A Day of Small Beginnings (49 page)

“Like the dragon of Kraków,” she said.

“Like the dragon.” He smiled. “But we cannot worry always about dragons. We must kiss beautiful girls too.” And he did. “Invite
me to your hotel, Harvest Moon Girl,” he said.

She was surprised at his directness, but not offended. “Follow me,” she said confidently.

Evening was upon them. They walked back along the Planty to her hotel, holding hands, sharing short kisses, in the way of
new lovers.

Side by side, they climbed the grand staircase of the Palace Hotel. At her door, he rubbed the back of her neck as she retrieved
the room key from her purse.

When they were inside the vestibule, he took her hand and kissed it. She brushed back the bolt of wavy hair that had fallen
over his face and led him into the room. With only a cursory look around, he slid sideways onto her bed, his long legs stretched
in front of him, his neck angled against the headboard. They looked at each other. Ellen glanced at the empty place beside
him and put down her purse.

“I love your eyes,” she said, turning on the bed light in the darkening room. She took off her crimson scarf and draped it
over the light, creating a pinkish glow. “You have the warmest eyes in Poland.” She was immediately sorry she had said this,
as it reminded her of the cold eyes she had seen in Zokof, and of her father’s warnings. But she resisted the urge to retreat,
and lay down on the bed beside him.

He smiled, leaned forward, and kissed her. When she didn’t quite respond, he tried again. “Ellen? Is there something wrong
with my eyes now? Or with Poland?”

She knew he was trying to be playful, but she said, “It’s Poland.”

His excitement seemed to dim. “It is only that you do not know us yet,” he said. “We are not what those Americans at the Ariel
Café think we are.”

She wanted to believe him. With some effort, she allowed herself to again adore the shape of his parted lips.

They kissed again, and their tentative hands began to struggle with his shirt buttons and her fitted skirt. She explored the
soft round cushion of brown hair on his chest and the smooth skin of his back. They rolled over each other, testing the sensation
of the other’s body. When they rolled too far to the edge, they fell, ungracefully and with a solid
thump,
onto the carpeted floor, in the open space between the bed and the wall. “Hey!” he said.

Ellen laughed.

Marek reached up and, with a jerk that would have been the envy of any magician, whisked the white brocade spread off the
bed. It settled over them like an elegant arched tent, enveloping them in whiteness. Snapping off her bra, he pulled back
to look at her. “You have beautiful breasts,” he said, and kissed one.

She wrapped her arms around his back. “Do you know, your body is just the right temperature for me? Just the right warmth.”

He kissed her, adoringly digging his fingers into the ringlets of her hair.

Without shyness, they watched each other work their way out of their remaining clothes, then climbed back under the bedspread.
The bed light and the setting sun gave their skin a rosy cast.

Ellen traced the line of Marek’s hip to his groin. “This is the most beautiful part of a man’s body,” she said, “and I don’t
even know what it’s called.” She ran her fingers up and down the ridge, watching his sharp breaths. Finally, he grabbed her
hand and held it still.

“Stop,” he said. “Look what you are doing to me.” He pressed her hand to his erect penis and pulled her to him.

She too pulled him close, as much for the feel of his warm skin as to lose sight of his fleshy uncircumcised organ, so unlike
the mushroom-smooth penis heads with which she was accustomed. She wondered if it would feel different inside her. But Marek
was so nimble, and so sweet a lover, it became easy to ignore the foreskin, even after he came and they lay in each other’s
arms, dreamy and dumb.

The sun had set. They were in shadows. Marek rolled onto his back.

Ellen took his outstretched hand in hers and kissed it. Its coolness felt good on her overheated palm. “You’re my first,”
she said, chuckling.

“What?”

“My first uncircumcised man.”

He remained strangely motionless. “Then, you only go with Jewish men?”

“No, but almost all the guys our age in the States are circumcised. They just do it in the hospital when babies are born.”

“Sweet Mary, Mother of God! No one is circumcised in Poland.”

“Sweet Mary circumcised her boy.”

There was a brief silence between them.

“Does this mean you do not want to be with me again, if I’m not circumcised?” Marek asked cautiously.

She stroked his cheek. “Marek Gruberski, I want to be with you. But if you ever want to make love to me again”—she nipped
at the tuft of hair below his lip—“this thing has got to go!”

He laughed with obvious relief, and hugged her to him. “Easier to cut the beard than the foreskin,” he said. “Tomorrow morning,
I promise, the thing is gone!”

They kissed each other good night. Ellen rolled over. Marek curled around her.

God forgive me, but I watched them. In my life, I never dreamed people could have relations like this. For me, intimacy between
Jew and Christian was already a scandal, but this unholy nakedness! I could not have imagined passion that would pull a man
and a woman to the floor, not even with Aaron. Of course, my knowledge of these things had its limits. I had buried desire
so deep in my marriage bed, it got lost with the feathers. And if the women of our town whispered of such matters, I had stood
too far apart from them to hear. Such familiarity offended me, as my father taught me it should. Not from timidity then, but
from pride I had closed myself off from their community. But this night I knew my father had been wrong to advise isolation.
I had remained undeveloped in some important way. When the two lovers quieted, I was like a child, understanding little but
that I had witnessed something strange and immodest, but touched with a gentleness that opened my heart.

They lay with their arms around each other. The fire of envy and admiration burned in me. Womanliness, with its tenderness,
its compassion and patient wisdom, I had denied myself for a seat in a house of study. And what had come of it? A lonely life,
a small life, affecting nothing because I had affected no one. I cursed myself for having lived lazy as a drunk in my indifference
to life. I scolded myself for having been so proud that the Angel of Death had come easily by me. Why not? For years I made
a home for him among my lifeless daily rituals. As it is said, those who do not grow, grow smaller.

I was nearly exhausted from heaping scorn upon myself like dirt on my grave, each shovelful a memory of another sin. Ellen
turned away from her lover. On her face I saw her grandfather’s lost expression that had drawn me from my resting place that
I might help him find his way. “Be vigilant,” my father had said. “Return her timbrel, and she will make an opening for you
to return.” I looked at this girl from the Golden Land and understood. The choice was mine, to enter her life and teach her
in the way she should go or to remain outside observing her. To cross this boundary between us was no small thing.

37

I
N THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT,
E
LLEN OPENED HER EYES AND
saw Freidl rocking back and forth in the wingback chair, a half-smile accentuating her high cheekbones.

“Your langer loksh has a light in him,” Freidl said.

Ellen stared across the room at the bed where she and Marek slept, her nakedness barely covered by the bedspread, his arm
draped over her upper thigh. She did not understand how she could be outside her body, yet, vaguely aware that she was dreaming,
she was not alarmed.

“Aaron Birnbaum had a light like that.” Freidl nodded approvingly. “And a head for Torah too.”

Ellen didn’t know who Aaron Birnbaum was. As for having a head for Torah, she thought Freidl was chiding her for sleeping
with a non-Jew.

“My Aaron had a talent for
niggunim,
like your langer loksh,” Freidl went on. “For him, the tunes came like fruit from a tree. He had only to pick them.”

“
Your
Aaron?” Ellen said, intrigued by the woman’s excitement about a man.

Freidl pursed her lips slightly. “You think I was always an old yideneh? When I was a girl in my father’s house, I knew what
was love. My Aaron sang to me every day, from the street. His voice was, for me, like the sound of a shofar. I could hear
it over all the others. God forgive me, but when Aaron sang, it was like my own Messiah had come, heh!”

Ellen marveled that a love more than a hundred years old could still look so fresh on a woman’s face.

“Sometimes he whistled, like a Pole.”

Ellen looked at her uncertainly.

“Does a Jew whistle? If Aaron whistled, my father would not suspect him. He would think it was just someone in the street.”
Freidl clapped her hands to her mouth and muffled a peculiarly lusty giggle.

Ellen realized Freidl was not like her grandma Sadie, a woman so embarrassed to admit any knowledge of or interest in sex
that she insisted her children had been conceived while she was asleep.

“You understand,” Freidl said, the buoyant expression fading, “my father, may his name be for a blessing, did not approve
of Aaron Birnbaum. Aaron was a Hassid. My father was not. ‘Their faith is backwards,’ Poppa said. ‘The music is for the Jew,
not the Jew for the music.’” She lifted her chin proudly. “But, Elleneh, I tell you, as I am here with you tonight, my father
was wrong. In Aaron’s tunes, every one, there is the essence of a prayer, of what it is to stand before God and dare to show
Him that deepest feeling, what it is to be a
ben Adam
—a son of Adam, a human being.”

Ellen thought it strange and magnificent that God would have to depend on human beings to tell Him how it feels to be one
of His creations.

Freidl’s lips tightened again. “My father, of course, forbid a union between Aaron and me.” She clenched her hands to her
breasts. “But the heart takes what it wants.”

The two women looked at the sleeping Marek. “The ‘For-a-GirlTune’ was Aaron’s, wasn’t it?” Ellen said.

Freidl nodded. “His music was all I had of him who should have been my husband.”

Ellen shrugged slightly. “It would have been different if you had had him for a husband. With a musician, you’d have probably
had to go out and work to make ends meet, feed the kids, pay the rent and all that.” To her, this seemed merely obvious.

“But I loved him,” Freidl said meekly.

Ellen saw no point in disillusioning her about a life with Aaron.

Marek murmured something in Polish and rolled onto his stomach. The two women waited until he settled back into sleep.

“Your langer loksh, he reminds me of the other one who loved music, the boy in the photograph, with Itzik,” Freidl said.

“Hillel. Yes, I think so too. Sexy guys,” Ellen said half-jokingly.

Freidl looked away, and Ellen thought the remark’s overtness had offended her. “I’m sorry if I upset you,” she said.

Freidl shrugged again. “Upset?” She seemed distracted. “What I am today, this shape, is not my body. There are times when
the light goes out from me altogether and I am afraid that I will be exiled forever from the world.” She sighed. “That is
how it has been, from the night your grandfather came by me. But still, these two could be like brothers.” She nodded again,
as if trying to comfort herself.

Ellen took this as her moment to ask, “Freidl, what happened that night, when my grandfather came to you?”

Freidl stopped nodding and gave Ellen a serious look. “From the grave I followed Itzik,” she said. “I sang to him. I sang
to him the deepest prayer I knew, Aaron’s niggun. He did not hear me. He was that kind of boy. What his eye did not see, his
heart did not feel.”

Ellen wondered if her grandfather’s refusal of God arose from the same stubborn literalism that was evident throughout his
life. She had always found it so difficult to understand this about him, how a person could be so progressive in his thinking
but so unwilling to explore his own imagination, and so resistant in his personal life. He never went to the theater or even
to the movies, steadfastly ignoring the pleas of his wife. She remembered once, when at ten or eleven, she had wanted him
to join the family for a visit to the Museum of Science. He had dismissed the idea so abruptly it had scared her.