Loves of Yulian (29 page)

One evening, Mother was sitting, cross-legged, on her bed, in her sheer, blue nightgown, her face covered with cream, and she was doing her solitaire on top of the pillow. I was teaching Irenka to play gin rummy in the living room, when there was a knock on the front door. I went to see who it was, and was surprised to see Mr. K. standing there.

“Good evening, Yulian,” he said, in a very friendly tone.

“G. . . g. . . od e. . . vening,” I said, catching myself in mid stutter, as Mr. K. stepped past me.

“Hello, Irenka dear,” he said, crossing the room toward her.

But, suddenly, Mother, in her bare feet and nightgown that you could see through, was standing between him and Irenka. “Get out!” she shouted. “Get out of here! She doesn’t want to see you!”

“She is my wife, Basia,” Mr. K. said.

“She is not your wife, you son-of-a-bitch, and don’t you
Basia
 me!”

Now Mother had her hands against Mr. K’s chest, and she was pushing him backwards toward the door.

I opened the door again, and then Mother and Mr. K. were both out on the landing. “But Basia,” I heard him say.

“You come here again, and I will have you arrested!” Then Mother was back inside. “Close the door, Yulian,” she said.

I closed the door.

“Oh, Barbara,” Irenka said. “He’s going to be so mad at me now.”

“Don’t worry about him. I will tell Ernesto to have some of his friends tell him that it would be a good idea to leave Rio.”

I wondered what Sr. Segiera’s friends might tell Mr. K. to convince him that it would be a good idea to leave Rio.

CHAPTER XIII

Christmas was in the hottest part of the Brazilian year. Mother had taken me aside to explain that I shouldn’t expect much in the way of presents, because of our precarious finances, which wasn’t, at all, necessary to tell me. I suggested we forego a tree, and Mother agreed, saying we would make up for it next year, when we were in America.

But Irenka brought us a little, tabletop tree, which she decorated with stars, angels, and balls that she had cut out of colored paper. She even bought me a box of watercolor paints, that she said were from her and Andre. And, so that I could buy something for my mother, she gave me some money, with which I bought two pieces of bath soap, shaped like an angel, for Mother and Irenka. Mother gave me a cowboy gun belt with two cap pistols.

Because Mother had gotten word that our entry permit to America would be coming soon, she decided that I did not need to go back to school, which was a big relief to me, particularly since it would save us money.

Three weeks after Christmas, January 13th, was my ninth birthday, and I got a cowboy hat from Mother, to go with my gun belt. Irenka gave me a leather-bound notebook, to write my poems in, and I immediately set to transcribing my existing poems into it, so that Irenka would know how much I appreciated it.

Then, Mother said that Mr. and Mrs. Tuwim had a present for me as well. We had met Mr. and Mrs. Tuwim a number of times at that café, and we set out for the café that afternoon.

I wore my gun-belt and hat, so as not to hurt Mother’s feelings, though it was not the image I wanted to project to Mr. Tuwim. As usual, the Tuwims were there before us, Mrs. Tuwim immediately happy to see us, with a kiss for Mother and a birthday hug for me, Mr. Tuwim sitting back in his chair, his legs thrust out in front of him, and deep in thought. Mother immediately ordered a dish of ice cream for me, chocolate and vanilla. “I can’t get him to eat anything,” she said to Mrs. Tuwim, and I felt instantly guilty over my lack of appetite. “Look how thin he is.”

“He looks fine to me, Basia,” Mr. Tuwim said. “He’s busy growing.” What he was saying was that the process of growing somehow took effort and concentration on my part, and I appreciated fully the humor and the creativity of the remark.

“Give the boy his present,” Mrs. Tuwim said to her husband, when we had been sitting there a while.

“I don’t have it,” Mr. Tuwim said. “You have it.”

“I gave it to you before we left,” Mrs. Tuwim said. “You put it into your left trousers pocket.”

Mr. Tuwim felt both his pockets and said he didn’t have it.

If Mr. Tuwim had lost it, I was embarrassed for him, but I didn’t much care about the present itself. All of us refugees, facing uncertain futures, had little money to spend on things like birthday presents.

Then Mr. Tuwim found a flat box with a gold bottom and a blue top, about six inches long, and tied with a little bow, in the pocket of his jacket. “You must have transferred it to your jacket,” his wife explained.

Mr. Tuwim tried to hand it to his wife.

“No, you should give it to him,” she said.

“It’s from both of us.”

“Yes, but it’s better coming from you.”

Mr. Tuwim handed me the box, and I thanked him.

“Kiss him,” Mother whispered.

I pretended not to hear. There was no way that I was going to kiss Mr. Tuwim.

A box of those dimensions could contain a fountain pen, a mechanical pencil, both, or a wristwatch. But wristwatches were expensive items, and I guessed it to be a pen or pencil, with which to write my poems. I ruled out a pen-and-pencil set, because the same gift gesture could be achieved with just a single item.

I untied the bow slowly and opened the box. Lying inside was a wristwatch.

I had received a wristwatch from my parents for my seventh birthday, in Warsaw. I was told that it was a “pilot’s” watch because it was shockproof, waterproof, antimagnetic, and glowed in the dark, and I took it as a mark of my maturity. I was immediately told to wind it carefully every night and lay it on the table beside my bed, where I could see it, and to take it off and lay it aside before washing my hands, all of which I promised to do faithfully.

From my uncle Jacob I had received another symbol of maturity, a sheath knife, about eight inches overall. This, I was allowed to wear, hooked to the button that connected my short pants to my shirt, as long as I never took it out of its sheath.

Then, when my stepfather, Lolek, went into the army at the beginning of the war, he had taken my pilot’s watch, because his own watch was gold and expensive, and because he said he had the right to take it, since he had given it to me. He also took my sheath knife, with which, I supposed, he would be able to kill some thin German soldier.

But the generosity of the Tuwims’ gift surprised me. This one wasn’t a “pilot’s” watch—it wasn’t waterproof, shock resistant, or antimagnetic, and it didn’t have the green numbers that glowed in the dark—but it was from Yulian Tuwim, the great poet, which made it doubly or triply precious. But I didn’t feel any of the thrill that I had felt on that day, two years ago. I wound my new watch, set the time from Mr. Tuwim’s watch, and had my mother buckle it onto my wrist. Then I sat and watched the little second hand, at the bottom of the dial, go round and round, while I tried to appreciate how generously I had been treated.

It was at that same café, with the Tuwims, a few weeks later, when I was studying the metal pipes that held up the awning, as I had that day months earlier, that I suddenly heard Mother say, “Oh Yulian, tell me what I should do.”

She was, of course, talking to Mr. Tuwim, but it was the note of pleading in her voice that pulled my attention from the overhead rigging.

“Basia, dear, it’s a decision you have to make for yourself,” Mr. Tuwim said.

“But I don’t know what to do.”

I had never, before, heard Mother make that particular statement in any form.

“I think I am in love with him,” Mother continued, and I knew immediately that she was grappling with the decision that I had seen coming for some time.

“Oh, I have no doubt that you are,” Mr. Tuwim said.

“So tell me what I should do.”

“I can’t tell you what to do.”

Now I saw Mother turn to Mrs. Tuwim. “What do you think I should do?” she asked in that little girl voice I had heard her use on occasion.

Mrs. Tuwim shook her head. “I can’t tell you, Barbara.”

I knew very well that it was the question of whether to go to America or marry Sr. Segiera that was on Mother’s mind. She was wringing her hands and biting her lips now, and, suddenly, I was feeling very sorry for Mother. I had seen her angry and sad, but I had never seen her seem so helpless.

“He’s so sweet and so understanding and good to me,” Mother was saying now. “I’ve been a real bitch to him sometimes, but he just worships me. And he has that lovely, crippled boy, who would be a good friend for Yulian. He’s the only boy Yulian has ever gotten along with. But then, on the other side, there is Yulian becoming an American and my book and. . . ”

I found that I was hurting for Mother. I was feeling her pain. I remembered the agony of my separation from Kiki, more than a year ago now, and not wanting Mother to have to endure the same thing.

“You can write your book in Portuguese as well as in English,” Mr. Tuwim interrupted her. “As far as I know, you can’t write in either language.”

I couldn’t agree more with him. In either case, she would have to have help writing her book, so why not stay here and write it in Portuguese.

“But I want Americans to read my book. Americans can do something about this war.”

That was true. I knew that America had many more people than Brazil, and that it was America that had influenced the outcome of the last war.

“So go to America,” Mrs. Tuwim said.

“But I love Ernesto.”

I knew exactly how that felt, and I hated Mother having to endure the pain of separating from him.

“So stay,” Mr. Tuwim said.

“But I want Yulian to become an American.”

I didn’t need to be an American. I could be very happy being Brazilian.

Now I could see a tear on Mother’s face, and Mr. Tuwim changed the subject suddenly. “Yulian, what plans do you have for Carnival?” he asked.

I shrugged my shoulders. I had heard mention of the Carnival, but assumed it to be a place you went to and paid admission, which put it beyond our budget.

“It isn’t for him,” Mother said.

“Why not? It’s a time when people dress up and become somebody else. They step outside of themselves for a few days, and everyone has a good time.”

“It’s for the common people,” Mother said.

“Oh come on, Basia. Everyone in Rio gets involved.”

“And what are you dressing up as, a circus clown?”

Mr. Tuwim laughed. But I knew that he wasn’t going to dress up as anyone.

But the idea of becoming someone else had an immediate appeal for me. I would get a wheelchair and become Paolo. I would wheel around in it, talking to all sorts of strangers, and everybody would have to talk to me and be nice to me because I was crippled and because I was coping so well with my disability.

Irenka told me that she and Andre were going to do something with some other people for Carnival, and Mother was going to go on working at Sra. O’Brien’s as usual. For weeks, my mind was filled with vignettes and entire scenes of me wheeling my way around the street in front of our hotel, zipping up to groups of people, who would turn to let me join them and then return my greetings, marveling at how unaffected I was by my handicap. Way in the back of my mind was the question of where in the world I was going to get a wheelchair. But the knowledge that there was, really, no way for me to obtain one, kept the thought in its back corner.

Then, two days before Carnival was about to start, I finally realized that, even if I did find my wheelchair and learned to operate it the way Paolo did, I did not have the capacity to wheel, uninvited, up to strangers and start a conversation. In a word, my plans for becoming Paolo were not going to happen.

So the start of Carnival found me leaning out of our window, looking at the activities on the street below. In the morning, there were people, individually or by twos and threes, in brightly colored and strange clothing hurrying up or down the street, as though late for an appointment. There were women in skirts that were cut very short in front and dragged on the ground in back, men in trousers with one leg of one color and the other different. Shirts had collars that were large and pointed or very round with large bows or just with long strips hanging down. There were hats of all sorts, usually very large. Some hats were made of fruits or vegetables; some fruits were worked right into hairdos. Some people wore masks that covered their entire faces, some had their masks on top of their heads, as they hurried to their destination. They weren’t, mostly, masks that made people look better, but uglier, with long noses, weird beards, huge, hairy ears, or, even, horns. I thought of Irenka’s impression of Jews.

Then, as the day progressed, a sort of parade developed, moving from right to left along the street. But it wasn’t a parade like any I had seen before. There were no soldiers marching in step and no brass bands with brass-buttoned uniforms. The people walked or rode on the back of trucks or open cars, the walkers making no particular effort to keep in step. Every once in a while a group of musicians passed, sometimes playing a marching beat and sometimes music to dance to. Some of the people in the parade danced to the music, others seemed to ignore it completely.