The Daughters: A Novel (29 page)

In the dream I liked the smell. It was more like pipe tobacco, sweet. Greta squinted and pinched the small rolled thing between her fingers, exhaling into the distance. She blew perfect smoke rings of outlandish size: as they emerged from her lips they were minuscule, but the farther they drifted away the larger
they got, until several were resting on the treetops in the forest below us.

“What happened to you?” I finally asked. We might have been sitting there for an hour, ten minutes, several weeks. I was in no hurry, but it was a question I’d always wanted to know the answer to.

Greta’s chin lay on her hand, and with the fingers of the other she passed me our cigarette. I inhaled with gusto, feeling the curls of smoke caress my throat, the mass of black breath coil and undulate within me.

“There was a war on,” she said at last.

“Yes, but you were you.” Greta was the size of a mountain, safe as houses. “At least,” I said apologetically, uncertain how much I’d spoken aloud, “that was always my impression.”

She stretched, and then looked at me. We both fell backward onto the grass, and I coughed a little puff of smoke out when my lungs felt the impact. From the ground, Greta reached out one hand and placed it on top of my head. Her palm moved back and forth across my hair, probably causing knots and tangles.

“Little girl, I ran and ran across the fields,” Greta said, still stroking my hair. “I had a gun in each hand and I shot anything that moved. They were all bad ones. But that wasn’t my concern. I wanted to get to my boys and feel their foreheads one last time. Fil had such a funny shape in his, a line right down the middle. Andrzej’s was enormous, and Konrad’s was so smooth. He never got,” she gestured at her cheeks, “any spots. He was just a perfect child, except not what I wanted. It was hard to forgive him that.”

I took a deep drag off the cigarette and moved it up to Greta’s waiting fingers.

“Sometimes,” she said, “it took my breath away.”

“What?”

She exhaled through her front teeth. “The sheer cheek. The total lack of respect for what I had. For my husband, for my beautiful sons. And it wasn’t just my sons, no, I wasn’t content to give just them up. I gave up every son in every township. Every daughter I could have imagined a life for. What did I think the devil would want? Everything,” she said, stubbing the cigarette out in the grass. “From everyone.”

“Even me?” I asked, though I knew the answer. She moved the cigarette around in the dirt—I could hear the shuffling—and brushed my hair again.

“Of course.”

I was silent. Wind whipped through the trees below us and dissipated Greta’s smoke rings. Pine crests tilted and croaked under the strain, but where we were the blustering had no effect at all.

Finally I said, “That doesn’t answer my question. Where did you go? Where are you?”

Greta sat up, and for a moment she looked so much, so achingly much like Ada that I cried out. But when she turned back to me, the likeness faded.

“You want to know where my grave is?” Greta asked. “The order in which we died? Whether we tried to save each other or sent people out to be slaughtered? I’m telling you, it doesn’t matter.” Her eyes looked for something on the horizon, something they couldn’t seem to find. “Gone is gone.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “If you can’t show me your grave, how can I know you really died?”

But Greta just shrugged.

“For all you know,” she said, “I never even existed.”

I
walk towards the front of the church as if in a trance. On the way I pass John and I gently peel my daughter from his chest and lift her up into the air. Her arms and legs dangle down towards me, and one leg gives a kick. A jig.

With only a bit of difficulty, owing to the fact that I can’t use my hands for help, I climb up onto the podium beside the violinist and Rick. Rick winks at me.

“Nice to see you,” he says. “Been wondering when I would.”

“Hush,” I say. And then, indicating the violinist with my chin, “Who put you up to this? It was just supposed to be the choir.”

He smiles at me. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

The three of us—four of us—form a semicircle. I shiver again, with nerves.

“I’m not warmed up, you know,” I say. “I’m not ready.”

“That’s okay.” Rick cracks his knuckles and runs a few fingers over the keys. “We’ve got some time.”

And so I listen to them run scales, first the basics at an even tempo, and then Rick adds in a little verve. Takes things into minor, adds trills. Generally tries to entice me into joining. This is always our game, but I’m not sure I can play. Already my pulse is quick. There are knots in my stomach, and I can’t tell which are tying and which untying. I am, I realize, terribly unprepared for this.

Instead of the sensations in my own body, I concentrate on Kara’s slack weight, and on what I see in front of me. John sits in the first row, watching me back, and a few rows behind him I see my mother. No longer in the rear of the church, she seems to have moved closer when I wasn’t looking. My chest pinches whenever
she catches my eye, and still I am silent. Waiting until the last minute to decide. The violinist shoots me a very sideways look.

At last the priest shows up next to me, nearly tripping on his own vestments. There are two altar boys lighting candles around the room, and I breathe deeply the fat-rich scent of melting wax.

I keep my voice steady.

“Is it time to begin, Father?” I ask. I want someone to tell me what to do.

He blinks at me. “It’s your party.”

“All right,” I say. I fill my lungs and empty them. Bellows in and out, breathing over a fire. Then I give Kara a kiss on the cheek and hand her to the priest. I almost can’t; it’s like handing over a bit of my body. But I do.

I nod at Rick.

And I sing:

Ave Maria! maiden mild!

Listen to a maiden’s prayer!

Thou canst hear though from the wild;

Thou canst save amid despair.

I feel a prickling behind my eyes, in my ears. The way blood builds up before you faint, when your head gets too heavy. I look at the door and for an instant I see Ada walking through it, and think,
No, you’re not supposed to be here.
But I blink, and it’s no one. Just a gray shadow come and gone with a trick of the light.

Safe may we sleep beneath thy care,

Though banish’d, outcast and reviled—

Maiden! hear a maiden’s prayer;

Mother, hear a suppliant child!

The room is silent, listening. My tongue is an icicle, melting in spring. My throat is a river, rushing. My body is breaking. My breath is quick. Quick. Quick.

Kara’s eyes are large white discs, shot through with blue. The pinpoints of her pupils focusing, watching my lips with hungry attention.

There is a merciful moment where I’m able to feel surprised, just before I lose consciousness.

T
he silence that follows a performance is a different silence entirely from the one that precedes it. Both are full—one with anticipation, the other with echoes, as if the silence itself were a vibrating bell.

I feel the tremors of sound before I hear them, and then I hear smears, snatches without meaning. As the sounds warm up and gain flesh, almost distinction, I’m aware of something physical: my hands are shaking.

Slowly, more leaks in. My hands in other pairs of hands, being held against a face that feels like ice. No. The face is warm. It’s my own skin that’s cold and pale as frost.

“Baba?” So I have a voice, too. I open my eyes and see my husband, looking concerned. “John.” Only the people who are supposed to be here are here, after all.

“Lu, what happened?” John asks. “My god, you really did blow a gasket. I thought that was a joke.”

“So did I.” My hands find my abdomen, pressing gently against the schism of string and scar tissue that’s been holding me together. “Sort of. Am I bleeding?”

“No, of course you’re not bleeding,” he says. Though even at
that moment he’s looking, touching me gingerly, finding the same thing. Nothing. But he keeps checking, placing his hand against my forehead and lifting my chin with three fingers. Moving my face from side to side, inspecting me with urgent eyes. Everyone else is standing, peering, but keeping their distance as John waves them back. “Do you feel like you’re hurt?”

In fact, for the first time in several weeks I feel calm, and whole. My body is radiating a peculiar heat, so it feels liquid and elastic. Beyond the possibility of harm. I don’t know if I can stand, but I don’t care. I lie propped in John’s arms, letting myself ebb and flow. What just happened? I can only half remember. There was a party. Or not quite a party. I sang a song.

“I’m fine,” I say. “I just— It was too hot. I need something to drink.”

John signals and someone runs to get something for me, bringing back a thick, riveted glass of cold water. I sip and it’s the best water I’ve ever tasted.

“John, listen,” I say.

“What is it?” His brown eyes find mine, and I think,
I chose you. I would choose you again.
John has told me many little lies, ones I know and ones I haven’t yet discovered. But in his arms now, I feel there is a larger truth still. Montmartre standing. Sacré-Coeur. The lies seemed so significant to me that they’ve shrouded the fact that I haven’t been better. Waiting for him to discover me. Waiting for him to call me out.

“Listen,” I say again. “I’ve got something to tell you.”

19

K
ara—the real girl, the one who lives and breathes and probably has her own thoughts, though I cannot yet fathom the shape of them—she deserves a real baptism. It’s a thing about the soul: even if you doubt it’s real, even if you don’t believe in heaven, you want your child to go there. To be invited, with or without you.

John shakes his head. “Why would you tell me that?” he asks. I take his hand.

“What do you want me to say?”

No one else is standing close enough to hear what we’re talking about, but I can imagine what we look like, two dark faces shedding tears, and then nodding.

“You think this is the right place for this conversation?”

“I don’t know.” I lick my lips. I was afraid for so long, and now here we are. Talking. It’s not so hard. I look at John, who doesn’t seem to agree. “I don’t want something to happen to me without you knowing the truth.”

At this, he softens. Just a bit.

“Still though. Why?”

“Because,” I say. “You’re the right father. The one who loves her.” I’m not quite brave enough to say
us.
“I wanted to make sure I told you that.”

John keeps waving people away as we talk—they must think I’m very badly broken to stay so long on the ground, crying. And there may be some truth to that. But as much as I want us to be alone—two souls on an iceberg, together, at sea—I want to move forward with the ceremony more. For the moment at least, John agrees. To fix things. Keep them going.

Eventually it’s established that I can stand.

“Who is the godmother supposed to be?” I ask. Realizing that I do not know. It was meant to be Ada, but if John has picked someone new in the meantime, I wasn’t aware of it. Life goes on, despite our best intentions.

“Michelle said she’d do it,” John tells me. “Pinch hitter.”

“Can Sara?” My emotions are like bats, flying around my head at odd angles. I can’t understand where they come from, where I’m getting my ideas.

“Your mother?” His hands in his pockets, John looks up at the ceiling. “That’s what you want?”

I try to take it as a good sign that he isn’t looking to fight me. So I nod and he goes over to talk to the priest, while I lean against the altar, smiling with what will I can at the little audience. John comes back with Kara in his arms, and the father with him. We look at one another as if to gauge tempo, all waiting for a signal from someone else.

“Haven’t you done this before?” I ask the priest. He is gentler with me than I deserve.

“I wanted to make sure you were well, my dear.”

John hands Kara over, her white gown fluttering around her and her face creased with confusion. The priest crosses his fingers over her head, raises a golden cup, and trickles it slowly over her forehead.

“
Ego te baptizo in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti
,” the priest chants, his voice high. “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.”

He then calls for godparents, spiritual sponsors, to guide Kara’s admission into the church. Sara, having been primed, comes up to stand with us, and one of the altar boys hands her a lighted candle. She tries to smile but gives up. Her face is serious. She raises one eyebrow at me, silent.

“And the second sponsor?”

From the audience Rick stands up and brushes off his tuxedo pants. The action is reflexive, as they’re perfectly crisp and clean. His hands are white and manicured, as always, as if washed in boiling water and scrubbed with steel wool. I watch the flame of Rick’s candle travel up with him to the podium. The side of the candle is emblazoned with silver paint, and a single drop of wax drips down its length only to be caught in the paper base.