A Day of Small Beginnings (53 page)

“Now go to that street, by the tree,” Rafael said impatiently. “I will show you where was the market square, before the war.”

Marek took these directions from Rafael without comment. Ellen wondered if he was intimidated or if he was hard at work listening
for tunes.

They approached a large concrete apartment block.

“Stop in front,” Rafael said.

Marek shifted into park.

“Tuesday mornings, this place here was full of wagons.” Rafael made a wide arc with his arm, indicating the area before them.
“Over there,” he said, pointing to the left, “the women sold fruits, vegetables, baked things, from
stalls,
you say?”

“Yes,” Ellen told him, although she hardly knew what he meant.

“The cripples and beggars went from one to the other. Such a
tummel!
All over the town you could hear the chickens and the children. And peddlers—Shmuel the Bookseller.” Rafael smiled. “Moishe
the Shoemaker’s fingernails I remember. Half smashed, the other half gone.”

Marek looked out the window. Ellen thought he looked bored, and feeling responsible somehow for sustaining his interest in
the tour, she quashed her desire to question Rafael further.

Rafael scanned the area, as if he could see the people he had described. “I must tell you about Velvl the Water Carrier. He
came every Tuesday, with the buckets swinging from the yoke on his shoulders. The Iron Yoke, he called it, like in the days
of Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar. Velvl, may his name be for a blessing. He lived, as we say, on air. A
luftmensh,
you understand?” He opened his mouth, took in a deep breath, as if to fill his lungs with Velvl. “On Shabbos, such a man
was for us a king, a
tzaddik
of the sweet mysteries of the Zohar.”

Ellen watched Rafael’s shoulders rise and fall until, unconsciously, her own breaths began to synchronize with his.

“In summer, there was dust everywhere,” he continued. “In spring, we were up to our ankles, or more, in mud. Now, let’s go.”
He rocked forward and back, as if paying private homage to the site.

Marek shifted into first gear and, at Rafael’s direction, drove to the birch-lined, two-lane blacktop that led out of town.
About a quarter of a mile farther, they turned left onto a dirt road.

Rafael turned around to Ellen. “I took your father here. He wasn’t so willing to come as you, but I insisted.”

Ellen nodded, easily imagining her father’s resistance, given his discomfort at all things emotional and all things religious,
not to mention his hatred of cemeteries.

The dirt road curved to the left, back toward town. On their right lay a striped, planted field. On their left, the forest.
About two hundred yards farther, Rafael announced, “We are here. Park the car.”

They got out and crossed the road to the forest. A path of stone pavers, littered with broken glass bottles, led inside. A
crow cawed from the treetops. Several more joined in, and the harsh chorus quickly grew.

Looking up at the birds, Marek broke his silence. “When I was a small boy,” he said, “my uncle Leszek would sometimes put
me to bed. I remember he told me, ‘Our angels watch over us.’” Marek stroked his bare chin and glanced at Ellen.

She wasn’t sure what it was about the crows that had prompted him to say this.

“Uncle Leszek told me he talked to the Jewish ghosts. He said, ‘They are in the trees; they are with the birds; they are in
the sky before a storm.’” He glanced up again at the birds. “Maybe they watch over this place.”

Ellen looked from him to Rafael, hardly knowing how he would react to this.

Rafael turned toward the path into the forest. “The wall is almost gone. No one can be buried here now.”

“Why not?” Marek asked.

“A Jewish cemetery needs a wall so no
Kohane
will enter without knowing he has crossed the boundary.” Rafael turned and led them forward, as if no further explanation
was warranted.

Ellen shrugged at Marek’s quizzical look and followed Rafael into the forest. The crows made a frightening racket in the trees.

“Your father made a
tsimmes
about the birds,” Rafael said, without turning.

“He told me about them,” Ellen said, remembering their conversation in his study.

“I told him he should pray, and he prayed. For your grandfather, alev ha sholem, he prayed. And for Freidl, he prayed also.”

Marek looked startled. “Freidl? The woman with the musician, Birnbaum? Why would he pray for her?”

Rafael halted his march and turned to them. “He prayed because a Jew must pray for the souls of his dead.”

“But how was she
his
dead?” Marek asked.

Rafael looked from him to Ellen. “For almost a hundred years she has wandered Poland, our Freidl, without children to pray
for her, without Itzik, your grandfather. When your father came, we thanked God and hoped for rest, but he did not finish
what he promised. He wrote me letters like a schoolchild. Excuses is all he made from it. It was not enough.”

Ellen reddened. “You’re not being fair,” she said. “How could you expect him to become someone he wasn’t, just because you
wanted him to?”

“I asked him for no more than what he knew he could do. He knew what was expected. This is why his daughter is standing here
with me today.”

Ellen’s hearing dulled, as if she were underwater. “But he didn’t know I would be invited to Poland.”

“He knew the Leibers have responsibilities here. The rest was a gift, a coincidence, you could say.” He smiled that slight
smile of his.

A rushing noise, like water, again filled Ellen’s blocked ears, and she remembered her father using that word,
coincidence.

“Beshert?” she said. “You’re telling me it’s beshert that I’m standing here?”

Rafael gave a short affirmative nod. “Your father had responsibilities.”

The image of Freidl’s stone, buried in her father’s cabinet, now made Ellen feel nauseous. “Can you show me the pile of stones
where Freidl is buried? My father told me about it.”

Rafael glanced from her to Marek, who seemed confused by this talk. “Come, I will take you to her grave,” he said, and he
led them farther down the stone path.

They reached a tall wrought-iron gaslight, the only one. Rafael gave its trunk a few friendly pats, as if in greeting. “It
is written in the book of Zechariah that in his dream the prophet saw a lamp stand of gold.” He gripped the gaslight. “Zechariah
asked God what it meant. God said, not by might nor by power but by His Spirit alone could the Holy Temple, which was in ruins,
be rebuilt. God asked, ‘Does anyone scorn a day of small beginnings?’” He cleared his throat. “And so it is with us today,
in this place.” He looked up at the lamp stand.

Marek looked up at the crows.

The rushing sound continued to course through Ellen’s ears.

They reached the center of the cemetery, where all paths met. To their right, under a tree, was a pile of small stones. They
tramped through the thick underbrush and stood before it.

Ellen didn’t know how they would proceed, if she was expected to know a prayer, or if Rafael would consider it some sort of
sacrilege for Marek to participate. She waited for his cue.

He merely stared at the stones.

She thought she should step away from the religious and ease the tension she felt between all of them. “Rafael, how exactly
did you find the top of her gravestone, the part you gave my father?” she asked.

He picked up a small stone, which he placed on top of the others. “I found it after the war, when I came back to Zokof. The
town was a shambles. Blown up. My house was gone. This I told you when you were here last time.” His voice was low and rough.
He paused, as if checking to see if she remembered.

Ellen nodded slightly.

“I had nowhere to go, so I went to the cemetery, the only Jewish place left.” He pursed his lips. “The crows were here already.
The gravestones...” He made a dismissive cut with his hand. “Gone.” He frowned. “I was standing here, alone. But inside me
was a sound, a note, and it felt, this sound, like such a power, like what could reach the heavens. I stood here in this place,
and I prayed in that note, that sound. ‘
Ribbono shel Oylom
—Master of the Universe,’ I said. ‘What have you done here? What have you done here?’ I was frightened of myself, of the anger
in that note. But I could not stop it.
Be ashamed,
I told God in that note.
Be ashamed.
”

He paused before continuing.

Ellen thought of her altered voice, manic with anger at the Poles, and she wondered, fleetingly, if this was the feeling of
prayer. Not the anger, but the heightened sense of listening to one’s own voice, speaking words, but not aloud. A madness,
but temporary. Not a descent into schizophrenia, but an opening up, a lightening.

Rafael looked at her. “For centuries we have called our cemeteries the Houses of the Living because here the dead return to
their ancestors and to God, who is always the God of life. But I cursed Him that day. ‘You are the God of the dead,’ I said.

“Then, one day, after I was already living in the town, I was walking home. I took the short way, over there.” He pointed
at the area that bounded the western side of the cemetery. “There were a lot of stones there, that used to be the wall of
the cemetery, and I stumbled. Before I knew what was what, I fell on my face in a ditch. A stream had been there once, but
it was dried up for years. That is where I found the top of Freidl’s gravestone, covered with fifty years of dirt and leaves.
I pulled it from the earth and held it in my arms. I remember sitting in that ditch, holding it to my chest, rocking it like
a child, asking, Is this God’s answer to me? I could not grasp it. My heart was below my feet. I sat in the dirt, holding
the stone. It was terrible, how completely alone I felt. I wanted my wife.”

Rafael began to weep, cupping his hand to his forehead so that Ellen and Marek could not look at him.

Ellen glanced over his shoulder at Marek, who politely averted his eyes. She patted Rafael’s arm reassuringly, but he shook
himself resolutely and continued. “You understand? During the war I did not think, I
survived.
For this woman, Freidl, to come to me in this way, it reminded me that I am a man who could have that kind of freedom again—to
think, to feel something in my heart, to know that I could reach God with a single note, uttered in despair and anger and
fear. This was a gift for which I can never thank her enough.”

Ellen handed him a tissue, resisting the impulse to ask him how he could thank God for what he or Freidl had been through,
but understanding now why he listened to Freidl’s request that he be a mensch and read Torah again.

“El Molei Rachamim,” Rafael prayed.

Ellen reached into her purse and took out the blue booklet of memorial prayers her father had given her in his study. Laid
across a page was her great-aunt Hindeleh’s faded red ribbon. She wound it around her finger protectively and searched for
the prayer. “Is it all right if I say it too?” she asked, when Rafael had finished. “The transliteration is right here.”

He leaned over her shoulder at the words to which she pointed and shook his head. “Read the English, so you should understand.”

Ellen turned the page and read the translation, filling the blank space with Freidl’s name, when it was called for.
Compassionate God, eternal Spirit of the universe, grant perfect rest in Your sheltering presence to Freidl Alterman who has
entered eternity.
Her hands began to shake with the enormity of standing at the grave of the woman who had come to her in dreams, in her linen
shroud, with her regal face, her open heart.

From deep in the blue, Freidl prayed,
“Compassionate God, hear this heartfelt voice. Let me return to the place where Itzik’s granddaughter stands.”

Ellen clutched Hindeleh’s ribbon and prayed,
“O God of mercy, let her find refuge in the shadow of Your wings, and let her soul be bound up in the bond of everlasting
life.”
Crows rustled their wings in the branches of the trees.
“May she rest in peace.”

“Yes. Let it be so,”
said Rafael.

“And let us say....”

Marek stepped forward and put his arm around Ellen.
“Amen,”
he said.

“
Amen,
” Rafael echoed. He looked up at the birds. “With them, we always have a minyan.”

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