But, over the past year, I had lost faith in a number of Kiki’s declarations, this one among them, and lost all interest in that activity. But now it occurred to me that perhaps what Kiki had told me had not been an old wives’ tale, after all, and that I was, indeed, suffering the consequences of my recklessness. While I still could see no logical way that unauthorized contact between my finger and that organ, which I had to handle, routinely, several times a day in front of the toilet, could, possibly, lead to mental consequences, that may well have been the reasoning of an, already compromised, mind.
If my brain could manufacture blood and even whiskers on little Gustavo’s face, then what credence could I give to any of my conclusions? Had I really heard Mr. Tuwim refer to himself as a Jew, or was that a fabrication as well? Had he really said that my poems were good and that I should continue writing them? Was that really Yulian Tuwim, writer of
The Locomotive
, with whom Mother and I met at the café and who had given me the wristwatch? Was there really such a poem? Were Kiki and Warsaw really gone from my life, and was I really living in Brazil with Mother? Was there really a war going on? Was a crazy man in Germany really gobbling up Europe?
With my world crumbling around me, I had finally fallen into an exhausted sleep. Waking up the next morning, I tried hard not to think about any of the things that had plagued my night. Since the end of school, Irenka and I had resumed occasional trips to the beach, the pool, or the movies. While I was allowed to go to the beach by myself, I could not go into the water without Irenka to watch me, which left looking at scantily-clad women as the only reason for going, and I had not been aware of any great desire to do that, for some time. Before she had left for Sra. O’Brien’s, I had told Mother that I would go to the beach and dig in the sand, but I had no intention of following through.
I sat in our living room, staring out of the window at people and cars going by in the street. I thought about the few hours of utter ecstasy that I had experienced the previous afternoon, and how the image of Gustavo had obliterated it. As with the witches and goblins that had visited me on earlier nights, the prospect of my “insanity” had faded with the coming of daylight, but I felt myself swathed in a gloom far thicker than the one that Mr. Tuwim’s revelation had, temporarily, lifted.
When Irenka came home, with her little suitcase, that afternoon, she found me still sitting by the window and, evidently, looking quite distressed, because her greeting words were, “What is the matter, Yulian?”
I found myself wincing, as though I had been caught in some shameful act. I loved Irenka, but how could I possibly share my issues with her?
Not waiting for the answer, which I was still formulating, she walked right across the room to, first, feel my forehead and then wrap her arms around me.
The moment I felt her arms around me, I knew that I could stop looking for words to answer her question. I pressed my head against her and remembered the way Miss Bronia had held me when German planes had strafed the road along which we were escaping from Warsaw and people around us were crying in pain. Now, I found that I, too, was crying.
It felt very good to cry in Irenka’s arms. But it felt particularly good to be able to cry without having to explain what I was crying about. It wasn’t just that I would not be able to explain my problems in any way that Irenka could understand, but that the freedom to cry without explanation suddenly seemed a great luxury, a luxury I could not imagine being granted by Mother.
I don’t know how much time I spent in the security of Irenka’s embrace. But, eventually, I found that I was feeling better.
“Do you want to tell me about it?” Irenka asked gently, when my sobbing had stopped. I shook my head and, again, experienced the satisfaction of having my refusal accepted at face value. Suddenly, it occurred to me that, in the freedom that she granted me, to cry without explanation, there was a bond between us, even stronger than when we used to share our embarrassing secrets.
By the time Mother returned, I was using Irenka’s birthday gift to color in the photographs in a newspaper, and Irenka was washing out blouses in the bathroom sink. That does not mean that my gloom was, in any way, lifted. What it was, maybe, was pushed a little to one side, giving me room to enjoy Irenka’s proximity in the other room, while still looming as large as before. While I could not say with any certainty whether or not I was crazy, Gustavo’s bloody and bearded face was never far from my mind. When I wasn’t actually seeing it, I was thinking about seeing it.
“That’s nice,” Mother said, observing my coloring activity, though the watercolors made a terrible mess on the porous newsprint. “Now why don’t you take a fresh piece of paper and write a thank-you poem to Mr. and Mrs. Tuwim, for the beautiful watch they gave you for your birthday, and illustrate it with your new paints.”
I did not feel like writing a poem, and I hated it when Mother told me to write one. But the last thing I wanted right now was an argument with Mother. I took a fresh piece of paper out of the drawer and poised my pencil over it to look as though I was thinking. But nothing came, of course, since my mind kept turning to a multitude of things, not in any way related to my birthday gift.
“Why don’t you begin by finding a word that rhymes with
wristwatch
,” Mother suggested, when she saw my lack of progress. If there were words that rhymed with
wristwatch
, in Polish, my mind was, clearly, unable to produce them. Yes, there was one, the word for
canary.
“What
is
wrong with you?” Mother said, a little later.
I shrugged my shoulders.
Mother checked my forehead again. I saw her roll her eyes. “I don’t know what to do with him,” she said to Irenka, in the other room. “He doesn’t have a fever.”
“My brother went through something like this,” Irenka said. “Boys have moods.”
“He had such a wonderful governess in Poland.”
I knew what Mother was really saying. She was saying that if Kiki were here, she would have known what to do about this, but I knew that she wouldn’t have.
At supper, I forced my food down so as not to provoke any more distress or questions on Mother’s part. Then, somehow, I got through the evening, till my bedtime.
Irenka gave me a hug before closing the door to the bedroom, and Mother came in, when I was in bed, felt my forehead again, and then kissed it. I realized that Mother was hoping that I did have a fever, and she could give me aspirin. I pulled the sheet over my head, closed my eyes, and tucked my knees up against my chest. Trying not to think about Gustavo, of course, only made him appear more often.
Then I heard Meesh ask, “Why did you trip him?” It was, I was sure, the first time I had heard Meesh initiate a conversation.
“I didn’t,” I said. “I pushed him, when we were playing tag.”
“Not Gustavo.”
“Not Gustavo? Whom?”
“The Jew.”
“What Jew?”
“The Jew shopkeeper in Hungary.”
Now I remembered about the man that Mother had told me that I had tripped, when I was with Carlos, the count’s chauffeur.
“Was he a Jew?” I asked.
And then I remembered the man’s bearded face, with its hooked blade of a nose and long ear locks. Of course he had been a Jew—I had forgotten that. I remembered his frightened face, as Carlos pushed him up against the wall of his shop. There had been old pots, dusty clocks, musical instruments, stuffed animals, and articles of used clothing scattered all around the weird shop.
Then Carlos had released the man and I watched him scurry past me, to the other end of the shop.
“That’s the way to do business with Jews,” the Russian chauffeur with the Spanish name, whom I had admired so much, said to me as we watched the frightened man take a box out of a drawer and scurry back towards where Carlos was waiting. Most of that, up until that point, I had remembered before—I guess all except Carlos calling him a Jew. And it was at this point that my memory had ended.
But now, for the first time, I was remembering more. As the man is about to pass me, I stick my foot out, tripping him. He falls face down, and I watch his glasses bounce and roll over the floor towards where Carlos is standing. Carlos looks frightened, scaring me as well. The man on the floor gets to his knees. He looks up at me from the floor, his bearded face covered with blood.
Carlos leans down to pick up the glasses. A fat woman in a long, peasant skirt has come out from some back room. The man on the floor is holding a towel to his bleeding nose. The woman has found some blood splattered on my camel’s hair coat, and she is kneeling in front of me, blotting it with a wet sponge. The man is still looking up at me from the floor, except that he’s not down on the floor anymore, but standing, and I feel terrible, horrible over what I’ve done. And then I black out.
“I didn’t mean to hurt the man,” I said to Meesh. “I didn’t. It was an accident.”
“God hates lying,” he said.
“I wasn’t lying.”
“He knows everything.”
“There may not even be a God. Kiki was wrong about a lot of things.” I could still see the man with the beard and the blood looking up at me, his eyes squinting to see without his glasses, and I felt horrible. Meesh was right. I had tripped the man on purpose. I hadn’t intended to do that to his nose, but I probably broke it. And the man was looking up at me wanting to know why I had done such a terrible thing. “I don’t know why I did it. I never meant to hurt anybody.”
“You did it because you wanted Carlos to like you.”
Meesh was right. “I did want Carlos to like me.”
“And you wanted him to think that you weren’t Jewish.”
I didn’t have an answer to that. Meesh was right again—I wanted Carlos to think that I was Catholic, like him. Being Jewish was something ugly and detestable.
I could see the question on the man’s face. Because when he looked at me, he could see in my face that I was just like him.
I reached my arm out from under the sheet and pulled Meesh into bed with me. With the crook of my arm, I held him tight to my chest, feeling, again, the familiar sensation of the scratchy plush, through my nightshirt.
Then I began to cry. I cried for the Jewish shopkeeper whom I had deliberately tripped. I cried for his damaged nose, that I hadn’t broken on purpose. I cried for the old woman who had gotten on her knees to sponge the blood splatters off my camel hair coat. I cried for Carlos, who had looked so frightened. And I cried for me.
CHAPTER XV
I woke up the, the following morning, with Mother’s hand, again, on my forehead.
“How are you feeling?” she asked. She was dressed to go to Sr. O’Brien’s, and I realized I had slept late. My eyes and throat had that dryness that was the result of insufficient sleep.
“I. . . .m all r. . . ight,” I said. From the tone of Mother’s question I sensed that she would have much preferred it if I had a sore throat or stomach ache to report.
“Did you have a bad dream?”
That was a relief. One of my bad dreams would give Mother the explanation she was looking for. From past experience, I knew that I must have had a bad dream—which I wouldn’t be able to remember—and thrashed around enough, during the night, to attract Mother’s attention. That had been going on fairly frequently, since we left Warsaw. “Y. . . es,” I said, quite certain that I must be telling her the truth.
Mother sat down beside me, on the bed. “What did you dream?”
I shrugged my shoulders. I had never been able to answer that question for Mother, but, this morning, I had the feeling that something more than a dream had taken place during the night.
Then I remembered the Jewish shopkeeper that I had tripped, and telling Meesh that I hadn’t meant to do it. I, again, had that taste in my mouth and the feeling in my stomach of having done something awful. That had not been a dream. It was a true memory that I had had before falling asleep. . . wasn’t it? Had it been a dream? I was wishing that it could all have been a dream, but I knew that the memory was true; the question was whether I had recalled it when I was awake or asleep. I felt Meesh’s presence against my thigh, under the sheet, and was assured that it had not been a dream.
“Try to remember.”
I made a split second decision. “I d. . . reamt about the m. . . an who fell d. . . own in H. . . ungary,” I said.
“Man who fell down?”
“W. . . hen I was with C. . . arlos.”
“You mean the shopkeeper?” I saw something begin to register on Mother’s face.
“The o. . . ne I t. . . t. . . t. . . tripped. He w. . . as J. . . ewish.”
At my last word, Mother’s hopeful expression disappeared. “Your memory is coming back?” she said, not totally pleased.
I nodded.
“I have to go. The car is probably waiting downstairs. I’ll wake Irena up— she’ll stay with you until I get back. You like talking to her. Tell her the story—just don’t say the man was Jewish. Just say he was an ugly looking, crooked shopkeeper with a beard. And the beard scared you—tell her that.”
Then Mother went back into the bedroom, and I heard voices. In a moment they were both beside me, Irenka wrapped in her bathrobe, smelling of toothpaste.