Loves of Yulian (10 page)

I don’t know how long we stayed sitting there, while Mother told our story to the senhora. Then the senhora said something to Sra. Vera, who stood up and, wordlessly, held her hand out to me.

I understood that I was supposed to go somewhere with her and shook my head. I had Mother’s ring to guard.

“Stand up and go with her like a gentleman,” Mother admonished me.

I stood up as ordered and placed my plate and coffee cup on my chair. But, while Sra. Vera was reaching for my left hand, I gave her my right instead. That meant that, as we passed the coffin, I was closer to it than she was. As we walked by, I stole a glance inside. What I saw I couldn’t believe was a real dead man. He looked like a sleeping, wax doll, with makeup on his cheeks and powder all over the face. He had curly white hair, and he was wearing a tuxedo. There was a flower in his boutonnière. Brown rosary beads were wound around the sausage-like fingers of his clasped, pink, powdery hands.

Sra. Vera led me through several large rooms, some with people standing and talking in quiet tones, some empty, to a door that led out onto another stone patio in back. One or two steps—I couldn’t tell exactly from my angle—led down onto a large lawn and, beyond it, a tennis court. Nobody was playing tennis, but a number of children were, evidently, playing a game on the lawn. A line of chairs had been set up, and the children marched around them to the music of a guitar played by a woman in a plain gray dress with a white collar. Her blond hair was in braids wound around her head, the way Kiki used to wear hers, and I guessed that she must be somebody’s governess. She sat on a chair off to the side with her legs crossed to support the guitar. She played some lively tune with which I wasn’t familiar. Kiki hadn’t played any musical instrument.

The children were of various ages, two boys and a girl clearly older than me, some, two or three years younger. They were dressed in party clothes. One boy was in a blue velvet suit with shiny white buttons. Another had on a grownup style tie and jacket.

Suddenly the governess stopped playing, and the children all scrambled to sit down on a chair. It was then that I realized that every chair in the line was facing the opposite direction from that of its two immediate neighbors.

It turned out that there was one less chair than there were players, and, when the scramble for the chairs was over, one of the smallest girls was left standing. She seemed very unhappy, but the governess said something to her, at which point the girl brightened and ran over to sit on a long bench beside the musical governess. It was then that I noticed two other children already on the bench.

Now a man in a white jacket was removing one of the chairs from the row, so that there would, again, be one less chair than player. When the man and the chair were out of the way, the music resumed, and the remaining children continued their circular march. This time the governess played a different tune and sang along with the music in a clear, pleasant voice. Kiki used to say that she had a voice like a rusty gate.

I supposed I would be made to play this game. It was easy enough to understand, but I didn’t like competitive activities. I liked make-believe. I liked pretending that we were soldiers marching in step on parade, with pretend rifles or musical instruments. I even liked it when we were all shooting at an imaginary enemy, encouraging each other and tending to make-believe wounds. I liked getting shot and falling to the ground holding my hand over a wound and gulping for breath as my life seeped out through the hole. But as soon as we were divided into opposite sides, shooting at each other and attacking each other, I hated the anger, even make-believe anger, that the opponents would direct at me. I would usually pretend to be shot right away and spend the rest of the game lying dead on the ground, or I’d gallop off to get reinforcements and not return till the battle was over.

During the one year that I had spent in school in Warsaw, before the war, when, at recess we made a “chain” by holding hands and weaving in and around our schoolmates, I would join in. But if we played tag, for example, I hated the sensation of being chased by someone and would always let them tag me, even though I could run faster than they—I found that I could run faster than all of my classmates—just to get it over with. Then, when I was “it,” I would drag it out as long as possible, pretending that I couldn’t catch anyone. Even in hide-and-seek, I preferred to be “it” and go looking for people than sit in my hiding-place, tense with the fear that I would be found.

As I had predicted, Sra. Vera led me up to the governess and said some things to her, most likely that I didn’t speak Portuguese. I heard her tell the governess my name.

The governess stopped playing, and the scramble for chairs began. “Do you know this game?” the governess asked me in French.

I should have said that I didn’t, but it was hard to resist saying that it wasn’t difficult to figure out.

“Then why don’t you join when I start to play again,” she said. “Just stand over there with the others until I begin.” Her French accent wasn’t quite right, but her voice had a friendly, musical tone. Kiki’s voice was often gentle, but it wasn’t musical. I wanted to please this governess, and so I went to where the other children were, and, when the new song began, started to march with the others.

There was a system to playing this game that the other children didn’t seem to understand. Since every alternate chair you passed was facing the wrong way, the trick was to delay in front of a chair that was facing your way, and rush past the one that wasn’t. Following this strategy, I found myself in front of a chair facing the right way every time the music stopped. And in a little while, I and another boy, a little older than me, in a blue and white shirt, were the only two players circling one lone chair. The others were all either sitting on the bench beside the governess or standing behind it—all of them, of course, watching the two of us.

And then I had an idea. It was something I had seen in a movie in Poland, and everyone had laughed uproariously when it had happened. I didn’t really care about winning the silly game, but these children and the governess, who certainly hadn’t seen the Polish film, would find it extremely clever. What I had to do was to make sure that I was
behind
the chair, instead of in front of it, when the music stopped.

I couldn’t make my delay too obvious, so I just had to hope for the best. And when the music stopped, I was, indeed, behind the chair, where I wanted to be. And as the other boy began to sit down, I yanked the chair out from under him.

He fell to the ground with utter surprise on his face, and I laughed and looked for laughter from the others. But they weren’t laughing. Now the eyes of the boy on the ground began filling with tears, and I realized that I had hurt him. I hadn’t intended to hurt him. I had been trying to be funny, and I continued laughing to show the others, on the bench, that it was a joke. But nobody else was laughing. The boy in the blue and white shirt was still sitting on the ground, his eyes full of tears now and looking totally bewildered.

The governess had put down her guitar and was walking over to us now, and I knew that I was in trouble. She squatted down in front of the boy and spoke kindly to him, touching his wet cheek with the back of her fingers. The other children were either looking at him with concern or at me with hatred. I was gripped by a feeling that I had had back in Warsaw, in the French school, when I had unwittingly done or said something that the other kids found offensive. Not being able to speak French, at the time, I had not understood what was going on most of the time, and I would, occasionally, find myself the object of anger and disdain. Except that this time I knew well what I had done to earn that hostility.

Now the governess was helping the boy stand up and brushing off his pants. She said something to the others.

They were yelling things at me or about me now that I didn’t understand. And then they were crowding around him and the governess and saying things to him. One boy pushed me out of the way with his shoulder.

Then I felt the governess take my hand, and I realized that I was going to be punished.

She led me away from the group, and then stopped and squatted down to my level. “Why did you do that, Julien?” she asked me. Her voice was no longer musical, but it wasn’t unkind.

“I. . . I. . . I w. . . w. . . w. . . was being f. . . f. . . f. . . funny,” I said. “He wasn’t r. . . r. . . really h. . . h. . . h. . . hurt, just s. . . s. . . s. . . surprised.”

From the expression on her face, I realized that my stuttering had surprised her. The expression on her face grew softer. She reached out and stroked my head. “No, he wasn’t hurt,” she said, “but he could have been.”

This possibility had never really occurred to me. The man in the movie hadn’t been hurt. He had jumped right back up and chased the other man down the street. But I realized that I had done something terrible. My own eyes were beginning to tear up.

“You’re sorry now that you did that, aren’t you?”

I nodded my head.

“May I tell Roderico that you’re sorry?”

The idea of this governess asking permission of me, really surprised me. Then I realized that she might not have known who I was. For all she knew, I might be the son of a count or an ambassador. But I nodded my head.

From somewhere she produced a handkerchief, a strange, very soft and scented handkerchief and wiped away my tears. Then she handed the kerchief to me. “Then let’s go and tell him so,” she said.

I tried to hand the handkerchief back to her, but she said to keep it. She took my hand, and we walked back to the group. She said something to Roderico, who wasn’t crying anymore. But the other children were all crowding around him, as though
he
had done something clever.

“I told him that you are very sorry you did that—that you were just trying to be funny,” she said to me, “and that now you want to shake his hand.”

I was confused about the hand-shaking. You shook hands when you greeted someone or when you were saying goodbye.

Roderico held out his hand.

“Go ahead,” the governess urged.

I reached out my hand as well. We touched palms. Much as I had been taught to shake hands firmly and look the other person in the eye, now I couldn’t take my eyes off my own right shoe as it described little circles in the grass. I hadn’t wanted to hurt him. I wished I hadn’t. I had just wanted to do something clever. When people in the movies fell down, I now realized, there must be padding hidden, where the camera didn’t show it, so they wouldn’t get hurt. Why hadn’t I realized that?

Then I sat on the bench next to the governess while the children played other games, until Mother came and got me for our trip home.

We had been given a long, black limousine and a chauffeur to drive us to our hotel, and Mother seemed very pleased with the day’s developments. She asked me if I had had a good time, and I told her that I had. But my mind was on what I had done to Roderico. In Hungary I had tripped that man and, maybe, broken his nose. I didn’t know why I had done that, but now I realized that I must have been trying to be funny then, too. I had seen grownups say and do things that made everyone laugh. In Hungary, the count used to make people laugh all the time. He would tell a story or do a trick with his napkin at the table or walk up behind a woman and grab her around the waist, surprising her, and everyone would laugh. And Mother had used to laugh at things M. Gordet would say, or some of the other men we went to dinner with. But when I tried to be funny, which was just something to
entertain
people, to make them happy, it always turned out bad.

There was something bad inside me. Maybe it had to do with my Jewish soul that I had been trying to turn Catholic. I was over that now—I knew now that you didn’t have to be Catholic to go to Heaven—but maybe by trying to change it, I had damaged it, and that was why I couldn’t speak like other people. There was absolutely nothing stopping me from speaking normally—it wasn’t that I didn’t know what I wanted to say, like some people kept suggesting, and I didn’t have any kind of paralysis in my tongue or my jaw—I could move my jaw and my lips as well as anyone, and I could even curl my tongue, which Mother couldn’t do. But some force inside me just would not let me speak normally. That had to be my soul.

And, maybe, I had damaged my soul by not wanting to be Jewish, which is what I was supposed to be. There was really nothing wrong with being Jewish, as long as you weren’t around the Germans. If God allowed good Jews into Heaven, He must have forgiven them for what they had done to Jesus. God had intended for me to be Jewish all along, and I had been disobeying His will. That explained a lot of things.

It wasn’t Kiki’s fault that she had wanted me to be Catholic. She didn’t know that good Jews went to Heaven just like good Catholics, and she was just trying to help me get to Heaven because she cared about me. She didn’t realize that God wanted me to be Jewish.

You didn’t
have
to wear a black hat and coat or grow your ear-locks long, like the men on the trolleys, if you didn’t want to. Some Jewish men and boys wore those black beanies, because Jews were supposed to keep their heads covered all the time. That was kind of cool. I didn’t have a black beanie, but I could get one. In the meantime, I had the scented handkerchief that the governess had given me.

I reached into my pocket, pulled out the handkerchief, and laid it over my head. I had seen women do that in church. Obviously God considered handkerchiefs to be an adequate covering. When He saw what was on my head and what was in my heart, maybe He would lift the stuttering. I had to be careful that the kerchief didn’t blow off with the wind from the open windows.