A Day of Small Beginnings (43 page)

Ellen nodded, although she didn’t entirely understand the connection. She noticed that he, like Freidl, used the word
narrishkeit,
which she now took to mean
nonsense.

Rafael slowly shifted his position in his chair, organizing his presentation, it seemed to her. “When I returned to Zokof
after the war,” he began, “one of my Polish neighbors came to me. He said, ‘We weren’t all anti Semites.’ I said to this man,
‘Wytold,’ I said, ‘we knew you couldn’t help us. We knew it was too much to ask a person to risk his life, his family, for
us. But we did expect that you, our neighbors, would not turn us over to the Nazis for a kilo of sugar.’ You know what that
man said to me?” He squinted at Ellen.

Everything had become eerily quiet to her. “What?” she said.

“Nothing. He hung down his head, and he walked away. But in all these years since that day, that man, Wytold, the only one
in this town who ever said a word to me about the Annihilation, never once did he come again to my door, to talk, to be a
neighbor, to bring a piece of cake. Nothing. Are there Nazis here to stop him?” Rafael threw his arms dramatically in the
air, as if searching for Nazis. “So, I ask you again, what’s different today?”

A tense silence followed. Ellen looked around. The cracked plaster ceiling and the walls now seemed vulnerable to her, as
if the weight of the townspeople were pressing against them, as if it were their intention to pummel this last refuge to bits
and dust. She got the same shaky feeling she’d had in the Old Synagogue, only this time the threat felt closer.

Rafael coughed and began to work on his fingers again. “Of course, there is another way to look at the situation. Maybe we
could say I am the fortunate man.”

“You survived,” Ellen suggested.

“Yes.” He nodded thoughtfully. “After the war, in towns all over Poland, towns like Zokof, the Poles did not make confessions
to Jews.” He glanced up at her. “They made pogroms.” His gruff voice was barely audible. “They don’t like that word here,
pogroms.
They say pogroms were only in Russia. But in Kielce—you passed it on your way here—they killed forty two survivors, wounded
hundreds. After.
After!
You understand?”

She did not. Nor did she understand his change of mood.

He narrowed his enormous eyes and appraised her as he raised a cautionary forefinger. “Ellen,” he said in a low voice, “about
this, your father was not wrong. You are in a land of unrepentant evil.”

Ellen felt a twinge at her temples. She realized then why he had sent the stone to America. It had been an act of protection,
of unselfish love. How difficult it must have been for him to give it up. “Why don’t you come to America?” she said. “We could
sponsor you.”

He shook his head. “For me, at my age, it hardly matters anymore. The only move I will make now is from here to the grave.”

She tried to protest.

He waved her off. “Every life has its end. But it is a mistake to think that if you turn your back to evil it will not follow
you.”

Ellen thought of Freidl’s gravestone, wrapped and hidden in her father’s cabinet. She knew Rafael wanted her to do something
about it. But she didn’t know what.

Rafael sighed. “Could you pour me a glass of tea? I’m a little dry.”

Ellen refilled the glass and handed it to him. His fingertips were cold. She placed her hand over his, as if to steady the
glass, but really she meant to insulate the warmth that already seemed to be ebbing from his body.

He took several short sips and put down the glass.

“You look like you could use a rest. How do you feel?” she said.

“Feel? I feel like a man old enough to touch a woman not his wife and not fear God for it.” He smiled distractedly. “Did your
father tell you that when I was a young man, I had a wife and a child?”

Ellen shook her head.

“In sleep they came back to me. For years.” He clenched his hands in his lap.

It seemed to Ellen this clenching of his hands caused him additional pain.

“From them, I heard the
mamaloshen
—the mother language. My daughter, my Sonya, when I dreamed, was a young woman already. How could it be, to grow in death?
I wondered. But they came to me. They were women together, my wife and my daughter. She would tell her mother, ‘I am going
to bake a challah for Poppa. A braided challah.’” He gestured an imaginary challah about two feet long. “Eggs and raisins
is what they talked about. And how to lay the challah in the oven. But after so many years, my wife, my daughter, they left.
Maybe it was because I forgot already how women talk to each other.”

“You’ve been alone a long time,” Ellen said understandingly. She got up and went to the front window, to try to absorb this
newest layer of loss in his life. A car had pulled up to the house across the narrow lane, and a man and a woman got out,
talking as they shut their doors. They saw her. She waved at them tentatively, but they did not wave back. Ellen stared after
them as they went into their house, depressed by the sense of isolation their coldness had engendered. “Why did you stay here
for Freidl? What good did it do?” she asked Rafael.

He sighed again. “Good. Heh. You are right. That God will not let her rest, this, you think, has something to do with good?”
He tilted back his head awkwardly and let out a dry, rasping laugh. “We think maybe God was not satisfied that she did good
enough by Itzik, who you call Isaac. He did not believe, maybe, that she could do better in America with him. So He kept her
here, with me, to wait. She got the idea that she should do something for me, to make me remember that once I feared God.
That this might be good. Who else could she care for? I am the only one left. You see, before the war I was a socialist. After,
when I came back to Zokof, I believed in nothing, and I was not afraid of God. God? I said. If He was in the world, what could
He do anymore to put fear in me? What He could do was done.” Rafael pursed his lips until they disappeared under his mustache.
“If God could take my wife and my child, He was a fool, I said. I did not accept this idea that God acts with a greater purpose,
not when He allows evil to ruin His creation.”

Rafael pressed his hand to his yarmulke. “I thought maybe it was time for God to be afraid now. I thought, He knows that for
what he did to my wife and child, I
should
curse Him. I am not Job that He should play tricks on me, to make my life a misery.”

Ellen was relieved to at least know who Job was, even if she did not entirely understand the trick to which Rafael referred.

“Freidl came to me,” Rafael said. “‘Be a mensch,’ she said. This made me weep because I saw how much of the mensch in me was
gone. That I was a man lost to myself.” He shook his head. “Maybe you are too young to understand such things.”

“Tell me anyway,” Ellen said, wanting very much to understand him.

“When I was at the end of my hope, she said to me, ‘Believe in your God. He brought you to me.’” He looked at Ellen. “That
God would come back to me and I to God, this was almost too much for me. Should a man be asked to bear such a thing? After
what He took? This is what I asked Freidl. But she said, ‘Be a mensch.’”

He shrugged. “What was I to say to this? I could say, a dead woman I never met cannot come to me and tell me to be a mensch.
I am talking to myself. I am putting words in her mouth I do not want to say myself. But in the end, what does it matter if
it is her speaking or me? Maybe it is God telling me, Rafael, be a mensch. In the end, I said, all right, what is, is. I put
on the
tallis
and the tefillin
,
and I prayed as a Jew, every morning, afternoon, and night. It gave me comfort. And in time, with Freidl, I began to study
again like I did as a boy in cheder.”

He looked at her. She understood cheder. That was the school he was coming from the night he and her grandfather met the peasant
with the whip.

“I went from house to house here in Zokof. I asked the Poles here for Hebrew books they found from before the war. They handed
them over. What did they want with them? And I think it made them feel better, that they did this, something decent. Some
of them told me who gave them this book or that. Some kept them for a memory; some remembered where they were told books were
buried.” He swept his arm around the room, at the shelves of books. “Behold the Jews of Zokof,
Am Ha Sefer
—the People of the Book.” He nodded. “With Freidl I read in Hebrew, the father language, and in time, my faith was returned.
My God is not a fool.”

He smiled slightly. “I light the candles on Friday night, like a woman, to welcome the Sabbath. I do this because she cannot.
I do this for my wife and daughter, because they cannot.” He pulled absently at his sleeve. “She stands behind me in this
room, at this table. I feel her presence, watching me.”

Once again, Ellen noticed how he talked about Freidl in the present tense. “Does that mean that if Freidl returns to her grave,
you’ll be alone?”

He began to rock back and forth.

“Is that why you waited for my father to find you, instead of you finding him?”

The rocking increased. He closed his eyes.

Ellen couldn’t bear to push him any further.

“I didn’t want to let her go,” he said softly. “I don’t want to let her go. But it’s a shonda, my shonda, what I did. A sin,
you understand?” His eyes remained shut.

“It’s not a sin to want to talk to someone. You’re all alone.”

“She needed me to find Itzik.”

Ellen could scarcely believe he could be saying that a dead woman had asked him to find her grandfather. But then she remembered
Freidl had told her that Marek, the langer loksh, would return with her to Zokof, and in her dream, Ellen hadn’t doubted her
at all. Why would Rafael?

“It was after the war. I promised her I would find him. He was in Brooklyn, New York. I wrote. He answered. He said he would
never come back to Poland. That’s all. He would never come back. And he would not pray.” Rafael recited these facts in a mechanical
manner, as if he had examined them many times before. His hand dropped to his side. “Ach! Itzik. Itzik the Faithless One!”

Tears fell from his cheeks, like her grandfather’s at the Passover Seder. Ellen dug around in her backpack and produced some
tissues for him.

Rafael wiped his eyes and tried to smile. “
Mine
mensch
.
That is what she calls me. But sometimes I don’t know. I am confused. What is true, what is my imagination? I see things,
not just Freidl. Across the market square, I see the back of my neighbor, Yossl Greenberg, from the old days. I open my mouth
to call to him, ‘Yossl, it’s me. Rafael Bergson!’ But always it is the same. The man turns around. It is not Yossl Greenberg.
It is some Pawelؠor Jan or Tomek, not one of us. To them, the Pawelٳ and the Jans, I am only their Jew, their little Jew.”

Ellen must have looked so bewildered by this that he felt the need to explain.

“In the old days, every Pole had a little Jew, someone they thought was a little better than the rest of the Jews, someone
they could tolerate. Mostly, that was someone they needed, a doctor, a shoemaker, and now, me, their tailor.”

His contempt was so evident, Ellen was glad Marek was not there. He was
not one of us,
and she knew his presence, at this first meeting, would have made Rafael feel intruded upon. She toyed with the notion that
his unavailability might have been Freidl’s work too.

Rafael sighed yet again, his fingers enmeshed in his beard. “I am an old man. I was given my life to live to an old age. This
is a blessing. And to have such a guest as you, this is proof that life can still surprise, and in surprise, there is hope,
even now, when death sits on my nose and makes me a fool. When I pray, I hear God laugh. And I thank God for Freidl, that
she did not leave me, that she would not leave me, even when I failed her. She wanted a memorial. She wanted me to find the
other half of her stone, the bottom half. She told me where it was, in the cemetery, facedown. They made there a path from
the stones so no one should know it was a cemetery. Then, after the war, they had a building project. They came for the stones
and took them to town. Freidl’s was under so many others, I could not get it for her. She begged me. But alone, a man could
not lift such weights without being found out. They took her stone and used it to support the pavement. I knew where it was,
but I could not get it. Then a farmer goes over there, Wladek Glٯwacki is his name, and it is gone. Just like that. This is
where things stand now. He has the stone. I cannot get it. And Freidl is making me heartbroken from this. What can I do? I
put pebbles at her grave, to mark her place. But I cannot do more. I do not have the strength to build her a memorial, and
it is not a memorial that will return her to her grave.”

Ellen listened to him, realizing he was reciting what went on in his head every day, all day, for years and years. She began
to understand his refusal to quit Zokof. If he left, he would be turning his back on his responsibility to Freidl, which he
alone had borne all these years. If he did not find a way to let her rest, if he died before achieving this, she would be
left to an uncertain fate, for there was no one else to take up her cause.

“What does she need, Rafael?”

“Prayer,” he said simply. “And I know it is the Leibers’ prayers she needs more than mine. She came from death for Itzik,
and no one but him or his descendants can return her there, to show God that she did good by defying the law of death.”

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