Mother and Me

by Julian Padowicz

  “Yes,” Fredek said eagerly. “We never saw them.”

  “Yulian, were they hiding?” Auntie Paula asked me.

  “I guess not. They weren’t whispering or anything. They were just talking,” I had to admit. And as I spoke, I began to become aware of the illogic of our conclusion.

  “But they were speaking German,” Fredek said. His tone was definitely defensive now.

  “How do you know it was German?” Mother asked. Neither of us had an answer.

  “They were speaking Ukrainian,” Auntie Edna said, her face brightening.

  “Of course,” Mother said.

  “What’s Ukrainian?” Fredek wanted to know. I knew that the Ukraine was a separate country that had been divided between Poland and Russia after the big war. But I had no idea that that was where we now were.

  There were no ponies on the Metners’ farm, that we knew of. In fact, the Metners weren’t there either, except for Mrs. Metner’s mother, who made her home on the farm. I never actually saw her—we called her the old woman—but Miss Bronia and Sonya would go to her house every morning to buy milk and eggs from her cook at the back door of the Big House. Meat, bread, and vegetables we bought from some of the peasants who lived in cottages like ours, but usually smaller.

  The bread came in large round loaves, about two feet across. Miss Bronia would hold the loaf against her chest as she buttered the cut end, before cutting off a slice. It was either black bread or a gray color, and, with butter or butter and cheese, both were delicious.

  One day Miss Bronia and Sonya carried home between them a crate of live chickens, which they installed in a little shed with a fence around it behind our cottage. They were to be Sonya’s charge, and Fredek and I were given strict instructions to leave them alone. That was all right—I had no affection for chickens. Had they been rabbits, for instance, this would have been a different issue.

  We had a wooden icebox for which we had to fetch a cake of ice from the icehouse every other day. The melted ice dripped into a large, shallow pan under the icebox and had to be emptied twice a day. It was Auntie Paula’s idea that Fredek and I be made responsible for the ice and its subsequent residue.

  We were both thrilled. This was the first time I had ever been given a job other than things like washing out my socks under Kiki’s supervision. Fredek told me he had had lots of jobs before.

  Durnoval, where we had spent the night before arriving here, I learned, was ten kilometers away. On our second day on the farm, my mother hitched a ride into town on one of the farm wagons. I watched her step on a wheel spoke, as we had all seen drivers do, and then transfer her weight hesitantly onto the seat beside the driver. As I watched her in her blue dress, silk stockings, and high heels next to the driver in his coarse wool vest and cap, I reminded myself that it would have been un-Christian to gloat at her awkwardness.

  She returned that evening on the same wagon with a carton of canned fruit, a woolen sweater for me, several packs of cigarettes, and a pair of tennis shoes for herself, which she said were a size too large, but the last pair of flats in town. She also had news. The Germans were nearing Warsaw, and there was no sign of the English or the French. The stores in town, she told us, were mostly empty. The canned fruit and cigarettes she had bought from women selling them in the street at several times their store price.

  While my mother was in town, Fredek and I had spent a good part of the day pushing each other around in the wheelbarrow. By the time my turn to wheel the cake of ice home from the icehouse arrived, the magic associated with the activity had worn off. And after several shaky, four-handed trips from the icebox to the wooden sink with the pan of water, the bloom quickly faded from this activity as well. After a few days, Fredek approached me with a proposition. He was perfectly willing, he said, to relinquish his share of both activities to me. In exchange for this, I would owe him a favor to be named at some later time.

  I could see quite clearly through this arrangement. But the idea of being the sole custodian of the icebox operation had, for me, a certain attraction that went well beyond the actual act of pushing a wheelbarrow or emptying the water pan. I couldn’t quite understand why it seemed so attractive, but it did, so I said that I wasn’t interested.

  Fredek’s disappointment was very clear. “But I’ll tell you what I will do,” I said in response. “I will take over responsibility for the icebox if you will clear my plate from the table to the sink every evening after supper.” Clearing our own plates from the dinner table was a duty assigned to us just that day, and the only thing I could think of to barter with. He would, of course, still have to help me carry the slippery cake from the wheelbarrow to the icebox.

  Fredek had to think a moment about this. I understood that he didn’t like the idea of having to clear my dinner plate. On the other hand, he could also see that this would take much less effort than the icebox obligation. He agreed to my terms, and I immediately asserted my stewardship of the icebox by emptying the pan, even though he and I had done it together not two hours earlier. I wanted to start with a clean slate.

  This made me, Miss Bronia, and Sonya the only ones with an actual responsibility. As the only person in our group who knew how to cook things like meat and vegetables or even work the wood stove, Miss Bronia was in charge of buying the food and preparing the meals. Sonya assisted her in this and took care of the chickens. The two had taken to wearing long, peasant skirts and kerchiefs over their hair, tying the kerchiefs behind their heads instead of under their chins.

  Miss Bronia had little time to give to me, but I found that wrapping my arms around her waist for an occasional hug on the go, reinforced the sense of our relationship. The rich Ukrainian earth was very child-friendly, providing beach-like digging, construction, and fantasizing opportunities. Augmented by rocks, pieces of scrap lumber, and Fredek’s endless imagination, the place left me little time to worry over issues of the heart.

  Also, I had found a round piece of metal, like a coin but with a hole in the center, lying on the road near our cottage. This, I quickly discovered, I could palm the same way I had palmed Mr. Lupicki’s coin. I slipped it into my pocket and, when I was alone, would practice the tricks he had shown me.

  The mothers did decide to take on the responsibility of drying the dishes after Miss Bronia washed them. They had originally intended to wash the dishes as well, but Miss Bronia said that the harsh soap available to us would harm their hands and ruin their nails, so she would not at all mind washing the dishes herself. As for the laundry, there was a woman at the Big House who could be negotiated with.

  Our second evening on the farm, Auntie Edna heated a kettle of water on the stove and directed Fredek to take off his clothes and climb into the wooden sink. Hearing this, I quickly turned my back and feigned great interest in the plaster of the cottage wall. As I listened to the water sounds and Auntie Edna telling the assembled audience how good it made her feel to give her son his bath and how she would frequently tell Miss Frania that she would take on the task that evening, I could not help feeling terribly sorry for Fredek, who was suffering such humiliation. Not for a moment did I dream that immediately following the sound of Fredek’s descent from the sink, I would hear my own name called by my mother.

  “Let me bathe him for you, Mrs. Waisbrem,” I heard Miss Bronia interject. I remembered how cleverly she had protected my privacy the other morning, and my hopes rose for a moment. Under different circumstances, I am sure that my mother would gladly have let Miss Bronia relieve her of the task, but after Auntie Edna’s confession, I knew that my chances were slim.

  “Thank you, Bronia,” Mother said, “but I enjoy bathing Yulek.” This was a vicious lie. I had no recollection of her ever doing more than assisting Kiki in this work. “Come on, Yul,” Mother summoned.

  “The boy is very shy,” Miss Bronia said.

  “Well, he has to learn not to be,” Mother said. Then, to me, she added, “You know, soldiers sleep in barracks and take showers toget
her.” I had no choice but to come forward, step up on the chair, and allow my mother to begin removing my clothes.

  “Let’s go to our room,” Miss Bronia said to Sonya, who sat at the table reading, with her back to the sink.

  “No, Bronia,” Mother insisted. “Don’t coddle the boy. Yulian has to learn. It’s wartime, and he needs to be a little soldier like Fredek. Everyone should stay, and this should be settled once and for all.”

  I closed my eyes so that I would not see them seeing me. Closed in my darkness, I was unconscious of anything happening in the room. Instead, I was back in that darkening street, hand-in-hand with Miss Bronia.

  When it was over, and I sat wrapped in a large towel beside the stove, I knew that my dream of saving my mother’s Immortal Soul had been just that—a dream. And, while working to save every soul was the duty of every Catholic, my own soul was currently filled with too much anger to be in any way effective.

  As for the others, they apparently did their washing at the sink when Fredek and I were asleep. One night, though, I did see Auntie Edna step out of her robe in the empty, darkened room. I quickly closed my eyes and covered them with my fists. My mind, however, kept returning to the image of Auntie Edna’s smooth curves and I realized afterwards that, with my eyes half open, I could have watched through my eyelashes, and she would never have seen me seeing her.

  When I arrived at the icehouse by myself for the first time, the attendant asked where my friend was. This was the first time I had heard him speak, and he spoke with a strange accent. I realized that this must be because he was Ukrainian. He was an old man with a mustache and he shuffled his left leg when he walked.

  I told him that I was in charge. This wasn’t a lie, and I hoped that it implied that Fredek worked under my supervision.

  “That’s good. That’s very good,” he said. “You are the head iceman.”

  I accepted the title with unconcealable pride.

  “You live in Warsaw,” he said.

  I confirmed that we did.

  “Your father, what does he do?”

  I told him that Lolek had a factory that made shirts, but he was my stepfather.

  “A big factory?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He has a car?”

  I said I wasn’t sure.

  “He’s fighting the Germans now?”

  “Yes, he went in the army a few days ago.”

  “And your real father.”

  “He’s in heaven,” I fibbed. Kiki had been pretty certain that Jews didn’t go there, but I wanted the man to think of me as the Catholic that I was at heart. In recent days, I realized, I saw myself as more of a virtual Catholic than the wannabe I had been before. In actuality, only the technicality of a baptism separated me from the legions of true believers.

  “And the others?” he asked.

  “Oh, they’re all…” I began, but stopped myself, realizing that he wasn’t asking about their religion.

  “They’re rich too?”

  “They’re my Aunties, their son and daughter, and a governess.”

  “A governess?”

  “Yes, Miss Bronia.”

  “You all live together in Warsaw?”

  “No, we live in different apartments.”

  “What do the other husbands do?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. But I was also growing uneasy with this line of questioning. “I have to get back with the ice,” I said.

  “That’s good. That’s very good. You’re a responsible boy, the head iceman.” He patted me on the head.

  I smiled and left with my cargo. On the road back, I saw a man’s head, then his shoulders, and finally his whole figure rise up over the hill in front of me. In a moment I could see that he was a priest in his long black cassock. He was tall with a thin waist cinched by a brown leather belt, a long, blond beard, and hair down below his collar. As he walked, a gold cross on his chest swung left and right from behind his beard.

  Coming closer, I saw that the cassock had been mended many times and a stitched-on, dark-blue hemming tape bound the bottom of the cassock. There were grease stains on the black gabardine. His eyes were large and round. His blond hair and beard were streaked with gray. I had never been that close to a priest before. As we passed, I bowed my head in respect and received another pat on the head.

  Remembering how upset Mother had been at my encounter with Mr. Lupicki, I decided to tell no one about either of these encounters.

  One day it was determined that Fredek’s, Sonya’s, and my schooling was suffering, and lessons were organized for us. We had no books, so it was decided that Auntie Edna would teach Fredek and me the multiplication tables while my mother taught French to Sonya. It turned out, though, that Fredek already knew the multiplication tables, all the way up to twelve times twelve, which was further than his mother could go, while I had trouble with anything beyond the times-two table.

  It quickly became evident that Fredek and I were not well matched as classmates, at least in the math department. To remedy this situation, Fredek was transferred along with Sonya to French, which met under a large tree near our house, while Auntie Edna was to bring me up to speed with the multiplication tables, a project that she assured me would take no more than a week or two.

  Auntie Edna made me repeat the times-three table several times with her, but the moment I was launched solo, I was lost. She then made me copy it out ten times, which helped a little—I realized that it was just a matter of adding three to the previous answer, and was finally able to pass an oral test, as long as I could count on my fingers under the table. Auntie Edna was quite proud of my achievement and, much against my better judgement, made an announcement to that effect that evening at dinner.

  “What’s three times seven?” Fredek asked me, and, as I had feared, Auntie Edna’s structure showed itself to be the house of cards that it was.

  Fredek, on the other hand, had his own difficulties. His acquisitive mind clamped itself around the French words with admirable speed. By the second day, his vocabulary must have surpassed mine by a considerable multiple. Unfortunately, though, coming out of his mouth, the words sounded no more French than their Polish equivalents.

  Unlike Auntie Edna, my mother had little patience for his tin ear. Her remedy, it seems, was to present Fredek with the correct pronunciation in ever-louder tones, which Auntie Edna and I could soon hear at our table inside the cottage. Finally, Auntie Edna excused herself and went out to confer with her son’s teacher. Through the window, I could see the two of them standing in the stubbled field talking for quite some time. When Auntie Edna came back into the cottage, I could tell that she had been crying. She told me to go out and play because there would be no more school that day.

  At the dinner table that evening, when Auntie Paula, who had admitted at the outset that she did not have sufficient patience to teach small boys, tried to resolve the issue of Fredek’s difficulty, it was discovered that when he wrote the words down at Mother’s instructions, his spelling was nothing like the proper French spelling. When he asked Mother what the proper spelling was, it turned out that she didn’t know how to spell French words either. School was not resumed the following day.

  There was some discussion among the mothers about the idea of Miss Bronia teaching us German, but it was deemed inappropriate under the circumstances. Besides, as the only member of our party who knew how to cook or deal with the farm people over provisions, she hadn’t the time. She did teach us to pluck chickens, an activity I found loathsome, but also very grown up.

  As for Sonya’s schooling, she learned many practical things assisting Miss Bronia, and in the evenings the two of them would get together to discuss some books that Miss Bronia had brought for her to read.

  What else happened over the next few weeks, I can’t fix into proper chronological order. Every two or three days one of the mothers would ride the wagon into town for news. We didn’t have a radio and without electricity we could not hav
e used one anyway.

  The news was always bad. The Germans were moving further and further east, closer and closer to us. Oddly enough, there was no sign of them in our sky. While we had seen German bombers and fighter planes bombing and harassing towns and roads in advance of their troops further north, here in southeastern Poland, it was as though the Germans had no interest in us.

  And where were the French and the English? We had heard that they had declared war on Germany, in accordance with their mutual defense pact with Poland, but so far there had been no sign of their involvement. Our own army, Auntie Paula explained, was losing ground because the surprise German attack had disrupted our transportation and communication, but the French, she said, had a mighty army on Germany’s western border that simply needed the order to advance. Once they did, this whole thing would be over in a few days.

  One evening, six peasants showed up at our door looking for shelter. They spoke Polish without the Ukrainian accent. Then it turned out that under their peasants’ clothes they had on army uniforms. Their unit, they told us, had been wiped out and the city they were defending to the west of us, overrun. Polish defenses, they said, were helpless against the German tanks, our airplanes outclassed by the Messerschmitts. They were cut off from other Polish forces and were now on their way east to Russia where our army would regroup with arms borrowed from the Russians, and liberate Poland. It sounded like a good plan to me.

  Two of them had wounds, hastily bandaged, and the mothers cleaned and redressed them with a torn-up sheet. Miss Bronia went around to the back of the cottage and killed two more chickens; Fredek and I then set about plucking under Sonya’s supervision. The soldiers spent the night on the floor in the loft and were gone when I woke up the next morning.

  On another evening, there was a knock on our door and a tall man fillied our doorway. My heart leaped as I recognized the priest I had passed on the road back from the icehouse. He wore the same mended cassock, or one equally mended and equally stained.

  “I am Father Chernievich,” he said in a booming voice as he stepped into the big room. “We will say the rosary.”