Mother and Me

by Julian Padowicz

  No, I would not tell Kiki about touching my birdie. As long as I was going to stop it, it would be all right, and I wouldn’t need to talk to anyone about it, would I? And it would remain my great secret.

  The all-clear had sounded some while ago, and I realized Marta must be tired of holding me. Besides, I was, in a sense, a soldier now on a special, secret mission. I disengaged myself from her arms, and she lowered me to the floor. Mother was not in the room.

  I had not asked God for a sign. I hadn’t known that to be negotiable. Nevertheless, I received one. On our dining room table, rested a street lamp.

  Our dining room table was on the floor now, or most of it, anyway, one leg still upright and the tracks connecting the two sliding halves and supporting the leaves, shattered. And on top of our splintered table lay a street lamp.

  We were on the fourth floor, and it had found its way to our dining room window and landed on our dining room table. It wasn’t the entire street lamp. But it was the important part, the part that actually lit up and was so high above the sidewalk that you could never hope to touch it. And there it was with its iron parts that you could never get close enough to see properly, shaped to look like leaves along a tree branch and the glass globe all broken, and thick, golden wire in colored wrapping, and the remains of the biggest light bulb I had ever seen.

  I knew it was for me—what would either Mother nor Marta want with a street lamp? God had found my new determination pleasing, and was both telling me so and rewarding me for it. Marta was already sweeping up the broken glass and wood, but I knew she wouldn’t be able to move my street lamp.

  There were pieces of glass, curved ones from the lamp and flat ones from our window, imbedded in the plaster walls. It was so real.

  I approached the street lamp for a closer look. “Don’t touch it!” Marta shouted. “It could still have electricity in it!” I backed off at her command, though I doubted her reasoning. It could not have flown all this way from the street, crashed through our window, shattered our dining room table, and still have electricity left in it. Besides, God would not have given it to me in that condition.

  On the other hand, it suddenly occurred to me, maybe that was exactly what God was doing. I had resolved not to ever touch my birdie again, and God was testing me by giving me something which, if I touched it just the slightest, would kill me. It wasn’t that God was trying to kill me, I understood. What God was actually doing was showing His confidence in me by tempting me with something that would not just make me crazy some time in the future from excessive touching, but could make me dead on the spot. And He knew and I knew that I would not touch it.

  I watched Marta sweep carefully around it, leaving a shadow of debris on the floor where she would not let her broom come too close. My fingers ached to run over the carved metal, my eyes to feast close up on the broken giant light bulb. But I knew I must resist it. Whether it had electricity in it or not, I did not know. But I knew God wanted me to perform this exercise. If Kiki only knew! I couldn’t wait to tell her.

  Then I helped Marta clean up the room. We leaned the broken parts of the tabletop against a wall, and Marta found a box to hold all the splinters. We put new blackout paper over the broken window. When it was all done, I went back to my room. I didn’t need anyone to tell me what to do this time. I lay down on my bed and thought about my street lamp and God and his testing of me and my vow and my new awareness of my senseless hostility towards Mother which I was about to change, and how grown up I had become in that one morning.

  Marta woke me up for lunch. She had set places for the two of us at the kitchen table. Mother ate off a tray in her bedroom. It occurred to me to feel sorry for her eating alone after the way I had treated her. I couldn’t tell whether I was actually feeling sorry for her or just knew that I should be. I wondered when we were supposed to start our trip, and when Kiki would be joining us.

  It was almost my bedtime when Mother and I finally left the house. She had two suitcases, I had the one she had packed for me. Marta had come out and found us a doroshka. It had taken her some time. With cars, including taxis, all mobilized for military use, doroshkas were in great demand. Then Marta had hugged me, and she and Mother had even hugged each other briefly.

  There were no lights on, and it was difficult to see anything. There were holes in streets and buildings. Some buildings, I could see, had spilled into the street, and there were always people doing something there. As we passed one place like that, Mother said, “Don’t look, Yulian,” and covered my eyes with her hand. I struggled to see, but couldn’t see anything anyway. In one street we had to turn around and go a different way because the street was blocked by fire trucks and a crowd of people.

  I was pretty sure we weren’t heading for the railroad station. Then I recognized where we were; we were at Fredek’s house. In some way, I knew, Fredek, the one whom I always had to help catch and hold people in the park so he could kick them in the belly, but never could find, was my cousin, though how we were actually related, I had no idea. If we were going on a trip with Fredek, I wasn’t happy at the prospect. I just hoped his governess, Miss Frania, hadn’t gone away too.

  Fredek’s apartment was full of people. Two or three were men, and I wondered why they weren’t in the army fighting the Germans. The rest were all women. When the doroshka driver had dropped our bags in the hall and Mother paid him, Auntie Edna, Fredek’s mother, came into the hall to greet us. She was much taller than Mother, with a long face and black hair rolled around her head. She and Mother didn’t kiss. “Sasha and Renia are here,” was all I heard Auntie Edna say in the way of greeting. She said it in a low voice as though it were something private between them. Mother said, “Good.” Auntie Edna didn’t seem to take notice of me. Mother was holding my hand.

  The others stood in groups talking. Nobody sat. They talked in urgent voices, and some people would move from one group to another and continue talking as though they had been there all along. I wasn’t hearing words, but only the urgency. Mother and Auntie Edna separated, joining different groups. Mother and I walked up to one group in the dining room, and no one seemed to greet us, but Mother was immediately in the conversation. Everyone seemed to be smoking. I didn’t see Fredek anywhere, but with all the adults standing, I wasn’t surprised.

  There was one man sitting down. He was very old and bald, and had a little black cap, like the one my grandfather had used to wear, on the back of his bald head. He was sitting at the dining room table eating boiled chicken from a soup bowl. His hands shook. I had never seen that before and watched him with interest. He smiled at me with gold teeth and beckoned with a bony, shaking finger. I turned away pretending I hadn’t seen.

  Then Mother and I moved to another group. “Edna and I are going together,” I heard Mother say. “I think Renia will come with us.” Suddenly panic gripped me. She had not mentioned either me or Fredek. Would we be left here with the strangers? I began listening intently. “We have a truck,” she went on. “It’s a van from the factory. Lolek didn’t give it to the army. He told them it was on a trip to Posnan and hadn’t come back.”

  “We’re going with the Rosenbaums,” a woman said. “They have a carriage, and the army didn’t know they had a horse.”

  “Which way are you going to go?” somebody else asked.

  “We’re going south, Fina and I,” the woman said. “Boris called me from the barracks and said to go south.”

  “Bolek said we should go east,” another woman said.

  “Toward Russia?”

  “The Russians aren’t going to do anything—they’re afraid of the English.”

  “The English, the English. Chamberlain won’t do anything.”

  “They have to. We have a defense pact with them.”

  “England and France will declare war on Germany tomorrow, you’ll see.”

  “Lolek said we should go south too,” Mother said. She and the woman who was going in the carriage immediately moved away from the
group and formed a group of their own.

  “Major Solecki and his wife are going south too,” the woman said. “He has to report to the barracks in Lublin.”

  “Are they here?” Mother asked. I was listening carefully for any mention of me.

  “They’re in the living room,” the woman said.

  Then Fredek was suddenly by my side. “That’s the German ambassador,” he said. I looked around in surprise. Then I saw him indicating the old man eating the chicken. “We’re holding him prisoner until they return our ambassador from Berlin. Then we’ll shoot him.”

  I knew Fredek was making it up, but I glanced at the old man again. He gave me another gold-toothed smile and held up a dripping chicken leg. I quickly turned away.

  “He wants you to eat that chicken leg,” Fredek said, “but it’s poisoned. Go take it from him and pretend like you’re eating it while I sneak up behind him with a gun. My father gave me a real gun before he went to the war. They gave him two guns by mistake, and he gave one of them to me.”

  Fredek’s victims were always imaginary, but this one was real. I didn’t want to go near the old man. “Mommy says I can’t let go of her hand,” I lied.

  “Auntie Barbara,” he said referring to Mother, “ is a German spy. Germans always use women as spies because no one suspects them. We’ll shoot her together with him. We’ll ask if they want blindfolds and cigarettes, and if they say yes, we won’t give them any.”

  The part about blindfolds and cigarettes I didn’t understand, though I realized that my knowledge of things like executions was not as thorough as my cousin’s. I wondered if Fredek knew what the plans for us were.

  Then I felt someone take my free hand. Looking around I saw a woman I had never seen before holding my hand in one of hers and Fredek’s in the other. She had on a brown wool skirt and a light brown sweater.

  “Yes, please take him, Miss Bronia,” Mother said.

  I was gripped by terror. There had been a story that Kiki had told me once in which a wicked stepmother took her daughter by the hand into the woods and then gave her to an old couple to be their servant. “Here, take her,” Kiki had her saying.

  “No!” I screamed and pulled my hand free. I wrapped my arm around Mother, still clutching her by one hand. I buried my face against her side. “Get away from me, you witch!”

  The room must have grown silent. “Miss Bronia’s not a witch,” Mother said, laughing.

  “Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!” I screamed in terror.

  “Yulian!” Mother said sharply. “Yulian, control yourself!” She was squeezing my hand hard and she was hurting it, but it didn’t matter.

  “It’s all right, Madam,” I heard the woman say behind me. “He’s upset like everybody else.”

  I felt Mother’s hand loosen on mine immediately. The woman’s voice was very gentle. Of course she wasn’t a witch. There were no witches—I knew that. And I was suddenly terribly embarrassed by my outburst. I had made people think I still believed in witches.

  “Yulian,” my mother said. The sharpness was gone from her voice, but her tone said, now behave properly.

  “It’s my fault. I surprised him,” Miss Bronia said.

  I turned my head enough to look at her with one eye.

  “Just give him a moment to adjust.”

  She had brown, wavy hair, cut short, and there was a kind expression on her face. At her throat, she wore a little gold cross on a chain.

  Of course she wasn’t going to take me away from Mother. She must just be somebody’s governess, and she was going to take me and Fredek to some other room while the grownups talked. Fredek was still holding her hand and must obviously have known her.

  “I’m Sonya’s governess,” Miss Bronia said to me. “I don’t know if you remember Sonya. She’s Fredek’s other cousin. I know Miss Yanka,” she added, referring to Kiki. “Now do you want to come with us to Fredek’s room?” she asked me. Her tone implied that I was perfectly free to refuse. It was a totally novel experience, and, of course, I would not refuse that kind of appeal. She took my hand again, and the three of us went down the hall to Fredek’s room.

  Fredek’s room was dark, except for the light coming through the partially open door. Somebody was lying on Fredek’s bed, and Miss Bronia led us directly to the other bed in the room. “Take off your shoes,” she whispered, “and lie down on the bed. Fredek at this end and Yulian at that end.”

  She spread a blanket over us and gave Fredek a hug. I both wanted a hug from Miss Bronia, too, and didn’t want one. I didn’t know if I would ever get used to war.

  Miss Bronia whispered something to Fredek then came to my end of the bed. I was too embarrassed to hold my arms out for a hug as I did every night for Kiki. Miss Bronia sat down beside me. Then she reached down for my shoulders, and I knew she would hug me. I sat up, and she held me to her for a much longer time than I could ever remember being held by Kiki.

  She was soft, and she smelled of a gentle cologne, not the strong perfume and cigarette smell that Mother had or the soap smell of Kiki. I was crying again, quietly, and I didn’t think she heard me, but if she did, I sensed that it would be all right.

  Chapter Two

  I remember waking for a few seconds as someone was carrying me in the elevator going down. I could tell by the scent that it was a man. Then I remember the dark inside the truck. It was totally dark. It was a dark I had never seen before. They had seated me in the corner, supported by walls in back and on my right. I was sitting on some kind of bench with a blanket wrapped around me. The truck was moving in the direction I was facing, over rough pavement, probably cobblestones. I didn’t know who else was in the truck with me. I remembered Miss Bronia and hoped she was in the truck. I sniffed for her cologne, but smelled only cigarette smoke and heavy perfume.

  Then I heard voices whispering. I couldn’t make out the words. Sometimes the truck made a turn, and I’d have to catch my balance. There was a lip to the bench under me that I could hold on to. The truck, I sensed, must be moving very slowly. Sometimes it would stop. If it stopped for a long time, someone would groan, and someone else would go, “Shshshsh.”

  When the truck was moving again, a woman said, “When we’re stopped, we’ve got to be absolutely silent. There’s not supposed to be anyone in the back of this truck. It’s supposed to be a supply truck.” It was an older woman’s voice, I was sure.

  “We’re supposed to be cabbages,” my mother said. I recognized her voice. There was quiet laughter. It was the way kids laughed behind their books in class so the teacher won’t hear. I had never heard adults laughing that way. Then the truck stopped, and everyone was quiet again. I was back asleep before we were moving again.

  Later, when we were once more underway, I heard Fredek’s voice. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said aloud.

  “Did you bring something for him?” another woman asked.

  “Like what?” I recognized Auntie Edna’s voice in the dark.

  “Each woman was supposed to be responsible for her own child,” the voice said. “Bronia doesn’t know what you packed. She doesn’t even know Yulek.” The mention of Miss Bronia’s name was music to my ears. I had been afraid she wasn’t along.

  “What did you want me to bring?” Auntie Edna asked.

  “All right, I have a hot water bottle,” the voice said, “but you’ll have to buy me a new one.”

  “You brought your hot water bottle?”

  “It’s for Sonya when she has cramps.”

  “Sonya has cramps?” Auntie Edna said. “She’s only five years older than Fredek.”

  “Five and a half. And she does have cramps.”

  “The hot water bottle will be fine.” That was Miss Bronia’s voice, and it was honey to me. Now I heard some moving around in the dark.

  “It’s in my bag here somewhere.”

  “I have to kaka,” Fredek wailed.

  “God damn! Stop the truck! Somebody stop the damned truck!”
/>   Somebody started banging on the front wall. I sat in my corner, wrapped in my blanket and the darkness, glad that it wasn’t I who needed to go to the bathroom.

  I felt the truck pull to one side, the side I was sitting on. Then it began to incline considerably. “We’re going to roll over!” Auntie Edna cried, but at that moment it came to a lurching stop.

  “I have to kaka,” Fredek sobbed as we waited for someone to open the door.

  “For godsakes hurry up and open the door!” a voice said.

  Then we heard somebody working the latch, and finally the door opened. A man’s head and shoulders appeared in silhouette in the opening. I recognized the shape of a four-cornered, military hat on his head. “Is something wrong?” he asked in the formal tone of an employee.

  “The children have to go to the bathroom,” a voice said. I recognized myself included in the statement and resented it. It was the voice of the one with the hot water bottle. “Sonya, do you have to go too?” she asked.

  The answer came from a form sitting at the other end of my bench. She sat in the front corner of the truck box, wrapped in a blanket much like I was. “No, Mother,” she said sleepily. “I just want to sleep.” I saw Miss Bronia and Fredek scrambling down from the truck together.

  “Yulek, you’d better go too,” Mother said. In the dim light from the open door, I could see that she was sitting on a bench on the other side of the truck, between the woman who must have been Sonya’s mother and an older woman. Auntie Edna was kneeling on one suitcase and opening another in a pile of leather bags in the middle of the truck’s cargo box in which we all sat. A cardboard carton contained our gas masks in their green, metal canisters and canvas pouches. I did not have to go, and, like the girl Sonya, would have preferred to sleep, but I was accustomed to following orders in this regard. Besides, I certainly didn’t want to leave myself vulnerable to Fredek’s undignified plight. I would pee by myself against some tree or bush, as I knew how to do. I would not do the other thing without more suitable privacy.