Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Diana
April 1992
D iana was nine years old when she was taken. The last she remembered of her childhood home in Poland were the tulips her mother had planted at the edge of the yard, bright reds and yellows and pinks, the sound of the piano sprinkling in through the open window, and the call of her name, Diana! Diana! The next thing she knew, she was in the back seat of a long gray van, sobbing as her childhood town swept past in grays and browns. Her father was in the front seat. She hadn’t seen him in a few months—not since he’d left her mother and Diana and “moved somewhere else,” somewhere that her mother hadn’t been willing to name. He looked exhausted and angry. There were dark circles beneath his eyes, and he was wearing thick black gloves. Beside him was a blond woman Diana had never seen before. They were arguing about something, but Diana couldn’t understand what it was all about. Diana was crying too hard and asking for her mother.
They drove many hours from Diana’s childhood home until Diana could hear the roar of airplanes. They parked and got out of the van. Diana had never seen the airport before, but it looked grand and domineering. Her father took her hand with his black glove and said, “Come on,” and marched her to the front of the airport. The blond woman was crying and trying to keep up, and Diana’s feet ached. She needed new shoes badly.
“Where are we going, Daddy?” Diana asked her father over and over again, but her father told her to stop whining and that he’d buy her a treat if she shut her mouth.
But Diana wasn’t so easily calmed down. “Where have you been, Daddy? Mom’s been so sad.”
Diana was too young to really understand what had just happened historically. The Berlin Wall had fallen, and the USSR was crumbling, and everything that once had been no longer was. It meant that for the first time in decades, people from Poland could move anywhere they wanted to. It meant that her father wanted to take a chance elsewhere.
Diana wouldn’t understand until much later that her father thought he was doing a good thing for her. He thought he was parenting in a way Diana’s mother never could. He’d always wanted to move to the United States. He’d seen it as a place of money and warmth and future thinking. He’d seen it as a place where all his dreams—and Diana’s—could come true. Diana’s mother couldn’t leave Poland. Her career was here. Her life and her family were here. Her mother would never have agreed to let Diana go, so her father made the decision for all of them. “Kidnapping” wasn’t a term that ever would have been used back then, not when it involved a father in Poland.
The east was a mess as it was. A nine-year-old girl on a plane to America didn’t matter much to anyone.
Suddenly, Diana was on an airplane for the first time in her life. They flew from Warsaw to London to New York City, where they met up with her uncle Bartek and stayed with him for the first three weeks. After that, her father got them a different apartment, a quasi-rat’s nest that was freezing cold no matter the season. Diana ached with sorrow. Everything about the city felt cruel and strange to her. The skyscrapers were enormous. The smells were exotic and filled with garbage and made her eyes weep. Everyone spoke a language she didn’t know—English—and when she spoke Polish back to them, they laughed at her. The worst of it was that her father didn’t like New York City, either. Six months in, his girlfriend left him for another man, calling Diana’s father “weak,” and Diana’s father promptly lost his job because he started drinking too much.
Not long after they’d arrived, Diana’s father enrolled Diana at a local school, and Diana went and sat quietly in the corner, unable to understand anything. Two other Polish girls there spoke to her sometimes, but they didn’t like to spend too much time with her in case her “bad luck” rubbed off on them.
Diana felt like a lost little kid. She turned ten and felt like she was three years old.
She dreamed of her mother coming to New York City to find her. But how would she ever figure out where they were staying? Diana saw posters across the city that advertised lost dogs and cats. Sometimes she saw “Missing” posters for children or young women. Could she put her face on a poster so that when her mother arrived, she could call the number attached? But Diana didn’t have a way to take photographs of herself, and her father forgot to pay the phone bill for too long, which meant their line was cut off.
Since Diana was four years old, she’d practiced the piano every single day of her life—sometimes for up to four or five hours a day. She was good and had talent. Everyone said so. But she wasn’t as good as her mother, Barbara, and never would be. Barbara was a professional pianist. Barbara had been a professional since the age of eighteen. She’d sold out countless concert halls and played with the USSR Symphony Orchestra based in Moscow. Diana had seen photographs of her mother dressed in iconic clothing, fingers flowing seamlessly over the keys, her eyes closed, as hundreds of people watched her, rapt. In those photographs, it was hard for Diana to remember that that gorgeous creature was the same woman who’d tucked her in and read her bedtime stories and made her pierogis on Sunday nights.
When Diana’s father got drunk, he liked to say that Barbara had left him first rather than the other way around. “She was married to that piano. She wasn’t married to me. She didn’t care about you either, Diana, so don’t kid yourself.” Diana knew better than to argue with her father. But late at night, she couldn’t sleep, and she pretended that her mother was in the next room, playing Rachmaninoff. Tears crept down her cheeks.
Of course, now that Diana was in New York City, she couldn’t play the piano any longer. Her father didn’t want her to have anything to do with it, either. “You saw what it did to your mother, to our family. It ruined us.” Diana struggled to comprehend. She also struggled to fill the extra hours of her day—hours that she’d previously spent practicing the piano.
When Diana turned twelve, her father got a job in Detroit and moved them away. By then, Diana had gotten used to New York City and ached to leave a place she understood so well. But rather than live in the city, her father had found them a house in a beautiful suburban city with a backyard and neighbors, many of whom were Polish immigrants. Diana’s father worked in a plant downtown, leaving every morning at six and returning every night at eight. It meant that Diana more or less had to fend for herself—at least until the neighborhood Polish ladies discovered her and demanded she come over for dinner many nights a week. It was in these women’s kitchens that Diana learned to cook. Eating Polish food, speaking Polish, and falling asleep listening to Polish music felt wonderful.
Six months after they moved to Michigan, one of the neighborhood women learned that Diana’s mother was Barbara Nowak. She shrieked so loudly that she dropped the spatula. Diana watched it rattle across the floor.
“She looks like her!” the neighbor lady cried in Polish. “Why didn’t we see it before?”
“Does your mother know you’re here?” another neighbor asked.
Diana shrugged.
The neighbors didn’t know what else to say. Diana left them to gossip about Barbara Nowak—about the woman who felt lost in another dream.
At this point, Diana hadn’t spoken about her mother in years. When she was able to, Diana let everyone believe that her mother was dead. It was still hard for her to fathom the fact that her mother hadn’t come to find her. Where was she? What was she up to? Was her father right—that she’d married the piano and, therefore, abandoned them?
Diana had long since given up being angry with her father for ripping her out of Poland and bringing her to the United States. She’d been here three years, and three years felt like a million to a kid like her. And besides, her father had a job. He provided for her and enrolled her in school and let her have a little spending money, sometimes. He was too exhausted looking to be angry with him. He always looked on the edge of death.
When one of the neighbor ladies got a piano and invited Diana to come play, Diana was nearly too frightened to go. She waited for three weeks before she got up the nerve and walked down the road. The neighbor lady—a Polish woman who had listened to many records of Diana’s mother—bustled in from the kitchen with a plate of Polish desserts and said in Polish, “You take all the time you need.”
In English, Diana answered, “I’m sure I’ve forgotten everything.”
The neighbor lady blinked at her. A strange look passed over her face. Diana knew the neighbor ladies didn’t like it when she spoke English to them. They preferred to maintain the culture they’d run away from as best as they could, and they saw Diana as someone they could mold in the style of a Polish child despite being so far away. But Diana had to go to school with American children five days a week. It was 1995. She was entrenched in American society.
Diana sat down at the piano and stared at the keys. Memories flashed through her: her mother positioning Diana’s hands on the piano, her mother instructing her to curve her fingers, and her mother banging on the wall to keep Diana’s hands in time. When Diana had left Poland, she’d been on the verge of entering a competition for little girls, and she’d had three pieces memorized for the occasion. Once, her mother mentioned the prestigious music universities around the world, and now that the East had fallen, Diana would have her pick of wherever she wanted to go. “Piano will be your passport,” Barbara had said.
But now, Diana found that her fingers were not the same ones she’d had three years ago. She’d grown and felt clunky and strange on the keys. Terribly, she found that she no longer remembered the pieces she’d worked on so diligently—for hours and hours every day. She had no wherewithal on the piano anymore. It was so frustrating and so strange and such proof of the passage of time that Diana promptly burst into tears and ran out of the neighbor’s house. She knew that the neighbor had wanted Diana to be a prodigy like Barbara was. But Diana was different now. She wasn’t Polish. She wasn’t American. She wasn’t a musician. Who was she?