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 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.
“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.
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.