Swans Are Fat Too

by Michelle Granas

  Hania made a note to email a question to Konstanty, glad that she had something besides various persons' physical and emotional ailments to discuss with him: 'Would the consequences really have been worse if Poland had not fought Sweden? Of course, I realize there were no easy answers. Only, I do wonder at the spilling-your-blood-for-the-country gusto with which these events are portrayed in Polish films and books…'

  When the century was over Poland had lost a third of its population; its territory had been reduced; agriculture and trade were failing; poverty became widespread; toleration diminished; corruption spread, magnatic families gained in power, and Sarmatism, a frequently regressive and xenophobic world view, became prevalent.

  And now, thought Hania, looking up from these images of past disaster, I can go to the window and look out at a stream of shiny cars and well-dressed people walking their dogs. My world seems peaceful and secure. But in Poland's golden age, how impossible all the future catastrophes must have seemed too. What was it one thought of in looking back to the 17th century? Baroque architecture, with its combined swirl and brio and sobriety of bell tower and pediment and buttress? Someone occupied such buildings and attended such churches. In that age too there must have been boys who played with small dogs––before the tides of destruction rolled over their homes, flattening dwellings and harvests; before they took up a sword and, listening not to reason but the spirit of the times, rode off to add their blows in the beastliness.

  She shook off the mood. As she reread a line she had just typed from the diarist Jan Chrysostom Pasek, she imagined some of these 17th-century Sarmatian noblemen, with their shaven heads and long, sashed gowns, speaking Polish in a macaronic mix with Latin: 'In decursu Augusti we went to Denmark to help the Danish king, who made an aversionem in the Swedish war...not ex commiseratione for us, but because that nation was ab antiquo well-inclined to Poland…and feeling odium against the Swedes...' She went on with her work. Here, anyway, was a lighter reference to horrors coming from abroad, by a contemporary poet with a home-grown taste in beverage:

  In Melcieśmy, I remember, I tasted coffee:

  A drink for pashas, Murats, Mustafas,

  And other Turks, such an abominable

  Drink, such a horrid poison and venom,

  No saliva could carry it past the teeth,

  Christians shouldn't pollute their faces with it.

  –Jan Andrzej Morsztyn

  She decided to get up and make herself some of the anathematized drink, but here was Maks awake and jumping onto the sofa beside Bartek, who greeted him with sufficiently lavish affection that Hania, whose feelings for the mongrel had previously been tepid at best, warmed toward the dog.

  "Isn't she beautiful?" Maks asked.

  "Yes," Hania lied. "Why did you name her Bartek?" In Polish, a male name for a female creature made for oddities in declension.

  "I like that name. It's like Batman. She was starving and so poor. I thought maybe she doesn't want to be starving; maybe she wants to be a hero. Besides, when I found her I didn't know she was a she. Kalina said." He was stroking the dog's head lovingly.

  "It's definitely a she. It's going to have puppies."

  "Really?" He looked at Hania with delight.

  "Really?" said Kalina, appearing in the doorway in her too short nightshirt, and throwing herself toward the dog with effusions: "Sweet little doggie. Are we going to have puppies? Are we going to be a mommikins?"

  Hania observed the group with distaste for a moment.

  "Yes. And what do you think your parents are going to say?"

  That froze them for a moment. "They'll never know," said Kalina, after consideration. "We'll put them all in the attic…I suppose we'll have to give the puppies away when they get old enough," she added to Maks. "We can take them to the dog market by the Łazięnki."

  "Maybe we can sell them!" said Maks eagerly, "I saw puppies there for 500 złoty. If she had four or five puppies that would be a million złoty! We'd be rich!"

  "No, Maks. When are you going to learn to count? It would be 2,000 złoty. But that's only for purebred dogs."

  "Bartek's better than a purebred dog! Her puppies…"

  "Yes," said Hania, breaking in on these calculations, "one way or another––if you try hard enough––you can probably get rid of the puppies. But what about Bartek?" And she told them what Konstanty had said.

  "There's no hope," said Kalina, looking serious. "Mama and Tata will never let us keep her. If Maks makes a fuss they'll say 'okay, you can keep her,' and then one day he'll come home from school and find she's gone. What are we going to do? They'll take her to the pound."

  "No!" shrieked Maks, grabbing the dog around the neck and squeezing it so that it squirmed and whined.

  Konstanty would think she'd failed toward the children if the dog was disposed of, Hania thought, but she had no doubt that Kalina was right.

  "Perhaps you want to think about trying, yourselves, to see if you can find someone to adopt Bartek. Some nice person." But even as she said the words, she knew it was wishful thinking. By the time the puppies were old enough to wean, school would have started, Ania and Wiktor would be back, she would be gone …and a dog of uncertain age and pedigree would be hard to get rid of at any time. There were so many dogs about. Everywhere one went there were people with dogs––boxers, terriers, limping Alsatians, quantities of dachshunds, and every sort of half or quarter dachshund. So many people in Warsaw already had a dog.

  "You could keep her!" said Kalina. "You could tell Mama and Tata it was your dog."

  "Yes," cried Maks happily, as if the problem were solved. "That's a great idea. And she would really still be ours, but you would say she yours. Oh, that's great!"

  "No, Maks, it won't work, I'm afraid," said Hania with regret. "I have a job in New York. I have to go back to it at the beginning of September. I can't stay here."

  "You're going away?" Maks asked in disbelief.

  Both children were silent for a long time.

  Then, "I told you," said Kalina to Maks. And to Hania, "but you could take her with you. It would be better than what will happen to her here."

  "I can't. The lease on my apartment in New York has a no-pets clause."

  "You're going away and you're not going to help us?"

  "Oh Maks, I wish I could help you, but I don't know how. I'll try to think…" But he didn't let her finish.

  "I hate you!" he screamed, his face turning suddenly red. "I thought you were okay. But you're not. You're just a big, fat, stupid turnip!" He ran out of the room.

  Then he thrust the door open again: "I'm going to make your life miserable!" He slammed the door.

  "He doesn't mean it," said Kalina with averted face to the silence in the air.

  "Yes, I think he does."

  "Yeah, he probably does." Kalina agreed, watching the dog as it began to scratch the paint off the door in an attempt to follow Maks.

  10

  Libertas elementum meum

  – motto from a political tract by King Stanisław Leszczyński

  Konstanty stood in his apartment, looking at the genealogical chart. It had been made by a talented miniaturist some time before the war, on a large parchment sheet, so that a good part of the wall was covered with the small, partly imaginary, heads of his ancestors, surrounded with tiny laurel leaves, in all their branching ramifications. Here was a lady––he peered at the inch-high portrait––reputed to have had Socinian views; did she give in, weighed down and overwhelmed by her surroundings, her background, or did she want to scream 'no!'? Her three sons went off to war and only one, his ancestor, came back. His eyes traced the line downwards. Intriguers, plotters, inciters to rebellion––oh, and here was a black sheep, the family gambler.

  Konstanty had a glass of red wine in his hand, but he wasn't drinking it. The wine was a cosmopolitan habit he'd brought back from abroad; Polish men didn't drink wine alone in their apartments, or not, at any rate, from glasses. Occasionally he gl
anced down at the liquid and watched the red climb the glass when he tilted it, considering. He should take that down, that chart; he would have done so when he moved back from London, only it had seemed rather improper to change anything in the apartment, it being all the way his parents had arranged it. There was a crucifix over the door of nearly every room. Like the chart, the tapestry covering one wall, and the scattered oil paintings, they seemed a part of the décor to him.

  He was thinking of the last email from Hania. 'Is it possible to reject the history of one's nation?' she had asked him, and while he knew it was a rhetorical question, he was framing an answer. He didn't think she quite had the intellectual upper hand, and yet she was always pushing him to think further; just slightly beyond that point where, previously, he would have been content to rest, for a year or two at least. Under her influence, he realized he was beginning to think rather differently about a number of things he'd always taken as givens.

  She had written once that 'rejection' was easier for her as an outsider. It had been easier anyway, in regards to American history. The American Revolution, she had written––with a sort of flippancy that rather perturbed him, in some deep corner of his being––was wrong, throwing the tea overboard was stealing, and being taxed, however unjustly, was no reason for killing people. She had said so, she wrote, during a junior-high history class. The teacher had been embarrassed. The students, fortunately, weren't paying attention. What, he wondered, would happen to a Polish child who objected in class to one of the accepted symbols of Polish glory?

  He had written to her: 'Are you talking about not venerating events that cost so many lives? Of course, it's axiomatic that historians are supposed to give a balanced picture.' Haven't I managed it? he wondered. He had a feeling that he, who had lived longer in Poland, was closer to the horrors of its past––was more weighted by its history. He agreed with her, and still he had a feeling that she made no allowances for the wrongs Poland had suffered, for its very real grievances in the face of crushing superior forces. She gave it no weight for being the underdog…

  She expected more. 'What I want,' she had written back to him, 'is for a history––for a world view, because that's what it produces, isn't it?––to be devoid of states' interests, of judgments on the order of 'what was good for' Poland, or America, or whichever group of people (disregarding how bad for some other group), and whose goal would be to record the misery inflicted or the better conditions achieved, regardless of ethnic or national allegiance…All histories should be in essence histories of what was good––or ill––for humanity...'

  But surely many historians––Polish, American, European––were objective and critical. Or was it that too few listened to them? After all, there were all those statues, and museums, and streets with names like 'Defenders of the Peace,' all those 'Combatants' Parks'––he had pointed them out himself. He had an image of Polish history reduced to the scale of the history of Szczotki Dolne, of the sole good being the advance of Szczotki Dolne in relation to Poland and the world. If Western historians had managed to get beyond that in terms of a broader association––Europe, the West––were they still at the 'Szcotki Dolne level' in terms of what was good for Russia, China, Africa? Would globalization bring about the broader picture, or only a change from nationalist interest to the interests of a cosmopolitan elite? He mused for a moment.

  I won't take down the chart, he decided, but I won't expect my children to hold their great-great-grandfather's activities in great reverence either. He peered at the tiny miniature head of Michał Konstanty Radzimoyski on the chart. And here were his own grandparents, Jan Michał and Izabela, good people and upright, who brought their family safe through the war with uncomplaining resourcefulness. He couldn't be irreverent towards them, certainly. And yet his own children would be different. If I ever have any, he added to himself, drinking the last of the wine and heading for his computer.

  "So you don't want me to invite Kalpurnia again?" said Pelagia to Konstanty as they sat the next day drinking tea in her peaceful garden amongst the tall pine trees. He shook his head, "Rather not. Very nice girl. Exactly the right type, I suppose. But no."

  "You're hard to please."

  "Yes."

  "How can she be the right type, and be 'no'?"

  "Chemistry?"

  "What nonsense."

  "No, I want a woman who is very intelligent, full of ideas, of warmth…who wants to listen to me, even when I'm boring. I don't know…"

  "'Very intelligent' might be difficult; 'fairly intelligent,' I can come up with."

  "It's just that I've met one like that…"

  "Really?" Pelagia was all interest. "Tell me about her."

  "No, for a lot of reasons…and she's not a possibility."

  "Hmm…"

  Konstanty could see Pelagia thinking, and wished he hadn't said anything.

  "I know," she exclaimed, with an attempt to stifle a giggle, "it's Natalia Lanska's granddaughter, isn't it?"

  "Let's change the subject."

  Pelagia obligingly changed the subject, but continued to eye him. Suddenly, in the midst of a conversation about the health system, she broke off and stated firmly, "You need someone like Izabela, the one who designs furniture…some one very beautiful and charming. Too bad she's already married."

  "Beautiful and charming––those are always married."

  "True." Pelagia sat back in her chair and considered this fact glumly.

  "I'm not sure beauty is really necessary, anyway," added Konstanty after a pause.

  A long pause. "Wiktor can compose the music for your wedding."

  "Pelagia! Please."

  But really, thought Konstanty, as he drove home, rather regretting that he had let the conversation with his sister go so far, what is beauty? Perhaps because I'm a doctor, because I am acquainted with what's under the outer wrapping, it makes me too familiar with people as conglomerations of possibilities for high blood pressure, for heart failure, for the proper or improper functioning of all sorts of tubing and mechanics and chemistry. All bodies age, and most minds. I want a mind, he thought––but here he had to pay a bit of attention to the road, to downshift––I want a mind, he thought, shifting up again––that I will not outgrow. The necessities of the traffic prevented him from putting a face to the mind at once, or from considering that not too long ago the outer wrapping had not been a matter of indifference to him at all. But when, some time later, he began to think about Hania, he at once shook his head. Of course not Hania. Pelagia had known he wasn't serious, couldn't be serious, otherwise she would never have joked the way she had.

  A civil war led to the abdication in 1668 of the last Vasa king, Jan Kazimierz. He was succeeded by two Polish noblemen. The second, Jan Sobieski, was born in 1629. He studied philosophy in Cracow, learned languages (including Tatar), and travelled abroad. His education, and perhaps his personality, fitted him for a better existence than he made of it. He went off with his brother to take part in opposing the Khmelnytsky Rebellion; the brother died and the rest of the story is contained in war: moving up the ranks to commander, he was in the Battle of Bereszteczko––1651, the Battle of Warsaw––1656, the Battle of Podhajce––1667, etc., etc., every year a battle––Hania typed on…the Battle of Chocim––1673, (as a result of his victory here––and French bribes to the nobles––he was elected King of Poland in 1674). Then more battles…the Battle of Vienna––1683 ('The people kissed my hands, my clothing,' he wrote to his wife. 19,000 soldiers died)…then more battles…He died in 1696, his country in disarray, and is considered––'oddly' Hania inserted, marking the word for Konstanty to note––to have contributed to Poland's glory.

  Even while I am typing these things, thought Hania, I am thinking not of unending death and destruction, but of the fact that Konstanty wrote these words, looked at these words, and I am wondering when I will see him again. She knew that some days he worked evenings at the hospital, so it was much less likely that she w
ould run into him on the stairs or at the grocery shop––or even that he might––she was silly enough to hope it––ask her out for coffee again. She had the more difficulty in keeping her mind off her imaginary romance in that the home atmosphere was unpleasant.

  There seemed nothing to be done. Days passed. Maks' bad temper gradually declined into a simmering boil that allowed him to function normally and even be tolerably polite, but which boded ill, Hania realized, for some time when she was least expecting it. Fortunately, she had had the foresight to check her bed that first night. Three eggs were nestled at the foot, under the covers, just waiting for her to climb in and break them. But since then nothing had happened. Hania checked chairs before she sat down, her drink before she drank it, and kept Maks as much as possible in sight. He returned to learning the piano, even if he wasn't very cooperative, and insisted on changing the rhythm and the dynamics, playing everything fortissimo and looking at her to see if she would object. Sometimes she simply walked away and closed the door on him.

  She tried to persuade him as much as possible to get out of the house, hoping that exercise might blunt some of the edge of his aggression. Her persuasion mostly took the form of bribery pure and simple. "Maks, come to the park and then we'll eat ice cream."

  Wasn't that the tactic her mother had used with her? Hania thought, as they sat one day in café chairs beside the sidewalk, eating chocolate ice cream. After Babcia had said she'd never make a pianist, no talent at all, and Mama had been determined to prove her wrong: "Hania, practice one more hour and you can have a big bowl of ice cream." It was a very bad idea, using food as a reward regularly. Look at the results for her. She hardly fit in this wicker chair. Well, and why did people so nearly always repeat the mistakes that had been made in their own upbringing? Like Wiktor and her father being neglected as children, being furiously resentful of Babcia for the fact, and then turning off to their own children. Or herself, a stuffed child, stuffing another.