Precious (10 page)

“It’s not the same thing.” She got up and returned to the sink. She took a dishcloth from the wicker basket on the counter and looked out the kitchen window to the backyard. A light snow fell, mottling the ground, and coating the tops of the metal fence. The sky was gray. By late evening, temperatures would slide below freezing and whatever moisture the sky still held would turn icy, pelting the skin of those unfortunate enough to be outside. Natalia would be delayed at the airport, arrive a day late, though no one in the Kisch family would know this.

“Do you think I look old?” Natalia asked without turning. “Ponce de León thought there was a cure for aging, but for men that only means a younger woman. There’s no good juice for stripping away time.”

“No,” Sissy said. “You don’t look old.”

Natalia looked up and, seeing her daughter’s expression, she stopped. Maybe Sissy was thinking, Natalia reasoned, of that woman years ago in Atlantic City, that short blonde with the nice smile, how Frank sat on the beach and talked with her while Natalia and Sissy bobbed in the ocean, the day ablaze with children and activity. She suddenly felt ashamed again. That was only a flirtation, wasn’t it? She was
the one who was leaving with the doctor, not Frank leaving her for some girl. “It doesn’t matter, anyway,” she said.

“Are you okay, Mom?”

“I’m okay,” she said. “I’m fine.” The dishes sat in front of her, waiting, as they always did. She thought perhaps she would make a pie if there was time, though after their recent argument, a pie seemed like an insult to Frank’s waistline, and, after all, maybe it was. She had an old thought of hunger and need: how she came to this very country, to this very region, without any choice to do so, and how after a time, in high school, she met Frank and life gradually seeded itself, without her ever seeming to make a definitive choice, one way or the other. It was peculiar to Natalia how much of life was thrown upon us: lucky or unlucky.

She mulled over her plan to meet the doctor, Ronald Finley It was only a week before that he’d come up behind her as she was filing away his papers. He laced his arms around her waist. They’d been seeing each other for two months, since his divorce had been finalized, and he told her that he needed a change of scenery and was going on holiday for six months, to Italy. He said, “Come with me.”

“I can’t,” she said. “You know I can’t.”

He held her tighter, and she could smell the lemony aftershave he wore that day. “I don’t ascribe to
can’t.
Not for me, or you. You’re an exquisitely beautiful woman,” he said, kissing her neck. “Your bone structure is lovely.”

Natalia couldn’t think of a time she’d ever been called
lovely.
In her youth, she had been awkward and a bit harder than she’d wished with people, difficult to know. She had been self-conscious of her looks, of the thin line around her neck that she often covered with scarves, a line that now, after years, looked only like a trapping of her age—a wrinkle. Dr. Finley had walked into his office then and returned with a gift of winter pears set in perfect rows, three by three in a wooden box, each pear wrapped in green tinfoil that was so festive she could not help but be delighted. But there was the small thought that nettled her—that Ronald Finley, unlike Frank, did not yet know that she hated pears,
their gritty sweetness. She would have preferred green apples, freshly picked and stolen from the farmer’s orchard, juicy and bitter on the tongue, sweeter, though, for all the sneaking around and laughter.

She watched now as the flakes fell outside the window. She washed a dish, ignoring the numbness that set into her hands from the hot water. “My mind today,” she said. “It wants to jump from thing to thing, Sissy. It must be the snow.”

“Why the snow?” Sissy asked.

“What?”

“Why the snow?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Just because.” She ran a sponge over the plate, rinsed it, and set it into the drying rack. “I could tell you a story if you want,” she said.

Sissy’s eyes lit up, not only in anticipation of the story itself but also of the changes that she knew would assail her mother’s face as she spoke—the way her lips would turn downward when the story became grim, the way her eyes would widen when something surprising unfolded, the exaggerated movements of her hands when a detail struck her as amusing, or times when she was made so angry by her own tales that she’d let go a barrage of lamentations and curses spoken in another language.
(Tolvaj! Megállj! A fenébe!)
When her mother told a story, her face became transparent, mutable, and subject to fanciful twists of emotion. There were so many stories given to Sissy and Eva over the years: the campfires that kept the darkness at bay and burned down to cinders in the morning; travels through the barren countryside, made in intricately carved caravans with stained-glass windows.
Many Gypsies,
she once said,
were kings, their fingers adorned with rings, their voices filled with laughter.
In the telling, the caravans grew majestic, as stately as the mountains behind them, golden harps crowning them like jewels. There were stories of traded horses, stories of bears that could dance on their hind legs, chains of bells around their necks. There were tales of women who married men that turned magically into animals—a wolf, a crow, and once even a rooster. There were charms, conjurations.
(Fever
go away!)
Spells against toothaches. A coin for luck. A stone to worry in your pocket. A reading of cards. A song for the dead. A wish that everything precious be given back to you. Stories of Budapest, stories of Hungary stories remembered from Natalia’s mother that Natalia passed to Eva. And then, when Eva no longer cared to hear the stories, when she was busy dating and picking out outfits and buying records, Natalia told Sissy the stories instead. They were all she remembered of her life back then, in that place, all she remembered of her
kompánia,
her family. They were, truth be told, only bits and fragments that, over time, she added to, letting her imagination fill in the holes. She had no stories from her adopted German mother. The woman was fastidious with numbers.

As it often happened when trying to recall her mother’s stories, Sissy would later massacre the tales told to her. The specificity of detail and the ordering of events were ruined. It was like stars blurring into one vast woven blanket. In imagining a hillside Sissy might feel the dirt crumble in her fingers and grind under her nails, or the dancing bear might be transformed into a man searching for his lost family.

A harp. A cymbal. A violin.

There was always music.

“Okay,” Natalia said, her face changing. “Let me think of one.”

Sissy waited.

Maybe it was the snow, the feeling of her mind wandering, moving backward and forward and backward again, further, to more unreachable places. She tried to push the thought away, but it was there, suddenly, as fresh as the day itself. “Sometimes in life,” Natalia began, “you breathe even when you don’t want to. Sometimes in life, you take in the bad along with the good and rub them together until something, however small, shines.”

Sissy nodded, and Natalia grew annoyed with her daughter. “Don’t nod if you don’t really know.” She glanced up at the clock above the door frame, calculated the amount of time it would take to usher Sissy off to Milly’s house and finish packing. She turned her attention back to Sissy.

“I’m telling you this story not so much for now but for when you’re older. Do you forget the things I tell you?”

“No,” Sissy said. “I never forget anything.”

“You forget all the time,” Natalia said, almost tenderly. “I tell you to clean your room and listen to your father, and you act like you don’t hear me. I tell you to be nice to your sister and to try to be kind and to not be so frightened, and you don’t listen at all.”

“I do,” Sissy insisted. “I don’t forget.”

“Well,” Natalia continued, “this story takes place in 1944, when Gypsies lived in a camp outside Kraków.”

The name Kraków sounded foreign to Sissy, silly like the word “cracker.” She could not picture a Kraków in her mind and so called upon the thing she could picture instead, another camp, Camp Paupac, where she sometimes spent a week in the summer. “Like Camp Paupac?” Sissy inquired, happy to think that she might be someone who understood things her mother spoke of without question.

Natalia considered this, then she shrugged finally, already tired. “You can imagine Camp Paupac if it helps you see things. Only imagine it gray and dry, at times bitterly cold with never enough food and clean water unless you ate the snow before it started to smell funny. When I was a girl—a little younger than you—I lived there. I don’t think of it often. It wasn’t a very nice place.”

Sissy closed her eyes and imagined Camp Paupac with its tranquil skies and hemlocks, its tethered boats undulating on the glassy lake, its cookouts with burgers and franks, the smokiness that often stung her eyes. She thought immediately of quests for frogs and fireflies through the woods, down the paths that smelled of dirt, of traps laid to ensnare unsuspecting raccoons or to douse bears with pepper. Then, in her mind’s eye, she painted the entire scene gray. She drained the lakes as one might a swimming pool at the close of summer. She pulled out the bits of color from the grass, but color kept seeping through, and soon she saw only a sky the color of a robin’s egg, damp grass that glistened like jewels, and so much water.

“You see, yes?”

“Yes.”

“In camp the children, they were ghost children, really—very thin. Sometimes they were so thin they would disappear entirely, and you would look for them but they were gone. That’s how we lived there, waiting to wake up and find that someone we loved was gone. We all waited. It didn’t seem to matter how many medallions were buried, how many chants were said, how much ground was spit upon—waiting only meant the end of time. So we’d tell stories instead of waiting. The children would say, ‘Ah, you need shoes? You want leather shoes, tooled and polished? Here!’ We would stomp around in our shoes until they were dusty and covered in ash. We would polish them with a make-believe brush. We would tie and untie the laces of the shoes. We would unthread the laces and turn them into moths that flew around us, unexpected, magical. A hundred, a thousand moths flittering around the camp, you see? We wished we could be moths, floating atop the metal wires. We said, ‘You’re hungry? Here is bread!’ We brought bread to our mothers and fathers, bread that was as light as the air. Once, though this was nothing we even wished for, there was a merry-go-round in our camp, a gift from soldiers. This is true. Our mothers fussed so much. They complained that the children had nothing. I rode a donkey. The other children rode bears and lions. The soldiers lifted some of us and carried us around, dancing in circles. There was real laughter that day.”

She stopped momentarily. She pushed away the memory of rumors that were whispered ear to ear, the snicker from one soldier who allowed the merry-go-round to be erected—rumors of bodies floating in vats of water, occasional screams from buildings, the impending massacre of the Gypsy camp, the worried looks that sometimes assaulted the guards, those who smuggled food into camp out of a last bit of kindness and hope.

“A merry-go-round?” Sissy asked.

“It was magical. One day in a thousand.” Natalia looked at the clock. The faucet dripped. She could not tell Sissy the rest of the story:
that within a month of that day, the women and men and children would all be gone. Her mother. Her father. Her younger brother. Killed, all of them. And gone with her mother and her father were the memories of them, their stories. Sometimes she told herself it didn’t matter, to be stripped so suddenly of your history. Gypsies had such little historical memory anyway: only that of the eldest among them, and those remembered by them. They didn’t even have a creation story. It was as if the world had always been there, and they had always been in it, turning across generations, cursed to wander, cursed to forget.

In life, if anyone survived, it was luck. If anyone found a loved one after losing them, it was luck. If anyone found a way home, it was luck. Her escape, too, was luck. In camp, in order to live (or to be promised life), family members were often made to hang one another, mothers hanging children, brothers hanging brothers. Natalia thought of her Gypsy mother’s round, grieving face, and her father with his thick hair and mustache, how he yelled and screamed at the guards and pushed forward. If you screamed, you were shot. If you moved when you weren’t supposed to move, the guns would fire. And there was blood— a pool of blood on the ground—and then it was the guard who, before Natalia could take any of that in, put a rope around her and pulled. A burn. A flash of blackness. And, sometime later, movement beneath her—the wheels of a cart hitting stones, the uneven holes in the ground bouncing her awake. And that long-ago day was in the present again, suddenly—the twitching of fingers, the rolling of eyes, a gray blur of sky and ash—Why is there always ash? It falls like snow but is graceless, without any hope—and then there is a moment of being aware of men and women under her, and children as young as she, and younger, staring blankly, watching without seeing, their faces twisted in pain, and it is that man again, that skinny man with the shovel, the tired man with the look of a bird, and he takes pity on her for having died once in the day. And then he gathers her in a blanket and smuggles her out into the night, through the woods, past the barking dogs, the
kutya,
to the blare
of headlights and the German couple, childless. But the bird man; she will never see him again except in memory, where she will always see him, this bird man with his big German nose, who tells her, “You will not die twice today.” Or perhaps he says, “You have done enough dying for a lifetime.” Natalia didn’t know German very well at the time.

What she knew was that sometimes things and people lived despite the world not wanting them—dianthus that managed to root in the gutter of their house; a dog crawling off to the side of the road after being hit by a car; a man searching through trash cans for food; a child who, despite not being yearned for, grew in her belly and brought with her a sense of surprise—and what Natalia knew was that people did what they had to, to get by, and that in the face of death there was so often a brute defiance, that most would give anything—absolutely anything—for a few more moments of life.