Swans Are Fat Too (4 page)

"If you have a problem, you fix it." Kalina answered in a high, false voice, obviously quoting. Hania recognized Ania's insouciant optimism. "You paint over it and start anew. Every day is a fresh canvas." And then in her own dull voice, "Leave me alone, Maks, you told me you'd take care of it." 

And after that she lay on the sofa in front of the television, claiming she felt ill and answering questions only in growls.

"I will take care of her," muttered Maks, folding his arms and narrowing his eyes. Not the knife though. He had a different idea to try first.

Hania realized she couldn't leave the apartment without taking Maks, and as he made it clear he wanted nothing to do with her, she was stuck there. The apartment grew hot as the day passed. She decided to do some housework. On the one hand it wasn't her job, on the other she was living there and it needed to be done. She would start with the laundry, she decided. The bathroom was heaped with dirty clothes. She did a triage, sorted out what she assumed were Maks's things and began a wash. Then she retreated to her grandmother's piano room and started on a bag of cookies as she flipped over the music. By the time she'd finished the second bag, the laundry was done, she'd dusted the tops of the music sheets, cleaned up the dirty dishes, and it was time to make lunch. She put some effort into it, since she knew the children hadn't had breakfast, but by the time she'd finished and called her cousins to eat, Kalina had disappeared––had left the apartment without saying a word––and Maks said he hated
pierogis
, he never touched
pierogis
, he was sure she was trying to poison him, and she should order a pizza or he'd starve, and it would be
all
her
fault
. 

She sat down and ate lunch herself, her own portion and Kalina's as well, and then went back to the piano room and subsided onto the Bösendorfer's bench. The day would pass somehow, she told herself. Bad moments always passed, and she'd been through far worse than this. She placed the potato-chip bag within reach and turned automatically to the keyboard, hands hovering over the keys, hearing the music already in her mind. And stopped. She looked down at her round hands––agile hands, strong hands, but padded. She put them down in her lap. Babcia had not looked like this until later, much later…after various triumphs. She looked around the room; the walls were full of photographs. There was her grandfather, a small man in a small photo, who had given up the race early, overwhelmed, no doubt, by the size of his wife's personality. The other photos were larger: Babcia playing at the Met, Babcia with conductors Karl Bohm and Ernest Ansermet, Eugene Ormandy, and Bruno Walter. A handsome woman wearing an evening dress and all her charisma. She, Hania, had no charisma, and for a year now every time she tried to play she heard her teacher's voice telling her so. She gave herself a little shake.

One got on as well as one could in the world anyway. She took a potato chip and began to play scales. She could make scales sound like music, but now she didn't want to. Like this they were just mechanical, not music at all, just physical exercise and relaxation.

From the apartment below an anguished howl arose. "Noooooo!
Pani
Natalia's come back!" 

And there was the sound of windows being slammed shut.

Konstanty, coming up the stairs in the evening, heard the sound of scales being played. That was what he'd almost remembered this morning, he thought with sudden enlightenment: his mother, leaning toward a folded newspaper as she drank tea from a thin blue cup in their London apartment. "Kostku," she was saying, "do you remember Natalia's granddaughter, Hania? Oh, no, I don't suppose you would, Norbert and Elka moved to America when she was still quite small, a year or two before we left for France. It says in the
Tribune
that she's just won an international piano competition." She waved the paper at him. "It says the judges were 'very impressed' but she wasn't a 'crowd pleaser' so there's some dispute about the award. The sponsors aren't happy." That had been, what, three-four years ago now? A concert pianist––well.

He went on up to his apartment, crossed the spacious room containing his desk and opened a window. Below, almost within touching distance, the crowns of lime trees obscured the sidewalk and a part of the street. Beyond was a row of Secession-style buildings and beyond that, early summer Warsaw, green and gray and sandstone beige in the afternoon sun, a horizon marked by church crosses and small towers, elements of past centuries and, further out, the harsh, raw, upstruck fists of the high rises. He brought his gaze back to the more mellow foreground. He was very fond of the city. The scent of lime blossom enveloped him. From the apartment beneath came perfect, fluid flights and cascades of notes, repeating, repeating. He listened for a time, wishing she would play something. Some strong but indefinable emotion came on tiptoe. He greeted it gravely, and with only a little of his customary irony. Was it happiness, longing, nostalgia, or a little of all those? But nostalgia for what? For that moment as a youth when he had met a small girl in the kitchen and they had shared a few seconds of complicity, of understanding? Was that really the closest he had ever got to another human being? He paused before this idea, almost shy of staring at it with too intent a gaze. Here he was, a respected professional, with an exalted background, from a happy family; how could there be anything missing that only that one brief episode had supplied? What utter nonsense, he thought, closing the window in spite of the lift of his heart, and turning away––as people so often turn away just on the edge of discovery, corralled within the limits of convention or their own expectations.

He got out, as usual, his history project. Sometimes, though, he found himself thinking, quite impersonally now, of the girl downstairs. The thought would recur: the girl was a concert pianist. He appreciated the discipline, the dedication necessary to get anywhere near that good. It must be rather like going to medical school from early childhood, he thought. That kind of hard work. Still, presumably she liked her profession––not like himself, he almost caught himself thinking. A pleasant-spoken girl, he considered, but how could anyone let themselves get into that shape? The poor thing was nearly round. Very bad for the heart, too.

'…
they carry cytars since they are not accustomed to clothe themselves in armor, they are unacquainted with iron and this allows them to live in peace; without dissensions, playing on lyres…and for people who have never heard of war a sterner type of music is obviously unnecessary
'––
so wrote the Byzantine historian Theofylaktos Simokattes about the Slavs in the 7
^th
century.

Unfortunately, one doesn't know of which Slavs he was writing. Slavonic tribes had arrived in the territory of today's Poland in the 6
^th
century. The people they must have met were certainly not unacquainted with iron, as it was being produced…
He paused in his laborious typing.

…in the vicinity of Warsaw and the Holy Cross Mountains from the 1
^st
century B.C. to the 4
^th
century A.D., in thousands of ovens, on a scale unequalled elsewhere in Europe, which could be called the mass production of weapons.

That sentence didn't seem right. Presumably, though, the girl's career hadn't taken off or she wouldn't be considering teaching, or even worse, translating. Did she know how to write, he wondered? That was something else he remembered hearing over the years––that she was very clever, good at school. (He could almost hear
Pani
Natalia telling his mother, in that curious tone in which pride mingled with surprise, that Hania was doing well.
Pani
Natalia, he remembered his mother saying, always expected the worst from her descendents.) The girl had said, that morning in the grocery, that some of the English she'd seen in Poland on previous visits was rather funny, like "beaten-up cream" on a menu, or "officers to rent" on a building. He wouldn't make mistakes like that, but he knew how quickly even small errors detracted from a text. Well, perhaps he'd have a job for her. Or was it too trivial a thing to offer?

It was some half hour after dark, when Kalina still hadn't come back, that Hania became fully aware that she had no way of contacting Wiktor and Ania, that she didn't even know where they were, and she didn't know when was an appropriate time to get really worried, call the police, etc.

"Maks," she tried, "is it usual for Kalina to stay out this late?"

"I don't have to answer your questions." He was watching television and he didn't turn his head in her direction.

She stepped in front of the set, blocking his view very effectively. "Is it usual for Kalina to stay out at this hour?"

A sound like a tea kettle boiling over. Then, "Yes."

She moved away from the television, breathing a sigh of relief. If it was usual she'd probably come back.

Maks had his chin on his fist and kept his eyes glued on the set. He added, "Course, I can't tell time."

Fortunately, it was only a short while later that Kalina came back. Hania considered speaking to her––"it would have been polite to inform me of your intended absence, etc."––but decided against it. To what end? She'd just get through the next two days, and then her uncle would come back and she would––what? Go back to America, or move to a hotel, or look for an apartment? One of those things, anyway. She wouldn't stay here with these…these children from hell. And now she'd just have something to eat and go to bed. The idea of sleep sounded extremely inviting. By the time she'd finished off the leftover
pierogis
and the leftover bread and was ready for bed, the children had retreated to their rooms and were asleep. Well, that was one good thing. They seemed very self-sufficient.

She slipped on her nightgown and turned out her own light. The room was enveloped in soft blackness and the floor was warm beneath her feet. It would be so nice to lie down. She crossed from the wardrobe to the bed in the dark, pulled back the cover, and made a sort of wallowing dive for the center of the sofa bed in the hopes it wouldn't collapse with her. It didn't collapse, but what was that horrible, that viscous, slimy stuff all over the sheet? Feeling revulsion in every fiber she tried to escape, but it stuck to her. She rolled from the bed and the sheet came with her, clinging to her nightgown. Stifling a scream, she pulled at the cloth with panicked fingers and a beating heart and flung it from her. She stampeded to the light and snapped it on.

Butter. It was butter. Someone had spread butter all over the bed.

Maks!!! She felt like shrieking. Come here and clean this up!!! She controlled her rage with difficulty. It occurred to her that that was exactly the sort of scene he wanted. Well, he wasn't going to get it.

Inwardly fuming, she lay down again on top of the covers.

So, all right, she realized as she began to calm down, there wasn't really anything personal in it. Maks was angry with the world and he was taking it out on her. Maybe Maks had good reason to be angry, she didn't know, but why, oh why, had she come here? How foolish she had been. Her father hadn't had much of a job to persuade her to come. She remembered now, when he had called about Babcia, what she had felt. There had been a little sorrow for her grandmother, a little chagrin at the passing of a stage in life that would never return, but more, there had been the desire to return to Poland, to meet what she had always thought of as "the other half of the family," to see if she couldn't in some way make them her own, let them fill up the emptiness of her own social existence, to flee for a moment from the boundlessness of her American life back to the rootedness of her earliest years. Ania and Wiktor––they'd always been kind enough to her on previous visits. A little condescending perhaps––no, actually, very condescending––but she had tried not to remember that, and anyway, wasn't it normal enough, in adults toward a teenager? Now, she had thought, maybe there would be contact, mutual ground, liking, acceptance. She would meet her cousins; they would feel the bond of blood, of family.

Obviously not. The future was an empty void, and she had nothing, not the piano or any person, to furnish it with purpose. She tossed and turned on her uncomfortable bed and eventually slept.

3

Konstanty, his tie dangling over his computer keyboard, was thinking a number of thoughts at once. Should he include that bit by the Roman geographer, Pomponius Mela, describing the women of Sarmatia who accompanied their men in raids on Byzantium? These were the people from whom the Poles once liked to think they were descended:

As the country's climate is severe, so the character of the people is wild. The people are belligerent, freedom loving, indomitable, and so wild and cruel that even women take part in wars at the side of men…Every grown girl is required to kill an enemy. If she does not, she is covered in shame and as a punishment is unable to marry.

Ah, Polish women.

Actually, he quite liked Polish women. No––correction––he really liked Polish women. He liked their femininity, their competence, their self-assured flirtatiousness. He'd been surprised, coming back to Poland after years in London, at the beauty of Polish women. He'd forgotten that. The only thing they lacked was the responsiveness of English women, those pleasant, pear-shaped women in their long cardigans. He liked the way English women actually listened, took what one said and gave it back to one with a new twist. He'd come to appreciate that sort of wit in the years he'd spent at medical school in London. Of course, it had taken him awhile. He hadn't realized at first that not everything was to be taken literally. There had been the time, for instance––no, he wouldn't remember that. There were memories that had to be bashed down into the subconscious the second they stuck their heads up. Still, he had got used to a certain humorous way of looking at the world and now he rather missed it.