A Day of Small Beginnings (5 page)

I
TZIK TOOK THE BACK STREETS, AWAY FROM THE MARKET SQUARE
, past the Kestenbergs, the Mandelsteins, the Shlufmans, Goldfarbs, and Flumenbaums, my neighbors who I remembered so well,
generations of them in those houses. A few faint kerosene lights from the windows were the last he saw of our town of Zokof,
where the Leibers had lived for generations, even before Jan Nowak’s people.

For the rest of the night he ran across the rye and wheat fields on that flat plain. When he got far enough from the town,
he made his way over to the road. It was easy enough to find it, between the lines of trees. Even in the dark, you could see
the silhouettes of the willows and the bent apple branches that always made me sad. Why, I asked my father, should something
have to be cut until it looks like a cripple for it to make such sweet-smelling blooms and tasty fruit?

“Freidleh,”
he said to me, “food is better than beauty.”

“Only for the hungry,” I said. “Otherwise, is it not as natural for the tree to reach for the heavens as it is for man?”

My father, may his name be for a blessing, made his little grunting sound. But underneath the beard, I knew he was smiling
at me.

I floated above Itzik along that road. In the hour before dawn, I watched for trouble from the village walkers. They were
on their way to the local farms to trade their grain or leeks or potatoes. When he saw one, Itzik slowed to a walk. He kept
his head down. I was sure no one recognized him, bent as they were under the heavy sacks on their shoulders.

A Jew, Nahum the Driver, plodded by, his wagon heavy with hides for Goldfarb’s tannery in Zokof. “My horse don’t have eyes
for humans anymore,” Nahum used to say. “Why should he? I don’t have money to buy him oats.” Nahum didn’t raise his eyes for
Itzik either, thank God.

At morning light Radom wasn’t far off. Itzik fell exhausted onto a patch of dandelions, under a stand of birch trees.
Sh’ma Yisrael. Adonoi eloheinu, Adonoi ehad,
he prayed. He took off his shoes, and careful as can be, he pointed the toes in the direction of the city, so he should know
where he was going when he awoke.

What?
I thought.
I should sit here and eat cherries?
I had discovered I had strange powers of observation. I could see hundreds of images at once, each stacked on top of the
other, but every one clear to my strange new eyes. I saw again the crooked streets and alleys of Zokof. Inside each household,
the grandfathers and the grandmothers, the fathers and the mothers, the children and even the great-grandparents were rising
from their beds and making their first water of the day in pots and privies. The men laid
tefillin
around their arms and heads and wrapped themselves in prayer shawls. The women woke the children with prayers. I heard their
voices drifting from the windows, hundreds of them, old and young, giving thanks for the new day. As the saying goes, one
who takes the joy of waking in the morning without giving thanks to God is like a thief.

When I lived, those half-sung prayers were as much a part of me as the skin on my bones. How I missed the voices of our Jews.
Even the best death, like mine, is still a lonely thing. Who knew that after, when you can no longer speak, the only sounds
your soul can make no one can recognize as you. To the living, you are the stray call of a bird in the trees beyond the town,
the lift between two notes, the sharp hiss of sparks from a fire. You are not at all the human who cursed your children one
minute, sang their praises the next, and every year, on the Day of Atonement, said
Al Chet
for these sins of cruelty and pride.

Still, I got a shock to hear the first few notes of Aaron Birnbaum’s tune. It rose above the din of the Zokofers’ prayers
like the blowing of the ram’s horn on Rosh Hashanah, ushering in the New Year. Even now, a year in my grave, this melody had
the power to clutch my heart, to make me remember feelings I thought I’d lost in girlhood.

The truth was, despite my love for Aaron, I’d felt a little ashamed to live in Zokof, where the Hassidim believed in the ecstasy
they found in their music as dearly as their Torah study, maybe even more. My family was known, for generations, for its scholarly
piety. “The Hassidim have it all turned upside down and inside out,” my father lamented. “The music is for the Jew, not the
Jew for the music.”

But on the morning after Itzik and I left Zokof, I hoped the music of the Hassidim would never end. When Aaron’s tune rose
like smoke through the chimneys and vanished in the wide Polish sky, I fought the temptation to leave Itzik and fly away with
it. It was no triumph to discover Poppa had been wrong, that sometimes a person, his own daughter even, could be for the music
and not the other way around.

Itzik awoke with dragonflies winging around his head and a snail creeping into his shoe. He hugged his bundle to his chest
like a rag doll and flicked the snail away. As he set out again, he skittered back and forth across the dusty road into the
fields to avoid being seen. Every few minutes he looked nervously back at Zokof, as if the town itself would give chase and
attack him like a peasant’s dog.

When no one appeared to be coming after him, he relaxed. I looked back to Zokof too. Shuli’s innocent face floated above it,
contorted by a terrible grief. She’s lost the boy she loved, I thought. Oh, the pity of a girl in love with Itzik. It was
easier for him to hate God than to believe he was entitled to lift his eyes to look at her.

By midmorning, we’d reached the paved streets of Radom. Pots of red and white flowers decorated the high doorsteps of the
brick row houses, but I’m sure Itzik didn’t notice them. From the way he kept bobbing his head around every corner, checking
his direction, I guessed he had never been there before. He hid under the cap he’d pulled over his face and carefully wound
his way through the crowded streets, skirting the noisy open stalls in the market square, until he reached the train station.

The stationmaster, a Pole with eyes blue and careless as the sea, looked down with a certain disdainful amusement at the ragged
Jewish child digging in his bundle for the fare. Out tumbled the money bag. As Itzik grabbed it up, I could see his confusion
at discovering his mother’s gift. He hesitated, ground his jaw until the muscles rippled across the sides of his face, and
for a moment I thought he might even turn back to Zokof. But slowly, without lifting his head, he muttered to the stationmaster,
“A ticket for Warsaw, mister.”

The stationmaster turned to the porter squatting on a stool behind him, and said, “What’s this, Pawel? Another Yid?”

The porter, all of whose features were squashed against his flat face as if he’d been hit by a skillet, stood up and nodded
in Itzik’s direction. “They say Warsaw is full of Jewish fleas like that one.” The words whistled through the gap in his mouth
where his front teeth used to be. “Watch you don’t give someone an itch, boy.” He lurched over the counter and smacked Itzik’s
shoulder.

Itzik shrank back. His hand, which had been reaching up to receive the ticket, now hovered in midair, staving off further
attack. The gesture provoked the stationmaster and the porter to howls of laughter that shook the walls of the stationhouse.

I watched Itzik’s eyes go slack, as if he didn’t have anything to say to them because he saw himself as they saw him—inferior,
unacceptable. The boy had nothing inside to give him strength. I felt the heat of danger all around. A Jew can’t afford to
be so starved in his soul. Not when he lives in a country where insults to his character roll off the tongues of strangers
every day, cool as idle chatter.

In 1863, when the Poles tried to oust the Russians from our part of the world, my father, may his name be blessed, spoke to
some headstrong young Jews who wanted to join the rebellion and show the Poles they were nationalists too. Poppa had tapped
his finger on his Talmud and said, “This is where you show what you’re made of. Here, in a house of learning. Out there is
narrishkeit,
foolishness. Why should you fight their battles? They don’t trust you. ‘Christ killers,’ ‘host poisoners.’ This is what they
think of you! Just remember this. Poland without Jews is like a barren woman. It produces nothing but sausage.” He laughed.
But his laughter was as angry as the stationmaster’s and the porter’s, the sound of two sovereign people resentfully sharing
the same sad scrap of land.

The stationmaster flicked Itzik’s ticket in front of him. “Get along, boy,” he said. “Go to America. Poland is for Poles.”

Such a rage and shame came over me, who had promised Itzik’s mother that I would protect him. And here I was, as helpless
a woman in death as in life, unable to keep this child safe, to nourish him any more than his mother.
Nourish him,
I renewed my vow. As long as Itzik remains with me, I must nourish his soul.

In my fury, I barely noticed that as I flew back and forth across the room, the tickets on the stationmaster’s desk began
to rustle and flutter. The porter glanced down at them. His laughter slowed like a train coming into the station. I paused,
amazed at myself.

In that moment of the stationmaster’s uncertainty, Itzik threw the fare on the counter, grabbed the ticket from the man’s
hand, and ran out of the stationhouse.

Outside, the sun shone on his cold hands. He squeezed the ticket like a good- luck piece and stuffed it in his pack.

I was wild with joy, dancing with it. I’d offered help and he’d taken it.
Itzik,
I called to him.
Now do you hear me? Itzik!
But Itzik heard nothing. He bought a bit of herring from a Jewish woman in the market and asked directions to the shul.

“Have you heard about the trouble in Zokof?” she said.

“What trouble?” He turned his face from her curious gaze.

“Trouble with the Poles. They say there’s been lives lost. People made to run away with the shirts on their backs. A pogrom
is what I heard. A real pogrom.” She was looking side to side, as if she expected Zokof’s pogrom to sweep through Radom like
a summer hay field fire, as well it might have. It wouldn’t have been the first time.

Itzik’s body got cold. He shuddered.

Why didn’t my soul have the power to show me what had happened last night?
God, give me mastery of what strengths I have left, for the boy’s sake,
I prayed. Who had died? Who’d paid the price for all this folly? It was not enough, what God had given me, a snatch of information
here, a veiled image there. Not enough.

Itzik took his fish from the woman and hurried from the market square, sweat beads dropping from his brow. He walked faster
and faster, until he was running. He didn’t stop until, out of breath, he’d reached the brick walls of the shul. Inside, he
breathed in the smell of dust and wax and sank into the protective shadows of a large column, well away from the
bimah,
where he might be seen. His whole body was shaking as if with a fever.

Eat a little,
I pleaded with him, knowing he’d need all his strength now. Itzik gave no indication that he’d heard me. The fish remained
uneaten. I shouted, I flew back and forth in front of him. Nothing. Itzik was deaf to me.

I thought of Zokof. Pogroms were not so much a part of our lives in Congress Poland as they were to the east, in Ukraine and
such terrible places as they had in Russia. But we’d had our share of the tremors of fear, the steady beat of whispers behind
closed shutters, the quick click of boots assembling. I imagined the terrified Shuli squatting in the cellar, her eyes hot
with silent tears, wondering when her father would arrive with the detachment of Russian soldiers to break up the mob. This
must have been what I saw in that grieving face, not the loss of Itzik. But where were the Leibers now? I prayed they’d left
town, but I couldn’t leave Itzik to find them.

An old man, the
shammes
of the shul, shuffled by, doing his job of replacing candles in the wrought-iron lamps. When he murmured a vague greeting
to Itzik, the boy hid his face in his bundle and crept out the door. Who could be more wretched, I thought, than a homeless
Jewish child who feels like a stranger in the house of his God?

With great sadness, I remembered a question my father, of blessed memory, once asked his students. “Why do children from religious
homes sometimes become impious?” When none of them gave him a satisfactory answer, he turned to me with those dark, penetrating
eyes that kept most people at a respectful distance. “What proverb is responsive, Freidl?”

“Proverb Twenty-two,” I said, from my usual place, beside his shelves of tall books. They had the honor of resting against
the driest wall of our house so that they shouldn’t touch the dampness we ourselves felt in our beds. To me, these books,
our most precious possessions, always looked like a group of
rebbes
leaning comfortably on each other, sharing Talmudic commentaries.

My father’s eyes danced with pleasure as he smiled at me. “Recite for us, please.”

“‘Instruct a child in the way he should go, and even when he grows old he will not depart from it,’” I’d said, proud of my
father’s delight in me.

“Exactly right, my Freidleh. If a child has a good upbringing, he will love God. Faith will become a habit with him, and he
will not forsake it. But if a parent teaches faith and disrespects God by behaving immorally, the child may become impious.
What’s more, the child will imitate the parents’ acts when he grows up.”

He looked at me again. “What a shame she’s only a girl,” he said, still smiling. “A tea, if you would, Freidleh. I’m a little
dry.”

At that moment, nothing could have given me more pleasure than the honor of drawing a cup of tea from the samovar for so exalted
a rabbi, so righteous and loving a man as my father. And if he was less pleased with me for being a daughter instead of a
son, well, this is the way men are, even when they admire a woman’s intelligence. What I felt always was his loving guidance.
All his life he protected me from the talkers of our town who declared, as if God Himself had revealed it, that I was cursed
with a male soul. Years after the marriage, they told each other, “Naturally, she is childless.”