Then, without turning to look at me, Mother snapped, “Oh, put it down, Yulian!” as though I had been pestering her about what to do with the tea, which I had not done.
I put the tea down on the coffee table, and Mother picked it up and handed it to Irenka. “Here, please Missus, drink this.”
Irenka took the mug and brought it to her lips. “Oh, it’s hot,” she said.
“Then Missus should blow on it,” Mother said. Then, softening her tone, she said, “Missus should just take her time. There is no hurry. Has Missus eaten?”
Sobbing and sniffling, Irenka explained that she hadn’t eaten since she had half a roll for breakfast the day before.
“Oh my God!” Mother said, using the same words and tone she used when I had done something stupid. “Yulian go and. . . . . no, I had better do it.” She got up. “You stay with Mrs. Kosiewicz,” she said, then marched to the desk clerk.
I saw her asking the clerk for something, and I could see by his hand motions that he was telling her that he couldn’t do whatever it was she was asking. She spoke some more, and he gestured some more, and, finally, he stopped gesturing and went into the office behind him. He was out, moments later, with a key, which he handed to Mother.
Mother now crossed the lobby and proceeded to unlock the glass dining room door. Then she was in the dining room and out of sight.
“W. . . what is Missus doing?” Irenka asked, Mother’s green kerchief still to her face.
“I. . . I. . . I d. . . d. . . don’t kn. . . .ow,” I said, trying hard to control my stutter.
I saw a light go on somewhere beyond the dining room doors, which Mother had left ajar. “I th. . . ink sh. . . e is g. . . ett. . . ing y. . . ou s. . . ometh. . . ing to eat,” I said. Then we both waited, our eyes fixed firmly on the glass doors.
In a few minutes, Mother emerged a plate in her right hand, the left hand to her mouth. On the plate, she had a slice of bread, considerably thicker at one end than at the other, covered with an equally uneven slice of ham. On the left hand, a trickle of blood flowed down toward her wrist.
“Oh, Missus has cut herself!” Irenka exclaimed, getting quickly to her feet. From somewhere on her person she now produced a white handkerchief. Her tears gone, Irenka took hold of Mother’s hand, and removed it from her mouth. “Oh, this is bad,” she said, examining Mother’s index finger. “We must wash it.”
With Irenka still holding her hand, Mother said, “This is ridiculous. Yulian, grab Mrs. Kosiewicz’s suitcase.” She was trying to wrap the handkerchief around her finger, but Irenka wouldn’t let her. Irenka did the wrapping and instructed Mother to hold her hand up over her head. Then she took the suitcase from me, I took the sandwich and the tea, and we all trooped to the little elevator.
That first night, I had had to sleep with Mother again, while Irenka slept in my bed. On previous occasions, when I had had to share a bed with Mother, there had been no alternative. This time, however, there was. There was no reason why it couldn’t be Irenka, who slept with Mother. In Barcelona, when Mother had run into Mrs. Paniewicz, a Warsaw friend, in a café, she had invited the lady to stay with us in our hotel room and share her bed to save money. Mrs. Paniewicz had stayed with us until we left for Lisbon.
So, this time, I decided to implement a plan that I had thought of some while ago, but had had no opportunity to apply earlier. It took some courage to do this because I knew how angry Mother would become at the irritation, but when I woke up in the morning, instead of lying very still, until Mother woke up, as I was supposed to, I rolled over, shuffled my feet under the blanket, and even emitted a slight groan, all the time pretending, of course, that I was still asleep.
As I paused between moves for the sake of realism, I entertained myself with the fantasy that my action resulted in Mother’s switching places with Irenka, for the next night. Then, Irenka and I could pull the sheet over our heads and whisper, as we had on the beach. And, if Irenka wore the kind of loose fitting nightgowns that Mother did, one of her breasts might, occasionally, slip out while she slept.
Irenka was still asleep, when Mother and I got up and I got ready for school. We tiptoed around the living room, and Mother whispered to me that Irenka had not been able to sleep for many nights, because of worries.
In school, I had a difficult time keeping my mind on the problems that Sra. Fernanda had assigned me, while my imagination created fantasy situations in which my new suite-mate became as accustomed to my presence as Mother was and allowed herself to move about the premises without positively securing her private parts.
As it turned out, my original plan did, actually, succeed, while my fantasies appeared to turn out to be exactly that—namely, fantasies. When I arrived back at our suite, Irenka was there to greet me with an apple and a piece of toast with cheese—we had not owned a toaster before, but now, we apparently did. She thanked me for the use of my bed and informed me that it was mine again, since she would be sharing Mother’s bed from then on. As for the fantasies, however, I couldn’t help noticing a new and more formal attitude towards me, on Irenka’s part. While I could not identify any decrease in friendliness, there was something in her demeanor that shattered any expectations of increased intimacy. Evidently, she and Mother had discussed matters, and formalized certain agreements that were to govern our three-sided relationship.
Irenka had supper with us in the hotel dining room that evening. When Mother discovered that she was out of cigarettes, Irenka immediately said, “Please Missus, I will get some for you.”
“This is craziness,” Mother said. “We can’t go around please-Missussing each other all day. My name is Barbara, and you’re Irena.”
“Oh, please Missus,” Irenka said, evidently quite overcome by Mother’s gesture. “Missus is so kind.”
“Barbara,” Mother said.
“Barbara is so kind.”
In a move that gave me a deep sense of satisfaction, Mother laid her hand over Irenka’s. “We will be friends, Irena, not mistress and servant,” she said.
“Oh yes…, Barbara.” Then she immediately got up, accepted some coins from Mother, and went out to the lobby for mother’s cigarettes.
Irenka continued living with us and sleeping in Mother’s bed with her. When I came home from school, there was a snack for me, even when Irenka wasn’t there, herself, and, that first weekend, when Mother and Sr. Segiera went somewhere overnight, it was Irenka who went to the beach with me and to a little restaurant around the corner from the hotel, for supper. But, though, at Irenka’s request, we had another French lesson, our relationship there was as different as it was at the hotel.
When Sr. Segiera came by our suite to pick Mother up for some outing, Irenka would serve him a cocktail, then keep him company, while Mother put finishing touches on her makeup in the bathroom. Because her Portuguese was much better than either Mother’s or mine, she could speak to Sr. Segiera in that language. And, on the occasions that I was included in an outing with Sr. Segiera, Irenka came along as well, though she always sat in the back seat with me.
Where I had, first, been excited by Irenka’s coming to live with us, I soon grew quite bored with this new arrangement. Not only had my fantasies been dashed, but I felt that I had, actually, lost a friend. Irenka had become Mother’s friend, which made her ineligible to fill that special role that she had filled for me before. And with that loss, I felt myself descending again into what I now recognized as a state, for which I had no name, because the word depressed, or even the word state was not part of my vocabulary.
“What is the matter, Yulian?” Irenka would ask, when she saw me laboring over my after-school banana. In the days before she had become Mother’s friend, I would, probably have made some effort to describe my feelings to her, but sharing my feelings with Irenka now, was as difficult as expressing them to Mother. I assumed that Irenka must have, later, discussed her observation with Mother, who, I was sure, had said that I was subject to such mo
ods.
I soon realized that my moods must have been a discussion subject with Sr. Segiera, as well, because, one day, Mother informed me that, the next day, Saturday, the senhor was going to take me up in his airplane. In my head, I could hear the discussion between Mother and Sr. Segiera, as one of them suggested that what I needed was to spend more time with a man.
Some months earlier, during our few days’ stay in Rome, I had done something, which, I now recognized as very dumb. I had found my way to the roof of our hotel, from which I had thrown pebbles onto passing cars. Someone had reported it to the hotel, and a uniformed employee had caught me red-handed. Mother’s reaction, when I had been turned over to her custody, was to take my act as a direct attack on her. Later I had come to understand this attitude to be quite reasonable. Italy, under Mussolini, was a Fascist country, allied with Germany, and our only reason for being there was that Mother knew the Polish ambassador, who, she hoped, could negotiate, for us, a visa to Spain or Portugal or, even, South America. But with the Nazis trying to stop us from reaching America, attracting attention to our presence in Rome, particularly by dropping pebbles on people, was not helpful to our security. Mother’s response had been to tell me that, if my father were alive, he would beat me.
Months before that, in Hungary, Mother had wanted the Count, on whose estate we were staying, to teach me to hunt, and, in Spain, when Sr. Sabastian had bragged about having been a fencing champion, she had said, “Oh, I would so love for Julien to learn fencing from you.”
Weeks before this proposed outing with Sr. Segiera, the prospect of flying in an airplane with him would have thrilled me beyond measure. But now, like everything else, the image of the flight as an enjoyable experience just refused to crystallize in my mind. When Sr. Segiera came to the hotel to take me to the airport, Mother told him that she had a “terrible” headache and would stay home. Since she had made no mention of the headache before his arrival, I understood that Mother had other reasons for not coming along. She did, however, ask Irenka to go, but the senhor said that, actually, nobody was coming, except him and me.
Then Mother said, “Do you really think this is a good idea, Ernesto?” and he said, “Yes, I do. Paolo has been up with me, and loved it, and I think it will be very good for Julien. He will love it too.”
Mother, then, turned to me and asked, “Are you sure you want to go?”
That was a strange question, since no one had, yet, asked me whether I wanted to, in the first place. And it wasn’t that I didn’t want to—the idea just didn’t excite me. But for Sr. Segiera’s sake, because he had invited me, I didn’t want to disappoint him, and I planned to give every sign of enjoying myself. “Yes, very much,” I said, surprised to find how big an effort it took to seem excited.
Since it was just the senhor and I in the Chevrolet, on the way to the airport, I got to sit in the front seat, which, again, should have been exciting for me. Sr. Segiera was wearing the kind of faded blue pants and checkered shirt that cowboys wore in the movies. His sleeves were rolled up just to his elbows, and his forearms had more hair on them than I had seen on anyone before. “Paolo says he had a very good time with you, Julien,” Sr. Segiera said. From somebody else I would have taken this as just some of the politeness that well-mannered people expressed to each other, but I could not imagine anything but the truth coming out of the senhor’s mouth.
“I h. . . ad a v. . . ery g. . . ood time w. . . ith P. . . aolo, M. . . onsieur,” I said. I remembered the secret that Paolo had shared with me. I wondered if the senhor knew about it. Then, for the senhor’s sake, and, in a way, for Paolo’s as well, I pushed on into unknown territory. “I th. . . ink P. . . .aolo is v. . . ery b. . . rave, th. . . e way he d. . . oes th. . . ings with h. . . is wh. . . eelchair, M. . . onsieur,” I said. I had never made that kind of statement about another boy before. It felt grown up.
“Yes, I think so too. But, I think you’re also very brave, the way you struggle with your speech, Julien.”
Nobody, nobody had ever said anything like that to me before. I was very embarrassed. If the senhor was expecting a verbal response, he wasn’t getting any. I was much too confused.
After a minute or two, he said, “You and Paolo could be good friends, you know.”
I wanted to tell him how much I agreed, but I was not about to open my mouth. I nodded my head vigorously, though I wasn’t sure that he saw me.
“Paolo, you know, goes to school, just like you do. It’s not a special school or anything, and the boys play football after school” he went on, “Paolo helps the teacher who’s in charge of the football. Your mother tells me that you’re a very fast runner.”
At his mention of my running, the picture of Gustavo appeared again. I shut my eyes tight, grimaced, and shook my head in an effort to dispel it.
“What’s wrong, Julien?” the senhor asked.
“N. . . othing, M. . . onsieur.”
The senhor seemed satisfied by my answer. “You and Paolo can go fishing in the stream behind his house,” he continued. “Paolo has a fishing pole with a reel to wind the line in, and you could have one of your own too.”
What Sr. Segiera was doing was trying to make me want Mother to marry him. I would live with Paolo and his grandmother, and Mother and Sr. Segiera would come and visit us. I thought that I would like that. I nodded my head and smiled.
“And I’m sure that, after a while, your stutter would go away.”
That was wonderful news.
“It’s all in your mind, you know,” he went on. “You have the power to make it go away, except that you, first, have to find the key to that power. Do you understand what I’m saying? There is something in your mind, something you don’t understand, and I don’t understand, and your mother doesn’t understand, that wants you to stutter, because of something that happened to you in Hungary. But, just as soon as you figure out what that something is, you can tell it to stop. It’s as simple and as complicated as that.”
He laughed as he said the last sentence, and I understood that he was trying to make light of the heavy things he had just said. I made myself laugh as well, to show him that I wasn’t insulted or anything by what he said.
The airport wasn’t anything like what I had imagined. I had seen photographs of paved runways with giant hangars, shiny, metal, multi-engine planes and a “control tower” with a striped “windsock.” This one had none of those, except for the windsock. The windsock flew from a metal pole on the side of a large, green field. At one end there stood a small, wooden hangar with the familiar curved roof and wide doors. There were a few open-cockpit airplanes to one side of the hangar, and then some that were similar to the one in the picture the senhor had given me, standing on the other. One plane was just starting to taxi away, and a man was doing something to the side of one of the others.
Sr. Segiera parked the Chevrolet near some other cars and we started walking towards the airplanes. I was pretty sure I recognized the one in the picture by the shape of its tail. It was a blue airplane. As we passed the man who was doing something to one of the planes, Sr. Segiera stopped to exchange a few words.
I saw what the man was doing. He had a large needle and thread, and he was sewing up the material that covered the side of the airplane. I was surprised—I had thought the airplane would have been all-metal, or, at least, solid wood. Looking more closely at the airplane, I could see its ribs showing as humps through the skin and realized that it must have been covered with fabric all over. I had had no idea that airplanes weren’t built as solidly as cars. It sent a slight shiver up my spine. Suddenly, I wasn’t at all happy about going flying.
When we walked on and approached the blue plane that I had thought was the senhor’s, I had a feeling of dread. The senhor opened the door for me to look inside. It wasn’t at all like the interior of a car. The seats were one in front of the other, and, instead of being upholstered, they were plain metal with cushions that didn’t even look attach
ed. The side windows were of some kind of transparent material that wasn’t glass, because it was flexible and all scratched. And there wasn’t even any steering wheel, only a stick in front of each seat.
The senhor told me to get in the front seat, but not to touch any of the controls. I wished I hadn’t come. As I waited in the cockpit, the senhor walked all around the airplane, checking things. There were oil and gasoline smells in the airplane. Then Sr. Segiera made me pull myself up, while he slipped an extra cushion under me and one behind me, and then began strapping me in. I didn’t like the feeling of being strapped in. In a moment he was sitting behind me, and he pulled the door closed. It didn’t make a solid sound like a car door, but more of a slap, as though it could open again, if you leaned against it. I saw the stick in front of me moving in all four directions, and realized that it must be attached to the one in front of the senhor, and that he must be checking out the controls.
Two men had appeared at the sides of our airplane, holding lines that attached to wood blocks under the wheels. Then the engine started with a terrible noise, and the plane began to shake. ”Here we go,” the senhor yelled above the noise of the engine. I saw the men pull the blocks out from under the wheels. We began to roll forward. I was about to grab a little black handle on my left, but I saw it move, and realized that it was one of the controls. I knew enough not to touch the stick in front of me. I didn’t know what I could hold on to.
We were bumping along on the grass now, and I wasn’t feeling well at all. I had a feeling in my stomach like the one I had had on the ship one windy day. I had almost thrown up that day, but managed to keep it down. Then we were turning, and I saw a long stretch of well-worn grass ahead of us. We stopped and the engine began to roar much louder, and the airplane shook.
With a lurch, we began rolling forward again, but faster than before. We were bouncing along the grass, going faster and faster. And, suddenly, I was vomiting all over my lap and the floor.
Loves of Yulian Page 19