Loves of Yulian

by Julian Padowicz

  Now I reached into my pocket for the handkerchief I had put there. Kiki had taught me to tie a knot in each corner of a handkerchief and make a little cap out of it, to protect your head from the sun. This “cap” would do as my Jewish head-covering, and I slipped it onto my head.

  But, in my mind’s eye, I could see Irenka removing her bathrobe, walking naked across the room to where her bathing suit hung, and stepping into it. Then, surprisingly, I envisioned her standing over the bathroom sink with Mr. K’s razor, lifting up one arm, and shaving under it. Fortunately, between my tight bathing suit and my outer pants, the fullness that I was now feeling under them did not show through to the outside.

  She came out in the same suit, shirt, and sunglasses from the other day, and we headed for the beach. She had not asked about the kerchief on my head, and I was glad because I wasn’t ready to explain it to her yet. I expected that she took it as protection from the sun. This time I put my hand in hers without the concern that it would make me seem childish. And what I seemed to feel back from her hand wasn’t the mechanical clasp of a guardian, but the pleasure of a friend.

  When we had sat down on our blanket, my companion produced a bottle of suntan lotion and proceeded to apply it to her shoulders, arms, and legs. Then she asked me to unbutton her straps in back, while she used her forearm to hold the top of her suit from falling down. Finally she handed the bottle to me and suggested that I apply the oil to my own skin, while she lowered herself onto her back.

  She laid the loose straps carefully on her chest and stomach. But, while there was a little un-tanned bit of the side of her breast spilling out the side of Irenka’s loosened suit-top, there was no sign of a nipple. And I found myself both disappointed and relieved. It would not have done to have my best friend seeing me seeing her. Actually, I now felt ashamed of my desires. Fortunately, while there had been a definite possibility that Sra. De la Vega had been able to read my mind that first day on the beach, I felt pretty confident that Irenka did not possess such powers.

  “Do you want to lie down and tell me what you’ve been doing?” she asked me, and I promptly lowered myself to her level.

  “We w. . . ent to a f. . . uneral,” I said, glad to be relating on that footing again. Then I told Irenka about Mother’s letter of introduction to Sr. O’Brien and the strange coincidence of our showing up just as he was about to be buried.

  But what I really wanted to tell Irenka about was what I had done to Roderico. Lying on my stomach, I moved around so that my face was very close to hers. I could see the little hairs on her cheeks and over her lip and the black stuff she had put on her eyelashes to make them look thicker. Mother put it on her eyelashes too, but with Mother’s you couldn’t tell that those weren’t the real lashes. From this close, I could see that Irenka’s clumped together so you could easily tell that she had some kind of stuff on them. But now I closed my eyes and went ahead and told her about how I quickly figured out the game with the chairs and then got the idea to do the funny thing I had seen in the movies.

  As it had the other time, there was a delicious pain in telling Irenka something about myself that was embarrassing. I was whispering almost directly into her ear, even though there was little chance of any of our neighbors understanding Polish. And, with my eyes closed, it was almost as though there was no distinction between Irenka and myself.

  Then, with my eyes still closed, Irenka was telling me about, when she was a little girl, taking her older sister’s bead necklace and hiding it because the sister had scolded her for fidgeting at mass, and I could visualize the two little girls in their Sunday dresses and dearly envied little Irenka for having a sister, even one who scolded you for fidgeting in church.

  Irenka went on to tell me about how her family were peasants growing beets in a field and how her aunt Rose, who worked as a cook for a family in town, had gotten her a position with Mr. and Mrs. Romanski, where Mrs. Romanski had been very kind to her and taught her to do hair and to speak good Polish, not the way the peasants spoke, and have good manners so that someday she could have her own hairdressing shop in the town.

  Lying there on the blanket, with my face inches away from Irenka’s and my eyes still closed, I could picture the good Mrs. Romanski and felt warmly toward her for being kind to my Irenka. In my mind, she looked something like my grandmother, but with blond hair, and she wasn’t cross-eyed, like Grandmother. And she wore only a little makeup. Makeup because she was rich, but only a little, because she was more concerned about other people than about looking beautiful. Then, when Irenka had told me, again, about leaving Alicia, the cook, behind in the Romanskis’ house when she and Mr. K. drove away in the Romanskis’ car and how she regretted that she hadn’t been more persuasive with Mr. K. to bring her with them, I decided to tell her about the conclusion I had reached in the limousine about God wanting me to be Jewish.

  “God wants you to be Jewish?” Irenka said, as though not sure she had heard correctly.

  “Y. . . es.”

  “Why would He want that?”

  “I d. . . on’t know,” I said. “W. . . e c. . . an’t e. . . xpect t. . . o u. . . n. . . der . . . stand all of God’s r. . . easons.”

  “If God had wanted you to be Jewish, Yulian, He would have had you born Jewish.”

  “I w. . . as b. . . orn J. . . ewish,” I said. “M. . . y m. . . other a. . . nd f. . . ather are J. . . ewish, e. . . xcept th. . . at m. . . y f. . . ather is dead n. . . ow.”

  “Go on,” she said, chiding me. And suddenly I could feel her hand on my head. Her fingers were feeling around the top of my head through the handkerchief. “So where are your horns?” she asked, laughing.

  “M. . . y h. . . orns?”

  “The little horns you were born with. If you had them cut off, there would be scars.”

  “M. . y h. . . orns? C. . . ut off?”

  “Jews are born with little horns, Yulian. Didn’t you know that? That’s how you can tell. And that’s why they never take off their hats. Some have them cut off, but they always have scars that you can feel.”

  “Th. . . th. . . that’s r. . . r. . . ridiculous!” I exclaimed, breaking into my customary stutter in my excitement. I opened my eyes and sat up. “P. . . P. . . People d. . . d. . . don’t h. . . h. . . have h. . . h. . . horns!”

  “Jews have little round horns, Yulian,” Irenka was saying. “Yes, they do. My cousin Sonia knew a Jewish boy once, and he showed her. They’re covered by their hats all week, but when they go into their temples on Friday nights, they take off all their clothes and dance around in circles all night. Sonia said that some of them even have tails. In my village, the Jews came in the middle of one night and stole a woman’s baby, and nobody knows what they did with it.”

  I had never heard anything so ridiculous in my life. I understood that Irenka, having been born into a peasant family had not had much education and, like Kiki whose parents had been poor, didn’t know a lot of things that my family did, but Jews with horns and tails dancing naked around, inside their temples, and stealing babies, was a preposterous concept.

  “There was a Jew who came to the Romanskis every month with a grindstone on a wheelbarrow to sharpen our knives. Mrs. Romanski wouldn’t let him into the courtyard, so he did it in front of the house. He never took his cap off, but I could see the horns making little raised bumps in his hat. And he sharpened the knives so they cut like some kind of magic.”

  I had no idea what to say to my companion. I had had no idea that there were people who thought that way, except, maybe, the Negroes in Africa. I remembered that book of mine with the several races of man portrayed, in order of superiority, and there had been no mention of people with horns and tails. If Jews really did have horns and tails, the fact would have certainly have been included in the book. There would have been a picture. But there hadn’t been any. If I had had my horns cut off, when I was a baby and not remember it, there would certainly be something I would be able to feel o
n my head—I had fallen a few years earlier and got stitches in my chin, and I could still feel that scar. I remembered seeing my cousin Monica a few days after she was born, before the start of the war, and she had had no sign of either horns or stitches.

  That a grownup could believe such nonsense was unthinkable. When I was younger, I had believed in witches and all sorts of monsters, and I could understand Irenka, while still a child, hearing this kind of thing from other children and accepting it, even finding a thrill in it, just as the report that in Africa there were people who ate other people, was something I had enjoyed believing. But the idea that my grownup Irenka actually believed things like this about me and my lineage was absolutely mind-blowing.

  “Yulian, what’s wrong?” Irenka asked, and I realized that my thoughts must have been showing on my face. I certainly did not believe Irenka capable of reading my mind.

  “N. . . n. . . othing,” I said. I was stuttering again.

  “Are you angry about something?”

  There may well have been some anger mixed with my disappointment. But who said that I had to tell her about it? “It’s n. . othing,” I repeated, in better control of my speech.

  The following day, Mother took me to see a Russian doctor who, Sra. O’Brien had said, could cure my stutter. The doctor, an old man, not much bigger than me, with a shiny, bald head, felt my jaw and my neck, with his little fingers, and said that, due to the malnutrition I had suffered, when we were living with the Bolsheviks, my speech muscles were underdeveloped. He had a machine, in a little black suitcase with a red light bulb, that could strengthen those muscles. He made me sit in a chair, holding two paddles, attached by wires to the machine, to the underside of my jaw.

  The paddles tingled, the machine buzzed, and the red light blinked, while I had to chant the alphabet. I did this for half an hour, and I would have to come back once a week to repeat the treatment. He also prescribed that I eat more spinach to strengthen my blood and get more exercise. To my great embarrassment, he told Mother that my entire muscular development was not where it should have been. Swimming, he said, would be very good, but it was too dangerous to go out far enough in the ocean to avoid the breaking waves. So he recommended a public pool not far from where we lived.

  Then Mother asked if he could put a plaster cast on each of my two pinkies because they were growing crooked. For the first time, I noticed that my pinkies were, indeed, the slightest bit banana-shaped, as they conformed to the shape of their adjoining fingers. This, the doctor said, he would be happy to rectify as well by breaking and resetting them. To my great relief, Mother opted to delay the matter till we were in better financial shape.

  That night I had boiled spinach with my chicken. I hated boiled spinach. Kiki used to chop the spinach and scramble it with an egg, which made it palatable, but I couldn’t expect the hotel chef to do that. The next morning we walked to the public swimming pool, and Mother bought a season pass for me and my “governess.” I hoped that “governess” would mean Irenka—that Mother had made some sort of arrangement with her, and she told me that, indeed, she had.

  Pleased as I was with this turn of events, I could not help being concerned over how much the season pass and Irenka’s salary would be depleting our finances. When I voiced this to Mother, as we left the pool area, her response was that we have lunch at a café on our way back to the hotel.

  This would be a further, non-essential expense. It was like the time in Lisbon, when Mother had gone out shopping for new dresses to wear on the ship.

  The café had tables out on the sidewalk and very large menus, and Mother said I could order absolutely anything I wanted. I ordered a ham sandwich, and Mother only ordered coffee and lit a cigarette.

  “I have a job with Sra. O’Brien,” she announced, suddenly. I remembered her mentioning the possibility of one when we were with Sr.Segiera.

  “Wh. . . at are y. . . ou d. . . oing?” I asked.

  “I am helping her to write her memoir.”

  Well, this certainly took some pressure off our financial situation.

  Then Mother said, “Well, I guess Ernesto doesn’t like us as much as we thought he did, does he?”

  The statement had taken me totally by surprise, and I realized that while this assuaged my concern over the security of our diamonds, I was actually disappointed, since I like the senhor.

  “A gentleman would have called by now,” she said.

  “M. . aybe he’s v. . . ery b. . . usy,” I said.

  “You liked him, didn’t you?” Mother said.

  I shrugged my shoulders in response.

  In the past, Mother would have admonished me for shrugging my shoulders, but recently she hadn’t. I was pretty sure that the reason was that she didn’t want people to hear me stutter. Or to hear me herself.

  The very next day, when Mother drove off to Sra. O’Brien’s again, in the black car, Irenka and I made our way to the pool, hand in hand. School being in session, there were very few people there. One muscular lifeguard sat in a chair raised several feet over our heads, reading a newspaper. In one corner of the shallow end, I proceeded to give Irenka her first swimming lesson.

  I had seen enough swimming instruction in Yurata so that I knew what to do. Standing in chest-deep water, I showed Irenka the breaststroke arm action again. When she seemed to have mastered that, I held on to the edge of the pool and demonstrated the frog kick. Then I had her do the same. But when I demonstrated the arm action and leg action together, as I made my way across the pool and then told her to do the same, Irenka would not lift her feet off the pool bottom.

  “J. . . ust j. . . ump f. . forward and s. . . tart s. . . swimm. . . ing,” I said, but she refused to try.

  I remembered my own solo flight in the ship’s pool. “J. . . ust t. . . ry it. Y. . . ou’ll s. . . e it’ll w. . . ork.”

  “I’ll try it tomorrow,” she said. “I’ve learned enough for one day.”

  It wasn’t a matter of too much to learn. She had already learned it. All that remained to do was to put what she already knew into action. “B. . . B. . . But I t. . . t. . . tell y. . . y. . . you that it it w. . . will w. . . w. . . work!” I said, impatient with her timidity and frustrated by my own difficulty at expressing myself.

  And suddenly there was a man standing there with us and saying,”Permit me, Miss,” in Portuguese. He reached out for Irenka’s hands, which she obediently gave him. Then he began pulling her forward, away from me, indicating that she should do her frog kick. She did as he directed, and he continued pulling her around by her hands. Then, when Irenka was on her feet again, the man put his hands on her waist and indicated that she should put both her arms and her legs into action, while he held her from sinking.

  With this assistance, Irenka lay down in the water and proceeded to follow his directions. Except that, instead of the frog kick that I had taught her, her feet began to flutter up and down in the water.

  “No, no, do the kick you were doing before,” the man must have been telling her, though I couldn’t understand or even hear everything he was saying.

  I saw Irenka’s arms stop their action and, as the man still held her waist, resume the proper kick. The man nodded his head in approval and said something else.

  Irenka began her arm motion again, and her feet immediately went back to their flutter.

  The man stood Irenka up again. Then he lay down and demonstrated the proper coordination of arms and legs in the breaststroke, as he swam a little ways away and then back to her.

  I saw Irenka nodding her head, and then they resumed their position with him holding her from sinking. On his instructions, Irenka’ legs began performing the proper kick, and the man seemed to approve. But the moment she started her arms moving, her feet resumed their flutter.

  The man said something sharp and let go of Irenka’s waist. Irenka immediately began sinking to the bottom.

  “Oh! Oh!” I heard her cry, with the second oh cu
t in half by water entering her mouth.

  I rushed as fast as I could toward her through the water, as the man reached down to pull her out. But Irenka’s feet found the bottom before either of us reached her.

  She was spitting water as she stood up, and I could tell by the tilt of the man’s head that he must be apologizing. Irenka, I think, was apologizing as well. Finally, they shook hands, and she walked back to where I was standing, while he dove into the water and swam a splashy “crawl” to the far end of the pool.

  “I’m so stupid,” Irenka said. “I made him very angry.”

  “N. . . n. . . no, n. . . n. . . no, I. . . I. . . renka!” I protested, losing all control over my stutter. “Y. . . ou aren’t!” But, at the same time as I was saying that, I was realizing that, maybe, there was something about my sweet Irenka that was very different from other grownups.

  That evening, in bed, I re-thought our experience on the beach the other day. It was hard to believe that Irenka had actually had said the things about horns and tails. Could I have only imagined her saying them? Or did she really believe them? Even if I hadn’t seen that my baby cousin had no horns and had not felt around my own head for scars, I would have known that the idea of horns and tails on people was preposterous. Just as I had known for years that there were no witches or goblins. I had known it not only because Kiki had told me so, but because it just wasn’t reasonable. Oh, in moments of stress, I had doubted that conviction as I lay alone in bed, surrounded by provocative wall-shadows. But I was a child under stressful circumstances, and in the light of day, my certainty had always been restored. On the other hand, Irenka was a grownup who should have known that such things weren’t possible. What she believed was a childish fantasy that she should have abandoned years before. She should have abandoned her fantasy years before I abandoned mine, even. And, yet, there she was.