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.
And what could people do?
They stood in line.
They waited.
The temperature fell below freezing. It changed nothing.
People stood in line.
They waited.
Because they had to.
* * *
—
Which brings us back to Penelope, and her father.
For the girl, none of that mattered so much, or at least it didn’t yet.
To her this was just a childhood.
It was a piano and frozen playgrounds, and Walt Disney on Saturday nights—one of the many small concessions from the world that lay wayward and west.
As for her father, he was careful.
Vigilant.
He kept his head down, and held all political ideas in the shadows of his mouth, but even that wasn’t much comfort. Keeping your nose clean while an entire system broke down around you guaranteed only that you would survive longer, not that you would survive. An endless winter would finally break, only to return in record time, and there you were again, at work: Small, allotted hours.
Friendly without friends.
There you were at home:
Quiet but wondering.
Is there any way out at all?
The answer was formed, and worked on.
Definitely not for him.
Maybe, however, for the girl.
* * *
—
In the years between, what else can be said?
Penelope grew up.
Her father grew visibly older, his mustache the color of ash.
To be fair, sometimes there were good times, there were great times—and old and dour as he was, Waldek surprised his daughter maybe once a year and raced her to the tramline. It was usually for one of those paid music lessons, or a recital. At home, in her early years of high school, he played stiff-and-steady partner, in the dance hall of the kitchen. Pots would clamor. A rickety stool was felled. Knives and forks would hit the floor, and the girl would laugh, the man would crack; he’d smile. The smallest dance floor in the world.
For Penelope, one of the strongest memories was her thirteenth birthday, when they came home via the playground. She felt far too grown-up for such things, but she sat on a swing there anyway. Many decades later, she would recount that memory, one more time, to the fourth of her five boys—the one who loved the stories. It was in the last few months of her life, when she was half-dreaming, half-high on morphine, on the couch.
“Now and again,” she’d said, “I still see the melting snow, the pale unfinished buildings. I hear the noisy chains. I can feel his gloves on the small of my back.” Her smile was hoisted up by then, her face was in decay. “I remember screaming with that fear of going too high. I begged for him to stop, but I didn’t want him to, not really.”
And that’s what made it so hard:
The heart of color in all that grey.
To her, in hindsight, leaving wasn’t so much a breaking free as an abandonment. Much as he loved them, she didn’t want to leave her father with only his Greek cast of seafaring friends. After all, what good was the fast-running Achilles in this land of ice and snow? He’d freeze to death eventually. And how could Odysseus be resourceful enough to give him the company required to keep him alive?
The answer was clear to her.
He couldn’t.
* * *
—
But then, of course, it happened.
She hit eighteen.
Her escape was set in motion.
It took him two long years.
On the surface, all was going well: she’d left school with good results and worked in a local factory, as a secretary. She took notes at all the meetings, she was responsible for every pen. She shuffled all the papers, and accounted for all the staplers. That was her position, her slot, and there were definitely many worse ones.
It was also around that time when she became more involved with various musical outfits, accompanying people here and there, and playing solo pieces as well. Waldek actively encouraged it, and soon she was traveling to perform. Restrictions had slowly become less monitored, due to general disarray, and also (more menacingly) to the knowledge that people could always leave, but had family members who stayed. Either way, sometimes Penelope was approved to cross borders, and even once to slip through the Curtain. At no point did she ever consider that her father was planting a seed for her defection; within herself, she was happy.
But the country, by then, was on its knees.
Market aisles were closer to completely bare.
The queuing had intensified.
Many times, in ice, then sleet and rain, they’d stood together, for hours, waiting for bread, and when they got there, nothing was left—and soon he realized. He knew.
Waldek Lesciuszko.
The statue of Stalin.
It was ironic, really, for he didn’t say a word; he was deciding for her, forcing her to be free, or at least, thrusting the choice upon her.
He’d nursed his plan, day after day, and now the moment came.
He would send her to Austria, to Vienna, to play in a concert—an eisteddfod—and make it clear that she was never to return.
And that, to me, was how us Dunbar boys began.
So there she was, our mother.
Ice and snow, and all those years ago.
And look here, at Clay, in the far-flung future.
What can we say about him?