Chapter 1/Episode 9: A Name Nobody Will Say

She Brings The Photograph To Her Mother And Gets A Door Slammed

The name was on a slip of paper folded into quarters and tucked beneath the photograph, so soft with handling it had gone furry at the creases. Lila unfolded it under the work light with the care she would have given a document four hundred years old.

It was a single line in pencil, in the same young careful hand as the word on the back of the photograph, and this time, blessedly, she could read it.

Mikołaj. 1948.

Below it, smaller, as if added later by an older hand pressing harder, were three words in English that her grandmother must have taught herself to write at some point in the long years between then and now, the way a person learns to say a thing in the new language because the old language hurts too much to hold it.

My son. Forgive me.

Lila sat on the floor of the empty house for a long time with the slip of paper in one hand and the photograph in the other and the rain finally easing off the windows. Mikołaj. A son. Her grandmother had had a son named Mikołaj in 1948, in the camp, before Henryk, before Rose, before any of it, and the child had worn the gown that lay across her knees, and somewhere her grandmother had written forgive me and folded it small and hidden it behind a wall and knelt in front of it for seventy years.

She photographed everything, finally, on the bare floor, the way her training told her to, the gown and the cap and the photograph and the slip, lining them up in the work light and shooting each one square. It steadied her hands. It did not steady anything else.

Then she put the photograph and the slip in a clean folder and drove into town to her mother’s house.

Rose was at the kitchen table with the local circular and a cup of her own coffee, and the kitchen was very warm and very clean and smelled of the cabbage she had on for supper, and on the counter a small radio was playing the kind of station that played polkas on Sunday afternoons and stayed on it the rest of the week out of habit. Rose looked up when Lila came in without knocking, and something in her daughter’s face made her set the cup down.

“What,” Rose said. “What is it. Is it your grandmother.”

“No. Babcia’s fine.” Lila pulled out a chair across from her mother and sat. She opened the folder and laid the photograph on the clean tablecloth between them, square in the light, and turned it so it faced her mother. “I need you to tell me who this is.”

Rose looked at it. Lila watched her mother’s face the way she had watched Joseph Mazur’s, looking for the small involuntary thing, the hands going still, the second floor under the voice.

It did not come. That was the thing that would keep Lila up that night. What came instead was confusion, plain and ordinary confusion, a woman frowning at a strange old photograph she had been handed without warning.

“Where did you get this,” Rose said.

“In the house. Who’s the baby, Mom?”

“That’s Mother. That coat, that’s, that has to be over there, before she came.” Rose drew the photograph closer with one finger, and she studied the young proud frightened face, and then her eyes went to the bundle in the girl’s arms and stopped there, and her frown deepened. “Whose baby is she holding? One of the other families’, I suppose. There were a lot of them in that camp, she always said, everybody minded everybody’s children.” She looked up. “Why? What is this about?”

“Mom.” Lila kept her voice very gentle, because she understood now that she was about to take something from her mother and she wanted to do it kindly. “There was a name with it. And a note.” She laid the slip on the table beside the photograph. “It’s Babcia’s writing. The baby’s name was Mikołaj. And under it she wrote my son. Forgive me.”

The kitchen was quiet except for the polka and the soft knock of the cabbage pot lid. Rose read the slip. She read it again. And Lila watched the meaning of it arrive in her mother, watched it land and fail to find any place to fit, because there was no place in Rose for it, no shelf, no story, no half-remembered hint, nothing. Her mother had not known. Rose had lived sixty-eight years as Stefania’s only child and had never once suspected she had not been the first.

“This is a mistake,” Rose said. Her voice had gone flat, the door swinging shut, but Lila could hear now that it was not the practiced flatness of a woman hiding something. It was the flatness of a woman holding herself together over a sudden drop. “She didn’t have a, there was no baby before me. She would have. Somebody would have. My father would have known, the parish, somebody.” She pushed the slip back across the table at Lila as if returning a thing that did not belong to her. “There was no baby, Lila. I don’t know what you found or what you think it means, but my mother did not lose a child before me and keep it from her own family for seventy years, that is not, people don’t, she would have told me.”

She stood up so fast the chair scraped. She went to the stove and lifted the cabbage lid that did not need lifting and stood with her back to her daughter and the steam on her face, and her shoulders were rigid, and when she spoke again her voice was almost steady.

“Take that out of my kitchen,” Rose said quietly. “Whatever it is. I don’t want it in my house. And don’t you dare, do you hear me, don’t you dare show that to her. She’s ninety-six. Leave her something.”

And Rose walked out of her own kitchen, down the hall, and Lila heard a bedroom door close, softly, the way her mother closed everything, and she was left alone at the clean warm table with the polka playing and the cabbage steaming and the photograph of the child nobody would name lying face up in the light.