Mother and Me (44 page)

Ignoring Mother's hand, the man began inching back toward the door.

“Just sit down and talk with me for a minute. I'll make some tea,” Mother said. She had put her hand lightly on his elbow and was urging him towards the table.

The man continued to move towards the door. “No women, no children!” he said, his voice rising in both volume and pitch.

“I am strong like a man,” Mother said, her quiet voice contrasting with his. “I was athletic champion in Lodz.”

This was news to me, but then grandfather's military career had been too.

“I will pay you extra.”

The man was shaking his head. Snow, mountains, border guards, were words that I heard him speak. Finally he gained the door, and in an instant he was gone.

Mother turned to look at me. The expression on her face was of total disappointment and surprise. I had never seen such surprise or such disappointment on her face before. “Ignore
what he said,” she said in a voice that was totally flat. “He is a crazy peasant. Why is he talking about snow and mountains? Don't pay any attention to him. Don't tell Mademoiselle about any of this.”

I said that I wouldn't.

Mother sat down on her own bed. “Come sit next to me,” she said.

For the first time in my life, I found that I wanted to sit next to her. I crossed to her bed and sat down beside her. Mother put her arm around my waist and pulled me closer. I didn't resist. I wondered if she was crying. I noticed that one of the cloth-covered buttons on her dress had been replaced by a large black wooden one.

“All right!” she suddenly said. “We will not be sad. We will have some tea and we will be gay.” Then she got up, straightened the skirt of her dress, and went to the kitchen.

A few minutes later, she was back with a tray. A man's cane hung from her arm. The tea was sweetened, but there was no milk, she said. The cookie was for me. I wondered about the cane.

Mother leaned the cane against the table as we sat down to tea. “We will not be sad,” Mother said again. “Sad people don't win. We will find somebody else. Don't worry.”

Then she stood up and picked up the cane. Turning her feet outward, she suddenly began to walk a strange duck-walk up and down the room. She poked the cane left and right in exaggerated movements. She was funny, and I laughed.

Mother laughed too. “Who am I?” she asked.

I had no idea.

“Come on,” she said, laughing, and resumed her duck-walk. “Who am I?”

“A duck?” I guessed without conviction.

“Come on—the cane,” she said, twirling it around. “And I'm wearing a derby hat,” though she really wasn't.

I shrugged my shoulders.

“I'm Charlie Chaplin!” she announced.

“Oh.”

“Don't you recognize Charlie Chaplin?”

“Who's Charlie Chaplin?”

“You know, Charlie Chaplin, the funny American movie comic.”

I shrugged my shoulders again.

“You don't know who Charlie Chaplin is?”

I shook my head.

“Oh my God! Every child knows who Charlie Chaplin is.”

I shrugged my shoulders another time.

“You don't know who Charlie Chaplin is,” Mother said still again. But she didn't sound angry as she had the other day about my not learning any French in school, though she was definitely disappointed. “Do you know about Shirley Temple?” Her voice was sad now, as though she were afraid of my negative answer.

I had heard the name and hoped my saying so would cheer her up.

“Have you seen her? Do you know who she is?”

I searched my memory for the ladies who had come to our Warsaw apartment. She may even have been an Auntie. “Is she the one who brought me chocolates?” I guessed wildly.

Mother came over to where I was sitting and put her arm around my shoulders. I saw that now she was crying. I felt terrible for having made her cry. “Was she at my birthday party?” I speculated desperately.

When Mademoiselle came the next morning, she and Mother had a quiet talk in French before Mother went out. On our walk later that morning, Mademoiselle said that she had been told that I didn't know who Charlie Chaplin and Shirley Temple were. She then proceeded to tell me about the baggy-trousered
English comedian and the American child actress, who was about the same age as I was. She also went on to tell me about a magnificent French actress, whom Mademoiselle had once seen on stage, but who was now dead, named Sarah Bernhardt, and a great Polish opera singer named Yan Kiepura, whom she had seen as well, and who was still alive. She also told me about an opera in which a beautiful girl who makes cigars and a man who fights with cows fall in love and everyone dies.

Mother surprised us after lunch by coming home early and taking Mademoiselle and me to a café where, she said, they had cheesecake that day. They didn't advertise it, she said with a little laugh, but if they knew you, and you asked for it, they had it. The café was dimly lit, and the glass display case by the front entrance was empty, except for a small white teddy bear. I supposed that it must have been placed there temporarily by the son or daughter of the café owner, since cafes did not, in my experience, sell teddy bears.

Then I thought I heard my mother ask, “Yulek, would you like that teddy bear?”

I could not have heard right. Such happiness could not be happening to me.

“Oh, Julien,” Mademoiselle was saying excitedly, “what a beautiful teddy bear. Wouldn't you like to have it?”

The best I could do was to nod my head, and in a moment the bear was in the crook of my arm, looking up at me through his brown button eyes, the way baby Nadia had looked at me in the hall.

He was about ten inches tall, made of white plush, with arms and legs that turned around wire joints in the shoulders and hips. I did not have to ponder a name, but immediately christened him Meesh, the equivalent of naming an English-speaking bear Teddy.

Seated on my lap, Meesh shared the cheesecake with me, though I would not take the risk of staining him with tea. Teddy bears, I explained to Mother and Mademoiselle, did not like tea.

I had had a bear in Warsaw, a large brown creature, almost as big as I was, who sat among my other toys in the corner by Kiki's bed. I cannot remember his having a name or my ever playing with him. I don't think I would have known how. And dolls, of course, were out of the question. But Meesh was my soulmate the moment my outstretched hands had touched the soft plush of his little body.

I worried about taking him outside without a coat or mittens, but Mademoiselle explained to me that bears not only had fur, but extra layers of fat to insulate them from the cold. While I did not disbelieve her, I did have difficulty internalizing the idea that his little body was not uncomfortable in the December cold. Had I been permitted to unbutton my coat, I would have wrapped him inside along with me, but I had to settle for covering him as well as I could with my arm.

That evening I taught Meesh the Our Father and the Hail Mary. Though he had no knees, by folding his legs back at the hips he could simulate a kneeling position, and I could hold his hands together for him. Unfortunately, there was no way that he could cross himself. Then he slept in my arms, and I remember waking several times, or maybe just dreaming that I did, concerned lest he be crushed by my large presence.

The next morning he accompanied Mademoiselle and me on our walk and we learned to buy sleeping car tickets in French. Mademoiselle waited patiently while Meesh and I both repeated the French, Meesh in a squeaky baby-talk voice that Kiki would not have permitted me to use. On two or three occasions I even had to alert Mademoiselle to the fact that we were ready to go on, since her mind seemed to have wandered in the interim.

For some reason there was no French at all over lunch, as Mademoiselle alternated bites of her bread and cheese with drags on her cigarette and I expounded on table manners to Meesh. It wasn't till she interrupted my explanation of gin rummy with a suggestion that Meesh be put down for a nap,
that I realized from her tone that Mademoiselle was annoyed over something.

I promptly complied with her suggestion and turned my attention fully to cards. But instead of resuming the easy conversation of previous days, Mademoiselle surprised me with a most uncomfortable silence as well as the most thorough trouncing I had experience in any card game. Of the two, the silence was the more distressing.

It was after playing three or four hands in virtual silence, and an atmosphere increasingly thicker in smoke, that I decided it was time for Meesh to rejoin us. As Mademoiselle shuffled the cards, I got down from my chair and proceeded toward my bed.

“Where are you going?” Mademoiselle asked.

“Meesh woke up,” I explained.

“Sit down.”

Mademoiselle's command surprised me, and I resumed my seat.

Mademoiselle laid the deck of cards down on the table with a very deliberate motion. “Julien, you have to realize,” she began, “that we are occupied by Communists here in Lvow, while Fascists are occupying the other half of Poland. People are being arrested and people are being killed. Some of us, who are cultured and accustomed to the finer things in life, have suddenly been reduced to living like peasants. You don't know if your own father is alive in a prison camp or dead on a battlefield. This is no time for you be pretending that dolls are alive and talking to them as though they were people.” Having said that, Mademoiselle proceeded to light another lumpy cigarette.

I found Mademoiselle's calling Meesh a doll offensive, but could clearly see how upset she was and determined it best for Meesh to extend his nap. When Mademoiselle picked the cards up again, I realized that her hands were as unsteady as they had been a few days before.

“Would Mademoiselle tell me about another one of those funny operas?” I asked, though I had found nothing funny about the cigar girl and the cow fighter.

“Most operas aren't funny,” she said. “There is nothing funny about
Carmen
.”

This confirmed my own opinion of the piece. Under the impression that all opera was supposed to be funny, I had been harboring a definite doubt as to my own judgement. What was most important, however, was that Mademoiselle was, quite visibly, settling down from being upset. “Most opera is tragic, the way that most life is tragic,” Mademoiselle was saying. I realized, it would be best if Meesh maintained a low profile around Mademoiselle.

“As your mother has most certainly learned by now, because everyone knows,” Mademoiselle was saying, “last night they arrested more people, some of whom I am sure, she knew.”

When Mother came home that evening, she and Mademoiselle again talked in French. I caught words like street and door and chair, and by the gravity of their tone I guessed that they were talking about the arrests of the previous night. But when Mademoiselle finally left, Mother's mood quickly changed as she surprised me with a piece of red cloth which, she explained, was to become a coat for Meesh.

I watched in disbelief as Mother folded the cloth in half and then proceeded to cut it into a shape that, frankly, resembled a dress more than a coat. The finished garment, sewn together with brown thread and fastened by a white button, made my poor Meesh look something like a misshapen red mushroom. But the very idea of my mother's initiative and effort in our behalf, got to my heart and Meesh's as nothing I could remember. I had the desire to wrap my arms around Mother's neck, but I didn't know if she would like it.

Christmas came and went, as did my birthday, three weeks later. I was eight, an age I had waited for decades to achieve, but,
somehow, it meant little now. Just before Christmas, Mother gave Mademoiselle some money for us to buy a tree, tabletop size, which we decorated with colored paper cutouts that Mademoiselle proved very clever at making. I understood that there would be no presents, except that Mother gave Mademoiselle a pair of wool gloves, which, Mother explained, weren't a Christmas present. They were used but serviceable, and Mademoiselle was so pleased that her knees bent almost into a curtsey.

I told the Christmas story to Meesh after we had trimmed the tree. Meesh had developed the habit of taking long naps while Mademoiselle was there. Mademoiselle told both of us about Christmas at the Countess's house.

On Christmas Eve, Mother really surprised me by knowing some of the words to some Christmas songs. She didn't know many of the words, but joined Mademoiselle and me when she could. Mother had insisted that Mademoiselle dine with us that evening, and even Mrs. Potkanskova, our landlady, with her one blackened eyeglass, came in with a bottle of vodka and some glasses on a tray and stayed to hear Mademoiselle sing a song in French. I hoped she had remembered to lock her crazy husband's door firmly behind her.

Then it was right on my birthday, January thirteenth, as I turned eight, that Bogda was late and breathless bringing our supper. “Oh, Missus,” she said, “I am so sorry for being late with your supper, but I was looking all over for Dr. Kratynovich, and nobody can find him.”