The Daughters: A Novel (10 page)

“What were their special gifts?” I hopped carefully over the seams in the concrete. If I was going to be denied my hotel, I wasn’t going to miss out on the best part of the story. “You said they had gifts.”

“Well,
lalka
.” She didn’t shift her gaze. “They were spirits of the forest. They could disappear into the trees, camouflage themselves in leaves. That kind of thing. Just for starters. But they each had a particular talent. A gift, as you say.

“Andrzej could hear footsteps from twenty miles away. Sometimes we would be sitting on the porch talking and he would tilt his head to the side”—she cocked her ear towards the water—“like this. As though someone were whispering something to
him. He could tell the direction a person was walking, and the weight of their body, and even what kind of mood they were in just by the sound of their feet on the earth.
Smak smak
, if you were angry;
flek flek
, if you had something to hide. Anyone else would make themselves crazy trying to hear what he heard. But Andrzej didn’t even have to try. Listening came to him as naturally as a heartbeat.

“Fil was shiftier.” She smiled. “He could smell anything, taste anything. He’d have made a wonderful knight to a king, because he could have detected poisoned food without even having to take a bite. It made him a fussy eater. But it was useful.”

“How?”

“Planting, for one thing.” Ada squeezed my hand. “He could always smell water in the ground. And his father, Saul, of course, was a woodsman—he cut down trees to make his living. Saul was already very clever at picking out which trees to cut, to harvest, but Fil could smell an infestation of ants. He could smell a bird’s nest in the top branches of an oak and would climb up to pick it out before the tree was felled. The thing about Fil, though, was that he was always looking to play a trick. If he wrinkled his nose and you asked him what he smelled, you had to be ready for him to say it was you.”

We walked along the steps for a ways, coming close enough to the beach that I could hear the jingle bells of an ice cream truck. “C major,” I said, not to anyone in particular. “What about Konrad?”

Ada stopped at the edge of the concrete stairs, where a series of smaller steps led down into the sand. At the lake’s edge, a group of children were throwing buckets of water at one another and shrieking with laughter. For a moment I felt a tug behind my navel. I wanted to run down the steps and onto the beach, letting
the dirty sand get in my shoes. I would head straight for the water and dive in, soak my dress, float on my back, and look at the sky. But Ada’s fingers were still interwoven with my own.

“Konrad was a beacon,” she said finally. “He called things to himself.”

I stared at the gang of children. “What kind of things?”

Ada blinked in the sun.

“Light. Animals. If Konrad sat still, he would be surrounded by birds. They fluttered out of the trees and landed all over him—on his shoulders, in his hair, on top of his feet. And he called rabbits. Not”—she looked pointedly at me—“by shouting or whistling. Not anything like that. I mean they came to him. First the smallest creatures, but then larger ones too. Once Greta walked into the woods at the edge of our land, looking for Konrad. She wanted to bring him in to dinner. And she didn’t see him in the first clearing, so she went a little farther, and then ahead of her there came a sound. A rumble. A growl. On the path stood a bear the size of a house, and right next to it stood Konrad. His fingers were wound up in the bear’s fur, and the bear’s eyes were closed. It was, well,
purring.

“Greta ran towards her son, and the bear’s eyes snapped open. The three of them looked at each other for a long moment. Then Konrad whispered something to the bear and scampered into his mother’s arms. Greta watched the creature lumber away, but it never turned around.”

We ourselves turned to walk back the way we’d come. I stole a last glimpse at the children over my shoulder, as they played on the beach, sunburned across their noses. Loud and ordinary, not one of them looked up at me, content as they already were with one another.

T
he one thing Greta didn’t have in her family of strong sons was a creature of songs. That is to say, a creature like herself. She had never minded living apart in her small town, hearing the whispers of those who said she was a witch, a water spirit. That the songs she hummed everywhere she went would draw men to her so she could drain them of life.

But after the dance at the piano factory, she couldn’t shake the memory of the girl she’d held there—a child who had blinked into existence to the tune of a piano. And then blinked back out again, disappearing with the gray man to who knew where. Greta loved her sons, but when she held them she could feel the girl’s absence.

She hated being alone in her own home. Saul was a gently giant man, hunched over at the table as he ate his soup, back bent in the woods to avoid hitting his forehead against low-hanging branches. But with his softness came his silence. He regarded his wife with an always-quiet admiration and never got caught up in her humming. In fact, he seemed not to hear it at all: the rhythms, the buzzing, the vibrations in her throat were as nothing to him. They were too insubstantial. He loved her for her weight and heft and hands.

The boys ran relays around their home. They pitched war games and threw mud balls and called up storm clouds and held congress with foxes and elk. Saul dragged trees down and planed off their rigid bark, and the boys queried wood larks, teased the nanny goats in the yard. Inside, Greta baked bread, and to herself she hummed. She took pride in her household and family, but she knew deep down that there was something missing from it, without which she would never be satisfied. Behind the cottage was a
small plot of land fenced off near the trees to protect it from wildlife. The grass was so green it was practically purple, and dabbed here and there were spots of white, which, from a distance, could easily have been flower bushes. Saul carved each slim cross himself, after the wood was consecrated by the church.

Greta vibrated with music, so much that it was hard for her to believe that neither her husband nor her sons noticed it. Sometimes Konrad paused in his games when she walked by as though he had been struck by an idea. But he never sang a note, never hummed along with her; for all his affinity with animals, he never caught a small bird and brought it to his mother trapped in his hands, singing. To even want this, Greta knew, was selfish. He was his own child. He had his own path to follow.

The cottage that the family shared was built of redolent pine, the walls always dripping slowly with sap. It seemed to be a sturdy and impenetrable structure, but when Greta was alone and looked around herself she always felt the forest encroaching, the trees returning to reclaim their material selves. Greenling stalks coiled around into the backs of chairs, and trunks like spines erupted from the floorboards: a thicket of men turning their attention to the distance. From the ceiling sagged branches so robust that Greta knew they came from trees almost too large to fathom, and despite the careful chinking Saul had done, wind seemed to slither through the timber limbs.

When they grew out of their cribs, each boy went with his father into the woods on what Saul called a hunting expedition, the purpose of which was to find the boy’s bed. They would spend a full day, sometimes two, searching through gnarled branches, assessing the benefits of each possible contender. Andrzej chose a mighty pine because the tree had impressed him in the backbone of his house, and because upon leaning his ear to its trunk he
heard something inside that he chose not to describe. Fil settled on ash after telling his father to close his eyes and then sneaking a taste on the tip of his tongue.

And Konrad, who was often inscrutable, spent two days of fruitless hunting. When his father was nearing exhaustion and despair, a sudden wind picked up and began blowing leaves around the forest floor. Konrad held out his hand and snatched something off the breeze. By the river’s edge, he and Saul found the willow that the leaf belonged to, and Konrad hid his eyes behind the roughing knuckle of one hand until the tree had been felled.

During these expeditions Greta stayed near the house or barn, usually wrestling with a new presence in her belly.
What tree will you choose?
she hummed and asked the air. When Andrzej was on his quest, it was a cheerful question; with Fil, uncertain. And by the time Konrad stepped into the woods, Greta’s mind sat balanced on a careful scale of fear and joy as she contemplated the red mess of a child coagulating within her. For between each boy there had come a girl, at least one, for whom there had also been a careful selection of wood grain. But instead of a bed, Saul cut the somber boards of a box, inside which each girl would nestle like a jewel while she rested silent beneath the trees.

I
t wasn’t until I was eleven that I realized what these sleeping girls meant. Who they were. They’d shown up in various Greta tales over the course of my life as anything from vital talismans to mere window dressing, their grave markers landmarks on the grassy ground my great-grandmother walked. But from the way that Ada spoke about them, it hadn’t occurred to me that they were my flesh and blood—Ada’s sisters.

Once the thought came to me, it took up residence. For weeks the dead girls hovered around my head like summer flies; I had to blink them out of my eyes and bat them away from my hair. Anytime I managed to distract myself—slipping bread into the toaster for a sandwich or leafing through the libretto Ada had given me for my birthday—one would pluck at my sleeve until a thread came loose. And as soon as I acknowledged one, the lot would be upon me, whispering their insubstantial opinions in my ear.

The haunting took its toll. I began to toss and turn in my sleep, and the food on my plate lost its savor. Whatever the meal was—pierogi, pizza—it appeared sallow to me, lacking in essential nutrients. My cheeks hollowed out. I looked like a ghost myself.

One day Ada was sitting across from me in the living room of our apartment, correcting my posture as I warmed up with a series of minor scales. She held a yardstick like a conductor’s baton, waving it back and forth to keep time. Occasionally she would press it to my shoulders or stomach to make sure I held an erect carriage. This was how I spent my time after school, on weekends. Other girls came over sometimes, but few returned. They made vague noises about being too busy, and most of the time I didn’t mind—we didn’t have much to say to each other. But it would have been nice to have someone to whisper to about the ghosts.

Baba Ada’s approach to my training was unscientific—she encouraged a straight spine that looked disciplined but is not technically correct for singing. At an age when most of my peers were still inventing games with plastic horses and sneaking makeup from their mothers’ purses, I was singing Puccini. But the maturity of my voice outstripped my emotions by several years. Inside I was still young enough to want to believe that my
babenka
always knew best.

Today, though, the short wooden flicks began to irritate me.
It was already taking all my attention to focus on the transition from an ascending melodic minor to a descending when my mind kept drifting to the graveyard behind Greta’s house. Each tap of the ruler against my abdomen felt like a gentle reminder:
you’re breathing
, it said,
that must be nice
. We started every rehearsal session with at least fifteen minutes of scales, and today there seemed to be no end to them.

Ada switched the ruler to her other hand, and in doing so cracked a nail.

“
Matko Boża
,” she said under her breath. And she set the yardstick on the sofa while she went to find clippers and a file. In the meantime, I was meant to take a short rest; this was the agreement made through countless sessions of voice lessons—while the cat’s away, the mouse must save her breath. I walked over to the couch and picked up Ada’s ruler, flexing it between my hands. Not very strong. With one swift bend, I snapped it.

Baba Ada rushed back into the room.

“What do you think you’re doing,
lalka?
Do you think rulers don’t cost money?”

I was ready to start yelling at her. To tell her that her rules were crazy and that my posture was fine and that I was tired. But instead my lower lip began to tremble.

“What happened to Greta’s daughters?” My voice came out in a whisper. “Her
other
daughters?”

“Oh.” Ada looked surprised, turning the nail clipper over and over in her hand like there was some important part of it she was missing. “You’re worried about that?”

I nodded. Ada walked over to the window and looked out of it, and for a little while I thought she wasn’t going to answer me at all. My anger started to heat back up, but before it could boil over, she spoke.

“Konrad used to pick flowers for them.”

“What?”

“Well, they all did. Konrad and the others picked flowers, and Greta buried the girls in their own little yard and kept them safe.” She turned towards me and looked thoughtful. “Except one. But you know that. It’s part of the story.”

It was true. The girls’ graves, the boys’ gallantry—all that was part of the story. I troubled each piece smooth over time, from Greta’s appearance in the factory door to her fight for the sacred ground of Poland when the war came. Ada told me her mother was a warrior, and that when she was tired she went and lay down with the girls underneath their house, ready to wake up again when the time was right. Safe and protected.

All this should have comforted me. It had, in fact, many times before. But today something nagged at me. The ghosts, who wouldn’t let me go.

“So where’s Konrad?”

Ada just blinked at me.

“And Fil? And Andrzej? Where did your brothers go? Why aren’t they here?”
If Greta is safe
, I wanted to ask,
and you’re safe, why didn’t she save them too?

My baba pressed her lips together, considering. “Darling,” she said. “I think you’re trying to put me off. I think you don’t want to practice your scales.”