I remembered Sr. Santos very well. He was the one who made me go to the waiting room after I had watched him shoot some pictures of Mother with her hair blowing from a big fan, because he was going to take some more pictures that I wasn’t supposed to see. As for Sra. O’Brien being Russian, Mother had had considerable luck with Russian people, due to her command of the Russian language. Her own mother, my grandmother, was Russian, and Mother had grown up speaking both Russian and Polish. Before our escape, Mother had been able to gain special consideration from several Soviet officers, due to some degree to her fluency in that language. Russian people always seemed to be particularly pleased when they heard somebody, outside Russia, speaking good Russian.
Now I watched Mother light a fresh cigarette from the end of the old one and hoped we would be going to America real soon.
“And when we’re at Sr. O’Brien’s,” she continued in a very sober tone, “you are not to leave the office unless I tell you to. Do you understand that? If Sr. O’Brien suggests that you go with his secretary to get some ice cream or something, like Sr. Talon did in Lisbon, you are to say, very politely, that, no thank you, but you don’t care for any. Do you understand that? You are not to leave me alone with him unless I tell you to.”
I remembered the scene in Lisbon when Sr. Talon had suggested that I go with his secretary to get some ice cream, and Mother had said that I couldn’t. This, of course, was the exact opposite of what had happened at Sr. Santos’s photography studio, when Mother had told me to do as he said and wait in the waiting room. But I supposed that she was afraid that this Sr. O’Brien might try to take her diamonds away by force. Now I wondered if, perhaps, that was what had happened with M. Gordet. Had he tried to steal Mother’s diamonds?
But somehow, I had the feeling that that had not been the case. If it had been, Mother would have referred to him as a thief. This not a gentleman business was more complicated than that. At any rate, tomorrow I would go to Sr. O’Brien’s office with Mother and make sure he didn’t try to snatch the diamonds.
I didn’t get to saying my prayers that night before falling asleep. It wasn’t the first time this had happened in recent weeks. But this time, my experience with Irenka at the beach had something to do with it.
The next day, I watched as Mother telephoned Sr. O’Brien’s office and used her very limited Portuguese to explain her letter of introduction from Sr. Santos in Lisbon. As she best understood it, the secretary said to come right away and gave her the address. Mother immediately changed into one of the dresses she had bought for our boat trip, pinned on a little green, feathered hat with a green veil, and made me clean my nails with a brush. Then we set off in a taxi.
Mother and I had both expected the taxi to take us further into the city where one would think the offices of important businessmen would be, but our driver surprised us by driving along the beach until we were out in the country. Mother even leaned over the back of the front seat with the piece of paper that the address was written on, but the driver said, “Si, si,” nodded his head, and kept driving. Mother lit another cigarette.
Then we were driving through a stone and iron gate and turning into a wide gravel driveway with flowerbeds on both sides. There was a large lawn ahead of us and a big stone house with many cars in front of it on a bit of a hill. Our taxi pulled up at the front entrance, where we had to climb some steps and then cross a stone patio to reach the front door.
A man in a black suit met us at the door. “Sr. O’Brien, Sr. Enrique O’Brien,” Mother said, and the man nodded his head and proceeded to lead us across the marble floor of the foyer. Mother took my hand, and I didn’t object.
The man stopped at a massive set of double doors that were open wide and motioned for us to enter. Now we found ourselves in the center aisle of a room where chairs had been set up as for a performance. Three women, dressed in black, sitting in the front row of the section on our left, were its only occupants. The middle woman of the group, considerably larger than her companions, leaned against the back of her chair with one hand seemingly in the lap of each of the other two. Her head was thrown back, and her black, curly hair, hatless and swept straight back from her upturned face, was in contrast to the pinned and lacquered hairdos that the two other women had under their little, black, veiled hats. At the end of the aisle that ran down between the two sections of chairs, huge sprays and wreaths of flowers surrounded what I took to be a long, gold-colored altar. This was no office, but some kind of church.
The two smaller women turned to look at us over their shoulders, through their black veils, as Mother stopped dead in her tracks. They kept looking, and then the large woman in the middle turned to look at us as well.
I felt Mother’s hand pull me forward. We marched right to the altar, where I recognized a padded kneeler right up against it. I had never seen a setup like this, and I wondered if it might be Jewish.
Mother stopped just short of the altar. “We’ll just say a short prayer and go home,” she whispered.
I pointed to the kneeler. “I think we’re supposed to kneel,” I whispered back.
Mother knelt down, and I with her. She crossed herself, backwards again. I crossed myself the proper way and put my hands together. The smell of the flowers that surrounded us was overwhelming.
“Don’t look inside,” Mother whispered.
“Inside what?”
“Oh my God,” Mother whispered under her breath, and I understood from her tone that wasn’t in prayer. Finally with a slight movement of her head, Mother indicated the left end of the altar. For the first time I noticed that a lid was open at that end. I stretched my neck to see what it revealed.
“Don’t look,” Mother repeated. There was no way that I could have seen inside from my kneeling position anyway.
Mother had folded her hands and now, indeed, looked as though she were praying.
Then she crossed herself backwards again and stood up. I crossed myself and stood up with her.
Now she walked to the three women sitting in the front row. “Sra. O’Brien?” she asked.
One of the smaller women answered her. “This is Sra. O’Brien,” she said, indicating the large woman.
Now Mother broke into Russian. “Senhora, I am so sorry for your loss. I didn’t know. I have just arrived from Lisbon with my little son, and I have a letter of introduction to Sr. O’Brien from Sr. Rudolfo Santos.”
I watched the Senhora’s head, which had been tilted back again, slowly right itself and her closed eyes slowly open. It was like seeing somebody wake from sleep to full, wide-eyed attention. “Senhora is Russian,” she said in that language. I saw that her large face had no makeup, while her two companions were made up to the degree Mother’s friends had been in Poland before the war. Mother, herself, I now realized, as I compared her to these two women, wore considerably less makeup than she used to.
“No, Senhora. I am Polish, but my little mother is Russian.”
“And Senhora, you have a letter from Rudolfo?”
“Yes, Senhora.”
“May I see it?” The Senhora, who was totally alert now, held out her hand.
As Mother took the letter out of her purse, I began to understand what was under that open lid. I saw the light blue, silk padding of the lid and the padding along what I could now see of the interior sides, and realized that there must be a dead man in there. I raised myself on tiptoe to see inside and thought that, maybe, I saw a little bit of a forehead and some white hair.
Mother’s elbow bumped my arm, and I automatically dropped from my tiptoes. I had seen people killed by the German planes, as we fled Warsaw, but I had never seen one laid out like this, and, suddenly, I had a deep yearning to see one.
“Ah Senhora,” Sra. O’Brien was saying now, as she read the letter. “You and your little boy have suffered at the hands of the filthy Bolsheviks.”
Words to that effect I had heard numerous times in the past few months, but never with such passion.
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“You must have something to eat.” Then she turned to the woman on her right and said something to her in Portuguese. The woman looked up at Mother, then stood up and walked quickly out of the room, her heels seeming to click even on the carpet.
“Please sit down next to me, Senhora, and tell me all about your escape.”
As Mother sat down, I started to edge myself imperceptibly closer to the casket for a better look inside.
“Sit down,” Mother hissed in Polish, and I had no choice, but to seat myself beside her. I had learned to understand Russian, first by listening to Mother and Grandmother talk together, and later from hearing Mother talk with the Russian officers before our escape. Now, for the first time, I realized that talking formally in Russian, as in French or Portuguese, one did not need to speak in the awkward third-person grammar that we did in Polish. Russian, French, and Portuguese all used the word “you” to address a person politely, while Polish only had the intimate version of the term, forcing you into third-person construction when you were speaking to someone you weren’t intimate with.
Mother was telling Sra. O’Brien about our escape over the mountains, as I had heard her tell it numerous times before. I knew that she would tell her about me falling into the stream and her pulling me out, which hadn’t happened at all, and that she wouldn’t tell her about getting her leg stuck under a fallen tree branch frozen in the snow and how she would still be sitting there if it weren’t for me. When she had first started telling the story that way, it had made me very angry, but now I had become accustomed to it, and I could even mouth the words along with her.
Then, the woman who had gone out came back in, and I quickly stood up to allow her to sit beside Mother.
Instead of sitting down, the woman stood, quite clearly waiting for Mother to give her back her seat.
But, by this time, Sra. O’Brien was holding Mother’s hand, and Mother did not seem to see the woman. She was telling Sra. O’Brien about some priest blessing us before our escape, though I could not remember any such event, and though it must have been very hard for her not to see the woman standing right in front of her.
“Sit down, Vera,” I understood the Senhora to say to the woman. I had picked up enough Portuguese in Lisbon to manage that.
Sensing an opportunity, I immediately stood up, and Sra. Vera sat down beside Mother, while I began inching my way toward the casket again.
Now a maid, with a little white apron and cap, came to us with a tray. The maid was black skinned with the flattened nose I had seen in my book, and I found her extremely pretty. There were little sandwiches on the tray and two cups. She offered them to Mother, who placed a sandwich on a plate and handed it to me. “Sit down and eat,” she said in Polish
“I’m not hungry,” I said.
“Sit down and eat,” she repeated. Mother was smiling, but I could tell the smile was for the benefit of the senhora.
I took the plate and sat down on the other side of Sra. Vera. Mother took a sandwich for herself and one of the cups.
“Oh, you must eat more,” Sra. O’Brien said, and Mother put another sandwich on her plate.
“And the boy,” the senhora said to the maid.
The maid brought the tray to me, and I took a second sandwich. As she waited with the tray, I realized I was expected to take the remaining cup as well. I could smell the coffee.
I had had coffee once or twice before, and, with four spoons of sugar, it wasn’t too bad. But this coffee was so strong that no amount of sugar would have made it palatable. I pretended to sip it. The sandwich was some kind of chicken salad, and it was all right.
I don’t know how long we stayed sitting there, while Mother told our story to the senhora. Then the senhora said something to Sra. Vera, who stood up and, wordlessly, held her hand out to me.
I understood that I was supposed to go somewhere with her and shook my head. I had Mother’s ring to guard.
“Stand up and go with her like a gentleman,” Mother admonished me.
I stood up as ordered and placed my plate and coffee cup on my chair. But, while Sra. Vera was reaching for my left hand, I gave her my right instead. That meant that, as we passed the coffin, I was closer to it than she was. As we walked by, I stole a glance inside. What I saw I couldn’t believe was a real dead man. He looked like a sleeping, wax doll, with makeup on his cheeks and powder all over the face. He had curly white hair, and he was wearing a tuxedo. There was a flower in his boutonnière. Brown rosary beads were wound around the sausage-like fingers of his clasped, pink, powdery hands.
Sra. Vera led me through several large rooms, some with people standing and talking in quiet tones, some empty, to a door that led out onto another stone patio in back. One or two steps—I couldn’t tell exactly from my angle—led down onto a large lawn and, beyond it, a tennis court. Nobody was playing tennis, but a number of children were, evidently, playing a game on the lawn. A line of chairs had been set up, and the children marched around them to the music of a guitar played by a woman in a plain gray dress with a white collar. Her blond hair was in braids wound around her head, the way Kiki used to wear hers, and I guessed that she must be somebody’s governess. She sat on a chair off to the side with her legs crossed to support the guitar. She played some lively tune with which I wasn’t familiar. Kiki hadn’t played any musical instrument.
The children were of various ages, two boys and a girl clearly older than me, some, two or three years younger. They were dressed in party clothes. One boy was in a blue velvet suit with shiny white buttons. Another had on a grownup style tie and jacket.
Suddenly the governess stopped playing, and the children all scrambled to sit down on a chair. It was then that I realized that every chair in the line was facing the opposite direction from that of its two immediate neighbors.
It turned out that there was one less chair than there were players, and, when the scramble for the chairs was over, one of the smallest girls was left standing. She seemed very unhappy, but the governess said something to her, at which point the girl brightened and ran over to sit on a long bench beside the musical governess. It was then that I noticed two other children already on the bench.
Now a man in a white jacket was removing one of the chairs from the row, so that there would, again, be one less chair than player. When the man and the chair were out of the way, the music resumed, and the remaining children continued their circular march. This time the governess played a different tune and sang along with the music in a clear, pleasant voice. Kiki used to say that she had a voice like a rusty gate.
I supposed I would be made to play this game. It was easy enough to understand, but I didn’t like competitive activities. I liked make-believe. I liked pretending that we were soldiers marching in step on parade, with pretend rifles or musical instruments. I even liked it when we were all shooting at an imaginary enemy, encouraging each other and tending to make-believe wounds. I liked getting shot and falling to the ground holding my hand over a wound and gulping for breath as my life seeped out through the hole. But as soon as we were divided into opposite sides, shooting at each other and attacking each other, I hated the anger, even make-believe anger, that the opponents would direct at me. I would usually pretend to be shot right away and spend the rest of the game lying dead on the ground, or I’d gallop off to get reinforcements and not return till the battle was over.
During the one year that I had spent in school in Warsaw, before the war, when, at recess we made a “chain” by holding hands and weaving in and around our schoolmates, I would join in. But if we played tag, for example, I hated the sensation of being chased by someone and would always let them tag me, even though I could run faster than they—I found that I could run faster than all of my classmates—just to get it over with. Then, when I was “it,” I would drag it out as long as possible, pretending that I couldn’t catch anyone. Even in hide-and-seek, I preferred to be “it” and go looking for people than sit in my
hiding-place, tense with the fear that I would be found.
As I had predicted, Sra. Vera led me up to the governess and said some things to her, most likely that I didn’t speak Portuguese. I heard her tell the governess my name.
The governess stopped playing, and the scramble for chairs began. “Do you know this game?” the governess asked me in French.
I should have said that I didn’t, but it was hard to resist saying that it wasn’t difficult to figure out.
“Then why don’t you join when I start to play again,” she said. “Just stand over there with the others until I begin.” Her French accent wasn’t quite right, but her voice had a friendly, musical tone. Kiki’s voice was often gentle, but it wasn’t musical. I wanted to please this governess, and so I went to where the other children were, and, when the new song began, started to march with the others.
There was a system to playing this game that the other children didn’t seem to understand. Since every alternate chair you passed was facing the wrong way, the trick was to delay in front of a chair that was facing your way, and rush past the one that wasn’t. Following this strategy, I found myself in front of a chair facing the right way every time the music stopped. And in a little while, I and another boy, a little older than me, in a blue and white shirt, were the only two players circling one lone chair. The others were all either sitting on the bench beside the governess or standing behind it—all of them, of course, watching the two of us.
And then I had an idea. It was something I had seen in a movie in Poland, and everyone had laughed uproariously when it had happened. I didn’t really care about winning the silly game, but these children and the governess, who certainly hadn’t seen the Polish film, would find it extremely clever. What I had to do was to make sure that I was behind the chair, instead of in front of it, when the music stopped.
I couldn’t make my delay too obvious, so I just had to hope for the best. And when the music stopped, I was, indeed, behind the chair, where I wanted to be. And as the other boy began to sit down, I yanked the chair out from under him.
Loves of Yulian Page 7