That was something I was very familiar with, having said the rosary with Kiki, using her beads, and having also participated in a rosary led by Kiki’s priest brother at the wake for their Uncle Bolek. There were parts that the priest spoke alone and parts where everybody joined in.
Mother and Auntie Edna were there in the big room with Fredek and me, and what was on the mothers’ faces could have been taken for nothing but panic. I could not help enjoying Mother’s discomfort, even though I knew this to be not only un-Christian, but counterproductive to my missionary assignment.
Mother was the first to recover her composure. “We don’t have our rosary beads with us, Father,” she said in a remarkably calm voice. “We had to leave Warsaw in a hurry.” This, of course, as any Catholic knew, was nonsense since holding beads was not necessary to saying the rosary, and I was afraid that Mother had blown her cover with her very first line.
But Father did not seem to notice her ignorance. “Just kneel down,” he said with evident impatience. I knelt immediately at his instruction and watched to see what Mother and Auntie Edna and Fredek would do.
At that moment, Miss Bronia who had evidently heard this from her room, came out. “Good evening, Father,” she said, stepping quickly past both Mother and Auntie Edna to place herself between them and our visitor. She knelt down, and Mother and Auntie Edna followed her example. Fredek knelt too, and, out of the corner of my eye, I could see Sonya peeking around the door of the room she shared with Miss Bronia.
Father turned around to face the icon of the Blessed Virgin on the wall beside the front door. It was obvious that he knew his way around this cottage. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” he intoned. Miss Bronia and I crossed ourselves. There was a flurry of noncommittal hand motions on the part of Mother and Auntie Edna. Fredek watched wide-eyed.
“Amen,” Miss Bronia and I chorused.
“Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name,” Miss Bronia and I said, following Father’s lead. I could tell that Miss Bronia was praying extra loud to sound like three people. I, on the other hand, made sure that she could hear me. After the first few repetitions of the Hail Mary, I could actually hear Mother and Auntie Edna chiming in. I could see them smiling to each other. While it was probably no sin for a non-Catholic to recite Catholic prayers, Mother was making a joke out of it. She saw me looking at her and quickly turned serious and indicated that I should face the front. By the time we reached the second Decade, I could hear Fredek’s voice as well, and I could even discern a certain bounce of enthusiasm in our praying.
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee. Blessed art Thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus,” Father led, and we followed with our “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen.” Only in the stand-alone Our Father did we lose my relatives.
My own joy, of course, knew no bounds. Mother was now on my turf, and while she might be fooling Father, there was no pulling the wool over God’s eyes. And Miss Bronia, too, could not have missed my Catholicism.
But on one’s knees, even pious ecstasy can grow wearisome, and Father Chernievich’s knees were, obviously, better conditioned for this activity than ours. Mother and Auntie Edna had begun to rock from knee to knee, and even Miss Bronia was fidgeting. I tried hard to maintain soldier-like discipline, but found that not only were my knees betraying me, but my mind was wandering from the Divine to the temporal. The soles of both of Father’s boots had holes part way through them. The one on the right was shaped like an egg, the left could have been a rabbit without ears.
Auntie Paula barged in through the front door and froze in her tracks. Father took no notice of the disturbance, but behind his back, Mother made a face and pointed to the floor indicating for Auntie Paula to join our ranks. I saw Auntie Paula shake her head and remain standing by the door, a strange expression on her face. We plowed on.
When there was a knock on the door, all of us, except Father, looked hopefully in that direction. Auntie Paula, standing by the door, opened it, and a rotund little woman with a gentle face and the long peasant skirt and kerchief stood in the doorway. Excusing herself, she turned directly towards Father, still on his knees before the Blessed Virgin. “Come, Sasha,” she said, using the diminutive form of the name Alexander, “it’s time to come home to supper.” Her voice was as kindly as her face, but quite firm.
Father turned his bearded face from the icon up to the woman.
“We have to go now,” she said. Father Chernievich made the sign of the Cross and rose to his feet.
The woman apologized for disturbing us. Then, taking the tall priest by the hand, she led him outside.
When they had gone, Auntie Paula leaned her back against the closed door and began to laugh. “So you’ve all done rosary with Father Chernievich,” she said.
Mother and Auntie Edna did not grasp her humor.
“You know who he is, don’t you?” Auntie Paula went on.
We all looked at her without understanding. Auntie Edna was massaging a knee.
“He’s Renia’s uncle…. Renia Metner,” Auntie Paula said. “Renia tells stories about him sometimes. He thinks he’s a priest and lives here on the farm.”
“Renia’s Uncle Sasha?” Auntie Edna repeated. “They let him go around impersonating a priest?” And she began to laugh too.
“He doesn’t cause any harm, she says,” Auntie Paula said, “so the Polish people around here let him do rosary with them as long as he doesn’t try to do Mass or confessions. The Ukrainians are some other kind of Catholic, you know.”
This took a moment to sink in. “Well, it was a good rehearsal,” Mother said. “We may have to do this kind of thing again. Bronia’s going to have to teach us.”
There was general agreement to this. “I realize now,” Mother went on, “that real Catholics wouldn’t have left Warsaw without their rosary beads. We should get some.”
“I’ll see about getting some at the church,” Miss Bronia said.
“Get them from Father Chernievich,” Auntie Edna laughed. I could already envision myself teaching them to cross themselves and to recite the Act of Contrition.
The very next afternoon, Auntie Edna came back from town with wonderful news. People were actually dancing in the streets, she reported, over the news that the Russians were coming to our aid. They had crossed our eastern frontier with their tanks and their guns, and the people along the way, she had heard, were showering them with flowers. They would be here soon to help stop the Germans some place on the other side of Durnoval.
This was the relief we had looked for all along, even though from an unexpected direction. The grownups drank vodka after dinner and wondered how our various apartments had fared after we left Warsaw and what else awaited us on our return. I could not totally rule out the idea that God’s pleasure at the sight of three and a half Jews saying the rosary together was, somehow, linked to this new and totally unexpected development. The fact that “Father” Chernievich was mad only reinforced this speculation, since God was reputed to work in strange and mysterious ways.
The next day Auntie Paula rode the wagon into town to find out more about how soon the Russians might be expected to pass through and make us invulnerable. Fredek and I were Russian soldiers roaming the fields around our cottage, looking for German deserters to take to our prison camp behind the house, currently occupied by the chickens who Fredek said were really German spies. The script was all Fredek’s, but this time even I took pleasure in the activity as we probed with our shoes and our bayonets under the large leaves of ground-hugging squash or pumpkin plants, or whatever they were, for the hated Nazis cowering in the field.
In this mode, we were only slightly surprised by our encounter with two elephants driving a wagon along the dirt road, pulled by an elderly, bony horse. The elephants were singing in Ukrainian. Their voices were muffled coming through their trunks, which had originally been gas ma
sks, but had had their air hoses disconnected from the canisters that filtered out the gas, and now hung loose in front.
The wagon stopped in front of us, and the elephants invited us on board in young, accented voices. That I clambered up as eagerly as Fredek, would surprise me later—it was not in my character. But the joyous war news must have worked to permit me to get into our make-believe to a degree that bypassed my customary shyness. Before I knew it, Fredek and I were seated on top of the cabbages behind the elephants, who now sang their song in Polish. It didn’t rhyme in Polish, but it praised the strength of Marynka who could pull a wagonload of cabbages and two elephants. Fredek and I joined in the song.
The kids in the gas masks seemed to be about a year or two older than we were, and the one driving had braids down her back. After several repetitions of the song, I volunteered the addition of “… and two soldiers,” to the verse, which was immediately incorporated.
We rode past several cottages. There were people outside some of them, and they waved to us. There were women in their long skirts and kerchiefs, with hoes or babies or baskets of wash. “Hey Marynka!” they called to our horse. We waved back. In the fields, there were men with teams of horses and farm machinery, and some of them waved to us as well.
After awhile, we pulled up in front of a barn and stopped. It was built of stone, and I could see no windows in it, but a large open door on the second floor. The two on the driver seat jumped down and removed their gas masks, transforming themselves into a boy and a girl, and began unfastening Marynka’s harness.
Inside, I was struck by the smell of the place. Horse manure and hay were smells you encountered on any street in Poland, but here they were an intense mixture that surrounded and permeated you.
There were several stalls in a row here; they weren’t the roomy stalls my grandfather’s horse had lived in, but were only wide enough for the horse to stand. I remembered that horses slept standing up. The stalls were all empty, except for Marynka’s.
Past the stalls, the boy began to climb a ladder that went straight up the wall into the loft above. I followed. I had never climbed a ladder before. Up in the loft, the smell was different again, with the hay smell much more intense. As my eyes got used to the semi darkness, I could see a mountain of hay filling a great portion of the floor. Several wide beams ran across the width of the barn, and the boy was walking along one of them.
Suddenly the boy was gone from the beam. I looked down in alarm. There he was, on his back, lying in the pile of hay. “Jump down!” he called merrily.
I would have preferred not to. I understood that it must be fun to do and evidently harmless, but then I saw the girl coming up the ladder to our beam with Fredek behind her. I tensed for the jolt and jumped.
The jolt didn’t come. Sinking into the deep hay was softer than jumping into water or onto a mattress. But the free-fall itself was the most astonishing feeling I had ever experienced. It was, for that split moment, as though all that I was ever anxious about had dissolved.
In a moment, the other two had joined us in the hay. The older boy was already climbing back up the ladder, and I ran after him compulsively. “My airplane’s on fire, and I have to bail out!” he said before jumping. I followed right behind him, spreading my arms like an airplane. As I fell into weightlessness, I heard a cry of joy escape my mouth. It surprised me completely, and I knew I was blushing when I landed. The boy and the girl laughed. Fredek made the sound of a gun firing, staggered, and fell backwards off the beam.
We had done several repetitions of this delicious jump when I was suddenly gripped by terror. We must be, I realized, long overdue for lunch. But I had no idea how to go about telling our hosts that we had to terminate this delightful activity. It was a situation I had never been in before.
I sidled up to Fredek in the hay and whispered that we had to go home. Fredek though about this for a moment.
“We have to go home,” he announced.
Without objection, our host and hostess led the way back downstairs. “You can come back tomorrow if you want to,” the girl said to us.
They walked us out to the front of the barn. “Your cottage is over there,” the boy said, pointing in the direction of some thatched roofs in the distance. “Follow this road till you can make a right turn.”
“Goodbye and thank you,” I said, as I had been taught to do. It felt so grown up. We began running down the road.
I knew there would be anger when we got back, maybe even spanking—something I had never experienced—but the good feeling I now had, somehow made all that seem irrelevant.
In the distance, we could see Auntie Paula standing outside the door of our cottage, shading her eyes with her hand. We could tell she was looking for us, and, when she saw us across the field, she went inside.
As we came through the door, she just said, “Go to my room and sit there quietly. No talking.” Her tone was ominously quiet, implying that at least part of our punishment would take the form of our contemplating the trouble and worry we had caused everybody. “Miss Bronia is looking all over the farm for you,” she added. She gripped Fredek’s shoulder and propelled him towards her door.
As we crossed the room, we suddenly heard sobbing coming from Auntie Edna’s room. Through the doorway, we could see Auntie Edna lying on the bed, a wet cloth across her eyes, and my mother sitting on the side of the bed facing her. Fredek broke from Auntie Paula’s grip and ran to his mother. His sudden concern for her surprised me. I saw Fredek’s mother remove the cloth from her eyes, reach her arm out, and draw him to her. Only she didn’t stop sobbing now that we were back, but just sobbed louder.
“They’re civilized people,” I heard my mother say. “My mother, you know, is Russian.”
Auntie Edna made an effort to stop crying and sat up in bed. She and Fredek had their arms around each other with his head tight against her breast. “It’s going to be all right,” she said to him.
Auntie Paula’s interest in my punishment seemed to have waned because she now followed Fredek to his mother’s room. “That was twenty years ago,” she said to Auntie Edna.
“It was in nineteen twenty-four,” Auntie Edna corrected her.
“All right, fifteen years ago, but don’t forget, he was a Count. We aren’t nobility. We are three simple women with children and a servant living on a farm.”
“And our husbands are in the army and own businesses,” Auntie Edna answered. “Lolek even owns a factory.”
“They don’t know that,” my mother said. “We are three women with husbands in the army. We are no different from most of the women in Poland.”
I had not the faintest idea what they were talking about, except that I was suddenly reminded of the conversation I had had with the man at the icehouse.
Auntie Edna didn’t say anything more, probably because Fredek and I were in the room.
“Basia, you’d better tell him,” Auntie Paula said. Of course she meant me.
“Why don’t you tell them both,” my mother suggested. Her voice was suddenly like a little girl’s.
“For godsakes, Basia, he’s standing right here,” Auntie Paula said. I could tell she was impatient with my mother, and I was pleased—at the same time that I was desperate to know what it was that no one wanted to tell us.
“Well, somebody has to tell the boys,” Auntie Paula finally said. “They’ll be finding out soon enough. Frederick, Yulian, this morning I heard in town that the Russians aren’t coming to fight the Germans. They’re coming to occupy this part of Poland. Do you know what occupy means?”
“Like before Marshall Piwsudski,” I volunteered. I knew that not many years ago Marshal Piwsudski had saved Poland from Russian occupation.
“That’s right,” my mother said quickly.
Auntie Edna pulled herself up higher on the bed. “There will be Russian soldiers telling people what to do,” she said in a weak voice, “and we will have to do what they tell us.”
“Or they’ll shoo
t us,” Fredek said.
“No, darling, they’re not going to shoot us,” his mother said.
“I won’t let them shoot us. I’ll kick them in the shins where it hurts a lot, and then I’ll hit them in the head.”
“My little patriot,” Auntie Edna said, smiling through her tears.
“No, we’re not going to do that,” Auntie Paula said sternly. “The patriotic thing to do will be to get through this as safely as we can until the French and the English come.”
The mothers spent much of the rest of the day cutting collars off their dresses and letting down hems. Auntie Edna even turned one green dress inside out and held it up to herself for approval. Mother and Auntie Paula approved. When Miss Bronia came back with Sonya from looking for us, she was relieved to see us and probably assumed that our absence had already been dealt with, because she said nothing about it.
The following morning, when Miss Bronia went up to the Big House for milk and news, she told Sonya not to come with her. Auntie Paula drew a line in the dirt outlining a few hundred square feet in front of the cottage, and Fredek and I were told to play inside that area. We immediately began construction on a stockade of imaginary logs and boulders.
When it was time for my trip to the icehouse, Auntie Paula came with me. But nobody was there to cut a piece off the big block for us, though we did manage to find a few small pieces of ice that would do in place of our one big one.
When we got back, Miss Bronia was telling her experiences at the Big House, and she started from the beginning again for Auntie Paula’s benefit. It seems that there had been no one to answer her knock on the kitchen door, but the door had been open, so she had gone inside. There, she found Mrs. Metner’s mother and several others with their arms in the air while a number of peasants with red armbands brandished rifles. These were not local peasants, but from another town, and they were collecting money and valuables for redistribution among themselves.
Mother and Me Page 14