Mother and Me

by Julian Padowicz

  Come to think of it, Mother’s reference to God was surprising. By now I knew that Jews sometimes went to a place called Son of Gaga to pray, ignorant of the deaf ear God turned in their direction, but I had never known them to pray at home like Christians. Was Mother committing blasphemy? Should she be confronted? Would true faith require me to defend God against such outrage? Then I realized that Kiki had not confronted Mother on this, and one could do worse than follow Kiki’s example. I decided to let the matter drop.

  But how can you deny the existence of a situation involving God? If I finked on my Christian duty, God would know it. Right then He may have been waiting for me to act. Oh Lord, he may even have instructed Kiki to be silent so as to test me.

  I was totally willing to do the right thing, if I only knew what the right thing was. Was Mother using the Lord’s name in vain? Was she pretending to be a Christian now when there was danger? What sin might that be? I wondered. Was she trying to get into God’s favor now, while I had to prove my faith over and over with rosaries and abstinence from sin—while I had endured the taunts of my classmates and teacher?

  No, I finally realized. Mother may be trying to win the favor of God, but God knew. He knew how I lived and how she did. Or in turning a deaf ear to Jews, did he also turn a blind eye?

  “Why are you crying, Yulian?” Kiki said. I had no idea I had been crying. “He’s tired,” she said to my mother.

  “Why isn’t he eating?” Mother asked.

  “It’s been a very upsetting day,” Kiki explained. I began to sob uncontrollably.

  “Little soldiers don’t cry,” Mother said. She didn’t say it unkindly.

  “Let’s go to our room,” Kiki said. “We’ll have our dinner there.” She stood up and bent down to pick me up. I put my arms around her, and she lifted. But I was too heavy for her, and we fell to the floor together. There was a very long silence.

  I looked at Kiki. “You’re too big for me to carry any more, you big horse,” she said.

  I began to laugh. Kiki laughed. “I’m too big for you to carry any more,” I repeated proudly.

  “You big horse,” she added.

  “I’m a big horse, and you can’t carry me any more,” I said.

  “You’re too big for me to carry any more, you big horse.” Then, instead of laughing, Kiki was crying.

  Later, when she had tucked me into bed, Kiki sat down beside me and repeated what she had said that other evening in the bathroom. “Yulek,” she said, “you must always remember to love your mother more than anyone else.” Then she hugged me and left the room

  When I woke up the next morning, Mother was in my room. She was having a cup of coffee and a cigarette at the little green table where Kiki and I ate our meals. She sat sideways to it like Kiki, because her knees wouldn’t fit underneath. Mother’s knees, in their silk stockings, showed when she sat like that. Kiki’s dress always covered her knees.

  “Where’s Kiki?” I asked, already fearful of the answer.

  “Well, Yulek, Kiki has had to go home to pack some things. She’ll join us in a few days.”

  I fought back the tears that wanted to gush forth. After the burning airport experience yesterday, after the dinner table matter, I must never, never cry again. “J-join us?” I repeated.

  “We’re going to the country,” Mother said. “Until the war is over. Kiki will join us on the way. You’re going to have to be a very brave little soldier now.”

  There was no ignoring an appeal to God or to country. I got out of bed and stood stiffly at attention waiting for orders. “What should I put on?” I asked.

  “What do you normally put on?” I had taken Mother by surprise.

  “Kiki always tells me what to put on.”

  “Well, why don’t you decide. You’re a big boy now.”

  I had never had to make such a decision before. I opened my green cupboard and confronted a stack of neatly folded shirts. I had no idea I owned so many. Thankfully the underwear was all the same, making decisions unnecessary. As I buttoned my underpants to my undershirt, I contemplated the stack of shirts. I finally settled on a blue one because it was on top. Applying the same reasoning to my selection of shorts—I owned no long trousers—I was soon in the kitchen washing. Marta had oatmeal ready for me when I finished. I sat at the enameled kitchen table forcing down the food. My heart was in tears over Kiki’s departure, but my face remained at attention.

  “My God, Yulian, you can’t wear those green pants with that blue shirt!” Mother said, coming into the kitchen. “After breakfast, go back to your room and change.” She refilled her coffee cup from the pot on the woodburning stove. “Marta, go back with him and find him something proper to wear.”

  “I think you look just fine,” Marta muttered under her breath as I followed her back to my room after breakfast. “Where does she think you’re going, to the opera?” The opera was Marta’s expression for putting on airs. Going to the opera, making an opera, looking like an opera, dressing like for an opera, all described states of existence for which she held scorn. As she moved hurriedly through the apartment ahead of me in house slippers, a damp rag in her hand, I realized that Marta had begun to waddle.

  She selected a tan shirt for me. “Here, put this on. Tan goes with everything.” I put the shirt on while she folded the blue one and put it back in the cupboard. She couldn’t fold it as neatly as Kiki.

  “Here, let me fix your hair,” she said. She took the comb from the shelf and proceeded to flatten my cowlick. “Oh Christ,” she said when it wouldn’t stay down. She put two fingers in her mouth, and applied saliva to my cowlick. “There, go show your mother.” I hurried to my mother’s bedroom for inspection, conscious of Marta’s saliva on my head.

  Mother was on the telephone facing away when I came in. She turned when she heard me. “Oh, good,” she said. Then she gave a sigh of resignation. “Oh, nothing,” she said into the telephone. “Marta just dressed Yulian up in a summer shirt and winter pants. Well, we all have to do the best we can.” She turned back to me and placed a hand over the receiver. “Go pack, Yulian,” she said. Then she yelled out, “Marta!” and then back to the telephone. “Sorry, dear. I was just calling Marta. She’s going to stay in the apartment, you know. Marta!”

  Marta waddled into the room. “Marta, be a dear and get a suitcase for Yulian. A small one.”

  I sat on my bed staring at the empty suitcase, the tears making my eyes blurry. There was a white cross in the paint on the wall above Kiki’s bed where her crucifix had hung. The hairbrush my mother had given her for Christmas was gone from the shelf. She would brush out her braids every night, and her long hair would lie in soft gold waves over her shoulders and down below her elbows. It made her look like one of the saints, and I had begged her to wear it that way sometimes, but she never would. Sometimes when we were in the country in the summer, I could get her to weave it into one thick braid and let it hang down the middle of her back. Otherwise it was always in two braids wound around her head. She said she had never cut her hair in her life, except to trim the ends and make it even.

  The picture of the two of us at the beach was gone too. We had been seated on a wooden crocodile, me in a white cotton beret, Kiki in a beach jacket over her bathing suit.

  It was all right for me to cry, I decided, as long as no one saw me. No, it wasn’t a matter of doing it in secret. Not crying in front of people was the most you could expect of someone my age. While I was too old to cry publicly over Kiki’s departure, I was, after all, a little soldier, not a grownup one.

  “Oh, my God,” Mother said, coming into my room. “Didn’t she teach you to pack?”

  “I know how to darn my socks and wash them,” I retorted. “And I can crochet.” I was lying. I could only crochet a chain; Kiki hadn’t yet taught me to do rows. But Mother wouldn’t know that. “Kiki also taught me all the letters and two times everything.” She had also taught me how to brush her hair, counting one hundred strokes on the right and one hu
ndred on the left, but I had a feeling that that skill would not be accredited.

  “All right,” she sighed, squatting by the open suitcase. “Bring me your underwear.”

  “What should I do now?” I asked when the suitcase was full and snapped closed.

  “I have to make some phone calls,” Mother said.

  This did not answer my question, but she left the room. I ran after her down the hall. “What should I do now?” I repeated.

  “I have to make some important phone calls now, Yulek,” she said over her shoulder.

  “But what should I do?!” I demanded.

  “Go back to your room and read,” she said. I turned back to my room.

  I had a bookcase of books in my room, from many of which Kiki had read to me. Many I had received as gifts to be appreciated in future years. Most of these were in leather bindings with gold letters, and either had no pictures in them or, if they did, they were just black and white sketches.

  I stood in front of the bookcase and realized that I had never selected a book before. What, I wondered, was to stop me from selecting one of the grown-up ones, one I hadn’t already heard several times? I pulled one out at random and began sounding out the words. To my surprise they were no more difficult than the words in the books Kiki had given me to read before, except that the letters were smaller. I had never read with no one in the room before. “It was,” I began aloud, “the best of times.” I flipped back to see if I had missed something. I hadn’t. The book began with, “It was the best of times.” All right. But then it contradicted itself. “It was the worst of times,” it said. I closed the silly book and put it back on the shelf.

  I took out the one about the poor woman with the three sons and no food. But I had already heard that one so many times. I looked over the grown-up books again. One was larger than the others, but thinner. Large pages usually meant pictures. I pulled it out and opened it. There was a colored picture of a sailing ship, leaning down so low it looked like it was going to roll over. It literally made me lose my breath. The sails were so full of wind and the waves leaping so high, like wolves trying to get at the sailors. And the ship looked as if it was sailing faster than it was ever supposed to sail. I spent a long time feasting on that one picture. There were little, tiny sailors up in the rigging, I noticed. How windy and slippery it must be up there.

  When I finally turned the page, the next picture was of medieval soldiers in battle. There was silver armor shining in the sun, several men on horseback fighting a lot of men on foot with swords and spears. The horses had huge round muscles, and their necks were arched so their chins almost touched their chests. One soldier, I saw, was lying on the ground dying. He had his hand up to protect himself, but a horse was about to back over him. I didn’t like that picture at all. The one after that was another battle scene, and I flipped past it quickly.

  The next one was of a lady with no clothes on lying on a bed, having something done to her toenails. It was like the ones in the palace in the park, and I immediately felt comfortable with it. I felt what a special lady she must be to let herself be seen without her clothes, when I couldn’t stand to have anyone but Kiki or my mother see me naked, and the way Kiki used to cover up if she and I had to change in the same room at the beach. I had a strong desire to touch this lady. She would feel so soft, and I knew she would be kind. She would invite me to have some of whatever it was that she had in her cup, unless, of course, it was wine or beer. But I had the feeling that with her it would be hot chocolate or tea with honey and milk in it—certainly not lemon. She would tell me a story about a beautiful princess and a handsome prince, and there would be no witch or stepfather or giant or dragon or evil magician, knight, or king. It would just be about a prince and princess who met and fell in love and lived happily ever after in a beautiful castle.

  She and I would both live in the castle, except that I’d be grown up, and we would walk around the gardens together, and the prince and princess would be like our children and we would watch them as they played, and sometimes we would take them to the beach and she and I would sit under an umbrella on a blanket as they built sand castles. The waves would come up on the beach and wash the castles away, and we would tell them not to cry and help them build a new castle up above where the waves couldn’t reach it.

  And then the air raid siren sounded. Mother’s high-heeled footsteps were in the hall. “Come in here, Yulian!” she called.

  I was immediately back from the beach and terribly aware of Kiki’s departure. I walked into the hall and sat in one of the chairs that someone had placed there. I was not going to cry.

  “Why don’t I tell a story!” Mother said. She bounced up and down on her chair in enthusiasm. I didn’t say anything, and Marta mumbled a few words about how nice that would be. Mother proceeded to tell the story of the Three Little Pigs. But she got it wrong. She had the wolf go to the house built of sticks first and then the one built of straw. And she didn’t even know the little rhyme the wolf recited each time he went to blow down one of the houses. And at the very end, when the wolf is in the kettle of boiling water under the chimney and the Three Little Pigs are playing their fiddles, she had one playing the drums and another playing the organ. It’s one of the Seven Dwarfs in Snow White who plays the organ.

  I sat in my chair scratching my knee, my elbow, the side of my leg, my head, all to show her that I wasn’t listening to her story.

  “Yulian, don’t scratch,” Mother said. I dropped my hands by the sides of the chair.

  Each time the bombs rumbled somewhere, Mother would stop and take a deep breath. She would tighten her lips and turn her eyes towards Marta, without shifting her head, as though I couldn’t see what she was doing. Then she went on to do Jack and the Bean Stalk, and totally left out the Magic Harp. I sucked on my upper lip, making quiet sucking noises and examining a scab I had just rediscovered on my knee. I realized that I actually found great pleasure in her getting the stories all wrong. I presumed Marta recognized her mistakes as well.

  “Stop picking your knee!” Mother said, louder than I’m sure she meant to. I swung my feet back and forth above the floor and switched to sucking my lower lip.

  Then we heard a loud whistle. It was followed by a loud crash, and our three chairs lifted a little ways off the floor. I knew all about bombs. Kiki had told me about the exploding shells the cannons fired in the Big War twenty years before. Her brother had been a soldier then and buildings that he was in shook just like this.

  “My God! What are they doing?” Mother said. She ran through the salon and began opening the balcony doors. I saw Marta take off after her, and I ran after Marta. She held Mother around the waist and was pulling her away from the doors. Marta, I realized, was much bigger than Mother. I had always thought of Mother as tall, because she was taller than Kiki.

  “Madam must come away from the balcony,” Marta was saying in the awkward, third-person way that Polish grammar does those things. I was in a bind. I was wishing Mother would open the balcony doors with their blackout paper so I could see what was happening in the street. On the other hand I was happy to see Mother admonished. Then I remembered Kiki’s command to love my mother, and I realized I wasn’t doing that.

  Then our house shook again. The sound and the shaking were bigger than before. A chunk of plaster, the size of my green table, fell from the ceiling between me and the two grownups. I looked at Mother and Marta standing there together and they looked at me as though there were a crater between us. None of us seemed able to move.

  Then I was the one who had crossed it. I had crossed the three or four feet of salon floor and crumbled plaster that had separated us and I was kicking at Mother’s legs.

  “What are you doing? Yulian, Yulian, what are you doing? Stop that, Yulian! Yulian, stop it!” Mother and Marta were both shouting. I remembered the way I had been kicking Susan in that same room when I was smaller, and I stopped and ran back to my room and jumped onto Kiki’s bed. I was crying fro
m the pain and from the embarrassment, and I had my eyes shut tightly. There were hands picking me up, and when I smelled my mother’s perfume close to me I pushed away. I didn’t want to be hitting her any more, but I was pushing with my hands wide open in the dark behind my closed eyelids. Then she released me, and I felt Marta’s large, dry hands on my sides, and I let her pick me up and hold me to her.

  I pressed my face hard against her neck and wondered why I had done what I had. Why did I hate my mother so? Why did it please me when she told stories wrong? Why was I happy to see Marta holding her and her thrashing around like that? And, of course, why had I started kicking her legs without any thought even about what I was doing? I knew it wasn’t a Christian thing to do—I would be punished for it some day. Was it because I was really Jewish, and I could pretend to be a Catholic, but could never really be one because Jews had bad in them? Or was it from touching my birdie?

  Kiki would explain it all to me when she joined us. I had never told her about touching my birdie. How do you explain to someone why you persisted in doing something that gave absolutely no reward, but only did something terrible, like make you go crazy? It was a crazy thing to do, and to do it, you had to be a little crazy already. So maybe it was the Jewish that made you a little crazy to start with—crazy enough to touch your birdie when you knew it would make you more crazy. But then, if that were so, then all Jewish men would be crazy. How did I know they weren’t? The only Jewish men I knew were Lolek and my late grandfather. Was Lolek crazy? He certainly wasn’t crazy like my Uncle Benek—I had forgotten that I knew Uncle Benek too, and he certainly was crazy—everyone knew that. But then, my grandfather certainly hadn’t been crazy. So I figured that theory wasn’t right.

  But I would tell Kiki when I saw her tomorrow or the next day. And I would stop touching my birdie. Yes, that was what I would do. I could do it. Poland was at war. Soldiers were marching into battle to be shot at, maybe killed, by the Germans. They were sleeping in tents on blankets on the ground. I could certainly discipline myself enough to never touch my birdie again. Then I could help Kiki serve food to soldiers at the railroad station, as she had done during the World War. I would not go crazy, but be available to serve my country.