Swans Are Fat Too (27 page)

Him I call a man and thank him for his manliness.

Hieronim Morsztyn (c.1581-1623), 'A Man'

Hania went indoors, took a warm shower, put on dry clothes, sat down in a chair with a cup of tea, and stared into space. She was curiously numb. She couldn't bear to think over the last hour, and only shook her head when Kalina asked her curiously what had happened. She didn't feel like talking at all.

For some reason the words 'Marysienka was fat too' kept repeating in her mind like a broken record. And other little bits, that she remembered typing not too long ago, recurred too. Jan Sobieski wrote passionate letters when he was away from his wife. One he began '
my most beautiful little wifey, greatest consolation of my heart and soul!
' and continued, '
I hope that
notre amour ne changera jamais en amitié...it has seemed to me that I could not love more or deeper, but now I admit that not more––because it is not possible to love more––but je vous admire ever more, seeing perfection and such a good––and in such a beautiful body––soul.
'

A beautiful body? Few persons looking at portraits of the queen would think that. That was the effect of love. It was possible then, for love to transform the outline of the beloved into beauty. Still she would be foolish, very foolish, to think the
amitié
between herself and Konstanty would ever be transformed into
amour.
One had to protect oneself and be reasonable. And yet he had put out his hand.

So there it was; she had tried to keep her mind off it but she couldn't. The memory was present all evening. She went to bed with it, dreamt about it, woke with it in the morning. She relived the moment over and over, so that all day long, whatever she was doing––fixing breakfast, sweeping the floor, playing the piano, talking to Maks––she was conscious of his hand putting back her hair, felt the brush of his fingers against her skin. 

He will call me today, she thought, or he will write an email, and she waited for it, both patient and impatient, holding off from the moment of hearing his voice, of seeing his words, and yet savouring it in advance.

Konstanty did not write or call. In the evening he drove out, in his damaged car, to Konstancin, to his sister's house. She had a number of guests, as usual, including Kalpurnia, who greeted him with just that precise calculation of distance and familiarity that he expected. Here, he thought, as he sat on a sofa beside her, is a woman who would never see in me anything but the sum of my social parts; here is a woman who would never cause me to jump in a lake.

He began to make conversation. How oddly thin she is, he thought, as he talked of other things. Pelagia too. I wonder if she's becoming anorexic? No, surely not, he considered, as he watched his pretty sister laughing with her guests, hers wasn't at all the personality. And Kalpurnia's personality? Oh, Kalpurnia didn't have a personality, only guidelines set down by her circle. Unkind, unkind, he told himself, she's really very nice, and to make up for his thought, he turned and smiled at her, but fortunately didn't have to speak again, as his attention was claimed by another guest.

Pani
Topocka was the sort of woman whose respectability stood out around her like an aura. She was a sturdy woman in her sixties, with her hair in a chignon, flat shoes, and a serious expression, a woman whose life work was to ensure the erection of statues and the inscription of plaques for as many acts of sabotage or insurrection as she could find. She was now organizing a monument, Pelagia said, to the women from the Konstancin area who had participated in a World War II plot to poison German officers in city restaurants. There would be an unveiling ceremony and Father Wysocki was going to speak and give the blessing.

The guests were enthusiastic and as they talked around him, Konstanty sat bemused, imagining what the monument might look like. It would have a column, surmounted by a large cross, with an engraving of a plate and silverware and the words 'In honor of the glorious act of patriotism performed by the women of Konstancin, whereby 5 German officers were sent to the hospital and 15 seriously incommoded.' And below there would be a Latin inscription: 'Caveat Eater.' Well, no. He swallowed his laughter in a hasty sip of too hot tea. He would save the joke for Hania.

And then he remembered that he had been trying hard all day not to think about Hania. He also became aware that Kalpurnia was approving the monument and asking that her name be put down for a subscription. He was going to be asked next. No, not asked, but everyone would look at him, or consciously not look at him, and he had better seek now for a mode of escape. This wasn't the place to speak his mind, or to embarrass
Pani
Topocka by suggesting that he didn't think any act of violence should be commemorated. He made as if to stand, but his brother-in-law entered the room at that moment, and, out of a polite respect for his––regrettable, but we think about it as little as possible, as some of the guests would no doubt summarize it––nationality, the conversation instantly switched to other topics.

Konstanty sank back in his seat. It was very pleasant here, really, in this comfortable room with the large fire in the chimney, the guests with their air of breeding and polite speech; one felt secure; there was a restful lack of stimulation and all the choices were already made for one. He didn't need to think about a certain girl, who could not, somehow, be whittled away to her essence, her eminently desirable mind, leaving her excess weight––and excess baggage in the shape of regrettable relatives––quite to the side.

And yet, if it was possible to rid oneself of national sanctities, to re-evaluate who and what were worthy of honor in Poland's past, then why couldn't one free oneself of convention in a personal matter? If it was obvious that human happiness could be better served by a more penetrating view in the one case, then surely there were other areas where old ideals could profitably be abandoned? Wasn't that what Hania, in other contexts, had been telling him? He had a momentary image of walking through the door with Hania––and he stood up abruptly, without even knowing why, and went to stare into the fire.

Hania squinted at Konstanty's handwriting:

For Poland, World War II had three main results. One was the immense loss of life and material destruction. Another was the shift of its borders westwards: Russia took its eastern lands, the Potsdam Agreement gave Poland territories to the west in compensation, and mass migrations of populations ensued. The third was Poland's domination by Russia again, and the imposition upon it, for the next half century, of Communist rule.

She had only a small stack of pages left. He would leave one more section in the Lanskis' mailbox; she would correct it and hand back the manuscript and then, she supposed, the intercourse between them would be entirely reduced to a nod and a sentence or two at chance meetings on the staircase. She felt bereft at the thought of giving back his handwriting. She had carefully preserved all his emails. Yesterday, when five days had passed since their outing to Wilanów and she realized that he was not going to call or write, she had opened them, and read them one by one. She hadn't been fooling herself, she thought; there were a great many of them and they did show a growing intimacy. And he had invited her out once to coffee, and once to dinner, and he had taken her to Powązki and to Wilanów. Still, there wasn't anything that gave her the right to suppose he had more than friendly feelings for her––even that last gesture, she had to admit, could fall in that category, and it was only she who was so stupid as to make something of it. The thought was bitter.

She had only the children to distract her. School had started, and she had spent hours traipsing round stores for their supplies, dragging a reluctant Maks, who suddenly decided he didn't want to go to school. 

"I don't want to go," he stated for the tenth time as she picked up a book for him. "I don't want that book. Don't buy it."

She wasn't as sympathetic with him as she might have been. She had her own preoccupations. "I have to. You have to. Sometimes in life we have to do things we don't like."

"Oh, ha. You never do."

"How do you know, Maks?"

He changed tack abruptly. "I won't go and you can't make me."

This was a declaration of war, and with Maks, the merest hint had to be taken seriously. Hania had to put aside thoughts of Konstanty, of the weight of Polish history, of a difficult passage in a Chopin étude, of notebooks and textbooks and pencils, of tonight's dinner, of four puppies, and pull her mind out, like Hercules emerging from the Augean stables, into the moment.

"What is it you're particularly afraid of?"

"I'm not afraid. I'm just not going."

"Okay. Good. That makes it much easier for me. I was going to help you with your homework so you'd be the best student in the class and everyone would look at you and say 'there goes the smartest boy in the school' but now I won't have to. That's good." She made an effort to appear relieved and pleased.

Maks said nothing for a moment, and then, with disgust, "Kalina says I can't cheat until I know how to read."

"Well, there you are." Goodness, yes, all Poles can read.

Maks kicked at pebbles and scowled at her. "Okay. You can teach me that much. But no more."

"Okay. Agreed." Obviously her ideals were shrinking.

"You see?" said Kalina, some time later, "We had to sell the piano. How else would we have managed?"

Hania had to admit that Kalina was right. She wasn't finding it easy to attract students. Two little girls had come. One was skinny and uninterested; she had a blank look in her eyes and reminded Hania of a rubber pencil. The other was skinny, uninterested, hard-driven by her mother, and fitting piano lessons in between English, German, French, math, ballet, and tennis lessons. Neither wanted to learn, but she did her best with them. They nodded politely and looked out the window or at the clock while she explained the beginnings of music theory. 

Lessons with Maks went much better. Not only was he making real progress at the piano, but he was learning to read with great rapidity as well. Maks, Hania thought curiously one evening, as she stared at his head bent over a book in which he was carefully deciphering words, was the one bright spot in her desolate existence.

On the other hand, since she had to walk with him to school, and meet him afterwards, it made it impossible to seek other work.

Then Kalina came back from school one afternoon, threw her knapsack in a corner and herself onto the sofa, and announced that she wasn't going to school ever again.

"What happened?" asked Hania, regarding her darkened face and trembling lip with trepidation.

"They think because they're teachers they can speak to us any way they please; they can humiliate us and make fun of us and..." Here the rest of the sentence was lost in tears.

Hania waited a moment, then asked "Which teach-er, and what did she––or he––say?"

"My Polish teacher. She's really mean," Kalina said between sniffs, as she hugged a sofa pillow. "I had her last year too. She likes to make fun of people. But last year she didn't pick on me, because there was this really stupid boy in class, and she always went after him. But now he's gone and..." Kalina shrugged.

"What? She calls on you and you don't know the answer?" Hania guessed, trying to imagine what a Polish classroom was like.

"No. I know the answers...." Kalina pulled some threads out of the pillow. "She makes remarks about my looks." Sniff. "Like today, she says, 'What's wrong with you? Why are you sitting there like a sack of potatoes? Straighten up.' I mean, it's not her business is it, how I sit? And yesterday, she didn't like something in my essay and she says 'the only thing sloppier than your writing is the way you look.' And all the kids laughed... I'm not going again."

"That's horrible. That's unacceptable. I'll go and talk to the director. Maybe you can go into a different class."

Kalina shrugged. "It won't do any good." But she looked rather hopeful.

Hania went back to her typing, wondering how much of Kalina's problems with her teacher were the result of leftover thought patterns from Poland's past.

...
The Communist regime, which was forced upon Poland by the Soviet Union after the war, ruled the country with a heavier or relatively lighter hand for over forty-five years…Perhaps initially the enthusiasm expended on rebuilding the country distracted those not directly affected by the excesses of Stalinism (there were some tens of thousands of victims)…When Stalinism ended in Poland, there was a brief period of euphoria during which censorship was relaxed, and more could be written and debated than before, but by the end of the fifties, the party was again tightening its claws.

Hania had an image of the national emblem, the bareheaded Polish eagle––the Communists had removed its former crown––coming down out of the sky to sink its talons into the country. She deleted the line, and wrote instead: '
the party reaffirmed its hold on society
.'

Although politically, the severities of the first half of the fifties never returned, general living conditions were difficult during the entire period: for many people these included appallingly crowded living quarters and long queues for staples...The rights of citizens, enshrined in the constitution, were flouted as a matter of course by the police and the courts
.

The next day, Hania, feeling considerable apprehension but armed with a sense of duty, pushed open the glass doors of a modern school building and went in. She had called yesterday and asked for an appointment. She was to meet the directress at eleven. It was five minutes before the hour. The hallway looked like school hallways everywhere, with notices up, and some class's identical drawings behind a glass display case. There was a vague hum of muffled voices behind classroom doors. In the office, a couple of bored secretaries were drinking tea and reading magazines. They gestured towards an inner door but told Hania she'd have to wait. She stood and waited. Eleven. Eleven five. Eleven ten. She tried to catch the eye of one of the secretaries, and finally one looked up with half a glance and shrugged. "Okay, go on in
pani
." Hania opened the door and found a middle-aged woman in a suit, shuffling papers. She did not look up on Hania's entrance.