The Daughters: A Novel (24 page)

All the different versions of the city’s death that I’d heard commingled in my mind, giving birth to new permutations. Hydra-head history. Did Ada tell me that lightning struck the town, burning a path from the woodpiles of the piano factory straight
to Greta’s door? Or did she say that a shard of fire fell from the sky and pierced Greta’s heart directly, burning her up between the ribs but leaving everything else untouched? Chopin’s heart was removed, after all, by the mere hands of man. Why should God be less specific?

Perhaps the lightning came from inside Greta. This version of the story is easy for me to imagine in Ada’s careful enunciation. She would have rubbed my belly as she spoke about the spark in Greta’s chest, leaving my skin uncomfortably warm.

“Think about it,
lalka
,” Ada said. Must have said. “At first Greta wouldn’t have worried at all, because it would only have felt like a bit of congestion. A little nausea, maybe. She’d had babies. Heartburn was nothing to a woman like that.”

The lightning tumbled around in Greta like an acrobatic child, testing its musculature, pushing against the tensile strength of her skin. It tickled her, vibrated in response to her songs, delighted her with its vivid newness.

Perhaps it even loved her.

But fire can’t escape its tendency to burn. Not even for a beloved. It crackles and consumes; it wants to be the only thing breathing. Soon Greta began to spy light shaking out between the chinks of her skin, illuminating the creases worn in by time. A cough released smoke curls, and each inhalation fanned the heat: flames rose and fell in time with her shoulders.

Next the electricity made itself known—her hair standing on end, kinking out, crackling. Folds of her dresses sticking together in errant attitudes. At this point, it was still possible to hide her condition by excusing herself to the restroom during a surge, blaming her mood on the monthly change. It would have hurt Greta to turn away from Saul’s embrace, but how could she let him
near her when a single touch could engulf him in flames? When the core he was reaching for was molten?

(And after all, I can’t help thinking, she’d turned from him before
.
)

One morning she woke up with her heart on fire, and she knew the time had come. Gathering her skirts up, she rushed out the door, sparking against metal buttons, doorknobs, the teeth of a rake. Outside she shook her hair down around her shoulders and swiftly walked into the forest—the leaves on the ground would cover her tracks, she knew, and keep her from being found until it was already over.

On the moss bed of a clearing she sat, thinking about the day she’d met the devil and feeling her body vibrate as her veins hardened into wire. They twanged. And then they began to conduct.

She felt heat. So much heat. It broke her apart until the shards of her flew in every direction: pinpoints of fire exploding up and out and through the woods like the devastation of an earthbound star, unseen except by the sky above her and the animals too fool to flee.

Her miscalculation, of course, was going into the woods. Did she simply forget that they could burn? Or was she compelled to go there and complete the deal she’d made so long ago? (
First I wanted your sons
, the devil whispered.
But now I want more. Now I want everything. Your girl is safe. Who are you to deny it?
) The force of the explosion pushed her underground and lit everything else up with a flash and a boom.

Saul was consumed. The boys were consumed. The
fabryka
was full of blinding piano-shaped auras, articulated skeletons of fire. Houses in town were reduced to black dust. Black roads led out towards the untouched world.

“Y
es,”
Sara told me once. “The town and the forest both burned down. A lot of people died. But not because of a storm. It was because of the war.”

“How do you know?”

She batted my question aside like a fly. “Because of history books. Anyone could know what I know. Just by looking.”

To understand the death of the town, Sara said, you have to go back quite a ways and tell a story that seems unrelated. One thing leads to another. It always does.

There was once a little boy, Sara told me, who lived in the same town in Poznań where Greta’s family made their home. His father worked in the fruit processing plant—he was unimportant, but the family got by. They had socks without holes in the winter, and if they were sometimes hungry, they were never starving. On special occasions they opened a jar of fruit from the plant, and the boy was allowed to pluck out a black plum with his fingers, letting the syrup run all down his hands.

As the boy grew older, his mother let him ride a bicycle to the church, where he was an altar boy. He liked swinging the censer and watching the haze of incense billow through the sanctuary; it made him feel that he was in charge of something important. He was present at the birth of clouds, which would grow and grow into unimaginably large shapes and fly through the air to be seen all around the world: in Egypt, Indochina, France.

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.

“W
ait.” 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.