Mother and Me

by Julian Padowicz

  “You keep the coin and practice,” he told me, “and tomorrow I’ll show you how you can turn your hand over and still hide it.” He held his head cocked to the right and squinted his left eye to avoid the smoke while he talked. Then he patted me on the head and walked back to the truck cab where Mr. Dembovski stood smoking.

  Back in the truck, I practiced my new skill … until I dropped the coin.

  “Yulek, where did you get that money?” my mother asked with alarm as she saw me retrieving it. I explained that Mr. Lupicki had given it to me.

  “What did he do to you?” she asked, her alarm compounded.

  “He showed me how to do coin tricks,” I said, puzzled and somewhat frightened by her alarm.

  “Give it to me,” she said. I stepped across the space between us and handed her the coin.

  “You are never to accept money from strangers,” she said.

  “All right,” I conceded.

  Nobody in the truck said anything for a moment, then my mother asked again, “Are you sure he didn’t do anything to you? Did he touch you?”

  “He patted me on the head.”

  “On the head?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are never to speak to him again, ever,” she said.

  For the life of me, I could not imagine in what way either one of us had transgressed.

  To my Aunties, my mother said, “The next time we stop, that man is getting out of this truck.”

  “All he did was teach Yulek some coin tricks,” Auntie Edna said.

  “Why would he do that? Fredek, did Mr. Lupicki teach you any tricks?”

  “No, Auntie Barbara,” Fredek said.

  “So why just Yulek? Why not both boys? Why single out Yulek?”

  “Because you were nice to him, Basia,” Auntie Paula said. “He was being nice to Yulek in return. You brought this on yourself.”

  “Well, I don’t want Yulek taking money from strangers.”

  “He didn’t give him money.” Auntie Paula said. “He gave him a coin to do tricks with. With that, he couldn’t buy a chocolate.”

  “I don’t trust that man,” Mother said.

  “Do you hear what you’re saying?” Auntie Paula asked her.

  “What? I said I saw courage and cleverness in his hand. That doesn’t mean I trust him. Yesterday you were the one telling me you didn’t trust him.”

  Auntie Edna said, “We’ll be in Durnoval tonight, and he’ll be going his way.”

  “I just don’t want Yulek taking money from strangers,” Mother repeated. “Miss Yanka should have taught him that. Didn’t Miss Frania teach Fredek that?”

  “I don’t know,” Auntie Edna said.

  “Fredek,” Mother said, “are you supposed to take money from strangers?”

  “Oh, no, Auntie Barbara, Miss Frania taught me….”

  “What stupidities you ask, Basia,” Auntie Paula interrupted. “What do you expect the child to say?”

  “The truth,” Mother said. “Fredek always tells Auntie Barbara the truth, don’t you, Fredek?”

  “Oh, yes, Auntie Barbara.”

  “This is total nonsense,” Auntie Paula said. “Don’t you understand children at all?”

  “Of course I understand children. Fredek is a very intelligent boy, and he and I get along …”

  “Why don’t we just all sing?” Auntie Edna interrupted. “Bronia, start a song.”

  Miss Bronia looked confused for a moment, as though her mind had been far away. “Yes … yes, a song,” she said. “How about…?” It took her some time to think of a song for us to sing.

  I still didn’t like Auntie Paula very much—she wasn’t kind or gentle—but she did make a lot of sense when she talked. And my ability to see her in these two different lights, I considered, a very grown-up observation.

  That night we had a proper supper and slept in real beds in the house of some people who had been expecting us, though we didn’t actually know them. Their house was in what looked like a real city with cobblestone streets, sidewalks, and street lamps.

  They were an elderly couple, and there was a woman about the same age as Mother and the Aunties, who must have been their daughter. There was also a cook named Maria who limped, and I saw that one of her shoes had a much thicker sole than the other. Auntie Paula, who appeared to be the one who had made the arrangements in the first place, introduced us all in the entrance hall, except for the men, who were bringing in the bags. When she introduced Fredek, I saw him pressing a little against Miss Bronia and recognized it as shyness. This inspired me and, when it was my turn, I imagined Kiki telling me that I must step up and shake hands with each of our hosts and look them in the eye, just as she had ordered me to march up to the marshal earlier that year and ask for his autograph. With that self-inflicted spur in my side, I crossed the hall and offered a firm handshake to each one.

  Stepping back, I could see my mother beaming. She didn’t know that it was Kiki for whom I had done it.

  These people, it turned out, were friends, or maybe some kind of employees, of the Metners to whose farm we were going. They had heard on the radio about what was happening in the north and were full of questions about what we had seen. The grownups sat around the dinner table talking, late into the night.

  After dinner, Miss Bronia took Fredek and me outside for fresh air and some exercise. Sonya opted to accompany us rather than talk war and politics with the adults. She held Fredek’s hand and they walked on ahead up the street, while I had Miss Bronia to myself in the evening’s half-light. Unlike Warsaw’s five- and six-story buildings that were familiar to me, here none seemed over three stories high. The street was narrower than the ones I knew, and there were no cars or even doroshkas.

  As in Warsaw, the windows were now covered with blackout material on the inside, and the street lamps were dark. In a little while, I knew, the street would be completely dark.

  Fredek and Sonya walked several steps ahead of us, engaged in some sort of conversation. It was warm and Miss Bronia’s hand and mine both grew damp. Instinctively and unconsciously, I slid my palm out of hers and hooked her little finger with my own pinkie.

  This was what Kiki and I used to do when our hands grew sweaty. I realized that I had lost track of the fact that this wasn’t Kiki. But the maneuver had worked with Miss Bronia as well, and suddenly I realized that Miss Bronia had replaced Kiki in my life and that I would probably never see Kiki again. Or if I did, we would be much older people—if not chronologically, then in life experience.

  And at once I was in the grip of a great sadness, the sadness that I had fully expected yesterday in the truck, but had not felt then. Now it was finally there, and I began crying there in the street.

  Miss Bronia called to Sonya and Fredek to stop and then squatted down in front of me. She didn’t ask what I was crying about, as Mother would have. And it was good that she didn’t, because I would not have been able to tell her—not because I didn’t know, but because I did. Because part of my grief was that I knew that I was now in love with Miss Bronia fully as much as I had ever been with Kiki. I was grieving the loss of one woman and that my fickle heart had given itself away to another. Fortunately, she was Catholic too.

  Miss Bronia held me to the softest part of herself, and I let my tears flow freely as they never had in my life. Greedily, I found her cheek with my wet mouth and kissed it passionately. In a minute or two it was all over, and we headed back before it would get dark.

  Chapter Three

  “It’s all right,” Kiki was saying as she held me against her blue bathrobe. “You just had a bad dream.”

  Only it wasn’t a blue bathrobe, it wasn’t Kiki, and it hadn’t been a bad dream. It was Miss Bronia, with her brown knit sweater over her nightgown. She was sitting on the side of my bed, holding me in her arms, and telling me that I had had a bad dream. My mother and Auntie Edna were standing there, too, and suddenly I was very embarrassed at having to be comforted one more time by Miss Bronia. />
  “He’s fine, Mrs. Waisbrem,” Miss Bronia was saying over her shoulder. “It’s just a bad dream.”

  “He shouldn’t have eaten that pear after supper,” Mother said.

  I could taste the salty tears in the corner of my mouth, but my dream had not been a bad one. Kiki and I had simply been on our way to the park. It had been a very short dream—we came out of the house, walked down to the corner, crossed the street, and then gone into the butcher shop for our sandwiches. That was all that had been to the dream. Why had that made me cry and whatever else I had done to wake people up? Fortunately, Fredek was still curled into a ball at his end of the bed, sound asleep.

  “Are you sure he’s all right?” my mother was asking. “Should he have something for his stomach?”

  “No, he’s fine, Missus. It’s just a dream. He’s had a few very difficult days.”

  “Why doesn’t Fredek have bad dreams? Why doesn’t he faint?”

  “Yulian just has a different blah-blah-blah. He’s all right, I assure Missus. I’ll stay with him.”

  “I will pay Miss,” I heard Mother say, as she and Auntie Edna shuffled out.

  I wondered if I should tell Miss Bronia that I hadn’t had a bad dream. Would she think something was the matter with me? What would she think of me then? I decided against it and hoped Fredek wouldn’t wake up.

  The next morning, Mr. Dembovski drove us out to the Metners’ farm where we had been given the use of a cottage. It had a thatched roof that was bigger than the rest of the house and made me think of a giant, rectangular mushroom. There was even a bit of a mushroom scent about it. I had seen such cottages from a distance and in pictures, but I had never been inside one.

  This one had walls painted white on both the inside and the outside. The front door opened into a large room dominated by a huge wood-burning stove, several times bigger than the one in our own kitchen. Against one wall was a large sink made of wood and a hand pump with a gracefully curved blue handle for pumping the water. There was also a large table flanked by two benches and some chairs. Doors at the back of this room opened to other rooms and a staircase led to a loft.

  When our belongings had been brought in from the truck, Mr. Dembovski and Mr. Lupicki began saying goodbye to the rest of us. I had no idea this was going to happen. The women all offered their hand to Mr. Dembovski, who, I could see, was not comfortable doing this. Mother even gave him a quick, stiff hug. Mr. Lupicki kissed the hands of all four women. Then he patted my head, and the two of them drove off. Mother, it seemed, had given the truck to Mr. Dembovski. I was sad to see them leave.

  The cottage proved considerably bigger on the inside than it had seemed from the outside. “It’s like a good pair of shoes,” Auntie Edna said, “bigger on the inside than on the outside.” I found the idea hilarious, though no one else seemed to. Each mother had her own bedroom, Miss Bronia and Sonya shared a room, and Fredek and I had an incredibly soft mattress on top of a surface they used for kneading bread dough, in a corner of the big room. On the front wall, between the sink and the door, hung a wooden icon of the Blessed Virgin.

  Behind the cottage, there was the tiniest house I had ever seen. All it contained was a wooden seat with a hole in it and a very bad odor. In time, I would become very intimate with this little house, though I never enjoyed the relationship.

  As the mothers bustled about with sheets and pillowcases, Miss Bronia set to lighting a fire at one end of the big stove. “We have to wash all the dishes,” she said to Sonya, who now surprised me by immediately gathering the dishes and flatware and setting them beside the wooden sink. I had not credited Sonya with such energy. Then I watched with fascination as Miss Bronia picked a tumbler of water up off the counter and poured it down into the hand pump. The first few pumps of the handle produced only noise, but eventually, water began to flow. Miss Bronia filled an iron pot and set it on the stove to heat, as Marta had always done.

  “Let’s go find us some Germans in the woods” Fredek now said to me. He, too, had watched the pump-priming procedure with interest.

  “Miss Bronia is washing dishes,” I answered.

  “We don’t need her,” he said.

  I had never gone outdoors without supervision. “What if we get lost?” I said. In my realm of experience, children outdoors on their own usually got lost and encountered evil of one sort or another.

  “I’ve never been lost,” Fredek said. In truth, I could have made this same statement. Now I realized that farm children must go outdoors quite frequently without adult oversight. Some even herded sheep.

  “All right,” I said, though I really would have preferred to dry dishes for Miss Bronia as I used to do for Kiki. But I knew that my little-soldierhood demanded my preference for this activity. “I’ll just ask Mother,” I said.

  “In the country, you don’t need permission.”

  I understood that this wasn’t to be taken as an absolute, but that a certain context was implied. What he meant was that in the country a number of the laws that proscribed our lives were suspended. I recalled hearing that Fredek and Miss Frania had spent summers in the country, while Kiki and I had been at the beach resort. I followed Fredek into the sunlight.

  A dirt road ran in front of our cottage with a field on the other side. To our right, it rose uphill a little.

  “They went this way,” Fredek said, turning up the rise in the road. I followed. He found a stick beside the road and it immediately became his sword. “Better arm yourself—they’re dangerous,” he advised me. I was already picking one up. It was vaguely in the shape of a rifle, and I put it over my shoulder. Fredek was waving his and he had begun to skip. “That’s no way to carry a sword,” he said.

  “It’s not a sword. It’s a rifle.”

  “What are you going to do with a rifle on horseback?”

  “What horseback?” I asked.

  “I’m on a horse. If you don’t get mounted, you won’t be able to keep up.”

  There was no refuting his logic. I began to skip as well and turned the rifle into a rather awkwardly shaped saber. With our sabers pointed up at forty-five degrees, we cantered on up the hill.

  Over the rise we almost ran into two real horses coming towards us at a walk. They were in harness, followed by a man on foot holding the long reins. He had an unbuttoned vest on over his shirt and boots up to his knees. As we passed, he smiled and said something that I didn’t catch. When he had passed the man, Fredek turned and slashed his saber viciously toward the man’s back. I was struck by the humor of the situation in which we, on imaginary horses, had just passed a man riding in an imaginary wagon.

  When I had caught up to him, Fredek demanded, “Why didn’t you help me finish him off? Now he’s escaped and he’ll tell the others that we’re here.”

  “No he won’t,” I ventured. “The others will capture him. He’s riding into a trap.” Fredek didn’t know that I could make things up as well.

  Fredek cocked his head to one side. “What are you talking about?”

  “The other troops,” I said uncertainly.

  “What other troops?”

  “The rest of our brigade?”

  “They’ve all been gassed. You and I are the only survivors.” Then he clucked to his horse and galloped on down the road. I followed.

  We were now between two fields, both covered with the stubble of some recently harvested crop. Ahead of us a large piece of farm machinery stood on the side of the road.

  “A German tank,” Fredek said out of the side of his mouth as I pulled my mount to a stop beside him. “Here’s what we do,” he continued. “You pretend to surrender. Put your hands up and walk slowly toward him—slow enough to give me time to sneak up behind him. Then, when he sticks his head and shoulders out of the turret to come out and handcuff you, I’ll shoot him with my rifle.”

  I could have reminded him that soldiers didn’t handcuff each other or that he had a saber, not a rifle, but I didn’t see what that might accomplish. So I
dropped my weapon, raised my hands, and began to walk slowly, hoping there was no one around the machine to see me. Fredek, in the meantime, crouched down and ran forward, through the stubbled field, holding his former saber in both hands.

  Then, as I got closer, I began to hear voices. Some men, I realized, must have been doing something on the other side of the machine. Embarrassed, I put my hands on top of my head which, I knew, was still a legitimate surrender signal but could also be seen as just somebody strolling along.

  I saw that Fredek had come to a stop and stood frozen in the field beside the road. I continued walking.

  Then I began to distinguish individual words. But I couldn’t understand them. The men weren’t speaking Polish. Fredek was moving back towards me now, bent over. In a moment he had broken into a run. “Run!” he said as he passed me, “Run! They’re Germans! Real Germans!” I wasted no time following Fredek’s example.

  “The Germans are here! The Germans are here!” Fredek shouted as we ran into the cottage.

  Mother and Auntie Paula, who were in the big room washing and wringing clothes, stopped to look at each other.

  “Fredek?” Auntie Paula said after a moment.

  “I heard them too,” I said. “They were speaking German!”

  “They’re miles away,” Mother said. “They’re fighting west of Warsaw. They couldn’t be here.”

  “Downed pilots?” Auntie Paula said.

  “German spies?” Fredek suggested.

  “German spies?” It was Auntie Edna standing now in the doorway to her room. “Somebody saw German spies? Where?”

  I could hear the fear in her voice. “We didn’t actually see them—we only heard them,” I said in an effort to mitigate the disaster.

  “There’s a big farming machine up the road,” Fredek said. “They were hiding behind it.”

  “Hiding behind it?” Mother said.