A Day of Small Beginnings (40 page)

Y
OU HAVE A MESSAGE,” THE FRONT DESK CLERK TOLD
E
LLEN
when she returned to the Palace Hotel later that afternoon.

My group is playing in łódź tomorrow. Last minute engagement. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Maybe we can go to Zokof again another
day. I hope you have a good visit with your friend. Call me at the Ariel Café, if you like.

Marek.

Ellen called the Ariel Café.

“Marek is not here,” the receptionist said. “I am sorry. I do not know where you can call him. The musicians are separate
from the restaurant.”

“Could I leave him a note?”

“Of course,” the woman said empathetically.

Within an hour, Ellen had delivered it to her. It said:

Marek,

I’m sorry too. I was looking forward to our going to Zokof together. Until we meet again, I’ll be humming the “For a Girl
Tune” and thinking of you.

Ellen.

She added her telephone number and hoped the message sounded more jaunty than needy.

Now she was sorry she had ever mentioned to her mother that Marek was driving her to Zokof. That had set off all her mother’s
alarms. “What do you know about this boy?” she’d demanded, as if her daughter hadn’t any street sense of her own.

Ellen wasn’t having any of it. “Mom, he plays klezmer music every week at the Ariel Café. That’s as close to a nice Jewish
boy as you can get in Poland.” She could hear her mother fretting on the other end.

“Why couldn’t you hire a reputable driver through the hotel?”

“Mom, stop worrying about Marek. I haven’t gotten myself raped or killed yet.”

Her mother emitted one of her exhausted sighs. “Don’t be smart with me. You don’t know where this boy is from or how he thinks.
Ellen, you know better. A woman alone over there is a target.”

“That’s why I’ll feel a lot safer going to Zokof with him than with a strange driver.” To her relief, her mother was temporarily
stumped by this argument and let the matter drop.

Now, as Ellen stood outside the Ariel Café, the sky had clouded up over Szeroka Square. The first fat drops of rain had begun.
Ellen knew that in Kraków this meant a thorough soaking was coming and that she needed to find shelter until the storm passed.
The weather was a setback in getting things together for her trip. She’d sent Rafael a letter telling him to expect her. She
had to buy fresh produce, pack up the provisions she was bringing him, and make sure she brought the traveler’s checks she’d
bought with funds from her father’s trust account, the balance of which she intended to give him in full. Her memory of the
trust’s language—
in the event of the incapacity or death of the undersigned
—gave Ellen a moment of raw grief so painful she had trouble breathing.

She crossed the square in the rain, over the great expanse of paved stone, tears flowing, her body hurting. She thought she’d
take a shortcut to the tram stop, through a street behind the square. But her path was blocked by the strange fortresslike
building that stood at the southern end. She didn’t know what it was.

The stone architecture was a confusion of rectangles, arched doorways, buttressed walls, and a parapet. On its left side,
the whole edifice seemed to have been torn apart and was collapsing like a classical landscape into a deep grassy pit the
size of a city street.

She noticed a recessed doorway on the far right side of the building. The rain had begun to fall in sheets, and she ran to
it for shelter. There was a sign near the entrance door: The Old Synagogue, Museum of History and Culture of Kraków Jewry.

Tentatively, she opened the door, walked into a darkened vestibule, and found herself in an almost bare sanctuary, inexplicably
bathed in white light. The light so reminded her of her dream of Marek and the old woman in the window, she hesitated before
taking a few cautious steps farther. A cool draft blew her wet hair.

In the center of the hall stood an enclosed circular balustrade. Its delicately crafted wrought iron bars curved to a pinnacle
on top, like a giant birdcage. Despite the sunless sky, the white light poured through the windows around the chamber, illuminating
the ceiling’s rib vaults, which flowed delicately onto several slender stone columns. The whole effect was elegant, yet intimate.

Ellen’s cowboy boots echoed on the stone floor, reminding her of how carefully she’d tried to walk in Wawel Cathedral to soften
their sound. But this white place was nothing like the dark, ornate Wawel, which had made her feel dwarfed amid the outsized
sarcophagi and the soaring heights of its walls.

Near the entry wall stood a short, stocky woman in a brown nubby suit, one stiff hand curled protectively over the other.

“Excuse me. Do you speak English?” Ellen asked her in Polish.

With a restrained smile, the woman nodded.

“Do you know anything about this place?”

The woman nodded again. “This is the prayer hall of the oldest Jewish religious building in Poland, dating from the fifteenth
century. It was once the seat of the Jewish community. Several hundred people could worship here together. Some of the outer
walls rise to about seventy feet and were part of the city’s walled defenses.” She spoke methodically, with a British accent,
as if reading from a tour book.

“Well, it’s gorgeous,” Ellen said, looking around. “The sign outside says it’s a museum. It’s not used for worship anymore?”

The woman eyed Ellen carefully and shook her head no. “During the war, the Nazis used it as a warehouse. Later it was torn
apart and looted.”

Ellen found the woman’s calm demeanor jarring. “Really?” she said, unable to think of a fitting response. She noticed that
in various places the whitewashed walls had been gouged, exposing the brick beneath.

“Eventually, the building was restored and became a museum,” the woman continued. She motioned for Ellen to follow her as
she walked toward the birdcage structure. “Please,” she said when Ellen hesitated. “This is the bimah.” Again, she gave Ellen
a careful look. “That is the Hebrew word for the platform used for ritual observance and for reading from the Torah. Over
there, on the eastern side of the room, facing Jerusalem, is the original Aron Kodesh, or the Ark of the Covenant, the ornamented
cupboard where the Torah scrolls are kept. That wall,” she said, pointing to grilled windows on the entry side of the room,
“is the
mechitzah,
the divider between the men and women’s sections. As you can see, the eternal light is located above the Aron Kodesh.” Her
tone remained polite but distant. She paused, as if testing for some reaction.

But Ellen, utterly unfamiliar with the terms the woman was using for the ceremonial objects in the sanctuary, could only comment
on their beauty.

“Over there, to the side of the Aron Kodesh, is a chapel that also served as a
kiddush
room.”

Ellen noticed the woman did not translate this word, and she was embarrassed to ask what it meant.

“Today, the kiddush room is used to display Jewish artifacts. For example, there are silver cups that used to contain salt
for sanctifying the bread before a meal. In the next room,” she continued briskly, “we have many ritual objects and Jewish
decorative art on display.” Again, she assumed her cupped hands position. “I think it is unfortunate, really, that we have
placed them under glass,” she said, almost confidentially. “When the Nazis planned their Museum of the Extinct Jewish Race
in Prague, this is exactly how they intended to display Torahs, kiddush cups, and prayer shawls. Under glass.”

Ellen’s skin crawled. “A Museum of the Extinct Jewish Race?”

“Yes.” The woman’s expression did not change.

The whole hushed, whitewashed atmosphere of the synagogue now gave Ellen the chilling impression that Jews were extinct. “How
long have you worked at the museum?” she asked, assuming now that the woman was a docent.

“I don’t work here, but I am from Kraków,” the woman said. “Today I am leading a group from Canada. They should be here any
minute. I only thought you might be interested in more information about...our past.”

Ellen realized she had just been asked if she was Jewish. She smiled awkwardly, troubled that the woman had not felt she could
be direct. “I appreciate it. Thanks,” she said.

“Not at all. Forgive me, but you are what my father, of blessed memory, would call a shayna maidel.” She smiled, more warmly.

Ellen remembered her grandma Sadie calling her that—a beautiful girl. But now the words made her feel odd, somewhat exposed
actually, as if the genetic Jewish remnant that linked her to Poland was so obvious, like a naked body through a sheer dress.

“I always think of my father when I come to this shul, this synagogue,” the woman continued. “He used to daven, to pray, here.
Now I give people tours in his name.”

Ellen shivered, remembering how her father had told her he’d prayed in Zokof’s cemetery, for Rafael’s sake. She felt tears
coming on again. Uncertain of her ability to maintain her composure, she walked over to the Aron Kodesh. In front of it was
the biggest menorah she had ever seen. She forced herself to focus on the eagle that stood poised at its center, its powerful
spread wings conveying to her a disturbingly misplaced sense of entrenchment and authority.

A group of English speaking people threw open the door of the synagogue. The woman smiled. “Those must be my Canadians. There
is an upstairs exhibit. You
must
see it before you go.”

“I will,” Ellen promised. “Thanks again.”

The woman nodded graciously.

Ellen moved on to the adjoining room, where she admired the engraved ritual cups, the collection of old Torahs, the pointers
and
shofars.
Although she wasn’t exactly sure how they were used, she was impressed that these objects represented the work of hundreds
of hands over hundreds of years.

In the upstairs gallery that the woman had said she
must
see was a horrifying display of Holocaust photographs. Ellen was unprepared for this. So much so, she was tempted to leave,
angry somehow at not having been warned.

But a large picture of a pretty young woman, about her own age, with a stylish pageboy caught her eye. The photograph had
been taken in the midst of chaos in Szeroka Square. What Ellen found most disturbing about it was that the young woman, clutching
a bundle to her chest and clearly frightened, was wearing beautiful black suede pumps. The shoes, so like a pair she’d once
rescued from her mother’s Goodwill pile, drew her into the room.

She approached the photograph, curious to know where the young woman had walked after it had been taken, where she’d slept
that night, and what had happened to her, and to the shoes. Her jaw ached. She realized she was grinding her teeth.

After several minutes, she moved on to the next photograph, identified as having been taken at the Podgórski Market in Kraków.
In this, and in every photograph after it, she found the odd human details the most painful—the bent old man hiding a handful
of bread and a pair of scissors, the woman on Krakowska Street who had chosen to take only an empty bookshelf into the ghetto,
the child with the adultsize hat covering most of his face, with only one weary eye staring into the camera.

When at last she arrived at the end of the exhibit, Ellen felt the need to place her hands against the sturdy walls of the
synagogue and to offer comfort. She was keenly aware of the presumptuous grandiosity of this gesture, that she was not the
kind of Jew who would make the former congregants of this synagogue feel secure about the future of their faith. But she felt
a powerful impulse to comfort them, to assure them they at least
had
descendants.

She thought of Marek, of how much she wanted to talk to him about this place, until she realized he wouldn’t have had much
patience with her being so upset. Marek, who had no use for Jews who came to Poland to cry. This incensed her. How dare he
pretend he could love Jewish music without loving the people who wrote it? Ellen’s legs shook as she descended the stairs.
She held tight to the banister, alarmed at the intensity of her own fury.

As she left the Old Synagogue a few minutes later, a mass of sparrows took off from the roofs into the now-gray but rainless
sky, as if swept away by an impatient arm. She stopped and watched them scatter, still waiting for her legs to steady.

She heard a tune, the “For-a-GirlTune,” but slightly different than Marek’s, coming from a battered brick building at the
other end of the square. She began to walk toward it, her pace quickening every few steps, until she was practically running.
She passed several people, but no one seemed to notice the music.

The tune brought her to a tiny bookstore behind an arched stone doorway, then faded away. Above the shop, she thought she
recognized the window where the old woman in her dream had sat.

The shop was empty of customers. Its proprietor was arranging books on a long table.

“Were you just playing some music?” she asked.

The man, shabbily dressed, looked at her questioningly over his bifocals. “This isn’t a music store,” he said in Polish-accented
English. “We have books here.”

“But did you hear music playing in the square?” Ellen persisted.

He looked at her but didn’t respond.

Embarrassed and confused, Ellen scanned the titles on the long table. They were mostly in Polish and English. A few had Hebrew
writing, maybe Yiddish, she wasn’t sure. She picked up a book of Yiddish proverbs, one about Kazimierz, and another about
the synagogues and Jewish cemeteries of Poland. By the time she left the bookshop, with an uncomfortable good bye to the owner,
she had purchased a small library of Holocaust literature as well.

That evening, in her room, she didn’t give a single tormented thought to her choreography, or to Marek. She called downstairs
and made arrangements through the hotel concierge for a driver to Zokof. Fired by her experience at the Old Synagogue, she
opened one of the new books and began to read the chapter titled “The Zenith of Polish Jewry (1556α648)”: