Mother and Me (46 page)

Then I realized that Mother was trying to wake me up. “We have to catch a train,” she was saying, and my first thought was about the coincidence of my dreaming about missing a train when, in reality, we did have to catch one.

I didn't want to wake up. The lights in our room were on and hurting my eyes while outside it was deep dark, and it wasn't morning. On the other hand, I didn't want to go back to that dream.

“You have to dress quickly and quietly,” Mother was saying.

I racked my brain to remember where we were supposed to be going. It was February now, three weeks after my birthday and baby Nadia's sickness. Nadia was well now, and Mademoiselle and I had done our daily walking and French lessons. Except that we were now walking both mornings and afternoons. We walked all over town with no particular goal except
the exercise itself. “Shall we turn to the right here or the left?” Mademoiselle would ask me in French, and I would answer in that same language that had grown considerably less foreign. “This is a new street,” I might say or, “Let's go see that brown cat in the window.”

Sometimes Mademoiselle would suddenly say, “Let's cross the street now,” and quickly lead me by the hand to the other sidewalk. It did not take me long to realize that this was when we saw Russian soldiers approaching us on the sidewalk, and then, if I spotted them first, I would say it and lead her across. I thought this was funny, but Mademoiselle didn't.

The afternoon walks had been difficult at first—difficult for me, that is, not for Mademoiselle, whose spindly legs seemed to know no fatigue. “Madame and I walked all over Paris, Vienna, London, Berlin, Budapest….” she had told me more than once. But by now I had no trouble keeping up with her long stride, and would sometimes even race ahead to the corner. Meesh I would bring only in the morning because he needed an afternoon nap to recover from the morning's outing. The decision had been mine, but Mademoiselle had agreed heartily, as I had known that she would. Our gin rummy games had to be shortened to only a few hands just before Mother came home, but that didn't really bother me.

But now I could not remember either Mother or Mademoiselle mentioning a trip of any sort.

“Go down the hall quietly because people are asleep,” Mother instructed me. “Do both number one and number two, wash your hands and face, brush your teeth, comb your hair, and come back as quickly as you can.”

It was only now that I became aware of the strange way that Mother was dressed. She had on the blue wool dress that she now always wore, but over it she had put a black skirt almost to her ankles and a gray knit cardigan that was so big that she had it wrapped almost twice around her. On her head was a kerchief tied peasant-style under her chin, and her face was
pale and bare of any makeup. Her black eyelashes and brows were now a translucent brown and her lips a light pink. I had never seen Mother look so soft or, I decided, so beautiful.

“You must hurry now,” she said, and in a moment I was making my unsteady way down the hall to the bathroom.

When I returned, Mother wasn't in the room, but she had laid some clothes out on my bed. Ordinarily I would have understood them as clothes I was supposed to put on, except that this time she had given me a choice of my gray or my brown pants, three different shirts, and two pairs of knee socks. I didn't normally get to select what to put on, and why she should have given me such a choice now, I did not understand.

A week or two earlier, Mother had brought home for me a pair of brown lace-up boots that came up over my ankles. At first, I had been excited by their military look, but I soon found that their top edges chafed my lower legs when Mademoiselle and I walked. Mother had insisted that I wear them every day till they no longer chafed. Now they were standing in front of my bed, and I saw that Mother had scuffed them so that they no longer looked new. From that and my mother's get-up, I deduced that we were disguising ourselves as peasants, though how giving me a choice of clothes went with that, was still a mystery.

I remembered having been criticized before for creating an unacceptable color combination, so I picked the brown pants and the blue shirt because they were both fairly dark and thus seemed the closest in color. Of the knee socks, the red ones were darker than the tan, so I selected them as well.

I was just beginning the laborious process of lacing up my first boot, when Mother came quietly back into the room. She carried a brown paper bag, filled, I guessed, with food for our trip.

“Oh no, Yulek, you must put them all on,” she said.

“All?”

“Yes, and you must put the gray pants on first because I sewed something into the back pocket.”

Now I had two big questions to ask, and the mysterious contents of my pocket won out over the two pairs of pants. “What did you sew into the pocket?” I asked.

“Your father's watch.”

For a moment I thought that she had somehow retrieved the waterproof shock-resistant, and anti-magnetic wristwatch that Lolek had taken from me in Warsaw, but then I remembered the gold pocket watch that had been my real father's and which had hung under a little glass dome in my Warsaw bedroom. Some day when I was an adult, I had been told numerous times, I would be old enough to wear it in my own vest pocket. But, except for the time Mother had shown it to Col. Bawatchov, I hadn't given any thought to the watch since leaving Warsaw.

Mother held up the gray pants and showed me the little lump in the back pocket. There must have been surprise on my face, because her own face grew very serious as she said, “I think you're old enough to wear it now.”

I tried to compose my face into an equally appropriate expression and proceeded to put on the various layers of clothes.

A little later, as I sat on my bed munching my breakfast of bread and cheese, Mother sat down at the table in her long skirt and babushka scarf and began writing. “I'm writing a note to Mademoiselle,” she said. “She doesn't know that we're leaving today. Do you want me to add anything from you?”

The idea of Mademoiselle coming later that morning to find us gone, saddened me. And suddenly I realized that I was never going to see Mademoiselle again. This wasn't like taking the train to visit Grandmother and then coming back a week later to the same people you had left. Neither Mademoiselle nor Miss Vanda nor Miss Bronia or Kiki or Fredek or Mr. Lupicki or the Aunties or Sonya or Col. Bawatchov or anyone else I had ever known, would I ever see again. It was as though they all came into my life through one door and out through another. That, I knew, was the nature of wartime. And the crazy thing
was that the one I would miss the most would not be Kiki or Miss Bronia, but Mademoiselle.

I instantly felt disloyal to Kiki—Kiki who had lived with me day and night ever since I could remember, who had been almost my entire world and was so good and so religious. But Mademoiselle, with her funny talk of operas that weren't funny at all and dress-up balls that had no interest for me and her fear of the Russians and the Germans and her silly jealousy of the attention I paid to Meesh, had somehow worked her way the deepest into my heart.

“Write Julien dit au revoir,” I said. I would also have added, I love you, but I couldn't say it in front of Mother.

“How do you spell that?” Mother asked. I said that I didn't know.

“Here's a handkerchief to blow your nose in,” Mother said a few minutes later, stuffing one into my pants pocket. “And don't forget your rosary,” holding that out to me. I put it in my pocket reverently.

I also picked the metal washer, that I had grown so adept at making appear and disappear, off the table.

“What do you want that for?” Mother asked.

I hesitated. Finally I ventured, “I like it,” for want of a better reason to give.

“All right,” Mother said, “and here is your knife.” Mother held up the pocket knife she had taken from me while waiting for Mr. Lupicki's bus. She held it up by one end the way my schoolteacher used to hold up a piece of chalk or a pencil when she wanted our attention.

I tried to maintain a perfectly straight face as I took it from her hand and slipped it into my pocket as well. However, I had to admit to a certain quickening of my heartbeat and a sense of growing a few centimeters taller.

There seemed to be one entirely new article of clothing to go over my three shirts and two pairs of pants. This was a strange, bulky coat with a shiny, dark finish, that Mother now
held up for me to put on. Only when I went to put my arms in the sleeves, did I recognize it as Mother's mink jacket turned inside out.

Those few centimeters of stature that I had just gained, quickly dissipated when I sniffed the scent of Mother's perfume on my new garment. I must have telegraphed my concern because Mother quickly said, “That scent will go away as soon as we step outside.” Then she tied a piece of clothesline around my waist, which helped some to disguise the feminine nature of the garment. With the final addition of a canvas backpack, like solders' knap-sacks, Mother now produced for me to put on, I felt the jacket's offensive gender thoroughly neutralized.

With gloves, a knit cap on my head, and Meesh tucked into the crook of my well-padded arm, I was ready to go. “Do we look like two peasants?” Mother asked laughing, as she slipped on her karakul coat, turned inside out as well, and tied it with clothesline. In her hand she held a partially filled burlap bag. Taking my hand, she led me to the mirror on our wall.

I pulled my hand free and hooked it, instead, around her arm the way grownups do. “Three peasants,” I corrected her, lifting Meesh to my shoulder level.

“Three peasants,” Mother agreed. In the mirror, I could see Mother's belongings scattered about the room—her suits and dresses, her shoes, her makeup bottles, the notorious leather suitcases.

“Most of the clothes won't fit Mademoiselle,” she said, “but she'll be able to sell them.”

Then, in the mirror, I saw Mother put her hand over the hand with which I was holding her arm. “Yulian,” she said, “we are starting out on a great adventure. We are going to do something the Russians say we are not supposed to do. Today is the first step in that adventure, and we are going disguised as peasants. Now, you know that peasants don't speak the same way we do, so you should not say anything so that you don't give us away. Do you understand?”

I nodded my head solemnly, and I could see Mother's approval in the mirror. Then she added, “You and I are partners in this adventure, you know, and we must take care of each other.”

We had been there before. I remembered how Mother had declared us partners just before taking my knife away from me while we waiting for Mr. Lupicki's bus, and I felt my sense of excitement cool considerably.

Then I saw Mother do something that threw the whole matter into confusion again. With a quick, uncertain motion, but wide enough to include us both, Mother made the sign of the cross. “Come quickly,” she said, pulling me out into the hall. “Don't look back.”

The street on the way to the station had been strangely light under the black sky. A gentle snow of large, widely spaced flakes had reflected the occasional lights to give an almost dusky sense as we hurried along. As we turned the corner into a commercial street, I was surprised to see queues of people already forming in front of certain still dark shops.

“Remember, you are not to talk to anyone,” Mother had said as we entered the train station. While I appreciated the importance of this plan, I found the admonition grating a little against my status as partner.

For the Polish-speaking soldier, Mother had produced a travel pass and asked him in Russian what part of the Soviet Union he came from, explaining that her own mother was from Moscow.

We had settled ourselves in the still-empty compartment of one train, Mother's sack on the seat beside me, when a woman wearing a red star on her hat with the gold hammer and sickle like Mr. Lupicki's, had walked along the platform announcing that the train's destination had just been changed and that the one we all wanted was about to leave on another track.

“Merde! Come on, we have to hurry,” Mother said, taking me by the hand again and picking up her bag. People poured from the train, funneling into the passageway toward the track indicated. As we ran with the others, Mother's head turned left and right as though looking for something.

Suddenly we found our way barred by a tall, gray-haired woman in an official-looking cap, who informed us in a loud voice that the train for which we were now running lacked an engine and could not move anywhere … at which point the train gave a jerk and pulled out of the station.

“They told me it didn't have an engine,” the woman whined.

“You could see right from here that it had an engine, you stupid!” somebody shouted.

“She's blind!” somebody else yelled.

“She's not blind. She just closes her eyes and opens her mouth and swallows everything they give her!”