Bridge of Clay(16)

In private, though, there were other things, like he owned a grand total of thirty-nine books, and two of them he obsessed over. It’s possible it was because he’d grown up in Szczecin, near the Baltic, or that he loved the Greek mythologies. Whatever the reasons, he always came back to them—a pair of epics where the characters would plow into the sea. In the kitchen, they were stationed, midrange, on a warped but lengthy bookshelf, filed there under H:

    The Iliad. The Odyssey.

While other children went to bed with stories of puppies, kittens, and ponies, Penelope grew up on the fast-running Achilles, the resourceful Odysseus, and all the other names and nicknames.

There was Zeus the cloud-compeller.

Laughter-loving Aphrodite.

Hector the panic maker.

Her namesake: the patient Penelope.

The son of Penelope and Odysseus: the thoughtful Telemachus.

And always one of her favorites:

Agamemnon, king of men.

On many nights, she’d lie in bed and float out on Homer’s images, and their many repetitions. Over and over, the Greek armies would launch their vessels onto the wine-dark sea, or enter its watery wilderness. They’d sail toward the rosy-fingered dawn, and the quiet young girl was captivated; her papery face was lit. Her father’s voice came in smaller and smaller waves, till finally, she was asleep.

The Trojans could return tomorrow.

The long-haired Achaeans could launch and relaunch their ships, to take her away the following night, again.



* * *



—

Next to that, Waldek Lesciuszko gave his daughter one other life-affirming skill; he taught her to play the piano.

I know what you might be thinking:

Our mother was highly educated.

Greek masterpieces at bedtime?

Lessons in classical music?

But no.

These were remnants of another world, a different time. The small book collection had been handed down as nearly the sole possession of her family. The piano was won in a card game. What neither Waldek nor Penelope knew just yet was that both would turn out to be crucial.

    They would bring the girl ever closer to him.

Then send her away for good.



* * *



—

They lived in a third-floor apartment.

A block like all the others.

From a distance, they were one small light in a concrete Goliath.

Up close, it was spare but closed-in.

At the window stood the upright instrument—both black and brawny, and silky smooth—and at regular times, morning and night, the old man sat with her, with a strict and steady air. His paralyzed mustache was camped firmly between nose and mouth. He moved only to turn the page for her.

As for Penelope, she played and concentrated, unblinking, on the notes. In the early days it was nursery rhymes, and later, when he sent her for lessons he couldn’t afford, there was Bach, Mozart, and Chopin. Often, it was only the world outside who blinked, in the time it took to practice. It would alter, from frosty to windswept, clearing to grim. The girl would smile when she started. Her father cleared his throat. The metronome went click.

Sometimes she could hear him breathe, somewhere amongst the music. It reminded her that he was alive, and not the statue people joked about. Even when she could feel his anger rising at her newest foray of errors, her father was always trapped, somewhere between po-faced and thoroughly pissed off. Just once she’d have loved to see him erupt—to slap his thigh, or tear at his aging thicket of hair. He never did. He only brought in a branch of a spruce tree and whipped her knuckles with an economic sting, every time her hands dropped, or she made another mistake. One winter’s morning, when she was still just a pale and timid-backed child, she got it twenty-seven times, for twenty-seven musical sins. And her father gave her a nickname.

At the end of the lesson, with snow falling outside, he stopped her playing and held her hands, and they were whipped and small and warm. He clenched them, but softly, in his own obelisk fingers.

    “Ju? wystarczy,” he said, “dziewczyna b??dów…,” which she translated, for us, as this: “That’s enough, mistake maker.”

That was when she was eight.

When she was eighteen, he decided to get her out.



* * *



—

The dilemma, of course, was the communism.

A single great idea.

A thousand limits and flaws.

Growing up, Penelope never noticed.

What child ever does?

There was nothing to compare it to.

For years, she didn’t realize what a guarded time and place it was. She didn’t see that while everyone was equal, really they were not. She never looked up at concrete balconies, and the way the people watched.

As the politics gloomed above, the government handled everything, from your job to your wallet to all you thought and believed—or at least what you said you thought and believed; if you were even vaguely suspected of being part of Solidarno??—the Solidarity Movement—you could count on paying the cost. As I said, the people watched.

The truth is, it had always been a hard country, and a sad one. It was a land where the invaders had come from all sorts of directions, across all sorts of centuries. If you had to choose, though, you’d say it was harder than it was sad, and the communist era was no different. It was a time, in the end, where you moved from one long queue to another, for everything from medical supplies to toilet paper, and vanishing stocks of food.