A Day of Small Beginnings (48 page)

Sitting up, she stared at the Tanakh on her lap, amazed at having awoken to a tangible remnant of the dream she had been having.
What was she to make of the fact that she knew the book was opened to a passage she had found for Freidl.
Then Miriam the prophetess, Aaron’s sister, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her in dance with
timbrels. And Miriam chanted for them: “Sing to the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously;—Horse and driver He has hurled
into the sea.”

She reread the verse six or seven times, curious at Freidl’s choice. She liked the timbrels. But she felt chilled by the phrase
horse and driver.

36

F
OR DAYS AFTER HER DREAM OF
F
REIDL,
E
LLEN WORKED ON HER
dance piece from early morning until late at night. She established that it would begin with the sound of timbrels, a call
to the audience. She bought a tambourine and tapped out rhythms in the studio as she tried to develop movement sequences.
She reread Freidl’s Exodus passage so often, she knew it by heart.

Baruch ata Adonai,
she repeated at various intervals, exhausting her vocabulary of Hebrew prayer. Alone in the studio, it sounded to her like
a voodoo incantation. She felt slightly embarrassed and fraudulent about making an appeal to a God with whom she had never
before conversed. But she was determined to attempt the language of prayer and to overcome that helpless feeling she had retained
from the encounter with Genia’s Jewish joke.

She began another ritual, humming the “For-a-GirlTune.”

Marek called from the Ariel Café.

“Is this Ellen, from America?” he asked.

“You have an Ellen from somewhere else too?”

He laughed. “I am glad you think I am a Casanova. Are you free tomorrow afternoon? I was thinking we could meet at the Starmach
Gallery. It is very near your hotel, on Rynek Główny.”

“What’s there?” she asked, not really caring. She wanted to see him.

“I have been thinking, this gallery is something you will like to see. You’ve heard of Andrzej Starmach, the art historian?”

“No,” she admitted, wondering if she should have heard of him.

“He shows work by the Kraków Group—Tadeusz Kantor, Jonasz Stern, Maria Jarema. You know these artists?”

She didn’t, although she did notice that Kantor and Stern were both Jewish names. This sudden hyper-Jewish consciousness about
things annoyed her, and she scolded herself for being provincial. “What kind of art do they do?”

There was a short silence on the line. “I do not really know how to explain,” he said. “This is something very important in
Poland. The Kraków Group were the great modern Polish artists before the war, and after. They refused to make art in the style
of socialist realism. You’ve heard of this?”

“Of course,” she said, hoping to combat the impression that she didn’t know anything about art in Eastern Europe.

“And also, Tadeusz Kantor made a special kind of avant-garde theater. Cricot Two, it was called.” He added this tentatively,
as if he thought he should not impose more information without a further sign of interest from Ellen.

“Sounds great,” she said. “If you give me the address, I can meet you at five.”

W
hen Ellen saw the paintings at the Starmach Gallery, she knew she had been invited to another Poland. They were huge, fiercely
colorful, and full of ideas. She was especially intrigued with a painting by someone who was not of the Kraków Group, a young
artist, Marek said. His canvas was dominated by the black back of an armed policeman facing a blue, decapitated man. The man’s
head was attached to his lapel with a dragon-shaped pin. His upturned red lips suggested either foolishness or defiance. The
painting elicited sympathy for the blue man, and Ellen realized that he probably represented the artists of Poland under communism.
She thought of Pronaszko. “I like this one,” she told Marek. “It’s a very good painting.”

He smiled. “Yes. Very good.” He put his arm around her and played, tentatively, with the sheer crimson scarf she had draped
over her shoulder.

“What does the dragon mean?” she asked, brushing her hand lightly over his.

He tilted his head toward her, caressing her shoulder as he spoke. “To me, it is the mythical dragon of Kraków, who is under
us always. He is the symbol of our city.”

With a cryptic smile, he took her hand and pulled her out the door, into the thick pedestrian traffic on the square, where
they walked, arm in arm, around the Cloth Hall, scattering gatherings of birds.

They headed down Floria
ska Street, toward Florian’s Gate, stopping at a Café for a small dinner of dumplings and salad. Marek
charmed Ellen with his talk of Polish art and Polish film and Polish music and festivals, the rich underground life of his
country. He mentioned a performance piece he had seen. “It continued for days,” he said. “We followed the singers and the
actors from one setting to another, from an apartment to Ko
ciuszko’s Mound to a jazz club to more apartments, and even to
LOT, the Polish airlines office. It was something great. The performers and the audience were one living part of this big
experience, together. It was very Polish, something for the soul,” he said, drumming his chest. “It reminded me, exactly,
of the Passion plays in Kalwaria during Holy Week. I remember this from when I was a child and I went with my family. Kalwaria
is close to Kraków, a very holy place in Poland. It is the tradition for the local people there, and the monks, to act out
the last days of Christ’s life. They go, in a procession, from one chapel to the next; there are more than twenty chapels,
I think, and at each one they have a sermon. For these two days, Thursday and Friday, people come from all over Poland. They
are part of the play too. Everyone goes together. When you are living the story like that, it is so real. You believe the
suffering of Christ. You see it!” He paused, as he seemed to realize that Ellen might not share his sense of wonder and delight
about such an event.

As for Ellen, she could not help asking herself the very question her mother had put to her:
What do you know about this boy?
Until that moment she had not feared discovering the distance between them. But now she saw the rootedness of his Catholicism,
the superficiality of his connection to Jewishness, saw that he was not nearly as close as she’d chosen to think he was.

He took her hand and squeezed it gently. “Of course, most of the reason my family went to these performances, I think, is
because it was during the communist time and we could only show that we were Poles by being Catholic. Today, I think, maybe
only the country people or the old go to these plays. Or tourists.” He cocked his head and grinned. “But I am talking too
much like a crazy Pole. You must tell me about your work. That is what I want to hear.”

She smiled weakly, took his hand, and caressed his smooth skin with her thumb, choosing, for this moment, to believe in his
basic goodness. “Let’s walk through the Planty Gardens,” she said. “You can show me your favorite piece of kitschy art at
Florian’s Gate on the way.”

“It’s terrible stuff, what they have there, isn’t it?”

“It ain’t the Starmach Gallery.”

Thus, in each other’s good graces, they strolled through the neighborhood and around the circular brick battlements of the
medieval Barbican. “Let’s sit,” Ellen suggested, pointing to a bench in the Planty.

Several pigeons waddled by, cooing and pecking sharply at the grass.

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my dance piece,” she said. “The thing is, I’d like you and your group to do the music
for me.”

Marek’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “What music?”

“What else? The ‘For-a-GirlTune.’”

His gave her a reserved smile. “What will be the idea of your dance?”

She opened her purse and took out the oversized envelope Rafael had given her. “I think it will be something about this.”
She slid out the photograph of her grandfather and Hillel. “This was taken in Warsaw in 1906.”

Marek edged closer to look.

She pointed to the seated figure. “That’s my grandfather,” she said. “He was fourteen. This is just before he left Poland.”

Marek nodded.

She pointed at the young man standing with his hand on her grandfather’s shoulder. “And this is Hillel. He was a musician,
like you.” She smiled at him. “Handsome like you too.”

Marek screwed up his face. “He is better-looking.”

“Actually, he reminds me of you,” she said shyly. She had noticed the resemblance the moment Rafael had handed her the photograph.
But only now she realized that it was not so much in the similarity of the two men’s long hair and thin frames, but in a certain
sensual wistfulness they shared. She put her hand on his. “When my grandfather arrived in Warsaw from Zokof, Hillel took him
under his wing and arranged his ticket to America.”

“Where did you get this photograph?”

“Rafael gave it to me. I thought you’d be interested in it because Hillel learned the ‘For-a-GirlTune’ from my grandfather.”

Marek took the photograph from her and studied it more carefully. “Where did your grandfather hear the tune?”

Ellen’s heart beat rapidly. She wasn’t sure how to navigate her answer. “Rafael says it came from a woman in Zokof named Freidl.”
She averted her eyes, hoping he wouldn’t ask for more particulars.

“You found where it came from? And you did not tell me first thing? You are a very bad girl.” Marek wagged his finger at her.

She could see he was only partly joking. “When we go to Zokof, you can ask Rafael about it,” she said appealingly.

“Yes, that will be good.”

They looked at the pigeons.

“You like history,” she said. “Do you believe it leaves ghosts?” She half hoped he would take her question in jest so that
she would not have to figure out a way to explain Freidl quite yet.

He shrugged. “I like to make fun that now the communists are gone, the churches that were full for Solidarity are almost empty,
because now we have our freedom. But you know we Poles are mostly Catholics, ninety percent of us, or more. We come into life
hearing of the Holy Ghost. So I suppose, yes, it is understandable if we, if I, believe in ghosts.” He glanced nervously at
her, as if he wasn’t sure how she would take this. “I think our ghosts are everywhere, all the time,” he said with more confidence.
“The past does not leave us. And we do not leave the past.”