A Day of Small Beginnings (51 page)

Ellen felt like a schoolkid caught unprepared for a test and desperate for excuses. The tape player gave her the idea to say,
“I have the music.” With that, she realized she could probably lay out enough elements of the piece to satisfy him.

He grabbed a folding chair and, turning it backward, seated himself. “Let me hear.”

She played the tune, vacillating between feelings of certainty and strength about how right it was for her to use it, and
fear that she was exploiting something private and fragile.

When the music ended, Pronaszko, his head cradled in his hands, waited a dramatic minute or so before asking, “And the dance.
What is it about?”

“It’s a prayer,” she said, surprised at her own certainty.

He scratched the back of his neck and stared skeptically at his own image in the mirror behind her. “What is the prayer? This
is Jewish music. You are not going to bore us, please, with bad Nazis and suffering Jews?” Without pausing to give her a chance
to correct him, he charged on. “This has been done. And done. I do not want my company to revisit Auschwitz with an American.
That is a very uninteresting aspect to me.”

Ellen was not put off by his unexpected vehemence. After all, she had no intention of doing the kind of piece he was describing.
What made her scalp crawl, from the hairline back, was his linking the words
American
and
uninteresting.

Pronaszko put down his satchel and let his focus drift to the pigeons nestling on the studio’s window ledge, as if trying
to think of a way to salvage the situation with her.

Strangely, Ellen got the feeling he was trying to be supportive, that he was leaving her room to elaborate. Something disturbed
the pigeons. They flew off with a powerful rustling of wings, reminding her how the crow who had fallen into her apartment
air shaft in New York had regained its strength to fly.

“The dance is a prayer for grass to sprout from the earth around the gravestones,” she said. “It’s about Miriam the prophetess—Moses’
sister—and her timbrel.” A smile came, almost unwittingly, to her lips at having offered Pronaszko a sampling from her list
of elements, enough to let him know she was not going to Auschwitz. “I’m thinking it’s a dance about Poland, from my eyes.”

He looked at her as if he had no idea anymore who this girl was.

Members of the company began to arrive, and Pronaszko was forced to turn his attention to them. Ellen gathered her things.
“Let us see something next week,” he called to her as she left. She thought she detected excitement in his voice.

She walked downstairs with a sense of confidence, which she hoped would last.

39

W
HEN SHE ARRIVED AT HER HOTEL,
E
LLEN PICKED UP A MESSAGE
from Marek asking her to call him at the Ariel Café.

“Forgive me, a hundred times, that I forgot to tell you,” he said when she reached him. “There are so many festivals in Kraków
in the summer. But the Jewish Culture Festival is new this year. My group is on the schedule to play. Today, when we were
making arrangements with the organizers, I realized you would be interested. Not for my group, you can hear us other times.
But they have organized workshops all over Kazimierz, of Jewish cooking and dancing and arts, and things like this.”

Ellen thought the idea of a Jewish Culture Festival in a city of almost no Jews rather strange. “What’s the festival
about?
” she asked, hoping this was not going to be another kitschy Polish interpretation of Jewishness, the sort of imitation thing
his band did, with the black-and-white clothes and silly hats.

“I have the schedule here. Tonight is a music concert by a Jewish composer that I think we will like. A quartet.”

Quartet
somehow sounded relatively harmless to her. “Where is it?” she asked, wondering who but the two of them would be interested
in attending.

“It is at the
Stara Synagoga,
the Old Synagogue, near the Ariel Café. You know it?”

“I know it,” she said. Seated on the edge of her bed, she pointed her feet and watched goose bumps rise on her calves as she
pictured the photograph of the girl in the black suede pumps. “I’d like to go.”

That night, they met for dinner at a small restaurant near Wawel Hill, a block from the Café where she’d had coffee on her
second day in Kraków. They sat side by side, in the European way, and Ellen realized that even if the neighborhood, with its
imposingly lit cathedral on the hill, had become familiar to her, it was still not hers in the way New York had become hers.

Marek handed her the schedule for the Jewish Culture Festival. “See how many workshops there are all week?” He ran his finger
down the list. “Cooking. Hebrew calligraphy. Singing. Klezmer. They also have films and lectures.”

She was taken with his almost proprietary pride in the festival.

“Look,” he said, pointing to an event scheduled to take place at eleven o’clock the next morning, “even a workshop in Jewish
paper-cutting.”

She took a look at the schedule. “Rafael has paper cutouts hung on his walls,” she said. “If you want to see the real thing,
you could drive me to Zokof tomorrow. What do you say, partner?”

Marek leaned toward her. “You are really an American girl, the way you talk.” He smiled at her provocatively. “You are just
like in the movies. I like it.” He touched his newly shaved chin. “And I would like very much to go with you to Zokof tomorrow.
It is almost as wonderful as my idea.” He pulled his cloth shoulder sack from the floor and discreetly pulled out a plastic
shopping bag. “I have brought my change of clothes so I do not have to go back home tonight.”

She played with the indigo silk shawl draped over her shoulders and gave him a studied sideward look. “Are all Polish guys
this presumptuous?”

The last word threw him off. He seemed uncertain if she was annoyed with him. “The students where I share rooms are having
fun guessing where I was last night,” he said.

Ellen realized she knew almost nothing about how Marek lived his daily life. He had never mentioned roommates. “Then let’s
keep them guessing.” She winked, preferring for the moment to keep him for herself, without social connections.

Later, when they arrived for the concert, the Old Synagogue was almost filled. The audience was mostly Polish. Ellen expressed
her surprise at the large turnout, but Marek explained how Poles love music concerts. “We like to get dressed up and tell
everyone
shhh,
” he said. Ellen laughed, and on cue, the people in front of them turned around. When the quartet began, she and Marek held
hands. The white-vaulted sanctuary glowed brightly, even without sunlight. The music was intricate, modern, and otherworldly,
like a conversation of distant voices. Marek clasped his other hand over hers and held it tight. At intermission, she took
him by the arm and explained, with some satisfaction, this was the bimah, and that was the Aron Kodesh, where the Torah scrolls
were kept. He nodded appreciatively. “I have seen this building only from the outside. I did not ever go in because I was
afraid it was a dark place, like a prison, you know? I did not imagine it would be so beautiful.”

Ellen was startled and touched that he had had the same reticence about entering the building as she’d had. “It is beautiful,”
she said, admiring the interior space anew. She was glad they had come.

They took the tram back to Old Town, content with their evening’s success. Fog had lifted from the Vistula. It snaked through
the streets in long puffs that made Ellen think of Kraków’s dragon. Arriving at the Palace Hotel, they went up to her room.
Their heads brushed together slightly as Ellen searched her purse for the key. She smiled at him, opened the wing of her shawl,
and led him into the room. Marek slipped his satchel off his shoulder and followed her onto the bed, where he unfastened the
long line of crocheted buttons that held together the front of her dress. She cupped his head in her hands, ran her fingers
through the length of his hair, and kissed him. He laid her back against the pillows and slid his hand between her legs. “Now
we make our concert,” he said.

I
n the morning, they awoke to the street sounds of a working weekday. A truck gate opened with a loud squeal, and Ellen sat
straight up in bed. “We better get going,” she said.

Marek rolled over to see the clock. “No problem. It is only seven thirty. We have time.” He pulled her back into his arms.

She patted his chest impatiently. “Time to go,” she said.

He pretended to be injured. “You are tired of me already?”

She jumped out of bed, grabbed his hand, and pulled him after her. “How could I possibly get tired of a langer loksh? Take
a shower with me?”

“What are you calling me?” he said, following her into the bathroom, all smiles again.

After breakfast, they shopped for fruits and vegetables at an outdoor market. Marek bought a bouquet. “We cannot visit your
friend in Zokof without flowers,” he said. “It is the Polish custom.”

“It’s a very nice custom,” Ellen said, pleased by the respect implicit in the gesture. But she stopped him from buying chocolates.
“They’re probably not kosher.”

“But he can say a blessing on them and make them kosher,” Marek protested.

“It doesn’t work that way,” she told him. But she was mildly puzzled herself at how it did work. In her room, she had another
package of kosher goods ready for Rafael. She’d asked her mother to send it. All the items were marked with a kosher symbol,
but she had no idea what requirements they’d had to meet.

They left Kraków in the Fiat in the muggy July heat and headed north into the rolling yellow hills. They passed corrugated-roofed barns, grazing black-and-white cows, fenced gardens surrounding tiny wooden houses, slanted sheds, and farmers in horse-drawn wagons, all of which now looked somewhat less novel to Ellen. She rested her head against the window frame and closed
her eyes.

“I am looking forward to meeting your friend,” Marek said.

She glanced at him, aware of potential trouble ahead. There was a real possibility that despite Freidl’s blessing, Rafael
might not trust Marek because he was a Pole. “I’m sure he’ll enjoy meeting you too. But he can be gruff,” she warned. “Be
patient.”

Marek reached across the gearshift and touched her knee. “He is old. I know about old people. My grandfather is eighty-six.”

“That’s not what makes him gruff,” she said uncomfortably.

“I understand. It is the war that changed them, that generation.” He glanced at her. “They are different from us, because
of what they lived.”

Ellen did not want to argue the point. She had no idea what had happened to Poles like Marek’s grandfather, and she didn’t
feel like discussing Rafael’s past before the two men had met. “I’m sure that’s true,” she said, looking away.

“The old people teach us to keep Poland’s freedom in our hearts.” He touched his chest demonstratively, as if he didn’t think
she would understand. “We have a holiday in November, All Saints’ Day. This is a holy day everywhere, but in Poland it is
when we mourn for our heroes, and our past. We take flowers and wreaths and light candles at the graves and the monuments
from the Nazi time. The air on that day is thick with smoke from millions of those candles, like a blanket over us.”

Ellen nodded, thinking of the
Yahrzeit
candles she’d seen at Jewish memorials in the past. It struck her how closely Polish and Jewish symbols and sensibilities
dovetailed without touching. “I think your grandfather and Rafael might remember the war very differently,” she said.

“I do not think so,” he replied. “The war came to everyone in Poland. When they tell their stories from that time, we know
that history does not happen to strangers. It happened to them.”

Ellen regretted their having once again stumbled onto the detritus of the Holocaust, which always seemed to create conflict
between them. She shrugged slightly. “You know what I’m starting to think? I think it matters less what you believe, what
faith you follow, than what kind of a person you make yourself because of that faith. The world is full of monstrously religious
people.”