didn’t know if he meant I had the chutzpah to still be alive or that he was surprised
I came back.”

Nathan shuddered at such a rude homecoming.

“But he was a mensch,” Rafael said. “He told me, ‘The town needs a tailor, Rafael. Be our tailor, and we will live in peace.
There’s a house I know for you.’

“So I became a tailor, a good one even, and the people here have always let me be.” He glanced at the sewing machine beneath
the window. “And it is not such a bad thing. You see, God has provided. I have even made my own linen shroud.”

Nathan looked stricken.

Rafael waved away his concern. “No one escapes the boundaries of death, Leiber. Not even Moses, whom God favored. Not even
he could persuade Him to set aside the sentence.”

“And Freidl?” Nathan asked. “How has she escaped that sentence?”

“Freidl is dead, Leiber. She crossed the boundary. Her body lies inside the cemetery, walled in by God, even if the gravestones
and the wall are gone.”

Nathan knew full well that he was crossing the boundary of his own beliefs, but he couldn’t resist asking, “But how does she
participate in your life?”

Rafael pulled nervously at the ends of his beard. “When I moved into this house, I was haunted for many years by the memory
of my wife and my daughter. The Poles began to call me the ‘crazy Jew’ because I wandered the streets. What did they know
what I was looking for? Could they imagine what it was to be homesick in my own town? I would walk to the marketplace on Friday,
just before Shabbos began, and see Shima walking the streets, shaking the birch whisk, calling, ‘Jews to the bath.’ It was
terrible. I was making myself sick with grief.

“Freidl came to me. She said, ‘To the cemetery.’ I thought she wanted me to do something for her. But she said, ‘Pick up stones.
Put them on the graves.’ And I did. I began to talk to them, the buried ancestors, as if we were family. It was craziness
and I knew it, but it consoled me, stone after stone. After, she began to come to me at night.”

“In dreams?” Nathan guessed.

“Dreams, yeh. But not like dreams. We talked. She told me her life, and what came after, and about Itzik and Hillel. There
was more between us too, but of this you do not have to know.” He gave a little shrug. “I needed her. She needed me. We are
alone here. But she never forgets your father.” He looked at Nathan.

“She wanted so much to know what happened to him. Why he did not return when the danger was past. Why didn’t she feel his
prayers? Did he remember her? Did his children pray for her? She is in terror that she will never be able to return, to rest
again in her place in the cemetery. Don’t look so skeptical, Leiber. You are fortunate that such a woman of valor is bound
up with your life. This is a great woman, wise, and a scholar, like you. The daughter of the famous Rebbe Eliezer of blessed
memory.”