Mother and Me (26 page)

“Bronia, why don't you come join us,” she said to Miss Bronia, who was doing something at the stove. “You work harder than the rest of us put together.” Mother's tone was very sweet now, though no more genuine. Miss Bronia immediately came back to the table and picked up her darning.

Then Mother said something to the captain about what great things Miss Bronia could do with the little food that was available in stores. She asked the captain what town he
came from and then translated his answer. It wasn't Moscow, which was the only town I knew in Russia. As Mother went on translating, we learned that his mother was director of a high school, and his father had been killed by the Tsarists. I knew who the Tsar was, but I had no idea who the Tsarists were.

Then Auntie Edna came back into the room. She had put on fresh lipstick and a green cardigan. When Mother introduced her to the captain, he had Mother repeat the story about her eye makeup running in the rain and how it had frightened him. The captain found this almost as funny as he had at the first telling, and his eyes began to tear again. Auntie Edna laughed politely.

Then, in the same sweet tone Mother had used speaking to Miss Bronia, she said, “Sonya, dear, why don't you take Yulek into the other room and read to him.”

Sonya closed the book, her finger marking the page, and we stood up. As I had been taught to do when there were guests, I said, “Excuse me,” and gave a little bow, before leaving the table.

The captain leaned back in his chair and beckoned me with his finger. Then he had a pocket knife in his hands, and I saw that he was actually cutting a button off the pocket of his tunic.

“What are you doing?” Mother asked, and the alarm in her voice was genuine.

“It's for the boy. I have more.” He held the button out to me.

Mother nodded her head, indicating that I should accept it.

The button was shiny brass with an enameled red star. In the center of the star there was a little gold hammer and sickle.

“Take it, dear, and say thank you,” Mother said.

The hammer and sickle, I had recently discovered, was the Russian emblem, the way the white eagle was ours.

“Take it and say thank you,” Mother repeated, the smile fixed on her face.

I didn't want the Russian button. I should have dropped it on the table—or on the floor and stepped on it. Or thrown it at him like a hero, and he would have had me arrested and shot with a blindfold. But I couldn't do that to Capt. Vrushin. He was a soldier, ordered into Poland by his general, and he was helping us out of his own kindness. Actually, I found that I liked him. I could not insult him like that. I took the button and mumbled, “Thank you.” But I did not look him in the eye. I did not want him to see my conflict. I followed Sonya into the inner room.

Sonya was standing a few feet from Fredek's bed. Fredek was telling her that his head hurt a lot.

I remembered the headaches that Kiki would sometimes get when she had to lie on her bed with a wet wash cloth over her eyes and forehead. I would freshen the cloth and wring it out in a dish of water, and walk around on tiptoe. I felt sorry for Fredek now. With Sonya and me not permitted to go near him, there was no one to freshen the cloth for him.

“Do you want me to read to you?” Sonya asked him. “I can do it from across the room.”

“No,” Fredek whispered, then he reached for his throat letting us know that it hurt to talk. Sonya tiptoed to the corner farthest from Fredek and signaled me to follow her. We settled down on the floor, and Sonya opened her book. Then she put it down again and got up to bring over a table lamp that we had acquired a few days earlier. Finally, she switched off the ceiling light and settled down to read to me in a whisper.

Only I don't think it was the same book that she had been reading to me before, because instead of the boy learning to be a knight, we were now dealing with a painter who didn't have enough money to buy food. I would have been disappointed except that I realized how his situation compared to ours. Only we had money, but no food to buy with it. Then, when a beautiful woman came to the studio to pose for him, my mind came wandering back to the people in the other room.

“He wants us to call him Vasilli,” I heard Mother say.

“Paula,” I heard Auntie Paula say, and I could visualize her tapping her chest with her fingers.

“Paula,” the captain repeated.

“Basia,” Mother said. The captain repeated it, but putting the accent on the last a.

Now Mother repeated it the way he had said it. Then she said something in Russian. She spoke more quietly to the captain than she did in Polish to the others. Finally she said, “I said to him that Russian is a much prettier language than Polish.”

I didn't like hearing that.

Captain Vrushin said something else in his quiet voice. “He says the two languages are very similar,” Mother said. “He can understand a lot of what we say.”

“Then we have to be careful what we say,” Auntie Paula said. “Tell him that.” Mother translated and they all seemed to laugh.

“Edna … Bronia,” Auntie Paula said. I realized that Miss Bronia and Auntie Edna had not given their own first names.

Captain Vrushin repeated the names, and I now recognized that his pronunciation did give a new softness to the two names. Well, if Russian was softer, Polish was more manly, I decided.

Then Sonya's painter was helping the beautiful woman mount a horse, and, at mention of the horse, my attention immediately switched away from the people in the outer room.

My attention snapped back quickly a few minutes later, when I heard the captain's boots crossing the floor. Through the archway, I could see Mother walk the captain to the door.

When the door closed behind him, everyone was talking at once. The three mothers came into the inner room, and Auntie Paula turned on the overhead light.

“Shshsh, I think Fredek is sleeping,” Auntie Edna said, and everyone grew quiet.

Mother and Auntie Paula took off their blouses. Mother brushed her teeth while Auntie Paula washed under her arms at the washbasin. Auntie Edna sat on the edge of Fredek's bed and put her hand over one of his.

“Freshen up, Edna,” Mother said, speaking around her toothbrush.

“I'll stay with Fredek,” Auntie Edna said.

“Oh, come on. Fredek doesn't need you to watch him, and Vasilli likes you,” Mother said.

“I'll just stay here,” Auntie Edna said again.

I wanted to like Auntie Edna for the way she cared for Fredek when he was sick. But at other times she was mean to him. I didn't understand her.

“Captain Vrushin isn't going to hurt you,” Auntie Paula said. Now she was talking around her toothbrush, and Mother was at the basin washing under her arms. “He's just a big, friendly, shy boy in a strange country,” she went on. I found the idea of the tall captain described as a shy boy amusing. But he really was shy, and I had never heard of a shy adult before. “He could be the key to our getting food, as well as some medicine for Fredek. You know, it never hurts to have powerful friends.” This I understood.

“And we'll have some fun for a change,” Mother said.

“I'll stay with Fredek,” Miss Bronia said, coming into the room.

“Fredek's asleep. He doesn't need anyone watching him,” Mother said. “We'll all be right in the next room. Look, he's bringing his friend, and Paula and I don't want to be two-on-two with them. Come on, Edna … Bronia.”

“There's safety in numbers,” Auntie Paula added with a little laugh.

Auntie Edna sighed and stood up. She walked to the basin and began brushing her teeth. Mother and Auntie Paula were putting on clean blouses.

When the three mothers had returned to the front room, Miss Bronia took off her sweater and proceeded to wash like
the others. We were all well accustomed by then to seeing each other in our underwear, but this was the first time I noticed how much larger and rounder Miss Bronia's breasts were in her pink brassiere than those of the others. It was pleasurable looking at them.

At some point during all this, Sonya had stopped reading, and now she casually followed Miss Bronia into the outer room. I followed Sonya. The mothers had cleared the tea things from the table. Auntie Paula was washing cups and glasses in the basin and setting them out on a towel to dry, and Auntie Edna had laid a yellow dishtowel with blue flowers around the edges, in the center of the taller table. Mother was dripping candle wax onto a dish to make the candle stand up. They were all moving quickly, as though in a hurry.

“You two go to bed,” Auntie Paula said when she noticed Sonya and me in the room.

“Yes, Yulek, go to bed,” Mother chimed in. “And don't listen.”

“He's coming back, isn't he,” Sonya said to her mother. “He's bringing other men back with him, and you're going to have a party, aren't you?”

“We're not going to have a party,” Auntie Paula said. “He's coming back with some ham for us, and he's bringing the man who's in charge of supplies with him. When you wake up tomorrow, we'll have ham for breakfast.”

“I'm old enough to stay.”

“Go to bed, Sonya. You have to take care of Yulek.”

“Yulek doesn't need me to go to bed. And it's not my bedtime.”

“You can lie down and read.”

“Whatever you're going to be doing, that you don't want me to see, you can see and hear perfectly well from the other room, you know. There isn't any door.”

“We're not going to be doing anything.”

“Then there's no reason I can't stay.”

“There is a reason, Sonya.”

“And what's that?”

“Because I said so.”

“That's not a reason.”

“That is a reason, and it's all the reason you need.”

Sonya turned on her heel and marched into the inner room where I had preceded her and was now peeking out from around the side of the arch.

“Go put on your nightshirt,” she ordered me.

Sonya's angry attitude surprised me. It certainly wasn't my fault that her mother wouldn't let her stay with the grownups. Why should she be angry with me? But I obeyed and ducked under the blanket of my pallet to change into my nightshirt.

Auntie Edna came in to check again on Fredek, who was asleep. She felt his neck with the back of her fingers and gave a sigh.

Then there was a knock on the door. Auntie Edna looked back into the outer room, straightened her blouse, then started back. I saw Mother cross to the door, but the door, like the table, was out of my field of vision. I heard Capt. Vrushin's voice, “Basia!” With the access on the last a.

“Ah, Vasilli,” Mother said, and then some things were said in Russian too quietly for me to hear. I heard another man's voice and the name Boris. Boris was my own middle name, but Capt. Vrushin again pronounced it with accent on the last syllable.

Then the three of them crossed the part of the room that I could see, for further introductions at the table. The brief glimpse I had of the second man showed me that he wasn't as tall or as thin as Captain Vrushin but he had a very large head with a big forehead and a very small face below it. Like his companion's, Comrade Captain Boris's hair was curly on top and cropped short on the sides and back, except that his was quite blond.

He carried a large covered basket in his left hand, with his right stretched out in greeting, and he seemed almost to be
skipping across the room in his eagerness. The handshaking took place outside my line of vision, but his voice was high and rasping, as though he had a sore throat. He sounded as though he was trying to shout, but his voice wasn't loud enough.

Then there were ooh's and aah's, followed by a very appreciative oooooh from the mothers as, I suppose, the basket's contents were revealed. The last oooooh, I speculated, must have been over something particularly good, of which, hopefully, there would be some left in the morning.

I could hear Fredek's and my steamer trunk being dragged over the floor and Captain Boris's—I assumed him to be a captain like his friend—high and raspy laughter.

There was a clink of glasses, in fact several clinks, followed by more laughter. Miss Bronia hadn't made any more tea, so it must have been something that Captain Boris had brought in that basket. The talk was too quiet for me to make anything out, but there was a great amount of laughter.

Sonya was sitting on her pallet, still in her clothes, but she had taken off her shoes and stocks and was cutting her toenails with a pair of nail scissors. “What are you looking at?” she demanded.

“I'm just looking at you cutting your nails,” I answered

“Don't look at my feet!” she hissed, making a face at me.

I turned away. I didn't understand Sonya.

Now Comrade Captain Boris had begun to sing. I recognize his high, raspy voice singing some Russian song. When he had finished, there was some clapping, then more clinking of glasses. Mother said something in Russian, and Captain Boris began another song, one I recognized as a song Grandmother would sing sometimes. Then Mother joined in the song. But Mother could not carry a tune, and soon they both stopped, followed by more laughter.

Then someone was playing a harmonica. There was the shuffling of feet and suddenly Mother and Captain Boris danced into my field of vision through the archway. It was a
fast tune and Captain Boris looked as if he was trying to push Mother to dance faster. Instead of extending his left arm, as I'd seen others do, he had tucked it in close to his chest, with Mother's hand in his, and, for the short moment that I could see them before they danced out of sight again, he did seem to be actually pushing her around the floor with a very serious expression on his face.

There was more laughter and clapping and then Captain Boris danced into sight again, but this time breathing hard and pushing Miss Bronia. He held her tight in his arms, too, and I could see Miss Bronia's legs trying to keep up, but tripping and her being held up by the comrade captain. I could see that Miss Bronia wasn't enjoying this as much as Mother had appeared to. But her turn was soon over and then Captain Boris pushed Auntie Edna onto my stage and then off again. Auntie Edna was much taller than he was, and the impression I had after my brief glimpse of the two of them was of a fat little boy hugging his mother around the waist.