No one ever begins a performance with the Reine de la Nuit aria, because after that there aren’t many places to go. But this audience made me angry. In the dark, I could imagine them rooting around for popcorn or munching on candy smuggled into the ballroom at the bottom of overlarge purses. A warm, bland mass. The first notes cracked through them like a foot through spring thaw—I was the chill in every spine, the soft “Oh!” bitten back between freezing lips.
Death and despair blaze all around me! I sang. Disowned forever! Forsaken forever! Shattered forever! No one breathed. My daughter never. Nevermore! My audience for the evening was comprised of investment bankers. Maybe five among them spoke German, and one or two had familiarity with opera that extended beyond attending Carmen from a sense of guilty obligation when a boss lent out his box at the theater. In their experience, music was an excuse to wear a tuxedo or, if they were saucy, a fitted blue three-piece suit. The women wore gowns.
I undid them by the buttons. I burned off their clothes. The ones who understood the words I was singing looked at my belly and took it the worst, drained completely pale by the time the aria ended. The piece has never been outside of my range, but that night I felt my tessitura stretching and my throat throbbing like a frog in front of those thin-skinned business faces. If I’d tapped them with an egg spoon, the lot of them would have shattered into unusable fragments.
When my voice died away, the air in the ballroom felt thick. There was a shell-shocked silence in which one man adjusted his tie; a lady in the first row slipped her shoes off her heels. I certainly wasn’t going to be the first one to move, and held my show posture—air sucked carefully into my diaphragm so my shoulders wouldn’t visibly rise and fall. For a second I was worried that nothing would happen at all and that I was still invisible. Nothing but a belly. Then there was a small creak from the back of the room and the door popped open. A head peeked in, a small head. It was a tiny girl, no more than six, and after sweeping her eyes back and forth she blinked at me. Like an emissary from the future, or the past.
“Wow,” she said. And, as if they’d been waiting for her opinion, the audience burst into thunderous applause.
I thought Ada might disapprove of my continuing to sing when she heard my choice of repertoire. But she was happy as a fat seal in the sun. She fed me up on rich oils and leafy greens and a weekly glass of wine that she claimed would stir the baby’s blood. Once she sat with me in my living room, stroking the foot I’d placed lazy on her lap, and suggested stretching headphones out over my stomach.
“Oh god,” I said. “No Baby Einstein.”
She raised an eyebrow and, when I explained, swatted the idea aside like a gnat.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I just mean for her enjoyment. All the rest of that curriculum”—the word boiled on her tongue—“is for people who don’t already know what their children are going to be.”
I laughed, but inside my heart shrank back. Better than me: that’s what she meant. Although she wouldn’t have said it quite that way, I could hardly miss her meaning. She might have said the same thing to my mother, once.
I say that Sara loved her troubles, and that’s true; she didn’t have to tell me the stories she did, didn’t have to try and splinter my heart. But I should also be fair: Sara had plenty of troubles to love.
I think that she wanted to take care of me. Wanted not to fall asleep so often in the middle of the day, pulling a pillow around her ears so she couldn’t hear my footsteps. Wanted not to ruin her voice with whiskey and cigarettes, wanted not to throw me with disgust at her mother and go moonlight in Italian bars in the Loop where they’d give her glasses of cheap red wine to drink as she sang and put her in a cab at the end of the night.
But I made it difficult for her.
My mother enjoyed feeding me. Little bites of strawberry into my mouth right off the knife, pieces of hot bread with butter and honey. Greta’s talent for baking skimmed over Baba Ada’s surface—she could do it sufficiently, it just didn’t hold her interest—but embedded itself in my mother, deep. I remember how happy she was every time I took a mouthful of something, like the use of my incisors was a miracle, the plunge of my throat an expression of love.
One Easter when I was about five years old, my front two teeth dangled painfully loose, and I couldn’t eat the chocolate or jelly beans or gummy worms stashed for me in plastic eggs. Ada was impatient with holiday traditions that did not involve church, but that year Sara wouldn’t let her take me, and I think Ada saw my situation as a piece of minor divine retribution. She sat sanguine, trying to distract me by painting eggshells. But my mother was wretched.
“It’s not Easter if she can’t eat candy,” she said. “Here, Lulu, try this.” She handed me a marshmallow rabbit. I bit down on it and grimaced, shaking my head.
“If your hands get sticky, you’ll muck up the pisanki,” Ada said. She removed the disemboweled pink bunny from my hand with two fingers and covered it with a piece of newspaper. “Lick them like this, lalka, and then you can try again.” Ada stuck her tongue out at the tips of her fingers and I giggled, following suit. She craned her neck at Sara. “There, she got some sugar. Are you happy now?”
“Yes, obviously,” said Sara. “My concerns were purely chemical.”
She kept trying different concoctions, chopping gummies into a near paste and holding chocolate kisses up to a flame, letting me drink the melted liquid out of her hands. I wasn’t really hungry, and would have forgotten about my candy in minutes if I’d been given a chance, but Sara pushed more and more options towards me—marshmallows microwaved into fluff and hard candies crushed into powder that dissolved on my tongue.
Finally, her Easter eggs shoved by the wayside, Ada got up and washed her hands, then returned to her seat in the kitchen and folded one leg carefully over the other. “Well,” she said, “that is enough. You’ve ensured the child will never sleep again, and she looks like a Chinese panda.” Indeed there were smears of chocolate all across my face, rimming my mouth and daubing my cheekbones like war paint. “Mamenka would never have allowed this kind of nonsense on a holy day. She put my hair up in special curlers the night before Easter Sunday so that I would be perfectly uniform, and I spent hours embroidering a new dress, because I wanted to be the most beautiful, perfect little girl in church.”
Sara raised an eyebrow. To invoke Greta was to pull a hidden card from your sleeve, not really an argument but a firm “Because I said so.” The effect on me wasn’t punitive, it was just unstoppable. Once tossed a crumb of Greta lore, I would do anything to get another taste.
Immediately my hands went up to my face and started wiping the chocolate away. Sara tsked and tried to help me, but her fingers were also spun with sugar and I shrieked when she grabbed my arm to pull me just a little bit closer. “No no no,” I cried, squirming and retracting. “No, please no, stop it, I can—” But she clamped down harder and dabbed at my cheeks, licking her thumb and scrubbing my skin in a huff. I twisted away, knocking over my chair, and when I picked myself up off the ground I saw a shadow of chocolate on my Easter dress. My ears started ringing and I collapsed into sobs.
“Why did you do that to me, Mama, why did you do that?”
Ada scooped me up off the floor and grasped my chin between her forefinger and thumb. She shushed me and nuzzled me and took me over to the sink, where a quick swipe from a damp cloth scoured my face pink and removed the worst damage from my dress, while Sara remained in her chair, ash silent. She picked up a hollow painted egg and rolled it back and forth in her palm.
“Now, słodka, it’s not so bad, is it?” asked Ada. “You know, we could still curl your hair with the curling iron. Would you like that? Hmm?” I nodded reverently. “And then maybe we could paint a couple more Easter eggs, and I’ll buy you a nice, soft piece of cake. Soft as a cloud. You know, Greta loved to have cake on Easter Sunday. She would bake a cake that was so tall! Like a man!” Ada held her hand up flat, high above her head. “
And we would eat it with custard, and I always knew that if I finished Easter that way I would fall asleep and dream of a clockwork girl, of braided gold and a beating garnet heart. A whole child made of jewels and shining rings and chains.”
Sara sighed through her nose, peering at the egg in her hand. I watched it and her from Ada’s arms, the slow rhythmic nature of their movements. The egg was red, struck through with lines of yellow and black, and it matched the crimson of Sara’s fingernails, though its pattern was much more severe. I remained cosseted in my baba’s arms but willed my mother to look at me, ashamed of myself without knowing why. Sara’s eyes were partially hidden by her lashes, but I could see them growing darker, edging towards black. If she would only look up, I thought, I could smile and everything would be all right again. We could all eat cake together and tell stories, bundled onto the couch under a blanket. But my mother set the eggshell on the table and slowly crushed it under her palm. Then she stood up, brushing off her hands, and walked out of the room.
“Well,” said Ada. “How about that cake then?”
Sometimes I forget that Kara is a real baby, that she isn’t just a manifestation of my own difficulty with babyness—that in fact when her pupil dilates, her nostril flares, it is a genuine person’s experience of something outside itself. Which means there is something inside itself as well. Not just blood and a shining purple liver the size of an apricot. Though that too. Organs glistening in miniature, and then somewhere inexpressible, unidentifiable: awareness.
I wonder if my mother ever saw me this way, as a whole thing, someone outside her own game of trials and errors, wracking points up for themselves. When she put her hand on my head in passing, did she somehow feel a brain beating beneath it or did an idle part of her just think girl? The shadowy form of girl that lived in her mind instead of the hungry-thirsty-needs-to-pee version that lived in her house. The shadowy form that came to eclipse her.
I lean into my baby, I surround her and drink in her scent of milk and straw and butter. The clean smell of ironed cotton and her own slightly rancid spit. I always want to be touching her, examining her, to remind myself she is there, she is she, but I still have this terrible time knowing it. Separating the she that has a smell from the me who smells it. And so the fear I feel is transposed onto her, the fear that singing to her will make her a part of my family’s strange and imaginary history. Draw her in like my mother’s mouth draws in smoke, like I draw in oxygen. When in fact the truth for Kara is that a song would be rhythmic to her, a song would just send her to sleep.
15
A da never returned to the town where she was born after coming to America—there was no town left to return to. The war swept through Poland while she was on a ship, traveling steerage, weighted down with pregnancy and seasickness. It brought a rigid structure of death, organized in small cabins on vast, endless fields. It spilled people out of their homes, dragging furniture to train stations so they could furnish the new houses they’d been promised, but there were no houses. Just trains, pushed full with bodies. And stations, piled high with abandoned chairs and divans and mattresses that got soaked in the rain, stained and ruined.
The rain itself was ruined in Poland for a time, each drop marred with bodily grime. Chimneys stretched up into the clouds and populated them with the smoke of burnt hair, sizzling bones. And the rain that once fell on Greta and Saul’s wedding turned soot black, marking the ground where it fell. Marking the trees.
In spite of all that, I’m not sure Ada ever forgave her mother for sending her away. Or, for that matter, for being dead. I’ve seen the thought cause my babenka physical annoyance: closed eyes and breath in counts of ten, shoulders bunched up towards her ears until nine, eight, seven, six, five, she could release them back down into her perfect posture. Once I found her and Sara in the kitchen, talking about the town in quiet tones. My mother stood behind Baba Ada, arms around her waist, chin on her shoulder. When they heard my footsteps they both turned around, and I never forgot their eyes: frightened, glass bright.
Baba Ada treated her grief like an oyster treats a grain of sand. By working it over, covering it up. Just for instance: instead of fighting Greta’s death, she told me about it every chance she got. More often than she told me about Greta’s wedding. More often than she told me the dark color of her mother’s hair, or described the crackle of stones under her own feet as she walked down the road between her home and the town.
But she told the story differently every time. It was the one Greta story that really changed, and when a new version came to her, it came with urgency. Sometimes she’d grab my arm in the hallway, leaving fingerprints of flour on my sweater sleeve. Sometimes we got stuck on a slow-moving train and she’d tell me three different stories in an hour, circling above Greta’s death like a bird as the train clacked slowly over the Chicago streets. Each new version made the others harder to believe, and that was her weapon: the multitude, the manifold, made the very fact untrue.
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 tha
t 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.
“Yes,” 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.
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