A Day of Small Beginnings (42 page)

When at last the door opened, she forgot about the woman in the street. She was facing a very old man with large brown eyes
set deep in a wrinkled face. His lips, puckered like drawstrings, were barely visible beneath the awning of his mustache.
A large black yarmulke capped his head, from which shoulder-length white hair trailed into a long ashen beard. He seemed so
exotic, almost unearthly, that it was difficult for her to grasp that this man had been the boy who reset the course of her
family’s life, who had made her very existence possible.

They shared a lengthened moment of mutual appraisal. It did not escape Ellen’s notice that he seemed to tense as his eyes
passed over her bare shoulders, visible under her loosely crocheted jacket.

He beckoned her inside, his fingers thick and awkwardly angled with arthritis. “So you are here, Ellen Leiber. Come in.”

She thought his deep, gruff voice unexpectedly robust, and he surprised her with a small, courtly bow. But as she thanked
him, she wondered why he had called her
Leiber.
She crossed the threshold into the darkness of the vestibule and was repelled by the dust and the heavy human smell imprisoned
in the house. She took his swollen hand, which he had not offered. “I’m very glad to meet you, Mr. Bergson,” she said. “You
had a very special place in my father’s heart.”

He acknowledged her greeting with a half-smile and several small nods, but gently drew back his hand. “May his memory be for
a blessing.” He rocked slightly. “You said in the letter he went quickly. Thanks God, at least he did not suffer.”

Ellen looked away. Even after all these months, there were moments when her fatherlessness made her feel as if she had been
cast out of her own life. Memories could not replace what it was to
be
her father’s daughter. It was unbearable, an unrecoverable loss, not to have him anymore, not to be the object of that shy
but earnest delight in her, his one and only child. Her carefully reconstructed inner balance began to give way, and she felt
the miserable shame of tearing up in front of a stranger.

“Your father did not tell me his daughter was such a beauty,” Rafael said as though he sensed her need for distraction. “You
have a real Jewish face, like in the old days.”

From the way he spoke, his eyes alight, his posture bent solicitously toward her, Ellen understood he meant this as a compliment.
“Someone at the Old Synagogue in Kraków told me that,” she said, remembering how she had thought it bizarre that her looks
might once have been so common among Jews that she could be recognized as a type. At home, people usually guessed from the
reddish hair and fair skin that she was Irish. No one had ever told her she looked like a Polish Jew.

“Come inside, Ellen Leiber,” Rafael said. He directed her to the right, into a long room lined almost entirely with bookcases
of tall books, most of them leather-bound. She understood, from the narrow, drooping bed pressed into the corner and piled
with rough, torn blankets, that this was the single room in which he lived. At the far end, on a table, was a copper samovar
and the remnants of a meal of bread and tea.

She paused in the doorway, taking in the brownish, water-stained wallpaper that was peeling in places. Between the bookshelves,
six or seven lacy white paper cutouts of animals, menorahs, and intricate Hebrew lettering had been tacked to the wall. She
smiled at these, hoping to lift her own spirits as well as his.

“Mr. Bergson,” she said, turning to him, “my grandfather’s name was Leiber, but mine is Linden.”

“You changed your name,” he said tightly.

“No, actually my parents changed it before I was born. Their name is Linden too.”

He combed his beard with his fingers.

Ellen thought he was angry, but he began to chuckle. “Call me Rafael, Ellen Linden,” he said. “I see you are not entirely
your father’s daughter.
He
let me go on calling him Leiber, the
mamzer.
”

She wasn’t sure she’d understood what he had meant, but she had heard that word,
mamzer,
before. Her grandfather had used it, always in a derogatory way. She was about to defend her father, to try to explain the
name change, but she saw a small boy’s mischief in Rafael’s eyes. She knew then that she liked him, that he was not at all
the humorless religious man her father had led her to expect. She let the comment pass.

“Let us sit.” He leaned forward and swung his arms as he walked, exerting what, to Ellen, seemed a great deal of energy to
propel himself faster toward the other end of the room, like a man impatient with the physical limitations of advanced age.
When he reached the covered round table, he pushed the bread and the empty tea glass behind the samovar and held out a chair
for her. It was such a gentlemanly gesture that Ellen felt clumsy about pulling off her unwieldy backpack to sit down.

Unbuckling its front flap, she handed Rafael the Plexiglas container of sugar with the meadow painted on it. “I found this
among my father’s things in his study,” she said. “It’s for you.” She handed him the canister and the note.

Rafael dropped heavily into his chair and turned the painted canister slowly around in his hands until he had made a complete
revolution. Then he read the note. “Finding a meadow and planting a seed,” he said, repeating Nathan’s words.

Ellen had looked down, ashamed not to have admitted that she had found the canister in her father’s cabinet, next to the top
half of Freidl’s gravestone. He had not made much progress with planting it. So, before he had a chance to ask her about the
stone, she took out the envelope of traveler’s checks and handed them to him. “My father said it’s from the Bundists.”

Rafael nodded at the checks and accepted them from her. “They have Bundists in America still?”

She realized he had not been deceived by her father’s sweet fiction that the monthly checks had come from aging American Bundists.
There were tears in his eyes now. Her own followed just as quickly, despite the no crying grimace she used to hold them back.

Rafael placed both his hands on his knees and patted them simultaneously. The slow, rhythmic motion reminded Ellen of how
her grandpa Isaac used to comfort her by patting her back until she fell asleep. “I will make us some tea,” he said. He started
to rise but lost his grip on the arm of the chair and fell clumsily back to his seat.

Ellen jumped up to steady him.

Embarrassed, he waved her off.

“Let me. I’d love to make the tea,” she said, glad for an activity.

He made another attempt to stand, trying to make light of his difficulty. “What does an American girl like you know from samovars?”

She liked the way he was trying to joke with her.

“Over there, in the kitchen, I have a plate of biscuits on the shelf,” he said. “Bring it here. They are for you, after such
long travels.”

She pushed open the narrow door to the kitchen, in the middle of the bookcase lined wall, and found a chipped china plate,
around which he had arranged five sad-looking crackers.

When she returned with it, his stomach growled loudly and long. “The body,” he said, pointing to the offending portion, “it
wants to remind me I am too old to make talk with a beautiful girl.”

“Thank you,” she said, finding him utterly endearing.

They smiled at each other.

“Why don’t you have a few of these to hold you before lunch?”

He looked uncertain. “Lunch?”

She pulled her plastic sack of provisions from her knapsack. “Guaranteed kosher,” she announced triumphantly.

He surveyed with obvious joy the small feast before him of rolls, juice, fruits, vegetables, hard boiled eggs she’d cooked
on the hot plate in her room, and the packaged kosher soup mixes she’d brought from New York. He mumbled a prayer, then his
calcified fingers reached for a cracker from the china plate. It disappeared quickly into his mouth, leaving a small scattering
of crumbs in his beard. “For such a meal we need to make the table!” he said.

Ellen wondered what else he had to eat in the kitchen. She went to look for plates in the cupboard and found a half loaf of
bread and some milk on an oilcloth covered side table near the stove, but not much else. She made them both a salad and served
it with the rolls and eggs. “I’ve brought you more food in the car,” she assured him when he hesitated to eat. “Besides, my
grandma Sadie—Grandpa Isaac’s wife—would never allow us to leave anything on our plates. It’s a family tradition. So you better
finish.”

Rafael looked at the salad suspiciously and laughed for the first time since they’d met. “Grass,” he said.

She noticed that his teeth, though mostly intact, were almost brown. But to her relief, he ate everything she put before him
as he talked enthusiastically about herring and onions in cream, poppy seed rolls, and bowls of fresh berries.

“That’s Grandpa food.” Ellen laughed.

“That’s
our
food,” he said.

When they had finished, he seemed invigorated. But leaning toward her, he said, “I am glad you are here, Ellen. The truth
is, my time is almost over. Who would have thought I would live to see such an old age, older than Freidl when she went,
aleha ha sholem
—rest her soul in peace.”

The mention of Freidl surprised Ellen. She would have expected him to compare his age to her grandfather’s when he died.

“You know about Freidl,” he said. “And now that you are here, she comes to you herself.”

Ellen felt as if she’d been knocked slightly off balance, as if she’d been hit with a wave and couldn’t tell which way was
up. “How do you know my dreams?”

“She tells me.” Rafael leaned back in his chair as if this was explanation enough. “An ‘air spirit,’ she calls you. Come,
Ellen.” He pitched himself forward intimately. “You did not know it was her?” His breath smelled like rotted cantaloupe. “Your
father did not tell you about her?”

“He did,” she said, still reeling, wondering what an
air spirit
was.

“What? What did he tell you?”

She squirmed in her seat, impatient to be the one asking questions. “He told me she was childless. He said she was the daughter
of a famous scholar.” She looked at him, hoping he would be satisfied.

“And?” He raised his eyebrows.

Ellen raised hers, conscious of mirroring him. “He said Grandpa Isaac broke her gravestone in two when he hid behind it.”
She hesitated before adding, “On the night when you got into trouble with that man.”

Rafael cut her off with a dismissive grunt. “A storyteller should not be afraid of her story. In the details is the juice,
you understand?”

Ellen couldn’t stand it anymore. “Rafael, how do you know about Freidl coming to me?”

He waved her question away. “I want to hear what your father told you about her.”

“He said you stayed for her, that you’ve made a memorial in the cemetery for her from small stones.” She toyed with one of
the faded tassels edging the table cover.

“What else? What did he say about her soul?”

His insistence made her feel more uncomfortable. “I don’t know what my father thought about souls,” she said. “Actually, I
doubt he believed in them.”

He rapped the table impatiently. “A person should not speak against the dead. But always it was the same with him. Always
he was afraid of what others will say.” He glared at the canister. “Finding a meadow, planting a seed. No, he did not do for
her what he promised.”

Shaken by his anger, Ellen looked around, trying to see the room as her father had seen it, trying to imagine what he had
promised Rafael here. “You have no idea how much you affected my father,” she said. “He never read the Bible in his life,
and he actually gave me a
Tanakh
to read before I met you. He respected you, and he worried about you. I almost think he let me come to Poland just so I could
make sure you’re all right. He just didn’t know what to do for Freidl. He didn’t know what to do.” Ellen watched him nervously,
waiting for him to respond.

Rafael rubbed the joints of his fingers. He moved from one to the next, massaging each in a well practiced manner. “Freidl
always said Itzik’s soul was like an uncooked potato,” he said. “Your father’s soul, God forgive me, I think it was only half-cooked.” He looked up and suddenly smiled at Ellen. “But you?” He raised his eyebrows with a look of pride.
“Fun a proste bulbe kumt aroys di geshmakste latke.”

“What does that mean?” Ellen said, her own hands now clamped in nervous dampness.

“From a humble potato comes the tastiest pancake.”

The two of them looked at each other and laughed.

“There is something I really want to ask you,” Ellen said.

Rafael raised an interested brow.

“My father was so afraid of my coming here. He talked about Poland like it was the Land of Evil. He told me you gave him the
gravestone not just because of my grandfather but because you said it would be safer in America. Is that true?”

Rafael shrugged. “There is evil here.”

His tone was so mild, she didn’t believe he meant it. “You wouldn’t condemn a whole country because of some peasant a hundred
years ago, would you?”

He smiled at her indulgently. “It is written, ‘Evil does not grow out of the earth....Men make mischief just as surely as
sparks fly upward.’ You think a hundred years changed this?”

She still wasn’t sure how literally he meant this. “But there are almost no Jews in this country today. You’re not saying
that’s the Poles’ mischief, are you?”

He put his forefinger to his lips and shook his head that she should let him speak. “You are a young woman, but old enough
to understand these things, maybe more than your father even. So, listen.”

She sat very still.

“Today, you have returned to the town of your family. But our Zokofer Jews are now just dry bones, and I am the only one left
from the five thousand in your grandfather’s time. Whose fault? The Nazis, yes. They organized.” He frowned. “A talent for
organization the Germans have, not like the Poles. The Poles are full of narrishkeit about freedom! Honor! But what to
do?
” He raised his upturned palms. “Gornish!
Nothing. Now, I will tell you something, Ellen Linden. It is not my purpose to lecture you about what was after the war.
But I want you should understand something of this. It will help when we talk about Freidl. Because it is Freidl we are here
to talk about.”