A Day of Small Beginnings (8 page)

7

I
T WAS A SLOW BUSINESS TO REACH
H
ILLEL’S FRIEND
P
IOTR’S
apartment. The winter had not let go its hold on Warsaw, and the pavements were muddy and gray with slush. There was ice
still in some places, and Itzik took a tumble when he slid in front of a porter carrying a load of fabric. The city was filled
with such men, carrying their goods on their backs, in their arms, pushing and pulling with carts, but mostly just with their
bodies, like beasts. God may live closest among the humble, as my poppa used to say, but better one should suffer from a little
pride and have a better life.

I took my chance then, to look around the city. I guessed we were near the Saxon Garden, because I saw with my own eyes, even
such as they were, the Zamoyski Palace, the Blue Palace, places I’d read about in a Jewish book of stories from Warsaw. Such
a pity that I could not go inside and see those paintings and books and sculptured things I’d read about. This was something
I had a hard time imagining, because we never had such things at home. But I was afraid to lose Itzik.

Hillel’s Piotr lived in an old tenement near the Saxon Garden. Itzik hung back on the staircase, making like he’d take off
if something wasn’t right. Hillel went up ahead to the third floor and knocked at the door. It wobbled on its hinges when
the man on the other side opened it.

He was a big fellow, with hair that shot out in all directions like a field of mowed hay, and one of those Polish faces, where
the nose starts low and shallow and ends in two upturned nostrils, dark as tunnels. This face was worn for someone still in
his twenties. “Come in, my brother!” he said to Hillel, and pulled him into the room, where the walls were dirty and cracked.
“There’s vodka on the table and not enough drunken men in here to fill a privy.”

Hillel laughed. “Piotr, this is my friend Itzik. He came in on the train today from the east. Go slow. His Polish isn’t as
good as mine.” Hillel pulled Itzik inside. The boy was nervous as a street cat. “I’ll join you in a drink, but he could use
a crust of bread, if you have any.”

Piotr grabbed Itzik’s hand and shook it enthusiastically. “
Pan
Itzik,” he said, bowing to him like an aristocrat. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance. Any friend of Hillel’s is a friend
of mine.”

Itzik stared at his own hand, buried in Piotr’s grip.

I understood how he felt. I never could make up from down at Polish manners, the hand-kissing, the bowing, the fawning way
they call you
Pan
or
Pani,
Mister or Missus, if you please. Of course, only a fool believes any of it. Next thing you know, they give you that sideward
glance that says what they really think, that you’re one of the “cursed race.”

“To the People,” Hillel said, dropping his bedroll to the floor and grabbing the open bottle of vodka by the neck. He took
a gulp and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “To the People of the Republic of Poland!”

“To the Republic of Poland,” Piotr echoed, accepting the bottle from Hillel. He motioned in Itzik’s direction. “Will he eat
our bread?”

“He’s a socialist,” Hillel answered. He winked at Itzik. “He’ll eat whatever you eat. Right, Itzik?”

Itzik nodded agreeably.

“Good,” said Piotr. “There’s kielbasa and bread on the shelf. Help yourselves. I’ll light the lamp.”

What could I do? With my blurred double vision, I circled the un-kosher meat and bread. I tried to knock them away from Itzik’s
hands. But he grabbed them both and shoved them into his mouth. He was hungry, yes. But hungrier still for Hillel’s approval.

It was evening already. Within the hour, the tiny apartment filled with people. A
lumpen
collection of stragglers, if I ever saw one. There was only one chair and a table in that place, so they sat on the floor
or leaned against the white-tiled stove. They laughed. They joked. They got louder after they’d finished Piotr’s bottle of
vodka and started passing around their own flasks. For this they called themselves socialists?

Itzik hid his extra bit of bread, but he pulled out his mother’s bottle of kvass and passed it around, to the approval of
all.
“Na zdrowie,”
to the health, he toasted. But his hands shook, and it seemed clear to everyone that Polish did not roll easily off his tongue.

“Sing to us, Hillel,” Piotr said. “Yes,” the group called out. “Sing! Sing!”

I prayed to the Almighty that Hillel not defile Aaron’s tune by singing it. I was so grateful when he sang a Polish ballad
about a girl in love with a dying soldier, I almost missed someone whispering to Piotr, “As if this
Yid
knows anything about being a soldier.”

Piotr cut the man off with a scowl. “Hillel’s one of us,” he said confidentially. “Don’t you forget the Jews fought at our
fathers’ sides against the Russians in the ’63 uprising.”

The chastened socialist leaned back against the wall and waved his flask as he recited Adam Asnyk’s verse:
“‘The heroic Maccabees, If circumstances demanded it, Would fearlessly give up their souls, For their god—capital.’”

The room grew still. Hillel was not so carefree in the way he moved anymore. Itzik curled against the wall, looking from one
face to the next, desperate to know what had just been said.

Poppa had been right, I thought. The intoxicating days of ’63, when Pole and Jew had their one moment of brotherhood, were
just an accident of history. Nowadays, when you heard a Jew referred to as a “Pole of the Mosaic persuasion,” it was with
a smirk, not a smile. Better a Jew should stick to his own kind and study.

Piotr spoke up. “You can’t blame the Jews for raising money to fight for the cause. When circumstances demand it, don’t we
do the same? And call ourselves heroes for it?” He clapped Itzik on the leg and offered him a small flask of vodka. “Have
some, little brother,” he said grandly.

Hillel winked at Piotr.

I watched helplessly as Itzik poured the swill down his throat like water. When he coughed half of it back up, everyone laughed,
including Itzik. Good humor was restored. “To the People,” he cried triumphantly, and drank some more. Hillel strummed his
guitar and nodded approvingly.

But in the middle of Hillel’s next song, Itzik did what any boy who’d swallowed a quarter of a bottle of vodka would do. He
vomited it all over himself and the floor, with the trayf meat he’d eaten. I can’t say I was sorry.

“Forgive him, Piotr,” Hillel said as he leaped from his seat and slung his guitar over his back.

“It’s all right. A wash and some air is what he needs,” Piotr said.

Hillel agreed. “Until later, Piotr.” And with a short farewell salute to the group, Hillel grabbed his and Itzik’s things,
hoisted Itzik by the armpits into the hall, and carried him down to the street, where he lowered him onto a wooden crate that
had been shoved up next to the building.

“Why did you drink so much vodka, Itzik? You’re too young for it.”

Itzik pushed away Hillel’s supporting arm. “I’m not too young.
You
were drinking.”

“Not so much. I drink so they think of me as one of them.”

“What for?”

“Because I have to.” Hillel squatted in front of the boy and looked him in the face. “Itzik, the truth is, Poland is still
their
country. Socialism is our only chance for equality.”

Itzik picked up a dirty cloth from the street and wiped the vomit from his trousers. “My poppa used to say, ‘A Pole is a Pole.
You can’t do nothing with them.’”

“Well, your poppa was wrong,” Hillel told him. “When they see how much they have to gain under socialism, they will change.
I promise you.”

I thought, what a marvelous thing is a young man’s sight. Everything is so clear to him that he cannot even imagine a world
clouded and blurred, doubled or darkened by doubt. I pressed myself as best I could against Hillel’s clean-shaven cheek and
could only wish him well, this darling young man, who had such faith.

He stood up.

I could see he was making himself ready for a speech.

“The Poles will learn that they can’t just talk about their honor or their freedom. They’ll have to make something of themselves
first. They’ll have to understand that this is how you become free. And when that day comes, Itzik, we will be able to call
ourselves Poles too. There will be true justice. They’ll stop treating us like foreigners, even though we’ve been here for
a thousand years.”

“You think so?” Itzik asked hopefully. But before Hillel could answer, Itzik’s face darkened. “What’s so great about calling
ourselves Poles?”

It was a fair question, but it clearly stopped Hillel cold, the way children’s questions often do.

“What’s so great about living like a Jew, like your father and that Mendel the Blacksmith back there?” He waved dismissively
in the direction of Plac Gryzbowski. “That’s the world you want for the future? You want to continue that golden chain of
generations?” He rolled his eyes. “That’s nothing but
shtetl
Jews living in filth with their ridiculous notions of superiority. No wonder the Jew is a figure of fun! What else do you
call someone who thinks memorizing every page of the Talmud is what man was put on earth to do? That’s about as useful as
learning to repeat every argument ever made on whether an egg laid on the Sabbath can be eaten. Is that what you believe in?
Then go home to them. Go ahead!” He pulled the boy from the crate and gave him a push. “Go back to your momma.”

Itzik was close to tears. “I can’t.”

I could feel his body heat up as it did when he clung to my gravestone. His stomach muscles tightened. His breaths shortened
with panic, and the focus of his great round eyes became distant, as if he barely could see the Warsaw street at all. He staggered
a bit, then braced himself against the wall. A moment later he sank to the ground and put his arms protectively over his head,
as if to block out the blows of the world.

Hillel, I could see, was not prepared for a reaction like this. “Look, boychik,” he said gently. He kneeled at Itzik’s side.
“All those people back east in that muddy town you come from, I know them. I grew up with people like that too. I had a father
like yours once.”

“What do you know about my father?” Itzik said thickly.

Hillel seemed to consider this. “Itzik, listen to me,” he said. “Ever since I came to Warsaw, I’ve been getting myself an
education from a man named Pesha Goldman. Pesha Goldman came also from one of our towns in the east. He has made a great change
in his life. Before, he spent his days wrapped up in mysticism. But then soldiers raped his wife, Devora, in front of him.
He put away the Kabbalah and took her and their son to Warsaw. He says a Jew doesn’t have the luxury to live in the clouds.”

I felt a pain, like the cut of an ax, in my heart.

Hillel sank down the wall next to Itzik, who was rigid after what Hillel had just said. “Pesha joined the movement. He became
an activist. He got caught organizing striking workers. They put him in prison, but he said they couldn’t do anything to him
that would change his mind about fighting for a better life here and now. He and his wife take in boarders like me, and he
teaches us social history. He’s a photographer by trade.” Hillel smiled. “He likes to collect pictures too, especially of
Indians in America.”

Itzik looked at him like a bird in a nest, opening its mouth to be fed. “Why?”

“Pesha says the Jews are like the Indians. We hold to this idea of the greatness of our ‘tribe.’ They dress themselves in
feathers and paint. We dress in caftans and fur. But it’s all an illusion, he says, just like the studio photographs with
the painted backgrounds. We’ve both been conquered. The Indians they sent to live on reservations, the Jews to the Pale of
Settlement in Russia, to live like rats and starve. Pesha says the only picture that tells the true story is the one a friend
of his in America sent him. It’s hanging in a frame in his house—a freezing Indian boy huddled between two mongrel dogs, trying
to keep warm in the bitter winter on the plain. Pesha says that’s what comes from allowing ourselves to be led by superstitious,
fanatical chiefs and rabbis. That’s what happens to people who insist on being tribal in the twentieth century.”