Perfect Lives

by Polly Samson

  ‘Swavjik is my oldest friend,’ Leszek said, introducing her to the whistler, who wore a fine-knit black cardigan that almost reached his knees and a smile as wide as a slice of melon.

  ‘Wow, Leszek, what a beautiful daughter.’

  Before her face grew too hot, Malgosha, tall in a pin-striped man’s suit, swooped to her rescue, taking Claudine by the elbow and steering her towards a jug of margarita and a tray of glasses. She poured from the jug. ‘So, you tell me all about your mother,’ she said, holding up a tumbler that was misted with ice. ‘She must have been one strong woman!’

  ‘What do you mean, strong?’ said Claudine, accepting the glass and hoping that margarita was one of the drinks that she liked.

  ‘Secret for seventeen years!’ said Malgosha, her smile a gash of newly-applied lipstick. ‘If I had Leszek’s baby I think I’d shout it from every rooftop!’ Claudine raised her glass and chinked it to Malgosha’s. She needed this margarita, whatever it was.

  ‘Best thing at the time,’ Aurelia had said on the phone. Yeah, she thought. Best for who exactly? The drink was strong. One thing was proving to be true: life around Leszek was awash with alcohol.

  Dinner was red wine with pasta and sausages and then there was sweet wine with a chocolate tart and some sour cherries. Despite the rivers of booze everyone managed well in English, though occasionally the table got thumped and then there’d be a loose stream of Polish, all of them talking at once.

  When Leszek asked Swavjik if he’d roll a joint Claudine shivered on the edge of outrage; what was she supposed to do if they passed it to her? Watching it being rolled reminded her of the parties she was missing. She started to feel almost panicky at the thought of the joint.

  She was probably just as out of it as she would’ve been on this Saturday night on her home turf but instead of dancing she was struggling to follow a conversation about an orchestra, stuck on a wire chair between Leszek and his doleful friend Bazyl, a man with black-rimmed glasses and the looks of a spy. She tuned in and out of the debate about the orchestra. Swavjik’s flat was like something out of a magazine at the dentist: the table of thick black glass, everything rattling about when it got thumped, lots of chrome, strange globes of light hanging from chains overhead like giant light bulbs suspended from industrial steel joists. The chairs were close relations to shopping trolleys and, across the room, with its lid suggestively open, Swavjik’s inevitable piano loomed like an elephant.

  Leszek settled his back against his chair, knees to the table, and she watched him bring Swavjik’s skinny joint to his lips, watched it glow as he took a pull and waited, holding her own breath, for his long exhalation. For some reason she was reminded of a hot summer’s day, years before; a picnic by a river in Dorset, annoying little flies and jam sandwiches, Aurelia and the other grown-ups giggling and stripping off their T-shirts and jeans to go skinny-dipping from the bank.

  He took another tug on the joint, narrowing his eyes. Claudine tried to remember if any of her friends’ fathers took drugs in front of their children. She thought maybe Laura’s once did. He exhaled again and spared her the embarrassment by passing it straight back to Swavjik before exploding in coughs.

  In Dorset the grown-ups slipping and sliding down the bank, swinging breasts, white bums, daring each other to make the first splash. She’d never seen a penis before and now there were three just bobbing around. Aurelia whooping and laughing along with everyone else, the pelts of fur, the dancing penises, her burning shame as she sat with the other children with the jam sandwiches on the grass.

  Talk had turned rather predictably to music: Leszek promised he’d play. Malgosha told him about a composer she was working with. ‘A very idiosyncratic project,’ she said and everyone seemed to find it interesting. They were speaking slowly, stumbling for words of imperfect English because she was there. ‘Id-io-syn-cratic.’ Malgosha looked pleased with herself. ‘Please feel free to just carry on between yourselves in your own language’ – that’s what Claudine thought she should’ve said. Leszek was telling Swavjik something about some work he was doing with a rock band. He seemed to have forgotten she existed.

  Swavjik got overheated about the avant-garde turn that Leszek’s career had taken: ‘I suppose we forgive that he gave up playing the greatest music ever written,’ he said, banging the table, and Claudine wondered if Leszek made a habit of giving things up. Her head was starting to spin. ‘He was putting things inside the piano to see how they would sound. Always. Pencil cases, cloths, even his shoes.’

  Malgosha joined in. ‘He was mad,’ she said. ‘He and Swav never stopped practising. They were competing to see who could practise the longest. Seven hours sometimes. Both mad!’

  It probably would have been better if she’d allowed herself to be sick at Swavjik’s; Claudine’s pounding head was proof enough. Swavjik’s place had been at sea the whole time Leszek played the piano, while she slumped in a chair of black leather straps, and he’d played for what felt like a year. She didn’t know what was worse: the sound of last night’s piano spinning around the echoing flat with the bright globes hanging from the rafters, or the piped music that was now burrowing into her brain in the breakfast lounge of the hotel. The sight of Leszek’s scrambled eggs made her mouth sour. He poured her a glass of water, popped a couple of paracetamol from their foil and passed them across the table to her along with a Danish pastry that he’d carefully wrapped in a napkin to put in her pocket for later.

  ‘Ready to see Nowa Huta?’ he said, shaking the hire car keys, and the rattling made her wince.

  They parked beside a green kiosk, ALKO HOLE, its name biliously in red on the green boards.

  ‘Keep your phone out of sight,’ he said. ‘It can be a bit dodgy in this part.’ A sad wind blew up the street, a bus belched by looking a little rusty. Nowa Huta appeared to have been made entirely out of Lego. They’d driven for an hour through its thoroughfares, unwavering blocks of it, street after street. ‘Stalin’s dream,’ Leszek, her irrepressible tour guide, had explained. Grey Lego. Straight roads and tall poplars spaced as evenly as soldiers. Row upon row of concrete uniformity, slotted together beneath a wishy-washy sky. ‘Uncle Joe’s workers’ paradise, some of these have almost five hundred apartments,’ Leszek said, gesturing skywards at towering blocks like human filing cabinets.

  His beloved Arka Pana church now rose across the street like a great hulk beached beside the pavement. ‘The people’s ark.’ He threw open both arms as though bowing to a great beauty.

  The concrete walkways didn’t look much like Mount Ararat as the traffic streamed relentlessly by. The church itself was a great modern lump of a thing, reddish brown and flat on top. From where they waited to cross, it looked like it might have been pebble-dashed. It could have been a trendy library in a development town.

  ‘The state would not give an ounce of steel for this church. The people had to do it all themselves. Even the concrete was mixed with shovels, they wouldn’t even lend the big machinery.’

  Its windows were cut in at odd angles and its walls bulged outwards. A huge cross rose from the roof like a mast with a gold crown where the pennant would fly.

  ‘Not what the Soviets wanted to see being built in their Godless model city,’ he said.

  Claudine wished they had never come to Poland. It seemed so long ago that they had walked together along the shore in the rain, though it had been only days. It was simple then. He’d asked her to tell him a happy memory for every year of her life that he’d missed. Now he gestured at the church: ‘Thousands of people used to gather and prayers were said for Poland to be free from oppression.’

  Claudine stifled a yawn. A dog was barking high up on a balcony. It was tied up and between barks they could hear its chain rattling against the bars. Two boys in knee-length parkas scuffed past them on the scrubby patch of green. They turned to double take Claudine, the spottiest one pretended to trip. She wondered if Leszek might take her hand as they crossed the road. He’d held h
er hand almost naturally when they’d walked along by the sea. They’d swung their arms together. She’d told him that her earliest memory wasn’t a happy one: it concerned the brake failing on her pushchair. ‘It sounds like that scene from The Battleship Potemkin,’ he said, shuddering. ‘Only tell me happy things. Please don’t make me sad.’

  So she’d obliged with stories of Indian tents and birthday cakes and swimming races and scenes remembered more from watching videos of happy occasions than from the happy occasions themselves. She’d told him about the first time she saw snow and the day that Aurelia unscrewed the stabilisers from her bike.

  Arka Pana loomed over them; what had looked like pebble-dash from across the road was actually millions of large smooth river stones, set into its walls. An abstract glass panel shaped like a sail hung over the door.

  ‘When they weren’t allowed to have a church, thousands used to come to this very spot to hear midnight Mass under the stars,’ he said after they’d dodged the traffic and slipped through the glass doors, his hand on her elbow to guide her.

  It was a little cool inside, and muted: silent as a well. She noticed how the highest panels of glass were set in a long curve, like rigging. ‘My mother used to bring me to mass when it was just an open field. I remember it was freezing cold.’

  Claudine looked around, at the smooth grey concrete flanks of the walls, at the modern art that was hung there. From the side a muscular bronze Jesus Christ appeared to be flying rather than being crucified. He was leaping, balletic, though his arms and legs were in the crucifixion pose: toes pointed, long sinewy arms thrown back.

  ‘Suffering and redemption,’ Leszek said, pointing to the Christ. ‘During the communist times this church offered the people a chance to meet and to speak freely.’

  The church was empty, apart from two women in overalls sweeping the floor. Leszek and Claudine sat at the end of a pew made of heavily varnished pale wood, like the desks in a Victorian school. She wasn’t surprised to see him bow his head.

  She knew he needed to pray hard and tried to turn her own thoughts to her grandmother in the hospital; she should feel something other than dread. They would be visiting Matka again when they left the church, once Leszek had done with speaking to this God. Claudine wondered if he might have tried to share his God with her if he’d been around; she’d only got a rather languid agnostic pose to thank Aurelia for. It might have been nice to have a God. She touched the mole above her lip on the left side of her face. ‘Babcia’, as Leszek had said she must call her, Babcia had a mole, the same size, in the same position only hers sprouted a few thick white hairs.

  ‘Matka, this is your granddaughter,’ he had said in gentle Polish and Claudine wasn’t sure if her tears were for her grandmother or for herself. Too late, Babcia. It was like looking at a husk. She’d never know her now. She wished Leszek could have found her sooner. That whoever had sent the anonymous letter to him in New York had done so earlier.

  At last he lifted his head from his hands. It was so quiet in the Ark that she could hear the drop of water falling into the font.

  ‘Can we speak?’ she said into her hands.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, putting his palm to the back of her head, so she’d look at him. ‘I do want to talk. I can see you are troubled. Tell me, what do you want to know?’

  The irony of their surroundings wasn’t lost on her. Here they were in a sacred space, a public place, and yet it felt like the right place to finally demand the truth. They both leaned their elbows on the back of the pew in front.

  ‘You didn’t move to New York until three months before I was born,’ she said. ‘Surely someone must have noticed that she was pregnant? I’ve worked out the timing. Did you really have no idea?’

  ‘All my dreams were about music, melodies, harmonies, about the sounds I would get out of the piano.’ He had no apologies to make.

  ‘You went away. She didn’t even have a number for you …’

  ‘She could have got it. Seventeen years is a long time to keep a secret.’

  ‘You were twenty-three. Would you have demanded your share of me?’ Claudine almost giggled at the thought of it, and then went silent. She could feel the buzz of a message on her phone in her pocket but she ignored it.

  ‘What were you doing when I was born?’ she added when he still didn’t reply. Two nuns had come into the church. She could hear the small rustlings of their habits as they moved around the flowers and the candles.

  After a moment where it seemed he couldn’t hold her gaze he took a deep breath, putting his hat on his head and then pulling it off again.

  ‘I was still on tour with the guys, all that year,’ he said. ‘We went to South America, Cuba, met Ry Cooder, it’s the best I ever played.’ He flexed his fingers and looked at them sadly.

  ‘Would you have had me for half the holidays, that sort of thing?’ Claudine couldn’t stop now that she’d started.

  She turned to look again at Christ, at his ecstatic leap, the blocks of painted concrete behind him only hinting at a crucifixion, at his concentration-camp rib cage and a crown of thorns that looked more like barbed wire.

  His leaping from his bonds made her bold: ‘Would you have come back to her for my sake if you had known that she was pregnant?’ He looked terribly sad then. She noticed the clanging of the bells. They’d been ringing for quite a while, they echoed in her ears. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to lie.’

  ‘I’d heard the rumours, could do the maths,’ he said. ‘People called, at first.’ He too looked up at the Christ, who had his head turned to the bluish light flooding through the slice of window: a noble profile with a goatee beard and an aquiline nose.

  ‘All my life, all I’ve ever wanted to do is to play my own music. I was in the Academy in Gdansk from when I was seven. Practise, practise, practise. My mother working her whole life to make that possible. Physical work, she had calluses on her hands sometimes. Rubbed raw.

  ‘When I was home I’d come with her to this church that she’d helped to build. I remember a ZOMO militiaman hitting her across the shoulders with a baton, her arms, her back, over and over again as I tried to pull her away. She always wanted to give as good as she got. There was always fighting. These ZOMO people were a bit out of their brains, like your football hooligans.

  ‘If there was a riot then there was tear gas and we had to run and crowd into the apartments nearby where we could put the cream on our eyes. One time I remember they fired fluorescent dye with the water from the tanks and we were marked for days afterwards and after dusk the UV patrols with their powerful reflectors, the dye impossible to wash out of our clothes, always waiting to be beaten up. Do you understand?’ he said.

  ‘I prayed and prayed that I would be allowed one day to have a life playing my own music, that’s all I wanted. Where’s the harm in music? I was sick of feeling frightened. That life had just started for me when I knew your mother; I met her at the Guild when I’d only just arrived. I always thought she’d have no trouble meeting somebody else. I was already heading for New York even before I lived with her.’

  He looked almost out of breath when he’d finished speaking. ‘Come on,’ he said, taking her arm. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  She imagined him always running: London, America, South America, Cuba. It was bad enough when Aurelia had to go away to play in this city or that festival but there had always been careful arrangements.

  ‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘If you’d been around I’d have been orphaned twice-over by the piano.’

  Usually she’d been sent to stay next door. The daughter, Lottie, who was pale and these days ate nothing but Quark, always had everything that Claudine wanted. The father owned a toy shop and sometimes Lottie didn’t even bother to get the things out of their boxes. ‘When people get what they want they haven’t got a clue what to do with it,’ Aurelia said.

  Leszek opened the door to the pavement. ‘So few young people come to the church now,’ he said a
s they went out of the Ark.

  ‘After all that fighting. Molotov cocktails and beatings. Now we don’t like to be constrained by anything, not even religion.’

  They stood together on the wall at the top of the steps outside, watching the people gather. It had started to spot with rain. ‘Hey, I’m very glad you’re in the world,’ he said, tipping her under the chin, and then both their phones rang at once and they bent away from each other to answer.

  The bells were making it difficult. The hospital was calling him, ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh no …’ he said when he heard the news. Laura was on the end of hers, party postmortem, non-stop: everyone got hammered. Crap band. Her jacket got nicked. A bit of a whoopsie: she’d take the morning after pill. The people flowed past, parting like a river around the man and the girl standing apart from each other on the path talking into their mobile phones.

  IVAN KNOWS

  Ivan almost choked on his candyfloss when he saw Laura Idlewild flying past in her blue bra. The clowns had just run off, squirting each other with water, the lights grew dim and some trumpet music had started to play. She appeared in a single spotlight as suddenly as if she had jumped straight through the roof of the tent. The throbbing of the generators grew louder with the rising trumpet and she swung out over their heads, arching her back. She was silver in the spotlight, surprisingly muscular: practically naked right in front of his eyes. Back and forth across the big top she swung, with powerful pulses of her body sending the trapeze swooping ever higher, her spangles twinkling. Ivan gasped, nudged Angus.

  ‘Look, it’s Laura,’ he said. His head was being drawn back and forth like a cat watching a bird.