Swans Are Fat Too (19 page)

They turned back, and on Świętojańska Street, next to the massive pile of St John's Cathedral, they listened to a violinist, standing on the cobbles beside the crouching statue of a bear guarding the Piarist church. Someone, Hania supposed, from a symphony orchestra somewhere in Russia, or Belarus, whose livelihood depended on busking, illegally, in a foreign city. She was lucky in comparison. Two policemen were strolling towards them. The violinist hastily lowered his instrument, picked up his case, and moved off.

There was a window, selling waffles with cream. The scent was delicious, and Maks pulled her towards it. They ate, standing in the street; the cream dripped between their fingers, and the waffles were as good as they smelled. Well, thought Hania, this has really been a rather successful outing. We've walked a long way, and Maks hasn't really complained that much––since we got here––and maybe it had some educational value too. Really, she felt quite pleased. They finished their snack. Hania threw away the wrappers.

"Shall we go?" she said to Maks.

Maks backed away. "Who are you?" he said loudly.

"Maks," she hissed, "Stop that. It isn't funny. Come with me."

"What do you want from me?" he said, even more loudly, so that a middle-aged couple standing near, tourists obviously, looked at one another, clutched their cameras, and hurried away. "Why do you want me to go with you?"

"Maks! Stop that and come on!" She said angrily, her face turning red. People all up and down the street were stopping to stare.

"What's happening, child?" a brisk woman asked Maks, approaching and giving Hania a suspicious look.

"I don't know this lady, and she wants me to come with her," shrieked Maks, with totally convincing theatrics, "I think she wants to kidnap me."

The woman was joined by a number of other persons; they all turned and gave Hania indignant glares and began to talk at once.

"No," Hania tried to explain, growing more flustered by the moment. Piano concerts had given her poise, but nothing like what was necessary for such a situation. "He's just pretending! He's my cousin. Really ...I…"

No one listened to her explanation. There were five different opinions of what should be done and an argument was starting.

"Here are the police coming," said one of the group surrounding Maks. "You'll see I'm right," he added in an irritated tone to the others.

 The police, the police, just great, thought Hania. What to do? What to do?

"Run, Maks! They're going to put you in
jail
for disturbing the peace!" she yelled over the hubbub of his rescuers.

"Aaaa!" shrieked Maks, and breaking through the circle, he dodged around the brisk woman and her helpers, pushed his way through a group of Japanese tourists who were clustered round a store window, helplessly observing the commotion, and ran down the street.

Hania whirled and ran after him. The Japanese tourists flattened themselves against the wall. Hania raced after Maks till they reached the end of the street and ran into the

Royal Square. Maks stopped. Hania looked behind. No one seemed to have come in pursuit. She caught up with Maks, and walked past him without speaking. He fell in beside her.

"Maks," she said furiously, controlling her voice with difficulty. "I've tried to be your friend. But this was it. The outer limit. It's over. Finished. I'm not going to be your friend anymore. I don't care what happens to you. I don't care what happens to your stupid dog. It's over." She strode on, very fast. She just wanted to get as far away from the Old Town as possible.

"You mean you're really mad?" said Maks, trotting to keep up. He seemed surprised.

She stopped. "Yes! I'm really mad! I'm furious! I'm not going to do anything for you anymore." She walked on. "I'm not going to cook for you, or clean for you, or sit with you at night, or teach you the piano, or anything. You don't like me. Well, fine. I don't like you either."

To her surprise, he burst into tears. Real, genuine, grief-stricken tears. He cried all the way along

Krakowskie Przedmieście Street; he cried, with heartbroken sobs, at the bus stop, where several women scolded Hania for her cruelty––"
Pani
, how can you treat the child like that? He'll make himself ill"––and all the rest of the way home, only stopping on the staircase to scrub his face with his sleeve. "I don't want Kalina to see me like this," he explained, sniffingly. 

In spite of her year of teaching she really knew nothing about children, Hania thought.

11

Pity me, both old and youngling

I've been to a bloody weddin
g.

– 'Świętokrzyski Lament' (Medieval)

"Tata called," Kalina said, when they came in the door, exhausted and red-faced. And then to Maks, "What's wrong with you?"

Why, oh why, do I always miss them, thought Hania, tearing her mind away from the unpleasantnesses of the afternoon, and Maks' condition.

"What did he say?" she asked eagerly. I need to tell them that I have to be back in New York, that we're going to run out of money––because I've been using my own and what with paying for the groceries, and the electricity bill, and the train tickets…

"What happened to Maks?" Kalina asked Hania accusingly, when Maks wouldn't answer her. "What have you been doing to him?"

"I..." Oh, really, thought Hania, now I have to justify myself as well. "Maks can tell you that. But please tell me what your father said."

"I don't know; I wasn't listening."

"What?"

But of course, like father, like daughter, thought Hania in outrage. "Aren't you even interested in when they're coming back? It matters because of Bartek, after all––and I have…"

"Why are you getting so excited?" Kalina looked at her curiously. "I told them everything's fine, nothing to worry about, and they shouldn't hurry back. That's right, isn't it? We don't want them to come back, do we?" A pause, and then, very definitely,"I sure don't."

"No, no, we don't want them to come back," said Maks, continuing to sniff. "We want you, Hania. I'm sorry I did all those bad things."

"Right…" said Hania, and she left the children, went into the piano room, and sat down at a piano. She reached for the keys, and before she even began to think, her fingers began to play….

Suddenly she broke off. That was the piece she'd played at her last concert. A very small concert. She had played it perfectly and the applause had been half-hearted. She'd heard the audience's soft, startled cessation of breath when she appeared on stage. Now she sat with her hands in her lap.

In three weeks she had to go back to New York. She would leave the children and return to her job. One had to make a living somehow. She doodled on the keys with one hand, rose impatiently, and went to the bookshelf. She ran her eyes over the list of titles hoping to remember something of use to her in this situation. There was Orzeszkowa's
On the Niemen
––that was an unusual riches to rags story in which the 19
^th
-century heroine, against the background of Poland's last failed insurrection, considers leaving a position of comparative wealth and leisure for poverty and hard labour with the man she loves. I would gladly give up my comparative wealth for comparative poverty with Konstanty, she thought, but the question was hardly likely to arise. She was not the heroine of a novel and her going or staying only concerned the children and herself.

And in either case, what was she going to do about Bartek? What was she going to do about Kalina? She had tried again to get the girl to go to a doctor but Kalina had refused point blank. And now she'd taken again to disappearing in the afternoons, not saying where she was going, and dressed in those outfits––those 'I'm a prostitute' outfits, there was no other word for them…And Maks? Hania, seated again at the piano, struck a quiet chord with her left hand. Well, it wasn't really her affair. In three weeks she'd be gone…she wouldn't have to worry about Kalina or Maks ever again, probably. She'd hear about them every few years through her father, who'd most likely get it wrong––she'd learn Kalina was a geology student when in fact she would be studying psychology. Maks would end up in a reformatory and no one would ever mention him. They would pass out of her existence.

The next afternoon Kalina put her head through the door of the piano room. "I'm going out." At least she said she was leaving these days, thought Hania––that was progress.

"Kalino! Wait!"

Kalina came into the room, looking defensive. "What? I have to leave. I'm going to be late."

"Late for what?"

"I have to meet someone."

Hania stopped on the point of asking "whom?" Kalina wouldn't tell her and she wouldn't like the prying. "I just––I know it's not my business, but I wonder if you really want to go out dressed like that?"

"What's wrong with the way I'm dressed?" Kalina asked angrily.

"It's just…" Hania began tentatively, "there are certain ways of dressing that make a woman look like she doesn't have a very high opinion of herself. Like she's begging for attention…"

"What do you know about it?" Kalina was instantly on the defensive, "Look at the way you dress––you call that having a high opinion of yourself?"

"I have to dress like this because I'm so overweight," murmured Hania, abashed. "I..."

"Well, if you have such a good opinion of yourself, why are you so overweight?"

Hania had no answer, and Kalina pulled the door shut and went off.

No, it wasn't exactly like that, thought Hania, trying to reason down her hurt; that wasn't really the mechanism. After all, there was Babcia. No one could say she had had anything but a superb opinion of herself, and yet she had been very large. Babcia had just liked to eat and she attacked the subject of food with the same impetuosity that she put into everything else. There had come a point for her, Hania supposed, when the pleasures of the table had come to outweigh the advantages of being less round. But then, for Babcia it had probably been a choice to let herself go. Hania hadn't made a choice. She could never remember exactly when she had ceased to be simply a far too chubby child and had become a seriously heavy teenager. She distinctly remembered the comments of other kids in high school, but by then she had been well on her way to obesity and any change had seemed impossible. She had had her music to concentrate on. She had concentrated to effect, blotting out every other unpleasant aspect of her life. It was only lately that she had begun to look at herself, to look about, and to think that she had ruined her life––no, that was too strong a phrase––that she had, rather, like most other people, in one way or another, put a serious impediment in the way of her own happiness.

What would her grandmother say to her, she wondered, if she were still alive?––now that she was adult, and perhaps they could have talked as adults. Would there have been any level at which they could have met? Would there have been one person in her family who might have empathized with her? Probably not, she thought, remembering some of her grandmother's more abrasive letters, but she would never know. Suddenly she wished very much that her grandmother were still alive. Now, she realized, she would never really know what she had been like. Tomorrow, she decided, she would go to visit her grave. She hadn't been yet.

Kalina was in a foul mood the next morning and only reluctantly and resentfully agreed to watch Maks, who said he didn't want to be watched by his stupid sister and had taken Bartek into the bedroom and slammed the door. Hania left the house with a feeling of escape. To walk along the street alone, to be unencumbered and have an hour of freedom ahead of her––it was wonderful, it was lovely, the sun was shining; she sat down on the bench at the bus stop to await her bus. The bus didn't come at once, and she began to wonder what Maks was doing, and why Kalina had suddenly become so unpleasant again, and what she was going to do about Bartek. Of course, in a very short time she would go back to New York, and then she would be free all the time, like this, and it would be wonderful and––very lonely.

A car had stopped in front of the bus stop and someone was speaking to her. It took a moment for her to come out of her thoughts. It was Konstanty, asking if he could give her a ride.

The car pulled back into traffic. She sat in the car and remembered what Kalina had said about her clothes and weight. She was going to Powązki Cemetery, she said. He suggested that if she had time to wait while he went into the hospital, he just had a brief errand there, and then he'd be glad to accompany her. Unless she preferred to go alone?

Prefer to go alone or with Konstanty? She almost laughed. Still, she was rather startled, made rather shy by his offer. She thanked him quietly.

Was it just his imagination, he thought, or was she losing weight? Maybe he was just getting used to the way she looked. She had quite a nice face, actually. Large hazel eyes and nothing objectionable about her other features.

They pulled up in front of the hospital. It was a pleasant-enough place, arranged around a courtyard with flowers and trees. "I'll just be a moment," he said, and was gone. Hania sat and watched a stream of elderly people, of women with swollen legs, of hobbling men with inward-looking faces, passing in and out of the building. She imagined them waiting at bus stops, going home, fixing dinner, washing their clothes and ironing them––they were all so clean––and doing the housework, all in the face of illness.

Konstanty was back. He gave her his quick half smile. "I hope I wasn't too long. We can go now."

"I think that no matter what problems one had," Hania said with feeling, "a half hour spent in front of a hospital would make one think they were fairly small. It's like that piece of Solon I read once: 'If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap, whence every one must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.' I don't know how doctors bear it."