Adrienne Celt - The Daughters

The answer is: both, both. Somehow I am the survivor of both deaths, if I believe all that nonsense that my grandmother told me. If I stand up and do the only thing I’ve ever known how to love completely. If I stand, and sing my appeal.

Last night when I was dreaming, I sat beside Greta on a knoll in Poland and we shared a cigarette. A luxury for both: Greta chewed tobacco because the papers were expensive, and the absolute proscription on smoke coming anywhere near my throat has long been a contentious part of my existence. Sara once threw an ashtray at the wall when Ada asked her to take her filthy habit out to the fire escape on a cold day.

In the dream I liked the smell. It was more like pipe tobacco, sweet. Greta squinted and pinched the small rolled thing between her fingers, exhaling into the distance. She blew perfect smoke rings of outlandish size: as they emerged from her lips they were minuscule, but the farther they drifted away the larger they got, until several were resting on the treetops in the forest below us.

“What happened to you?” I finally asked. We might have been sitting there for an hour, ten minutes, several weeks. I was in no hurry, but it was a question I’d always wanted to know the answer to.

Greta’s chin lay on her hand, and with the fingers of the other she passed me our cigarette. I inhaled with gusto, feeling the curls of smoke caress my throat, the mass of black breath coil and undulate within me.

“There was a war on,” she said at last.

“Yes, but you were you.” Greta was the size of a mountain, safe as houses. “At least,” I said apologetically, uncertain how much I’d spoken aloud, “that was always my impression.”

She stretched, and then looked at me. We both fell backward onto the grass, and I coughed a little puff of smoke out when my lungs felt the impact. From the ground, Greta reached out one hand and placed it on top of my head. Her palm moved back and forth across my hair, probably causing knots and tangles.

“Little girl, I ran and ran across the fields,” Greta said, still stroking my hair. “I had a gun in each hand and I shot anything that moved. They were all bad ones. But that wasn’t my concern. I wanted to get to my boys and feel their foreheads one last time. Fil had such a funny shape in his, a line right down the middle. Andrzej’s was enormous, and Konrad’s was so smooth. He never got,” she gestured at her cheeks, “any spots. He was just a perfect child, except not what I wanted. It was hard to forgive him that.”

I took a deep drag off the cigarette and moved it up to Greta’s waiting fingers.

“Sometimes,” she said, “it took my breath away.”

“What?”

She exhaled through her front teeth. “The sheer cheek. The total lack of respect for what I had. For my husband, for my beautiful sons. And it wasn’t just my sons, no, I wasn’t content to give just them up. I gave up every son in every township. Every daughter I could have imagined a life for. What did I think the devil would want? Everything,” she said, stubbing the cigarette out in the grass. “From everyone.”

“Even me?” I asked, though I knew the answer. She moved the cigarette around in the dirt — I could hear the shuffling — and brushed my hair again.

“Of course.”

I was silent. Wind whipped through the trees below us and dissipated Greta’s smoke rings. Pine crests tilted and croaked under the strain, but where we were the blustering had no effect at all.

Finally I said, “That doesn’t answer my question. Where did you go? Where are you?”

Greta sat up, and for a moment she looked so much, so achingly much like Ada that I cried out. But when she turned back to me, the likeness faded.

“You want to know where my grave is?” Greta asked. “The order in which we died? Whether we tried to save each other or sent people out to be slaughtered? I’m telling you, it doesn’t matter.” Her eyes looked for something on the horizon, something they couldn’t seem to find. “Gone is gone.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “If you can’t show me your grave, how can I know you really died?”

But Greta just shrugged.

“For all you know,” she said, “I never even existed.”

I walk towards the front of the church as if in a trance. On the way I pass John and I gently peel my daughter from his chest and lift her up into the air. Her arms and legs dangle down towards me, and one leg gives a kick. A jig.

With only a bit of difficulty, owing to the fact that I can’t use my hands for help, I climb up onto the podium beside the violinist and Rick. Rick winks at me.

“Nice to see you,” he says. “Been wondering when I would.”

“Hush,” I say. And then, indicating the violinist with my chin, “Who put you up to this? It was just supposed to be the choir.”

He smiles at me. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

The three of us — four of us — form a semicircle. I shiver again, with nerves.

“I’m not warmed up, you know,” I say. “I’m not ready.”

“That’s okay.” Rick cracks his knuckles and runs a few fingers over the keys. “We’ve got some time.”

And so I listen to them run scales, first the basics at an even tempo, and then Rick adds in a little verve. Takes things into minor, adds trills. Generally tries to entice me into joining. This is always our game, but I’m not sure I can play. Already my pulse is quick. There are knots in my stomach, and I can’t tell which are tying and which untying. I am, I realize, terribly unprepared for this.

Instead of the sensations in my own body, I concentrate on Kara’s slack weight, and on what I see in front of me. John sits in the first row, watching me back, and a few rows behind him I see my mother. No longer in the rear of the church, she seems to have moved closer when I wasn’t looking. My chest pinches whenever she catches my eye, and still I am silent. Waiting until the last minute to decide. The violinist shoots me a very sideways look.

At last the priest shows up next to me, nearly tripping on his own vestments. There are two altar boys lighting candles around the room, and I breathe deeply the fat-rich scent of melting wax.

I keep my voice steady.

“Is it time to begin, Father?” I ask. I want someone to tell me what to do.

He blinks at me. “It’s your party.”

“All right,” I say. I fill my lungs and empty them. Bellows in and out, breathing over a fire. Then I give Kara a kiss on the cheek and hand her to the priest. I almost can’t; it’s like handing over a bit of my body. But I do.

I nod at Rick.

And I sing:

Ave Maria! maiden mild!

Listen to a maiden’s prayer!

Thou canst hear though from the wild;

Thou canst save amid despair.

I feel a prickling behind my eyes, in my ears. The way blood builds up before you faint, when your head gets too heavy. I look at the door and for an instant I see Ada walking through it, and think, No, you’re not supposed to be here. But I blink, and it’s no one. Just a gray shadow come and gone with a trick of the light.

Safe may we sleep beneath thy care,

Though banish’d, outcast and reviled—

Maiden! hear a maiden’s prayer;

Mother, hear a suppliant child!

The room is silent, listening. My tongue is an icicle, melting in spring. My throat is a river, rushing. My body is breaking. My breath is quick. Quick. Quick.

Kara’s eyes are large white discs, shot through with blue. The pinpoints of her pupils focusing, watching my lips with hungry attention.

There is a merciful moment where I’m able to feel surprised, just before I lose consciousness.

The silence that follows a performance is a different silence entirely from the one that precedes it. Both are full — one with anticipation, the other with echoes, as if the silence itself were a vibrating bell.