A Day of Small Beginnings (47 page)

T
HAT NIGHT,
E
LLEN DREAMED
F
REIDL WAS STANDING AT THE
edge of a forest holding a kerosene lantern from which white sparks burst, then flittered up to the trees. Her proud bearing,
the noble beauty of her angular face, the large deep-set eyes, the improbably full lips made so powerful an impression that
Ellen remembered it even after she awoke in the morning.

“Freidl?” she had said in the dream.

The woman had blinked slowly. She smiled, examined Ellen carefully. “Such curls,” she said. “This color you call
copper?
”

“You heard me and Marek?”

“I heard.”

But I had not come to talk of her distraction with this boy. I came about the Polish girl, about the cruelty of words. A Jew
should not be afflicted by strangers insulting her bloodline. A Jew should be able just to live, to love if she can. Yet have
we not seen it time and again, how our God uses hatred to return our lost ones to us, who have become strangers to their own
people? Terrible. Terrible. I was sorry for Ellen. She was not a fool, but poor soul, she did not know how to defend herself
from these wolves.

The woman put down her lantern and made a circular, dismissive motion with her hand. A strong breeze swept over Ellen’s face,
blowing back her hair, reminding her of the breath at her neck that morning. She closed her eyes briefly, and although there
was no grass anywhere, she detected its scent. Cut grass, she remembered, piled high behind Freidl in another dream. Cut grass.
The scent had wafted in the air around Zokof and had led her to Rafael. “You’ve been with me, haven’t you?” she said.

“We have a saying in Jewish,” I told her. “‘Man plans and God laughs.’” But tonight it is my time to laugh.” I let the shawl
fall from my head and reveal the white, luminescent square cloth, tied in knots at its four corners. It floated gently above
me. She was shocked, I could see. The handkerchief was her grandfather’s, the one she had sent back to Poland with her father.

I laughed, touched the handkerchief. “I watched over him. He told you this, yes?”

She looked at me in a way I knew something was not right, that he had not told her.

“You watched over my father?”

“Your grandfather,” I corrected. But her tears were for her father.

“I watched over your father too,” I told her. This quieted her.

“My dad showed me your gravestone,” she said. “He told me your father was a famous scholar. He said you were a scholar too.”

I bowed my head that she should not see my disappointment. She did not know of me from Itzik. He had told her nothing. “I
was not famous,” I said. “A woman does not get her share from being a scholar. It is said, in the World to Come, her share
is to be her husband’s footstool.”

She made a face. “That’s awful,” she said. “Things would have been very different if you had been born in our time.” She looked
so certain of this, as if I should envy her. I was not so sure.

“Things would have been different if my husband had been a
shayner Yid
and I had given him his due,” I told her. “I did not make for him a peaceful home. My father, may he rest in peace, warned
me often. ‘Freidl,’ he used to say, ‘if you swim against the stream with your mouth open, you will also swallow hooks. And
who wants to marry a girl with hooks in her mouth?’ ‘Papa,’ I told him, ‘if I don’t open my mouth, I will starve.’” I laughed.
“For this, he called me Freidl the Mouth.”

Now she laughed.

“Shah.” I hushed her. “My husband also called me Freidl the Mouth. But he said it like a curse.”

In my anger, I stood up, spread open my arms, and showed myself to her, my full breasts, strong limbs, bound in mud-caked
white linen. My shadow was immense.

She drew back, frightened.

I had upset her, and this I did not want to do. I hoped to teach her that night, not to frighten her. “We should begin,” I
said. “There are things you should know. Your father gave you a ribbon, yes? Bring it to me.”

She seemed surprised I knew about the ribbon, but she went to the Tanakh her father gave her. Between the pages was the ribbon.
The red had faded.

I took it from her and held it above her head. “This belonged to your great aunt Hindeleh,” I said. “The night your grandfather
ran from Zokof, she gave it to him. It was red then. A ribbon from her hair. Four years old she was, with copper curls, like
yours, exactly.”

I could see her anxiety. She asked what happened to Hindeleh. What could I do but tell her the whole story? “They went east,
toward Chelm. The poor child died in an orphanage.”

Her chest contracted. “Why an orphanage?” she wanted to know.

“Your great grandmother Sarah, may her name be inscribed, perished on the road to Chelm.”

She took the ribbon from me and placed it on her palm. “My grandfather never told me he had a sister with hair like mine,”
she said.

My heart broke for her. “He did not know what became of them,” I told her, though we both knew this was no excuse. “The Leibers
became like scattered birds. One by one, I watched them fall from the sky. God would not let me do more.” My grief at this
returned to me, sudden and terrible. Worse for seeing it also on her face. “They suffered,” I told her. What could I say?
It was the truth.

She reached for me, tried to brush back the loose strands of my gray hair under the white handkerchief that was still floating
above my head. The ribbon fluttered upward, back into my hand, and turned red again.

I said, “Thanks God for what I see in your heart. But we are not here tonight to recite Lamentations, Elleneh, or to ask how
could this have been.”

“Then why are we here?” she asked.

“To make a strong Jew from a seed,” I told her.

And this girl had the chutzpah to say she did not know if being a strong Jew was what she needed to be. “In my world being
Jewish is just not that important,” she said.

Such narrishkeit. How she inflamed me with these sentiments. But I spoke calmly to her. “A life in the Golden Land is what
I made possible for your grandfather,” I said. “Very pleasant. A life of summer. A place to forget that a Jew has to be strong,
like a tree. That you should grow roots and branches and have a trunk made tough by the seasons. And why?” I let her wait
for the answer, like my father when he wanted me to know he was making an important point. “Why am I here to make a strong
Jew from a seed?”

She looked at me.

“So when a Polack makes of you a joke, you do not fall down and begin to die.”

Even in her sleep, my words made their mark. The blood rushed to her face.

But I did not give her peace. I came at her, full of force. I said, “You let them make you afraid. What is that, that you
don’t even know where to turn to answer them? At such times as those, you open your Torah, your Talmud, even your Tsene Urene.”

“My what?”

“Gevalt, you never heard of the Yiddish bible for women?”

But she had nerve of her own. She gave me a look. “What good would those books do in my situation today?” she demanded.

I said to her, “Asses bray all the time, Elleneh. So? It is for you to remember the proverb. If you have learning, you will
never lose your way.”

There was a hint of understanding in her eyes. This pleased me. “Now,” I said, “what is that turning and jumping I saw you
do today? What is this?”

“I’m a dancer,” she said. “The kind of dance I do didn’t exist in your day. It’s like ballet, but not quite.”

“Ballet?” I said. “I never heard such a thing.” It came to me that Miriam danced, so I asked her, “Why do you dance?”

This surprised her, but I saw she was glad I thought her dancing was important. “Dance is movement from the soul,” she said.
“It’s like your tunes, in a way, except the dancer sings through her body.”

Such an unusual girl. I put my fingers to my lips, as if the tune of a dance might be there. “What does it say, your dance?”
I asked her.

She dropped her head. “Nothing, yet.”

I was disappointed for us both. I tried to encourage her. I asked, “What is this dance for?”

She liked that. “Sometimes I make dances about the beauty of the movement,” she said, “like a beautiful tune. Sometimes I
tell a story, like a song, or I try to make a point about something.”

She saw I did not understand this entirely. She said I was like her grandma Sadie. “When I tell my grandma Sadie about my
work,” she said, “she pats me on the head and says, ‘That’s wonderful, my darling, you should enjoy your life.’”

I did not want to be like her grandma Sadie. I asked, “With what are you making a point?”

This only seemed to upset her. “I don’t know yet what I’m trying to say. The director wants me to have a point of view, a
cry of passion. I want to use your tune, but I don’t know how yet. I don’t know enough.”

She was getting frantic, this even I could see. I put my arm around her shoulder and tried to draw her close. I had never
done such a thing to anyone in life. I knew she could not feel the shape of my hand, or my arm around her back. Still, maybe
she could feel something from me, maybe I would send up the smell of pines in the forest, or grass, to reassure her. I told
her, “The Hassidim say it is a great blessing to have a soul that dances.”

But I felt I should tell her also the truth. “Part of your soul, Elleneh, stays in the ground, away from the light, like Itzik’s,”
I said. “The night he came by me, I knew this was a soul that needed to be cooked into a cholent, to let go of its flavor.
But it seems he did not cook.”

Fear and hope together gathered on her sweet face. “Listen to me,” I said. “You come from a beautiful people. Without your
Jewish soul this dance, what you call it, will not have that flavor. From you will only come
pareve.
No
tam,
you understand me? No taste.”

She pulled away from me. “I’m not a Jewish dancer,” she said. “I don’t have to be limited to that. I’m just having a problem
with this piece, with the music. I don’t know enough about it. But it’s not who I am.”

I pulled away from her too. I told her, “I would have given so much for a taste of such freedom as you have. The holy books
lie open before you, and you say it’s not who you are, that you don’t want to be limited to have to read them? This is how
the daughter of a scholar talks?”

This only made her angry.

“I don’t want what my father wants,” she said. Then the tears came because she had spoken of him as if he were still alive.
“What I want isn’t in books,” she insisted. “What I want is in the body.”

I was gentle with her. I knew what it was to be a father’s daughter with her own ideas. “You told me you don’t know what you
want to say in your dance,” I reminded her. I lifted the lantern. Sparks flew out of it into the trees.

She stared in wonder.

“Listen to me,” I said. “A little Torah now could help.”

“Torah? What would the Torah do for me?”

I thought, did I really have to explain this? “You want something more the Torah should do for you?” I said. “This is the
book from God, His prayer to His people! This is His people’s prayers to Him, asking, What we should expect from each other?”

I had spoken too harshly. She looked confused, heartbroken. “I’m sorry, Freidl,” she said to me. “I just don’t know the Torah
any more than I know how to pray.”

I was ashamed for us both. I was not a good teacher. “Shah, shah,” I comforted. “Listen. Tonight, I want you should read Torah
as a Jew reads, as a Jew prays, with an open heart and a mind full of doubt. Try, Elleneh. For me, try.”

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” she said to me.

Such a lovely girl, such a good heart. I could not help wondering, was this how it was to have the pleasure of your own child?
She picked up her father’s Tanakh. We were standing now by a tall lamp, along a forest path. I looked at her book’s blue cover.
It said, “Tanakh, The Jewish Bible,” for the wholly uneducated, I supposed. I began to laugh, God knows why. I said, “Come
sit by me, my shayna, and open to the book of Exodus. This is where the story of Passover is told, what we retell every year
at the Seder table, yes?”

She nodded and gave me a hopeful smile.

“Turn the pages and I will tell you where to begin, in the ‘Song of the Sea,’ as we call it.”

“Song of the Sea.
I like that phrase,” she said, happy like a child.

She opened the book to Exodus, pressed down on the stiff new binding, and turned about twenty pages.

“Read to me,” I said.

“‘Thus the Lord delivered Israel that day from the Egyptians.’”

“No, after,” I prompted her.

“You know this by heart?” She seemed amazed at such a thing.

“Naturally,” I said.

“Then tell me which page it’s on.”

“Page?” I pretended to take offense. “Not by us, pages. Such a thing maybe you find in a goyish book.”

I was making jokes. And now she understood me. We had a laugh.

I waited just until I saw her find it, then I left.

S
ometime later, Ellen awoke. She remembered dreaming that the bells of Saint Mary’s had begun to peal unbearably loudly, the
notes of the hejnalؠencircling her like a hundred taunting Christian bullies. She remembered putting her hands to her ears
to shut out the cacophony.

“A choleria on them,” Freidl had said, and in the dream the bells had gone silent. The rest of her memory of what she and
Freidl had said or done came to her only in disjointed pieces. They had talked, yes, but it all came apart when she tried
to remember the specifics. Something about getting stronger, something about being a strong Jew. What she had managed to retain
most were the dream’s images. A fish with a hook in its mouth, a little girl, Hindeleh—yes, that was her name—with a red ribbon
in her hair, Ellen’s hair. It was all upsetting and exhilarating at the same time. The sun had begun to cast a dull light
over the room. She closed her eyes and slowly became aware that her hands lay outside the covers, holding an open book. A
prickly sensation swept across her back, down her arms to her fingers. She was certain she had not been reading when she had
fallen asleep.