Lindemann slipped Greta a key, Just in case you need it. And she did need it. She and Saul were going hungry more often than not lately, trying to keep their sons in food. The boys, in turn, snuck their own portions back onto their mother’s plate. But there was little enough to shuffle around. Potatoes from the garden, all turning black after a deep frost. Plums from the local trees, mostly gone rotten. The good ones were canned and shipped out to feed the soldiers who were amassing in anticipation of an invasion by Germany.
“We should have sent the boys to America too,” Greta said to Saul.
“Couldn’t do it.” They sat on the porch, feet hanging off into the air, and he gnawed on a piece of dry venison jerky from a hunting trip the previous year. Even game was in short supply these days, with too many people going in to thin the herds. “You know it. We had the money for one ticket, and I don’t even know where you got that.” He didn’t meet her eyes. “You made a choice. And we all agreed. The boys want to stay and fight, anyhow.”
That was the truth. If she had pleaded with them, and had the means, she could maybe have gotten one to leave. Maybe one. To spare himself for her sake. But Greta’s resources were limited even with a powerful friend, and she couldn’t stand the thought of another one of her daughters dying. Especially not when the girl had her own child brewing, a new innocence growing within her. So the boys remained and made it clear that they saw it as their duty to fight.
“It’s a damn devil’s bargain,” Saul said. “Choosing one child to go.”
He put his hand on Greta’s, and they stared into the woods, where dark shapes shuffled off on their unknowable errands.
16
One morning in my ninth year, I woke up to find the apartment silent but full of smoke. It didn’t worry me the way it might concern most children: I recognized the scent as cigarettes, not fire. I was annoyed that my lungs were going to be scratchy for a day or two — usually my mother smoked out the window so I wouldn’t have to worry about this — but the haze lying over all our furniture made the rooms seem new and distracted me from working myself up into a snit.
It was like finding oneself in the middle of dense fog, or waking up on an airplane that was rising or descending through cloud cover. There was that sense of disorientation, and that feeling of being followed. I sat up in bed and felt the smoke waft around my hair. Darker and lighter curls wormed their way through the mass and I slipped onto the floor, my feet scudding against the hardwood.
“Ada?”
My voice was thick and dry. Before speaking I had no choice but to breathe, and the smoke coated my throat and tongue. I wandered down the hall half expecting to see a dragon’s tail disappearing around a corner, but I reached the kitchen and found it empty, light bleeding through the windows and diffusing in the clouds. There was a note from Ada on the table: Gone in to work. Find something to eat. Do your homework. It was Saturday, but Baba Ada often worked on weekends, altering party dresses and adjusting the cuffs on tuxedos. Rush jobs for an event that night, a debut, a premiere. Costume changes between cocktail hour and after-dinner drinks.
It wasn’t until I read her note that I realized I was hungry, and that I wanted pancakes. It felt important to follow my instincts in a house where everything was suddenly so indistinct. For a moment I considered tackling the cooking myself, but I was still sleepy and didn’t quite trust my eyes in the smog. It seemed all too possible that I’d end up knocking the pan off the stove, burning my hands and legs and face with hot batter.
A few weeks earlier my mother had made me pancakes from scratch — a peace offering after our trip to the opera — adding cornmeal to give them grit and bite, trying to form each cake into the shape of a foreign country. They looked like blobs, failed mouse ears, but they tasted wonderful. She smiled at me and sucked on a cigarette while I ate.
I thought, I’ll help. So I took down the grease-spotted Joy of Cooking from the shelf and dug through drawers until I came up with a few measuring cups, a Pyrex bowl, and some flour, butter, vanilla, and baking powder. I couldn’t remember exactly what went in the batter, but I figured Sara would tell me what to keep out and what to put away. Whispers of smoke hung around my head and followed my hands; it was starting to make me cough, but I didn’t open a window. The smoke didn’t seem like something I had the right to control.
The day before, my mother and my baba Ada had gotten into a fight. I thought it was lucky that Ada chose to leave so early today: it gave us all a chance to calm down, forget what was said, and move on. Sara had been telling me about how Ada came to America: That she was pregnant and refused to name the father. That she left just before the Second World War reached her town in Poznań, so she wasn’t there to fight against the Nazis, to protect her family or hide the Jewish children who were being rounded up and sent to death camps. In death camps, Sara told me, a child might be picked up by the ankles and swung around in the air. Around and around, arms dangling in front of them.
When I tentatively suggested that this sounded fun, Sara laughed, and asked if I thought it would be fun to have my skull crushed against the side of a brick building after swinging for a circle or two.
Your grandmother was a coward, Sara told me. She abandoned her country and her parents and her brothers and ran away to live in America and never heard from anyone ever again. Her mother saved all the money they had to get Ada out of Poland. Her brothers signed up for the army to help pay. They died because of her. Everyone died because of her. She and Greta had no mercy.
“And I suppose you’re sorry?”
This is when Ada walked in, her face completely composed. She ran a hand over her hair, smoothing down invisible flyaways.
“After all,” she continued, “who do you think I was pregnant with? Some stranger? Are you sorry we didn’t all die? That you didn’t die? That Lulu is here?”
She stood next to me and put a hand on my shoulder. My mother grasped me on the other side. But neither woman looked at me. They had eyes only for each other.
The red measuring cups stood in a row, lined up by size. Each one was full of smoke: a cup of smoke, a half cup, a quarter cup. In school sometimes on Halloween, the teachers filled a plastic cauldron with punch and dry ice which they doled out in single servings, and I had the urge now to pick up one of the measuring cups and sip from its billowing bowl.
My eyes streamed tears and yet still felt like they were full of pepper. Maybe, I thought, if I lay down on the ground there wouldn’t be quite so much smoke and I could just go to sleep.
I shook my head. The smoke backed away from me, made tentative by the sudden movement, but soon swirled back, ran its fingers through my hair. I scrunched up my nose and stretched the cotton from my pajama sleeve across my airways.
“Mama,” I whimpered.
It took longer than usual to get to her bedroom. Our apartment wasn’t very big, and on an ordinary day, if I was full of energy I could run around it at top speed and bang my fist on every door several times a minute. But today I kept getting lost. Every few steps I paused to get my bearings and found myself standing by an object that I’d never seen before. True, we had a hallway table, but did it look like this one? Was that our coat rack? Those abandoned shoes couldn’t belong to me, so did they fit some other, unknown child?