Mother and Me

by Julian Padowicz

  “There was a truck full of firewood, and the soldiers were giving it away to everybody,” Fredek said.

  “If we had had something to carry it in, we could have gotten a lot more,” Miss Bronia said, out of breath. “Mrs. Herbstein found two more loaves of bread and some cheese. I’m afraid there’s no butter. Missus didn’t find any, did she?”

  “We got some lamb,” Mother said, holding up a package. “And some more carrots and spinach.”

  “Wonderful, I can make a stew,” Miss Bronia said, leading the way into the building. We were immediately enveloped by the smell of mold and the toilet.

  Auntie Edna wasn’t back by suppertime. Auntie Paula and Sonya had brought back potatoes and roses. “A poor old woman was trying to sell flowers, and nobody was buying, so we bought some,” Sonya said.

  “Anything to make the place smell better,” Mother said, and they laughed. Then we sat around on suitcases and boxes while Miss Bronia dealt with supper.

  “Where’s my mother?” Fredek asked.

  “She’ll be home soon, dear,” Auntie Paula said.

  “She’ll be home soon,” Mother repeated.

  “Your mother is out finding us a nicer place to stay,” Auntie Paula said. “You don’t want to go on staying here, do you?”

  “I want my mother,” Fredek wailed. Fredek was not a little soldier.

  “So, Basia,” Auntie Paula said cheerfully, and I could tell it was for Fredek’s benefit, “you and Yulek really did well. Sonya and I stood in line at a butcher shop too, but they ran out of meat long before we could get in.”

  “There was a soldier in the store to make sure they didn’t sell more that a quarter kilo to a customer. A very pleasant lawyer from Krakow made them give Yulian a quarter kilo too.”

  “When is my mother coming home?” Fredek whined. He had curled up on our sleeping pallet and was sucking his thumb.

  “She’ll be home soon,” Auntie Paula said again, but without her earlier cheer. Then, to Mother, “How did you meet this very pleasant lawyer?”

  “He was standing in line, and you could tell that he wasn’t from here. So I walked up and started a conversation. And when he went into the store, we just went right in with him.”

  Auntie Paula found that amusing. Of course Mother did not tell her about pretending to mistake him for Judge Staretski, but I was just as glad not to have to relive that experience.

  We ate out of an odd assortment of bowls. I didn’t like the lamb stew and would have filled up on the delicious bread and cheese, but Mother made me eat some. “Who knows when we’ll have meat again,” Auntie Paula said. Miss Bronia tried to coax some stew into Fredek, but he made a terrible face after his first sip. “It is pretty bad,” Miss Bronia said to Auntie Paula, and they agreed to let him abstain.

  “The people are saying that the farmers are all selling their meat on the black market,” Auntie Paula said. Putting two and two together, I reasoned that black market must be another name for that Soviet Union where, the woman on the loudspeaker said, you could go and buy anything you wanted.

  “We’ll have to find out how to contact them,” Mother said. I wondered why the Russians would go to the trouble of setting up loudspeakers to advertise the Soviet Union without telling you where to go and find it. I had heard that the Russians were stupid.

  Miss Bronia was now sitting beside Fredek in the back room, holding his head in her lap. The rest of us had gravitated to the proximity of the stove.

  “Do you think something could have happened?” Auntie Paula half whispered.

  “Some soldiers tried to blah-blah me,” Mother said, again using a word I didn’t know. “But it was an honest mistake. Standing in the doorway in my heels and stockings, I must have looked the part.”

  They both gave a little laugh. Sonya laughed too, but louder.

  “I think they’re trying hard to keep order,” Mother said. “Edna can take care of herself.”

  At that moment, Auntie Edna came in the front door. She stood there looking down on all of us on our boxes and suitcases. Fredek ran to her side and buried his face in her suit jacket.

  “You have no idea,” she finally announced very slowly, “how lucky we are to have found this place. There is nothing out there—absolutely nothing. There are people sleeping in the park.”

  I visualized my park in Warsaw with people sleeping on the benches. I wondered what was left of the park.

  Miss Bronia was the first to speak. “I have a bottle of disinfectant,” she said. “We can scrub this place clean. We can air it out and the fire will dry up the dampness.”

  Nobody said anything for a while. The prospect of staying where we were, however disinfected and dehumidified, took us all a bit of time to digest. Finally Auntie Paula said, “Bronia’s right. We can make this place habitable. Tonight we’ll make a list of things we need. Tomorrow we’ll figure out how to get them. We saved you some lamb stew, Edna.”

  Auntie Edna just shook her head as she stood there. You could tell how tired she was.

  “You have to eat something,” Auntie Paula said. Auntie Edna stood there, holding Fredek to her and not saying anything.

  In the days that followed, Miss Bronia, Sonya, Fredek, and I washed down every surface of our two rooms with the disinfectant. Opening our windows wide during the day and maintaining a small fire in the evenings, seemed to get rid of much of the dampness. When Auntie Paula and Sonya returned to the corner where Miss Bronia and Fredek had gotten the firewood, there was no more wood, and no one knew when or where another army truckload of wood might appear. When one of the mothers encountered a man or woman carrying firewood, they would ask where the wood had been obtained and sometimes would arrive at that corner while wood was still being distributed—sometimes not.

  The same method was applied to the procurement of meat. “They have chickens at such-and-such butcher shop,” would initiate a rush to that location. A queue meant that there was still merchandise. Whether there would still be some when your turn came, was a different issue. Bakers and greengrocers seemed to have a steadier supply. If you lined up early enough in the morning at the baker’s, you could usually count on being rewarded with a loaf of bread, though what flour they had received to bake with, varied from day to day.

  Foraging for supplies was pretty much a full-day occupation for the mothers. My mother preferred going on her own, while the Aunties usually went out together, though they often split up eventually, according to the opportunity. I definitely did not want to go with Mother again and was allowed to help Miss Bronia with the housework. Fredek was, sometimes, invited to accompany our Auntie Paula, which he enjoyed. I don’t remember him ever asking to go with his own mother. Sonya sometimes accompanied either of the Aunties. As for me, I just didn’t feel comfortable enough with either of my Aunties to go out with anyone but Miss Bronia.

  Miss Bronia and I sewed pallets out of old curtains, sheets, and tablecloths that Auntie Edna had found somewhere. It seems that nobody ever asked where such items came from. Fredek, who wouldn’t touch a needle and thread, stuffed the pallets with straw. A universal packing material, straw was available for the asking from almost any store. The pallets turned out to be quite comfortable, except that each movement raised a small could of dust.

  One time, I went out early in the morning with Miss Bronia to wait in the bread queue together. Miss Bronia got into a conversation with two women standing in front of us. She seemed to know one of them from other queues—or maybe the same queue on other days. The other woman had come from another town where there weren’t any queues because the food stores had nothing to sell. The farmers came into town and sold food out of their wagons at many times the normal price. The woman had heard that the commissar commanding this town didn’t allow things like that.

  Somehow we acquired several chairs in the next few weeks, two tables—one slightly higher than the other—that, fitted together, could seat all seven of us. Two people sat on nail kegs and Fredek and I sha
red a steamer trunk at the end. We even got a bed. The mothers took turns sleeping in it, one week at a time. Fredek and I shared a large pallet.

  “No talking,” Auntie Paula had told us on our second night there, when Fredek and I were put to bed in the back room where we all slept, while the older people had their tea around the table in the front room. Prior to arriving at our former residence, the cottage, I had never had anyone in my room to talk to at night, and in the cottage our bed was only a few feet from the center of after-supper life. It had never occurred to me that anything like talk was appropriate in bed, unless you were there because you were ill or unless you were married people who read the paper and ate breakfast in bed.

  No sooner had Auntie Paula given us her admonition, turned out the light bulb hanging from the ceiling, and gone into the front room, that I heard Fredek’s whisper in my ear. “If we whisper,” he said, “they can’t hear us in the other room.”

  I considered the statement for a moment and realized that it was probably true. “What… should we whisper about?” I asked. Fredek had no ready answer, but took it under advisement. Before he could formulate a reply, I heard the deep breathing that indicated he had fallen asleep. Relieved, I turned my back on my sleeping bedfellow.

  “Tomorrow a whole train of firewood is arriving at the station,” Auntie Paula announced one evening, coming in with a headless chicken wrapped in a newspaper under her arm. “We should all go and carry home as much as we can.” The days and nights were colder now, and the supply of firewood was growing sparse. The truckloads brought in by the army and dumped on street corners seemed to have stopped, and the price that the peasants asked for wood they sold from their wagons was linked inversely to the mercury in the thermometer. It may have been my imagination, but I was sure I had seen Auntie Paula eyeing Fredek’s and my wooden steamer trunk.

  The next day was overcast and damp as we all walked the few blocks to the train station, each of us equipped with a cloth shopping bag. There, we indeed found a train of open cars stacked high with the split yellow firewood. It stood on a side track beyond the platform and, as we had expected, a queue paralleled the cars, veering only to skirt the puddles from the night’s rain.

  To our right, three cars were empty and soldiers stood on top of the pile in the fourth car, throwing the wood to the ground. The pieces bounced and somersaulted in all directions while six people at a time were permitted by armed guards to pick up as much as they could carry, while dodging the tumbling pieces. As each moved away with his or her load, the guards would let the next person in line have his turn. To our left, the train and the queue extended several car lengths, until they both curved away and disappeared from view.

  Auntie Paula led the way, as we began following the line to its end. The track curved gently in front of us, revealing another railroad car and more waiting people with each few steps. A guard stood at the front of every car, keeping the queue separated from the train by several yards.

  Gravel crunched under our feet as we walked. I held Miss Bronia’s hand. Fredek and Sonya walked on ahead, deep in conversation. As on other such occasions, I wondered what the two of them talked about so intently. The three mothers led the way. Their conversation didn’t interest me, but I gloried in the feel of Miss Bronia’s soft hand around mine.

  The end of the line had finally come in sight, still several cars ahead of us, when it began to drizzle. Anticipating rain, we had put on raincoats this morning. Mine was a cape with a hood and a heavy rubber smell.

  “I’m not doing this,” I suddenly heard Mother say, as she stopped in her tracks. “Yulek, give me your hand,” she commanded. I obeyed and, to my embarrassment, we began walking back towards the station. Long and wet as the wait in line promised to be, I understood it to be her and my duty to our “family.” To enjoy the firewood that they had waited all day for and we hadn’t, was simply unthinkable. As we walked back, I realized that while Mother’s skin was actually softer than Miss Bronia’s, her grip wasn’t so much one of affection as of possession.

  Mother was walking very fast again, and I was, again, running to keep up. But where I had expected her to turn right to head back home, we continued on towards the head of the line. My heart sank even further as I realized that instead of going home, we were about to crack the line in some way again.

  We approached one of the guards where they were throwing the wood down from the train, and Mother spoke to him in Russian. I heard her explaining that I was sick and that she wanted to talk to the commander.

  The guard indicated two other soldiers, standing off to one side, one considerably taller than the other. Their uniforms were no different from the others’, but, by the pistols at their belts, I took them to be officers. I heard the guard say the name, “Comrade Captain Vrushin.”

  Mother thanked the soldier with a big smile, and we made our way over the gravel to the two officers. The rain was growing heavier. Mother’s smile didn’t leave her face.

  “Comrade Captain Vrushin,” Mother said as we approached the two. I didn’t think she knew which of the two he was.

  The look of delight that suddenly came over the faces of these two officers was actually comical. I understood the taller one express surprise at Mother’s fluent Russian, to which she answered that her mother was from Moscow. Then I heard her go into her “sick little son” routine and immediately straightened up to look as strong and as healthy as I could. I certainly was not about to collaborate in her charade to wheedle the enemy into giving us special favors at the expense of my countrymen waiting in line for their firewood. The eyes of the two officers, however, were not on me.

  Mother talked about her brave husband fighting the Germans and about not knowing what had become of her little mother and how much she wanted to see Moscow and the Soviet Union. This, at least, clarified one thing for me. The Soviet Union, I now concluded, was a department store in the Russian capital, not here.

  The rain had become quite heavy by now. Mother and I were in our hooded rain capes, but the two officers were both bareheaded and wore no rain gear over their uniforms. The rain matted their hair down and washed down their faces. The one who turned out to be the comrade captain was the tall one with a long thin face and cheekbones that looked as if they might poke through his pale skin. The other man had dark skin and looked something like the pictures I had seen of Eskimos. I noticed that their tunics must not have been intended to be cinched by leather gun-belts, because they hung in folds below the waist.

  Suddenly I saw the smile on Comrade Captain Vrushin’s face turn to alarm. Following his gaze, I saw that black rivulets had begun running down Mother’s face from her eyes. I immediately realized that this must be from the black makeup Mother applied to her eyelashes in the morning, but the comrade captain didn’t seem to make the connection. Mother saw his alarm, but not the reason for it, and I could see the confusion on her face. “What’s wrong?” she asked. The smile on her face wasn’t real.

  Capt. Vrushin pointed to mother’s face and she touched her hand to her cheek. Seeing the black smudge on her finger, she began to laugh. “It’s my eye makeup,” she said. She took a compact from her rain-cape pocket and looked at herself in the mirror. She tried to wipe her cheeks with the back of her wet fingers.

  The relief on the captain’s face, I saw, was very real. It was quickly replaced by one of embarrassment. Mother laughed that light, bouncy laugh she sometimes used. The comrade captain now pulled a neatly folded handkerchief from his tunic pocket and, with an awkward little bow, handed it to her.

  Mother thanked him. But as she wiped, the black rivulets continued to flow. She looked like she was crying black tears at the same time that she was laughing. Capt. Vrushin was looking embarrassed again. The shorter man maintained his seriousness. In another minute, the eye makeup was gone from Mother’s face, and the captain’s handkerchief was black.

  “Oh, I am so sorry,” Mother said. “I will wash it and bring it back tomorrow.”

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bsp; “I will wash it myself,” Capt. Vrushin answered. He reached out and took the handkerchief from her. “Comrade Lt. Grunsky will get you some wood.” He turned and spoke to the man beside him, who immediately headed for the wood train.

  “You are very kind, Comrade Captain,” Mother said. “My son and I are very grateful.”

  “You must dry your son in front of the fire when you get home. And give him hot tea with honey.”

  “I would,” Mother assured him, “but we have no honey. But you speak as though you have children of your own.”

  “I am not married, but I have younger brothers and sisters.”

  “Do you have photographs of them?” Mother asked.

  The comrade captain said that he did not, but he did have one of his dog, which Mother admired greatly. Then Lt. Grunsky returned. With him were three soldiers, each with a bulging potato sack over his shoulder. The sacks were filled with firewood.

  Mother didn’t seem terribly surprised by this. “Thank you so much for your kindness, Comrade Captain,” she said. Then, to me in Polish, she said, “Say thank you.”

  I liked the man’s open face and the very genuine concern that he had shown for Mother’s distress, and I didn’t mind thanking him. “Thank you, Captain,” I said in Polish. Now I wondered whether Mother actually knew how much Russian I had picked up from Grandmother. Something told me that this ability might be something worth keeping secret.

  Mother and I walked home, followed by the three soldiers. Mother gave them each some money when they had stacked the wood beside our stove and lighted a fire in it.

  It was after dark when the others returned. The room was warm, and some stew from last night simmered in the pot. Mother sat at the table doing her solitaire. Each of the arrivals carried a shopping bag filled with firewood. They looked tired and their shoes squished water. Auntie Edna and Auntie Paula did not look happy to see us.