“Mama?” I said. She came over and placed herself next to me, looking at me over her shoulder. She lifted her hands.
“Zip, please.”
I stood up on the bed and obliged, the zipper clicking sticky teeth.
“Mama?” I tried again. “What did you say?”
“I said she lied. You heard me.” My mother checked the zipper and then opened the window, lighting a cigarette and blowing the smoke outside. “Someday you’re going to understand.” She inhaled. “About Greta. And all that.” She exhaled. “I’d be doing you a favor, telling you. But you wouldn’t see it that way, I don’t think.”
She dropped the cigarette in a jar she kept on the outside sill. It was half full of rainwater, so the other butts were tinted green and black from stagnation. The new one expanded just a bit when it hit the liquid, slowly coming to resemble the rest.
“So I’ll do you the favor you think you want.”
She kissed me on the cheek and walked out of the room, slamming the bathroom door behind her. A week later she would be gone, but I didn’t know that yet. Maybe she did though. Maybe it was in that moment, and with those words, that she formed her plan.
I didn’t see Ada’s stories as lies, but some part of me knew that their truths were separate from the truth of the war offered up by my mother. They felt, in my hands, like two sides of history: Chopin in Paris and Chopin in Żelazowa Wola.
It didn’t bother me. The split seemed as natural as having two bedrooms in a house: you could walk into one and see a single life laid out, then close that door and open another. But in either room you knew the larger home, the larger truth, was still around you.
The real problem was that neither story was complete — they didn’t tell me what I wanted to know about the end. What shape did Greta’s sacrifice take? And who were the men and women who came to the town and burned it? How did they get in? How did they leave? And how could they possibly hurt Greta’s family?
The truth lay, as it so often does, between the two stories. In the cracks and crevices where they seeped into one another. At least that’s what I’ve decided.
When my baba Ada was a girl, she could have swallowed the whole world and no one would have tried to stop her. She was the only child her mother ever gave birth to laughing, smiling through the grit of her tears. Greta the bear. Greta the she-wolf. Greta the lonely who craved a pair of ears to recognize music when they heard it. Her other girls had died being born, and she had battered herself over their deaths, wondering, Why them? Why not me?
Ada was sprightly, dark, and small. She bounced unstable from place to place making up songs, pulling on her brothers’ hair. They were all besotted with her, especially Konrad, who was not much older. He followed her everywhere. When she was learning to walk, he shadowed her with such a look of serious concern — that furrowed brow, those blue eyes clouding — that Greta and Saul could not help but laugh. They clutched one another behind his back, tears streaming down their cheeks. Look how he loves her.
How can I know this? It’s nothing Ada would ever tell. Nothing she has the authority to know. But I know. I’ve spoken to Greta in my sleep, and she fills me in on the secrets that my mama and my babenka kept close to the chest for reasons of their own.
Ada was her mother’s image reflected back, slightly smaller, slightly oblique. The pair of them were a walking discourse on the evolution of proud Polish blood. Is it impossible to improve on a good woman? Or inevitable?
Saul could refuse the child nothing. Poor papa. He saw his powerful wife transformed into a creature he could pick up with two hands and toss into the air, and the vision turned his heart on its side. Here is someone to protect, he thought. Little knowing what he was dealing with. Little knowing how headstrong a body can grow when given unlimited access to satisfaction.
“You’ll spoil her,” Greta warned.
“If she turns out like you,” he said, “I can’t see how I’d call that spoiled.”
And so she grew. A laughing, twirling dervish. A girl beloved by her whole town, who looked so much like her beautiful mother that no one thought to question why she didn’t really look like her father at all. No one held her hand in check, no one watched her, because everyone was confident that no one would hurt her. And Ada. Well, Ada wasn’t a foolish girl. It just didn’t occur to her that ministrations, attention, could have consequences. That they were anything other than an end in themselves.
This is the beginning of my mother Sara’s story. Some night after a dance in town, the summer darkness. These things happen. The fields near the church were covered in soft grasses, a spray of flowers. And the young boy, drunk on love, told Ada over and over again how beautiful she was, and how precious.
As my mother loved to remind her, Ada was ushered out of town before the war fell. But of course my mother always fails to mention that it was because of her that Ada agreed to go.
“We all have to give something up,” Greta whispered to her. Then she gave her a gentle shove onto the train. “So our daughters can grow.”
Ada’s eyes filled up with tears. She couldn’t even pronounce the name of the city to which she was being exiled. The word Chicago made no sense in her mouth — her hard ch and soft sh always blended together; she confused her sibilants and places of articulation, her tongue tied into knots. But she clutched her visa to her chest and took a step forward into the world.
She must have felt much smaller in transit, more like the soft toy that Saul always imagined her to be, tossed from side to side by the steam engine, the waves and their methodical pounding, the second train from New York to Union Station in Chicago. Her cousin Freddie met her dressed in a dark suit, like a funeral man. He took off his hat to her, but once home in his small apartment he made her sleep on the couch. Instead of opening his arms in welcome, he was curt and always in a hurry. He seemed annoyed to keep having to explain her presence, to clarify that, no, she was not his wife.
As if I’d want you, Ada thought. He was fat, almost enormous considering the little that they had to eat. Any weight he’d lost since the war began still hung off him in folds of skin. As if anyone would want you. The thought was Ada’s one cruelty, her unspoken revenge. Everything else was fear: troops mustering in the newspaper. Boys in Germany with bright blond hair.
And so it was little comfort to be cruel to Freddie, because he was suddenly, breathtakingly, all that she had. Every Monday, and sometimes again on Friday, Ada sent a letter to Greta or Konrad, and even once to the boy she’d met in secret behind the church. But she received nothing in return, no replies. Not even a note from the post office explaining that most of her letters had been lost in transit. The growing hysteria of one young girl was not a priority in a time of war.
So she didn’t know that back in Poznań, the piano factory had been requisitioned as a bunk and barracks manufacturer. Greta ran into Gustaw Lindemann one day when she was coming out of the alleyway that served as a meeting ground for black market exchanges. He was going in. His face was grim, his suit still gray, as always, though not so crisp.
“It’s a lucky thing,” he whispered to her, “that we got the girl out when we did. I wouldn’t be able to do it now. My money’s no good.” He ran a hand over his hair, as if to reassure himself it was still there. “I’m trading ivory keys for food. God knows what they’re doing with them.”