The Daughters: A Novel (25 page)

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?

T
he 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.

W
hen 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.

A
s 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.

S
o 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

O
ne 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.

It wasn’t until I read her note that I realized I was hungry, and that I wanted pancakes. It felt important to follow my instincts in a house where everything was suddenly so indistinct. For a moment I considered tackling the cooking myself, but I was still sleepy and didn’t quite trust my eyes in the smog. It seemed all too possible that I’d end up knocking the pan off the stove, burning my hands and legs and face with hot batter.

A few weeks earlier my mother had made me pancakes from scratch—a peace offering after our trip to the opera—adding cornmeal to give them grit and bite, trying to form each cake into the shape of a foreign country. They looked like blobs, failed mouse ears, but they tasted wonderful. She smiled at me and sucked on a cigarette while I ate.

I thought,
I’ll help.
So I took down the grease-spotted
Joy of Cooking
from the shelf and dug through drawers until I came up with a few measuring cups, a Pyrex bowl, and some flour, butter, vanilla, and baking powder. I couldn’t remember exactly what went in the batter, but I figured Sara would tell me what to keep out and what to put away. Whispers of smoke hung around my head and followed my hands; it was starting to make me cough, but I didn’t open a window. The smoke didn’t seem like something I had the right to control.

T
he day before, my mother and my baba Ada had gotten into a fight. I thought it was lucky that Ada chose to leave so early today: it gave us all a chance to calm down, forget what was said, and move on. Sara had been telling me about how Ada came to America: That she was pregnant and refused to name the father. That she left just before the Second World War reached her town in Poznań, so she wasn’t there to fight against the Nazis, to protect her family or hide the Jewish children who were being rounded up and sent to death camps. In death camps, Sara told me, a child might be picked up by the ankles and swung around in the air. Around and around, arms dangling in front of them.

When I tentatively suggested that this sounded fun, Sara laughed, and asked if I thought it would be fun to have my skull crushed against the side of a brick building after swinging for a circle or two.

Your grandmother was a coward, Sara told me. She abandoned her country and her parents and her brothers and ran away to live in America and never heard from anyone ever again. Her mother saved all the money they had to get Ada out of Poland. Her brothers signed up for the army to help pay. They died because of her. Everyone died because of her. She and Greta had no mercy.

“And I suppose you’re sorry?”

This is when Ada walked in, her face completely composed. She ran a hand over her hair, smoothing down invisible flyaways.

“After all,” she continued, “who do you think I was pregnant with? Some stranger? Are you sorry we didn’t all die? That you didn’t die? That Lulu is here?”

She stood next to me and put a hand on my shoulder. My mother grasped me on the other side. But neither woman looked at me. They had eyes only for each other.

T
he red measuring cups stood in a row, lined up by size. Each one was full of smoke: a cup of smoke, a half cup, a quarter cup. In school sometimes on Halloween, the teachers filled a plastic cauldron with punch and dry ice which they doled out in single servings, and I had the urge now to pick up one of the measuring cups and sip from its billowing bowl.

My eyes streamed tears and yet still felt like they were full of pepper. Maybe, I thought, if I lay down on the ground there wouldn’t be quite so much smoke and I could just go to sleep.

I shook my head. The smoke backed away from me, made tentative by the sudden movement, but soon swirled back, ran its fingers through my hair. I scrunched up my nose and stretched the cotton from my pajama sleeve across my airways.