“Yulian, what are you doing?!” Mother cried.
I wasn’t doing anything except sitting there, but I knew Mother was referring to the kerchief. “G. . . G. . . God w. . . w. . . wants me t. . . t. . . to keep my h. . . h. . . head c. . . c. . . covered,” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
The stuttering was still there. Well, it had been childish of me to believe that God would lift the stuttering just because I had laid a handkerchief on my head for all of two minutes.
“G. . . G. . . God made us J. . . J. . . Jewish because H. . . H. . . He w. . . w. . . wanted us to be J. . . J. . . Jewish. O. . . O. . . Otherwise H. . . H. . . He w. . . w. . . would have made us C. . . C. . . Catholic.”
Mother’s voice dropped to a whisper and became very harsh. “Don’t you ever, ever say that in front of anyone, do you hear? We are Catholic, we have always been Catholic, and we will always be Catholic. Do you know what the Germans are doing to Jews?”
Of course, I knew about the Germans killing Jews back in Europe just for being Jews. But we were in Brazil now.
“Take that thing off your head now and give it to me before the chauffeur sees you,” she hissed.
I knew that if I didn’t, she would snatch it off. I handed her the kerchief. Mother squeezed it into a ball and put it in the ashtray, as though I had contaminated it.
“B. . B. . . But that’s a good h. . . h. . . handkerchief,” I protested.
“It’s only a paper tissue. You throw it away after you’ve used it.” I had never heard of paper handkerchiefs before.
I didn’t say anything more for the rest of our ride. For the second time that day I had done something for which I had gotten into trouble, though, this time, God was on my side. Mother’s reaction was one that I should have anticipated, based on past experience, just as I should have anticipated the fact that it would hurt Roderico when I pulled the chair out from under him. But I didn’t. So, maybe it was God that was directing me to do these things. He had made me pull the chair out from under Roderico to alert me to what I had later realized about my soul, or, maybe Roderico had done something earlier that deserved punishment.
One thing I knew, I wasn’t like other children. I wasn’t one of a group. I didn’t have friends. When I was in first grade in Warsaw, and everyone had friends, I didn’t. I didn’t even have any brothers or sisters. Maybe God had selected me to be His instrument, to do things for Him that He wanted done here on earth, like punishing Roderico and, maybe, even that man in Hungary. Maybe he had done some bad things, and God had made me punish him for Him. And the stuttering was my reminder of my mission. Maybe God would remove it as a reward for doing His bidding, or, maybe, He would leave it with me forever as a reminder. That certainly explained a lot of things.
Back in our hotel suite, Mother sat me right down on my bed and pulled up one of the chairs facing me, as though to block my escape. “Don’t you ever, ever talk like that again!” she said.
“But I. . . I. . . I’m sure the ch. . . ch. . . ch. . . chauffeur didn’t speak P. . . Polish,” I argued.
“I don’t want to hear the word
Jewish
from you ever again. In any language. Even in private.”
“But wh. . . wh. . . what if I s. . . s. . . see a J. . . J. . . Jewish p. . . person w. . . walking d. . . down the s. . . street, or s. . . s. . . something?”
“Don’t be impertinent!” Mother said.
I understood that I had a difficult path in front of me. God wanted me to be Jewish, but I couldn’t do that in front of Mother—nor in front of people who might tell Mother. And not only was I supposed to keep my head covered, but there were certain things that Jews weren’t supposed to eat, though I had no idea what they were. It wasn’t going to be easy, but I wasn’t scared. Instead, as God’s secret agent, I had a whole new sense of purpose. I was here for a purpose. Not only that, but, as never before, I now had the sense of a Being who had singled me out for His special attention, a very powerful Being, a male Being.
That night, I remembered my prayers, something I had fallen quite lax with over past weeks. Actually, I realized, this would be my first time praying on Brazilian soil. For a moment I entertained myself with the idea that, since we were now in the Southern Hemisphere, where winter was summer and summer winter, it might be necessary to say your prayers backwards. This was, of course, just a joke between me and myself, but I regretted that there wasn’t someone to share it with. Kiki would have laughed at it.
Then I realized that there was someone—there was Meesh, sitting there on the table, silhouetted on the wall behind him by the light coming from the street through the window. I had been ignoring Meesh lately. Now I explained my joke to him, and he found it funny. Then I told him about my recent thinking regarding God and being Jewish, but, although he didn’t say anything, I had the strong feeling that this really wasn’t his kind of material. Or, rather, that it was just too personal for me to share even with him. I told him to go to sleep.
I didn’t know any Jewish prayers, but I expected that God would make allowance for that, as long as he saw my earnestness. What I did know about the Jewish religion was that Jews had a saint named Moses and that their symbol was a six-pointed star. When you did the sign of the cross at the beginning and end of a prayer, you said, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” which I understood to mean that the one prayer was directed to all three of them. Alone in a hotel room in Budapest, some months earlier, I had corrected what I saw as a discrepancy by changing it to, “In the name of the Father, the
Mother,
the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” and now I realized, quite brilliantly, that I could even incorporate both the name of St. Moses and the six-pointed star into the process by crossing, or rather
starring,
myself by drawing the six points of the star as I recited, “In the name of the Father, the Mother, the Son, the Holy Ghost, and St. Moses, amen.” And, since I was alone at this point, I placed my pillow so that it rested against the top of my head, rather than under the back of it, forming a sort-of head covering. When I had finished my customary
Our Father
and the
Hail Mary
, and
starred
myself, I admonished myself to put a stop to the slacking off and go back to my previous routine of praying every night.
CHAPTER V
Back in Warsaw, before the war, right near the park to which Kiki and I went every morning, stood a heroic statue of Poland’s great warrior king, Jan Sobieski. Mounted on a splendid horse, wearing full armor, and with his sword in the air, this great general was as well known to Polish children as Paul Revere is to Americans. At the head of his Hussars, Jan Sobieski had lifted the siege of Vienna, and stopped dead the Tartar hordes overrunning Europe in the seventeenth century.
Whenever we stopped to gaze at this great champion, I would ask Kiki to tell me again about the great battle outside of Vienna when Polish Hussars, with great feathered wings mounted on the backs of their saddles, had charged the fearsome Tartars, the wings flapping noisily in the wind and terrifying enemy horse and rider alike. But one day, when one of my cousins and his governess were walking with us, my cousin, older than I by a full year, confided to me a little ditty which declared that Jan Sobieski had three doggies, a gray one, a brown one, and a blue one. While I was concerned over the propriety of saying such nonsense things about the great Polish hero and doubted that blue dogs even existed, I did appreciate the poetry, since the Polish word for
blue
rhymed with the word for
doggies
as well as the name
Sobieski
.
Poetry was something that I had been growing up with. Memorizing chauvinistic, patriotic poems and then reciting them in front of grownups, with grand, theatrical gestures, was something I had been made to do since I could remember. But my very favorite poem wasn’t one of these, but a children’s poem about a big, black locomotive that stands at the station with its collection of cars and passengers strung out behind it. The passengers vary from a car full of fat men eating sausages to figs and pigs to elephants and giraffes. It had a beautiful, pulsing rhythm that sounded like a chugging train, and it was written by a man with my own first name, Yulian Tuwim. Mother and Lolek had, actually, known him before the war, and I was even told that I had been introduced to him, though I couldn’t remember that. I had learned this poem by heart, on my own, and would recite it in my head for my own pleasure.
But on that day, as Kiki and I walked home, after parting from my cousin and his governess, I found myself repeating the Sobieski poem in my head, and finally went on to compose a second stanza, stating that, after the king’s death, his three doggies mounted the throne, first the gray one, then the brown one, and finally the blue one. My second stanza parsed and rhymed perfectly, and I remember experiencing not a little admiration for my creative achievement. Since I had not yet learned to write, I committed the entire poem to memory, but did not dare repeat it aloud for fear of being declared un-Polish.
Then, in the spring of the year that Mother and I sailed for Brazil, for some reason we had had to spend a few hours in the company of a Yugoslav border official who had entertained me by writing, for me, a little poem in Yugoslavian, a language quite similar to Polish. I had answered by picking up a pencil and piece of paper and composing a responding poem in Polish.
My facility with poetry writing seemed to impress Mother greatly and, soon after, as we witnessed the Yugoslavian custom of adorning children’s collars with little brass bells at Easter time, Mother had suggested that I be moved to write a poem about it. Not moved as much as Mother apparently wished, I had written a few humorous stanzas, which she dismissed as inappropriate and instructed me to start again, and compare the children to sweet little sheep with bells hanging from their collars.
I did as I was told, and Mother and I were both impressed with what I had done, though I preferred the first version. Nevertheless, Mother told me, then and there, that someday I might grow up to be a great poet, like Yulian Tuwim.
Then, a few days following our visit to the O’Brien’s I was, again, put in contact with my poetic muse. Mother, it seemed, had an appointment to meet again with Sra. O’Brien the following week, giving us several days with nothing to do.
Mother had agreed to go to the beach with me, that first day, but, instead of putting on her bathing suit, she sat cross-legged on her bed, laying out her solitaire on a pillow and smoking cigarettes. She had said that we would go after breakfast, but it was well after breakfast, and she showed no sign of getting ready.
Every so often, I would hear the exclamation, “
merde
!” from the other room, telling me that she was stymied again and about to begin a new solitaire.
There was really nothing for me to do, while I waited. I had a harmonica that Carlos, the count’s chauffeur had taught me how to play, but Mother wouldn’t let me play it in her presence because it gave her headaches. And having the kind of conversation with Meesh that had covered many empty hours over the last few months, seemed a little awkward now, after the way I had cut him out of my thoughts the previous night.
Somehow, my mother must have sensed my impatience, though I had been careful not to make any impatient sounds, because I suddenly heard her call, “Why don’t you sit down and write one of your poems!” through the open door.
“I’m not inspired to write a poem,” I shot back, communicating, I hoped, the idea that the creation of poetry was fueled by divine stimulation, rather than parental mandates.
“Write one about how beautiful the beach is, curved like a crescent moon,” Mother suggested.
There was, of course, no way that I was going to allow Mother to dictate in which direction my creativity would flow. If she wanted to see the Rio beach as a crescent moon, let her write her own poem.
And then I thought of the long, curving sidewalk, with its S-shaped black-and-white stripes that ran along the beach, and realized that the Polish word for
street
rhymed with possessive form of the word for
moon
, and a stanza forced its way into my resisting mind.
I would not, of course, write it down and endeavored to firmly lock my mind against any further suggestions from my inner muse, under these kind of circumstances.
When she finally called me to get ready and I made my way to the bathroom, where my bathing suit hung on a hook, I found Mother already in her bathing suit, a cigarette in her mouth, and shaving under one arm with her big Gillette razor. I had never heard of people shaving there, but Mother immediately told me not to look, which surprised me further, since I had watched her shave her legs numerous times, without any concern on her part. Then we walked to the beach where Mother lay down on the blanket and told me to build her a sand castle while she got some sun. I was relieved to see that she did not undo the straps on her suit, the way Irenka had.
Just like the time I had been there with Sra. De la Vega, there were several people playing with that strange feathered projectile that they slapped back and forth with their hands. This time they were hitting it over a net. After a while, the projectile, which I later learned was called a
pateka
, landed on a corner of Mother’s blanket, making her jump.