Mother and Me (3 page)

Grandfather was an Orthodox Jew. When he was not at the hosiery factory he owned, he would sit at the dining room table reading what must have been a religious book. Because of this reading and his advanced years, I had to walk on tiptoe all the time I was there. I remember trying to figure out why this was necessary even when he was at the factory and eventually coming to the conclusion that the entire household must have been accustomed to quiet. I was very proud of this deduction.

Every afternoon, Grandfather would ride in his carriage around the park. Grandfather had his own carriage, his own horse, and his own driver named Adam. Kiki and I would accompany him on these rides, Kiki beside Grandfather in the carriage and I on the driver seat beside Adam. Adam was missing most of the index finger of his right hand. I knew instinctively that I shouldn't look at it, but it drew my eyes the same way that my birdie pulled at my hand. I was happy to distinguish this as only a social rather than a mental health transgression.

When we got to the park, Adam would let me hold the reins. I knew no greater happiness in my childhood than sitting beside Adam with the reins in my hands.

One day at the dinner table—Kiki and I ate in the dining room at my grandparents—Grandfather choked on a piece of meat and died. Francishek and somebody else carried him into the next room while Grandmother screamed, and a doctor who lived upstairs was hastily summoned. But Grandfather was dead. It turned out to have been his heart and not a piece of meat.

It was decided that my mother, the youngest of his eight children, should not be told of his passing. I reasoned that by
not seeing him or hearing from him for awhile, my mother would gradually arrive at the realization that Grandfather had passed away, without experiencing the shock that a sudden announcing of his death might have caused.

This theory proved pretty much correct when my mother telephoned from Warsaw on the following day and asked to speak to me.

“Don't tell Mother that Grandfather is dead,” everyone mouthed as I was handed the receiver, even though I had already been briefed on this conspiracy.

“How are you today?” Mother asked.

“I'm fine,” I said. Speaking on the phone was a new experience for me since no one had ever asked to talk with me before.

“And how is Kiki?”

“She's fine too.”

“And Grandmother?”

“Grandmother is fine.”

“And how is Francishek?”

“Francishek is fine.”

“And Adam?”

“Adam is fine.”

“And how is the horse?”

“The horse is fine.”

Then she blindsided me. “And how is Grandfather?”

“Grandfather is dead,” I told her.

I did not need the looks of horror around me to inform me that I had broken down under interrogation.

“Grandfather is asleep,” Grandmother mouthed.

“No, no,” I corrected myself. “I meant he's asleep. He's sleeping,” before the receiver was abruptly pulled from my hand.

I remember no pain at Grandfather's passing. There had been no closeness between us. He was just an old man I was supposed to love … quietly. This does not mean that I was a stranger to grief. Every second Sunday, Kiki had her day off. At these times, I was overcome by an emotional agony that
I could neither bear nor understand. I knew that Kiki was coming back that night, but I would still find myself lying face down in the front hall, bellowing out my pain like a cow.

There was no consoling Yulian. However, Mother and one or two of her perfumed friends would sometimes try by taking me to one of the cafes for which Warsaw was famous, and I would be allowed to order any delicacy I chose. Making choices was a foreign experience for me.

The decision always came down to two kinds of cheesecake, Viennese and Krakow. The former was fairly light with a powdering of confectionery sugar. The Krakow version was richer with some brown pastry strips over the top. All the cafes seemed to carry both varieties and the choice was always difficult, though the decision invariably came down in favor of the native Krakow style.

But even the taste of the cheesecake, consumed in a few minutes, did not cancel my pain. To this day, cheesecake has a bittersweet taste for me.

On several occasions, it was my stepfather, Lolek, who applied a masculine solution to my problem. One time we took a taxi ride into the country and back, which did little for me. Another time, he took me to the movies where two comedians, one fat, one thin, were featured. They were named Flip and Flap, and whether these were Laurel and Hardy dubbed into Polish or a home grown version, I don't know. The results were not much better than with the cheesecake, though I'm not aware of any residual emotions triggered by Laurel and Hardy.

I can remember few other efforts at any bonding between me and my parents. There was the time Lolek returned from some foreign trip with toy soldiers for me. I, of course, already owned a couple dozen three-dimensional lead soldiers, about two inches high in brightly colored uniforms. The ones Lolek had brought me were about half that height and only two dimensional, but there were hundreds of them. My mind arranged them in both parade and battle order as he and I
opened box after box of marching, charging, and shooting soldiers on the dining room floor.

I thanked Lolek profusely, motivated by both well-schooled manners and the sincerest gratitude. But I couldn't have them, he said, until I kissed him on the lips.

This was a total shock to me. I had never kissed anybody on the lips, and I found the very idea disgusting. I didn't get my soldiers that day, but they did appear, some months later, in my cupboard. On another occasion, my mother and Lolek tried to get me into bed between them one morning. This was more intimacy than I could handle, and I remember kicking and screaming.

There was also the time my mother was assisting Kiki in giving me a bath, and asked which of them I loved more. “I love you both the same,” I pronounced, congratulating myself on my diplomacy, while marveling at Mother's stupidity in thinking that my love for her could, in any way, approach what I felt for my inseparable Kiki.

“You must love your mother more,” Kiki immediately admonished me. “You must always love your mother more than anyone else.”

On my fifth birthday I remember receiving a telegram from my mother. One hundred years, it wished me, a barrel of wine, and a beautiful wench. In Polish it rhymes and may well be a standard birthday wish under certain circumstances. The next time that my mother and Kiki met, I overheard my governess murmuring something about how madam must have been drunk.

What I remember of summers, Kiki and I spent in a resort town on the Baltic Sea. If we turned right coming out of our hotel, we could walk to the bay. If we turned left, we walked to the beach on the open sea and played in the sand or the mild surf. We would float in the shallow water supporting and propelling ourselves with our hands against the bottom, pretending
that we were swimming. When we walked around the town, we would hold pinkies, it being too hot to hold hands.

Recently, I came across a photograph of the two of us in that town. I was surprised to find that, though I was always small for my age, at six or seven, when that picture was taken, I wasn't much shorter than Kiki. The photograph confirms my memory of her long blond braid wound around her head. She has a kindly, but tired face. Though I know she was no more than thirty, she looks older. I suspect her health was not robust.

The start of school was something that I had looked forward to since I could remember. Students wore little navy blue uniforms with colored stripes down the sides of long trousers, and brass buttons on their tunics. They had billed military caps, and they marched in parades carrying flags and singing patriotic songs. Had the afterlife not been so weighty a subject for me at the time, I might now be resorting to the cliche, “my idea of Heaven.”

September 1938 came, and Kiki took me by the hand to first grade. And someplace between the dream and reality a cog must have come loose.

It would be fashionable, or perhaps cute, Mother must have decided, if the school I attended were to be French. There was such a school within a few blocks of our house, set up, I presume, for the children of French families stationed in Poland. Because it did not have its own facilities, it rented them from another school in the afternoon, after normal school hours. And in the French fashion, its uniform was not long trousers with a colored stripe down the side and brass buttons, but a black smock with a Peter Pan collar, topped by a beret. A lifetime of dreams was shattered in one blow.

In my black smock and beret I was walked the several blocks to school each afternoon and walked home again, mercifully after dark.

The intent had been that I learn French. But the school did not teach French. It taught the three R's in French to French-speaking children.

I learned a number of things in this school. I learned, for example, that you could roll your pencil down the sloping desk surface, but it was sure to make the boy or girl, sitting beside you in the two-person desk, make a fuss to the teacher, which resulted in your being made to stand in the corner. I learned that if you had a pocket knife, which I of course didn't, you could cut long, sharp splinters out of the desk seat or even carve your own initials in it. I also learned that even though we weren't allowed to use pens, if you dipped your pencil in the inkwell that the morning kids used, you could make ink lines on paper with it. And then I discovered, purely on my own, that if you took chalk dust from the trough at the bottom of the blackboard and mixed it with the ink, you could get paste of various shades of blue, depending on how much ink you used. I also learned one French phrase, “Padowicz dans le coin!” It meant Padowicz into the corner, and I learned it through the technique of repetition. What I had done to merit this on most occasions, I never knew. But one way or another, I had made that part of our classroom my own. And since Warsaw was mostly obliterated by the Germans before the start of the following school year, I can say with reasonable certainty that I was its last occupant.

The other thing I had not counted on at this school was the behavior of children. In my fantasies, we had marched down the city's wide avenues in ruler-straight ranks, our brass shining in the sun, our long trousers in perfect step. But children, it turned out, took your snacks, turned your pencil box upside down, punched you in the arm or other places, pushed you down, yelled French obscenities in your face, and had bad breath. To none of these had I any effective response.

They did, of course, all speak Polish as well, and would do so when a message had to be delivered with particular
accuracy, such as, “Go to the devil, you stupid!” And most of the recess-talk in the hall outside our classroom—we apparently did not have a yard—was, in fact, Polish. But they seemed to take great pleasure in addressing me in French, pointing their fingers at me, mimicking my facial expressions, and going into fits of laughter.

At first this surprised me. I knew about witches and giants and evil step parents whose nature—in fact their profession—was to do hurtful things. But the idea of ordinary individuals generating spontaneous anger and cruelty was simply outside my realm of experience. Then, when I noticed how many of them wore crosses and other religious medals around their necks, I finally understood what was taking place. It was not that I accused my tormentors of anti-Semitism—prejudice on a human level was not a concept to which I had yet been introduced. But the Heavenly variety was something with which I, of course, was well familiar. Clear as day, I suddenly saw in their treatment of me, the hand of the Almighty exacting due punishment for what we had done to His Son.

This realization did not mean that I automatically bowed my head to the inevitable. I remember one occasion during joint recess with the second grade, which we did one or two times a week, when I discovered a second grader with shiny metal rods strapped to both sides of one leg. In an effort, I suppose, to join what I obviously couldn't beat, I pointed to him and laughed. “Look at those things on his leg!” I said. I was immediately pummeled for my insensitivity.

When, at home that evening, I explained how I had acquired my bruises, my story apparently prompted a visit to the principal by my mother. I did not know about the visit until my classmates came to advise me of the fact, just before adding some black-and-blue marks to complement the ones that were just beginning to fade.

This time, I reported to Kiki that I had tripped on my way down the stairs and acquired the bruises bouncing off the walls
as I tried to maintain an upright position. It was the first time I had ever lied to her. My mother did, however, take some occasion to point out how well the previous matter had been taken care of by my simply reporting it at home, and that this should convince me to continue the practice in the future.

A delegation of girls approached me at recess several days later to inform me in what was obviously a well-rehearsed speech, that they were sorry for Marina, but they were not sorry for me. Who Marina was and how she merited their pity, I do not know to this day. The fact that they did not harbor the same sympathy towards me, I took as a matter of course by then. I had already come to terms with the fact that I was not to be treated like other people. It may even have had some connection with my birdie.

Some weeks later, a chubby girl named Vana did offer me half of her banana at recess. Since I had my own orange, this was quite clearly a gesture of friendship rather than charity. While I accepted both the banana and the friendship, sharing with her my opinion of our fat and homely teacher, Mlle Pro, I could not have much respect for Vana's choice of friends and made no effort to extend our relationship beyond the one-recess stand.

In my parents' bedroom, there stood a radio. It was a magnificent polished wood and cloth structure, about the size of a present-day twenty-one-inch television, with two vertical glass dials. One dial had numbers etched into the glass, the other the names of cities like London, Paris, Berlin, and New York. When the radio was turned on, either the numbers on one dial or the cities on the other would light up. In the center was a round green eye by which you fine-tuned the apparatus. I was not allowed to touch any part of the machine.