A Day of Small Beginnings (62 page)

“What’s the matter?”

He shrugged slightly. “My parents and their friends used to sing this song with us sometimes, when I was a boy. It was something
we would sing when we were all together, at home or in the forest, around an open fire.” He rubbed his cheek pensively. “Before
my father began to leave us.”

“Where did he go?” Ellen asked, not recalling him ever mentioning that his father and mother weren’t together anymore.

“My father? He did not go anywhere,” Marek said. “He lost his job. So he sits by the river fishing every day, with his bait
and his bottle. To me and my mother, that is how he has left us.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said, as heartbroken to hear this as she was stunned.

Marek shrugged. “It is the Polish sickness, the drinking. We hope he will get better someday, when he has work.”

“It will get better. You’re just at the beginning of a long change,” she said, hoping he’d be reassured by her confident tone.
She stroked his hair until he fell asleep, disturbed at remembering him drunk in her bed not so long ago, and the frustration
and anger she had felt toward him then. She drifted into her own sleep that night wondering how deep a mark his defeated father
had left on him. At six thirty the next morning, she awoke, still uneasy, and left him sleeping.

O
n the evening of August 20 the audience gathered in the center of Szeroka Square, swelling well beyond the rows of folding
chairs set out for the performance. Except for peripheral street lighting, it was almost dark. From behind the scaffolding
erected on the broad expanse of pavement in front of the Old Synagogue, Ellen paled as she watched how many people were arriving.
Most of them were young, although she could spot older people in the crowd by their neckties and jackets. She wondered how
they would see this
thing
she was presenting, or what they would see that she hadn’t intended. This thought sent her into something of a panic. Her
ears became blocked. She could hear the muffled sounds of the musicians tuning up backstage. Then she lost her hearing altogether
and could only feel her heart pounding.
Breathe. Just breathe,
she told herself, afraid to move, forcing each inhalation, praying for the stage manager to signal the beginning so that
she would have something to do, anything to stop this terrible feeling.

To distract herself, she checked the set, beginning with the central tree trunk, which formed the back wall of the stage.
The four vertical railroad ties, cut to ten-foot lengths, had been expertly lashed together in a crisscrossed pattern to allow
for climbing. From the bottom of the trunk, a single, powerful spotlight shone a white beam into the sky. She liked the wooden
branches the set designer had arranged at angles to each side of the trunk. It had been her idea to wrap them with strings
of tiny blue-and-white lights, like an Orthodox Jew’s tefillin.

She had begun to regain her equilibrium, but when she glanced back at the audience she got shaky again. Strangers were reading
the program notes she had written. A friend of Pronaszko’s, a professor of English at Jagiellonian University in the city,
had written the Polish translation. They were reading her title,
A Day of Small Beginnings,
and her dedication to Freidl:

Strength and dignity are her clothing,

And she laughs at the time to come.

She opens her mouth with wisdom,

And the law of kindness is on her tongue.

Proverbs 31:25 26

Spotlights came up on the transparent gauze veil that stretched from above the tree structure and slanted down over the entire
stage. The dreamlike boundary it created with the audience did not make Ellen feel any more secure. On a scrim above the stage
appeared, in English and in Polish, the words:

PART ONE: GENESIS

Listen to my heart, calling in the wilderness,
shaking like Miriam’s timbrel.

And then, her piece began. A timbrel, held to a microphone, was struck and shaken. Ellen nervously clicked her fingernails
as Marek, Paweł, and Stefan, in black jeans, white T shirts, and baseball caps, emerged from the wings and climbed the tree
trunk, their bodies silhouetted by the spotlight. Each settled himself in the branches, among his instruments and musical
paraphernalia. The sight of Marek and the confidence with which he and the other musicians moved calmed her. The timbrel faded
under a rising recorded caw of crows.

The Sparks
—Henryk, Genia, Ewa, and Tomasz, dressed in mustard tank tops and loose-fitting trousers, appeared at the top of the tree
branches holding lit cigarette lighters, leaping from branch to branch.

“My real name is Leiber,” Ellen’s voice said. “My grandfather, Itzik Leiber, a Jew, came from the town of Zokof, near Radom,
where my family lived for many generations. In 1906, my grandfather left Poland for America. He never returned. He never told
us why he left his home in Zokof or who he had left behind.” The dancers stopped and faced the audience. Offstage, Monica
translated Ellen’s monologue into Polish. After a pause, she added,
Bist a Yid? Are you a Jew?
she repeated, in Polish.

There were sounds of alarm from the audience as the dancers jumped five and six feet to the floor. Ellen, unable to determine
if it was the acrobatics or the words they were reacting to, grabbed the pair of compact binoculars she had brought with her
and aimed them at the crowd. Among those seated in the first few rows, she saw surprise, perhaps confusion, and she wished
more than anything that they would understand this was not fiction. Maybe she should have been braver, less obscure. She turned
to watch her Spark dancers perform their flamelike elevations. They burst and floated, exactly as she had envisioned, better
than she had even hoped.

But before that moment of small satisfaction had passed, she felt a wave of fear, that what she had created was not enough,
that art alone could never be sufficiently powerful to change Freidl’s fate.

From stage right,
the
Grass
—Jacek, Monica, Piotr, and Magdalena, dressed in green, rolled onto the stage area in earthtone blankets. Over the loudspeaker,
a recording of blowing winds layered itself neatly over the recorded crow caws, and Konstantin Pronaszko said in Polish, “May
you sprout from this place as grass sprouts from the earth.”

The timbrel shook again. A white screen with a cutout of a horse, a wagon, and a driver appeared. Ellen swallowed hard. “Horse
and driver He has hurled into the sea,” she recited to herself from Exodus.

Andrzej, in his oversized cap and ragged clothes, burst from stage left and tore through his angry solo. It ended with him
falling onto the screen, crushing the image of the horse, wagon, and driver. Dark figures wrapped the screen over him like
a shroud and dragged him offstage. Ellen wondered nervously if the paper horse, driver, and wagon had reminded anyone, especially
any of the older people in the audience, of the Jewish boy accused so long ago of killing the son of the famous peasant who
had seen the Virgin Mary over the Tatra Mountains, not so very far away from Kraków.

The wind, crows, and timbrel built in volume. The Grass dancers fell and rose in circles around the stage. They rolled over
the Sparks, extinguishing them with their blankets until the two groups lay still, piled grotesquely atop one another. Before
the blackout, Ellen wondered if this sight made anyone in the audience think of Auschwitz, an hour away. Many faces did, in
fact, seem stunned.

On the scrim above, the following words appeared:

PART TWO: NATIONALITIES AND BOUNDARIES

Górecki’s Third Symphony began and was greeted with prolonged, effusive applause. Ellen could almost feel the audience’s relief
at hearing familiar music.

Now spotlights illuminated dancers wearing contemporary clothes, carrying six shiny white satin banners mounted on tall wooden
dowels shaped like crucifixes across the stage. Each banner bore the image of an eagle and a cross. Wide, colorful ribbons
streamed from the three points on top. Piotr, in traditional Polish dress, performed his solo. The audience clapped enthusiastically,
until the Górecki symphony died into the sound of the wind, and the stage darkened, leaving them alone with their applause.
Ellen sensed their discomfort at having been cut off. They coughed and talked and moved in their seats as if anxious about
what would happen next.

She could see Marek sitting in the shadows. She knew he could see her too, in the pale backstage light where she was standing.
He held the ram’s horn she’d had sent from America. Before he put it to his lips, she held up her fist, thumb concealed. “It
is the Polish way of saying good luck. I am holding thumbs for you,” he’d explained to her at a rehearsal a few days earlier.
In the darkness of the stage, she couldn’t see his face. But she could see him returning the gesture, and it gave her the
courage to believe that God would not take offense at a Gentile blowing a shofar, or at her for using it in a secular forum.
She even found herself addressing Him directly, saying that Marek had been vigilant in learning how to play the ram’s horn
correctly, that he had gone to the Remuh Synagogue across the square and pestered one of the elderly regulars to teach him
how to make the strident blasts.

Now Marek began to blow the unbroken note of the
Tekiah,
one of the calls of the shofar. She’d found an explanation of it by Maimonides in a book she’d bought at the Jewish bookstore.
“Awake all you who sleep, and you that are in slumber, rouse yourselves. Consider your deeds, remember God, turn unto Him.”
Standing there in the darkness, listening to Marek, she repeated the words.

The lights came up on four rectangular gray boards, laid like pavers across the stage. Genia, dressed in white, stood to one
side. Facedown, beneath each board lay a dancer. Genia began a precarious walk across their backs. As she had stepped off
the last board, the dancers stood, revealing that they were gravestones inscribed with Hebrew letters and designs. The audience
reacted with cries of recognition.

Marek lay down the shofar and played a disjointed, slow version of the “For-a-GirlTune” on his electric violin. Ellen got
chills hearing it fill the square, over pavement once touched by the soles of a certain pair of black suede pumps.

At center stage, in a square of white light, the gravestones rocked forward and back, one foot in front of the other. The
Polish banner dancers, emerging in a procession with Piotr swinging an incense burner, swayed from side to side. For the audience,
the two groups were set apart from each other by these two contrasting directions.

Still moving, the dancers began to recite.

“A proverb is a true word,” the gravestones said in Yiddish. Pronaszko’s voice recited an English translation.

“A proverb tells the truth,” the banners responded in Polish.

“A man comes from the dust and in the dust he will end—and in the meantime it is good to drink a sip of vodka,” the gravestones
said in Yiddish.

Ellen was relieved to hear a few laughs from the audience.

“You are dust and dust you will become,” the banners said in Polish.

Stefan struck a triangle. The gravestones raised their hands above their heads, as if beckoning to God. Slowly, they began
to list and lean against one another, evoking, Ellen hoped, a look of abandonment and indignity.

Andrzej, in his cap and tattered clothes, wove his way between the stones, tentatively touching their inscriptions. The stones
rose hopefully toward him. He pushed against one, folded himself over another, tore around the stage, using the gravestones
as launching points. His movements were alternately fluid and frenetic, excited and distraught. He clutched a gravestone to
his chest, ducking when the clarinet shrieked like a human voice, and the “For-a-GirlTune” built tension and speed. The lights
dimmed, and the long gauze curtain covering the front of the stage was pulled violently away before the light faded to black
and the music came to a stop.

The scrim read:

PART THREE: PRAYERS AND DREAMS

The stage was bathed in blue light. Pawelؠshook the timbrel. Andrzej lay in a heap on the floor. A pile of small stones had
been set at the base of the tree.

From a distance voices recited, in Polish, the prayer for the dead on All Saints’ Day.

A huge, shadowy female figure draped in a plaid shawl appeared in the tree.

Marek blew the shofar.
Shevarim!
The pensive, sad wail was Monica’s cue to lead the line of women forward in circles around the stage, arms raised above their
heads, palms forward, fingers shimmying with ancient cries to God. The movements had come to Ellen late one night as she lay
in bed, repeating the words Freidl had shown her about Miriam the prophetess, Moses’ sister.

Now they came to the section Ellen found difficult to watch, where the Spark dancers entered, holding their lit cigarette
lighters above their heads like Statues of Liberty, and the Grass dancers lifted the crumpled Andrzej, supporting his crippled
body as he slowly contracted and refused further contact with the world. Ellen began to cry, almost believing she was seeing
the embodiment of her grandpa Isaac’s potato soul, even while being amazed it could be so well understood by a gay Polish
dancer.

With the flick of their thumbs, the Spark dancers extinguished their flames.

In the darkness, Ellen found herself being carried aloft, to Zokof’s cemetery, where she was immersed in the silence of those
who had lain buried there in peace for generations. A long, raw exhalation poured out of her. She was filled with its power,
with awe, and with an ineffable gratitude at having been given the ability, even if fleeting, to sense it.

The scattered applause for the end of Part Three tapered off as new words appeared on the scrim:

PART FOUR: RETURN AND REMEMBRANCE