The House with the Stained-Glass Window by Żanna Słoniowska

Author:Żanna Słoniowska
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857057150
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2017-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Lenin

“I’d rather not take you with me, because it’s not a place for children. But since you insist – after all, you are fourteen already,” said Aba.

Back then, I was giving the Opera a wide berth, but this day was going to be exceptional, the show was due to take place outside, and spectators were closing in from all directions. It was September 1990. By now, Mykola had his set designer’s degree, and had been working at the Opera for several years. That day, we were both in the crowd, as yet unaware of each other’s existence, but both thinking about Marianna. To Mykola, the whole event contained too much politics and not enough art, so he was feeling overwhelmed by a melancholy yearning for her voice – it isn’t there, he thought, neither in heaven nor on earth, and he wondered how that “isn’t” differed from his own “is”, and whether or not his own “is” – or rather “am” – had atrophied more since Marianna’s death than it had before he met her. For me it was the total opposite – her words came back to me: We are humus, we give up our lives to fertilise the soil, we shall never see its harvest. I imagined I was taking part in an opera that had come out in front of the theatre and was being performed for everyone – “Art belongs to the people” – and Mama’s voice was taking the lead in it.

I looked up: crowning the tympanum as ever was the allegory of Glory with her palm leaf, tired of the fact that the shows were always held inside the building – perhaps it was she who had called this gathering together. The golden frond in her hands was sending out sparkling rays in the sunlight, but the real star of today’s programme was situated closer to the ground, and I was the only one not looking in his direction. I stepped onto the edge of a bed of daisies, with my chin touching the crown of Aba’s head: there was a city on the golden map of her hair, with the white threads of highways running off in various directions before disappearing in a tangle of darker local roads. Angry faces surrounded us, at first in a single circle, later a double and treble one; I could tell that very soon it would be impossible to get out of there. Nervously I did up the row of buttons on the trendy denim jacket that I’d inherited from Mama; it still smelled of tobacco and grown-up scent, and at one point a button was missing, so there was a safety pin instead.

There I stood, with my gaze fixed on Glory, nodding her head as the choir came in – today’s performance would be without an overture. The choir sang in two parts: the altos wailed against the desecration of the leader, while the bassos demanded his overthrow. Between them stood cadets from the officer’s training school, in silence, not yet knowing if their part would be included in the general score.

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