A Day of Small Beginnings (50 page)

“Still, I prayed,” Freidl continued. “I told myself, God doesn’t always answer us the first time, or the second.” She shrugged.
“I prayed when he went by Avrum Kollek’s house, when he said good bye to his family. I prayed for him on the road to Radom,
in the station where he bought the ticket, on the train when he fell asleep.”

Ellen watched her closely, so fascinated by this succession of events that she was reluctant to interrupt for details.

“I looked for someone who could help him. In the Warsaw train station, when your grandfather arrived, I was so frantic already,
I sang the tune to Hillel.”

“How did you know Hillel heard you?” she asked.

“He asked Itzik about it. Itzik himself he didn’t care about, not in the beginning. It was the tune that kept Hillel. Heh!
A socialist begging to hear the tune of a Hassid! He wanted it, in the way a man wants a woman. I made him think it was Itzik
humming, when it was me at his ear.” She smiled sadly. “I could see, from the way he moved, like a cat, that Hillel was a
man always ready to escape. I had to watch him, to make him want to stay, to take care of Itzik.”

“And he stayed. Not bad for a socialist.” Ellen couldn’t help teasing.

Freidl conceded this with a gracious smile. “A mensch is a mensch. He took care of your grandfather to the end.”

Ellen tried to imagine Hillel and her grandfather as friends. Their pose in the photograph, with Hillel’s hand on her grandfather’s
shoulder, suggested friendship, but their expressions revealed little else. “Is that how my grandfather became a socialist,
when he met Hillel?” she asked, since this was the one thing she knew they had in common.

“Your grandfather was no socialist when he came by me,” Freidl said tightly. She leaned forward, as if inviting Ellen to join
a closed circle of talkers. “When he came to my grave, he wrapped his arms around my stone, my
matzevah,
and he prayed to
Ha Shem,
the Almighty.”

Ellen had an image of her grandfather on his knees at Freidl’s grave, and the muscles tightened around her chest.

“Itzik the Faithless One.
Ptuh!
Like I said, such a joker is God, who would send this angry boy to my stone, as if he were my own child. That He would choose
me
to save him, a fertile woman gone childless to her grave, a woman restless as I was with regret.”

She raised her open hands. They were filled with blades of grass. “Two handfuls of grass Itzik dropped on my grave.”

Ellen inhaled the unmistakable sweet smell of grass that seemed to accompany Freidl wherever she went.

“That night when Itzik came by me, with grass in his hands, I thought it was a sign,” Freidl said, her voice breaking. “For
the first time, I knew what it was to pray with a mother’s heart. You cannot imagine what this was for me.
Ruler of the Universe,
I said,
it is written
,
‘Every blade of grass has its own guardian star in the firmament which strikes it and commands it to grow!’ Let a spark
be lit in him and let him grow!
” Freidl covered her face with her hands, her voice having given out.

Stunned by the depth of Freidl’s passion for a child, her grandfather, Ellen tried to approach her. But Freidl had not finished.
She shook the fistfuls of grass at the heavens. “‘Grass!’ he said. I should have known when he kicked it from my grave that
he did not mean to pray for me. I should have known that, good as he was, he would not hear me. I was a fool. I thought he
meant a prayer for me, that I too should sprout from that place as grass sprouts from the earth. But he meant the grass that
made Jan the Peasant fall to his death. I am sorry, but truth is truth.”

“It’s all right,” Ellen said, seeing the pained yet apologetic look on Freidl’s face.

Freidl turned away. “I have asked myself, was it for me, or Itzik, that God answered my prayer that night?” Her voice was
barely audible. She looked at Ellen. “His power He gave me, to make a mensch of this boy, your grandfather, who had stood
between the wicked and the innocent. And what did I do? I failed him and God both.” Freidl put her hand to her mouth and held
back a cry.

“What can I do for you?” Ellen asked her.

Freidl hesitated, then spread her arms. The walls fell away, and she rose into the enormity of a starry sky. Above her head,
a white linen shroud floated like a wedding canopy.

Ellen hovered just below, a child peering up at a mother who was trying to teach her something she could not comprehend.

Freidl looked down at her. Her expression was gentle but distressed. With a whooshing sound, she returned to the wingback
chair. The walls rejoined. She regarded Ellen expectantly. “Your prayers for mercy are what you can do for me,” she said.
“The soul cannot endure forever in such a state as mine. You who hear me must redeem me. Return me to rest with my body in
the place Rafael has marked with stones in Zokof cemetery. That is what I ask of you.”

“If I knew how to pray for you, Freidl, for it to be real, you know I would do that for you. But I don’t know how,” Ellen
said.

Freidl rocked back and forth, restored to her grandmotherly state. She patted her chest feebly and said, “Make a start, with
the open book. You can pretend, as if it is the first day of your school—your cheder. Your teacher gives you a word from Rebbe
Nachman of Bratslav.” She smiled at the name. “Rebbe Nachman, you should know, was a Hassid whose faith even my father admired.
Rebbe Nachman said, ‘Pray for an open heart, and in your dance you will attach yourself to God.’” She sat back, apparently
satisfied. “Don’t be afraid to tell me a little Torah—a
shtickl Torah,
as we say.”

Even in her consternation, Ellen smiled at the funny sound of the word
shtickl,
which made her think again of her grandpa Isaac and how he had also made her laugh.

“You have begun already, with Miriam and the timbrel.”

Ellen thought there was a hint of playfulness in her smile, and something slightly secretive. She wanted Freidl to stay. She
wanted to talk to her, to know her more. But the white linen shroud, now lit from within, floated in through the open window.
As it drew close, Ellen recognized the pattern on Grandpa Isaac’s handkerchief. She watched, in dumb fascination, as the shroud
wound itself around Freidl and swept her into darkness, leaving behind an empty chair.

Ellen suddenly felt the weight of the bedspread on her shoulder and the warmth of Marek’s body next to hers. She inhaled deeply,
so grateful to have been returned to her body. As she exhaled, she whispered, “Thank you,” surprised that it was God to whom
she spoke.

38

E
LLEN AWOKE WITH THE MORNING LIGHT, BENEATH THE WHITE
bedspread. The words
a shtickl Torah
rolled around her head. Marek kissed her neck, and she turned to him. He stretched, surveying her through slit eyes as his
arm crept under the sheet. He smiled as he found her lower back and pulled her close.

Aroused by his breath on her skin, she ran her fingertips up and down the length of his torso.

He arranged a handful of her curls with his free hand. “Good morning, beautiful Ellen,” he said.

She thought his courtliness charming. “How did you sleep?”

“Well enough to perform my morning duties,” he said, with lascivious good humor. He tumbled her, punctuating his kisses with
playful bites. She wrapped her legs around him, her hands and tongue at his neck and shoulders, then she let him go.

His eyelids opened in surprise. “Don’t stop,” he said.

“I’m not stopping, just looking,” she murmured, and slid from his sight, down the thin, hairy path to his groin.

Afterward, they lay together in the damp sheets, lightly tracing circular shapes on each other’s arms.

“I had a strange dream last night,” he said, smiling shyly. “I was in Warsaw, at the apartment of my friend, on Nalewki Street.
There were several of us there, playing music, singing old Polish songs. The door opened and there was Hillel, from your photograph,
with a guitar. He sat down and he played for us. No words, just tunes. Amazing, no?”

Ellen’s face and neck became rigid. Rafael had told her Hillel played guitar, but she was sure she had not mentioned this
to Marek. There was no guitar in the photograph.

“It was so strange to see him there, alive,” Marek said. “My friends did not know he wasn’t from our time, and he did not
speak. But he looked at me, and his tunes touched my heart. I remember thinking this in the dream. This touches my heart.”
He put his hand to his chest and looked at Ellen.

Ellen thought of Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav.

“His melodies were like your ‘For-a-GirlTune’” Marek went on. “Only now I cannot remember them.” He pulled at his hair in
frustration and raised himself on his elbows, staring absently at the light now streaming through the open window.

Ellen said nothing, thinking it too much to invite Freidl into the conversation.

“Now you must let me perform the rest of my duty,” he said, turning back to her with a soldier’s solemnity. He got up, went
into the bathroom, and closed the door. The water ran for several minutes. The toilet flushed. Ellen began to wonder what
he was doing, until he emerged, clean-shaven. She leaped from the bed and ran her forefinger over the place below his lip
where the little tuft of hair had been. “Wow!” she said, laughing. “You look great!”

He tickled her nose. “Shall we try a kiss without it?”

“Absolutely.” She draped her arms over his shoulders and kissed the cleanly shaven place. “’Bye, little beard,” she whispered,
and kissed his lips. They nuzzled, gawky as teenagers, nose to nose, lips to forehead, cheek to cheek, neither wanting to
give up the embrace, until Ellen felt a breeze from the window and saw the curtain flutter slightly. It made her think of
the white linen shroud floating there in her dream. She sighed. “I have to go to the studio this morning. I need to work,”
she said.

He nodded. “I have a rehearsal today also.” He winked at her as he began to let her go. “I will see you tonight?”

“You bet.” She missed him already.

A
n hour later, she sat on the studio floor and stared at the question she had written in her spiral notebook.
Who is Miriam?
She took a pen and the Tanakh from her backpack and wrote,
Dancer, leads women, plays timbrel, crosses Red Sea to the Promised Land, a prophet.
Nothing about this attracted her. It was like a description of one of those awful paintings hanging on Floria
ska Street.

A knot formed in her stomach and sent up a wave of nausea that tickled the back of her throat. Ellen took a deep breath and
stared out the window at the sky, which was very blue that morning, like on the day she had walked into Szeroka Square for
the first time and had seen the reflection of clouds in all the windows. She realized that something had begun for her that
day, although she couldn’t yet say what it was. Her temples pulsed as she began to consider her other worry. She rubbed them
with her thumbs. Why would any of this help Freidl rest?

Konstantin Pronaszko opened the door. “Good morning, my innovator from America,” he said brightly. “How is the work?”