But it was Magdalena who got the worst of it, not because her number was highest, not because Barry’s family had even come from Lithuania, but because he had read in that book that the Lithuanians hadn’t just handed over the Jews, but in fact had done most of the killing themselves.
When he got worked up, even if it had nothing to do with her at all, he’d call her down and ask her how many Jews she knew. Not so many, Magdalena would say, knowing what was coming. How many synagogues were there in Vilnius? Maybe a few, Magdalena would say. “Nope, not maybe a few. Fucking two. How many were there in 1939?” He’d open the book with the sticky notes and point to a page. “Fifty. It was forty percent Jewish, how about that? And how many pits in the forest did it take, would you say? For all of them?”
“I don’t know,” Magdalena would say.
“But if you had to guess.”
“I really don’t know.”
Once, when she had just moved in and before she’d learned to keep quiet, Magdalena told Barry he’d better be careful of what he said, that a lot of people had died in Rhodesia too. She didn’t know what she was saying at the time, but Barry got very quiet after that, and he looked at Magdalena in a way she didn’t like at all. It said a lot more than that across his chin and his arms, and even though Magdalena didn’t understand exactly what it meant, she knew better than to get into it. From then on she let Barry say what he wanted.
“How many bullets did it take for the babies?” he’d ask.
“I don’t know.”
“Sure you do. Bullets aren’t cheap. Think about it.”
“I don’t know.”
“One? Two? For the little ones, the really tinys. Give up?”
“Yeah, I give up.”
“It’s a trick question.”
“I don’t know.”
“One half of one bullet. Guess how.”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t know much. Ask Granddaddy. Go on, use the phone. Call old Grandpop up long distance.” And Barry would say in Lithuanian in a singsong voice, “Make mama hold baby close. One half for mama, one half for—”
“Okay, it’s enough,” Magdalena would say, but Barry was just getting started.
“Did you ever go hunting for bones in the forest? You ever go off to take a piss in the forest and poke your cunny on a Jew bone sticking out of the ground?”
“No, I never did this.”
And it would go on like that until Barry got tired and said, “But cheer up kiddo. Nobody knew a thing about anything, did they?”
But the truth was, she did know some things about those places in the forest.
Sometimes after school Lina and Magdalena would take the bus to Lina’s grandmother’s house. Magdalena didn’t have any grandmothers, and knowing this, and because she was grateful to Magdalena’s mother for taking Lina to live with them, Lina’s grandmother let Magdalena call her Baba like Lina did, and she stitched both of them tiny dolls that she turned inside out to hide the seams.
Lina’s grandmother lived just outside the city in an old wooden house painted blue. She didn’t like to go out because she was Polish and she didn’t want people to hear her accent, so Lina and Magdalena did her shopping, going to the butcher’s and the vegetable market and the pharmacy all by themselves, almost too shy to say what they wanted and then running home with their bags of cabbages and bread and medicines as if they’d stolen them.
Lina always took care of the money, because she was older and it was her grandmother, but Magdalena held on to the list that Baba had written out for them in her old-fashioned handwriting with the spelling all wrong, because Magdalena was the better reader. And when they came home, poppy seed cakes would be warm on the oven and Baba would be stitching yarn onto the heads of the dolls, yellow for Lina and brown for Magdalena.
Baba’s skin hung like tissue paper over her bones, and if it hadn’t been for her white gold hair anchoring it to her skull it would have slipped off a long time ago. There were hollows under her ears and in her collarbones and her hair was so thin she could hold it all in a child’s barrette. From time to time Baba patted her hair and brushed the fine bits back behind her ears in a way that showed that Baba had once been so beautiful that Lina’s grandfather had taken a great risk during the war and married her, to save her from being sent away.
But Baba’s hands were like the hands of another person. The older and tinier Baba got, the bigger her hands became. They looked to Magdalena like pieces of driftwood that had been soaked and rounded and sanded and smoothed by the sea for hundreds of years.
Baba had been a seamstress, and though her hands looked like blocks of wood they could do anything. If Lina or Magdalena had brought a bit of shiny cloth or a piece of lace with them, Baba would turn it into a dress or a long winter coat for their dolls, with cuffs that turned up on the ends of the sleeves and bits of thread knotted to look like buttons.
Magdalena liked to watch Lina’s grandmother work, because when she used the old sewing machine she pushed up her sleeves and Magdalena would get to see the paintings on her skin. Baba had letters on her face and hands and in the gap between her stockings and her skirt like other people, but on her arms the words were written in another kind of alphabet, with letters that looked like tiny paintings, each one shaped almost like so many things but not exactly like anything, and Magdalena would lean in close, pretending she was watching Baba as she finished off a tiny hem, trying to understand what they said.
Baba’s skin was so thin and she was so covered in writing that from far away she looked blue. Most of the words on her face and neck must have been Polish because they were much harder to stack one sound on top of another than the words they learned in school, or the words on Magdalena’s teacher’s face or Lina’s or anyone else’s. Sometimes Baba would catch Magdalena looking at her, trying to make sense of the line of letters that started at her ear and ran all the way down to the collar of her dress.
“Don’t move your lips like this,” Baba would say, and Magdalena would try as hard as she could to keep all the sounds in her head without saying anything. But she always lost the first part by the time she got to the end, and without meaning to she’d be back to shaping the letters with her lips. “Stop this,” Baba would say again, more sharply. “Someone will see.”