The Daughters: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

herself often, looking for just the right word. Drifted between English and Polish so that from her mouth I heard them both as the same language.
    “A large room. A hall. A loft.”
    Her tongue tripped from the l of loft to the f in a broad arc, as though saying lolly or lopped, halfway to loop. I was thirsty, but I didn’t want to ask for water. If Ada got up, she’d fuss around about something. Find that all the glasses in the kitchen were dirty and tie an apron on with a sigh. Or she’d come back with the water but lose the thread of the story and maddeningly embark on something different. The spit in my mouth was heavy and thick, and every time I swallowed I felt my throat getting drier. But I wrapped myself around Ada’s arm and leaned my weight into her. Listening.
    She stroked my hair, and then she truly began.
    “Someone had swept the wooden floor so it was as clean as it would ever be. The window was tall, kolosalne , prodigious. Let us look at it. The harvest moon glinting through the glass. Snips of wire lit up around the room by the moon’s beams. Like fireflies.
    “Then what do we see? The doors open up and in rush the young people, stamping their feet in excitement. Hitting each other with an elbow, a knee, in their hurry. Young people are always in a hurry, you see, and sometimes it gets them where they’re going faster than they ought to go.”
    Ada smoothed her skirt.
    “But our young people didn’t know that. They rushed from place to place and looked around. The boys huddled over a table of apples and bread, adjusting their ties, while the girls swarmed and dispersed with—well. They were light on their feet and they chattered. They followed the same logic as birds.
    “By chance the bird girls were all wearing blue dresses, and each of the dresses was brand new.”
    In my mind, these antic girls were clear, tugging at one another’s hems and judging the geometry of waistlines, the pristine nature of pressed fabric. Any piece of dirt or dust was carefully picked away by fingernails, which were themselves buffed and polished to a diamond gleam. I could hear the matching dresses flutter.
    “Then,” said Ada, “came the music. There weren’t cassette tapes then, and no radio. So if you heard any music at all it was either an accident—walking by a lucky window—or the music was being played just for you. For your pleasure. In the fabryka there was a little bandstand, a stage, with a piano and a fiddle and a clarinet. The players looked into each other’s eyes to make sure they started playing at the exact same time. In the space of one heartbeat.
    “The sound got under everyone’s skin, so the young people were terribly overexcited. A girl and boy cracked their heads together reaching for the same slice of apple, and the whole room burst out laughing. They didn’t know what to do with themselves.”
    Ada unpeeled me from her arm and laid me back onto my pillow. Twitching her mouth into a secretive pout, she leaned an elbow on her knee, her chin on her palm.
    “You’ll probably want to know, why were they so . . . provoked? Why was every heart beating so fast? The whole room was full of energy. The whole factory was. Up in the ceiling beams, there was a colony of little gray birds, little starlings, and when the musicians played they swept around the roof, going crazy. They beat their wings all at the same time, and the young people could feel the wind those birds stirred up.
    “ Shoosh ,” she said, sweeping her hand through the air and then smacking it against the other one. “ Boom .
    “And why? Why? No one knew. They just felt their breath coming fast and short. And they decided they should fly like the birds—or at least they should do the next best thing. The boys bowed”—Ada tilted her chin—“and the girls curtsied”—she flicked her chin back up. “And they all flooded out onto the dance floor. Like petals,” she said. “Like petals in a rainstorm.
    “As the boys