Mother and Me (2 page)

Within walking distance of our apartment there was a public park. This park, I understood, had been a royal residence and contained a palace that one could tour with felt slippers over one's street shoes. Its walls were gilded, and there were paintings on these walls in huge gold frames, depicting a variety of activities featuring either vastly overdressed or underdressed—some even totally undressed—people. Something Kiki must
have said, or possibly her body language, led me to understand that there was a significant similarity between the overdressed people and the friends of my mother whom I occasionally saw in our apartment with their hats and veils, jewelry, fur stoles, and cigarettes. They walked funny, and occasionally patted my cheek and gave me smelly kisses. “Painted women,” I had overheard Kiki and Marta call them. Overdressing I understood to be pretentious and improper. Because Kiki expressed no opinion regarding the underdressed or undressed ones, I took this as approval. Nor did I miss the connection to the saintly and equally naked Jesus above the altar of Kiki's church.

The painting I remember most vividly is of a king seated on a throne with a sword in one hand and a baby held up side down by one foot in the other. This, I had come to understand, was King Solomon, Poland's smartest king.

Beside a pond in the park, I remember a huge bronze sculpture of the composer Frederick Chopin, seated under a windblown willow. Peacocks walked the park paths, occasionally displaying their beautiful tails.

To this park, Kiki and I would walk every morning. Along the way we would stop at a butcher shop—white tiled floor, walls, and ceiling—to have sandwiches made for our lunch. Mine would always be boiled ham, Kiki's sausage. Sometimes, in the park, Kiki would give me a tiny bite of her delicious sausage sandwich, but I understood that it was bad for me.

Along our way, we would pass a stand of doroshkas, the horse-drawn cabs that still served Warsaw, and I would look with envy at the drivers on their tall seats, eating bread and long shafts of sausage. When I grew up, I decided, I would be a doroshka driver.

Sometimes, people in the street would all be stopped, their necks craned and their arms extended upward, pointing. That meant there was an airplane overhead. Kiki and I would crane our necks, too, scanning the sky for the little silver cross. “There it is! Look, there it is!” we would point out to each other.

Usually I went to the park under arms, a sword hanging from my left hip, a pistol strapped to my waist, and a balloon tied to one of the shirt buttons holding up my short pants. In the park, Kiki would sit on a bench and knit a sweater or short pants for me, or she would read from a tiny book. I was instructed to play, but not to get dirty or talk to any children we didn't know. Since I knew no other children besides my cousin Anita, her cousin Andy, and another cousin of mine named Fredek, and since they all lived in a different part of town and came to our park only by special arrangement between governesses, I never did figure out what I was supposed to do.

I would walk up and down the paths and soon find myself not in the presence of the bronze Frederick Chopin under his willow or the blue and green peacocks, but the underdressed men and women of the non-offensive palace paintings. The overdressed ones I had adopted Kiki's distaste for, but the lounging, uncovered ladies would get up from their beds and their chaises and serve me plums and oranges and tell me how glad they were that I had come to visit. Men and women would stop whatever it was they were doing to each other and invite me to participate.

Sometimes I would encounter other children running after each other, shooting their guns and waving their swords. But knowing full well that any disobedience of Kiki was likely to lead to trolley cars, I would ignore them and return to my soft-voiced and soft-bodied ladies and their muscular friends.

On occasions when one of the cousins came to visit in our park with his or her governess, or we went to their park, the governesses would sit together on the bench, and we, children, would be sent off to play, but nicely.

Anita and Andy always came together and had an agenda of their own, to which I could find no access. I would walk or run behind them, but had little understanding of what they were doing. Fredek always welcomed my company to help him get revenge on someone. He would tell me that we must sneak
up on some Charlie or Joe, and I must hold him while Fredek kicked him in the belly. Sneak around the park as we might, much to my relief we never did encounter either Charlie or Joe, though on returning to our governesses, Fredek would describe at length and with mounting excitement how he had punished the offender, until his governess acknowledged that it was time they were getting on home.

Marta's niece came from the country to work for us. She must have been in her teens and slept on a cot in Marta's room, off the kitchen. That cot and Marta's bed filled the room practically wall to wall. The girl's name was Susan. She was to do the cleaning in our apartment while Marta tended to the cooking.

I hated Susan. I would punch her and kick her legs whenever she was within reach and no one was watching. One day, Susan was polishing the hardwood floor in the salon with a device that was a broom stick with a heavy, flat, iron weight at the bottom around which you wrapped rags. I went over to her and began kicking her shins. Suddenly the question of why I was doing this occurred to me. Susan had done me no harm. She was just a girl living in a tiny room in a strange family's apartment, trying to make a living, and I was hurting her. Why in the world did I want to hurt her?

The fact that I was hurting an innocent, vulnerable person—she never fought back—hit me like thunder. Why? Why? I was filled with a strange desire to hold her and say comforting things to her. I wished terribly that what I had done could be made not to have happened.

I don't know if there were such things as pet shops in Warsaw at that time. Puppies, however, were commonly sold on the street by men from the country who stood on the sidewalk, holding a puppy, with several more tucked into the pockets of their heavy peasant jackets. Whenever we passed one, my heart would melt at the sight of the puppy's head sticking out from between the man's hands. I knew I couldn't have one, and my soul cried for
a puppy to love. I would have settled for a cat, if I had had to, but the hunger for a dog that I could love and hold and stroke was more than I could bear at times. Lying in bed at night, I would sometimes fantasize myself playing with a dog. I could actually feel his soft round head against my palm and his little legs tucked under him in my lap. Then I would break down into tears and turn my mind to prayer to ease the pain.

One day when my grandmother was visiting from Lodz, she accompanied Kiki and me on a walk. I don't remember where we were going, but we came across a man selling puppies on the corner and stopped. How much did he want for the puppy, my grandmother asked. My heart wanted to leap to the sky for joy. But my brain knew better by then. It held my heart in check, knowing well the odds for disappointment. When my grandmother and the man from the country could not come to terms, I was able to walk on.

A major problem was with toothpaste tubes. Every morning and evening, I would carry the toothpaste that Kiki and I shared, along with my toothbrush and towel, to my parents' bathroom, if it was free, or the kitchen sink, if it wasn't. As the toothpaste tube became exhausted, I would be aware of a great sadness. Soon it would be empty and discarded into the trash, and we would start a brand new, strange tube from a box.

As the life of the old tube wound to a close, I would take less and less paste on my brush and perform heroics of rolling, unrolling, flattening, and pressing to extend its life by one more day. I would look down on its flattened, twisted body, knowing that it would soon be going into the garbage, and tears would come into my eyes. When reality could no longer be denied and a sleek new tube replaced the faithful old friend, I was depressed and resentful. I knew how ridiculous this was, but I could not help myself. If ever I needed proof that the abuse of my birdie was having its consequences, I had it in this bizarre response to what I knew to be a natural life process.

I remember a party in our apartment. The dining room table had disappeared and been replaced by several small tables covered with red-and-white checked tablecloths. To our polished wood and silk chairs, had been added other polished wood and silk chairs, but of a different style, and the dining room, as I walked through it on the way to and from the kitchen, was an empty restaurant with unmatched chairs.

For a while, I was a waiter with my handkerchief over my wrist, serving imaginary food with sweeping gestures to beautiful imaginary people. I took orders for chicken and rice with yellow, lemony sauce; cold borscht with sour cream; chopped spinach scrambled with an egg, and sausage, all on an imaginary pad, and then swept up menus with a flourish that impressed even me.

In the park, later that day, I fanaticized being allowed to serve at that evening's party.

Then, after Kiki and I had had our supper in our room and I was in my nightshirt and bathrobe, the guests began to arrive. Because our room was off the entrance hall, near the front door, I could peek (Kiki surprised me by allowing me to do this) through the crack in the not-quite-closed door, at the arrival—the men in identical tuxedoes and the women in sparkling, frilly, floor-length gowns in various colors, with bare shoulders under their fur stoles, and naked backs. Kiki, I remember, sat at our table reading a little book. From the look on her face, I could tell she was in a bad mood.

My mother came into our room at one point, carrying a plate with funny things on it and a glass with wine that had bubbles. She had on a gown of a shiny black material that clung very tight to her body, except that just at the knees it flared out because there were what I now know to be called pleats, with a bright green material on the inside. When she stood still, you could just see a thin green line, but when she walked, the green flashed in a wider or narrower wedge. The stark simplicity of the black dress with its flashing green wedge, topped by
Mother's deep gold hair and emerald earrings, was absolutely the most beautiful sight I had ever seen.

Kiki would not have any of the wine or the funny things on the plate, and she told Mother that I had already had my dinner and brushed my teeth. Then the two of them walked to the window at the other end of the room and started to talk in hushed voices.

Kiki had to look up to talk to my mother. “That's much too late,” I heard her say in a very emphatic tone. “Much too late.”

I could tell by Mother's body language that she acquiesced, and she left the room nodding her head and carrying the wine and the funny things. Kiki went back to her book.

After a while, a strange woman in a maid's uniform came into our room. “She says to come now,” she said over my head to Kiki. Then she pulled up her skirt, adjusted her stocking, and left the room.

“Come here,” Kiki said to me, almost as though she were angry at me. I walked over cautiously. She reached for my hairbrush and smoothed my freshly washed hair. Then she stood up, took me by the hand, and we marched out into the hall. I had no idea where we were going.

The guests were all sitting or standing in the salon, and all turned the same way as though for a performance. For a moment I thought someone would be doing magic tricks. But we walked to an empty chair in front of everyone, and I realized I was going to have to recite. Kiki told me to stand on the chair. “Say the poem, ‘I'm Not Afraid Of Anyone',” she said.

I had had to recite poems before, for my grandparents or an aunt and uncle, but never for this kind of audience. But I knew the poem well and had been taught to recite in a firm voice its braggadocio lines about even facing down tigers. Kiki didn't need to prompt me even once.

The applause was tremendous and people shouted “encore,” which I knew meant more. I knew a song that Marshal
Pilsudski's brigade used to sing, which I thought would go well with the tone of the poem, and I began to sing it, but Kiki took me by the hand, dismounted me from the chair, and marched me out of the room. I was still singing as we went out the door.

A few minutes later, one of the ladies with a rouged face, and a frilly blue gown with bare shoulders came into our room with a plate of those funny things again. “You sweet, sweet boy,” she said, kissing me. She smelled of perfume, liquor, and cigarettes. She took one of the funny things in her fingers and indicated that I should open my mouth. It was the most awful thing I had ever tasted, but I didn't let on.

“You've done a wonderful job with him, Miss Yanka,” she said to Kiki.

“Thank you, Madam,” Kiki said. Then the woman placed the plate on the table, kissed me again, and swished out. Kiki picked up the plate and slid its contents into the wastebasket.

My grandparents on my mother's side, lived in the city of Lodz, an hour or so away by an express train called The Torpedo. As I remember, it consisted of just two highly streamlined, self-propelled cars and no engine. A couple of times a year, Kiki and I would pack our bags and take The Torpedo to spend a few days with the grandparents. I was usually sick the day before departure, and the morning of the trip we would rise early and try to eat breakfast. But the anxiety over not missing the train made me unable to eat, and Kiki and I would sit at the little table in our room as she tried to will the food down my throat, while she continually checked her little gold wristwatch.

This was the one occasion when I would, regularly, see Kiki's will overcome by circumstances. It was not intentional on my part, but I simply could not get the food down, and eventually her anxiety for the train would overcome her resolve, and we would dash for the train station—there to sit on our suitcases as train after train was called before ours began to board.

Grandfather was many years older than Grandmother. He was in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down, diabetic, and attended by a man named Francishek. Poking out of Grandfather's left pant leg was something I first took for the end of a sword scabbard, but realized later it was a rubber incontinence device.