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—”