“I’m sorry,” Mother said. “My husband went into the army when the war started, and I don’t know where he is.”
The woman clucked her tongue. “One must survive,” she said. “Missus has her boy to take care of. I don’t let my daughter out of the house as long as they are in the streets.” Her head made a little nod towards the Russian soldier across the street.
As they talked, we advanced a few places toward the entrance door. A man stood on the other side of the glass door, unlocking it to let each customer out and a new one in.
“Missus doesn’t have a shopping bag,” the woman said to Mother.
“No, it’s our first day here. We were on a farm. There was no shortage of food there.”
“Missus will need to sew herself a bag. You never know how many lines you’ll stand in and how long you’ll have to wait.”
“Yes. Thank you for the advice. What’s happened to all the food anyway?”
“The Russians take it all. Their army, you know, doesn’t carry provisions. They just live off the land. Everything’s stopped since they got here. The stores have nothing to sell. The soldiers go crazy buying up trinkets, watches, mechanical children’s toys. When a store does get some supplies, you stand in line like this.”
There was an old man in line behind us now. He had a white mustache, a little white goatee, and very large ears. “Have you been waiting here long?” he asked me.
I tugged on Mother’s sleeve. “Don’t do that,” she said, turning away from her conversation.
“Mummy, the man wants to know if we’ve been here long,” I said, mindful of admonitions against speaking to strangers.
“So tell him.”
I was pleased with this change of policy. “A few minutes,” I said to the man.
“A few minutes?” he repeated. “Do you have a watch?”
I was puzzled by this question. “I do have a watch, but not on me. It’s my father’s gold pocket watch.”
“Then how do you know it was a few minutes?” His tone and his face were extra, extra serious, and I suddenly realized he was joking. “I counted the seconds,” I said.
“Now, that’s a very good way to tell the time when you don’t have a watch,” he said in a grave tone. “Do you know how many seconds are in a minute?”
“Sixty.”
“That’s very good. And how many minutes in an hour?”
“Sixty.”
“And I suppose there are sixty hours in a day?”
“Of course. And sixty days in a week,” I said laughing.
“And sixty weeks in a month.”
“And sixty months in a year.”
I had never had a nonsensical conversation like this before, and, for some reason, it made me feel very grown up.
“Do you know how many years in a century?” he asked.
I was afraid that if I said sixty again, he might think that I didn’t know the real answer. “One hundred,” I finally said.
“Very good. And do you know what century this is?”
“It’s the twentieth century and this is nineteen thirty-nine.”
“That’s excellent. Here’s your reward,” he said, reaching into his coat pocket. Here I was concerned. While the ban on my speaking with strangers seemed to have been lifted, I doubted that it also applied to accepting presents, and I did not want to bring this very weird and funny conversation to a premature end by refusing his gift. The old man fished around in his pocket for a moment, then extracted his hand holding nothing, which he held out to me proudly.
With great relief I accepted the imaginary object, placed it carefully in my mouth and began to chew.
“Oh no, no, no!” he said in mock alarm. “You don’t eat it—you wear it on your head like I do.” There was, of course, nothing on his head other than a little black skullcap to keep his bald spot warm, like Grandfather did.
“I am terribly sorry,” I said in equally mock regret. I took the object out of my mouth, blew on it, and carefully put it over my head. The man cocked his head back a little and looked at me. “I think I would wear it a little more over the right eye.”
I adjusted the imaginary headgear.
“No, maybe over the left eye,” he said. I adjusted it again.
Suddenly there was a loud, collective groan from the people making up the queue. “I’ve been waiting over an hour,” somebody said. Now I saw that a hand-lettered sign had been put up in the glass door. “Closed—out of stock,” it said.
“Is this what happens?” Mother asked the woman in front of her.
“It happens all the time.”
“I wasted half an hour,” Mother said.
The line was quickly dissolving. The man with the white goatee and the skullcap behind us curled his fingers around an imaginary object. I guessed it was a sausage. He took a bite. “Not up to pre-war standards,” he confided to me, “but actually quite decent. Now I have to find some bread to go with it.”
I followed his example. “Not as good as we had in Warsaw, but eatable,” I acknowledged. Remarkably, I could actually almost taste the spicy meat.
Suddenly I felt Mother’s hand sliding down my arm. “Give me your hand,” she said. We walked quickly on down the street; Mother’s heels clicking angrily on the sidewalk. “I can’t waste my time like this,” she said, though I wasn’t sure she was talking to me. I looked back for my new friend, but I couldn’t see him.
It wasn’t long before we spotted another queue on the other side of the street. It was even longer than the first one. Like the other one, it was mostly women in kerchiefs or little flowered hats with shopping bags hanging from their arms. Some of the bags had lumps in the bottom—many hung down empty.
“It’s a butcher shop!” Mother said in a triumphant tone when we could distinguish the empty steel hooks in the window and the tiled interior walls.
Edging toward the curb, where the line ended, I felt Mother pulling me, instead, towards the shop door. “Adam, Adam Starecki!” she called, when we were a few yards from the waiting people. In a moment I could see that she was addressing a man, three people from the store entrance, about a head taller than the women in front and in back of him. In a blue, pinstripe, double-breasted suit, like the ones men wore in Warsaw, he looked like someone not from here. He had a long, thin face and a neatly trimmed little dark mustache. His hair was neatly combed and brushed back, and held in place with hair oil. He certainly could have been one of Mother and Lolek’s Warsaw friends, except that he didn’t respond to the name and he certainly wasn’t Adam Starecki, whom I knew because, when he came to our apartment, he often brought a box of chocolates for Kiki and me. And he wasn’t as tall as this man and was nearly bald.
“Oh, I’m so glad to see you safe,” Mother said as we kept approaching.
Finally, the tall man realized that it was he who was being addressed, made a little bow with his head and said, “I am sorry, Missus, but my name is Rokief, Roman Rokief.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry, Mr. Rokief,” Mother said, stopping short and holding a hand up to her face. “Yes, yes, I can see now that Mister is not Judge Starecki. But from a few meters away Mister looks just like the judge. And Mister has the same bearing. I would guess that Mister is also a judge. Am I right?”
“As a matter of fact, I am an attorney,” he admitted, “but, I’m afraid, not yet a judge.”
“But Mister is not from Durnoval.”
“No, my wife and I came here from Krakow when the fighting started. I have a bad heart, so they wouldn’t take me in the army, and I wanted to get my wife and daughters out.”
“My brother lives in Krakow. Maybe Mister knows him, Pavew Rogacki. I don’t know what happened to him. I’m so worried.”
My uncle Pavew’s name was Rozenfeld, not Rogacki, and he lived in Lodz where he ran Grandfather’s stocking factory.
The man thought for a moment. “No, I don’t know that name,” he finally said.
“My name is Barbara Padovich,” she said, a
nd there she was with that Padovich again. I realized that I resented her taking over my name that way.
“My little son and I are from Warsaw,” she went on, “and we’ve had just an awful time getting here. We were bombed on the road and then, when we finally found a little cottage on a farm near here, the peasants turned Communist and threw us out. My little son is sickly.”
I was damned if I was going to cough for her this time. While she was telling lies to a total stranger for some bizarre reason, several people had already joined the line ahead of where we should have been, and the man who wasn’t Judge Starecki was almost ready to go into the store.
“Mister really does have the bearing of a judge,” Mother repeated now, and made the man smile self-consciously. Then, a man in a white apron unlatched the shop door from the inside, indicating that Mr. Rokief should come in. Mr. Rokief quickly took Mother’s elbow and the two of them stepped inside the butcher shop together, pulling me along by the hand.
“You can’t do that!” I heard a woman say, who had been standing behind Mr. Rokief, and suddenly the purpose behind Mother’s entire charade revealed itself to me. I ducked my head in shame as the glass door shut behind us.
“I would like some beef, please, a nice cut,” Mother said to the woman behind the counter.
“All we have is lamb and pork,” the woman said. “Quarter kilo to a customer.” Like the people in the butcher shop in Warsaw, she had on a white apron over a white smock and a white cap on her head.
“My husband and two children are home sick with nothing to eat,” Mother said.
“All I can sell you today is a quarter kilo. I sell you more than one package, and he’ll arrest me,” she said, indicating a Russian soldier sitting in a chair, which he rocked back against the wall, at the side of the store. A rifle stood against the wall. He yawned without covering his mouth. “Come back tomorrow. Lamb or pork?”
“Lamb,” Mother said a little uncertainly. The woman reached into a box and handed mother a little package in white paper.
Mr. Rokief leaned forward across the marble counter. “And a quarter kilo of lamb for the young man,” he said.
“A quarter kilo per customer is all I’m allowed to sell,” the woman said.
“He’s a customer!”
“He’s a little boy.”
“He’s a big boy, who came here and waited in line to buy some of your lamb.” He said it quietly so the soldier wouldn’t hear, but very forcefully.
Looking sideways at the yawning soldier, the woman quickly thrust a white package towards me as well. I took it before I realized what I was doing. Involuntarily, I also glanced at the soldier, who seemed to have seen nothing.
Mother quickly paid for our purchase, Mr. Rokief paid for his, and in a moment we were standing outside the store with our white-paper-wrapped packages.
The people in the line were all looking at us. “They cut into line,” one woman said. “Dirty cheaters!” someone added.
Mother and Mr. Rokief ignored them. “Thank Mister so much for Mister’s kind help,” Mother said to him. “I’m living now with two sisters-in-law, their two children, and a governess. This half kilo isn’t going to go very far, but a lot further than a quarter kilo.”
“Line cutter!” somebody said. The package in my hands seemed as though it were the size of a soccer ball. I stepped around to Mother’s other side, away from the queue.
“With some vegetables, they’ll make a nice soup,” Mr. Rokief said.
“I suppose I overpaid several times,” Mother said, laughing. “I have no idea what a quarter kilo of lamb is even supposed to cost. At home, my husband pays all the bills. I don’t even know what cut this is.”
“The commissar won’t let them overcharge. That’s why the soldier’s there. He’s a good man.”
“Where can I find a greengrocer?”
I realized that Mother hadn’t even bothered to tell Mr. Rokief that Lolek wasn’t really home sick. That was because he would already know that. He would know that she didn’t really have a sick husband and probably that she hadn’t really mistaken him for Judge Starecki either. He and Mother had never met before, but they immediately recognized in each other their common dishonesty. It was that Jewish thing.
“There’s a greengrocer around the other side of this block. I don’t know if they’re still open,” Mr. Rokief said. “I’d take you both to a café, but there aren’t any open—there’s no coffee. Coffee is probably the most precious commodity in town.” I just wished we would go anywhere else.
Mother laughed. “I’d invite Mister and his wife for cocktails, but we have no cocktails.” They both laughed at this.
“Stop that, Yulek!” Mother surprised me. I hadn’t realized that I had begun to tug at her sleeve. “He’s anxious to get going,” she explained to Mr. Rokief. “Does Mister have a telephone?”
“We have two rooms in a kind lady’s apartment. Let me write her telephone number down for Missus.” He wrote a phone number with a little gold pencil on a pad of paper in a little leather folder. Mother explained that we were staying in an awful place for just a night or two, they shook hands, and we finally walked down the street and around the corner.
The line at the greengrocer’s was very short. We bought some vegetables and headed for home. It must have been lunchtime by now, because I was hungry. But I knew it would do no good to mention it. I remembered Fredek’s wailing this morning.
I also noticed that all the people that I had seen standing in the streets were now gone. Except for the Russian soldiers on the corners, Mother and I were practically the only people in the street. The voice on the loudspeaker was telling us that in the Soviet Union everyone was equal.
Back at our building, there was a new problem—we had no key to our apartment. Miss Bronia had been entrusted with our only key, and she was to pay frequent visits to the rooms in case somebody came back early.
A little hallway, running past the water pump, the toilet, and the door to our rooms, connected the courtyard at the center of the building with the street. One step led down to the sidewalk. Parts of three hinges from an absent iron gate were embedded in the masonry.
The hallway was too dark and malodorous from the toilet and the courtyard too strewn with garbage for us to wait there. We went back out to the street, put our packages down in the hallway, and waited. I sat down on the step and Mother told me to stand up because it wasn’t nice to sit on the step and I would get my pants dirty. Then she changed her mind and said it was all right for me to sit.
The loudspeaker said that the Red Army had brought equality to us. “Equality” seemed like a big thing to these people. I guessed that Red Army was what the Russians called their army, since their flag was red, but the equality issue concerned me. Not that it really mattered, but it was something to ponder while we waited. I wondered whether those soft little spikes on the soldiers’ hats had something to do with equality. Were shorter soldiers issued hats with longer spikes?
I saw two soldiers with rifles across their backs approaching along the sidewalk. One was taller than the other, but the spikes on their hats seemed to be of the same length. So that certainly wasn’t it. As they approached us in our doorway, they smiled. Instinctively, I smiled back, but immediately realized that I was smiling at the enemy.
They stopped and greeted us in Russian. They seemed quite friendly. Mother answered them in Polish. The taller one bent down and patted my cheek. The other was saying something I couldn’t hear to Mother. It sounded like a question. He continued smiling.
“I don’t understand,” Mother said in Polish. “I don’t speak Russian,” which wasn’t true.
The soldier put his elbow against the side of the building, leaned closer to Mother, and said something else.
“I don’t understand,” Mother repeated.
The soldier reached for Mother’s hand. She drew back, shaking her head. “No, no,” she said.
The other soldier held a piece of candy out t
o me. I shook my head. “It’s good,” he said in Russian.
“No!” Mother said in a much firmer tone than before. The soldier’s tone sounded like he was pleading. His hand reached up to touch her cheek.
“No!” she said again, pushing his hand away.
The soldier shrugged his shoulders and said to his companion, “She must be waiting for an officer to come along.” They both laughed. Then they walked on.
“Standing in the doorway like this, I look like a blah-blah,” Mother said, using a word I didn’t know. I could tell she wasn’t really talking to me. She gave a little private, dark-sounding laugh.
“What did he want?” I asked. I sensed that this had been one of those things that adults didn’t like to share with children, and it gave me a perverse pleasure to ask.
“About buying cigarettes,” she snapped.
“What?” This was new and scary ground for me.
Mother’s voice grew much calmer. “He just wanted to know where he could buy cigarettes.”
I knew this wasn’t the truth. “Why did you say you didn’t speak Russian?”
“I just didn’t want to be nice to them.”
I knew she still wasn’t telling me the truth, but I didn’t want to push further. I let it go.
“Let’s walk up and down the street a little,” Mother said. “Pick up your package, and we’ll just walk back and forth a little until Miss Bronia comes.”
“I’m hungry,” I said maliciously.
“Little soldiers learn to accept hunger sometimes,” she said. It wasn’t an answer I had expected, and I had no response to it. Now I wished I hadn’t said it. I was being like Fredek. I stood up.
But just then, we saw Miss Bronia and Fredek come around the corner. Each carried an armload of firewood, and they were singing a song I didn’t know, something about tents and campfires.
Mother and Me Page 17