Swans Are Fat Too Read Online Free PDF Page A

growls.
    "I will take care of her," muttered Maks, folding his arms and narrowing his eyes. Not the knife though. He had a different idea to try first.
    Hania realized she couldn't leave the apartment without taking Maks, and as he made it clear he wanted nothing to do with her, she was stuck there. The apartment grew hot as the day passed. She decided to do some housework. On the one hand it wasn't her job, on the other she was living there and it needed to be done. She would start with the laundry, she decided. The bathroom was heaped with dirty clothes. She did a triage, sorted out what she assumed were Maks's things and began a wash. Then she retreated to her grandmother's piano room and started on a bag of cookies as she flipped over the music. By the time she'd finished the second bag, the laundry was done, she'd dusted the tops of the music sheets, cleaned up the dirty dishes, and it was time to make lunch. She put some effort into it, since she knew the children hadn't had breakfast, but by the time she'd finished and called her cousins to eat, Kalina had disappeared––had left the apartment without saying a word––and Maks said he hated pierogis , he never touched pierogis , he was sure she was trying to poison him, and she should order a pizza or he'd starve, and it would be all her fault . 
    She sat down and ate lunch herself, her own portion and Kalina's as well, and then went back to the piano room and subsided onto the Bösendorfer's bench. The day would pass somehow, she told herself. Bad moments always passed, and she'd been through far worse than this. She placed the potato-chip bag within reach and turned automatically to the keyboard, hands hovering over the keys, hearing the music already in her mind. And stopped. She looked down at her round hands––agile hands, strong hands, but padded. She put them down in her lap. Babcia had not looked like this until later, much later…after various triumphs. She looked around the room; the walls were full of photographs. There was her grandfather, a small man in a small photo, who had given up the race early, overwhelmed, no doubt, by the size of his wife's personality. The other photos were larger: Babcia playing at the Met, Babcia with conductors Karl Bohm and Ernest Ansermet, Eugene Ormandy, and Bruno Walter. A handsome woman wearing an evening dress and all her charisma. She, Hania, had no charisma, and for a year now every time she tried to play she heard her teacher's voice telling her so. She gave herself a little shake.
    One got on as well as one could in the world anyway. She took a potato chip and began to play scales. She could make scales sound like music, but now she didn't want to. Like this they were just mechanical, not music at all, just physical exercise and relaxation.
    From the apartment below an anguished howl arose. "Noooooo! Pani Natalia's come back!" 
    And there was the sound of windows being slammed shut.
     
    Konstanty, coming up the stairs in the evening, heard the sound of scales being played. That was what he'd almost remembered this morning, he thought with sudden enlightenment: his mother, leaning toward a folded newspaper as she drank tea from a thin blue cup in their London apartment. "Kostku," she was saying, "do you remember Natalia's granddaughter, Hania? Oh, no, I don't suppose you would, Norbert and Elka moved to America when she was still quite small, a year or two before we left for France. It says in the Tribune that she's just won an international piano competition." She waved the paper at him. "It says the judges were 'very impressed' but she wasn't a 'crowd pleaser' so there's some dispute about the award. The sponsors aren't happy." That had been, what, three-four years ago now? A concert pianist––well.
    He went on up to his apartment, crossed the spacious room containing his desk and opened a window. Below, almost within touching distance, the crowns of lime trees obscured the sidewalk and a part of the