Mother and Me (21 page)

“Where are we going to live in Durnoval?” Auntie Edna said.

“We can ask the Roseviches to help us find a place,” Auntie Paula assured her. That was the name of the people at whose house we had stayed before.

“I tell you,” Mother said, “that the reason that they want us out of the house has nothing to do with last night. They want us out of here so they don't have to share the land with us when they divide up the estate by Soviet law. What happened last night just gave them a convenient excuse.”

“Just stop giving them excuses,” Auntie Paula said angrily. “You put ideas into a simple man's head, like you did with Lupicki.”

I wasn't following any of this. I did know that it was Mother who had made the man angry at us by slapping his face and with her silly talk about Grandfather's sword from the Big War. Grandfather was an old man, paralyzed from diabetes;
Francis, his attendant, had to give him injections every day, and he had not fought in the Big War. And, I was sure, he didn't own a sword.

When they came back for us with the wagon, two men carried our belongings out to the wagon. It was the same wagon that Fredek and I had ridden in with the elephants and the cabbages, but pulled by a different horse. An old man with a white beard drove us to Durnoval.

Nobody talked much on the way, except for Miss Bronia and Sonya who got to dangle their legs over the back end of the wagon and whispered and laughed together. Auntie Edna and Auntie Paula sat with their backs against one side of the wagon, my mother against the other. A large wooden box that Miss Bronia had filled at the last moment with pots, bowls, and other utensils from the cottage, clanged in the center of the wagon. Fredek and I were sitting up with the driver—one on either side—but that didn't really matter to me at the moment. I was jealous of Sonya for Miss Bronia's company. I thought about the way Mother had gotten us kicked off the farm with her silly lies about Grandfather's sword and how she had undressed me in front of everybody and I came to the conclusion that making a Christian out of her was something that neither I nor, probably, anyone else could do.

I watched the driver take out a small square of yellow paper from inside his jacket, form it into a kind of trough with one hand, pour some tobacco into it from a little pouch, and then roll it into a cigarette. He licked the end of the paper, where there must have been some glue, to complete the cylinder, and placed the cigarette between his lips. He then pulled a match out of his pocket with the same hand, lit it with his thumbnail, and raised it to the cigarette.

In a moment, Mother's head and shoulders were between me and the driver. “Would you roll one for me, please,” she asked. Without a word, the driver produced another piece of paper and proceeded to repeat the process.

“Yulek, change places with me,” Mother said. I didn't care about sitting up with the driver right now, but I resented her making me get down. But I did change places, and in a moment she was asking him questions about his wife, his children, and whether he had fought in the Big War. With each question, I saw Auntie Paula roll her eyes.

“You look like an artillery man,” Mother said.

I was mortified.

Somebody was playing a radio very loud when we rode into town in our wagon. A woman was speaking in what I took to be Ukrainian. But, instead of getting louder and then fading after we passed it, the voice followed us along the street.

“They set these up yesterday,” our driver said to Mother, pointing his whip at what I recognized as a loudspeaker attached to a lamppost on a street corner. There was another loudspeaker on the next corner and the one after that.

“She's speaking Russian,” Auntie Edna said, “but I can't make out what she's saying.” Russian was what my grandmother spoke, and I understood a lot of the words, though what the woman was talking about didn't make sense to me either.

Mother turned in her seat. “She's saying what a paradise the Soviet Union is,” she said.

“Who's she talking to in Russian?” Auntie Paula said. “Aren't the Russians already supposed to know what a paradise they have?”

“Look at the Russian soldier. There's a Russian soldier over there!” Fredek said, pointing. There was a Russian soldier standing on one corner. He had on the same pointed green hat as the one I had seen galloping by our cottage. His rifle was strapped diagonally across his back with a length of packaging string. On the front of his cap was a shining enamel red star. Another soldier and another loudspeaker stood on the next corner.

A line of people stood outside a bakery shop. They must have very good bread or cakes or something to attract so many people, I reasoned.

There was nobody home at the house where we had spent that night on our way to the farm. I remembered that we had been expecting them to help us find a place to stay.

With servants in the household, it was unusual to find a house completely empty, but no one answered the doorbell, and the window shutters were pulled shut.

The wagon driver had already begun unloading our things onto the sidewalk. “Just a moment,” Auntie Paula said. “There's nobody here.”

“I have to go back,” the old man said. “I have to go back to the farm.”

“But we have no place to go,” Auntie Paula said. “We expected to be able to stop here, but there's nobody home.”

“I have to go back,” the man said, continuing to unload our suitcases and boxes.

“Mr. Koblonski,” Mother said. I noticed that she called him Mister and not the Comrade they were all calling each other now. “Mr. Koblonski, you aren't going to leave women and children out on the street with their suitcases, are you?”

The old man sighed and began putting the suitcases and boxes back in the wagon.

“I don't think they're coming back soon,” Auntie Edna said. Auntie Paula agreed.

Mr. Koblonski drove us to a little hotel, but the rooms were all taken by the Russian army. They did, however, let us wait in their lobby with our baggage while the three mothers went looking for a place for us to stay. Before leaving, Auntie Paula gave us a strong admonishment about being well-behaved and quiet. Here, in the presence of real enemy soldiers, we needed little persuasion.

I saw Mother walk quickly towards the front door and I could tell by the deliberately slow pace of the Aunties that they were still mad at her. The lobby of this hotel wasn't like
the one Kiki and I had stayed in at our resort. It didn't have marble floors with oriental carpets, palm trees in enormous pots, or uniformed bellboys. The hotel was no wider than a town house, and the lobby had room for only one sofa and three armchairs around a coffee table. The walls were covered with a gray paper that had a burlap-like texture. The man who had permitted us to stay was doing paperwork behind a counter at the side of the lobby. A uniformed attendant operated a small elevator behind us, and a bathroom, Fredek and I had been shown, was behind that.

From the armchair that we had been told to share, Fredek and I watched as soldiers in green tunics and dark blue trousers walked in and out through the lobby in twos and threes. They looked different from Polish soldiers. They seemed, for the most part, not as tall and heavier set, with round faces. Some were darker skinned, with oriental eyes. They didn't have swords, like Polish officers, but like Polish officers, they did wear pistols at their sides. Many carried briefcases as well.

One soldier, coming into the hotel, stopped in front of Fredek and me and smiled. His round face and short-cropped hair made me think of a snowman. “Ah, little boys!” he said in accented Polish. He seemed delighted with his discovery. I saw Miss Bronia lean towards us from the sofa she shared with Sonya. The Russian fished in the pocket of his loose-fitting trousers and, after a moment's search, came up with two lumps of sugar in their paper wrappers. Hotel Grand was printed on each wrapper. He held them out to us, one in each hand.

We had all been warned, in the weeks before the war, about German planes dropping poisoned candy, and neither Fredek nor I reached out to accept his gift.

“They are not allowed to eat sugar,” Miss Bronia interjected. “It rots their teeth.”

The Russian broke into another big smile, revealing a number of steel teeth. “Ah, the momma,” he said, then added, “and the big sister.”

The smiling Russian dug into his pocket again. This time he produced a button. It was a large blue button with some design molded into its surface. He held it out to Sonya, who looked at it blankly.

“Go ahead, take it, dear,” Miss Bronia urged her. To the Russian she said, “Thank you for your kindness, Comrade,” as Sonya reluctantly accepted the gift. The man patted Sonya's cheek, winked at Fredek and me, and walked on.

When he had gone, Miss Bronia explained to us that Russia was a very poor country, and things like sugar cubes and fancy buttons were special to them. The man was trying to be friendly, and, as long as the Russians were our occupiers, we should take care not to offend them.

Miss Bronia had packed some bread and cheese, which we ate for lunch soon after settling into our chairs in the hotel lobby. She had also dug in the boxes and suitcases that the elevator man had neatly piled behind our armchair, to produce some books for us to read silently to ourselves. The books, mine about a talking rabbit and Fredek's about a boy in America who delivered newspapers on his bicycle, we had read many times before, and they held little interest for us now. Sonya was knitting under Miss Bronia's close supervision.

As the afternoon wore on and grew into evening, boredom and hunger had taken up residence inside me. I had made two trips to the little bathroom under the stairs and Fredek had made four or five. After one of them, he whispered to me his discovery of a secret room with a short wave radio where a Russian soldier was listening to everything that was being said here in the lobby and reporting it to Moscow. In view of our need not to cause a disturbance, I thought it best to pretend quiet interest.

I would have liked to practice my coin-disappearing with the coin substitute I had found—Miss Bronia had told me it was something called a washer—but that required a certain arm movement that I did not believe appropriate under the circumstances.

When Mother and Auntie Edna returned without Auntie Paula, it was well past suppertime, and the lateness of the hour was gnawing at my stomach. The way they walked together didn't look as though anyone was mad at anyone else anymore. It seemed that they had been unable to find a proper place for us to stay, but they had found one where we could spend the next night or two in until they could find us something better. Auntie Paula was cleaning the place out now.

We left some bags in the care of the hotel desk clerk and carried what we could the several blocks to our new temporary home. Fredek's question about supper, as we walked, was answered by his mother's un-reassuring, “We'll see.”

The place was two large rooms on the ground floor of an apartment building built around a courtyard. They were connected by an archway and had windows on the street. The outer room must have been at least twenty-five feet by twenty, and the inner room even bigger. Although the autumn chill had not yet set in, these two rooms were cold and damp, and there was a strong odor. The beige paint was peeling off the walls, and there was mildew near the ceiling. I had never seen walls like that before.

“Smell the wall,” Fredek said, standing with his nose to the wall.

“Get away from that wall!” his mother said.

An electric light bulb hung on a cord from the middle of each ceiling. A stove stood in the first room for cooking and heating. The toilet and the water pump were down the hall to be shared with other tenants. The furniture was one chair and a pot on the stove.

“This is just for one night,” my mother said. “Tomorrow we'll find something much better.”

For supper, we had a basket of very large carrots that the mothers had bought from a peasant woman—there had been no food in the shops. By noon, the food stores are empty, they had been told.

Miss Bronia broke up the one chair to burn in the stove and cook the carrots. Never a fan of carrots, I was hungry enough to find these palatable. After dinner, we unpacked the suitcases to make one large sleeping pallet out of all the clothes. That night we all slept fully clothed, side by side on the common pallet, covering ourselves with coats and jackets. I had my mother's mink jacket, which kept me warm, but did not keep out the damp.

There was nothing for breakfast the following morning. Fredek complained of being hungry. I could not understand his persistence since we all knew that there was nothing to eat.

“Yes, yes, dear. I know and I'm sorry,” Auntie Edna kept telling him, and I could see that she was on the verge of tears. She walked back and forth nervously, waiting for her turn at the wash basin. When it was her turn, she washed Fredek's face rather roughly, making him cry out. “I'm sorry, dear, I'm sorry,” she kept saying. I didn't know why she did it in the first place, since Fredek and I had washed ourselves every morning at the cottage. To her credit, Mother let me do my own face washing this morning.

Miss Bronia had taken water from the pump in the hall, in a pitcher that we had brought with us from the cottage. We washed ourselves in the pot we had cooked the carrots in the night before, carrying it to the toilet to empty. When Mother told me to go to the bathroom, as I did every morning, with a sheet of newspaper that wasn't for reading, I found the toilet, a board with a hole in it in a closet off the hallway, too foul smelling to do more than pee in it, which I could do without stepping close to that hole, though I did wet the board liberally. When Auntie Edna led Fredek there by the arm, we could hear his muffled protests even inside our apartment.

With our morning toilet finished, Auntie Paula laid out a plan for attacking our problems. A bakery two blocks away would be open at eight. That would be in fifteen minutes, and somebody should, right now, go and get in the line that was
probably already forming. Actually, two people should go so that one could come back to give the rest of us an idea of how long the wait might be so that we would know whether to wait here for breakfast or go out foraging for the other things we needed. Once we had had breakfast, or learned that it would be too long a wait, Auntie Paula said, we should break up into teams to look for firewood, meat and vegetables, and other quarters.