Loves of Yulian (16 page)

One day, we were both invited to join a
pateka
game, much the way Mother had been invited that time that we met Sr. Segiera. And my friend proved as incompetent at the game as Mother had, so that we soon had to retire to avoid further embarrassment.

This didn’t seem to bother Irenka any, and, when we got back to our blanket, she laughed and said, “Oh, I am so terrible at games,” with which I had to, privately, agree.

One morning, when I was a policeman and she was a lady who had had her purse stolen, Irenka switched, suddenly, to Polish and said, “I don’t want to play right now.”

We continued lying on our stomachs, our faces turned toward each other, and I could see Irenka’s lips moving slightly, as though she were trying out different words. Finally, she said, in Polish, “Tadek didn’t come home again last night.”

I immediately searched my mind for a prior such incident, that the
again
would refer to, but came up blank.

“He was gone all day yesterday, all the night before, and now all of last night,” she said. I hadn’t known about either day or the night before.

“D. . . o y. . . ou th. . . ink he was h. . . it by a c. . . ar?” I asked, conscious of how important it was for me not to stutter under these circumstances.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Irenka said.

It hadn’t been my intention to suggest this new option, but simply to determine if this was the direction of her concern. “I’m s. . . ure th. . . at is n. . . ot wh. . . at h. . . appened, and th. . . at he will c. . . ome h. . . ome soon,” I assured her.

And I turned out to have been right, because he was there in the suite when we returned from the pool that afternoon. “Hello, my two fine friends,” he said, when we came in. His tone was more jolly than I had ever heard from him before. “I’ve just made a big hay-load of money,” he said, using the colloquial Polish expression for a large quantity, “and we’re going to celebrate. We’re all going out to dinner tonight!”

“We have to check that with Yulian’s mother,” Irenka said, without much enthusiasm over his accomplishment.

“We’ll bring her too,” he said.

“You go right upstairs now,” Irenka said to me.

“Sh. . . ould I a. . . sk M. . . other. . . ” I began, but stopped when I saw Irenka shaking her head. Mr. K., I realized, must have had too much to drink and was just talking nonsense.

It must have been a week or so after Sr. Segiera’s aborted visit that the desk clerk handed me a letter as Irenka and I returned from the swimming pool. In the afternoons, when it got very hot and it bothered Irenka a lot, though it didn’t me, we would go to the pool for my muscle-building exercise. I would swim back and forth, the length of the pool, while Irenka sat in the shallow end and kept cool. We had given up on the swimming lessons, at least for the time being. Every once in a while, some man would approach Irenka, often with an offer of a cool drink or just conversation, or, sometimes, even swimming instruction, but she would explain politely that she had to keep an eye on me, and was not permitted by my mother to talk to people.

But this time, as we passed through the lobby, I heard the desk clerk go, “Pssst!” and turned to see him holding an envelope in my direction. The envelope only had the words, “Mme. Barbara,” on it, and must, I deduced, have been delivered by hand to the hotel. I took it upstairs and laid it on the table, never suspecting that it would be from Sr. Segiera, since he had the telephone to use and could not have known that I was instructed to hang up if he called.

When Mother came home and saw it, she did not open it right away, but sat down at the desk and played absently with the envelope, as though trying to decide what to do with it, before even finding out who it was from and what it said. She even tapped her chin with one corner a few times.

“D. . . on’t you w. . . ant to f. . . ind out who it’s f. . . rom?” I asked.

“It’s from Ernesto,” she said, as absently as she had been tapping her chin with it. I supposed she was debating whether to throw it in the trash without opening it. Finally, I watched her strike the end of the envelope lightly on the table to slide its contents to that end, then tear away a narrow strip of envelope at the other end to release the contents. She read it, smiled, then tore the letter up into little pieces, before throwing it into the wastebasket.

“What d. . . id he s. . . ay?” I asked, even though I knew full well that it wasn’t polite to enquire into other people’s correspondence.

“He says he is sorry, and it won’t happen again.”

“S. . . o will you s. . . peak to him n. . . ow, if he c. . . alls?” I dearly wanted to be relieved of the burden of having to hang up on him.

“First he has to send flowers,” she said.

“S. . . end f. . . lowers? He al. . . ready b. . . rought you f. . . lowers, r. . . emember?

“That was before he said he was sorry. Now he has to send them again—send them, not bring them.”

“How w. . . ill he know th. . . .at th. . . at’s what y. . . ou w. . . ant him to d. . . .o?”

“He’ll figure it out.”

And the next day, there was, indeed a telephone call soon after Mother came home. “Hello,
Julien
?” I heard Sr. Segiera say, and, with Mother watching me, immediately hung up.

The phone rang a second time, and I performed my duty again. We waited for a third ring, but it did not come, and I was much relieved.

The next day, however, the telephone rang before Mother came home. “
Julien
?” I heard Sr. Segiera say. His voice was quiet, as though he didn’t want Mother to hear him, as though this were private between him and me.

“She s. . . ays she w. . . .ants f. . . lowers,” I blurted out. Then I hung up the phone.

That same evening, a huge bouquet of flowers was delivered by a man in a military uniform, probably the same one I had seen holding the car door open downstairs.

“They’re very beautiful,” Mother said to the delivery person, as she took them from him, though she did not smile. “Please tell Sr. Segiera that they’re very beautiful and thank him.” Then she closed the door. “You see?” she said to me. “He figured it out.”

“S. . . o n. . . ow will y. . . ou s. . . peak to him?”

“Yes, the next time he calls, I’ll speak to him.”

I was much relieved.

The next day I was eager to tell this whole story to Irenka, but when we got to the beach, I decided that, due to her intellectual limitations, she might not understand. And, frustrated by not being able to tell her, I didn’t feel much like role-playing in French either. But I did come up with a very interesting pastime, which was to observe the contours of Irenka’s bathing suit and imagine what she must look like underneath. And since the only experience I could draw on was Mother, with her hands covering the crucial parts, or the quick glimpses I had caught at the beach in Poland, my imagination had a difficult task, and the images tended to be fuzzy. Then, when I was back in our suite that afternoon, following our session at the swimming pool, I told Meesh all about the Sr. Segiera business. It was the first conversation I had had with Meesh for some while, and I felt good, as we talked.

And Sr. Segiera did call soon after Mother came home, and I told him that she was, indeed, home and would talk to him.

First, though, Mother lit a cigarette, while the receiver lay on the table. When she finally picked it up, Mother said, “Hello, Ernesto,” with a big sigh, as though speaking was a big effort. “Thank you for the flowers, they are lovely.” But her tone was as though she were telling him that she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep, or something. Then she listened for a long time, while he talked. I watched a smile grow on her face as she listened, but it disappeared instantly before she said, “Very well, but not tonight. I’m busy. Call me again tomorrow.” She didn’t say
goodbye.

When she had hung up, Mother seemed very pleased. “He was called suddenly to the Interior and couldn’t call me,” she said, though he had told her that before, when she had slammed the door on him. “He’s taking us to dinner tomorrow.”

I took the occasion to ask what the Interior was, and Mother explained that Brazil was a very big country, but all of its cities were on the coast. The Interior was that part of the country that was away from the coast, and it was all jungle with wild animals and wild people. This immediately set off, in my mind, a movie in which Sr. Segiera, in his flying helmet and jodhpurs, dodges from palm tree to palm tree, as naked, black-skinned people go about their normal business of dancing, spearing lions and giraffes, and eating them raw.

The next evening, Sr. Segiera wore his white suit again and brought Mother another bouquet of flowers.

“You’re late,” Mother said, as she took them.

The senhor looked confused, and when I glanced at the clock, I saw that he was, indeed, half an hour late. “I’m sorry, Barbara,” he said. I could see how sorry he was, and felt sorry for him. I didn’t think it was very nice of Mother, when he had just brought her flowers.

“Let’s go. I’m starving,” Mother said, and headed for the door. When she got there, she stopped, and Sr. Segiera stepped up quickly to open it.

He had come for us in the long black car I had seen from our hotel window the other evening. It was called a
Lincoln Continental
, and, unlike the count’s limousine in Hungary, this car was sleek and very modern looking. I got to sit up front with the chauffeur, the same man who had delivered the flowers the other evening. The maitre d’ at the restaurant, dressed in a tuxedo, knew Sr. Segiera and led us to a table that was reserved for us.

Unlike the previous restaurant, where there had been fishnets and boat things on the walls, this one had gold, silk drapes, white tablecloths almost to the floor, and a little orchestra playing slow music on a little stage. I could see that Sr. Segiera was being extra attentive to Mother. He held her hand when she got out of the car, held her chair at the restaurant, and was very eager to light her cigarette for her. Mother accepted these attentions politely, but I did not see her smile at him. When he spoke, she listened and nodded her head to show that she really was listening, but she did not say anything that wasn’t in answer to his questions.

Sr. Segiera did have a photograph of his airplane, which he gave me as soon as we were seated and said that I could keep. But it wasn’t a biplane with open cockpits, only a monoplane with the wings above the cockpit, which was enclosed, so that you couldn’t see if anyone was sitting in it or not.

“Say
thank you
,” Mother said, when he handed me the picture, although there wasn’t the slightest chance that I wouldn’t have said it on my own. But I knew this to be something that Mother did quite automatically, probably without even knowing she was saying it.

Some people were dancing, but Mother told her companion that she had had a long day of work with Sra. O’Brien and was too tired to dance. When the senhor asked what she did for Sra. O’Brien, she told him, as she had told me, that they were writing a book together. And when he asked what sort of book, that was when Mother finally began to talk to him. We had eaten most of our appetizers by then, which may have revived Mother some, because she began to tell Sr. Segiera that when she had first met the senhora, she had told her about the book that she was planning to write when we got to America, and that the senhora had said that she had been planning for a long time to also write a book about her own experiences, but couldn’t get started and probably needed an energetic, younger person like Mother to work with her. Then she told him about writing it in Russian, but not knowing the Russian alphabet and writing the words out using regular letters. They both laughed at this, and, from then, on she was as friendly to him and he as relaxed, as they had been that first night. Mother even agreed to dance with him.

At one point, I was amused to see Mother pick up the senhor’s hand and examine his fingernails. “A European gentleman,” she told him, “would not have his nails cut so short.”

“Sometimes, Basia, I have to work with my hands, and they break.”

“A gentleman can work with his hands, but he finds a way to keep his nails from breaking. He might wear gloves. And you shouldn’t have your hair cut off that way in back, but tapered gradually.”

“I will talk with my barber.”

The next day, on the beach, I did tell Irenka about the restaurant and Mother being too tired to smile or dance until the snails that she ate gave her renewed energy so that she had told Sr. Segiera all about the book she was writing, and even danced with him. And about her telling him how to cut his nails and his hair. Irenka told me that Mr. K. had been gone all night again.

It was two or three days later that Mother came home from Sra. O’Brien’s, an hour later than usual and wearing a strange, green kerchief on her head. She explained that the senhora’s son had offered to drive her home in his open sports car. Mother had said,
no thank you,
explaining that she had nothing to cover her hair with, at which point he had brought her one of his mother’s kerchiefs. Then he had insisted on stopping somewhere for a drink, and Mother had said,
all right,
because she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. He had wanted to take her out to dinner as well. When she said that she had a small son, waiting for his supper at home, he asked if there wasn’t somebody she could leave me with, to which she said,
no
. So he had, finally, driven her to the hotel, with Mother promising to make some arrangements in the future so that she could go to dinner with him. Then we both laughed over the fact that, unlike Sr. Segiera, this man had not suggested bringing me along, and Mother was glad because she didn’t want to go out with him anyway.