A Day of Small Beginnings (35 page)

Ellen hoped her face didn’t reveal that she thought the assignment trite. Kids’ stuff. She sat cross-legged on the floor,
assuming he wouldn’t volunteer her to be first. She had no idea what he had in mind, and anyway, she didn’t want to serve
as an example of what was good or bad. If he liked what she did, it would put more pressure on the company and they’d hate
her. If she was bad, she would lose credibility as a choreographer.

“Ellen, perhaps you’d like to begin.”

Annoyed, she walked to the middle of the floor, stood in thought for a moment, then gathered Adam Mickiewicz’s imaginary robes
around her, cupped his book in her hand, and executed a series of her trademark movement phrases. When she finished, the dancers
glanced at one another nervously and began a slow, polite applause. Ellen thought this odd. Applauding improvs was not part
of her world’s etiquette. Pronaszko winked at her.

She turned to Andrzej. “Please tell everyone I was the statue of the man who’s standing in Rynek Główny.”

He looked at her, all amusement, and translated. The poet’s name was repeated around the room. But instead of having the effect
of warming her to them, they seemed to regard her with some suspicion.

She spent the rest of class watching the others perform their improvisations. They did so with varying degrees of success
but with increasing humor, most of which she didn’t understand. Then Andrzej took his turn. He clearly took special pleasure
in performing some very dated hip-hitching jazz moves, which he seemed to think sexy but which, to Ellen, were just funny.

When class ended, he came up behind her. “You should have done an American,” he said flatly.

“What’s wrong with Adam Mickiewicz?”

“We call him Ada
,” he said coldly. “Nothing is wrong with him. But how can an American dance to the poet of Poland’s spirit?
This is like a deaf person pretending to hear music or an atheist pretending to know God.”

Ellen’s face became very hot. “I didn’t mean to insult anyone,” she muttered, quickly gathering her things.

Pronaszko interrupted. “Ellen, I would like to invite you for lunch.”

“I’d love to,” she replied, unsure if he had heard what Andrzej had said but grateful for his intervention.

“Unfortunately, today I have an important meeting with one of our benefactors.” He pronounced the last word with gravity.

She smiled gamely. He asked her how she liked her hotel, and they discussed the living quarters he had arranged for her. “I
promise, we will have our lunch,” he said. “A dinner would be better. More expensive, anyway.” He winked at Ellen’s deflated
face. “Go, have a look at our city today,” he encouraged her. “Come back fresh to us tomorrow.”

By this time, the company had already dispersed. She slowly walked back to her hotel, not knowing what to do with herself
for the rest of the day. As a hedge against her anxiety, she began to study the street more closely. Pollution had blackened
the buildings, pocking and wearing away their facades and bas reliefs. But the pair of old wooden entry doors, hanging awry
like broken arms, filled her with shame at her loneliness.

26

U
PON RETURNING TO HER ROOM,
E
LLEN CALLED HER MOTHER
. If her father had been alive she would have admitted that her first day with the company had been difficult and that she
was pretty depressed. But she had learned that the death of a parent creates an imbalance that is less forgiving of normal
family complaints.

“Today was fine. Really fine. It was a good class, just a little weird in Polish. I couldn’t talk much to anyone,” she said
in her bright upper register. She described the cobbled streets, the courtyards, the hejnalج the amber earrings she’d just
bought at the Cloth Hall. Taking a small risk, she said she wished Dad could have seen all this too. The silence that followed
this remark made her add, “This afternoon I’m going to visit the castle in the middle of the city. It’s on the top of a fortified
hill.”

“By yourself?” Her mother sounded alarmed.

“Yes, by myself. It’s totally safe.” What Ellen wasn’t going to admit was that she felt unmoored, that she’d have preferred
to work, to connect, not to loll hours away on tourist attractions. “You know how I am when I travel. I like to scope out
a city alone. Anyway, this place is called Wawel.” She cleared her throat and affected a deep tourist guide’s voice. “This
was the seat of Polish kings for five hundred years.”

“I see,” her mother said.

“No, really, there’s a whole museum complex up there, and a cathedral.” She was aware of working too hard for her mother’s
approval.

“Don’t you have work to do with the company?”

From the careful tone her mother used, Ellen knew she had detected something was wrong. “Today is sort of an off day. There’s
nothing scheduled until tomorrow.” She hoped her mother wouldn’t ask why because she had no answer, which, in itself, was
worrisome.

“I thought there’d be some sort of reception for you tonight,” her mother suggested.

Ellen crumpled into a ball on the lumpy bed and tried to keep her voice even. This was something her father would have said.
Receptions for visitors were the specialty of academicians. They were something her mother, who’d traveled often with him,
had grown to expect. Meanwhile, she hadn’t even thought about how she was going to get through the evening. “They don’t do
that kind of thing,” she told her mother, in what she hoped was a casual voice.

“But some kind of welcome would seem appropriate,” her mother insisted.

Tears popped over Ellen’s lower lids as if they’d been waiting in the wings for their cue. They dripped sloppily off her nose
and onto her pillow. She wiped her eyes. “Pronaszko said he wanted to take me out to lunch but he had some kind of fund-raising
meeting. We’re going to do dinner another day.” But even this now seemed tenuous to her.

“I see,” her mother said, in a way that sounded doubtful and judgmental of Pronaszko. For that, Ellen loved her fiercely.
She gripped the phone hand piece, straining to be closer to home. Finally, she realized she had to let go. “Mom, this is costing
a fortune. I’ll call you tomorrow night, okay?”

“So everything’s fine?”

“Everything’s fine.”

They said good bye.

She threw on a pair of jeans and the comforting blue cowboy boots. On her way out the door, she grabbed some scarves and her
short mustard silk jacket from the armoire.

By the time she’d reached the impressive sight of Wawel Hill, some fifteen minutes’ walk from her hotel, she felt much better,
even though it looked like rain. The wind had picked up. She began the climb up the narrow stone ramp that led to the complex
of buildings on top. To her left, dark redbrick fortifications supported the hill. On her right, a steep, lush embankment
plunged to the street. About halfway up, under a tree, a costumed Polish folk group was playing for a scattering of German
tourists. She stopped to listen. Raindrops began pattering onto the leaves of the tree, but she stayed where she was.

The music reminded her of her mother, who’d brought home ethnic recordings ever since Ellen could remember—obscure Russian
balladeers, Nana Mouskouri, Odetta, and Miriam Makeba. She’d spent much of her childhood dancing to foreign tunes, wrapped
in scarves and loopy ensembles, banging a tambourine while her mother stomped along behind her, clapping and encouraging her
to dance and dance and dance.

Ellen slipped some zlotys into the musicians’ basket and continued up the steep incline. The city’s street sounds receded.
The spire of Wawel Cathedral rose directly above her. At the top of the hill, she joined the small groups of visitors passing
through the castle gate, heading left the short distance to the entrance of the great cathedral.

Inside, the smell of burning wax from hundreds of flickering votive candles permeated the gigantic vaulted space. Her boots
echoed on the stone floor. She walked slowly down a side aisle, rolling her heels to muffle their sound in the hushed atmosphere.

The ornate chapels, many of them closed off with grilles, looked to her like miniature stage sets. She peered into one and
saw a painting of Saint Sebastian. As a child, she’d pulled her mother from room to room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
in New York, looking for all the paintings she could find of the saint. Her mother had thought her ghoulish for counting the
number of arrows stuck in him at every painting—under the armpit, in the thigh, through the ribs. She’d had no idea who he
was. Years later, finding him again in the galleries of European museums, she’d realized it hadn’t been fascination with his
torture that had drawn her to Saint Sebastian. It was his peculiar nakedness, so unnecessary for a man being executed by arrow.
The unspoken secret in all these portraits, it had seemed to her, was how many painters had used him, of all the saints, as
a model for the suggestiveness of a beautiful young man, tied helplessly to a tree. But now, as she stood looking at the painting
in the Wawel chapel, she sensed from the dense Polish iconography that some other allusion to the saint was being made, that
a conversation among Poles, something about martyrdom, was under way in that space. Intrigued, she moved down the nave toward
the central altar, instinctively running her hands along the cold stone smoothness of the royal carved sarcophagi as she went.

She noticed a middle aged couple seated in a pew. Their faces, lit in profile by the votive lights, flickered in and out
of shadow like a Rembrandt painting. Ellen sank onto a bench and scanned the twenty or thirty faithful bowed in prayer throughout
the cathedral. Stout, ruddy peasants and urban sophisticates alike, on their knees. What did these people think about in that
pose? she wondered. Were they forming words of atonement or reciting wish lists to God?

This need to pray had baffled her since she was eight years old, the night her parents went out for the evening and Grandpa
Isaac had told her the rocket story. She remembered how he had shuffled into her room and stood at the foot of her bed, not
knowing where to put himself in the glow of her nightlight.

“Your grandmother sent me up to tell you a story. I don’t know from stories,” he’d said.

Maybe he’d thought she’d let him go, send him back downstairs with a good excuse. Instead, feeling very grown up, she’d patted
the coverlet and said, “Sit on my bed, Grandpa. You can read me a story. Dad’s been reading me
Hans Brinker.
”

“Oy, Gottenu,” he’d said, which meant no. She didn’t yet realize that Grandpa Isaac could barely read in English. He’d rolled
his big dark eyes upward and sat down. Ellen had always loved her grandfather’s eyes. She used to think he stored wisdom in
the great domes of his lids. “What kind of story you want to hear?”

She chose carefully. “Tell me about heaven,” she’d said. In the Linden family, this was the equivalent of asking about sex.
Her parents wouldn’t talk about it. Whenever she asked, all they wanted to know was who put the idea in her head. Once, she
told them her friend Mary Sorentino had said God lived in heaven behind pearly gates. They were speechless. “We, we don’t
believe in that,” her mom had finally stammered.