Greta’s fingers tightened around the shovel. The day, she realized, had grown dark, and the sky now seemed to be threatening rain.
“What are you going to do?”
“I told you. Or did I?” The man frowned. “It’s just a simple trade. I take a few things that you don’t need—a few things I’d like to have—and you get something in return. Something you want very much. Doesn’t that seem fair?”
A drop fell from the sky onto Greta’s cheek. The stranger looked up at the clouds.
“You’d better hurry,” he said. “There isn’t much time to decide.”
“All right,” said Greta. Before she knew what she was doing.
“Really?” The man scraped a nail along the edge of his bottom lip. “You’re sure?”
Greta nodded. Another few raindrops fell on her shoulders, a few on the top of her head and her hands.
“Well, good then.” The man turned and walked towards the woods, then looked back at Greta. “I won’t see you again, you know.” When she didn’t reply, he stepped into the trees, picking his way through the underbrush until he was gone.
A moment passed and the rain began to drum against the ground in earnest. Then Greta’s heart wrenched. The baby. He’d taken the baby with him.
“Wait!” Greta tried to pull herself out of the hole, but the dirt was turning into mud and she slipped and scrambled against it. “Wait!” she cried.
But her voice echoed into nothingness. When she finally managed to get out of the grave, the clearing was empty. There was no one in sight, no matter which direction she turned. Just trees, which looked spindlier and more identical as they receded. Her shawl lay empty on the earth.
Greta sat down and sobbed into her hands. Her whole body was covered in mud, and it slurred into her eyes, so everything looked brown and dead. She waited. Time passed and nothing changed, except that she blinked out the mud and wiped her nose on the back of her hand.
The man was gone. And he wasn’t coming back.
Little knowing what else to do, Greta filled in the hole she’d dug. And as strange as it was, with every shovelful she threw down, she felt her fury recede. As if she weren’t lifting dirt from a mound but from her own shoulders. A weight from her mind. When she was done, she marked the place with a cross of stones and paused to appreciate it. No one would ever know the difference. Maybe, she thought, I’ll forget too.
But she never did.
9
“Lulu.”
Over the phone I can hear my mother light a cigarette, take a drag. Pause and spit a flake of tobacco off her tongue. She doesn’t say anything but my name, and that’s enough. As always, her voice sounds like it’s kept on packed ice. Winter breathing off the water, ice crystallizing on your eyelashes as you stroll the last block home. A Billie Holiday voice, scratchy muslin that touches your skin even before it reaches your ears.
“Mama, I—” My own voice catches. “I was just . . .”
On the other end of the line, she shifts. I can see her lifting her arms to the lights in the jazz bar. Sipping a glass of wine with her legs crossed, dainty, at the ankles. All the poses she made in my childhood, flitting in front of my eyes like a deck of cards. So many of the cards are blank though. Black.
“Lulu,” she says again. “What?”
A fair question. I cast around for common ground: history, geography. “I’m near the Green Mill,” I say. The bar is, in fact, close by. “I was just thinking of you.”
I’m surprised to hear her laugh.
“Well, first time for everything, isn’t there?”
This is fair too—or almost. And it hurts. The bookstore is quiet around me—I can hear the scratching of the man’s pencil behind the counter, the occasional flip of a page, but I’m the only real disturbance. Kara has settled down and blinks, her nose rooting around my collarbone. I should feed her soon. I keep forgetting that my time is not my own.
“Don’t be mean,” I say.
“Am I?” Sara laughs again. I can feel it in my body, like a punctured lung. “If I’m not very much mistaken, you called me. I don’t see how that obligates me to all the pleasantries.”
My good sense tells me to hang up, make some excuse. But somehow I can’t do that, any more than I could walk into St. Boniface and stand on top of Ada’s grave.
“I had a baby,” I say at last. “A girl. Kara.”
“You think I didn’t know you were pregnant?” Another deep inhalation, smoke swirling between my mother’s teeth. “Your grandmother still calls me sometimes. Which is more than I can say for you.”
I catch on the present tense—I make the same mistake too, often enough. God knows, today has been that kind of day. Before I can mention it, though, my mother speaks again.
“Should we pretend something, Lulu? Something fun? For old time’s sake.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, let’s say magicians. Children trained by their next-door neighbor in the art of sorcery. To everyone else, the neighbor’s just a shabby old man, but to us, he’s twenty feet tall, dressed in silk the color of the sky just before everything goes really black.”
“Mama,” I say. I can’t quite picture her expression. Is she having fun with this? Does she really want to play, the way we used to? It’s been ten years since I saw even the shadow of her, the edge of her dress. During my debut run, I thought I spotted her at a matinee of The Magic Flute, but whoever it was turned a corner and disappeared too fast for me to be sure. Trick of the dark witch. Poof. Gone. Probably I had Ada to thank for that too. I’m surprised to hear they were in touch.
“Okay.” I pull Kara closer to my neck and breathe in the soothing scent of her hair where it meets the cap. “Magicians. What’s my special power?”
But my mother has lost interest.
“Is she with you right now?” she asks.
“Who?”
“This baby. Did you say Clara?”
I shake my head uselessly. “Kara. Of course. Where else would she be?”
“I don’t know,” says Sara. “I don’t know anything about it.”
There is no one in the world like my mother for saying something hard, and then sitting in the ringing silence that follows. I hear her pour a drink: no more than half a glass. I remember how she used to do this, asking for just a splash, and then drinking splash after splash. Ignoring the arithmetic.
“We’re having a christening,” I say before I can stop myself. “Next Tuesday. Saint Mary of the Angels.”
“And you called to invite me? Well. Aren’t you a thoughtful girl.”
This is too much. Sara hasn’t changed at all. Why don’t I hang up? My mother seems to be wondering the same thing.
“Was there something else you wanted?” she asks. “Really?”
And just like that, I remember there is. She has always had that ability: to make things true about me with a word, a glance. I sit deeper into my chair and look at the spines of the books nearby. I’m in the Ps. Poetry. Postmodernism. Poltergeists.
“Do you think I should be worried for myself?”
“About what? About me?”
“No.” I wipe a strand of hair off my forehead—it’s still wet from the snow, starting to coil up in the heat. “I—you know, because of Greta. The curse.”
I find myself holding my breath. If anyone knows, it’s Sara. If anyone can tell me what’s happening. What comes next. But she doesn’t answer me—at least, not exactly. Her voice, when it comes, is distant and distracted.
“Did you say you were at the Green Mill?”
“Nearby. I was going to visit Baba Ada’s grave.” I’m talking as much to myself as to my mother now. “What a stupid idea that was. No wonder I’m being so morbid. But I can’t shake it. This feeling that something even worse is coming.”
Another silence. Another inhalation. My hackles are raised, and I laugh, not a pleasant sound.
“I almost died having the baby,” I say. “And then Ada . . .” I let myself trail
off. “You know. Don’t make me say it.”
“I didn’t know anything.” Sara is cold. “No one told me anything.” The temperature around me seems to drop, complicit with her. “Where is she? Not in Graceland, I hope. She hated that place. It’s tacky.”
“St. Boniface,” I whisper. And then, in my own defense, weakly: “I was unconscious. I didn’t know who was called.”
“The hell,” she says. I hear her breathing. Then her voice drips once more into my ear. “I’ll see you on Tuesday. You and the baby.”
My phone beeps as the call is dropped.
I barely remember leaving the bookstore. What I do recall next is being in a cab and asking the driver to stop a few blocks from our apartment because I need to walk and clear my head a bit. My whole body feels shaken—literally shaken, as if some giant pair of hands has picked me up and rattled me around. I stop in a neighborhood café and order a glass of wine, drinking it too fast as the eyes of the other patrons bore into me, taking in the baby.
The wine laps back and forth inside me, nauseous, sweet. Heavy, salted foods are stacked under the counter, hanging off the walls. Fat of the goose. Marbled meat of the pig. Pungent cheese dripping from a blood-red rind. I want to be calm, sniff indifferently at the mozzarella and the duck confit. All my favorite foods, and John’s too. But the richness just makes me sick—one more indignity visited upon my body. And that makes me angry. I set down my glass and skid towards home as quickly as I can.
It’s dark by the time I arrive, and John is in the living room, lying on the couch. As he reads he rubs his feet together, an idle gesture, the wool socks scratching against one another. Velcro, Velcro, tiny fibers linking and wrenching apart. He sees me over the top of his book, and he smiles.
“You bastard,” I say. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
He is momentarily too shocked to speak, and I hear this beat, this pause, and I take it.
“You had my phone.” I lift Kara out of the carrier on my chest and set her down in a car seat on the floor, which we’ve been using as a makeshift bed. “For days, I think. So it’s not as though you didn’t have her number.”
“Her?” John has gained enough composure to be dubious of my choice of pronoun. It occurs to me that we may be about to have two different fights, but that’s all the more reason to push my advantage. I don’t know if I’m ready to be honest. But I’m ready to be angry.
“What were you thinking? What kind of a person are you? You just let her go on living, thinking everything was fine, when her mother had died? Did you think that would be better?”
So far John has not moved off the couch. What he’s ready for is not yet clear. He lies back, his neck on the sofa arm and his head hanging off into nothing. I tear off my coat, kick both shoes across the room away from the baby, throw my unwound scarf in front of me, where it flutters ineffectually and falls into a heap. John sits up and leans his elbows on his knees.
“So,” he says, “did you go to the cemetery after all?”
“Shut up.” My voice is shaking, and it feels wonderful. “You want something good? You always want something good. But some things are just bad, and you can’t talk your way out of them. You can’t tell a little lie to make the world look the way you wish it did.”
“Who are we talking about now?”
“We are talking about you.” I reach down into my lungs for the words, giving them enough force to reach back fifty rows in a theater. That’s something a good singer will practice for years, being able to intone while still projecting, making yourself heard but still making yourself clear. “Your little stories. Telling me Ada was fine. Telling my mother . . .”
John walks across the room as I talk and puts his face very close to mine. Here it comes, I think. He’s right next to my mouth, close enough to bite it and take a piece out. For a second I wonder if he might kiss me. He sniffs.
“I think,” he says, “that you’ve been drinking. You always get like this.” He picks up Kara, turns a slow circle while holding her above his head and smiling. Then he looks back at me. “Unreasonable.”
He walks to the kitchen and I can hear him take out a bottle of formula that we have on hand in case we want to go out to eat and have a drink, just relax together. Something untarnished for the baby. With her in his arms, he goes into the bedroom and gently, so as not to scare her, closes the door.
We are still frightened, then. Both of us.
10
Everything about me depends on Greta. That’s what Ada told me, what she needed to be true. With every word and every flick of the wrist, she made me into something as fragile and hard as cut glass. A lens, through which she could see the world she wanted.
“You are the finest creature yet born,” she said to me each morning. We had a ritual: Baba Ada woke me up at seven, and the first thing she did was brush my hair. Light spilling through the curtains in the summer, a soft lamp turned on to help us see in the winter, when the sun was barely up by the time she cracked open the door. My baba Ada sat on the edge of my bed and wrapped the comforter around me, drawing me towards her and kissing the top of my head.
“You are my golden girl, złota moja, lalka.”
The brush was brown wood, with many hard bristles, like a horse brush. It brought me into my body. My first sensation on any given day was the sudden sharp pressure of those bristles on my scalp, and the slow tugging that followed them. I let my head fall to the side Ada was brushing, and she tilted me straight with two fingers on my chin.
“You’re growing so beautiful. Every day.”
She said this to me when I was three, four, five; she said it to me on my fifteenth birthday, when I lay in bed with my colt legs tucked under me. At seventeen I decided the routine left no room for my personal expression and began sleeping naked. It made no difference. In fact, my baba never even mentioned it. She came into my room and brushed my hair a hundred strokes, then stood me up on bare and wobbling knees and led me to the closet to choose between my dresses.
“Before me,” Ada told me, “Greta was lonely for a daughter. And when I was born she wept for ten days. As I grew up, she brushed my hair every morning to spin it into silk, and to teach me how to someday brush your hair for you. She understood what a treasure you would be. She dreamed of you even though she had to wake up every morning into a world without you.”
The night before Kara was born—not that I knew it, then—I lay in bed with the covers pulled up to my knees and chatted with her through my skin. I wanted to prepare her for coming into the world, explain that I would be gone sometimes for tours but that someone would always be at home to take care of her. I told her that she would resent the way adults treasured her childhood, would always be indignantly trying to explain that her life was difficult, too, and could we please just acknowledge that?
“But we’ll have our reasons,” I told her. “You’ll have something we all want and can’t have, and we’ll be so jealous of you that sometimes we’ll feel like blowing up.”
In my dreams, until I was six or seven years old, I lived with Greta in her small cottage at the edge of the woods. When I wanted to be alone, I sat on a footstool in the corner of the kitchen so that I could be near the fire but also smell the sharp resin of the wooden walls. The footstool was covered in scratchy brown wool. Greta reached into the stove and took out fistfuls of flame with her bare hands.
She and I stared at these balls of fire, asked them questions as if they were tiny stars come down to visit. You must have seen so much, we said.
Each time I learned a new song I rushed to sleep, to Greta, and sang it for her. Each time I coaxed my voice towards a new high note, I saw her eyes shining with pride. We walked through her Poznań township hand in hand, and the people on the street parted ways for us—they shifted the sea of their movements to let us through, and we walked as though on the sandy floor of the ocean, marveling at all that was around us. Sometimes Greta pointed up to the sky and said, Look! And a bird flew past s
o fast that no one but us noticed it obscure the sun. Just for a moment. The bird’s wings a black cape across the clouds.
“We’ll want to see what you see,” I told Kara. At that moment her eyes were shut against their gentle bath, the warm water I stored for her within me. She saw geometric combinations, Escher portraits of the sounds on the other side of her swaddling wall. Or maybe she saw nothing, since she hadn’t yet the experience to know that there are shapes to name and colors to fill the shapes in and make them shine.
As I grew older, Greta’s cottage receded from me; the weight of her hand on my own diminished. When Ada told me the stories of her mother’s life, all I saw was that they explained who I was supposed to be. I didn’t see the knots in the floorboards anymore or the mammoth iron mouth that was Greta’s cookstove. And I only had a faint, haunting memory of the last trip Greta and I took out to the forest, when she helped me climb up into a tree and together we hummed the river’s song. I had some notion of the person who happened towards us and, hypnotized, scrambled up the tree to sit beside us.
That person was, I thought, my mother, Sara, with her dark hair and her almond eyes. She took our hands in her own and lifted to each of our lips a crust of bread fresh from the oven, watched me chew and swallow and open my mouth for another. And she looked at me, looked so reproachfully, when from either side Greta and I leaned in to kiss her cheeks. I remembered faintly the way the color drained from my mother’s face and how her body fell like a rag to the forest floor. She got up and brushed herself off, walked away, but I could see that something was missing from her from that moment, and that I had taken it for myself.
“Now you’ll be strong,” Greta told me. “Like I was.”
I put my hand on my belly and could feel through the taut skin the basic outline of a foot. I inspected it for toes and searched for a heel, but everything was still too indistinct, too much a part of me. Kara was sleeping, soothed by who knows what. The sound of my heart? The thrum of my blood? Something nourished and protected her. Some piece of me that lay beyond my control.
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