The Daughters: A Novel (20 page)

“The piano factory,” I said. “In Poland.”

“Oh, that’s right. The fucking piano
fabryka
.” My mother’s use of Polish in my presence was haphazard at best and expletive at worst. If it had been up to her, I’d only ever have learned the terms she used in public to mask my need for a toilet:
dupa
,
siusiu
. But she loved storytelling every bit as much as Baba Ada. She was compelled by it, telling with inventive precision even the tales she claimed to regret ever having known. “Where Greta the Great sold her soul.”

I looked at her uncertainly.

“To the devil?”

“Sure,” said Sara. “If that’s how you want to put it.”

M
y mother described Greta’s world to me in a way that felt familiar but askew. The orange foxes there did not whisper messages, and the boys—Andrzej, Fil, and Konrad—only went with their father into the woods to learn the basics of his trade. But there was still the feeling of something unseen lingering beneath the surface of everyday life, a coded danger. Perhaps there were dark messages written in the trees?
On one side of town was an area that Ada had never mentioned, with a synagogue. If I’d asked, Baba Ada would probably have said that those people were irrelevant to her because they didn’t come to church and hear her sing. Their children didn’t compete with her for solos in the choir. Sara had her own thoughts on the subject.

The buildings in town stood close together, like men lined up side by side so their shoulders hunched up slightly towards their ears. At ground level, slabs of window glass glinted before stacks of brightly colored cans, dress dummies swathed in wool, and posters extolling aperitifs and local pilsner. The skin of the world was composed of cobblestones and careful storefront displays, its spirit written in gossip and hunger. There was a broad plaza next to a railroad track. Naked rabbits hung upside-down in the window of the butcher’s shop, ruby red like lipstick.

On the village outskirts, where Greta and Saul lived, a person could get by on their wits—that is, their wits, a small farm, and a gun. For a house in town, however, or even a small flat above the shops, one had to be willing to give his time away for money. Some people owned the shops themselves and lived in slender buildings along with their bolts of cloth or tack and feed or even mortuary tools. There was also a fruit processing plant to which blue-suited workers walked each morning. One could recognize them from the sweet gummy stains on their clothing and from the way their wrists swelled up to the size of persimmons after ten-hour days fixing lids onto jars.

But the jewel of the town was the piano factory.

The
fabryka Łozina
sat on a hill above the streets and always had an aura of pitch about it: the place stank beautifully with the blood of trees. Men walked out after a long day’s work laughing, sometimes singing, with grit adhering to their shoes. They
picked sticky slivers off their shirts as they unrolled the cuffs and descended home into the warm light of the town.

Saul was a woodsman. He understood the weight, the grain, the flexibility of different types of wood with the instinctual ease most people use to differentiate wholesome milk from sour. By placing his palm on a tree trunk, he gauged its usefulness in building a home, carving the headboard for a bed, or amplifying keystrokes—housing hammers and wire. Łozina instruments were of the highest quality, meant to accompany symphony orchestras across Europe and teach young aristocrats the value of perfection. And although he was not officially employed by the factory—Saul liked to keep his own hours and his options open—Greta’s husband was sought after by the buyers there because he brought them the best lumber, simple as that.

W
as it the house of the devil? Was it full of fire and brimstone, I wanted to know?

“Don’t be so stupid,” my mother said. “Do you really believe everything that woman tells you?”

I frowned. “Don’t you?”

Sara brushed the question aside.

“Here’s what was inside the factory.” She waved a hand out past her head, nearly toppling her teacup and a jam jar full of makeup brushes. “A handsome man.”

“Saul?”

“No,” she said. “Not Saul. He couldn’t give Greta a daughter, remember? He didn’t have what she needed.”

This was something I’d always wondered about but had been afraid to ask Baba Ada. She was so fervent in her tales of Greta’s encounter with the devil in the forest that even my heart didn’t
dare question their reality. But I was curious anyway. I wanted to understand the stories from every angle, until I could close my eyes and sculpt them with my own hands.

“Why was that what Greta wanted? A girl?”

Sara closed her eyes and laughed at me. It always delighted her when I asked her a question she knew I’d never have asked my
babenka
, brought up a line of inquiry that ran contrary to Ada’s version of events. Then something occurred to her; her smile froze and retreated into a straight line.

“It’s very painful, to lose a child. A daughter. You’d do anything to get her back, get another chance with her.”

I smoothed the fringe of the rug beneath my fingers. Separated the strands into threes for new braiding. From where I was sitting, I could see the small of my mother’s back, the place where the satin of her kimono robe collapsed.

“How do you know?” This too was a question I would never ask Ada. “You don’t have any dead babies.”

She kept her eyes closed.

“No, but I have you,” she said. “Isn’t that enough?”

My mother, by nature a performer, shrugged something off when she fell into a story. Yes, she still had a tendency to brood and, yes, she was mercurial—I might easily be kicked out of her room for an offhand remark, no matter what we were doing. But her eyes grew bright. Like Baba Ada, she told it all as if she’d been there. And Greta especially intoxicated her, as wine would, or a puff of opium, or her tongue’s first taste of salt.

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.

M
aybe 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—”

“Gustaw!” the man cried. Really, he was no more than a boy; his relief was almost embarrassing. “Yes, Gustaw! That is, Mr.
Lindemann.” A frown spread over his face. “I’m afraid he’s gone, for the rest of the day.”

“Hmm, how like him.” Greta was really enjoying herself, despite a small twinge of pity for the boy in front of her. “Well, that’s no trouble. I’ll just look around myself. Unless”—she eyed the nervous youth and turned her mouth down into a mock sulk—“that’s against some sort of regulation? I promise I’ll be as quiet as a mouse.”

“No.” The boy deflated gently back into his socks. “Quite all right. As long as it’s no trouble to you.”