Swans Are Fat Too (9 page)

Than to wear a shield and kicking spur,

Or to flatten one's scalp with heavy headgear.

–
Hieronim Morsztyn (c.1581-1623),

'Pleasant Advice'

Hania, opening her eyes in the morning, thought that something had changed in the room, but she couldn't think what at once. She blinked several times and looked around. The bed was still holding together, sort of; the wooden armoire was there. That chair with the ripped upholstery and the lion's-head armrests––she remembered that from her childhood. She hadn't noticed it before. Oh no, it must have been behind the stack of paintings. The paintings! The paintings were gone. She'd forgotten all about Ania coming. How could she have forgotten? She sat up abruptly. And the children wouldn't even be up. She'd have to wait to find out what Ania had said.

She dressed and went into the piano room. To her surprise Maks was already there. He was intent on the keys, pressing them very lightly so as not to make a sound. He was practicing, she realized, and was touched. He seemed to be applying the same concentrated energy to the piano that he applied to thinking up mischief. He looked up guiltily and saw her standing there.

"I didn't make noise, did I? I can't reach that pedal over there."

"No, no, it's fine. That's good that you're practicing. What did your mother say last night?"

"I don't know. I wasn't here."

"You weren't here?"

"No."

"Maksiu!" Hania had great self-control, but she came near to exploding. "How could you not have been here?"

"We went out. Kalina and I." Maks returned to his playing.

Hania strode down the hallway to Kalina's room. "Kalino! Wake up, please, Kalina. Kalino!" Kalina moaned and turned over in bed and opened one eye under her hair.

"Whaat?"

"You were supposed to tell your mother to call me last night. Maks says you went out."

"Leave me alone. I feel sick."

"But I really needed to talk to your mother. Now…"

Kalina sat up in bed, and almost shouted, "Why do you want to talk to her? To tell her to come back and take care of us? Well, she won't. We learned that a long time ago. Tata says she should go with him so she goes. And she calls up and says 'oh, my dear little children, I love you so much'"––she mimicked her mother's fluting voice––"and it's all
gówno warte
." She saw Hania wince at the vulgarity, dropped back in bed, and pulled the pillow over her head.

Then, as Hania still stood uncomfortably in the doorway, Kalina raised herself up again and said, "she leaves us with one person after another. Maks hardly even knows what she looks like. I'm his mother. Me." She jabbed a finger into her chest. "And I have been since he was three. If you don't want to stay, you can go. That's fine with us. We don't like people coming and going. We wish they'd just go." She put the pillow back over her head.

Great, thought Hania, just great. Maybe I should just pack my bags and go like Kalina says. But of course then if anything happened she'd be responsible for having abandoned them.

She needed breakfast. Lots of bread and butter, lots of sugar in her coffee and then she'd feel better. Something was lying on the table. She pounced on it. There was a stack of photos of Ania and Wiktor––Ania and Wiktor seated at a restaurant table, Ania and Wiktor beside the sea––she pushed them aside. There was a brochure for a music festival and a note. She snatched at the note. It was in two parts.
Kochanie
––My Dears––said the first part,
I'm sorry to miss you. Didn't you realize I was coming? I thought I said on the phone. Tata is having a great success.
Where? wondered Hania.

The salt air is so good for our health, we both feel so much better. We don't know when we'll be able to get back though. Tata is getting inspiration from the waves and Herr Bonner and Pan Słominski are here too. We love you so much. Be good and we'll see you before long. Hugs and kisses. Mama

The second part, below, said:

Kochana Haniu, We don't know when we'll be able to get back. Wiktor is involved in a very important project. He's doing the work for the festival and the movie…I'm starting a new series of paintings in gradations of beige, whole canvasses of beige. I'm going to call it 'Ecce Sando' and I really think it's the most significant work I've done yet. But we couldn't do it without you and we're so grateful that you offered to stay with the children this summer. Wiktor suggests that you all go to our country house in Żabia Wola for a week or two. It would be good for you all to get out of Warsaw. Hugs and kisses. Ania.

P.S. Kalina knows how to get there and the neighbors have the keys.

P.P.S. I've just sold two paintings, isn't that wonderful?

Poor, batty woman, thought Hania. She flipped through the photos, picked up the brochure and opened it. It listed the events of the festival, with biographies of some of the musicians. There was an interview with Wiktor: …
it is the single sustained chord, the minor chord, that reveals the innate sorrow and sublime beauty of our universal reality. I am definitely a minimalist, and what I am trying to do through festivals like this one is to initiate a wider audience into the potentialities immanent in this type of music. This is why my piece 'Penetration,' which we are playing for audiences here, consists in the rich interplay between a single sustained note and a single note repeated in staccato... 'Penetration' lasts for forty-three minutes....I want listeners to be moved, I want them to come out of the concert hall feeling shell-shocked. The idea came to me one night, when I was listening to a jackhammer...

Maks came into the kitchen. Hania put down the brochure and rose to get his breakfast.

"There's a letter from your mother there," she gestured toward the paper.

He picked it up and put it down. "I can't read."

"What? You told me you could."

He shrugged. "I lied." The fact didn't seem to bother him.

"What grade are you in at school?" Polish children started later than American ones, she knew.

"I finished kindergarten last year." He added proudly, "I went to a private school."

"Oh. Was it a good school?"

"I guess." He shrugged again, adjusted his glasses. "Mama read me the advertisement. It said 'you can tell what sort of school we are by looking at all the BMWs and Mercedes in the parking lot.' I'd like to have a BMW."

"It didn't really?" Hania asked him, scandalized at his nod.
Boże
, the quantity of human folly in the world.

"Do you have friends there?"

"Ye-ny." He made an inarticulate sound that might have been either yes or no. "Next year I have to go to the school here. It's on the street over there." He jerked his head. "Like Kalina."

"Oh. Are you looking forward to that?"

"It's okay, I guess. Everyone says it's really hard but it doesn't matter because Kalina's going to teach me how to cheat."

"What?"

"Yes. Only it's harder for boys, because girls––they can put the cheat sheet under their stockings, on top of their leg here." He patted his thigh. "And wear a skirt." Obviously the idea appealed to him. "But boys can't. I'll think of a good trick though."

I'm sure you will, Maks, thought Hania. And then, as in duty bound, "You know, it's not right to cheat." Or lie, either, she thought, but we'll get to that later.

"Why not? Everybody does it."

"Oh, not everybody, surely."

"Yes. Everybody." Maks was very definite. "Everybody, everybody, everybody. Only some kids have to do it on their own and some their parents help them."

Kalina came into the kitchen in her nightdress, looking pale and puffy-eyed. She seemed to have forgotten her earlier rudeness, and spoke to Hania in a friendly-enough, if rather morose, manner.

"Maks isn't going to the private school anymore because Mama and Tata forgot to register him or pay for him or something. They'd forget we existed if they could."

What was there to answer to that? "Oh, no, I'm sure they care about you very much."

Kalina and Maks just regarded her with expressionless faces. She squirmed under their gazes.

"Okay," she agreed, putting bread and jam on the table, "okay, so maybe they only care about you a little bit."

"A tiny little bit," added Kalina forcefully.

"A weensy bit," insisted Maks. It seemed to matter to them that she agree.

"No. I don't agree. I think that if push came to shove, you'd find they showed up."

"Like for Babcia?"

Someone was knocking on the door. A heavy impatient knock.

Glad to get away from the conversation, Hania went unsuspecting to open it. She found two men standing there, with clipboards. "We're from the electricity company," they said. "The bill hasn't been paid"––one of the men shuffled through a stack of papers––"for over three months. That's nine hundred seventy-six
złoty
and forty-eight
groszy
. You can pay now or we'll turn off the electricity." He rested his hand on the clipboard and both men gazed at her expectantly.

Hania stared back and at last managed, "I expect they––the owners––just forgot. I'm sure they'll pay when they get back."

"Can't wait, I'm afraid."

"But I don't have nine hundred
złoty
. I don't even live here."

The men shrugged. "Okay. You can tell the owners that if they want the electricity turned back on they should come to the electricity company with proof of payment."

"But you can't just turn it off…"

A woman paused on the landing below, gazed upwards over the railing, and then came on up the stairs. She was a shapely young woman with dyed black hair and a sturdy tall boy of seven or eight in tow.

"Hania?" she asked, "Hania, do you remember me? Aneta? We live in the apartment below. I remember you from when you were little."

"Aneta." Hania tore herself away from the electricity problem. The two men ignored the interruption and were already dealing efficiently with a fuse box on the landing.

"And this is my son, Kuba, and I have a daughter too."

"I'm so glad to see you again," Hania managed faintly. Yes, she remembered––a sweet girl, the youngest in a family that drank. So that must have been her father, the man who'd wished her good health the other day. Let's see, twenty years times 365 days times two bottles of hard liquor made how many bottles since she'd last seen him? He was holding up very well, and Aneta seemed to be flourishing too.

The electricity men were putting their clipboards under their arms and descending the stairs.

"Don't worry about them," Aneta said with a deprecating wave of her hand, "I'll show you how to deal with these little problems. You've been abroad so you probably don't know."

"What do you mean?"

"You have to stick a needle under the meter cover so the bill doesn't run up. It's easy once you know how."

"I'm afraid I couldn't do that," said Hania. A slight noise made her look up and she found she was looking into Konstanty's eyes. He nodded 'good morning' to them both and went on down the stairs.

So, thought Konstanty, as he descended the stairs with his unhurried step, there was no need to be quite so chummy with the girl. Why had he just smiled at her in such a friendly way? He could have put a little more distance into it. After all, he'd been kind and that was enough; he wouldn't want to carry it too far, make her into a close friend. He thought these thoughts and then felt ashamed of himself. The problem was...was what? He liked her, he thought she was very entertaining, why shouldn't he enjoy her company? Because...Well, there it was: He'd actually been rather uncomfortable being seen with her in town last night. So all right, he had to admit it to himself. He was as concerned with 'how things look' as Pelagia, as everyone else in Poland. It was an uncomfortable admission but there it was. He had thought he could escape the iron hand of––of what? Not tradition exactly, but of doing what was expected, that was it––he was in the grip of the expected. It was not expected that aristocratic young men dated obese young women. Discreetly buxom, maybe. Not blush-for-her obese.

His car keys jingled as he took them out of his pocket. She had told him that the human ear could hear 20,000 vibrations a second and that the Nazi war propagandist Goebbels had organized a conference in London to try to set the pitch for C in 1939. In 1939! Who attended the conference? He would have to ask her, he thought. And then he remembered that no, he had been kind enough already. 

Respected Sir,
…Oh, how mortifying. What was she going to do? She'd have to pay the bill…
The battery on my laptop will only last two hours so I'm sending you this email to tell you that I won't be able to do any work for the next …
Delete. He had gone on down the stairs with the curtest of nods. His 'good morning' had been frosty. There was nothing to do but have some more breakfast and go on typing.

Like Copernicus, many luminaries of the Polish Renaissance went abroad for a time: There was Jan Łaski (John a Lasco), for instance, who brought East Frisia into the Protestant fold, became superintendent of foreign Protestants in England, and had an influence on the English Book of Common Prayer. Erasmus considered Lasco to be 'a man of such parts that I wish for no greater happiness than his single friendship.'

And I wish for no greater happiness than…Hania tried to stifle the thought, but the words '
his single friendship
' kept repeating in her mind.

 
King Edward was so charmed that he donated part of an Augustinian monastery to Lasco for a church. Oxford was less happy, however, when he took up quarters in Christ Church with his wife, the first woman to have, as one historian says, 'invaded the sanctity of College life.' After her death, which occurred not long after, 'she was buried by the shrine of St Friewide in Christ Church Cathedral, but on the accession of Queen Mary the Celibates had their revenge, for her body was thrown out in scorn and buried in a dunghill without the precincts of the College.' Her bones were restored to the saint's tomb itself, though, in Elizabeth's time.