Swans Are Fat Too (10 page)

There was a scrawl at the side of the page. Hania struggled to make it out:
Is this just trivia or is it symbolic of the variable fate of those who go against tradition?

Then there was Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski (Modrevius), a pioneer of modern political thought…

Another person who went against established ideas, Hania noted.

…He advocated an equitable welfare system and the idea that the law should be the same for everyone. If anyone, persons in privileged positions should be more severely punished than other people for any crimes committed, and wealthy young men should be better educated so they would stop spending their time playing lutes, singing indecent songs, and thinking of nothing but feasting and pomp; they should learn common sense and how to listen before giving orders themselves.

Really? thought Hania, was poor listening a problem even then?

He desired the freeing of the serfs –'Their bread, he wrote, lasts them scarcely half the year, they spend the rest in utter poverty, they are helpless before the law, and they are oppressed by the service and tithes forced from them by both lord and parish. 'A peasant is not your slave, he is your neighbor.'

 Modrevius did not become popular for these views. His book On the Reform of the Commonwealth was banned by Pope Paul V, and King Zygmunt August had to issue a mandate to protect him from persecution.

…
The lot of the peasants, though,
Konstanty had added,
which grew progressively worse as the centuries passed, has to be seen against the background of the slave economies of America, England, France, and other European countries; even Sweden kept a slave colony into the mid-19
^th
century
…Hania paused, considering how to reword this. There was another note in the margin:
Is this really a mitigating factor, or am I made uncomfortable by the fact that my ancestors no doubt also objected to Modrevius and grew rich on the basis of such a system
?
Still, life for the peasant
was fairly brutal all over; Lafayette, when told that the peasants on his French estates were starving, took five days off––only five––from his activities on behalf of revolutionary America.

Hania sat with the laptop before her, staring at the screen, considering how to respond to these various points without offending Konstanty's sensitivities. Kalina, having finished breakfast, appeared beside her.

"The lights are out."

"Hey! There's no television!" said Maks in dismay.

"The electricity company just turned the electricity off."

"Oh." Kalina just nodded; obviously she knew what that meant.

"What do you usually do in such a situation?"

"You mean, when they turn the electricity or the phone off because they"––she said it as if in quotation marks, 'they'––"didn't pay? We go buy candles."

"No!" whined Maks, "Candles are scary! I don't like the dark! I want the lights back on."

"How long does it take to get the electricity back once one's paid?"

"Depends. Maybe a couple days, maybe a week."

"A week!"

Reading ahead in Konstanty's history she had found that it was a Pole, a certain Łukaszewicz, whose inventions had started the oil industry––and also produced oil lanterns. They could have used oil lanterns now.

"We could go to the country like they suggest."

"No!" shrieked Maks, "Kalino! You know we can't! We can't go!" He made expressive eyes at Kalina and meaning jerks of his head toward the ceiling. Hania observed him in surprise. Whatever did he mean? He couldn't have understood her romance with Konstanty. But that was all in her mind! He couldn't have guessed––or had her little conversation with Kalina before the mirror given rise to ideas on the part of the children? Oh, how embarrassing. But how touching that they wanted to help things along. Only, of course, it was completely hopeless. Oh, how very, very embarrassing.

Maks was still fussing, "We can't go! Kalina!"

"Hush, Maks, I'll arrange it."

Maks was saying "You're the one who didn't want to leave town! You refused to go to camp. And I know why. Because you wanted to keep meeting…"

"
Quiet
, Maks!" Kalina aimed a blow at her little brother, while hissing, "There are such things as vacations. Vacations, get it? Some people go on vacations..." tears sprang to her eyes, "with their families."

"Oh." He looked unconvinced and whined again, "but our secret upstairs."

Our secret upstairs? So they weren't talking about Konstanty?

"What secret?" she asked. No, of course they weren't thinking of her and Konstanty––that was all in her mind, just as she'd thought. And the way he'd smiled this morning, so distant, and he must have heard about the electricity as he was coming down the stairs––what would he think? It would be more dignified not to be too friendly. She felt like running away.

"Oh, Maks thinks everything's a secret. There aren't any secrets." And to Maks:

"I'll ask Paulina."

"Oh." He brightened.

Kalina was saying "Please. You'd like it there, really."

"I thought you wanted me to 'just go'," Hania said, "and now you want me to go somewhere in the country with you? I don't understand."

"I'm sorry about that. Actually, you're not like the others."

The other babysitters? Hania wasn't sure what she meant, but she was pleased anyway, even though she suspected the apology was made out of expediency. 

Maks was bouncing beside her on the sofa. "Please, let's go to the country. It's great there. There's a frog pond…"

A frog pond and Maks, thought Hania, horrors––

"…and a river."

Worse and worse, thought Hania.

"There's electricity in the house," said Kalina. "And the internet."

"Let's go," said Hania.

There was fruit on the trees, said the children, and vegetables in the garden; the air was clean, said the children, and we leave from Central Station.

The air in Central Station was not clean. Or maybe it only gave that impression. They had not crossed the busy expanse of high-rise construction and cars and buses under the looming crenellations of the Palace of Culture and Science, but had dived into extensive underground passages, come out near their destination, and rushed along the street and into the building. Central Station looked like a war zone, thought Hania, as they picked their way down to the platform to wait for their train. Homelessness was rare in Poland. Even drunkards, who might spend a night or two on a bus-stop bench, were sooner or later usually hauled home by their relatives. Families didn't live in cars or tents as in America, she knew, but all the deranged old women and unclaimed addicts of Warsaw did congregate in tattered heaps about the station. Hania shuddered and turned her eyes away from unwashed limbs even as she dug in her purse for a coin.

Still, constrained as their hearts were for various reasons, the three had something of a holiday feeling as they rushed down a staircase with an assortment of bags and packs. Only Kalina edged away from Hania on the platform, leaving a wide-enough gap between them so that other passengers might not think they were together. Maks dropped a soda bottle and it rolled across the platform and over the edge onto the rails. Hania screamed at Maks to leave it as he headed after in hot pursuit. And then the train came in with a rush and whoosh.

She couldn't see the step. She always hated that moment of stepping from the platform over an unseen chasm, onto the narrow confines of the railcar ladder. Would she stick? No, there, puffing and pulling her bags after her, she followed Maks down the aisle to their compartment. Only the compartment was crowded with a family of a type she recognized instantly in spite of her intermittent association with Poland: church-going, godly, moving up from the lower to the middle class, disapproving, uncompassionate. The type who kept a hawk's eye on their neighbors for signs of degeneracy and envied them bitterly––to the point of hatred––for any acquisitions or attainments. They never looked directly at her; they put their noses in the air and didn't like how much room she took up on the bench.

She went out to stand in the corridor by an open window. A young soldier, trying to pass, was momentarily nonplussed, politely apologetic. She squeezed back into the compartment to let him by and extracted a package of cookies from her luggage. Someday she was going to lose weight, she thought, as she returned to the corridor. She would go on a diet. Someday she was going to get on the scale and be able to see it. Someday she would feel happy enough not to need comfort.

They were leaving Warsaw. In the distance she could see the roofs and spires and domes of the Old Town; somewhere over there, she had read in a book called
Warsaw
Triptych
, was what had once been 'Crown Warsaw,' the area around the later residence of kings, the castle built up by successive generations on the fort of a medieval duke named Trojden. Beyond, in the Middle Ages, there had been the little agricultural and trading communities belonging to individual nobles and clergymen: Areas clustered around Warsaw that were entities unto themselves in the kingdom, even sometimes having their own measurements and monetary systems. Warsaw, the author said, had once been a sea of orchards surrounding manor houses.

Now they were crossing the river, its broad gray, empty water spread below them. The Vistula was the last large river left unregulated in Europe.

And now they were out of Warsaw, into the countryside, and there were fields and trees and farmhouses, bicyclists waiting at railway crossings, combines mowing here and there, and troops of men and women lying under trees at the edge of hay fields, resting from their work in the midst of the day.

She wasn't really leaving Konstanty behind, she thought as the train picked up speed; she could get an internet connection over the phone, Kalina had said.

They had been travelling a long time through forests. The sign Żabia Wola passed before the windows as the train came briefly to a stop, let them off, and departed again. Hania watched it leave, feeling there must be some mistake. The station was a slab of cracked cement beside a dirt road. Pines rose all around, their narrow brown-orange trunks reaching straight for the sky, there to burst into a profusion of branches that obscured the light. The air was clear and heavy with pine scent and very quiet.

Hania looked around, "Here?" she asked doubtfully. "But we're in the middle of nowhere."

"Isn't it great?" asked Maks happily.

"We have to walk a ways," said Kalina, shouldering some of the lighter luggage. "This way." And she set off at a brisk and swinging walk. Maks trotted happily after her.

"Wait!" cried Hania, as she slung a bag over one shoulder, a backpack over the other, picked up a grocery sack and the remaining soda bottle and staggered after her charges.

There followed a period in which she was aware only of the awkwardness of her bundles, the sunlight flickering through the woods, and the passing of the tree trunks against an infinite green underworld.

"Stop!" she panted to her companions after a time, and sank down onto the pitchy soft needles at the side of the trail.

"No, we're almost there, come on," they urged her.

The walk was difficult, but worth it. Hania, seated at the edge of the forest with Kalina and Maks, leaned back against a tree and thought, "this is heaven." Before them stretched a pale-green field of grain, in the distance a heavy dun horse was pulling a wagon, and under them the moss was soft and springy. It was neither hot nor cold and the sky was blue and wide and full of birds.

"Oh, look. A stork," pointed Maks, as a big white bird rose from the grain and glided, all legs and long beak, past them.

The village was a string of houses along two sides of a narrow, paved road: houses ranging from cabins of vertical wood slats, with windows sagging at odd angles, inhabited by the elderly, to spruce stucco blocks belonging to persons who owned cars and commuted to work in nearby towns, to old, Germanic-looking structures of patinated red brick fronting identical-looking barns. The yards opened onto meadows, the meadows onto fields. There were grape vines scrambling over doorways, and fruit trees, and hens, and after the city, an amazing absence of noise.

The house, when they reached it, was a small brick building with low beams and rooms that opened inconveniently one off the other, with big white tile stoves in each corner. The kitchen facilities were rather charming but antiquated––a brass faucet and a large gas stove of dangerous aspect. The bathroom, however, had been renovated in an un-aesthetic Leroy Merlin style that left nothing to be desired in the way of hygiene.

Kalina and Maks struggled with the wooden shutters and flung open the back windows. They did indeed look onto a frog pond and a bit of the neighbor's barnyard. Somewhere a cow was lowing and a large rooster, with a speckled neck and mad jumble of tail feathers, strolled superciliously about the grass.  It would be fine here for awhile, thought Hania, pleased at the children's pleasure. Even Kalina's face had lost its sullen and injured air; she looked almost happy and carefree for a moment.

Hania hooked up her laptop, feeling an immense sense of relief when the screen lit up and the internet appeared. Konstanty was within reach. Now he seemed even more accessible than when she had known him to be living above her head in Warsaw. She was barricaded by distance from any hint that she might be pursuing him, and yet she had a perfect excuse for writing to him. Happily, she began to type:

As Catholics and Protestants were burning each other elsewhere in the 16
^th
century, Poland remained 'a country without stakes,' full of differing ethnicities and faiths: There were Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, Ruthenians, Tatars, Jews, and smaller Armenian, Dutch, Italian, French, Greek and Scots minorities; the population was not only Catholic, but also Muslim, Jewish, Karaite, Orthodox Christian, Uniate, and Protestant. Jews had had far-reaching protection since Bolesław the Pious's Charter of Kalisz in 1264:  if a Christian fought with a Jew, the matter was to be judged by the Jews, if a Christian injured a Jew 'with a bloody wound' he was required to give him half his possessions; anyone jeering at a synagogue was to be fined in pepper. Muslims, like Jews, were also left to pursue their religion unimpeded; nor was either Islam or Judaism a barrier to ennoblement.