Mother and Me (6 page)

“Stop picking your knee!” Mother said, louder than I'm sure she meant to. I swung my feet back and forth above the floor and switched to sucking my lower lip.

Then we heard a loud whistle. It was followed by a loud crash, and our three chairs lifted a little ways off the floor. I knew all about bombs. Kiki had told me about the exploding shells the cannons fired in the Big War twenty years before. Her brother had been a soldier then and buildings that he was in shook just like this.

“My God! What are they doing?” Mother said. She ran through the salon and began opening the balcony doors. I saw Marta take off after her, and I ran after Marta. She held Mother around the waist and was pulling her away from the doors. Marta, I realized, was much bigger than Mother. I had always thought of Mother as tall, because she was taller than Kiki.

“Madam must come away from the balcony,” Marta was saying in the awkward, third-person way that Polish grammar does those things. I was in a bind. I was wishing Mother
would open the balcony doors with their blackout paper so I could see what was happening in the street. On the other hand I was happy to see Mother admonished. Then I remembered Kiki's command to love my mother, and I realized I wasn't doing that.

Then our house shook again. The sound and the shaking were bigger than before. A chunk of plaster, the size of my green table, fell from the ceiling between me and the two grownups. I looked at Mother and Marta standing there together and they looked at me as though there were a crater between us. None of us seemed able to move.

Then I was the one who had crossed it. I had crossed the three or four feet of salon floor and crumbled plaster that had separated us and I was kicking at Mother's legs.

“What are you doing? Yulian, Yulian, what are you doing? Stop that, Yulian! Yulian, stop it!” Mother and Marta were both shouting. I remembered the way I had been kicking Susan in that same room when I was smaller, and I stopped and ran back to my room and jumped onto Kiki's bed. I was crying from the pain and from the embarrassment, and I had my eyes shut tightly. There were hands picking me up, and when I smelled my mother's perfume close to me I pushed away. I didn't want to be hitting her any more, but I was pushing with my hands wide open in the dark behind my closed eyelids. Then she released me, and I felt Marta's large, dry hands on my sides, and I let her pick me up and hold me to her.

I pressed my face hard against her neck and wondered why I had done what I had. Why did I hate my mother so? Why did it please me when she told stories wrong? Why was I happy to see Marta holding her and her thrashing around like that? And, of course, why had I started kicking her legs without any thought even about what I was doing? I knew it wasn't a Christian thing to do—I would be punished for it some day. Was it because I was really Jewish, and I could pretend to be a
Catholic, but could never really be one because Jews had bad in them? Or was it from touching my birdie?

Kiki would explain it all to me when she joined us. I had never told her about touching my birdie. How do you explain to someone why you persisted in doing something that gave absolutely no reward, but only did something terrible, like make you go crazy? It was a crazy thing to do, and to do it, you had to be a little crazy already. So maybe it was the Jewish that made you a little crazy to start with—crazy enough to touch your birdie when you knew it would make you more crazy. But then, if that were so, then all Jewish men would be crazy. How did I know they weren't? The only Jewish men I knew were Lolek and my late grandfather. Was Lolek crazy? He certainly wasn't crazy like my Uncle Benek—I had forgotten that I knew Uncle Benek too, and he certainly was crazy—everyone knew that. But then, my grandfather certainly hadn't been crazy. So I figured that theory wasn't right.

But I would tell Kiki when I saw her tomorrow or the next day. And I would stop touching my birdie. Yes, that was what I would do. I could do it. Poland was at war. Soldiers were marching into battle to be shot at, maybe killed, by the Germans. They were sleeping in tents on blankets on the ground. I could certainly discipline myself enough to never touch my birdie again. Then I could help Kiki serve food to soldiers at the railroad station, as she had done during the World War. I would not go crazy, but be available to serve my country.

No, I would not tell Kiki about touching my birdie. As long as I was going to stop it, it would be all right, and I wouldn't need to talk to anyone about it, would I? And it would remain my great secret.

The all-clear had sounded some while ago, and I realized Marta must be tired of holding me. Besides, I was, in a sense, a soldier now on a special, secret mission. I disengaged myself from her arms, and she lowered me to the floor. Mother was not in the room.

I had not asked God for a sign. I hadn't known that to be negotiable. Nevertheless, I received one. On our dining room table, rested a street lamp.

Our dining room table was on the floor now, or most of it, anyway, one leg still upright and the tracks connecting the two sliding halves and supporting the leaves, shattered. And on top of our splintered table lay a street lamp.

We were on the fourth floor, and it had found its way to our dining room window and landed on our dining room table. It wasn't the entire street lamp. But it was the important part, the part that actually lit up and was so high above the sidewalk that you could never hope to touch it. And there it was with its iron parts that you could never get close enough to see properly, shaped to look like leaves along a tree branch and the glass globe all broken, and thick, golden wire in colored wrapping, and the remains of the biggest light bulb I had ever seen.

I knew it was for me—what would either Mother nor Marta want with a street lamp? God had found my new determination pleasing, and was both telling me so and rewarding me for it. Marta was already sweeping up the broken glass and wood, but I knew she wouldn't be able to move my street lamp.

There were pieces of glass, curved ones from the lamp and flat ones from our window, imbedded in the plaster walls. It was so real.

I approached the street lamp for a closer look. “Don't touch it!” Marta shouted. “It could still have electricity in it!” I backed off at her command, though I doubted her reasoning. It could not have flown all this way from the street, crashed through our window, shattered our dining room table, and still have electricity left in it. Besides, God would not have given it to me in that condition.

On the other hand, it suddenly occurred to me, maybe that was exactly what God was doing. I had resolved not to ever touch my birdie again, and God was testing me by giving me something which, if I touched it just the slightest, would kill
me. It wasn't that God was trying to kill me, I understood. What God was actually doing was showing His confidence in me by tempting me with something that would not just make me crazy some time in the future from excessive touching, but could make me dead on the spot. And He knew and I knew that I would not touch it.

I watched Marta sweep carefully around it, leaving a shadow of debris on the floor where she would not let her broom come too close. My fingers ached to run over the carved metal, my eyes to feast close up on the broken giant light bulb. But I knew I must resist it. Whether it had electricity in it or not, I did not know. But I knew God wanted me to perform this exercise. If Kiki only knew! I couldn't wait to tell her.

Then I helped Marta clean up the room. We leaned the broken parts of the tabletop against a wall, and Marta found a box to hold all the splinters. We put new blackout paper over the broken window. When it was all done, I went back to my room. I didn't need anyone to tell me what to do this time. I lay down on my bed and thought about my street lamp and God and his testing of me and my vow and my new awareness of my senseless hostility towards Mother which I was about to change, and how grown up I had become in that one morning.

Marta woke me up for lunch. She had set places for the two of us at the kitchen table. Mother ate off a tray in her bedroom. It occurred to me to feel sorry for her eating alone after the way I had treated her. I couldn't tell whether I was actually feeling sorry for her or just knew that I should be. I wondered when we were supposed to start our trip, and when Kiki would be joining us.

It was almost my bedtime when Mother and I finally left the house. She had two suitcases, I had the one she had packed for me. Marta had come out and found us a doroshka. It had taken her some time. With cars, including taxis, all mobilized for military use, doroshkas were in great demand. Then Marta
had hugged me, and she and Mother had even hugged each other briefly.

There were no lights on, and it was difficult to see anything. There were holes in streets and buildings. Some buildings, I could see, had spilled into the street, and there were always people doing something there. As we passed one place like that, Mother said, “Don't look, Yulian,” and covered my eyes with her hand. I struggled to see, but couldn't see anything anyway. In one street we had to turn around and go a different way because the street was blocked by fire trucks and a crowd of people.

I was pretty sure we weren't heading for the railroad station. Then I recognized where we were; we were at Fredek's house. In some way, I knew, Fredek, the one whom I always had to help catch and hold people in the park so he could kick them in the belly, but never could find, was my cousin, though how we were actually related, I had no idea. If we were going on a trip with Fredek, I wasn't happy at the prospect. I just hoped his governess, Miss Frania, hadn't gone away too.

Fredek's apartment was full of people. Two or three were men, and I wondered why they weren't in the army fighting the Germans. The rest were all women. When the doroshka driver had dropped our bags in the hall and Mother paid him, Auntie Edna, Fredek's mother, came into the hall to greet us. She was much taller than Mother, with a long face and black hair rolled around her head. She and Mother didn't kiss. “Sasha and Renia are here,” was all I heard Auntie Edna say in the way of greeting. She said it in a low voice as though it were something private between them. Mother said, “Good.” Auntie Edna didn't seem to take notice of me. Mother was holding my hand.

The others stood in groups talking. Nobody sat. They talked in urgent voices, and some people would move from one group to another and continue talking as though they had been there all along. I wasn't hearing words, but only the urgency. Mother and Auntie Edna separated, joining different groups. Mother
and I walked up to one group in the dining room, and no one seemed to greet us, but Mother was immediately in the conversation. Everyone seemed to be smoking. I didn't see Fredek anywhere, but with all the adults standing, I wasn't surprised.

There was one man sitting down. He was very old and bald, and had a little black cap, like the one my grandfather had used to wear, on the back of his bald head. He was sitting at the dining room table eating boiled chicken from a soup bowl. His hands shook. I had never seen that before and watched him with interest. He smiled at me with gold teeth and beckoned with a bony, shaking finger. I turned away pretending I hadn't seen.

Then Mother and I moved to another group. “Edna and I are going together,” I heard Mother say. “I think Renia will come with us.” Suddenly panic gripped me. She had not mentioned either me or Fredek. Would we be left here with the strangers? I began listening intently. “We have a truck,” she went on. “It's a van from the factory. Lolek didn't give it to the army. He told them it was on a trip to Posnan and hadn't come back.”

“We're going with the Rosenbaums,” a woman said. “They have a carriage, and the army didn't know they had a horse.”

“Which way are you going to go?” somebody else asked.

“We're going south, Fina and I,” the woman said. “Boris called me from the barracks and said to go south.”

“Bolek said we should go east,” another woman said.

“Toward Russia?”

“The Russians aren't going to do anything—they're afraid of the English.”

“The English, the English. Chamberlain won't do anything.”

“They have to. We have a defense pact with them.”

“England and France will declare war on Germany tomorrow, you'll see.”

“Lolek said we should go south too,” Mother said. She and the woman who was going in the carriage immediately moved away from the group and formed a group of their own.

“Major Solecki and his wife are going south too,” the woman said. “He has to report to the barracks in Lublin.”

“Are they here?” Mother asked. I was listening carefully for any mention of me.

“They're in the living room,” the woman said.

Then Fredek was suddenly by my side. “That's the German ambassador,” he said. I looked around in surprise. Then I saw him indicating the old man eating the chicken. “We're holding him prisoner until they return our ambassador from Berlin. Then we'll shoot him.”

I knew Fredek was making it up, but I glanced at the old man again. He gave me another gold-toothed smile and held up a dripping chicken leg. I quickly turned away.

“He wants you to eat that chicken leg,” Fredek said, “but it's poisoned. Go take it from him and pretend like you're eating it while I sneak up behind him with a gun. My father gave me a real gun before he went to the war. They gave him two guns by mistake, and he gave one of them to me.”

Fredek's victims were always imaginary, but this one was real. I didn't want to go near the old man. “Mommy says I can't let go of her hand,” I lied.

“Auntie Barbara,” he said referring to Mother, “ is a German spy. Germans always use women as spies because no one suspects them. We'll shoot her together with him. We'll ask if they want blindfolds and cigarettes, and if they say yes, we won't give them any.”

The part about blindfolds and cigarettes I didn't understand, though I realized that my knowledge of things like executions was not as thorough as my cousin's. I wondered if Fredek knew what the plans for us were.