Mother and Me (23 page)

“My little son and I are from Warsaw,” she went on, “and we've had just an awful time getting here. We were bombed on the road and then, when we finally found a little cottage on a farm near here, the peasants turned Communist and threw us out. My little son is sickly.”

I was damned if I was going to cough for her this time. While she was telling lies to a total stranger for some bizarre reason, several people had already joined the line ahead of where we should have been, and the man who wasn't Judge Starecki was almost ready to go into the store.

“Mister really does have the bearing of a judge,” Mother repeated now, and made the man smile self-consciously. Then, a man in a white apron unlatched the shop door from the inside, indicating that Mr. Rokief should come in. Mr. Rokief quickly took Mother's elbow and the two of them stepped inside the butcher shop together, pulling me along by the hand.

“You can't do that!” I heard a woman say, who had been standing behind Mr. Rokief, and suddenly the purpose behind Mother's entire charade revealed itself to me. I ducked my head in shame as the glass door shut behind us.

“I would like some beef, please, a nice cut,” Mother said to the woman behind the counter.

“All we have is lamb and pork,” the woman said. “Quarter kilo to a customer.” Like the people in the butcher shop in Warsaw, she had on a white apron over a white smock and a white cap on her head.

“My husband and two children are home sick with nothing to eat,” Mother said.

“All I can sell you today is a quarter kilo. I sell you more than one package, and he'll arrest me,” she said, indicating a Russian soldier sitting in a chair, which he rocked back against the wall, at the side of the store. A rifle stood against the wall. He yawned without covering his mouth. “Come back tomorrow. Lamb or pork?”

“Lamb,” Mother said a little uncertainly. The woman reached into a box and handed mother a little package in white paper.

Mr. Rokief leaned forward across the marble counter. “And a quarter kilo of lamb for the young man,” he said.

“A quarter kilo per customer is all I'm allowed to sell,” the woman said.

“He's a customer!”

“He's a little boy.”

“He's a big boy, who came here and waited in line to buy some of your lamb.” He said it quietly so the soldier wouldn't hear, but very forcefully.

Looking sideways at the yawning soldier, the woman quickly thrust a white package towards me as well. I took it before I realized what I was doing. Involuntarily, I also glanced at the soldier, who seemed to have seen nothing.

Mother quickly paid for our purchase, Mr. Rokief paid for his, and in a moment we were standing outside the store with our white-paper-wrapped packages.

The people in the line were all looking at us. “They cut into line,” one woman said. “Dirty cheaters!” someone added.

Mother and Mr. Rokief ignored them. “Thank Mister so much for Mister's kind help,” Mother said to him. “I'm living now with two sisters-in-law, their two children, and a governess. This half kilo isn't going to go very far, but a lot further than a quarter kilo.”

“Line cutter!” somebody said. The package in my hands seemed as though it were the size of a soccer ball. I stepped around to Mother's other side, away from the queue.

“With some vegetables, they'll make a nice soup,” Mr. Rokief said.

“I suppose I overpaid several times,” Mother said, laughing. “I have no idea what a quarter kilo of lamb is even supposed to cost. At home, my husband pays all the bills. I don't even know what cut this is.”

“The commissar won't let them overcharge. That's why the soldier's there. He's a good man.”

“Where can I find a greengrocer?”

I realized that Mother hadn't even bothered to tell Mr. Rokief that Lolek wasn't really home sick. That was because he would already know that. He would know that she didn't really have a sick husband and probably that she hadn't really mistaken him for Judge Starecki either. He and Mother had never met before, but they immediately recognized in each other their common dishonesty. It was that Jewish thing.

“There's a greengrocer around the other side of this block. I don't know if they're still open,” Mr. Rokief said. “I'd take you
both to a café, but there aren't any open—there's no coffee. Coffee is probably the most precious commodity in town.” I just wished we would go anywhere else.

Mother laughed. “I'd invite Mister and his wife for cocktails, but we have no cocktails.” They both laughed at this.

“Stop that, Yulek!” Mother surprised me. I hadn't realized that I had begun to tug at her sleeve. “He's anxious to get going,” she explained to Mr. Rokief. “Does Mister have a telephone?”

“We have two rooms in a kind lady's apartment. Let me write her telephone number down for Missus.” He wrote a phone number with a little gold pencil on a pad of paper in a little leather folder. Mother explained that we were staying in an awful place for just a night or two, they shook hands, and we finally walked down the street and around the corner.

The line at the greengrocer's was very short. We bought some vegetables and headed for home. It must have been lunchtime by now, because I was hungry. But I knew it would do no good to mention it. I remembered Fredek's wailing this morning.

I also noticed that all the people that I had seen standing in the streets were now gone. Except for the Russian soldiers on the corners, Mother and I were practically the only people in the street. The voice on the loudspeaker was telling us that in the Soviet Union everyone was equal.

Back at our building, there was a new problem—we had no key to our apartment. Miss Bronia had been entrusted with our only key, and she was to pay frequent visits to the rooms in case somebody came back early.

A little hallway, running past the water pump, the toilet, and the door to our rooms, connected the courtyard at the center of the building with the street. One step led down to the sidewalk. Parts of three hinges from an absent iron gate were embedded in the masonry.

The hallway was too dark and malodorous from the toilet and the courtyard too strewn with garbage for us to wait there.
We went back out to the street, put our packages down in the hallway, and waited. I sat down on the step and Mother told me to stand up because it wasn't nice to sit on the step and I would get my pants dirty. Then she changed her mind and said it was all right for me to sit.

The loudspeaker said that the Red Army had brought equality to us. “Equality” seemed like a big thing to these people. I guessed that Red Army was what the Russians called their army, since their flag was red, but the equality issue concerned me. Not that it really mattered, but it was something to ponder while we waited. I wondered whether those soft little spikes on the soldiers' hats had something to do with equality. Were shorter soldiers issued hats with longer spikes?

I saw two soldiers with rifles across their backs approaching along the sidewalk. One was taller than the other, but the spikes on their hats seemed to be of the same length. So that certainly wasn't it. As they approached us in our doorway, they smiled. Instinctively, I smiled back, but immediately realized that I was smiling at the enemy.

They stopped and greeted us in Russian. They seemed quite friendly. Mother answered them in Polish. The taller one bent down and patted my cheek. The other was saying something I couldn't hear to Mother. It sounded like a question. He continued smiling.

“I don't understand,” Mother said in Polish. “I don't speak Russian,” which wasn't true.

The soldier put his elbow against the side of the building, leaned closer to Mother, and said something else.

“I don't understand,” Mother repeated.

The soldier reached for Mother's hand. She drew back, shaking her head. “No, no,” she said.

The other soldier held a piece of candy out to me. I shook my head. “It's good,” he said in Russian.

“No!” Mother said in a much firmer tone than before. The soldier's tone sounded like he was pleading. His hand reached up to touch her cheek.

“No!” she said again, pushing his hand away.

The soldier shrugged his shoulders and said to his companion, “She must be waiting for an officer to come along.” They both laughed. Then they walked on.

“Standing in the doorway like this, I look like a blah-blah,” Mother said, using a word I didn't know. I could tell she wasn't really talking to me. She gave a little private, dark-sounding laugh.

“What did he want?” I asked. I sensed that this had been one of those things that adults didn't like to share with children, and it gave me a perverse pleasure to ask.

“About buying cigarettes,” she snapped.

“What?” This was new and scary ground for me.

Mother's voice grew much calmer. “He just wanted to know where he could buy cigarettes.”

I knew this wasn't the truth. “Why did you say you didn't speak Russian?”

“I just didn't want to be nice to them.”

I knew she still wasn't telling me the truth, but I didn't want to push further. I let it go.

“Let's walk up and down the street a little,” Mother said. “Pick up your package, and we'll just walk back and forth a little until Miss Bronia comes.”

“I'm hungry,” I said maliciously.

“Little soldiers learn to accept hunger sometimes,” she said. It wasn't an answer I had expected, and I had no response to it. Now I wished I hadn't said it. I was being like Fredek. I stood up.

But just then, we saw Miss Bronia and Fredek come around the corner. Each carried an armload of firewood, and they were singing a song I didn't know, something about tents and campfires.

“There was a truck full of firewood, and the soldiers were giving it away to everybody,” Fredek said.

“If we had had something to carry it in, we could have gotten a lot more,” Miss Bronia said, out of breath. “Mrs. Herbstein found two more loaves of bread and some cheese. I'm afraid there's no butter. Missus didn't find any, did she?”

“We got some lamb,” Mother said, holding up a package. “And some more carrots and spinach.”

“Wonderful, I can make a stew,” Miss Bronia said, leading the way into the building. We were immediately enveloped by the smell of mold and the toilet.

Auntie Edna wasn't back by suppertime. Auntie Paula and Sonya had brought back potatoes and roses. “A poor old woman was trying to sell flowers, and nobody was buying, so we bought some,” Sonya said.

“Anything to make the place smell better,” Mother said, and they laughed. Then we sat around on suitcases and boxes while Miss Bronia dealt with supper.

“Where's my mother?” Fredek asked.

“She'll be home soon, dear,” Auntie Paula said.

“She'll be home soon,” Mother repeated.

“Your mother is out finding us a nicer place to stay,” Auntie Paula said. “You don't want to go on staying here, do you?”

“I want my mother,” Fredek wailed. Fredek was not a little soldier.

“So, Basia,” Auntie Paula said cheerfully, and I could tell it was for Fredek's benefit, “you and Yulek really did well. Sonya and I stood in line at a butcher shop too, but they ran out of meat long before we could get in.”

“There was a soldier in the store to make sure they didn't sell more that a quarter kilo to a customer. A very pleasant lawyer from Krakow made them give Yulian a quarter kilo too.”

“When is my mother coming home?” Fredek whined. He had curled up on our sleeping pallet and was sucking his thumb.

“She'll be home soon,” Auntie Paula said again, but without her earlier cheer. Then, to Mother, “How did you meet this very pleasant lawyer?”

“He was standing in line, and you could tell that he wasn't from here. So I walked up and started a conversation. And when he went into the store, we just went right in with him.”

Auntie Paula found that amusing. Of course Mother did not tell her about pretending to mistake him for Judge Staretski, but I was just as glad not to have to relive that experience.

We ate out of an odd assortment of bowls. I didn't like the lamb stew and would have filled up on the delicious bread and cheese, but Mother made me eat some. “Who knows when we'll have meat again,” Auntie Paula said. Miss Bronia tried to coax some stew into Fredek, but he made a terrible face after his first sip. “It is pretty bad,” Miss Bronia said to Auntie Paula, and they agreed to let him abstain.

“The people are saying that the farmers are all selling their meat on the black market,” Auntie Paula said. Putting two and two together, I reasoned that black market must be another name for that Soviet Union where, the woman on the loudspeaker said, you could go and buy anything you wanted.

“We'll have to find out how to contact them,” Mother said. I wondered why the Russians would go to the trouble of setting up loudspeakers to advertise the Soviet Union without telling you where to go and find it. I had heard that the Russians were stupid.