Loves of Yulian (25 page)

I watched Irenka telling Mother something, though I was too far away to hear much of anything. I did hear her address Mother with, “Please Missus,” in several places, and I saw Mother maneuver her to a chair and, actually, push her into it.

“Yulian, get Mrs. Kosiewicz a cup of tea,” Mother said, as she squatted in front of the, still crying, Irenka.

“Th. . . th. . . the r. . . r. . . restaurant is c. . . c. . . closed,” I stammered.

“Oh my God!” Mother said, “can’t you do anything? Go ask the desk clerk.”

I couldn’t imagine the desk clerk going into the closed-up kitchen and putting on a pot of tea, but I explained to him that Mother had asked me to ask him for a cup of tea for the lady who was crying, though I didn’t know what about. He looked in Irenka’s direction, then, to my surprise, said, “Yes, just a moment,” and disappeared into the office.

In a while he was back with a mug, with a teabag string hanging out. I thanked him and conveyed it to where Mother was, still squatting in front of a sobbing Irenka. She was assuring the younger woman that she had a powerful friend in the government who would have Mr. K. found and arrested, that Mr. K. would not be able to hurt her again, and that all she had to do was to smile and be happy. What I would learn later, to my great delight, was that, while I was waiting for the tea, Mother had told Irenka that she could move in with us, since she had been evicted from her own suite for, long-term non-payment of hotel bills.

In the meanwhile, I stood behind Mother, holding the mug, its handle hot in my hand, waiting for her to take it from me, while Irenka, with Mother’s filmy, green kerchief to her face, was saying, “Missus is so kind to me. I won’t be any trouble, and I will help with Yulian and Missus’s wash and Missus’s hair.”

Then, without turning to look at me, Mother snapped, “Oh, put it down, Yulian!” as though I had been pestering her about what to do with the tea, which I had not done.

I put the tea down on the coffee table, and Mother picked it up and handed it to Irenka. “Here, please Missus, drink this.”

Irenka took the mug and brought it to her lips. “Oh, it’s hot,” she said.

“Then Missus should blow on it,” Mother said. Then, softening her tone, she said, “Missus should just take her time. There is no hurry. Has Missus eaten?”

Sobbing and sniffling, Irenka explained that she hadn’t eaten since she had half a roll for breakfast the day before.

“Oh my God!” Mother said, using the same words and tone she used when I had done something stupid. “Yulian go and. . . . . no, I had better do it.” She got up. “You stay with Mrs. Kosiewicz,” she said, then marched to the desk clerk.

I saw her asking the clerk for something, and I could see by his hand motions that he was telling her that he couldn’t do whatever it was she was asking. She spoke some more, and he gestured some more, and, finally, he stopped gesturing and went into the office behind him. He was out, moments later, with a key, which he handed to Mother.

Mother now crossed the lobby and proceeded to unlock the glass dining room door. Then she was in the dining room and out of sight.

“W. . . what is Missus doing?” Irenka asked, Mother’s green kerchief still to her face.

“I. . . I. . . I d. . . d. . . don’t kn. . . .ow,” I said, trying hard to control my stutter.

I saw a light go on somewhere beyond the dining room doors, which Mother had left ajar. “I th. . . ink sh. . . e is g. . . ett. . . ing y. . . ou s. . . ometh. . . ing to eat,” I said. Then we both waited, our eyes fixed firmly on the glass doors.

In a few minutes, Mother emerged a plate in her right hand, the left hand to her mouth. On the plate, she had a slice of bread, considerably thicker at one end than at the other, covered with an equally uneven slice of ham. On the left hand, a trickle of blood flowed down toward her wrist.

“Oh, Missus has cut herself!” Irenka exclaimed, getting quickly to her feet. From somewhere on her person she now produced a white handkerchief. Her tears gone, Irenka took hold of Mother’s hand, and removed it from her mouth. “Oh, this is bad,” she said, examining Mother’s index finger. “We must wash it.”

With Irenka still holding her hand, Mother said, “This is ridiculous. Yulian, grab Mrs. Kosiewicz’s suitcase.” She was trying to wrap the handkerchief around her finger, but Irenka wouldn’t let her. Irenka did the wrapping and instructed Mother to hold her hand up over her head. Then she took the suitcase from me, I took the sandwich and the tea, and we all trooped to the little elevator.

That first night, I had had to sleep with Mother again, while Irenka slept in my bed. On previous occasions, when I had had to share a bed with Mother, there had been no alternative. This time, however, there was. There was no reason why it couldn’t be Irenka, who slept with Mother. In Barcelona, when Mother had run into Mrs. Paniewicz, a Warsaw friend, in a café, she had invited the lady to stay with us in our hotel room and share her bed to save money. Mrs. Paniewicz had stayed with us until we left for Lisbon.

So, this time, I decided to implement a plan that I had thought of some while ago, but had had no opportunity to apply earlier. It took some courage to do this because I knew how angry Mother would become at the irritation, but when I woke up in the morning, instead of lying very still, until Mother woke up, as I was supposed to, I rolled over, shuffled my feet under the blanket, and even emitted a slight groan, all the time pretending, of course, that I was still asleep.

As I paused between moves for the sake of realism, I entertained myself with the fantasy that my action resulted in
Mother’s
switching places with Irenka, for the next night. Then, Irenka and I could pull the sheet over our heads and whisper, as we had on the beach. And, if Irenka wore the kind of loose fitting nightgowns that Mother did, one of her breasts might, occasionally, slip out while she slept.

Irenka was still asleep, when Mother and I got up and I got ready for school. We tiptoed around the living room, and Mother whispered to me that Irenka had not been able to sleep for many nights, because of worries.

In school, I had a difficult time keeping my mind on the problems that Sra. Fernanda had assigned me, while my imagination created fantasy situations in which my new suite-mate became as accustomed to my presence as Mother was and allowed herself to move about the premises without positively securing her private parts.

As it turned out, my original plan did, actually, succeed, while my fantasies appeared to turn out to be exactly that—namely, fantasies. When I arrived back at our suite, Irenka was there to greet me with an apple and a piece of toast with cheese—we had not owned a toaster before, but now, we apparently did. She thanked me for the use of my bed and informed me that it was mine again, since she would be sharing Mother’s bed from then on. As for the fantasies, however, I couldn’t help noticing a new and more formal attitude towards me, on Irenka’s part. While I could not identify any decrease in friendliness, there was something in her demeanor that shattered any expectations of increased intimacy. Evidently, she and Mother had discussed matters, and formalized certain agreements that were to govern our three-sided relationship.

Irenka had supper with us in the hotel dining room that evening. When Mother discovered that she was out of cigarettes, Irenka immediately said, “Please Missus, I will get some for you.”

“This is craziness,” Mother said. “We can’t go around
please-Missussing
each other all day. My name is Barbara, and you’re Irena.”

“Oh, please Missus,” Irenka said, evidently quite overcome by Mother’s gesture. “Missus is so kind.”

“
Barbara
,” Mother said.

“
Barbara
is so kind.”

In a move that gave me a deep sense of satisfaction, Mother laid her hand over Irenka’s. “We will be friends, Irena, not mistress and servant,” she said.

“Oh yes…, Barbara.” Then she immediately got up, accepted some coins from Mother, and went out to the lobby for mother’s cigarettes.

Irenka continued living with us and sleeping in Mother’s bed with her. When I came home from school, there was a snack for me, even when Irenka wasn’t there, herself, and, that first weekend, when Mother and Sr. Segiera went somewhere overnight, it was Irenka who went to the beach with me and to a little restaurant around the corner from the hotel, for supper. But, though, at Irenka’s request, we had another French lesson, our relationship there was as different as it was at the hotel.

When Sr. Segiera came by our suite to pick Mother up for some outing, Irenka would serve him a cocktail, then keep him company, while Mother put finishing touches on her makeup in the bathroom. Because her Portuguese was much better than either Mother’s or mine, she could speak to Sr. Segiera in that language. And, on the occasions that I was included in an outing with Sr. Segiera, Irenka came along as well, though she always sat in the back seat with me.

Where I had, first, been excited by Irenka’s coming to live with us, I soon grew quite bored with this new arrangement. Not only had my fantasies been dashed, but I felt that I had, actually, lost a friend. Irenka had become Mother’s friend, which made her ineligible to fill that special role that she had filled for me before. And with that loss, I felt myself descending again into what I now recognized as a state, for which I had no name, because the word
depressed,
or even the word
state
was not part of my vocabulary.

“What is the matter, Yulian?” Irenka would ask, when she saw me laboring over my after-school banana. In the days before she had become Mother’s friend, I would, probably have made some effort to describe my feelings to her, but sharing my feelings with Irenka now, was as difficult as expressing them to Mother. I assumed that Irenka must have, later, discussed her observation with Mother, who, I was sure, had said that I was subject to such moods.

I soon realized that my moods must have been a discussion subject with Sr. Segiera, as well, because, one day, Mother informed me that, the next day, Saturday, the senhor was going to take me up in his airplane. In my head, I could hear the discussion between Mother and Sr. Segiera, as one of them suggested that what I needed was to spend more time with a man.

Some months earlier, during our few days’ stay in Rome, I had done something, which, I now recognized as very dumb. I had found my way to the roof of our hotel, from which I had thrown pebbles onto passing cars. Someone had reported it to the hotel, and a uniformed employee had caught me red-handed. Mother’s reaction, when I had been turned over to her custody, was to take my act as a direct attack on her. Later I had come to understand this attitude to be quite reasonable. Italy, under Mussolini, was a Fascist country, allied with Germany, and our only reason for being there was that Mother knew the Polish ambassador, who, she hoped, could negotiate, for us, a visa to Spain or Portugal or, even, South America. But with the Nazis trying to stop us from reaching America, attracting attention to our presence in Rome, particularly by dropping pebbles on people, was not helpful to our security. Mother’s response had been to tell me that, if my father were alive, he would beat me.

Months before that, in Hungary, Mother had wanted the Count, on whose estate we were staying, to teach me to hunt, and, in Spain, when Sr. Sabastian had bragged about having been a fencing champion, she had said, “Oh, I would so love for Julien to learn fencing from you.”

Weeks before this proposed outing with Sr. Segiera, the prospect of flying in an airplane with him would have thrilled me beyond measure. But now, like everything else, the image of the flight as an enjoyable experience just refused to crystallize in my mind. When Sr. Segiera came to the hotel to take me to the airport, Mother told him that she had a “terrible” headache and would stay home. Since she had made no mention of the headache before his arrival, I understood that Mother had other reasons for not coming along. She did, however, ask Irenka to go, but the senhor said that, actually, nobody was coming, except him and me.

Then Mother said, “Do you really think this is a good idea, Ernesto?” and he said, “Yes, I do. Paolo has been up with me, and loved it, and I think it will be very good for Julien. He will love it too.”

Mother, then, turned to me and asked, “Are you sure you want to go?”

That was a strange question, since no one had, yet, asked me whether I wanted to, in the first place. And it wasn’t that I
didn’t
want to—the idea just didn’t excite me. But for Sr. Segiera’s sake, because he had invited me, I didn’t want to disappoint him, and I planned to give every sign of enjoying myself. “Yes, very much,” I said, surprised to find how big an effort it took to seem excited.

Since it was just the senhor and I in the Chevrolet, on the way to the airport, I got to sit in the front seat, which, again, should have been exciting for me. Sr. Segiera was wearing the kind of faded blue pants and checkered shirt that cowboys wore in the movies. His sleeves were rolled up just to his elbows, and his forearms had more hair on them than I had seen on anyone before. “Paolo says he had a very good time with you, Julien,” Sr. Segiera said. From somebody else I would have taken this as just some of the politeness that well-mannered people expressed to each other, but I could not imagine anything but the truth coming out of the senhor’s mouth.