Mother and Me

by Julian Padowicz

  “Alors, where were we?” she finally said, picking up her cards. “Oh, gin! Gin!” and she laid out her hand.

  As I shuffled the cards, I formulated my next question. “Why are they arresting lawyers, judges, and army officers?” I asked, when we had begun our next hand.

  “We really shouldn’t be talking about this,” Mademoiselle said, as she arranged her cards with steadier fingers. Anxious to hear more, I had no idea what cards I held.

  “Why not?” I asked. It had taken some courage to ask this. It was a question that I was not accustomed to asking.

  Mademoiselle let out a loud sigh. “The Russians are really much better than the Germans,” she said.

  I waited, hoping she would talk about the Germans now. “I hate the Germans,” I finally said to fill the silence.

  “The Russians haven’t bombed us and they don’t shoot or club people on the street,” she said.

  “Shoot or club people on the street?” I said in surprise.

  “Mr. Katolski just came from Warsaw, and he says the soldiers will walk down the street, and if they don’t like the way you look, they’ll just arrest you or shoot you or club you with their rifles. Right there on the sidewalk. Then they’ll order people in the street to take the body away.”

  Mademoiselle was beginning to cry again. She was fumbling for her handkerchief in her purse with her free hand. “Oh, my,” she said. “Why am I telling you all this?”

  I shrugged.

  “I shouldn’t be telling you all this and upsetting you, should I?”

  “Yes, you should.” I knew that I should be more upset about Germans killing people on the streets of Warsaw, the way Mademoiselle was, but it didn’t seem real to me. And it was interesting stuff. Mademoiselle’s being upset the way she was, was far more disturbing to me. I had a great yearning to make her feel better.

  “You’re very sweet,” she said through her handkerchief. This time I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “So tell me how you and your mother got here from Warsaw,” Mademoiselle said, evidently wanting to change the subject. I told her about Lolek’s truck painted green and Mr. Dembovski wearing an army coat and hat. And about the planes strafing us and the woman whose forearm had been shot off.

  Mademoiselle gasped at that part. Then I told her about the man I had seen have a heart attack on the road, and she brought her hand up to her mouth. “Just like Madame,” she said.

  “Except that he was walking,” I pointed out.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “But what horrors you’ve seen.”

  “Yes,” I said, for want of a better answer.

  “And you don’t have nightmares.”

  “Yes, I do. Except I don’t know what they are. Sometimes I wake up crying, but I don’t know what I dreamt.” It was funny, but telling Mademoiselle that I had been crying didn’t embarrass me.

  “You can’t remember them because they’re so horrible. Let me tell you now about The Barber of Seville. It’s very funny.” Then, Mademoiselle proceeded to tell me a story I couldn’t possibly follow about some barber and his friend who kept disguising himself as other people in order to marry some lady. When Mademoiselle laughed, I laughed too.

  When Mother came home that evening, I treated her to walking on the boulevard and under clouds and trees.

  “Oh, he is so smart, Madame,” Mademoiselle said. Mother smiled, but I could tell her mind was on something else too. She seemed to want Mademoiselle to leave quickly.

  “Oh, not so much, Madame,” Mademoiselle said when Mother paid her, but Mother insisted and almost pushed her out the door.

  “Have you said anything to Mademoiselle about being Jewish?” she asked, when Mademoiselle’s footsteps had died away.

  That was something that I certainly couldn’t be accused of, and my body language must have said so.

  “You are not to tell anyone that we’re Jewish—do you understand?”

  I nodded my head.

  “Do you understand?” Mother repeated.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “We are Catholic—do you understand that?”

  “Yes,” I said. I well understood why Jews weren’t liked by a lot of people.

  “The Germans are killing Jews in Warsaw. Soon the Russians will start. No one is to know we’re Jewish. We’re not Jewish. We’re Catholic, and we’ve always been Catholic. Here, you have to wear this.” And Mother took from her purse a tangle of chain, beads, and crucifixes.

  Laying them on the table, she began to separate two rosaries and a silver chain with a medallion of Mary and Jesus. “You must wear this all the time,” Mother said, holding the chain by its two ends.

  In a daze, I walked over and let her fasten it around my neck. For years I had lusted after such medallions in jewelry stores and on the breasts of the blessed. Now I had one of my own. Only then did I notice a little gold cross, suspended below Mother’s throat.

  “And this you must carry in your pocket,” she said, handing me a white rosary. Then she suddenly changed her mind and handed me the brown one. “Now you must teach me how to use it. I know Miss Yanka taught you.”

  I knew that Mother had actually learned the words to the Our Father and the Hail Mary that evening on the farm with Father Chernievich, but I made her repeat them after me anyway and then recite them by herself for me. I had to prompt her in a few places.

  “That’s very good,” I finally told her. Then I showed her how to cross herself.

  “What’s the Holy Ghost?” she asked.

  “He’s one of the three people of God,” I said.

  “God has three people?”

  “God is three people. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”

  “God is three people?” There was a note of skepticism in her voice.

  I didn’t like Mother questioning Catholic doctrine. Jews had no right to do that, particularly when you considered the horrible thing they had done to Jesus. “God is God,” I said with annoyance. “He can be anything He wants to be.”

  “Of course, I don’t know as much about this as you do,” Mother now said, “so please explain it to me.”

  That was better.

  “Jesus Christ is supposed to be … I mean is the son of God, right?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, not impressed by her recitation of the obvious.

  “But He also is God, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And this Holy Ghost is also God.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Mary, the Mother of God, is She God too?”

  “Yes, that’s the Holy Trinity.”

  “The four of Them?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see,” Mother said. “Miss Yanka taught you all this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, thank you for teaching it to me so well.”

  Well, that was a lot better. I wondered if this meant we would get christened too. “Do you know about heaven?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. But the Polish word for heaven and the word for sky are the same, so I realized that my question had gained me nothing.

  “I mean, do you know about the place where God lives?” I asked it cautiously because I realized this was probably a whole new concept for her.

  “You tell me about it,” Mother said.

  Oh, my Lord, what an opportunity this was! “Well,” and I remembered now the word paradise, which would finally distinguish heaven from sky. “Paradise is where God and the angels and the saints and the twelve apostles live and where good Catholics go after they die. It’s way up in the sky, above the blue, and only good things happen to you there. You can do anything you want, eat anything you want, wear anything you want, and, I think, have anything you want. Wouldn’t you like to go there some day?”

  “It sounds like a wonderful place. Is your father in Paradise?”

  “No. He wasn’t Catholic.”

  “But he was an extremely good man. Doesn’t that count?”

  “No. Y
ou absolutely have to be christened in order to go to paradise. And you also have to believe in the Holy Trinity and be truly sorry for all your sins just before you die.”

  “And if you don’t do all those things, do you go to Hell?”

  She had raised a specter now that I tried not to think about—the hot flames, ugly, bad-smelling devils, and unspeakable torture for all eternity that awaited those of us who didn’t gain access to paradise. I had no idea Mother even knew about Hell. “Yes,” I said.

  “And your father, he is in Hell?”

  I had asked Kiki that very same question, and she had assured me he wasn’t. “No,” I said, fearing the question that was to come.

  It came. “So where is he?”

  “Kiki doesn’t know,” I said. “That’s what’s called The Great Mystery. There is a place where good Jews and good Negroes and good Chinamen go after they die, but nobody knows where it is.” Here I may have spoken too hastily. Kiki had never actually said that that was what The Great Mystery was. But it did make sense, so probably it was.

  “Maybe it’s over the rainbow,” Mother suggested.

  That had never occurred to me. And now I wondered if it had ever occurred to anyone before. Kiki and I had once tried to reach the rainbow, but discovered that it just kept moving further away. But maybe somebody’s soul, flying invisibly through the air at who-knows-what speed, could catch it. My mother may have just stumbled on the solution to The Great Mystery. Of course, we would never know for sure until we died.

  Suddenly I was seeing Mother in a whole new light. But I was wrong to be so surprised. If I was capable of thinking about and understanding all these grownup things at my age, it made perfect sense that my mother would be extra smart too. Mother thanked me again for teaching her all these things and began to lay out her solitaire. I fingered the new rosary that now occupied the place in my pocket vacated by my pocket knife and felt very good about everything.

  The following day, Mademoiselle and I followed the same program as the day before—a walk in the morning, gin rummy in the afternoon, and more French. I learned to buy bananas in French. Neither Mademoiselle nor I had tasted a banana since the beginning of the war, and we agreed to do something about it. So we bought and sold bananas in French. We counted bananas, boxed them, shipped them, peeled them, and fried them. We even resoled my shoes with banana skins. We did similar things with pineapples, oranges, and grapefruit, even though I didn’t like grapefruit. I also learned to go to the ball by limousine and invite a young lady to dance with me because she was the most beautiful young lady at the ball. I even learned to play gin rummy in French.

  As before, Mademoiselle seemed most impressed with my ability to repeat accurately and to memorize. However, when the statement about the opera starting in half an hour popped into my head from two days before and I pronounced it, she expressed great surprise at my knowing it. Not wanting to imply that she had forgotten teaching it to me, I avoided answering by doing my best to assume a conspiratorial smile. This may have been a mistake, since it immediately resulted in feelings of guilt.

  I also learned more about the countess’s Warsaw home and life style. I really wasn’t much interested in either of these things, but Mademoiselle was, clearly, very anxious to tell me.

  Occasionally, I would lightly scratch my chest just below the opening of my collar so that my new medallion would flip out for Mademoiselle to notice. On the other hand, I did not want her asking if it was new. I need not have worried. Mademoiselle gave no sign of noticing it at all.

  Before Mademoiselle’s arrival that morning, Mother had sat me down to explain that what she herself was doing all this time, was arranging to sell some jewelry and looking for an apartment of our own. She had shown me that she had consolidated all of her jewelry into cloth-covered buttons down the front and the lining of the same blue dress she had worn every day since our arrival in Lvow.

  This last, of course, was to be our secret, and I was to tell no one about it.

  While I could see precious little opportunity for betraying these confidences, I was also aware that there was probably more to the story than what I had been told. Part of this must have come from Mother’s talk with the Aunties about escape, and part simply from the knowledge that whatever I was told generally represented only the already visible tip of the iceberg.

  My suspicion was confirmed that very evening. It began when Mother sat me down once more on my bed and explained that we would soon be receiving a visitor. And, contrary to my training, I was not to walk up to him and give a firm handshake, but stay on that very bed and say nothing. Nor was I to listen to the ensuing conversation. But first I was to help Mother to move our table and two chairs to the farthest location from my bed and be ready to jump onto my bed at the first knock on the door. I was also to tell no one about any of this evening’s activity because we were partners and this was our secret.

  Having moved the table and chairs, I was free to roam the room until I heard the knock, so I stood in the middle of the floor with my hands on my hips wondering how to spend my momentary freedom. Then the knock came, and I leaped for my assigned position.

  In a moment, a burly man in a fleece-lined peasant jacket and knee-high boots stood in our room, looking around as though searching for something. Apparently not finding it, he whipped off his cap and mumbled something to Mother. I could make out the now-familiar peasant accent.

  “My husband went into the army,” Mother said, offering her hand, “and we don’t know if he’s alive.”

  Ignoring Mother’s hand, the man began inching back toward the door.

  “Just sit down and talk with me for a minute. I’ll make some tea,” Mother said. She had put her hand lightly on his elbow and was urging him towards the table.

  The man continued to move towards the door. “No women, no children!” he said, his voice rising in both volume and pitch.

  “I am strong like a man,” Mother said, her quiet voice contrasting with his. “I was athletic champion in Lodz.”

  This was news to me, but then grandfather’s military career had been too.

  “I will pay you extra.”

  The man was shaking his head. Snow, mountains, border guards, were words that I heard him speak. Finally he gained the door, and in an instant he was gone.

  Mother turned to look at me. The expression on her face was of total disappointment and surprise. I had never seen such surprise or such disappointment on her face before. “Ignore what he said,” she said in a voice that was totally flat. “He is a crazy peasant. Why is he talking about snow and mountains? Don’t pay any attention to him. Don’t tell Mademoiselle about any of this.”

  I said that I wouldn’t.

  Mother sat down on her own bed. “Come sit next to me,” she said.

  For the first time in my life, I found that I wanted to sit next to her. I crossed to her bed and sat down beside her. Mother put her arm around my waist and pulled me closer. I didn’t resist. I wondered if she was crying. I noticed that one of the cloth-covered buttons on her dress had been replaced by a large black wooden one.

  “All right!” she suddenly said. “We will not be sad. We will have some tea and we will be gay.” Then she got up, straightened the skirt of her dress, and went to the kitchen.

  A few minutes later, she was back with a tray. A man’s cane hung from her arm. The tea was sweetened, but there was no milk, she said. The cookie was for me. I wondered about the cane.

  Mother leaned the cane against the table as we sat down to tea. “We will not be sad,” Mother said again. “Sad people don’t win. We will find somebody else. Don’t worry.”

  Then she stood up and picked up the cane. Turning her feet outward, she suddenly began to walk a strange duck-walk up and down the room. She poked the cane left and right in exaggerated movements. She was funny, and I laughed.

  Mother laughed too. “Who am I?” she asked.

  I had no idea.

  “Come on,” she said, laug
hing, and resumed her duck-walk. “Who am I?”

  “A duck?” I guessed without conviction.

  “Come on—the cane,” she said, twirling it around. “And I’m wearing a derby hat,” though she really wasn’t.

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “I’m Charlie Chaplin!” she announced.

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t you recognize Charlie Chaplin?”

  “Who’s Charlie Chaplin?”

  “You know, Charlie Chaplin, the funny American movie comic.”

  I shrugged my shoulders again.

  “You don’t know who Charlie Chaplin is?”

  I shook my head.

  “Oh my God! Every child knows who Charlie Chaplin is.”

  I shrugged my shoulders another time.

  “You don’t know who Charlie Chaplin is,” Mother said still again. But she didn’t sound angry as she had the other day about my not learning any French in school, though she was definitely disappointed. “Do you know about Shirley Temple?” Her voice was sad now, as though she were afraid of my negative answer.

  I had heard the name and hoped my saying so would cheer her up.

  “Have you seen her? Do you know who she is?”

  I searched my memory for the ladies who had come to our Warsaw apartment. She may even have been an Auntie. “Is she the one who brought me chocolates?” I guessed wildly.

  Mother came over to where I was sitting and put her arm around my shoulders. I saw that now she was crying. I felt terrible for having made her cry. “Was she at my birthday party?” I speculated desperately.

  When Mademoiselle came the next morning, she and Mother had a quiet talk in French before Mother went out. On our walk later that morning, Mademoiselle said that she had been told that I didn’t know who Charlie Chaplin and Shirley Temple were. She then proceeded to tell me about the baggy-trousered English comedian and the American child actress, who was about the same age as I was. She also went on to tell me about a magnificent French actress, whom Mademoiselle had once seen on stage, but who was now dead, named Sarah Bernhardt, and a great Polish opera singer named Yan Kiepura, whom she had seen as well, and who was still alive. She also told me about an opera in which a beautiful girl who makes cigars and a man who fights with cows fall in love and everyone dies.