A Day of Small Beginnings (44 page)

T
HEY SAT SILENTLY AT THE TABLE.
E
LLEN RAN HER FOREFINGER
around the rim of her tea glass. “She wants me to pray for her?”

A floorboard creaked. Another car drove by. “Do you pray?” Rafael asked. He didn’t wait for her to respond. “You think it
is nonsense to pray, yeh? Don’t deny it. The face tells the secret.”

Ellen opened her mouth, hoping to finesse an answer that would suit them both. “I don’t know if it’s nonsense. I just have
never understood it. If I don’t believe in God, how can I pray for Freidl?”

He didn’t answer.

She frowned, not knowing how to explain herself adequately to him. How could she possibly impart the level of hostility toward
faith with which she had been raised? “My grandfather always said God is for primitives.” She looked at him nervously. When
he merely nodded, she thought him gracious. “When I first came to Kraków, I went to Wawel Cathedral and watched people pray.
The Catholics don’t pray like Jews, but I couldn’t help wondering how people don’t feel idiotic, shutting off their reason
and asking God for favors. I don’t understand what they’re doing.”

Rafael stroked his beard. He seemed to be listening very closely to what she had to say.

When she paused, he nodded his head. Encouraged, she wrapped a tendril of her hair around her finger and twisted it slowly,
nervous about saying these things out loud for the first time. “You know, when I was little, I used to be very curious about
heaven. One of my friends told me prayers went there. But my parents and my grandfather convinced me there is no such place.
There is no God, and there’s nothing out there at the end of the universe.”

Rafael laughed. “What is so interesting to you about heaven? God, you think, lives in a nice house up there? What does it
matter? The end of the universe!” He laughed again. But when he saw that she was not laughing with him, he stopped. “When
the Baal Shem, of blessed memory, was in the hour of his death, he said, ‘Now I understand the reason I was created.’ You
see?” He pointed meaningfully to the earth. “We are to rejoice in life here and live mindful of God’s judgment of our deeds.”

“I wouldn’t have a problem with the ‘rejoice in life’ part,” Ellen said. “Though after seeing this town, I don’t know how
you do it. It’s the God part that I get stuck on.”

He looked toward the window.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she said, not wanting to insult him in any way. “A lot of people I respect believe in God. And to me,
believing only in science seems just as primitive. One tracked, you know? Who knows, maybe the universe is expanding because
it’s reaching for heaven? But why pray? That’s what doesn’t make sense to me.”

Rafael turned back to her and smiled. “And my knowing that you dreamed about Freidl, this makes sense? But you don’t deny
it’s true.”

She could not argue.

“And God? God makes no sense to you because you were not trained to recognize Him, to see the hand that moves behind all things
in the world. For you, it is easier not to believe. But if we turn our backs to God and not our faces, it does not mean He
is not there.”

“Like evil,” she said.

“Like evil.” He nodded. “Into the darkness God brought light, but still, there is darkness.”

She felt relieved and a little excited by a certain comfortable solidity to his argument. “You have no idea how ignorant I
am,” she said, embarrassed somehow that she didn’t know more about Judaism. “One year, when I was about thirteen, I decided
to observe Yom Kippur. At that age, fasting seemed like an interesting idea. You may think this is funny, but I didn’t know
anything about Yom Kippur except that religious Jews fast on that day. No one told me that I was supposed to be in a synagogue.
My parents took me downtown to the aquarium.”

“Tsk.”
Rafael shook his head.

“It was really crowded and hot inside, and I fainted in the middle of a dark hall lined with these huge gray fish.” She sighed.
“I can still remember the fish. My parents picked me up off the floor, got me outside, and stuck a sandwich in my mouth. That
was the end of my religious experience.”

It surprised her that again he laughed.

“Your parents were afraid you would become a
frummeh
—an observant Jew—if you knew what is Yom Kippur?”

“Maybe so,” she said, realizing she recognized the word
frum
from her dream of Freidl. She saw herself dressed up in a wig and a long denim skirt with sneakers, like the Orthodox women
in New York, and she too had to laugh.

Rafael looked at her. “You knew to fast on Yom Kippur. That is something. A memory that remained, yes? It would have been
better if your parents knew what they
didn’t
believe in before they taught you not to believe.”

She screwed up her face in puzzlement.

“In Jewish we say,
Ersht lern zikh, un dan lernen ondere
—first learn, then teach. That is what I would have told them.”

“Yeah,” she said, loving that he was speaking to her in her grandpa’s language, the
mamaloshen
, even if she hardly understood a word. “So, a question,” she said. “How does my being able to pray for Freidl make any difference
for her?”

He studied her. “Prayer brought our five souls together.” He held up the five fingers of his hand and counted off. “Your grandfather
Itzik prayed for Freidl to protect him. Freidl prayed for me that I should survive the Annihilation and help her rest. I prayed
for Nathan to find me, and he prayed for the Leibers at Freidl’s grave.” He looked at her. “We pray to console ourselves,
the living and the dead. And you must pray for Freidl’s resting place to be cleared of the stones of Lamentations.”

“Lamentations!” Ellen cried. “When I left for Poland, my father told me to read that for you. He said it’s pure poetry.”

“Then read and you will understand about the stones.” He seemed satisfied with her. With some difficulty, he stood up and
walked, in his labored fashion, to a hulking dark wooden wardrobe along the street side of the room. He opened the doors and
slid open a drawer, removing a yellowed envelope. Returning to the table, he handed it to Ellen and sat down.

“When your father was here, I told him this photograph was stolen from my coat on my way home to Zokof. Yesterday, a man came
to my door. A Pole. He tells me he broke down a wall in his house a few years ago, to make a new room. In the wall he found
this. He asked if I wanted it because his house used to belong to a Jewish family, and he thought maybe I knew the people
in the picture. They did that, during the war, you understand? Jewish people hid their photographs in the walls. Or they buried
them, like the books, for after. Or they gave them to Polish neighbors, for safety.”

“So this is a photograph from before the war?” Her arms tingled as if she had touched electricity.

He nodded. “I asked my neighbor, why is he bringing it to me now? He said his conscience was bothering him. He meant to give
it to me years ago, when he found it, but he forgot.” Rafael shrugged. “Yesterday, something made him take the envelope and
bring it to me. Something, yeh? Freidl came to me last night and told me how she scared this Pole into bringing me the photograph
for you. She wants you should have it.”

Ellen could barely speak as she began to open the envelope.“Thank you,” she whispered.

Rafael shrugged again.

The photograph was mounted on a card, in the old style. It was very much like the framed one her father had in his study.
She pulled it out carefully and saw her grandfather seated in a chair, wearing the same clothes as in her dad’s photograph.
But standing beside him, with a protective arm on her grandfather’s shoulder, was a beautiful young man. His long dark hair
was combed straight back, startlingly like Marek’s. She loved the jaunty yet elegant way he held his body. It perfectly complemented
the defiant look on his face.

“That is Hillel,” Rafael said, pointing to the young man. “He was a musician, a Jew. He played guitar. Freidl wanted I should
tell you that to him she sang a niggun—a tune—in his ear. He was a socialist. Still, she thought he looked like a mensch.
She sang to him so he would stay with Itzik and watch out for him, which he did, gave him passage to America. Now I will tell
you something. Not so long ago, in Kraków, Freidl sang it again. But the tune, you know which one, it is from her. Her prayer
for you.”

Ellen felt her face flush. “I know which one,” she said, filled with love and awe of this woman.

T
he afternoon grew late. Ellen asked to use the bathroom.

“The toilet is in the back. This is an old house,” Rafael said, as if he felt he needed to apologize. “Use the kitchen door.”

It took Ellen a moment to understand that she would have to go outside, to an outhouse that stood at the end of a footpath
about thirty feet from the house. The stench of it reached her before she got to the wooden door, and once inside, the fetid
smell of urine warned her not to sit. Squatting over the hole, she grabbed a few sheets of the abrasive gray paper he kept
there as toilet tissue and peed as quickly as she could. It would soon be dark. She wondered how he managed this at night.
Or in the winter snow.

She washed her hands in the kitchen and returned to Rafael in the living room. He had closed his eyes. She would have liked
to press him about how Freidl’s tune was a prayer, and if he knew that Marek now played it with his musicians in Kraków, but
he seemed so tired. Still, when she told him she would have to leave, his chest contracted ever so slightly, as if her departure
caused him physical pain.

“I’ll be back soon,” she said. “Next time, will you show me the cemetery where Freidl is buried?”

He looked up at her with a tenacious tenderness and rose to escort her to the door. “Next time. Yeh.”

She squeezed his arm gently. “I’ll be back.”

“Good bye, shayna maidel,” he said with some difficulty as he watched her tuck the photograph of her grandfather and Hillel
into her backpack. “I leave you in Freidl’s good hands,
aleha ha sholem
—upon her may there be peace.” He walked her to the vestibule and opened the door. “Tell your driver to be careful, yeh?”

She spread her arms to say good bye, and he did not resist her when she enfolded him. He wore so many layers, the demarcation
of body and cloth was indistinct. At close range, his clothes gave off the stale odor of dead skin and dust.

She walked back to the main square. Krzysztof sat smoking on a bench next to the war memorial. He greeted her, and they chatted
pleasantly on their way back to the car, making liberal use of hand signals, which they continued to do all through their
ride back to Kraków. They spoke about the Polish love of mushroom picking, and how the pollution from Nowa Huta was affecting
people’s health. At some point, Ellen rearranged her crocheted shawl on her shoulders, and as she did, she caught the distinct
smell of Rafael’s musty clothes. It made her very happy to have been able to take it with her.

33

T
HAT EVENING,
M
AREK CALLED THE
P
ALACE
H
OTEL.
“E
LLEN
, we are still in łódź. I’m sorry I could not take you myself to Zokof. Did you find a ride?” He didn’t wait for a response.
“I did not know about my group’s engagement. I came to your hotel to tell you, but you were not there and I had to leave.
My group, well, we are not as organized as we should be. I don’t see them when we are not working.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Ellen said, enjoying his asking her to forgive him almost as much as the sex in his rolled
r
’s. “It worked out. I spent the day with Rafael. We’ll go there together some other time.”

“Good, good. Any time you like. But if you are not going tomorrow, will you come out with me for dinner? I will be back in
Kraków in the afternoon.”

She cupped the phone in her hands, smiling. “Sure. I’d like that a lot. Where do you want to go?”

There was a pause. “Well, you are always in the city. Maybe you would like to see a different kind of place. I know an inn
in the forest.”