The boy liked to be important.
Sometimes, after helping the priest clean up after the service, the boy would ride his bike through the streets and towards the woods. He would abandon it at the edge of the trees and hike to his secret places, where he stored beautiful stones and saw fish talking to each other in the river. On other days, if the priest had given him a coin, he rode to the Jewish side of town and bought a pickle, crunching through the first bite to the burst of garlic and vinegar inside.
And on some days he let himself get lost, for the pleasure of finding his way home again. His mother didn’t worry, because he told her that he’d been setting out candles in the church, polishing the confessional booth, sweeping between the pews. She patted his head and told him that he was a good boy but that he should remind the priest he needed to be home before the sun went down.
One day after eating his pickle and playing a brief game of tag with some children in the streets, the boy decided he was not yet ready to go home. He ought to have gone and asked his mother’s permission to stay out a bit later, told her that he was going on a ride and pointed in the direction he was intending to pedal. But he was ten years old. He felt strength ripple through his legs as he drove his bicycle faster and faster. He felt his first little glimmer of power, and he didn’t want anyone to know where he was going.
At the woods he tucked the bike underneath a flowering bush and ran with abandon through the patches of sun and shade cast by the treetop canopy. The river was running fast and deep, but the boy found a narrow bend and leapt across it, his shoe just barely finding purchase against the far bank. Rooting around in the dirt and leaves, he gathered a supply of smooth, flat stones and tried to skip them over the surface of the water, but the current was too fast and they all sank, cast forward a few feet by the force of the waves.
After a while, the boy got tired. He wanted to go home, but the river looked terribly wide. Had he really jumped across it just a little while ago, he wondered? The sun was beginning to sink towards the hill, but it wasn’t yet late enough to give the boy pause. He decided to rest against the trunk of a tree and make the leap once his strength was regained.
But, of course, he fell asleep.
Meanwhile, his mother was starting to get worried; her son had never stayed out so late after the church service was over, though the time he spent helping the priest had been stretching out longer and longer. She decided to go fetch him home and ask the priest please to not keep the boy for quite so much time.
When the boy’s mother arrived at the church, the sun had just dipped below the horizon, and the woman was alarmed to learn that her child was not there. He left a few minutes after you did, the father told her. I gave him a coin and he rode off on that bicycle of his.
Which way did he go? the mother asked, wringing her hands.
With a frown, the priest shrugged—the boy told him he’d go straight home. After that, he hadn’t thought to watch.
A few hours later the boy awoke. He called out to his mother for a glass of water, as his throat was sore and dry, and he seemed to have kicked the blankets off his bed. Then he started. He was not, he realized, in his bed at all, but on a soft mound of dirt, leaned up against a tree. He’d fallen asleep, and now his mother would be angry.
The moon seemed to howl down at him, a terrible white and open mouth. Something with soft feet shuffled through the shadows deeper in the forest’s bowels. The boy sprang to his feet and jumped over the river, landing on his knees and tumbling through the dirt. He ignored the scratches and scrapes on his hands, the mud on his pants. With his heart pounding up through his tongue, the boy ran to his bicycle without looking back and raced through the dark streets towards his home.
His mother was pacing in front of the door, and his father was sitting at the kitchen table, sighing. He had just arrived home from work, hungry, his hands and knees sore. When the boy rode up on his bicycle, his mother gave a cry, and both parents ran out to the terrified boy.
What happened? his father asked, picking him up as if he were an infant and carrying him inside the warm, bright house. The boy’s mother ran her fingers over his dirty clothes, then hurried to get a warm washcloth to clean away the blood and grime.
Where did you go? she asked.
The boy’s head was buzzing. He was exhausted, frightened, and also concerned. If he told the truth, he knew, he would be spanked and sent to bed with no dinner. There was a chance that his father would take away his bicycle and tell him to walk to church with his mother from now on. His parents would be angry if they knew how long he’d been lying to them.
He opened his mouth. Out came a whimper.
They took me, he said. And then it began.
The boy wove a fabulous story, picking up his cues from whatever came into his head. He remembered buying a pickle from the Jewish grocery, remembered seeing boxes of crackers on the shelves, and remembered the stern, dark eyes of the shop owner. The ringlets of hair.
The Jews took me, he said. When his father looked unconvinced, he said, They wanted my blood for matzoh, and his mother—holding tight to his bleeding fingers—began to cry uncontrollably.
I had to fight them off me. The boy looked up at the ceiling to avoid his parents’ eyes. And then I escaped and I ran through the woods and I just barely got home alive. He began to cry and threw his arms around his mother’s neck. I’m so happy to see you. So, so, so happy to see you, Mama.
Although his father remained somewhat dubious, the boy’s mother spoke to him in a voice so low it was almost a growl. She told her husband to go find his friends and to bring the Jews some kind of justice. She hissed this at his back, as he walked reluctantly out the door.
“Wait.” I grabbed my mother’s hand. “No one did anything to him, though.”
“I know,” said Sara. “But that’s how it was. Sometimes little children do big, bad things.”
The boy’s father got into the spirit of things once he saw the outrage in his friends’ faces. They drank brandy to put a little fire in their bellies, and then they picked up large sticks, fireplace pokers, bats. They smashed the windows in every Jewish house and store and burned the synagogue to the ground. The little boy got to stay in bed the next day and eat sweet plums. He licked sugar syrup from his palm and nibbled the soft plum flesh out from where it stuck underneath his nails.
“So is that how the town died?” I was horrified.
“No,” said Sara. “But people remembered it. Even once the boy had grown up and moved to a different town, they told the story to their children. They told each other around fires at night. So even if they did business with the Jewish side of town, or were friendly, people always remembered.”
“But that’s stupid,” I said.
Sara shrugged. She leaned close to me.
“The things people say have the power to change your life, whether they’re true or not.”
I kept my face upturned towards her, and we stared at each other, both of us seemingly waiting for a kiss. Instead, my mother said, “Ada lied too, you know.”
“About what?” I shrank back just a bit, because her breath was fusty, and I didn’t like the glint in her eyes. My mother didn’t blink as I recoiled. She just stood up and walked over to her closet, pulling out an indigo dress that was cinched at the waist and fell off of one shoulder. She removed her robe and started to dress for the evening, tugging and tucking her body here and there.
“Mama?” I said. She came over and placed herself next to me, looking at me over her shoulder. She lifted her hands.
“Zip, please.”
I stood up on the bed and obliged, the zipper clicking sticky teeth.
“Mama?” I tried again. “What did you say?”
“I said she lied. You heard me.” My mother checked the zipper and then opened the window, lighting a cigarette and blowing the smoke outside. “Someday you’re going to understand.” She inhaled. “About Greta. And all that.” She exhaled. “I’d be doing you
a favor, telling you. But you wouldn’t see it that way, I don’t think.”
She dropped the cigarette in a jar she kept on the outside sill. It was half full of rainwater, so the other butts were tinted green and black from stagnation. The new one expanded just a bit when it hit the liquid, slowly coming to resemble the rest.
“So I’ll do you the favor you think you want.”
She kissed me on the cheek and walked out of the room, slamming the bathroom door behind her. A week later she would be gone, but I didn’t know that yet. Maybe she did though. Maybe it was in that moment, and with those words, that she formed her plan.
I didn’t see Ada’s stories as lies, but some part of me knew that their truths were separate from the truth of the war offered up by my mother. They felt, in my hands, like two sides of history: Chopin in Paris and Chopin in Żelazowa Wola.
It didn’t bother me. The split seemed as natural as having two bedrooms in a house: you could walk into one and see a single life laid out, then close that door and open another. But in either room you knew the larger home, the larger truth, was still around you.
The real problem was that neither story was complete—they didn’t tell me what I wanted to know about the end. What shape did Greta’s sacrifice take? And who were the men and women who came to the town and burned it? How did they get in? How did they leave? And how could they possibly hurt Greta’s family?
The truth lay, as it so often does, between the two stories. In the cracks and crevices where they seeped into one another. At least that’s what I’ve decided.
When my baba Ada was a girl, she could have swallowed the whole world and no one would have tried to stop her. She was the only child her mother ever gave birth to laughing, smiling through the grit of her tears. Greta the bear. Greta the she-wolf. Greta the lonely who craved a pair of ears to recognize music when they heard it. Her other girls had died being born, and she had battered herself over their deaths, wondering, Why them? Why not me?
Ada was sprightly, dark, and small. She bounced unstable from place to place making up songs, pulling on her brothers’ hair. They were all besotted with her, especially Konrad, who was not much older. He followed her everywhere. When she was learning to walk, he shadowed her with such a look of serious concern—that furrowed brow, those blue eyes clouding—that Greta and Saul could not help but laugh. They clutched one another behind his back, tears streaming down their cheeks. Look how he loves her.
How can I know this? It’s nothing Ada would ever tell. Nothing she has the authority to know. But I know. I’ve spoken to Greta in my sleep, and she fills me in on the secrets that my mama and my babenka kept close to the chest for reasons of their own.
Ada was her mother’s image reflected back, slightly smaller, slightly oblique. The pair of them were a walking discourse on the evolution of proud Polish blood. Is it impossible to improve on a good woman? Or inevitable?
Saul could refuse the child nothing. Poor papa. He saw his powerful wife transformed into a creature he could pick up with two hands and toss into the air, and the vision turned his heart on its side. Here is someone to protect, he thought. Little knowing what he was dealing with. Little knowing how headstrong a body can grow when given unlimited access to satisfaction.
“You’ll spoil her,” Greta warned.
“If she turns out like you,” he said, “I can’t see how I’d call that spoiled.”
And so she grew. A laughing, twirling dervish. A girl beloved by her whole town, who looked so much like her beautiful mother that no one thought to question why she didn’t really look like her father at all. No one held her hand in check, no one watched her, because everyone was confident that no one would hurt her. And Ada. Well, Ada wasn’t a foolish girl. It just didn’t occur to her that ministrations, attention, could have consequences. That they were anything other than an end in themselves.
This is the beginning of my mother Sara’s story. Some night after a dance in town, the summer darkness. These things happen. The fields near the church were covered in soft grasses, a spray of flowers. And the young boy, drunk on love, told Ada over and over again how beautiful she was, and how precious.
As my mother loved to remind her, Ada was ushered out of town before the war fell. But of course my mother always fails to mention that it was because of her that Ada agreed to go.
“We all have to give something up,” Greta whispered to her. Then she gave her a gentle shove onto the train. “So our daughters can grow.”
Ada’s eyes filled up with tears. She couldn’t even pronounce the name of the city to which she was being exiled. The word Chicago made no sense in her mouth—her hard ch and soft sh always blended together; she confused her sibilants and places of articulation, her tongue tied into knots. But she clutched her visa to her chest and took a step forward into the world.
She must have felt much smaller in transit, more like the soft toy that Saul always imagined her to be, tossed from side to side by the steam engine, the waves and their methodical pounding, the second train from New York to Union Station in Chicago. Her cousin Freddie met her dressed in a dark suit, like a funeral man. He took off his hat to her, but once home in his small apartment he made her sleep on the couch. Instead of opening his arms in welcome, he was curt and always in a hurry. He seemed annoyed to keep having to explain her presence, to clarify that, no, she was not his wife.
As if I’d want you, Ada thought. He was fat, almost enormous considering the little that they had to eat. Any weight he’d lost since the war began still hung off him in folds of skin. As if anyone would want you. The thought was Ada’s one cruelty, her unspoken revenge. Everything else was fear: troops mustering in the newspaper. Boys in Germany with bright blond hair.
And so it was little comfort to be cruel to Freddie, because he was suddenly, breathtakingly, all that she had. Every Monday, and sometimes again on Friday, Ada sent a letter to Greta or Konrad, and even once to the boy she’d met in secret behind the church. But she received nothing in return, no replies. Not even a note from the post office explaining that most of her letters had been lost in transit. The growing hysteria of one young girl was not a priority in a time of war.
So she didn’t know that back in Poznań, the piano factory had been requisitioned as a bunk and barracks manufacturer. Greta ran into Gustaw Lindemann one day when she was coming out of the alleyway that served as a meeting ground for black market exchanges. He was going in. His face was grim, his suit still gray, as always, though not so crisp.
“It’s a lucky thing,” he whispered to her, “that we got the girl out when we did. I wouldn’t be able to do it now. My money’s no good.” He ran a hand over his hair, as if to reassure himself it was still there. “I’m trading ivory keys for food. God knows what they’re doing with them.”
Lindemann slipped Greta a key, Just in case you need it. And she did need it. She and Saul were going hungry more often than not lately, trying to keep their sons in food. The boys, in turn, snuck their own portions back onto their mother’s plate. But there was little enough to shuffle around. Potatoes from the garden, all turning black after a deep frost. Plums from the local trees, mostly gone rotten. The good ones were canned and shipped out to feed the soldiers who were amassing in anticipation of an invasion by Germany.
“We should have sent the boys to America too,” Greta said to Saul.
“Couldn’t do it.” They sat on the porch, feet hanging off into the air, and he gnawed on a piece of dry venison jerky from a hunting trip the previous year. Even game was in short supply these days, with too many people going in to thin the herds. “You know it. We had the money for one ticket, and I don’t even know where you got that.” He didn’t meet her eyes. “You made a choice. And we all agreed. The boys want to stay and fight, anyhow.”
That was the truth. If she had pleaded with them, and had the means, she could maybe have gotten one to leave. Maybe one. To spare himself for her sake. But Greta’s resources were limited even with a
powerful friend, and she couldn’t stand the thought of another one of her daughters dying. Especially not when the girl had her own child brewing, a new innocence growing within her. So the boys remained and made it clear that they saw it as their duty to fight.
“It’s a damn devil’s bargain,” Saul said. “Choosing one child to go.”
He put his hand on Greta’s, and they stared into the woods, where dark shapes shuffled off on their unknowable errands.
16
One morning in my ninth year, I woke up to find the apartment silent but full of smoke. It didn’t worry me the way it might concern most children: I recognized the scent as cigarettes, not fire. I was annoyed that my lungs were going to be scratchy for a day or two—usually my mother smoked out the window so I wouldn’t have to worry about this—but the haze lying over all our furniture made the rooms seem new and distracted me from working myself up into a snit.
It was like finding oneself in the middle of dense fog, or waking up on an airplane that was rising or descending through cloud cover. There was that sense of disorientation, and that feeling of being followed. I sat up in bed and felt the smoke waft around my hair. Darker and lighter curls wormed their way through the mass and I slipped onto the floor, my feet scudding against the hardwood.
“Ada?”
My voice was thick and dry. Before speaking I had no choice but to breathe, and the smoke coated my throat and tongue. I wandered down the hall half expecting to see a dragon’s tail disappearing around a corner, but I reached the kitchen and found it empty, light bleeding through the windows and diffusing in the clouds. There was a note from Ada on the table: Gone in to work. Find something to eat. Do your homework. It was Saturday, but Baba Ada often worked on weekends, altering party dresses and adjusting the cuffs on tuxedos. Rush jobs for an event that night, a debut, a premiere. Costume changes between cocktail hour and after-dinner drinks.
The Daughters Page 18