Swans Are Fat Too

by Michelle Granas

  "Right…" said Hania, and she left the children, went into the piano room, and sat down at a piano. She reached for the keys, and before she even began to think, her fingers began to play….

  Suddenly she broke off. That was the piece she'd played at her last concert. A very small concert. She had played it perfectly and the applause had been half-hearted. She'd heard the audience's soft, startled cessation of breath when she appeared on stage. Now she sat with her hands in her lap.

  In three weeks she had to go back to New York. She would leave the children and return to her job. One had to make a living somehow. She doodled on the keys with one hand, rose impatiently, and went to the bookshelf. She ran her eyes over the list of titles hoping to remember something of use to her in this situation. There was Orzeszkowa's On the Niemen––that was an unusual riches to rags story in which the 19th-century heroine, against the background of Poland's last failed insurrection, considers leaving a position of comparative wealth and leisure for poverty and hard labour with the man she loves. I would gladly give up my comparative wealth for comparative poverty with Konstanty, she thought, but the question was hardly likely to arise. She was not the heroine of a novel and her going or staying only concerned the children and herself.

  And in either case, what was she going to do about Bartek? What was she going to do about Kalina? She had tried again to get the girl to go to a doctor but Kalina had refused point blank. And now she'd taken again to disappearing in the afternoons, not saying where she was going, and dressed in those outfits––those 'I'm a prostitute' outfits, there was no other word for them…And Maks? Hania, seated again at the piano, struck a quiet chord with her left hand. Well, it wasn't really her affair. In three weeks she'd be gone…she wouldn't have to worry about Kalina or Maks ever again, probably. She'd hear about them every few years through her father, who'd most likely get it wrong––she'd learn Kalina was a geology student when in fact she would be studying psychology. Maks would end up in a reformatory and no one would ever mention him. They would pass out of her existence.

  The next afternoon Kalina put her head through the door of the piano room. "I'm going out." At least she said she was leaving these days, thought Hania––that was progress.

  "Kalino! Wait!"

  Kalina came into the room, looking defensive. "What? I have to leave. I'm going to be late."

  "Late for what?"

  "I have to meet someone."

  Hania stopped on the point of asking "whom?" Kalina wouldn't tell her and she wouldn't like the prying. "I just––I know it's not my business, but I wonder if you really want to go out dressed like that?"

  "What's wrong with the way I'm dressed?" Kalina asked angrily.

  "It's just…" Hania began tentatively, "there are certain ways of dressing that make a woman look like she doesn't have a very high opinion of herself. Like she's begging for attention…"

  "What do you know about it?" Kalina was instantly on the defensive, "Look at the way you dress––you call that having a high opinion of yourself?"

  "I have to dress like this because I'm so overweight," murmured Hania, abashed. "I..."

  "Well, if you have such a good opinion of yourself, why are you so overweight?"

  Hania had no answer, and Kalina pulled the door shut and went off.

  No, it wasn't exactly like that, thought Hania, trying to reason down her hurt; that wasn't really the mechanism. After all, there was Babcia. No one could say she had had anything but a superb opinion of herself, and yet she had been very large. Babcia had just liked to eat and she attacked the subject of food with the same impetuosity that she put into everything else. There had come a point for her, Hania supposed, when the pleasures of the table had come to outweigh the advantages of being less round. But then, for Babcia it had probably been a choice to let herself go. Hania hadn't made a choice. She could never remember exactly when she had ceased to be simply a far too chubby child and had become a seriously heavy teenager. She distinctly remembered the comments of other kids in high school, but by then she had been well on her way to obesity and any change had seemed impossible. She had had her music to concentrate on. She had concentrated to effect, blotting out every other unpleasant aspect of her life. It was only lately that she had begun to look at herself, to look about, and to think that she had ruined her life––no, that was too strong a phrase––that she had, rather, like most other people, in one way or another, put a serious impediment in the way of her own happiness.

  What would her grandmother say to her, she wondered, if she were still alive?––now that she was adult, and perhaps they could have talked as adults. Would there have been any level at which they could have met? Would there have been one person in her family who might have empathized with her? Probably not, she thought, remembering some of her grandmother's more abrasive letters, but she would never know. Suddenly she wished very much that her grandmother were still alive. Now, she realized, she would never really know what she had been like. Tomorrow, she decided, she would go to visit her grave. She hadn't been yet.

  Kalina was in a foul mood the next morning and only reluctantly and resentfully agreed to watch Maks, who said he didn't want to be watched by his stupid sister and had taken Bartek into the bedroom and slammed the door. Hania left the house with a feeling of escape. To walk along the street alone, to be unencumbered and have an hour of freedom ahead of her––it was wonderful, it was lovely, the sun was shining; she sat down on the bench at the bus stop to await her bus. The bus didn't come at once, and she began to wonder what Maks was doing, and why Kalina had suddenly become so unpleasant again, and what she was going to do about Bartek. Of course, in a very short time she would go back to New York, and then she would be free all the time, like this, and it would be wonderful and––very lonely.

  A car had stopped in front of the bus stop and someone was speaking to her. It took a moment for her to come out of her thoughts. It was Konstanty, asking if he could give her a ride.

  The car pulled back into traffic. She sat in the car and remembered what Kalina had said about her clothes and weight. She was going to Powązki Cemetery, she said. He suggested that if she had time to wait while he went into the hospital, he just had a brief errand there, and then he'd be glad to accompany her. Unless she preferred to go alone?

  Prefer to go alone or with Konstanty? She almost laughed. Still, she was rather startled, made rather shy by his offer. She thanked him quietly.

  Was it just his imagination, he thought, or was she losing weight? Maybe he was just getting used to the way she looked. She had quite a nice face, actually. Large hazel eyes and nothing objectionable about her other features.

  They pulled up in front of the hospital. It was a pleasant-enough place, arranged around a courtyard with flowers and trees. "I'll just be a moment," he said, and was gone. Hania sat and watched a stream of elderly people, of women with swollen legs, of hobbling men with inward-looking faces, passing in and out of the building. She imagined them waiting at bus stops, going home, fixing dinner, washing their clothes and ironing them––they were all so clean––and doing the housework, all in the face of illness.

  Konstanty was back. He gave her his quick half smile. "I hope I wasn't too long. We can go now."

  "I think that no matter what problems one had," Hania said with feeling, "a half hour spent in front of a hospital would make one think they were fairly small. It's like that piece of Solon I read once: 'If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap, whence every one must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.' I don't know how doctors bear it."

  They were in traffic again. "It's not really that bad. What makes any problem seem worse is the sense of helplessness. Mostly we can do something for our patients. Not always, of course––and then it's good to have some other interest, some distraction. Most doctors have some outside passion that occupies them; for the women doctors it's usually their children. The male doctors go skii
ng or mountain hiking…I like history... But I'm sorry to hear you have problems that need to be reduced to size by the contemplation of worse ones."

  The sympathy and the unstated question were almost too much. Almost she told him everything. Instead, she just smiled and said offhandedly, "No, nothing so terrible––just small worries about the children."

  "I suppose their parents will be back soon."

  Why did this fact no longer seem desirable?

  They were approaching the cemetery, parking, passing by flower stalls. Polish people were always buying flowers for graves. Hania stopped. She couldn't afford one of those big formal bouquets––not to mention that she thought they were hideous––and perhaps one of the small pots would seem too skimpy. She could imagine her grandmother thinking "is that all?" in the one case, and "hmpf, what a waste of money," in the other. Konstanty was waiting patiently.

  "I don't know," she said, "None of these seem right somehow."

  They walked through the gates into the alleys of graves, quiet below the tall arborvitae and linden trees. Even the sound of the nearby traffic seemed muffled. Here were the birch crosses to the young, the piteously young, men and women who died fighting in the Home Army. "Age 17." Hania read on one of the markers, "I don't suppose he even understood what it was all about."

  "The origins and reasons? No. Most soldiers don't. Or if they do, only their small, immediate part of it. They are cogs in wheels beyond their imaginings, no matter how well instructed or aware they may be...And not only soldiers. Take the First World War. Perhaps 37 million casualties, and the causes––I don't mean the train of events––are so unclear that historians can't agree on them; only that there was a great deal of nationalist feeling about."

  They walked on. He said, "There used to be the graves here of some of the German soldiers who fell; some thousands of them in mass graves. But they were moved a hundred kilometers or so outside of Warsaw. I don't know why."

  And here they were passing the tombs of the survivors of the 1863 Uprising. The graves were planted with hostas with tall pale-blue flowers; there was moss and cobblestones. What a lot of old rebels lived to be one hundred, thought Hania. Was that like musicians? They tended to be very long-lived too; it was good to have an interest in life. Were they kept alive by a passion of contrariness?

  A short walk further and they reached the grave they were seeking. And now that they were here there seemed nothing to say or do. Hania stood contemplating the slab of marble. "Natalia Lanska, Pianist," it said, and her dates. I'd prefer to have "beloved wife and mother" on mine, thought Hania suddenly, not "pianist." Still, she was sure "pianist" was exactly what her grandmother would have wished. No doubt she had even directed it to be engraved thus.

  She turned away, and Konstanty fell into step beside her. "I used to hear your grandmother playing," he said, "when I first came back to Poland from England. I would come back from the hospital––I was doing very long shifts in those days, conditions were worse than they are now––sometimes I would come in weary and discouraged, and I would hear your grandmother playing. I'm not musical, you know. I can't tell one Chopin piece from the other, but I always found it solacing and––uplifting, in a way. When she fell ill and stopped playing, I missed it. I've never found that recorded music has the same effect at all, even though it's supposedly more perfect––or so I've read."

  "Yes. Live music is like a conversation with another person, recorded music is like words in a book. It's not the same thing."

  "When will I have the privilege of hearing you play?"

  "Oh, I don't play anymore," she answered dully and he gave her a look and obligingly changed the subject.

  "Over there," he said, pointing an arm, "is a Muslim cemetery, and in that direction, the old Jewish cemetery."

  "What will you do about the Second World War?" asked Hania, as if by an association of ideas. "I notice you've left it off in the material you gave me. Are you still working on it?"

  "Yes. I'm thinking about it. Its closeness makes it difficult. My parent's generation lived through it––or didn't live through it in a lot of cases––and the numbers are so vast. The extermination of the Jews. I don't know if you realize we passed through the former Jewish ghetto on our way here? It's all Stalinist-and-later-era apartment buildings now." He gestured with an arm, "And then the non-Jewish population––2 million or more across Poland. During the Warsaw Uprising, over 150,000 civilians died in two months...In Poland––as in America and England, I think––we concentrate on our own losses; we forget the other civilians who died: Germany's more than two million victims, Russia's 13 to 17 million, China's 11 to 16 million. Over 60 million people across the world, and over half of them noncombatants––women, children, the elderly.…We don't remember much about the bombing of German cities, or about Hiroshima, or the millions who starved in Bengal under British rule, or that our ally Stalin was a monster. It wasn't the liberating, saving, or patriotic event of later myth-making."

  "You don't want, certainly, to exonerate the Nazis of their crimes. But the other participants shouldn't be exalted either. To paraphrase Churchill, you think that 'Never have so many owed their deaths to so few?'"

  He was a little shocked at her irreverence, but smiled. "Something like that. Only, no, it's really that we're all responsible."

  They walked in silence for a while, and then he continued. "To me the only heroes were––not the politicians or the fighters––but the ordinary people who risked their lives to save others––and there were many who did so. For instance, there was a young Pole named Matysiak I read about recently. He not only went into the Ghetto to bring out the Jewish girl he loved and her family––he then went back to rescue her dog. A couple I know kept a Jewish woman, a complete stranger, hidden in their apartment for two years––to the risk of their own children. I don't know that it's a decision I would have made. Of course, there were lots of denouncers too––that's the other side of the coin––but when one thinks that for every Jewish person saved ordinarily not one, but very many people, had to be involved, then one can see that Warsaw still holds numerous individuals––elderly people now––who showed the best side of their humanity."

  "Yes." They were strolling slowly, very slowly, back towards the car. Hania broke another long silence. "Speaking of difficult subjects, do you think Churchill did help Stalin assassinate General Sikorski? Or is that just one of those conspiracy theories––Poles have a tendency towards those, I know."

  "No. I don't know if it was Churchill. Or if it was an assassination. But I think the fact that the British have sealed the records for an additional fifty years is suspect."

  "Fifty years. I wonder if I'll live long enough to know the truth?"

  Not unless you lose weight, he thought, and then was angry with himself for the thought. It seemed so cruel, so harsh to have jumped to his mind like that. And she was really such a nice young woman. "Of course," he answered. "It won't make the news in America, but I'll send you a postcard, and we can dodder over to our old history books and scribble little amendments in the margins."

  Konstanty dropped her off at their building. He had errands to do, he said. Hania, after a visit to a hospital and a graveyard and a discussion of war casualties, should have been depressed. Hania floated across the sidewalk and up to the door as if she were a part of the sunshine.

  Aneta, the neighbor, was there, just going in. She watched Hania descend from the car and approach the entrance.

  "So he gave you a ride?" She was watching the car drive away.

  "Yes."

  "He's nice, isn't he?"

  "Yes." They went into the building and began to climb the stairs.

  "Of course, I suppose he feels a lot of gratitude to your family."

  Hania didn't really want to discuss her family or Konstanty with Aneta, but she couldn't help asking, "What do you mean?"

  "It was because of your grandmother that they––the Radzimoyskis––got to keep tha
t apartment. Everybody knows that. She had pull with the authorities. Didn't you know? Didn't you ever wonder how come only you––your family––and the Radzimoyskis have a full pre-war apartment, and for the rest of us they were divided? It was your grandmother. Who knows where the Radzimoyskis would have ended up otherwise, because in those days…well, you've heard how it was. You're lucky."

  Hania could hear the note of envy, that bane of Poland, creeping into Aneta's voice. Even Aneta, she thought, whom she'd always thought pleasant, if simple: et tu Aneta. Suddenly she felt quite flat. So perhaps his attention wasn't liking for her, but repayment, in sort, of a family debt to her grandmother? Well, of course, that made more sense. She said good-bye to Aneta and began to climb the next flight with such a weight on her heart that she suddenly realized––it's not a crush. Her legs didn't seem to want to move. She leaned against the banister. She was trembling and she felt sick. It's not a crush, she thought, I am in love with him, and I have every reason to be in love with him. He's a kind, caring, interesting man whose character has been known to me for a long time and whose family background vouches for his adherence to high standards. I'm in love with him. It's not just some crush that I'll forget about when I go back to New York and my usual activities.

  But I'll have to.

  She let go of the banister, straightened herself, and went on up the stairs.

  She opened the door of the apartment to chaos.

  "Hania! Come! Come quick!" shrieked Kalina.

  Maks appeared, dancing about, waving his arms. "Bartek's having puppies! Bartek's having puppies!"

  "Haannia!" called Kalina urgently.

  Hania hurried down the hall and into Maks room. Bartek had chosen Maks' bed for her birthing nest. In the midst of heaped sheets and blankets, the dog was panting and straining. One small puppy––was it a puppy?––lay in a crumpled ball, another appeared to be emerging from the birthing canal. There was blood everywhere and green liquid. Hania felt her stomach heave.