Mother and Me (53 page)

But what about Mother's faith? My faith, I realized, would have to be strong enough to protect us both. Yes, I had to believe that it would—yes, it would. “Would you like to lean on my shoulder?” I asked.

Mother smiled for the first time. “No, thank you, Yulian. You know, my leg doesn't hurt as much any more.”

I could see that she was walking a little more easily now, and the grim expression was gone from her face. It must have been the pain, I now realized, not anger at me, that I had seen on Mother's face. And only when I felt her squeeze back, did I realize that I had taken Mother's free hand in my own.

“What a pair of adventurers we are,” Mother said. All I could do was nod, trying not to show the pleasure I was suddenly feeling. Then I let my mother's hand go and resumed breaking the trail for her.

“No,” Mother said, taking hold of my hand again. “I'd rather hold your hand now.” We began walking side by side. It was getting dark, though. The trees around us no longer had definition, but were simply black lines across a gray background. Somewhere there must have been a moon, because there was enough light reflecting from the clouds overhead and the snow underfoot to keep it from being pitch black. The ice and snow wafers on the banks of the stream picked up glimmers of light that told me where the stream was. At times, I could hear it.

It had grown chilly, and I had re-tied the piece of clothesline around my jacket. I was tired too, and aware again of my hunger. I had found a stick like Mother's which made the walking somewhat easier. But I soon walked into a low-hanging branch that hit me across the forehead, and the stick now had to become a shield protecting my face.

Now Mother was getting ahead of me. “Walk behind me. It'll be easier,” she said. I had taken my turn, a long one, breaking the trail, so it was all right to walk behind Mother now. Mother had picked up a third stick, a long, thin one, of which we now each held one end in our free hand so as not to become separated.

“Yulian!” Mother suddenly said, “I'm sure we're walking uphill.”

I hadn't noticed, so it certainly couldn't have been much of an incline.

“Where's the stream?” she asked with alarm.

Now I understood her concern—water didn't flow uphill.

We stopped. Peering to our left, where the stream had been all along, I could see no sign of it. “I don't see it,” I said.

“We haven't lost it, you know,” Mother was saying. “It has to be somewhere over in that direction and not far away. We'll find it.”

We turned to our left and began pushing our way through the underbrush. “Let me go first,” Mother said, as she began poking the snow ahead of her with her pole. “We wouldn't want to fall into it.” For some reason, I found this idea extremely funny, though I didn't have the energy to laugh.

Then I heard Mother cry, “Aaaaah!” and saw her trip over something under the snow. There was a second cry when she landed, and I realized that she must have fallen on her hurt leg. I knew what a hurt on top of a hurt felt like.

I reached down to help Mother stand up, but instead of trying, she was pounding the snow with her fist and forearm, and yelling words I didn't know. There were tears running down her face at the same time.

I grew afraid. I remembered how she had been that last day in Warsaw when Marta had had to hold her to restrain her from rushing out onto the balcony in the middle of an air raid. But Mother quickly stopped herself.

I tried again to help her stand up, but she waved me off. That grim expression was on her face again, but I knew now that it had nothing to do with me. When she started to walk, I saw that she was in as much pain as she had been earlier.

We found the stream with the path beside it in a few more strides and resumed following it.

We came to a large log, like the one on which we had sat down earlier to eat our lunch. “Can we sit down and rest?” I asked. “I'm a little tired.” Actually I was more than a little tired.

Mother surprised me by saying no. “If we sit down, we will freeze,” she explained. “Would you like to hear a story?”

I could tell that she was speaking through clenched teeth. It must have been because of the pain. “No, thank you,” I said. Besides, I remembered how she had butchered “Three Little Pigs,” that afternoon in Warsaw, and I didn't want to see her embarrass herself now. But my legs were growing heavy.

Then the woods opened up. There was a clearing in front of us—a flat expanse of snow made to sparkle by a moon that I could now see.

“Stop!” Mother suddenly said, as I was about to step onto the clearing. “That's a pond, and I don't know how strong the ice is.”

I had heard numerous tales about boys skating on ponds that they weren't supposed to be on and falling through the ice.

“We have to walk carefully around the edge to see where the stream comes out,” Mother said. I could see our stream disappear under the snow.

We set out to circle the pond. It was slow going, with Mother leading the way, poking the snow with her stick to make sure we stayed on solid land. The moon went behind a cloud, making the going more difficult for a while.

“There it is!” Mother said. “There's the stream.” Now I could see a trench in the ground with the ice wafers as before.

“Oh, no,” Mother said, stopping at the edge of the stream. Standing beside her now, I could see it too. It was our footprints on the other side of the stream and turning to circle the pond. “We've gone all the way around the pond,” I said.

“How stupid of me!” Mother said angrily. “I should have known. Streams go into ponds—they don't come out.”

“Does that mean we're lost?” I asked.

Mother didn't answer. In the moonlight, I could see her biting her lower lip.

“We're lost, aren't we?” And suddenly, my use of that “1” word opened the lock on a torrent of emotions born of a lifetime of “Hanzel and Gretel” and “Little Red Riding Hood,” and, just as suddenly, my self-control left me. “We're lost,” I wailed, and now stark terror overcame me, and I began to cry.

I felt Mother wrap her arms around me. She was saying something in a soothing tone, and I wasn't listening to the words, but burying my face in the softness of her coat, where I felt much safer.

Then I realized that Mother wasn't saying not to cry. “Go ahead cry, cry,” she was saying. “You've been brave all day, my little soldier. Now you need to cry.” Mother was urging me to cry, and I was obliging her with great, palpable sobs.

We stood that way for, I have no idea how long. And then we were walking again, my mother's arm around my shoulders, and me feeling the unnatural weight shift as Mother managed her hurt leg through the snow. “We're going to go this way. I have a feeling that this is the way to the village,” Mother said in a reassuring tone. “You know, mothers have a special sense of direction, and it tells me that it's this way.” I followed the pressure of her arm without question.

But it was difficult to lift my feet now, and I was beginning to stumble. “Couldn't we rest a bit when we find a place to sit?” I pleaded.

Mother didn't answer me as we kept walking. Now it was my legs that were turning to lead. “I have to stop,” I said.

Mother again didn't answer. We kept walking.

“Can't we sit down for a minute,” I pleaded. “Then we'll have more energy to go on.”

“If we sit down, we could freeze. We have to keep going.”

“I can't keep going. I can't walk any farther,” I pleaded.

“Do you know what soldiers do when they can't march any further?”

“No.”

“Of course you do—they sing. Let's sing a marching song. Start a marching song.”

I, of course knew a number of marching songs, but none of them came to my mind, and I didn't feel like singing anyway.

Now Mother began to sing a soldiers' song that Kiki and I knew. Except that she couldn't keep the tune, and in place
of some words, she just sang la, la, la, which I didn't consider appropriate for a soldiers' marching song and was now compelled to correct.

We sang that song through twice, which did take my mind off my legs, and then every other marching song I knew, I don't know how many times. We sang songs that weren't meant for marching and songs that Mother knew and I learned and I suddenly found us shuffling our way along a packed-snow road with a group of thatch-roofed cottages clearly outlined against the night sky in front of us. Mother's arm was across my back, and she was pushing me forward.

I was bewildered. It was as though I had been asleep, except that everyone knows that you can't be asleep at the same time that you're walking. I wondered if some spell hadn't been involved.

The cottages were arranged in rows on both sides of the road. There were no lights in any of the windows, but smoke was rising from all their chimneys.

We shuffled to the door of the first cottage we came to. Mother knocked. She didn't knock politely with her knuckles, but pounded with the side of her fist.

We waited a while before someone came to the door. A man with a quilt wrapped around his shoulders and bare feet, opened the door a crack and looked quizzically at us.

“We've just come from Poland,” Mother said.

I couldn't understand the question he asked in response. It wasn't Polish, Ukrainian, or Russian.

“Poland,” Mother enunciated in Polish, then in Russian. She was leaning with her hand against the door.

Now there was a woman in a quilt standing behind the man, saying something I couldn't understand. Then the door opened wider. Mother would have fallen, except that the man caught her. Then the woman was supporting Mother staggering across the room while the man picked me up off my feet. With my weight off them, my feet suddenly began to ache terribly.

Then I was sitting on something very warm, about three feet off the floor, and drinking a warm cup of that same cheesy-tasting milk I had had the night before—was it only the night before?—and the woman in the quilt was washing Mother's hurt leg, accompanying it with a stream of words, as Mother sat in a chair across the room. Then I woke up again and it was daylight, and Meesh was in my arms.

There were two men standing just inside the front door, talking to Mother. One was a policeman in a dark blue uniform with a big black gun holster in his belt. He had a large round head and his hair was cut close to his scalp. Policemen in Hungary, I deduced, didn't look much different from policemen in Poland.

The other was a civilian. He was much shorter than the policeman and somewhat older, with gray hair and a round face. Over his suit, he had on something I had never seen before, a shiny, all-leather overcoat. And on his head there was a funny green hat with what looked like a little shaving brush stuck in the hatband. He had on brown leather gloves, and under his hat, his left ear stuck straight out from his head.

He spoke quietly with Mother for some minutes, then he tipped his hat and they left.

“Ah, you're awake, my sleepy hero,” Mother said, turning to me.

What I had been sleeping on seemed to actually be a part of the great iron stove, of which the other end now held a fire with a steaming kettle on top of it. There was warmth coming up through my bedding. The outer layers of the clothes that I had been wearing hung over two chairs in front of that stove. Mother had on what she had worn yesterday, except that the tear in her stocking had been sewn up in large stitches with a coarse thread.

She limped over to where I was sitting and immediately felt my forehead. “How do you feel?” she asked.

I felt fine and told her so. Mother made a face and felt my forehead again. “You feel warm,” she said.

The woman who had tended to Mother's leg last night came over and pressed the back of her hand against the side of my neck. She was smaller than Mother, but looked older, and had small dark eyes. She said something in her language, then pulled down the corners of her mouth and shook her head.

“Does he feel hot?” Mother asked.

“No hot,” the woman said in Polish, shaking her head again. Then she added some more words in her language and stepped to the far end of the stove. She slid a black pot from the middle of the stove to the hot end and stirred the contents.

“The police knew right away that we were here,” Mother said. I assumed she was speaking to the woman.

“Police,” the woman said, nodding her head. “Hungary police.”

“Mr. Vostokos speaks excellent Polish. He must have lived in Poland at some time.”

The woman said something in her language.

Mother asked in Russian if the woman spoke that language.

“No Ruski—Hungarian police,” the woman said.

Mother asked if she spoke German.

“No German,” the woman said emphatically.

“Thank you.” I could tell that Mother had given up on verbal communication and now turned her attention back to me. “You slept well,” she said in a jolly tone, and she seemed especially eager to talk. “There is a train station here,” she said with some excitement. “Very soon we will be in Budapest, and there we'll stay at a big hotel where it's warm and one can order anything one wants to eat. Here, put these on.” She had taken a change of underwear from my backpack, along with a toothbrush. “We just have to stop at the police station to register, and Mr. Vostokos couldn't believe that we escaped from the Bolsheviks the way we did.”

I saw the woman bring the wooden spoon to her mouth and taste what was in the pot. I hoped that was breakfast because I was suddenly starving. I ducked under my quilt to change clothes. Meesh was under the quilt with me, and I told him that I would explain to him all about where we were and what we were doing after breakfast. I really didn't feel like talking to him at the moment, and felt a little guilty about it. But I wanted my breakfast and to get on to Budapest.