One day when they went to visit Lina’s grandmother, Ruta was there. Baba stood in front of the door and said to them, “Please, you must not come in today,” but they could see Ruta behind her wrapped in a blanket. Ruta started calling for Lina, and Lina ducked under her grandmother’s arms. But Ruta was sick and her hands weren’t steady. Baba tried to get Ruta to sit down, but she didn’t want to. Ruta ripped Baba’s dress at the shoulder and Magdalena saw that all across Baba’s body there were words, some of them in the language of paintings, written over and across each other as if they were meant for a person with twice as much skin. Ruta’s face had changed, there was something slack in her mouth and as soon as Lina saw it she pulled away. Ruta tried to make Lina come back to her, but Lina didn’t want to. There were two red points at the tops of Ruta’s cheeks. When Baba tried again to make her sit down, Ruta slapped her. Suddenly Lina was crying, and it was as if her crying had no beginning, she started right in the middle with big sobs. Ruta yelled at her to stop it, but Lina only cried louder. It was a screaming, hysterical cry like Magdalena had never heard, and Ruta put her hands over her ears and ran toward the door. She stumbled and got up again, only taking her hands off her ears to take Baba’s purse off of the hook by the door, and then she left.
As soon as Ruta was gone Lina stopped screaming. She stood for a moment, then she ran after her mother. Baba called to her, but Lina was already halfway down the street, running after Ruta who was just then disappearing around the corner with Baba’s purse dangling from its broken strap.
Baba started down the steps after them, but she nearly lost her balance, and it was only Magdalena being there that kept her from falling. Baba wanted to stay right there on the steps, but Magdalena led her back inside to the sofa. Baba’s big hands were tented over her face as if she were reading them, and she sat there shaking her head slowly, not saying anything.
So Magdalena did what she thought her mother would have done. She shut the door. She pulled the torn sleeve back over Baba’s shoulder as best she could. She patted Baba’s hair and brought a wet rag from the kitchen for the place on her cheek where Ruta had hit her. Then, because she didn’t know what else to do, she started singing to Baba as if she were a little child, and by the time she ran out of words to the songs she knew it was getting dark. Baba was still looking at the palms of her hands, and so in the last light Magdalena read to her what was written there, spreading Baba’s hand on top of her own and tracing the letters like a gypsy telling the future, except that when she put the sounds together, what came out was all in the past, and she sang it to Baba like the continuation of a lullaby.
In the forest past the station Paneriai they stop the train. First Lidya Kamiemiecki, Jakob and Jacha Gornowski, Solomon Marmorsztejn and his mother Gita, Lejba Byk and Ester Kowarska. Malka who never waited. Smuel, Boris and Ilja. Varvaza brought the children with her. Anna Litvinova and the baby Misha. Irina Kac and the man on the train. Josef Lewin’s fiancée Rivka. Mira and Luba Erlich. Jakub, Mama and Anucia at once. Professor Ginzbergas who wore his shirts one for each day. Chana Bir, then Mr. Izakov, the man who sells buttons . . .
“Where is Anucia?” Baba asked, and Magdalena showed her. “And Misha?” There on her thumb. “Jakub and my mother?” There and there.
Then Baba said, “You have to pretend you don’t see such things. If you tell like this again they will take me away.”
Right before Baba died she lost her caution and asked Ruta to bury her in the old Jewish cemetery, where the gravestones were covered with the same kinds of letters that Baba was. Ruta didn’t have the heart to tell her that the cemetery had been dug up years ago when the Russians built the Sports Palace. Magdalena didn’t know about any of it at the time, because Lina and Ruta had moved away to Kaunas and it was while they were living there that Baba died. It was only when they came back to Vilnius that Magdalena heard, and only then because Ruta came to their door drunk one night and told Magdalena’s mother everything, how Baba’s whole family had been killed in a pit in the forest, and how Baba would have been killed too if it hadn’t been for an old man, a sage of the community who had always frightened the children by reading from books that weren’t there. He looked to where Baba stood with the others beside the train tracks and told her she would run, and she did. She ran through the forest until she was found by Ruta’s father, who it seemed very likely had been doing some of the killing. He was a peasant man who lived nearby and he saved her because of her beautiful blonde hair. He hid her for a time in his chicken coop and then when the war was nearly over he married her.
Magdalena’s mother had been the one to tell Ruta the night that Lina died. “If I had known,” Ruta kept saying over and over on the phone, never finishing the sentence. Magdalena’s mother didn’t understand what she meant, but Magdalena did. How could Lina’s mother have looked at her daughter each day, fed her and taken her to school and sometimes slapped her and left for days without saying why, bought her dresses and held her hand across streets, if she had known that Lina would be gone at twenty-one?
With Dov Kitrosser it was the same. He’d pressed his wet face into Magdalena’s shoulder and said, “I never would have left her alone if I had known.” And when the policewoman called to explain the results of the inquest, she’d said, “We believe Ms. Valentukait? ingested the seeds without knowing their toxicity.”
But Magdalena had known. If she’d locked Lina in the bathroom the moment she shaved away the last bits of her hair and saw the words cause of death underneath, if she’d made up some lie to keep her there long enough to look up ingesting and acute, to make sure respiratory failure meant what she thought it did and then—with Lina probably threatening to pour her lotions down the drain if Magdalena didn’t unlock the door—if she’d flipped back to the A’s in her high school English dictionary and seen that apricots were a fruit and that was Dov’s specialty—well, everything might have been different. Lina and Dov might at that moment be together sampling a shipment of pineapples grown without any skins. Or things with Dov might have ended as they usually did and Lina would be back in their flat in London, sitting in front of the open fridge, cooling her feet in the vegetable bin.