Mother and Me (18 page)

Coming closer, I saw that the cassock had been mended many times and a stitched-on, dark-blue hemming tape bound the bottom of the cassock. There were grease stains on the black gabardine. His eyes were large and round. His blond hair and beard were streaked with gray. I had never been that close to a priest before. As we passed, I bowed my head in respect and received another pat on the head.

Remembering how upset Mother had been at my encounter with Mr. Lupicki, I decided to tell no one about either of these encounters.

One day it was determined that Fredek's, Sonya's, and my schooling was suffering, and lessons were organized for us. We
had no books, so it was decided that Auntie Edna would teach Fredek and me the multiplication tables while my mother taught French to Sonya. It turned out, though, that Fredek already knew the multiplication tables, all the way up to twelve times twelve, which was further than his mother could go, while I had trouble with anything beyond the times-two table.

It quickly became evident that Fredek and I were not well matched as classmates, at least in the math department. To remedy this situation, Fredek was transferred along with Sonya to French, which met under a large tree near our house, while Auntie Edna was to bring me up to speed with the multiplication tables, a project that she assured me would take no more than a week or two.

Auntie Edna made me repeat the times-three table several times with her, but the moment I was launched solo, I was lost. She then made me copy it out ten times, which helped a little—I realized that it was just a matter of adding three to the previous answer, and was finally able to pass an oral test, as long as I could count on my fingers under the table. Auntie Edna was quite proud of my achievement and, much against my better judgement, made an announcement to that effect that evening at dinner.

“What's three times seven?” Fredek asked me, and, as I had feared, Auntie Edna's structure showed itself to be the house of cards that it was.

Fredek, on the other hand, had his own difficulties. His acquisitive mind clamped itself around the French words with admirable speed. By the second day, his vocabulary must have surpassed mine by a considerable multiple. Unfortunately, though, coming out of his mouth, the words sounded no more French than their Polish equivalents.

Unlike Auntie Edna, my mother had little patience for his tin ear. Her remedy, it seems, was to present Fredek with the correct pronunciation in ever-louder tones, which Auntie Edna and I could soon hear at our table inside the cottage. Finally,
Auntie Edna excused herself and went out to confer with her son's teacher. Through the window, I could see the two of them standing in the stubbled field talking for quite some time. When Auntie Edna came back into the cottage, I could tell that she had been crying. She told me to go out and play because there would be no more school that day.

At the dinner table that evening, when Auntie Paula, who had admitted at the outset that she did not have sufficient patience to teach small boys, tried to resolve the issue of Fredek's difficulty, it was discovered that when he wrote the words down at Mother's instructions, his spelling was nothing like the proper French spelling. When he asked Mother what the proper spelling was, it turned out that she didn't know how to spell French words either. School was not resumed the following day.

There was some discussion among the mothers about the idea of Miss Bronia teaching us German, but it was deemed inappropriate under the circumstances. Besides, as the only member of our party who knew how to cook or deal with the farm people over provisions, she hadn't the time. She did teach us to pluck chickens, an activity I found loathsome, but also very grown up.

As for Sonya's schooling, she learned many practical things assisting Miss Bronia, and in the evenings the two of them would get together to discuss some books that Miss Bronia had brought for her to read.

What else happened over the next few weeks, I can't fix into proper chronological order. Every two or three days one of the mothers would ride the wagon into town for news. We didn't have a radio and without electricity we could not have used one anyway.

The news was always bad. The Germans were moving further and further east, closer and closer to us. Oddly enough, there was no sign of them in our sky. While we had seen German bombers and fighter planes bombing and harassing towns and roads in advance of their troops further north, here
in southeastern Poland, it was as though the Germans had no interest in us.

And where were the French and the English? We had heard that they had declared war on Germany, in accordance with their mutual defense pact with Poland, but so far there had been no sign of their involvement. Our own army, Auntie Paula explained, was losing ground because the surprise German attack had disrupted our transportation and communication, but the French, she said, had a mighty army on Germany's western border that simply needed the order to advance. Once they did, this whole thing would be over in a few days.

One evening, six peasants showed up at our door looking for shelter. They spoke Polish without the Ukrainian accent. Then it turned out that under their peasants' clothes they had on army uniforms. Their unit, they told us, had been wiped out and the city they were defending to the west of us, overrun. Polish defenses, they said, were helpless against the German tanks, our airplanes outclassed by the Messerschmitts. They were cut off from other Polish forces and were now on their way east to Russia where our army would regroup with arms borrowed from the Russians, and liberate Poland. It sounded like a good plan to me.

Two of them had wounds, hastily bandaged, and the mothers cleaned and redressed them with a torn-up sheet. Miss Bronia went around to the back of the cottage and killed two more chickens; Fredek and I then set about plucking under Sonya's supervision. The soldiers spent the night on the floor in the loft and were gone when I woke up the next morning.

On another evening, there was a knock on our door and a tall man fillied our doorway. My heart leaped as I recognized the priest I had passed on the road back from the icehouse. He wore the same mended cassock, or one equally mended and equally stained.

“I am Father Chernievich,” he said in a booming voice as he stepped into the big room. “We will say the rosary.”

That was something I was very familiar with, having said the rosary with Kiki, using her beads, and having also participated in a rosary led by Kiki's priest brother at the wake for their Uncle Bolek. There were parts that the priest spoke alone and parts where everybody joined in.

Mother and Auntie Edna were there in the big room with Fredek and me, and what was on the mothers' faces could have been taken for nothing but panic. I could not help enjoying Mother's discomfort, even though I knew this to be not only un-Christian, but counterproductive to my missionary assignment.

Mother was the first to recover her composure. “We don't have our rosary beads with us, Father,” she said in a remarkably calm voice. “We had to leave Warsaw in a hurry.” This, of course, as any Catholic knew, was nonsense since holding beads was not necessary to saying the rosary, and I was afraid that Mother had blown her cover with her very first line.

But Father did not seem to notice her ignorance. “Just kneel down,” he said with evident impatience. I knelt immediately at his instruction and watched to see what Mother and Auntie Edna and Fredek would do.

At that moment, Miss Bronia who had evidently heard this from her room, came out. “Good evening, Father,” she said, stepping quickly past both Mother and Auntie Edna to place herself between them and our visitor. She knelt down, and Mother and Auntie Edna followed her example. Fredek knelt too, and, out of the corner of my eye, I could see Sonya peeking around the door of the room she shared with Miss Bronia.

Father turned around to face the icon of the Blessed Virgin on the wall beside the front door. It was obvious that he knew his way around this cottage. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” he intoned. Miss Bronia and I crossed ourselves. There was a flurry of noncommittal hand motions on the part of Mother and Auntie Edna. Fredek watched wide-eyed.

“Amen,” Miss Bronia and I chorused.

“Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name,” Miss Bronia and I said, following Father's lead. I could tell that Miss Bronia was praying extra loud to sound like three people. I, on the other hand, made sure that she could hear me. After the first few repetitions of the Hail Mary, I could actually hear Mother and Auntie Edna chiming in. I could see them smiling to each other. While it was probably no sin for a non-Catholic to recite Catholic prayers, Mother was making a joke out of it. She saw me looking at her and quickly turned serious and indicated that I should face the front. By the time we reached the second Decade, I could hear Fredek's voice as well, and I could even discern a certain bounce of enthusiasm in our praying.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee. Blessed art Thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus,” Father led, and we followed with our “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen.” Only in the stand-alone Our Father did we lose my relatives.

My own joy, of course, knew no bounds. Mother was now on my turf, and while she might be fooling Father, there was no pulling the wool over God's eyes. And Miss Bronia, too, could not have missed my Catholicism.

But on one's knees, even pious ecstasy can grow wearisome, and Father Chernievich's knees were, obviously, better conditioned for this activity than ours. Mother and Auntie Edna had begun to rock from knee to knee, and even Miss Bronia was fidgeting. I tried hard to maintain soldier-like discipline, but found that not only were my knees betraying me, but my mind was wandering from the Divine to the temporal. The soles of both of Father's boots had holes part way through them. The one on the right was shaped like an egg, the left could have been a rabbit without ears.

Auntie Paula barged in through the front door and froze in her tracks. Father took no notice of the disturbance, but behind
his back, Mother made a face and pointed to the floor indicating for Auntie Paula to join our ranks. I saw Auntie Paula shake her head and remain standing by the door, a strange expression on her face. We plowed on.

When there was a knock on the door, all of us, except Father, looked hopefully in that direction. Auntie Paula, standing by the door, opened it, and a rotund little woman with a gentle face and the long peasant skirt and kerchief stood in the doorway. Excusing herself, she turned directly towards Father, still on his knees before the Blessed Virgin. “Come, Sasha,” she said, using the diminutive form of the name Alexander, “it's time to come home to supper.” Her voice was as kindly as her face, but quite firm.

Father turned his bearded face from the icon up to the woman.

“We have to go now,” she said. Father Chernievich made the sign of the Cross and rose to his feet.

The woman apologized for disturbing us. Then, taking the tall priest by the hand, she led him outside.

When they had gone, Auntie Paula leaned her back against the closed door and began to laugh. “So you've all done rosary with Father Chernievich,” she said.

Mother and Auntie Edna did not grasp her humor.

“You know who he is, don't you?” Auntie Paula went on.

We all looked at her without understanding. Auntie Edna was massaging a knee.

“He's Renia's uncle…. Renia Metner,” Auntie Paula said. “Renia tells stories about him sometimes. He thinks he's a priest and lives here on the farm.”

“Renia's Uncle Sasha?” Auntie Edna repeated. “They let him go around impersonating a priest?” And she began to laugh too.

“He doesn't cause any harm, she says,” Auntie Paula said, “so the Polish people around here let him do rosary with them as long as he doesn't try to do Mass or confessions. The Ukrainians are some other kind of Catholic, you know.”

This took a moment to sink in. “Well, it was a good rehearsal,” Mother said. “We may have to do this kind of thing again. Bronia's going to have to teach us.”

There was general agreement to this. “I realize now,” Mother went on, “that real Catholics wouldn't have left Warsaw without their rosary beads. We should get some.”

“I'll see about getting some at the church,” Miss Bronia said.

“Get them from Father Chernievich,” Auntie Edna laughed. I could already envision myself teaching them to cross themselves and to recite the Act of Contrition.

The very next afternoon, Auntie Edna came back from town with wonderful news. People were actually dancing in the streets, she reported, over the news that the Russians were coming to our aid. They had crossed our eastern frontier with their tanks and their guns, and the people along the way, she had heard, were showering them with flowers. They would be here soon to help stop the Germans some place on the other side of Durnoval.