Perfect Lives

by Polly Samson

  ‘I know it’s early for drinking alcohol but I think we should celebrate,’ he said, looking nervously to Aurelia, as though seeking her permission. His wool jacket was a black pea coat, it suited him, went well with the black felt hat. Aurelia gestured to the sitting room, and Claudine almost stamped her foot with irritation that the first thing he did was to fawn over the piano.

  The piano was perfectly in tune, almost smugly so. Leszek couldn’t resist lifting the lid and running his fingers over a couple of keys. ‘Nice,’ he said.

  It had been relentlessly brought to this state of refined equal temperament by the local tuner, Richard, a noticeably younger and more tousled specimen than the regular London man.

  Aurelia had been in Hamburg the first time the London tuner hadn’t made it so Claudine had dealt with everything. The new guy was OK, she’d said. This time, however, they’d barely exchanged a word on the doorstep before Aurelia, coming down, caught sight of him standing there and flew the last of the stairs.

  ‘Ricky? Richard!’ she exclaimed and his face went the colour of salami. ‘So many years since I’ve seen you!

  ‘I hadn’t heard word of you since the Guild. And now here you are!’ He smiled slightly nervously at her. ‘I never had another student who played the Haydn quite as you did … I expected to find a recording by you one of these days.’ Richard hung his head as he fiddled with his roll of tuning tools. ‘Ah well,’ he said. ‘In another life maybe.’ Claudine excused herself from her mother’s excruciating lack of tact. She always hated the racket of the piano being tuned, the dinging of the notes, the constant comparison, the trills to nowhere and back.

  Claudine crammed the champagne bottle into the freezer. She watched from the doorway as Leszek went from the piano to the sofa. It was a strange sight: him perched on the edge of their sofa, turning his hat in his hands.

  Aurelia was staring at him with her arms crossed over her chest and he seemed to be talking to the floor.

  ‘It must’ve been odd seeing Rick again,’ he was saying.

  ‘He says he’s given up all performing. He had such talent!’ Aurelia wandered over to the window; only at the word ‘talent’ did she turn to Leszek.

  Leszek looked stranded, the green leather sofa an island surrounded by uncertain tides. ‘Yes, I can imagine,’ he said, coughing into his fist.

  ‘He was the best in his year …’ she said. ‘Well, apart from you, I suppose.’

  The piano tuner had at least given them something to talk about, Claudine thought bitterly, looking from one to the other: at Leszek, so fascinated by his own thumbs playing again at the brim on his hat; at Aurelia’s evasive eyes.

  ‘Talented but no confidence. He was never going to be any good,’ Leszek said.

  ‘His Haydn Fantasia in C was about as lovely as I’ve ever heard it played,’ she countered.

  ‘Yes, but what was the use? Remember the Wigmore Hall?’

  Aurelia grimaced. ‘Poor Ricky, what a time for stage fright.’

  ‘Ah yes, poor Rick,’ he agreed.

  Claudine couldn’t believe how bored they were making her feel with this tragedy. She might as well have not been in the room.

  Leszek coughed and Aurelia seemed to suddenly remember, almost with a jolt, that she actually had a daughter, and walked to where she was slouching in the doorway. She cupped a hand to her cheek.

  ‘Richard was always very jealous of Leszek,’ she explained, and then she smiled across at Leszek in the way that Claudine had always hoped she would.

  ‘Your father, I mean.’ She moved her hand up to her own face, covering her eyes.

  ‘Your father.’ Leszek echoed her and coughed again, almost theatrically.

  Aurelia jumped. ‘Anyone want anything? A glass of orange juice? Buck’s Fizz?’

  Leszek had been quiet all the way to Gatwick. Claudine looked at him sideways a couple of times, mainly trying to decide in which ways his profile resembled her own; then when he still wasn’t speaking, she put her feet on the dash and had a quick rally of texts back and forth with her friend Laura.

  ‘Would you have recognised her?’ she asked him when she could stand his silence no longer. ‘Has she changed?’

  Leszek only shrugged. Claudine wondered why she’d agreed to this trip. She was missing two pretty good parties on Saturday night; Laura had texted that she had a new leather jacket.

  Even on the flight he still didn’t want to talk: ‘To tell you the truth, I feel quite angry with your mother’, was all he said when she questioned him about his silence. ‘Seventeen years is a long time to keep a secret.’

  They drank Bloody Marys and then he asked if she’d mind if he read his newspaper? She said she didn’t, and it could have been worse but she noticed him glancing at her a couple of times, and then he noticed her noticing and smiled, which made her feel better.

  As they were landing in Krakow he shared what his mother’s doctor had told him on the phone. ‘We must be prepared for the worst,’ he said, and Claudine understood then that his silence on this journey might have little to do with her. She tried to imagine his pain. It was odd, she thought, the way things had turned out: he was losing a parent just as she was gaining one.

  Everything had gone very smoothly; the hire car smelled not unpleasantly of mandarin oranges. It wasn’t like travelling with Aurelia where stuff got lost on the luggage carousel.

  They were still early for the hospital so they stopped for pierogi in the bright sunlight of Rynek Square, where the Easter market was spilling across the cobbles in a profusion of stalls and baskets and painted eggs and bright chrysanthemums. The pierogi came on paper plates and they perched to eat them at a wooden table with an hour to kill.

  ‘I’ve never met a grandmother before,’ she said. The pierogi was quite chewy for a dumpling, with a filling of greasy cheese.

  ‘That’s right.’ He nodded his head, chewing slowly, as though vaguely recalling an arcane fact. ‘I remember now. Rae was brought up only by her father, you wouldn’t have a grandmother on her side.’

  Claudine liked that he called Aurelia ‘Rae’, but still she’d have preferred that Aurelia’s family circumstances were indelibly engraved on his heart.

  ‘I think she was very young when she lost her mother, am I right?’ he said.

  ‘How well did you actually know her?’ Claudine hadn’t meant to sound sharp, nor spill her coffee. ‘She told me you lived together.’

  Leszek put his hand beneath the brim of his hat to cover his brow. ‘We did live together’, and left it there while he told her how it felt to be lost in music and she dabbed at the puddle of coffee with a napkin. ‘Even if Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs had moved in I’m not sure I would have noticed—’

  ‘Did you really not know she was pregnant? Is that the truth?’ Claudine interrupted him.

  ‘… When I wasn’t playing I was imagining the music I would play.’ He took another bite of his pierogi. He was a great one for talking with his mouth full.

  ‘You can’t understand what it was like: I had finished all the studying I would ever do: the exams, the constant assessments, the marks from one to five for my playing from the steel-faced judges in room number seven.’ Here he grimaced at his fingers, as though he’d suddenly discovered warts.

  He shook his hands free of their afflictions, jumping up from his seat. ‘I had already been taught by two great masters here in Poland. The iron curtain had lifted and I was free.’ Leszek swung his arms out wide, making a woman step sideways.

  He raised his hat to the woman, an all too handsome apology. The woman smiled.

  ‘I wanted to play everything,’ he said, pulling her hands and lifting her to her feet, practically jigging on the spot.

  ‘I wanted to write music and play music from Bach to The Beatles and back again. I wanted to write down my own music. But before you write it down it has to live in your head, the dynamics, the articulation, it all needs to be there before you touch a key of the piano.’
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br />   ‘Oh God, now you’re behaving like my mother,’ groaned Claudine, plonking herself down again. ‘I can’t stand the piano.’

  She wiped her greasy fingers on another napkin and screwed it into a twist with the paper plate. She aimed and missed the bin and Leszek leapt to pick it up before she had a chance to retrieve it herself.

  ‘Going to tell me off for dropping litter now, are you, Dad?’ she said, the strange heat of the word as it left her mouth, and the smile that it brought to his, making her suddenly furious.

  He pointed across the cobbles to a stall where wicker baskets were filled with tall displays of dried grasses and flowers.

  ‘I was twenty-three years old when you were born,’ he said. ‘I was already in New York.’ He shrugged a couple of times and pointed again to the stall.

  ‘Look,’ he said, pulling her across the street, as easily as a man changing channels on the television. ‘We always had these in our house at Easter. Why don’t we get Aurelia a traditional Easter palm? Do you think she’d like that? Is it her sort of thing?’

  Claudine gulped; the grease from the pierogi was still in her mouth. She hoped she wasn’t about to cry as he led her through the avenues of painted eggs and elaborate handicrafts, the flowers and the carvings, the baskets and yet more painted eggs and the rabbits and the chickens made from wicker and feathers and fluff.

  Puppets had nightmarish faces: even the ones of little boys and girls in traditional dress had the bulging eyes of constant strangulation.

  ‘Peculiar for a puppet state, don’t you think?’ he said as a busking violinist shook his hat at them and the wings of the pigeons flapped so close that a shiver ran down the back of her neck. ‘We already had such a tradition of puppetry.’

  He pointed to the statue of Adam Mickiewicz raised high on its plinth at the opposite end of the square: ‘Our greatest bard and philanderer,’ he said, and she thought she might as well be walking around with a tour guide for all the difference it made.

  Her phone was like an itch in her pocket. She wondered who Laura would get off with at the party. She hoped Laura’s new leather jacket wasn’t too much like her own. Claudine couldn’t bear it when her friends started copying her look.

  No time to stop and text though. Leszek was steering her towards a stall of fancy iced cakes. ‘Mazurek,’ he said. ‘Very traditional.’ Leszek chose a large ginger one for his mother, covered in lurid green and red cherries with the word ‘Hallelujah’ in waves of white icing.

  She was thinking what a shame it was that language wasn’t genetic. If she’d been born with the ability to speak Polish she’d be able to understand what he was saying to everyone, though it didn’t sound such a pretty language. She heard her name in the middle of something and interrupted him while he was paying for the cake.

  ‘This cake is for your mother?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, your grandmother.’

  ‘If she’s just had major surgery, will she want to eat cake like that?’

  He laughed. ‘You’ll see. She’s strong as an ox. A Polish ox. None stronger.’

  Claudine was right about the cake. The bountiful gingerbread with its glossy fruit and fat white ‘Hallelujah’ did nothing but highlight the frailty of the old woman propped in the hospital bed amidst the wires and the tubes. ‘Matka,’ he said and the tears bulged and slid from his eyes and he did nothing to wipe them away. He sat on the only chair by her bedside, crying silently, cradling her tiny yellow hand. ‘Matka.’

  Claudine couldn’t believe that anyone could be that shade of the paintbox. She could feel her own bile and stomach juices. The hospital smelled of old school dinners. Leszek seemed to have forgotten her existence. She hovered, uneasily shifting her weight from foot to foot behind him. Her grandmother’s breathing was shale at the shore, her tongue a dehydrated cockle. The whites of her eyes were as jaundiced as her face. She didn’t seem particularly aware that her son was at her bedside. Claudine had never seen anyone die: it was grotesque.

  She was shaky but Leszek needed to sleep when they got back to the hotel so there was nothing he could do to comfort her. He apologised for leaving her alone. ‘I am too sad to stay awake,’ he said, shrugging. Then, hours later, when he finally revived from his nap, they were straightaway on the drive across town, friends to see, and much to tell about the monuments they passed on the way. Leszek’s inner tour guide had made a good recovery: even his hair looked springier and he’d had a shave. He had an apricot-coloured scarf knotted at his neck to break up the black, a good choice.

  Claudine felt only worse for the solitude: while he’d napped or cried or shaved, or whatever it was he’d been doing for the last three hours, she’d managed only to pick spots, row with her mother on the telephone and watch herself cry in the hotel room mirror.

  ‘He was too wrapped up in his music. There wouldn’t have been any point in telling him …’ Aurelia still defended her decision. ‘I was so much older. I didn’t want to tie him down.’

  ‘But it might’ve been nice for me.’ Claudine had picked so hard at her chin that a small spot of blood appeared, the telephone wedged to her shoulder.

  ‘As soon as I saw you all fat and pink I knew that I wanted you to be all mine.’ This was the bit that Claudine had heard a million times before and she took the phone from her ear, ready to cut the line.

  ‘As I held you in my arms the waves of love were so strong …’ Aurelia had been saying. By the time Leszek emerged from his room, ready to go out, with his hands tucked into the pockets of his black pea coat and the bright scarf, Claudine was already regretting that she’d put the phone down.

  Leszek’s hands tapped along on the steering wheel to a tune in his head. She watched him chew his lip and tried to imagine him in the school hall with all the other parents, but none of the other fathers looked like a brooding hero and the thought of him being there made her laugh out loud.

  They were passing some particularly splendid buildings, dramatically lit with spotlights, and Leszek resumed his educational spiel: the town hall, the Mongol hordes, the kings at Wassel Hill, ignoring her sputtering laughter.

  ‘Tomorrow, before we visit Matka in the hospital, I will take you to the town I was from. To where Matka has lived all her life,’ he said. ‘Nowa Huta, it’s quite famous. I think you’ll find the architecture astonishing.’

  Yeah, like hell, she thought. She wondered how much time they had left before he would have to take himself back to New York. She wondered what arrangements they’d make to stay in touch. He gestured to some more gracious buildings of golden stone.

  ‘And imagine all this splendour and just down the road Auschwitz,’ he said. Claudine nodded wearily. Why was it that everyone always felt such an urge to educate her?

  They passed a man on a unicycle. He was wearing a business suit and carrying a polythene shopping bag in each hand. Claudine sank down in her seat, wondering if the lacy tights worked with her Doc Martens, and remembering driving through a town rather like this one, with lots of old stone and history, on a holiday when she was younger.

  It was somewhere in Italy, maybe Naples. She’d been touring with her friend and her friend’s father for long enough to lose interest in place names. She was missing her mother and suspected she’d been brought along, a bit like a frisbee, as holiday entertainment for the friend.

  Every time her friend’s father had to brake, even a little bit, Claudine would endure the sight of his arm shooting out to the side to protect his daughter, though the front seats were the ones with seatbelts. He would ruffle her hair or pinch her lightly on the cheek, a secret smile would pass between them before he put both hands back to the wheel. All holiday long Claudine had observed this little ritual from the rear seat of the car. It was noisy and hot and they’d had to drive with the windows open, which meant she couldn’t ever hear their conversation in the front.

  ‘Tomorrow I’ll show you the church my mother helped to build,’ Leszek was saying. ‘She took a rock from the rive
r and carried it in her arms like a huge stone baby.’

  Claudine’s brief fury melted away as she remembered how sad he must be.

  ‘It’s called the People’s Ark, you’ll see why tomorrow. Everyone brought the stones, on their horses, in carts; all two million stones brought by the people. Mainly it was a symbolic act,’ he told her. ‘The Pope sent a stone from St Peter’s tomb and a crystal from the moon was sent by the Apollo 11 mission.’

  Claudine noticed as he leaned over to the glove compartment for his glasses that although his hair was springy as her own, it was slightly thinning, so that the gap between the curls was wider than would be expected at the top of his head.

  ‘The lunar crystal’s been set in the tabernacle,’ he told her.

  All he ever did was talk at her like a tourist brochure, ignoring that there were plenty of things she wanted him to say, none of them to do with the history of a town or its buildings. She was being driven mad by Laura’s texts: the parties she was missing. It sounded like Laura’s leather jacket was identical to her own. She ought to call her mother back, she thought; but then he was parking and there wasn’t time.

  Leszek’s friends lived on the top floor of a modernist block of glass and red-painted metal. The lift was mirrored, like in a department store. Claudine stole a look as they went up, not speaking. She could see the resemblance, probably anyone could: something about the slope of the shoulders, the way they were standing. In the face, the thick brows: the same shape exactly as her own, the dense dark eyelashes, certainly those.

  Inside the apartment there was metal in the places you’d expect to see wood, black shiny furniture, stark walls of bare brick. She offered silent thanks to Aurelia for suggesting she pack the black dress, she’d have felt like Fairy Daffodil dressed in the yellow while eight of Leszek’s friends just stared at her as though she’d burst out of a cake.

  ‘Leszek’s daughter!’ they exclaimed. And then everyone laughed a little too loudly for a little too long, including Claudine. For a moment she felt like she’d landed in the middle of a group hallucination. They stared at her, still no one moved from the semicircle, trendy mourners in shades of crow, the women especially very thin, and then one of them, Elzbieta, clapped her hands and the others did too. One of the men wolf-whistled through the gap in his teeth.