The Daughters: A Novel

by Adrienne Celt

  Was it the house of the devil? Was it full of fire and brimstone, I wanted to know?

  “Don’t be so stupid,” my mother said. “Do you really believe everything that woman tells you?”

  I frowned. “Don’t you?”

  Sara brushed the question aside.

  “Here’s what was inside the factory.” She waved a hand out past her head, nearly toppling her teacup and a jam jar full of makeup brushes. “A handsome man.”

  “Saul?”

  “No,” she said. “Not Saul. He couldn’t give Greta a daughter, remember? He didn’t have what she needed.”

  This was something I’d always wondered about but had been afraid to ask Baba Ada. She was so fervent in her tales of Greta’s encounter with the devil in the forest that even my heart didn’t dare question their reality. But I was curious anyway. I wanted to understand the stories from every angle, until I could close my eyes and sculpt them with my own hands.

  “Why was that what Greta wanted? A girl?”

  Sara closed her eyes and laughed at me. It always delighted her when I asked her a question she knew I’d never have asked my babenka, brought up a line of inquiry that ran contrary to Ada’s version of events. Then something occurred to her; her smile froze and retreated into a straight line.

  “It’s very painful, to lose a child. A daughter. You’d do anything to get her back, get another chance with her.”

  I smoothed the fringe of the rug beneath my fingers. Separated the strands into threes for new braiding. From where I was sitting, I could see the small of my mother’s back, the place where the satin of her kimono robe collapsed.

  “How do you know?” This too was a question I would never ask Ada. “You don’t have any dead babies.”

  She kept her eyes closed.

  “No, but I have you,” she said. “Isn’t that enough?”

  My mother, by nature a performer, shrugged something off when she fell into a story. Yes, she still had a tendency to brood and, yes, she was mercurial—I might easily be kicked out of her room for an offhand remark, no matter what we were doing. But her eyes grew bright. Like Baba Ada, she told it all as if she’d been there. And Greta especially intoxicated her, as wine would, or a puff of opium, or her tongue’s first taste of salt.

  Greta had dreams of working in the piano factory. Not as a secretary, stirring cream into coffee and shuffling paper into files. She was grander than that, and her dreams were grander too. She wanted to be a doctor of music.

  Sometimes Saul was called to Łozina when a special-order instrument wasn’t behaving—falling out of tune or echoing. On occasion a board would warp and the keys, which were so precious as to have been cut from the mouths of elephants, refused to fit evenly in the slip. Saul described it to Greta: they undulated like waves in the river, cresting over one another and yielding banshee twangs. He would bring in boards so fresh they fairly dripped with the spice of their sap and plane them fastidiously, sanding the wood in broad concentric circles. These would be used to replace malfunctioning elements, and Saul would leave with a new happy weight in his pocket.

  But what if, Greta asked herself, the problem was smaller, more subtle?

  Then they would need a subtler solution. They would need someone for whom music was language, and medicine. They would need the Doctor of Łozina.

  The images ran through her mind while she was kneading bread dough in the kitchen, punching gasps of yeast out into the air. She would wear a white coat. Why not? She would wear quiet white shoes, slippers of cotton that hugged her feet and slid against the slick factory floor. Men with dark, serious faces would usher her over to an ailing instrument and wail, “No one knows what to do!”

  She’d smile. Place a hand briefly on a quaking shoulder and then turn to the patient. The Doctor of Łozina would run her fingers over every inch of the piano, then open the lid and smell the interior, judging health or sickness from its bouquet. It’s the wires, she would say. Then take a small silver hammer out of her coat and tap around on the soundboard. There’s a murmur. A break in the vibrations. A misplaced damper. It needs someone to spend the night here with it, taking its pulse at regular intervals. And the dark, tense men would drink in her every word, writing it all down and thanking her profusely. They would hold Greta’s hands in their own and squeeze them.

  “Thank you,” they’d say. “Thank you.”

  And she would wince, drawing back and flexing her fingers. Smiling once more before she withdrew.

  Maybe it was this (maybe it was this, Sara said into my ear, the warm air hissing against my skin. I’d climbed onto the bed and curled into a ball before her, wrapped her arms around me and held them there by the bulb of her fists), maybe it was this unrequited dream that brought Greta to the factory gates one morning not long after the loss of her fifth daughter. In this Ada and Sara agreed: it was after the fifth.

  She was in town for some small thing: negotiating a price on a bolt of cloth, replenishing her store of baking yeast. (My mother snorted as she said this, though she was a fine baker too.) Perhaps acquiring poppy seeds to make makowiec, rolls of white and black cake for her sons. (For her brats.) This small task was her outward purpose, the sense of volition that allowed her to get out of the house in spite of the fact that Fil had just hit Konrad in the head and the latter was crying; despite the fact that laundry needed to be hung to snap in the wind. Her inward purpose crouched in the lacuna of her mind, until a pinch in her calf muscles startled her out of a daydream and she realized she was walking uphill. Well, she thought, I guess I’m going to visit Łozina.

  It was a surprisingly cold morning; the sky was the sharp blue of ice. The iron gate was open to allow for the influx and egress of craftsmen and guests, and Greta slipped through casually as if she was meant to, walked up to a window, and peered inside. Her hand idly ran down the rough scratch of the bricks on the exterior wall. The window was fogged up, crystallized with condensation—the accumulated hot breath of so many men.

  Greta peeled away the fug of ice with her hand to provide a better view. Her belly still felt raw and carved out, and somehow this formed a delicate thread of logic. If she could be changed instantaneously from a mother into an empty bowl, then it was her right of transformation to become a person who belonged at the fabryka Łozina, instead of one who simply wished to. She did not press herself for specifics. Something inside her simply said to wait.

  Two men strolled out into the day, one pushing the doors open bombastically with his palms and exclaiming at the cold. The other ran a hand through the salt-and-pepper of his hair. Neither of them turned to where they could easily have seen a misplaced woman peeping into their factory. Spying. Greta froze in place and in her momentary fear heard only some of what the men said to each other: one enumerating points on his fingers as though he were trying to teach someone to count, the other laughing. She caught a few words: exhibition, showroom, certain failure, mad. She came back to herself just in time to hear, “All right, Gustaw,” just as the men passed through the factory gate and descended out of range of her sight and hearing. The name echoed in Greta’s head: Gustaw. She considered it for a moment and then shook it away; in its place she formed a plan.

  (Desperate people, Sara told me, always make the most interesting plans.

  Was she desperate? I asked.

  You’d better believe it.)

  The factory’s bustling central room was kept warm with four masonry heaters, stationed one in each corner. Greta walked purposefully towards the nearest one and held her hands out, savoring the light burn on each palm. Although Saul was called to the factory for work, Greta hadn’t been inside since the night so long ago when the fabryka had been opened up for a dance. It was as alive now with industry as it had been then with youth, and Greta soaked up the energy of it, the noise. She looked around herself, keeping close to the heater and its embellished ceramic legs, made to look like the paws of a blue lion.

  Raising his eyebrows from across the room,
a young worker walked up to Greta and said, “Yes, hello?” making the greeting into a question.

  She turned to him with a brilliant smile. Yes, she belonged here. She had always belonged here.

  “Good morning, sir,” she said, winding the shawl off her neck and shoulders. She was wearing mourning blacks, her small outward concession to loss, and she knew that these clothes—kept pressed and stored in a chest in her bedroom, hidden away out of sight until necessity demanded them—looked much smarter than her everyday dresses. “I’m here for the tour?”

  The worker leaned in as if he hadn’t quite caught her words.

  “The what?”

  “The tour, of course. For the exhibition guests? I was told it would be starting sharply.”

  It was a gamble: he might easily have remembered Greta from town, but as luck would have it, the worker’s natural nervousness eroded his attentiveness to detail. He started to blush up over his collar, craning his head around for some possible authority.

  “I’m not—” he said. “That is, I don’t . . .”

  “Yes,” Greta said. “Quite. Well, anyway, if Gustaw is unavailable—”

  “Gustaw!” the man cried. Really, he was no more than a boy; his relief was almost embarrassing. “Yes, Gustaw! That is, Mr. Lindemann.” A frown spread over his face. “I’m afraid he’s gone, for the rest of the day.”

  “Hmm, how like him.” Greta was really enjoying herself, despite a small twinge of pity for the boy in front of her. “Well, that’s no trouble. I’ll just look around myself. Unless”—she eyed the nervous youth and turned her mouth down into a mock sulk—“that’s against some sort of regulation? I promise I’ll be as quiet as a mouse.”

  “No.” The boy deflated gently back into his socks. “Quite all right. As long as it’s no trouble to you.”

  Greta gave a nod and slid away before he could change his mind.

  The air buzzed with conversation as men walked past, the top buttons of their shirts undone, rolls of paper tucked under their arms. Some of them seemed to recognize her, their eyes lingering on her face with momentary curiosity. But she was lucky. Whether because they were too busy to stop or whether they thought she was there on some errand for Saul, no one did more than nod hello. Greta took deep breaths to keep her heartbeat even as she had in preparation for giving birth, when the first sharp pains shot up her spine. But she found that she wasn’t nervous. Her body moved smoothly and her mouth remained kinked into a small, smug smile. She was looking for something, without knowing quite what.

  (She wanted something, Sara said, that she couldn’t admit to herself that she wanted.)

  To her left, a pair of legs extended from the bottom of a discordant, groaning instrument, one bent at the knee and tapping its toe. Farther off was a tunnel. Could that be right? Greta approached and saw a man reaching up and making pencil markings on an arch of white wood, and realized the tunnel was in fact a caterpillar queue of grand piano frames, lined up with their bottoms in the air.

  Everywhere around her were sounds. Not just factory sounds, but echo chambers, hollow demi-music. A fist connected with a keyboard on the left side of the room, and the dissonant chord stormed across the warehouse like a wave. When it passed, Greta could hear wire coiling, stretching, snapping, and below this the great rumbling of boxes being moved on wheeled trays with a rhythm all its own. She felt she was being tugged in all directions at once, and the effect was familiar somehow, that yearning, gnawing urge. A high trill here, a rough scratching there, as pianos were pulled and warped into life.

  Greta tried not to stay in one place for too long, silently imploring the men (everywhere, men) to ignore her, to pass over her with a glance and move on to more important things. She reached a hand up to rearrange the curls of her hair. Back home the oven temperature would soon puff them out into a shapeless, floating floss, or else sweat them down in rivulets along her neck. But she was here, a part of the factory machinations, and she knew that for once she looked the way people expected a lady to look.

  As she walked towards the showroom in the factory’s rear, the tinkering fell away. First the pallets of raw materials were shed, then the sand-shaved, pretreated wood that still retained its faint scent of needles and leaves. Greta felt she could see all the detritus—the tools, the wood chips—being swept backward away from her, though in fact it was she who moved away from it. Her eyes were keyed on the sleek floor before her, peopled by a black herd of perfect glassine surfaces. At last even the sound of conversation died away, so that stepping onto the polished showroom floor was like walking into a world where everyone held their breath.

  Greta felt a pinch in her abdomen, and wondered if she would find another small trickle of blood on her leg when she went home and stripped off her town stockings. The thought made her nauseous, and she sat down before an imposing baby grand piano—her back was turned to the piecemeal beasts in the workshop, but her mind strained towards them. Not so different, Greta thought, as her stomach clenched. How many unfinished things have I abandoned? Her left hand found its way to the keyboard, and she suddenly felt very angry and foolish. A cough resounded behind her.

  “Excuse me?”

  Turning sharply, Greta found herself staring into the face of the gentleman she’d seen outside the factory, the one who’d laughed so freely when his graying companion said failure and mad. He had white blond hair and a strange smile on his face, his hands tucked carefully behind his back.

  “My name is Gustaw,” he said. “Gustaw Lindemann. I’m a senior designer here at Łozina.” He stared up at the ceiling for a moment, as if uncertain how to proceed. Greta noticed that he rocked gently back and forth on his heels. “I heard that there was a lady looking for me on the showroom floor. Would that lady by any chance be you?”

  Lindemann smiled at her, gently now. His suit was made of tidy pin-striped wool, and Greta supposed his was the sort of polite society that noticed when a woman was wearing mourning blacks, that made a point of knowing the difference between fashion and funereal garb.

  “Oh,” she said, blushing. “You design these?”

  “Yes.” He gave a slight bow. Or perhaps he was still just rocking back and forth. “Well, that is to say, not all of them. Not alone. But I do have a degree of oversight over the direction of our movements. Glandt and I share a certain, shall we say, particularity about the way our instruments sound. But I’m also interested in their longevity, so—” He stopped. “You don’t really know what I’m talking about, do you?”

  Greta frowned.

  “How can you design a piano? Doesn’t it already more or less have its own design? Built in?” She stroked the keys of the instrument in front of her like they were little finger bones.

  His hand going lightly to the nape of his neck, Lindemann laughed again. His fingers were clean, scrubbed pink.

  “Well, I can’t say it’s the first time I’ve heard that question. Let me put it this way: I believe there is an ideal piano out there”—he gestured vaguely, into the distance, not the factory—“somewhere. A fixed form, if you will, which if you found it would allow you to make a perfect piano every time, without fail. But at the moment, you see, no one knows what it is. So when I say I’m designing pianos, what I mean is I’m trying to shave away all the mistakes that the other piano makers—and, well, also that I—have made.” Lindemann grinned. “Trying to get closer to that piano in the sky.”

  Greta looked out over the gathered instruments. Was each one different? Each one an infinitesimal improvement? Were they lined up, then, in the order of their creation so that discerning buyers could easily select the finest or choose, with greater consideration to price, the third from best? Fifth from best? Perhaps it gave Lindemann a pang of regret to depose each glorious princeling with the new generation. After all, each of them began with him. “You must be very well known for your work. You speak about it beautifully.”

  She was worried that he was growing tired of her, as he had his back to her,
strolling through the instruments and striking a note or two on each one. But then he turned and shrugged.

  “Ah, well, there’s the rub. If I’m doing even a passable job, most people don’t have the faintest idea who I am. They all think like you, don’t they?” He nodded at Greta. “A good piano has no maker. It just is.”

  “But Łozina? Surely people look for the name?”

  It was a point of pride for Greta, when she thought of Saul cutting and warping the boards. When she dreamed of sussing out the faults and illnesses of each instrument in a peerless white coat. Somewhere out there a woman in finery was asking specifically for a piano from their town, believing nothing else would do.

  “Oh, certainly, the manufacturers’ names have a certain caché—Łozina, Steinway, Petrof.” Lindemann waved a hand. “But most people still don’t know what those names mean, who’s behind them. I suppose they imagine Łozina as some great mother instrument, trailing baby grands behind her.”

  Greta and Lindemann looked at one another for a moment, sharing in this strangest of images. Then Greta shook her head, trying to dissipate it. Her hair was pinned back, but a few strands fell over her ears and she felt slightly indecent, like Cinderella shedding her finery at the stroke of midnight.

  “I should be going,” she said. “I’ll be needed at home.”

  Lindemann looked once more at Greta’s black dress, its creases carefully ironed, her shoes with a high polish. His face was soft, and he crossed the room to her, taking her warm baker’s hand in his own.

  “To była moja przyjemność, my good lady. My pleasure entirely. I hope that I see you again.”