Swans Are Fat Too Read Online Free PDF

street. Beyond was a row of Secession-style buildings and beyond that, early summer Warsaw, green and gray and sandstone beige in the afternoon sun, a horizon marked by church crosses and small towers, elements of past centuries and, further out, the harsh, raw, upstruck fists of the high rises. He brought his gaze back to the more mellow foreground. He was very fond of the city. The scent of lime blossom enveloped him. From the apartment beneath came perfect, fluid flights and cascades of notes, repeating, repeating. He listened for a time, wishing she would play something. Some strong but indefinable emotion came on tiptoe. He greeted it gravely, and with only a little of his customary irony. Was it happiness, longing, nostalgia, or a little of all those? But nostalgia for what? For that moment as a youth when he had met a small girl in the kitchen and they had shared a few seconds of complicity, of understanding? Was that really the closest he had ever got to another human being? He paused before this idea, almost shy of staring at it with too intent a gaze. Here he was, a respected professional, with an exalted background, from a happy family; how could there be anything missing that only that one brief episode had supplied? What utter nonsense, he thought, closing the window in spite of the lift of his heart, and turning away––as people so often turn away just on the edge of discovery, corralled within the limits of convention or their own expectations.
    He got out, as usual, his history project. Sometimes, though, he found himself thinking, quite impersonally now, of the girl downstairs. The thought would recur: the girl was a concert pianist. He appreciated the discipline, the dedication necessary to get anywhere near that good. It must be rather like going to medical school from early childhood, he thought. That kind of hard work. Still, presumably she liked her profession––not like himself, he almost caught himself thinking. A pleasant-spoken girl, he considered, but how could anyone let themselves get into that shape? The poor thing was nearly round. Very bad for the heart, too.
     
    '… they carry cytars since they are not accustomed to clothe themselves in armor, they are unacquainted with iron and this allows them to live in peace; without dissensions, playing on lyres…and for people who have never heard of war a sterner type of music is obviously unnecessary '–– so wrote the Byzantine historian Theofylaktos Simokattes about the Slavs in the 7 th century.
    Unfortunately, one doesn't know of which Slavs he was writing. Slavonic tribes had arrived in the territory of today's Poland in the 6 th century. The people they must have met were certainly not unacquainted with iron, as it was being produced… He paused in his laborious typing.
    …in the vicinity of Warsaw and the Holy Cross Mountains from the 1 st century B.C. to the 4 th century A.D., in thousands of ovens, on a scale unequalled elsewhere in Europe, which could be called the mass production of weapons.
    That sentence didn't seem right. Presumably, though, the girl's career hadn't taken off or she wouldn't be considering teaching, or even worse, translating. Did she know how to write, he wondered? That was something else he remembered hearing over the years––that she was very clever, good at school. (He could almost hear Pani Natalia telling his mother, in that curious tone in which pride mingled with surprise, that Hania was doing well. Pani Natalia, he remembered his mother saying, always expected the worst from her descendents.) The girl had said, that morning in the grocery, that some of the English she'd seen in Poland on previous visits was rather funny, like "beaten-up cream" on a menu, or "officers to rent" on a building. He wouldn't make mistakes like that, but he knew how quickly even small errors detracted from a text. Well, perhaps he'd have a job for her. Or was it too trivial a thing to offer?
     
    It was some half hour