A Day of Small Beginnings (45 page)

Ellen didn’t like the sound of this. Too far for a first date, and in one of their recent conversations, her mother had told
her to stay away from Polish inns. “Your father told me they’re cement rooms where men go to get drunk,” she’d said.

“Why would we go to an inn instead of a restaurant?” she asked.

“You don’t like an inn?” He seemed confused.

“Is it one room, where people just drink?”

Marek laughed. “Oh, no. Not that kind. How do you know about that?”

“My father told my mother about them, and she told me.”

“Your father went to such places?”

“I think he might have walked into one by mistake.” She could easily imagine him doing this, then backing out like a dog from
a skunk’s burrow.

“Don’t worry, you will like this inn,” Marek said. “Very beautiful. They serve meals outside in the garden, or inside. It
is very nice inside too. People also come to stay the night.”

When she still hesitated, he added, “Not us, but people.”

Ellen smiled at his nervousness and thought that if Freidl could trust Marek with the “For-a-GirlTune,” she should trust
him to take her to dinner. “Okay, tomorrow,” she said.

T
he following evening, Ellen descended the grand staircase of the Palace Hotel. In her right hand, she held her beaded jean
jacket and a small embroidered purse with a golden chain. Halfway down the stairs she saw Marek enter the hotel. In chocolate
brown jeans and a close-fitting black shirt, his hair blown back, he looked fantastic.

She slowed her pace, remembering that well bred women kept their heads lifted when they walked down stairs. Lately, she
had developed a desire to attend to notions of nineteenth-century etiquette. The architecture at the Palace seemed to require
it. So did the strappy metallic heels she was wearing.

Marek’s wide mouth parted into a shy, approving smile when he saw her. “Good evening,” he said.

She liked the even shape of his white teeth as he smiled up at her. Only the silly tuft of red hair below his bottom lip upset
the look she liked. “Hi!” she called down to him, and abandoning all pretense at old-world manners, leaped down the remaining
stairs, her new amber droplet earrings swinging wildly along the sides of her neck. On the second step from the bottom, she
stopped to look at him, his gold earring, his oval face, the wavy flow of his long brushed-back hair.

Unconsciously, she raised her free hand slightly above the curved banister. He took it in his and kissed it. She was surprised
by the gesture, and wondered if hand-kissing was as customary a Polish greeting among people her age as it apparently still
was with older Poles like Konstantin Pronaszko. Or, she wondered, did Marek mean something more by it?

His dark-brown eyes roved merrily from her face to the softly folded neckline of the white chiffon blouse she wore.

She noticed this with pleasure.

He pointed to the door. “My car is down the street,” he said, gallant as a knight.

Together, they walked to his miniature muddy white Fiat Polska. Marek opened the door for her. Ellen eyed the lopsided black
upholstery and quickly folded her long legs into the passenger seat, glad she had worn her satin silk slip skirt, cut on the
bias to stretch when needed.

They chugged slowly out of Kraków, the Fiat emitting grunts and fumes at every stop. “It can make the trip,” Marek assured
her. “And I can fix it if anything breaks down.”

“With those musician’s hands?” she said in mock horror.

He smiled at her.

In the car’s tight proximity, she could feel the heat of his forearm as he shifted gears. He was one of those men, she noticed,
whose body was always the right temperature. His hands, with their long rectangular fingertips, cupped the steering wheel
in a manner suggesting a graceful and certain lover. She leaned back happily in the hard, uneven seat.

Marek slid a cassette of a Chopin mazurka into the portable tape player and informed her, with a certain pride, that they
could play music wherever they went.

She opened his cassette case and was surprised to discover tapes by B.B. King, Robert Johnson, and Rickie Lee Jones. “We seem
to have the same taste,” she said.

He sent her a quick sidelong smile.

She watched how his fingers caressed the wheel and decided this was not the time to tell him about her visit with Rafael.

Twenty minutes later, they turned off the highway onto a narrow road that took them through a birch and pine forest. Shortly
after, they reached a clearing. In the waning light, people were still seated at small tables in the patio garden of an intricately
crafted wooden chalet.

Marek parked, and Ellen put on her jean jacket in the cool pine-scented air. They followed a flower lined stone path to the
front entrance of the inn.

“It may surprise you, but this building is new,” he told her. “This is a replica of a traditional wood architecture that was
destroyed during the war.” He seemed very proud of the place.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

Marek smiled. “I thought you would like it, but you look cold.” He examined the thin fabric of her outfit with concern. “We
will sit inside.”

They were seated at a table for two near the open hearth of a lit brick fireplace. The mantel was crowded with brightly colored
carved-wood figurines, each with painted red cheeks. The carved women held fish and ducks. Some of them churned butter. The
men carried baskets of birds. “Aren’t they wonderful?” she said to Marek.

“Yes, and so is the food.”

“What should I order?”

“Try the
bigos,
” he suggested. “Very Polish. This is a cabbage stew, with meats and sausage. At home, my mother serves it after church on
Sundays. A good bigos takes most of the week to make.”

Ellen could not imagine Marek as a churchgoer, and she didn’t particularly want to try. It only served to underline the differences
between them. She had not even begun to try to imagine his family. Perhaps his mother was one of those solid Polish women
of indeterminate age, like the ones she’d seen in Zokof carrying grocery sacks, wearing scarves tied under their chins and
knee-high stockings with their thick, round-toed shoes. “Where do your parents live?” she asked.

“In Kielce.”

At once, her ears began to burn. She did not want to ask Marek if he knew about the forty two Kielce Jews who’d been killed
after the war. Instead, she stared at the hearth fire.

“What do you know about this boy?” her mother had asked her. “A good looking boy, a kind face,” Freidl had said. Ellen glanced
at Marek and thought it strange to be connected to Polish people, from Kielce, through their son. Those people seemed so much
more foreign to her than he did.

The waiter arrived.

“You know, the bigos sounds a little heavy for me,” she said. “Do they have salads?”

He rolled his eyes playfully. “I forgot. Americans eat grass.”

She thought of Rafael.

He conferred with the waiter. “Maybe you would like to try the wild mushroom salad or tomatoes with onion?”

“Wild mushrooms,” she said, in the interest of avoiding onion breath.

“For the main course, they have fried pork cutlet or a stuffed cabbage. Also duck with apples inside. That is very good.”

“I’ll have the duck,” she said.

“And I’ll have bigos and a beetroot soup. You can taste mine.” He winked at her.

Ellen smiled again, trying to banish the whole business of Kielce from her mind. It was ridiculous to dwell on it. She didn’t
know anything about his family. Maybe they didn’t even live there after the war. “This inn isn’t at all the Poland my father
described to me,” she said.

“Your father should have seen it with a Pole. And you, you have been almost nowhere. Do you like to go hiking?”

Ellen told him that she did.

“Then you must see Zakopane, in the Tatra Mountains. It’s not far from Kraków. I could show it to you. This is the best place
in Poland for hiking. There are trails through the valleys and the granite peaks, to the
Jaskinia Mroźna,
the Frosty Cave. My family used to go camping there on holiday in the summer.”

The fire lit his smiling face with gold and reddish hues, and she thought him beautiful. A langer loksh
,
Freidl had called him. She felt at ease with him again.

“Zakopane is the most beautiful place anywhere,” he said.

Ellen shook her head, teasing him. “Couldn’t be. The Adirondacks, where
we
used to go for the summer, is the most beautiful place. There are mountains and lakes and the most orange salamanders on
earth. I ought to know,” she whispered conspiratorially. “When I was a little girl, I used to fill paper cups with them and
carry them down the mountains. The funny part was, when I fell asleep on my father’s shoulders, they were always gone when
I woke up.”

Marek chuckled. “You dropped them?”

“No, I think my father took pity on them and let them go. Otherwise, I would have tried to make a home for them.”

“A house for salamanders?” Marek laughed. “There is a song I knew when I was little, about a boy who catches lizards until
one night he wakes up in the house of the king lizard. They serve him for dinner, of course.”

She made a face.

“It is not a nice story,” he said, laughing. “The melody is not very good either.”

“But it kept you from torturing lizards, I bet.”

“No, my mother did that. She is like your father.”

Ellen tilted her head slightly, relieved at this information about his mother. She smiled at him again. They laughed some
more. He slid his hand across the table and took hers. “I’m glad we met,” he said.

When they returned to the hotel, Marek turned off the motor. He pulled a cassette tape from his jacket in the backseat and
handed it to her. “In łódź, my group made a special recording for you of that song you liked.”

She took the tape from him, overwhelmed that he had done this for her. Yet she was still reluctant to tell him how the tune
had come to him.

His smooth fingers closed over hers, warm and insistent. Instinctively the two of them looked down at their hands, locked
together over the gearshift. She peeked up at him and found him doing the same. They smiled briefly at each other, lips closed
shyly. Then he reached over and opened her door for her.

They walked the short distance to the hotel’s entrance. He held her elbow protectively. A current rippled up and down her
arm. She turned to say good bye. His hand slipped comfortably around her back.

“This has been an incredible evening,” she said, praying for composure.

He cocked his head and returned her smile. “Do you know your eyes are the same color as your hair? What is that color? The
color of the moon in autumn. Not gold.”

It occurred to Ellen that had she been in Rome and some guy had said this to her, she would have laughed and put him off.
“Copper,” she said encouragingly.

“Yes, copper.” His eyes didn’t leave her face.

The pause grew longer. It was clear he wasn’t going to break it. She said, “The copper moon in autumn, we call it a harvest
moon.”

His eyes didn’t waver. “So do we.”

She poked him playfully in the chest. “You should see it over the Manhattan skyline.”

“I’d like that, someday.”

He leaned forward and kissed her softly, just next to her mouth. His skin was smooth as it brushed hers, and she felt the
pull of his mouth playing on her cheek, the tickle of the tab of hair beneath his lower lip. Straightening, he ran his other
hand over the crown of her hair, his eyes and mouth equal parts smile. “Good night, Harvest Moon Girl,” he said. “We will
see each other soon, I hope?”

She liked the way he didn’t assume anything. “I hope so too,” she said, and kissed him lightly on the mouth before she turned
and, under the soft lights of the hotel entrance, skipped up the grand staircase, knowing that his eyes were on her still.

Later, she lay on her bed, eyes closed, afloat in a hopeful desire for him. She listened repeatedly to his “For-a-GirlTune”
on her Walkman, reliving every phrase, every glance they’d exchanged all evening, as if watching a fast action film of a blossoming.
She knew she was being stupid and juvenile, but she didn’t care.

She rolled over on her side, thinking she had never had a relationship begin so effortlessly, like a clean leap, the secret
of whose fluidity is the strength of each partner’s body.

The “For-a-GirlTune” ended. She turned off the tape and fell asleep, content.

I came to her in the night as she slept. I sat by her bed, called her name. But she did not open her eyes as before. She had
wrapped herself in her blanket and, even in sleep, had assumed a lover’s posture. What new foolishness had I begun with my
envy of the living? Carelessly, I had carried Aaron’s tune with me into the world so that a Pole, even if a mensch of a Pole,
had heard it. And now Ellen, my hope for redemption, was enveloping herself in a distracting passion for this boy. Yes, the
heart takes what it wants. I always said it. But a union between these two? God forgive me. What kind of legacy was this from
what Aaron gave me?

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