“Don’t worry about him,” Mother shot back. “Just climb.”
I wondered why we shouldn’t worry. Would the wine make him so drunk that he wouldn’t be able to see us or shoot at us? Was it poisoned wine, maybe? We were only about a quarter of the way up the mountain. Looking down at the guard again, I could see him walking his post still apparently oblivious of our presence.
After a while Mother stopped. “We have to … rest,” she said, out of breath. She lay down in the snow. “Lie down. It’ll … make it harder … for anyone to see us.”
I lay down, though I didn’t need to rest. I could feel my heart beating a little faster, but I was certainly not out of breath like my mother. I had been walking all over Lvow with Mademoiselle while Mother had been sitting around cafes, smoking cigarettes.
Now below us I could see a long sleigh, like a farm wagon on runners, pulled by two horses, following along the route our sleigh had traveled. It was filled with soldiers.
“Look, there are more soldiers coming” I said. “I think they’re going to change the guard.”
“Damn!” Mother said. “Keep your head down,” she ordered sharply. “Don’t move.”
I didn’t need to be told that. I made myself as flat as possible, the side of my face against the snow, the way Kiki’s brother had done on the battlefield in the last war. I could no longer see the sleigh and hoped that it meant that the soldiers couldn’t see me either.
“Damn, they’re changing the guard,” Mother whispered, which was just what I had said. Of course, it also meant that she wasn’t really keeping her head down the way she had told me to.
“All right, we have to be very careful now. There’s a new guard—don’t let him see you,” Mother said after some time. “We have to crawl the rest of the way on our stomachs. And don’t make any noise.”
I had practiced this in our Warsaw apartment, crawling along the floor between chair legs, the way Kiki’s brother had crawled from trench to trench under the barbed wire. I kept the side of my face down almost to the snow, turned my feet out so that my heels wouldn’t stick up, and followed Mother.
But she didn’t seem to know about turning your feet out, and the heels of her boots bobbed up and down in front of me.
“Put your heels down,” I said in a loud whisper.
“Shshsh, be quiet,” Mother whispered back. She hadn’t put her face down sideways either, and I could see the top of her head in its wool hat.
“Turn your toes out so your feet lie flat and put your face down on its side,” I said, speaking with the authority of experience.
“Hush!” Mother said.
I let it go—we were nearing the top anyway.
The ground wasn’t as steep anymore. “Yulek,” Mother said, “when I give the signal, we’re going to stand up and run as fast as we can into the woods. I know how fast you can run.”
This was undoubtedly an untruth—Mother had never seen me run. And it was very unlikely that Kiki had reported the results of the races we had had on the beach when I had beaten her. What was more likely was that Mother was just trying to make me want to demonstrate my speed and run faster—which, of course, was totally unnecessary in view of the circumstances. Besides which, she hadn’t even said what the signal to run was actually going to be.
For a few minutes Mother lay very still, breathing hard. I knew what she was doing—she was resting up for the sprint to the top. I could have done it without resting. Finally I saw Mother rise to all fours. “Now!” she whispered, straightening to a crouched position and running up the hill. I followed and beat her to the top. In a moment Mother was hugging a tree for support at the top of the hill, trying to catch her breath again. I stood clear of any tree, my hands on my hips. Actually, I did have to take some deep breaths, but I managed to do it through my nose so you couldn’t notice.
I heard strange gasps from Mother and realized she was trying to laugh while she gulped air. She slid down the tree trunk, sinking slowly to her knees, and finally sat down. “Yulek,” she said, “we’re out of Poland. Do you realize that? We’ve escaped the damned Bolsheviks!”
Mother was looking down at the guard now, the new guard, who hadn’t had any wine to drink, who was looking up at us. He had probably noticed us when we had made that last dash, and was now standing in the snow, a few feet from the road with his hands on his hips. Mother got to her feet again and, putting her thumb between her index and middle finger, gave him what we called a “fig,” a gesture of derision that I was never allowed to make. The soldier didn’t respond, but at that distance he probably could not distinguish the gesture. Mother sank to her knees again, laughing.
I pressed my heels together and, standing at attention, put two fingers up to the imaginary visor of my hat in the Polish military salute to the enemy soldier whom we had beaten.
“What are you doing?” Mother demanded. “Are you saluting that Bolshevik swine?”
I didn’t understand Mother’s anger. These were not Germans, whom we all hated. Mother had liked Col. Bawatchov and Capt. Vrushin, and she had even talked nicely to the soldiers on the train. For all we knew, the soldier down below was one of the ones who had been on the train with us. “I was saluting Poland,” I said, not wanting to create problems.
“Poland,” Mother repeated. I detected a little sneer in her voice. “That Polish peasant betrayed us. He took my money and promised to carry you. Then he dumps us into the snow and leaves us there to die.”
“I was perfectly able to climb the hill by myself.” I did not want to continue that subject.
“We’re not there yet. There’s a long walk ahead of us. And where is that coward Max? Where is Max right now, please tell me?”
I was thinking now of the way Mother had been last night, telling me about when she had been a little girl and about God.
“He’s back in a café in Lvow,” she said, I suppose answering her own question. Then she began to laugh. But it wasn’t a fun laugh. “He’s sitting there at Molenski’s telling everyone that we’ve either been shot or arrested. And they’re all saying, ‘That crazy Barbara. Serves her right.’”
For some reason, the idea of Mr. Koppleman sitting in a café and telling everyone that we had been shot or arrested, didn’t make me laugh as much as it made me aware of the serious nature of what we were doing—this wasn’t looking for spies with Fredek.
“All right,” Mother said, a bit of the laugh still in her voice, “now we have to go find that stream. When we do, we’ll have some lunch and a drink of cold, clear mountain water.”
Lunch sounded good. “How are we going to find the stream?” I asked, seeing no indication of where even to look.
“Yulian, where does water always flow?”
I couldn’t tell whether this was an admonition over something I should have learned and racked my brains for an answer.
“Hmmm? Which direction does water always flow in? You know.” By the tone of her voice, I now knew this was a friendly question, but I still had no clue. Then I had the answer. “Downhill!” I said. “Water always flows downhill. So it must be down there somewhere, doesn’t it!” I pointed down the wooded slope.
“That’s exactly right! So now we get to go downhill. And when we get to Budapest, we will have a hot bath and a soft warm bed, and eat anything you want.”
“Will we be in Budapest tonight?”
“Probably not tonight. We have to find the village first.”
“Right, follow the stream to the village.”
“Follow the stream to the village! Come on.”
As we started into the woods, I saw that Mother was crying.
Going down was only a little less steep than it had been coming up, except that we did have the trees to hold on to. Mother ran with mincing steps, stopping herself against each tree. I found that locking my knees I could slide from tree to tree. At one point I missed my tree and found myself gathering speed. I passed Mother and was heading straight for a log lying across my pat
h.
Instinctively I sat down. I continued sliding, but at a more controlled pace. I raised both feet and was able to cushion my stop against the log.
“That’s a good idea,” Mother said behind me, holding on to a tree. She sat down too and, holding her skirt around her legs, soon joined me against the log. She laughed. “This is fun,” she said. I knew that Mother would much rather have been sitting in a café with a cigarette, but I recognized her good intentions.
I peered into the twilight under the trees for the bottom of the hill and our stream, but could see neither. What if Yanek had lied about the stream as well?
Mother got to her knees, crawled over the log, and sat down on the other side. “Here we go!” she said gaily. Wiggling a little in the snow, she began to move downhill again. Not wanting to wiggle my rear the way she did, I pushed myself off against the log. Bumping our way from tree to tree, we continued down the hill.
Then I saw Mother raise her arm over her head and point somewhere to our left. Looking where she pointed, I could now see jagged sheets of ice and crusted snow that I realized must mark our stream. Coming from somewhere above us on our left, it paralleled our track on a slightly convergent course. On the other side of the stream, the ground rose again, and I had the feeling that we were sliding into the vortex of a giant funnel.
Suddenly, Mother’s downward progress stopped with a jolt and a cry of pain in front of me. I lay down on my side, perpendicular to our path, to avoid crashing into her with my boots. I began to roll, slid on my back, head down, and finally came to rest grabbing a low-hanging tree limb.
Mother was a few yards above me now, her left foot sticking out from under the branch of a fallen tree.
“My leg is stuck under this damned log,” she said.
I worked my way back to where she was. “Can’t you pull it out?” I asked.
“No, I can’t,” she said, angrily.
“What if I help pull?”
“No!”
“Does it hurt?”
“Yes, it does. See if you can lift the log.”
“Did you break your bone?”
“I don’t know. Try and lift it off my leg.”
I straddled the branch and reached down to lift it. But it would not budge.
“Maybe we can lift it together,” Mother said. But I could see that she couldn’t get enough of an angle to be of much help.
“What are we going to do now?” I asked.
Mother kicked at the log with her other foot. “Ow!” she cried. “Find a pole of some sort and pry it off,” she said. “Go find a stick about this big around,” indicating a two-inch diameter with her fingers, “and as tall as you are.”
I immediately tried breaking off another branch of the same tree that she was pinned under, but it wouldn’t break. I looked around us, but saw nothing else that would do. “I don’t see anything,” I said.
“Walk around and look,” Mother said impatiently. “There’s got to be something.”
I could see right from where I was standing that nothing like that showed above the snow, but I began to crawl on all fours to our right.
“Take your knapsack off first,” Mother said. I pulled my arms out of the straps and immediately felt the relief.
Now I could see a large boulder up ahead of me. In shape and size, I realized, it looked a lot like a tank pointed downhill, except without the gun barrel. There was a fairly cylindrical turret and even the top of a man’s head sticking out of the hatch. I thought of Fredek and unconsciously raised an imaginary rifle to aim at the protruding head.
“Yulek, are you looking?” I heard behind me.
“Yes, yes!” I yelled back, “but I really don’t see anything!”
“Try on the other side, by the stream!”
I turned around and headed back. Suddenly, I was aware of the coincidence of Mother’s predicament and my earlier imprisonment on the other slope. I wondered if there was a divine hand involved. What might be God’s reason? Was Mother being punished now for her impatience with me?
“Hurry,” Mother said, as I crossed in front of her.
Now I could hear the water splashing and gurgling in front of me, though I couldn’t see it. The stream was well below the level of the snow. There were twigs coated with clear ice from, I deduced, water splashing on them. There were sheets of ice, some two feet or more across, that must have been pushed up onto the bank by the current. They stuck up in the air, reminding me of the wafer they stuck into your ice cream in cafes. I wondered why they did that. Kiki had told me that in America somebody had once rolled a wafer into a cone and now everybody there ate their ice cream that way.
One wafer was in the shape of a very big leaf. Another was like a sailboat. A third was like the face of an old woman looking out from behind a rock.
“Do you see anything?!” I heard from Mother, and my thoughts came back to the matter at hand. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes, yes, I’m looking!” I knew I had done wrong letting my mind wander over the ice instead of looking for a stick to get Mother’s leg free. I determined to pay attention.
But now, perhaps in reward for my admission, there was something that might do the trick, stuck right in the middle of the water, a few yards downstream. It was planted in the streambed as though it were growing there, except with the thick end up, and vibrating in the air.
I didn’t know if I could reach it. Lying flat on my stomach, I stretched my arm out for the branch. The tip of the middle finger of my glove touched it, but I couldn’t encircle the stick. I was out over the bank with water running under my face.
I wiggled further out over the water. I heard the crust crack under my weight and experienced an instant of panic as I felt myself go down. But I only dropped a little, and now I had hold of the stick and it helped support me.
“Yulek!” Mother called. “What are you doing!”
“I’ve found something!” I yelled back.
Suddenly, there was a shadow on the opposite bank. There had been no shadows at all until now, but here was the shadow of a head and shoulders. In an instant I realized that it was my own shadow. But now I was reminded of the witches and horrible hermits that inhabited forests. And that ice wafer that looked like an old woman looking at me from behind a rock, could well have been a witch!
Kiki had assured me that there was no such thing as witches, but she could have been mistaken, since she was brought up in the city. Or she could even have told me that so I wouldn’t be afraid to be left in my room alone at night when she went to talk with Marta in the kitchen. Maybe a good fairy or wizard had frozen the witch—or a number of witches—in the ice, and my breaking the ice would release them!
Before I knew it, I was half-crawling, half-running back to Mother. But I had the thick end of the pole in my hand.
“You found one!” Mother said.
Suddenly the sight of my mother sitting there in the snow with her leg trapped under a log was a shock. It was as though I were seeing her that way for the first time. It was as though I had not really believed her helplessness before.
Filled suddenly with guilt, I jammed the thin end of the pole under the log and pushed. It broke.
“Use the other end,” Mother said. I was already turning the stick around.
“Ow! Ow!” Mother cried when I must have made the log move a little.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I really was sorry—I had caused Mother more pain. I didn’t say anything about either the witch or the shadow. Now, back with Mother, I realized that it had been a childish fantasy.
“It’s all right,” Mother said very calmly now. “Put the stick in a little further and push straight up. I’ll help you.” Mother lay back on the snow so that she could put a hand under the stick. Then she put her free foot against the log. Together we pushed up on the pole and suddenly, with another cry of pain, Mother’s leg was free.
I saw the big hole in her black woolen stocking and the clotted blood all over her shin. I felt a
shiver go through me, as I usually did at the sight of blood. “Is it… is it broken?” I asked.
“Just a minute,” Mother said. I was sure there was annoyance in her tone. Then she carefully turned her foot left and right. I saw her wince with pain and felt the horrible guilt over playing with the tank and thinking about ice cream wafers while she had sat there hurting.
“Help me stand,” Mother said. I helped her to her feet. “Let me lean on you.” She put her hand on my shoulder. I braced against her weight. Then I felt her weight shift slowly off my shoulder as she tested her hurt leg.
“Is it all right?” I asked anxiously, before I realized I was rushing her again.
“Yes, I think it is. It just hurts. Let me have that stick.”
I wiggled the pole out from under the log and handed it to her. Mother took it, then looked at me very seriously. She looked angry, but she didn’t say anything.
There wasn’t anything I could think of to say, so I shouldered my backpack again and slid my way down to the next tree and stretched my hand out for her. Mother bit her lip and reached out for my hand. Then, leaning heavily on my hand, she carefully slid down to my tree.
I moved to the next tree and held my hand out again. But I only held it out partway, indicating, I hoped, that I wasn’t rushing her, but just there for whenever she was ready.
In a moment, Mother reached out for my hand, and now I stretched it as far as I could toward her. She slid on her good leg and I soon felt her weight against my hand again. Again, I eased her carefully down to my tree and immediately slid down to await her at the next one.
“Just a minute,” Mother said, as I had feared she would. She was feeling rushed again.
I waited at the tree while she took some deep breaths, then, slowly as I could, to show that I wasn’t hurrying, I slid down to the next tree. This time, though, instead of holding out my hand, I waited till I saw Mother begin to ease herself away from the tree. Then I reached out my hand and caught hers.
Mother and Me Page 38