Mother and Me (7 page)

Then I felt someone take my free hand. Looking around I saw a woman I had never seen before holding my hand in one of hers and Fredek's in the other. She had on a brown wool skirt and a light brown sweater.

“Yes, please take him, Miss Bronia,” Mother said.

I was gripped by terror. There had been a story that Kiki had told me once in which a wicked stepmother took her daughter by the hand into the woods and then gave her to an old couple to be their servant. “Here, take her,” Kiki had her saying.

“No!” I screamed and pulled my hand free. I wrapped my arm around Mother, still clutching her by one hand. I buried my face against her side. “Get away from me, you witch!”

The room must have grown silent. “Miss Bronia's not a witch,” Mother said, laughing.

“Don't touch me! Don't touch me!” I screamed in terror.

“Yulian!” Mother said sharply. “Yulian, control yourself!” She was squeezing my hand hard and she was hurting it, but it didn't matter.

“It's all right, Madam,” I heard the woman say behind me. “He's upset like everybody else.”

I felt Mother's hand loosen on mine immediately. The woman's voice was very gentle. Of course she wasn't a witch. There were no witches—I knew that. And I was suddenly terribly embarrassed by my outburst. I had made people think I still believed in witches.

“Yulian,” my mother said. The sharpness was gone from her voice, but her tone said, now behave properly.

“It's my fault. I surprised him,” Miss Bronia said.

I turned my head enough to look at her with one eye.

“Just give him a moment to adjust.”

She had brown, wavy hair, cut short, and there was a kind expression on her face. At her throat, she wore a little gold cross on a chain.

Of course she wasn't going to take me away from Mother. She must just be somebody's governess, and she was going to take me and Fredek to some other room while the grownups talked. Fredek was still holding her hand and must obviously have known her.

“I'm Sonya's governess,” Miss Bronia said to me. “I don't know if you remember Sonya. She's Fredek's other cousin. I
know Miss Yanka,” she added, referring to Kiki. “Now do you want to come with us to Fredek's room?” she asked me. Her tone implied that I was perfectly free to refuse. It was a totally novel experience, and, of course, I would not refuse that kind of appeal. She took my hand again, and the three of us went down the hall to Fredek's room.

Fredek's room was dark, except for the light coming through the partially open door. Somebody was lying on Fredek's bed, and Miss Bronia led us directly to the other bed in the room. “Take off your shoes,” she whispered, “and lie down on the bed. Fredek at this end and Yulian at that end.”

She spread a blanket over us and gave Fredek a hug. I both wanted a hug from Miss Bronia, too, and didn't want one. I didn't know if I would ever get used to war.

Miss Bronia whispered something to Fredek then came to my end of the bed. I was too embarrassed to hold my arms out for a hug as I did every night for Kiki. Miss Bronia sat down beside me. Then she reached down for my shoulders, and I knew she would hug me. I sat up, and she held me to her for a much longer time than I could ever remember being held by Kiki.

She was soft, and she smelled of a gentle cologne, not the strong perfume and cigarette smell that Mother had or the soap smell of Kiki. I was crying again, quietly, and I didn't think she heard me, but if she did, I sensed that it would be all right.

I remember waking for a few seconds as someone was carrying me in the elevator going down. I could tell by the scent that it was a man. Then I remember the dark inside the truck. It was totally dark. It was a dark I had never seen before. They had seated me in the corner, supported by walls in back and on my right. I was sitting on some kind of bench with a blanket wrapped around me. The truck was moving in the direction I was facing, over rough pavement, probably cobblestones. I didn't know who else was in the truck with me. I remembered Miss Bronia and hoped she was in the truck. I sniffed for her cologne, but smelled only cigarette smoke and heavy perfume.

Then I heard voices whispering. I couldn't make out the words. Sometimes the truck made a turn, and I'd have to catch my balance. There was a lip to the bench under me that I could hold on to. The truck, I sensed, must be moving very slowly. Sometimes it would stop. If it stopped for a long time, someone would groan, and someone else would go, “Shshshsh.”

When the truck was moving again, a woman said, “When we're stopped, we've got to be absolutely silent. There's not supposed to be anyone in the back of this truck. It's supposed to be a supply truck.” It was an older woman's voice, I was sure.

“We're supposed to be cabbages,” my mother said. I recognized her voice. There was quiet laughter. It was the way kids laughed behind their books in class so the teacher won't hear. I had never heard adults laughing that way. Then the
truck stopped, and everyone was quiet again. I was back asleep before we were moving again.

Later, when we were once more underway, I heard Fredek's voice. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said aloud.

“Did you bring something for him?” another woman asked.

“Like what?” I recognized Auntie Edna's voice in the dark.

“Each woman was supposed to be responsible for her own child,” the voice said. “Bronia doesn't know what you packed. She doesn't even know Yulek.” The mention of Miss Bronia's name was music to my ears. I had been afraid she wasn't along.

“What did you want me to bring?” Auntie Edna asked.

“All right, I have a hot water bottle,” the voice said, “but you'll have to buy me a new one.”

“You brought your hot water bottle?”

“It's for Sonya when she has cramps.”

“Sonya has cramps?” Auntie Edna said. “She's only five years older than Fredek.”

“Five and a half. And she does have cramps.”

“The hot water bottle will be fine.” That was Miss Bronia's voice, and it was honey to me. Now I heard some moving around in the dark.

“It's in my bag here somewhere.”

“I have to kaka,” Fredek wailed.

“God damn! Stop the truck! Somebody stop the damned truck!”

Somebody started banging on the front wall. I sat in my corner, wrapped in my blanket and the darkness, glad that it wasn't I who needed to go to the bathroom.

I felt the truck pull to one side, the side I was sitting on. Then it began to incline considerably. “We're going to roll over!” Auntie Edna cried, but at that moment it came to a lurching stop.

“I have to kaka,” Fredek sobbed as we waited for someone to open the door.

“For godsakes hurry up and open the door!” a voice said.

Then we heard somebody working the latch, and finally the door opened. A man's head and shoulders appeared in silhouette in the opening. I recognized the shape of a four-cornered, military hat on his head. “Is something wrong?” he asked in the formal tone of an employee.

“The children have to go to the bathroom,” a voice said. I recognized myself included in the statement and resented it. It was the voice of the one with the hot water bottle. “Sonya, do you have to go too?” she asked.

The answer came from a form sitting at the other end of my bench. She sat in the front corner of the truck box, wrapped in a blanket much like I was. “No, Mother,” she said sleepily. “I just want to sleep.” I saw Miss Bronia and Fredek scrambling down from the truck together.

“Yulek, you'd better go too,” Mother said. In the dim light from the open door, I could see that she was sitting on a bench on the other side of the truck, between the woman who must have been Sonya's mother and an older woman. Auntie Edna was kneeling on one suitcase and opening another in a pile of leather bags in the middle of the truck's cargo box in which we all sat. A cardboard carton contained our gas masks in their green, metal canisters and canvas pouches. I did not have to go, and, like the girl Sonya, would have preferred to sleep, but I was accustomed to following orders in this regard. Besides, I certainly didn't want to leave myself vulnerable to Fredek's undignified plight. I would pee by myself against some tree or bush, as I knew how to do. I would not do the other thing without more suitable privacy.

The light was gray, outside the truck. The sky was gray, and everything else seemed gray. I realized it must be early morning. I carefully clambered down from the formidable height that the truck bed represented to me. And suddenly I felt the warm, breathy proximity of a horse. Only inches away from my face was the muzzle of a horse, dapple gray with a white star
on his forehead and a bewhiskered chin. He was hitched to a wagon on the seat of which three people sat, huddled together sleepily. Behind them, the wagon was loaded with boxes and bundles, and behind the wagon, what I had not been able to see from the interior of the truck, was a parade.

I knew that this was not a parade in the usual sense of the word. These were not soldiers in dress uniforms or students with shiny brass buttons marching for the benefit of onlookers. But parade was the only concept I had for long files of people, filling a road, all heading in the same direction at the same pace. At the moment, that pace was virtually zero.

Some were on foot, some sitting in wagons, some in carriages—I even recognized one as a doroshka. Two men in suits and gray felt hats were asleep behind the driver, a blanket over their legs. I saw a few cars in the long line of not-moving people.

I reached out for the horse's nose, which I knew would be soft and velvety. I held my hand out the way Grandfather's coachman, Adam with the missing finger, had shown me, palm up, fingers bent back where the horse could not nip them. He nuzzled my hand. Assured that he would not bite, I bent my fingers to feel the soft nose. Without anyone's permission, I reached for the soft underside of his neck. It was warm and soft as I had also known it would be. The large, trusting eye was looking at me, and he rubbed his muzzle against my chest, clanking his bit. I started to reach for his ears.

“Yulek, get away from that horse!” I heard my mother shout. Startled, the horse and I both moved apart.

“I'd better see if there's some place for me to weewee too,” Auntie Edna was saying behind me.

“You'd better take Yulek with you,” I heard Mother say. “Yulek, wait for Auntie Edna!”

I clenched my teeth in rage at my mother. I was perfectly capable of going to the bathroom by myself, but beyond that, the thought of sharing bathroom intimacies with Auntie Edna repelled me.

“Give me your hand, Yulek!” Auntie Edna sang out merrily, “I'm afraid of the dark.” I could tell by her tone that this was a joke veiling a command. I took her hand obediently and we made our way down into a ditch beside the truck.

What terrified me, I realized, was not the idea of Auntie Edna seeing my birdie, since only a little of it would be exposed out of the leg hole of my short pants and I could easily turn away from her, but rather the thought of seeing Auntie Edna squat there with her bare bottom exposed and her seeing me seeing her—even if I didn't really see her. We climbed up the other side of the ditch and into the brush beside the road.

“You go around that side, I'll take this side,” Auntie Edna sang out again when we came to a particularly large bush. “Meet me back here when you're through.” I breathed a huge sigh of relief and decided that I liked Auntie Edna. Auntie Edna, I now remembered, was Lolek's sister. She was tall for a woman, as he was tall for a man.

“Yulian and I are committed to each other now,” Auntie Edna said when we were back at the truck. I did not understand her meaning except that it somehow implied to the others that what I had feared most had, indeed, happened, though it hadn't. It would be best, I decided, to pretend total ignorance. I hoped I wasn't blushing or that, if I was, it would not show in the half-light. Maybe I wasn't going to like Auntie Edna that much after all.

The parade had begun to move again, and the horse and wagon had gone on ahead. Mother and Sonya's mother stood in the open truck door smoking and looking out over the parade. I watched it move past. A man and a woman were pushing a white baby carriage along the road. There were cartons in the carriage, and I wondered whether there was a baby inside as well. One man was pushing a wheelbarrow with someone in it. A girl about my age in the back of a wagon, held a cage with a canary on her lap. Another wagon had a cow tied to the back with a length of rope. I had never seen a cow that close. I was surprised that she had no horns. She kept swishing her
funny, brush-ended tail back and forth against her flanks. As she passed by, I noticed how strained with milk her udder was. I knew that you had to milk a cow early every morning and in the evening, and it was easy to see that this one was due.

Then Miss Bronia and Fredek came walking along the side of the road. They held hands and were laughing.

“We found a stream and washed our hands and everything,” Miss Bronia said.

“I stepped on a frog,” Fredek said.

“You did not,” Miss Bronia said, laughing. Fredek laughed in response. “And are you all right, Yulek?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I went by myself,” which was absolutely true.

“But I saw a frog,” Fredek insisted. “I did. I saw three frogs.”

Miss Bronia looked at him with a bemused look of disbelief on her face.

“I did,” he said.

I was sure Fredek was making it up, but I realized that he knew that there was no way Miss Bronia could say she knew for sure that he hadn't. The look of triumph on his face confirmed my suspicion.

“All right,” Miss Bronia said, “you saw a frog.”

“I saw three frogs.”

“You saw three frogs? You did not.”

“I saw four frogs.”