A Day of Small Beginnings (59 page)

Ellen didn’t need to ask him if he was Jewish. She looked at him. He met her gaze briefly and looked back at the drawing.

“Tell him I would be honored if he would do the work on this gravestone for us,” she said to Marek. “Tell him I’ll send him
the text in the mail next week. Then if he’ll send me back a draft of what the whole thing will look like, we’ll be on our
way. But tell him I need it to be finished by the first week of September. I’m leaving on the fifth.”

Marek glanced at her before translating.

ukasz agreed to her requirements. They came to terms about the price, and he rolled up her drawing to take with him.

“I’m going to miss the gravestone,” she told Marek.

“This gives you reason to return to Poland.” He smiled.

“Oh, I’ll be back to Poland.”

“It is a difficult place to leave,” he said.

She realized there were several conflicting ways to interpret this remark. Such were the delicacies of the nation, she thought.

When
ukasz had left them, Marek seemed at a loss. He asked her how
the dancing,
as he put it, was going.

Ellen, not wishing to revisit the subject of her leaving, rubbed her forehead with the palm of her hand. “I made the mistake
of asking the company what they thought of the tune when I played it for them. You know what they said? ‘We’re doing a Jew’s
dance?’ It seems they don’t like the subject. ‘This is not what we’re thinking about in Poland today,’ they said.” Her eyes
hurt from having stayed up three nights, working and reworking the piece, sliding in and out of the feeling that it was losing
its flow, its balance, maybe its whole point.

“Maybe you could have them for a coffee,” Marek suggested. “Maybe talk could help out the situation.”

She shook her head. “I don’t have time for group therapy here. I’m up to my neck working with the sets and lighting and everything.
You have no idea how much time all this takes. They’re just jerks.” Her voice cracked. She hadn’t realized she was this upset.
She put her head down on the table so no one could see the tears that had sprung from her eyes faster than she could stop
them.

Marek reached over and stroked her hair.

Ellen balanced her chin on the backs of her hands and looked up at him. “The truth is I don’t know what’s upsetting me more,
them or me. I am making them do this Jewish dance, and what do I know about it? I feel like a fake, like I’m using other people’s
information, pasting it all together. I have scraps of paper all over my bed with elements I need to get into the dance, but
I can’t choreograph what’s in my heart, because my heart isn’t organized and it doesn’t know where it’s going.” She exhaled
against the tightness that was corseting her torso. “I don’t know how to tie it all together. It’s scaring me. Every night
I think of Freidl and how I can’t let her down, and I can’t sleep. My heart pounds like I’m going to have an attack. It’s
crazy. That’s how my father died.” She looked up. Her tears puddled and overflowed over the lower rims of her eyes.

Marek wiped them away with his thumbs so that anyone looking at them would have thought he was merely caressing her cheeks.
“Maybe you should talk to God,” he said.

She looked at him as if he were mad.

“Just talk, like to a friend. Tell Him everything, even the things you are afraid to say out loud, especially those. And do
not stop talking, even when you do not think there is anything left to say. Because then you will begin to say it again, and
it will be more clear. God can help you, if you let Him.”

She wasn’t ready to accept this, even from him. It sounded like something a missionary would say. She stuck with the problem
at hand. “If I give them exact instructions, they’re fine,” she said, sniffing. “You know, like
lean out, keep your shoulders down,
that sort of thing. But that’s not enough. They’re supposed to be setting a mood. They give me blank faces.”

He nodded understandingly.

“So finally, I lost it with them. I said, it doesn’t matter if this isn’t your subject, you make it yours.”

He got up, came around behind her, and massaged her neck and shoulders.

“Thanks,” she said, even though a stinging shiver had just run from a vertebra in her neck to her tailbone. The day was coming
when they would part. Her mouth tasted like chalk.

“Then we rehearsed and I got so impatient with them, I think I just made them feel ashamed that they were terrible dancers.”
She took a sip of water.

Marek returned to his seat. “If you know how you want them to dance, then you must insist they follow you. That is all.” He
looked serious now. “Polish people are different from Americans. There is nothing we will not argue about all night, all day,
from every side. But when it comes to doing something, making something, yes? Well, then we have trouble. Then you see, we
are all argument, no action, no discipline, no organization. Any Pole will tell you that, all night, all day, from every side.”

His grin surprised her.

“So when an American says to us, make this yours, be brave, just do it, we come full stop. We want to do our best. But most
of the time, we do not know what to do, how to begin. So we do nothing. And then we may discuss how we are doing nothing.
We make promises we do not keep. Then we make like we are heroes, defending our doing nothing. After this, we tell you, poor
American, you cannot possibly understand us, because the problem is so Polish.” He was laughing now.

How could she be upset when he had such beautiful white teeth?

“Come, we must have a drink,” he said. “That is so Polish too.”

They left the milk bar and went back to her room, where Marek produced from his shoulder bag a bottle of vodka, with a long
blade of grass in it. She took out two glasses, and they drank to dancers and musicians and Poles and Americans. He drank
much more than she did, much more than anyone she knew would drink. And somewhere between his becoming slightly high and too
close to drunk, she again began to doubt how well she really knew him, even if he could step out of his Polishness enough
to see it from her side.

They spent the night together, but he fell asleep soon after they got into bed. She lay awake in the dark, turned her back
to him, and buried her disappointment in him by visualizing the dance from beginning to end. She kept rearranging elements,
adding and deleting parts, but it was the content that bothered her. There was a lack of focus she did not know how to fix.

That night she dreamed of her grandfather. He was a figure in a painting, posed in his upholstered armchair, his face turned
toward the outline of a window in the Brownsville apartment. The rest of the canvas was unfilled. She awoke, disturbed at
having seen him so flat and unfinished. A question came to her, as if someone had given it to her for dictation, and she wrote
it down in her notebook:
What did we lose, what was left behind, once Miriam’s timbrel stopped shaking and we found ourselves alone in the land of
milk and honey?

In the morning, Marek awoke full of apologies for having abandoned her the night before. “We Poles drink too much. It is our
curse.”

She was beginning to find the Polish drinking excuse tiresome. But he was so sweet, finding her robe for her and putting it
on with many kisses along her arms and back and neck. The way he looked directly at her, smiling as he brushed back her loose
curls, made her want to play. When he turned to get his shirt, she edged herself up on the bed and jumped on his back, laughing
as he grabbed her calves and trotted her around the room. “Hey, don’t even think about dropping me!”

He did drop her. Right on the bed, where she lay on her back, legs askew, robe open, with the belt still tied, rather uselessly,
around her waist, looking up at a man who so clearly desired her. “Come here,” she said. He climbed on top of her and pressed
himself to her, and into her.

Later they had breakfast at a Café down the street and parted soon after. He told her that he didn’t know when he would be
finished working that day. “I’m painting someone’s apartment,” he said. She had had no idea this was how he supported himself.
There were so many things about his life she realized she didn’t know. She gathered her dance bag and walked to the studio
through Rynek Główny. It was already crowded with tourists.

All that day she was alternately enticed by the thought of Marek, roller in hand, reaching upward, exposing the smooth white
flesh of his side, and by the image of her grandfather in her dream. She took out her notebook and reread the sentence she’d
written down. It seemed obscure and strange. Yet the phrase
alone in the land of milk and honey
so perfectly described her grandfather. It evoked all the loneliness she’d always known had resided in him, permanent as
his chair by the window. She spent the morning trying to work it into the dance and became irritable when she couldn’t find
a place for it. The more she tried to force it, the less it worked and the more aware she became that she was running out
of time to keep reimagining the piece.

That afternoon, the company seemed fairly pleased when she announced they would be dancing to Górecki’s Third Symphony. She
told them they would be carrying long dowels hung with traditional Polish religious banners. She asked for suggestions on
how the banners and the costumes should look and how they could move with them.

“We could make them with white cloth and very tall, like we do at home,” Ewa suggested.

Ellen tried to feed this spark of interest. “Do you know any traditional Polish dances?” she asked Piotr. “Come on,” she urged.
“Show me something.”

Reluctantly, Piotr unfolded his long, slight frame and shuffled to the middle of the studio floor. He splayed his fingers
over his hips and took several defiant sidesteps to the right. With his left hand raised above his head, he began a series
of turns, knees bent, his neck tipped back at a proud angle. Picking up speed, he circled the room and added a low, controlled
kick, which reminded Ellen of the Russian Moiseyev dancers she’d seen as a child. The dancers began to clap out the beat.

Ellen joined them with enthusiasm. “We have to use this,” she said. Her notes for this section of the dance were pages long,
crammed with unconnected ideas and tangential references. Now she saw how much better it would be to simply present a Polish
dance, done in unison.

Piotr finished with a triumphant, short bow, and a small, self-satisfied smile.

B
y the end of rehearsal that day, Ellen had begun to feel more hopeful.

Andrzej remained behind in the studio. “Where is this from, what you are choreographing here?” he asked her.

Ellen wasn’t sure she really wanted to get into a whole discussion about it.

He pursed his lips, perhaps sensing her impatience. “I want to know how you make your choices for the dance. This is what
I want to learn.” With unexpected hesitancy, he added, “If you will tell me.”

Ellen wasn’t sure if he was trying to understand choreography in general or her method in particular. “Don’t you ask Pronaszko
questions like these?”

He clucked his tongue. “Kostek does not encourage me in choreography. He wants me more for himself.” He looked off long enough
for Ellen to figure out that Kostek was a diminutive for Konstantin, Pronaszko’s first name. “It is more difficult for us
in Kraków than in Warsaw, where I am from,” Andrzej said.

She understood that by
difficult
he meant being homosexual, but he shrugged off her question about how awkward his involvement with Pronaszko must be.

“He is not interested in training someone who might try to take his place someday,” he said.

She was surprised at how openly he expressed his bitterness. “Maybe you’ll have to go somewhere else to do choreography then.”

He did not respond.

“You could go back to Warsaw.”

“Yes, but I want to learn about modern dance, and Pronaszko is the best. This is not America. We do not have so many choices
here for companies.”

“I have to tell you,” she said sympathetically, “you’re the last person in this company I ever thought I would get to like.”