Loves of Yulian Page 3

  I saw Mrs. Kosiewicz blink in surprise. “My ear?” she said in a quiet, but genuinely surprised voice.

  “Yes,” I said. Then I reached over and produced the washer, as though out of her ear.

  “Oh,” she said. “You did a magic trick.” As a child, you, was all the form of address that I was entitled to.

  “A m. . . magic t. . . rick?” I said, as though that was the furthest from the truth.

  “Why, you pretended to pull that thing out of my ear,” she said.

  She was smiling as she said it, and I was suddenly emboldened by an idea. I noticed that her surprised voice had made the others turn to look at us. “W. . . what th. . . thing?” I said, making the washer disappear again. “W. . . what th. . . thing is M. . . issus t. . . talking about?”

  To my very great delight, Mrs. Kosiewicz laughed.

  Then I saw Mr. K give his wife a quick, annoyed look, then turn back to Mother with a smile. “She doesn’t speak French,” he said, confirming my suspicion.

  “That was very clever,” Mrs. Kosiewicz said. “Can you do any other tricks?”

  I shook my head. I knew that shaking my head wasn’t polite, but, with her asking for more tricks, my self-confidence had left me. I had hoped she would show me a trick, herself, or tell me a joke or something. But she was looking at me and smiling, as I was at her, but didn’t seem to know what to say either.

  This was a very new experience for me. In the past, all of Mother’s grownup friends had had lots of questions to ask me about where I had been, what I liked to do, what I liked to eat, what grade I was in, where I had spent the summer, and so forth. But not Mrs. Kosiewicz. I put it down to the fact that she hadn’t been grown up long enough.

  On the other hand, since I knew some of those conversation-starting questions, why shouldn’t I ask her them? Mrs. Kosiewicz certainly seemed friendly enough not to feel insulted.

  “S. . . so tell me, please M. . . Missus,” I began. “Where has M. . . Missus been spending the s. . . summer?”

  “Well—I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”

  I realized that M. Gordot’s introductions had been in French. “It’s Y. . . Yulian,” I said.

  “That’s a beautiful name.”

  Everyone said that.

  “My name is Irena. You can call me Irena, if you want, instead of the Mrs. Kosiewicz. In fact I’d like that better.”

  I had never had a grownup lady tell me to call her by her first name before. Except, of course, for Kiki, but I had been calling her that as long as I could remember, and it had probably started before I was old enough to call her Miss Jane. “All r. . . right. . . ” I had intended to add the Irena to the end of that statement, but, somehow, it wouldn’t come out.

  Then I remembered that now that we were out of Europe, I could talk about our escape. I hadn’t been supposed to tell anyone about it before, in case the story got back to the Nazi-sympathizers who were looking for us to stop Mother from writing her book in America. That’s not to say that it hadn’t slipped out a few times, when we were in the company of people who I was sure weren’t Nazi-sympathizers, particularly when I had to correct distortions that my mother made, like when she said that I had fallen into the stream and she had to pull me out, which was totally untrue, or left out the little fact that, if I hadn’t found a strong stick and moved that tree branch off her leg, she would still be sitting there in the woods. And Mrs. Irena—I had no trouble calling her Mrs. Irena—who only spoke Polish, certainly wasn’t a Nazi-sympathizer.

  “My m. . . mother and I e. . . scaped from the R. . . Russians, who were oc. . . c. . . cupying Lwow, where we were s. . . staying, by w. . . walking across the C. . . Carpathian M. . . Mountains into Hungary for e. . . eleven hours, last F. . . February,” I said.

  “Oh my, that’s quite an adventure,” she said.

  “T. . . the g. . . g. . . guide that we h. . . had h. . . h. . . hired d. . . didn’t g. . . g. . . get out of the s. . . sleigh, when w. . . we d. . . did, but just d. . . drove off, and my m. . . m. . . mother and I w. . . wandered in the w. . . woods a. . . a. . . alone, until we f. . . found a v. . . v. . . village by a. . . accident.”

  “You must have been very scared.”

  “Well, yes, p. . . please M. . . Missus, we were.” It was funny that now it didn’t bother me at all to say that I had been scared. Before the war started, when I was only seven, I would have been ashamed to admit to being scared of anything. “How did M. . . Missus and Mr. K. . . Kosiewicz get out?”

  “Well, we drove out just before the war started. Tadek, that is, my husband, had a car and we drove out because we knew there was going to be a war.”

  “W. . . were you s. . . cared?” This was a question people had frequently asked me.

  “Well, I certainly was, but not Tadek. He’s not afraid of anything.”

  Suddenly I could see Mr. Kosiewicz looking at his wife and me. His eyes were darting back and forth between us and Mother and M. Gordet, as though he was trying to pay attention to both conversations. Mrs. Irena must have seen it too, because she stopped talking suddenly and lowered her eyes. “My husband is a very brave man,” she said after a moment, and I had the impression that she wanted him to hear it.

  At supper, the Kosiewiczes did not sit at the same table with us, and I heard M. Gordet say to Mother, “He certainly showed a considerable interest in your ring.”

  “Do you think he’s interested in buying it for his wife?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, but I’d lock my cabin door securely.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. He has such beautiful manners. He doesn’t speak French so well, but did you see how manicured his fingers are?”

  Mother’s mention of manicured fingers set off a sour note in my head.

  On Sunday, one of the passengers, who was a Catholic priest, said mass in the passenger’s lounge. As she had done in Hungary, pretending to the count that we were Catholic, Mother decided that we were going to attend this mass as well. Now that I knew that you didn’t have to be Catholic to go to Heaven, I had cooled considerably from the religious fervor that had gripped me less than a year earlier. And, since we were rapidly putting miles of ocean between ourselves and Europe, where the Nazis and Nazi-sympathizers hated Jews, I could not see why Mother was so concerned with maintaining the charade. But, fortunately, this time, unlike the experience in Hungary, where she had insisted on taking Holy Communion and then chewed the Host, instead of letting it melt into her soul, Mother did not try to take Communion, and I was much relieved.

  Soon after my scarlet fever in Barcelona, Mother had informed me that two Polish priests would come and instruct us in Catholicism, following which we would be baptized. A year earlier, this would have been the best news I could possibly have heard. To receive my visa to Heaven, where Kiki would, someday, reside, and, at the same time shed my detested Jewishness, would have been the fulfillment of all my dreams. But in the course of that year, Kiki’s prestige had been diluted somewhat by the several new women who had passed in and out of my life, and when Mother had explained, prior to our escape from the Bolsheviks, that good Jews did go to Heaven along with good Catholics, that concept did conform more closely to my idea of an all-loving God. And, while the idea of Mother and myself being instructed in a subject in which I was better versed than she, had a definite appeal, like the fantasy of one of the fathers posing a question and me having the answer, while Mother didn’t, I certainly didn’t receive the news with the same enthusiasm that I might have at an earlier time.

  The two young Polish priests in their long black cassocks with their multitude of buttons, did pay two visits to our hotel room and talked about God and Jesus, original sin and the sacrament of baptism, but, somehow, the plan never did get off the ground. We were still Jewish, though Mother continued wearing the little gold cross, which she had obtained before our escape from the Bolsheviks and telling people that we were Catholic. And when, the two t
imes that he did dine with us, the captain asked for the Lord’s blessing, Mother crossed herself along with most of the company. Except that she touched her right shoulder before her left one, which was, of course, the wrong way around.

  It was a couple of days after we went to Mass that the whole ship went crazy. We were crossing the Equator and, in keeping with tradition, a gang of sailors, dressed garishly as make-believe undersea beings, searched the ship from stem to stern for all passengers and crew who could not produce a certificate of Equator-crossing baptism. Those of us who could not, were marched to the afterdeck at the urging of wooden tridents in our backs, to cheers and jeers from those already initiated. Once there, we were painted from head to toe with some slimy green substance and made to kneel individually before a bearded, seaweed-draped, crowned, and enthroned King Neptune who ordered each of us to be thrown into the sea. It was fortunate that we had a pool full of seawater right there on the deck, so that no one had to be thrown overboard.

  One of the officers had forewarned us about this at dinner, the evening before, telling people to wear their bathing suits or old clothes, and Mother had explained to me that this would be all in fun. So I knew the shouts, the grunts, and the tridents in our backs to be all an act, though I could not help the feeling that some crewmembers were taking more pleasure in the charade than they were supposed to. As I sailed, covered in green slime, into the pool and then proudly swam away from the sailor stationed there to rescue non-swimmers, I saw my beautiful mother, in her bathing suit and an orange scarf covering her hair, being permitted to lower her own self carefully into the pool to rinse off the small globs of green slime that had been applied symbolically to her shoulders and upper arms, without getting her hair wet.

  A small group of passengers and crew stood around King Neptune on his throne, up on a specially-constructed platform on the deck beside the wood-framed pool. Some were in bathing suits, some in regular clothes, and many showed evidence of having been in the pool. They cheered as new neophytes were led into the king’s presence to receive their sentence and then forced up the ladder and into the pool.

  I joined this group and cheered with the others as a stout, gray-haired man whom we had all seen promenading the deck in a spotless white suit, a Panama hat, and a walking stick, was being coated with the green slime before being led into the king’s presence. He was without his jacket, hat, stick, or tie, and stood barefoot as the “sea creatures” applied their goo with large paintbrushes, making his shirt and trousers cling to his body. The crowd seemed to take particular enjoyment in seeing the proud man humbled.

  He didn’t struggle, and, when the sailors led him into the king’s presence, he bowed respectfully before kneeling to receive his sentence. Then, directed with more grunts and gestures, he climbed the pool ladder, and I could hear a loud splash, accompanied by an even louder cheer from us spectators. In a moment, he had climbed down again with his wet clothes, nearly transparent, clinging to his skin. His wife handed him a towel, and suddenly there was spontaneous applause for the good sportsmanship he had shown in playing along with the game.

  A moment later there were more grunts from the sea creatures, and I saw Mr. K. being led into view by two of them. But, unlike the man of the white suit who had walked willingly between his two captors, Mr. K walked, jerking his elbows trying to free his arms from their grasp. He was yelling something at them that I couldn’t hear, and his face was distorted with anger. Like the man before him, he was dressed in a shirt and trousers, except that he still had his shoes on.

  Cheers went up as extra measures of green slime were applied to his body and even rubbed into his blond hair. It took three men to force him to kneel before King Neptune.

  And then, I suddenly saw Mrs. Irena standing beside me. She was in her bathing suit, her wet hair indicating that she had already undergone her baptism. Her bare shoulders were hunched and she had the tip of one thumb in her mouth in her excitement. “Oh, Yulian, they want to kill him,” she said. She put her arm around my shoulders and hugged me close to her side. I knew that she wasn’t really afraid for his life, and then I heard her give a little giggle and realized that she was actually enjoying this scene. “He was hiding under our bed. He said he wasn’t going to let anyone treat him that way again.”

  Mr. K was permitted to remove his shoes before climbing the ladder to the pool. Then, as he climbed, yelling something over his shoulder that was drowned out by the jeering of the crowd, I wondered what sort of treatment in the past it was that he had referred to. I remembered Mrs. Irena telling me that they had driven out of Poland before the war had started, so I didn’t suppose they had been exposed to any of the Nazi brutality that we had heard about. But I didn’t consider this an appropriate time to ask such questions. I decided, instead, to enjoy the touch of Mrs. Irena’s soft skin against mine. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much time to enjoy it, because her husband came over, took her other hand, and immediately led her inside. Mrs. Irena managed to turn her head and blow me a kiss before disappearing through the doorway.

  Dinner was very noisy that evening with much laughter, stewards bringing bottles of wine that people had ordered, and talk of the day’s happenings. More than once I heard the name Kosiewicz mentioned, though usually the context was in a language I couldn’t understand and generally followed by more laughter. Concerned over how this was affecting Mrs. Irena, I discovered their places to be empty. Then I heard Mother comment on their absence.

  “He did make quite a spectacle of himself,” M. Gordet said.

  “Well,” Mother said, “he’s probably a gentleman of the older school and just isn’t accustomed to being treated this way by common sailors. I know that if they had tried to do that to my father, he would have given them such a look that they wouldn’t have dared touch him.”

  “I don’t know just how much of a gentleman he is. He does have very formal manners, but I couldn’t find out anything about him.”

  “You mean you check on the passengers, like the secret police, George?” Mother laughed as she said this.

  “We do have to be very careful these days, Basia.”

  “So what have you found out about me?”

  “That would be giving away my secrets, wouldn’t it?”

  “But it’s my secrets we’re talking about.”

  There was a tone in their voices now that grownups sometimes get when they don’t really mean what they say, and the other person knows that they don’t mean it, but they say it anyway, and it’s all some kind of grownup game. I could understand how Mr. K could be too embarrassed by his own behavior to show his face in the dining room, but I sincerely hoped that Mrs. Irena didn’t have to go without supper because of him. Then, as we were having dessert, the captain came in, made a little speech about how glad King Neptune was to have made the acquaintance of all of us, and began calling out names of people who had been initiated that day. As I waited, anxiously, for my name to be called, I tried to remember what King Neptune had looked like to see if it may have been the captain behind the beard, but decided that it wasn’t.

  My certificate had the name of the ship and of the shipping company printed in beautiful gold letters, my own name written by hand, and a lot of words in a language I did not recognize. But I knew that when we re-crossed the Equator on our way to America at some future time, I would be one of the initiated, the people who got to cheer and to jeer and to stay dry.

  CHAPTER II

  I didn’t see anything more of the Kosiewiczes until we arrived in Rio, except for our second lifeboat drill. It turned out that their lifeboat was right next to ours, and, after the public address had dismissed us, I saw Mother exchange a few words with them. I was glad to see that Mrs. Irena looked quite well and decided that they must have been eating their meals in their cabin.

  Then, when our ship finally docked in Rio de Janeiro, Mother spoke to the Kosiewiczes again, and she and Mr. K. both wrote things down, which I presumed to be each ot
her’s Rio addresses. I was very sure that that was what they were doing and felt quite proud to be able to make such assumptions. I wondered who of my peers back in Poland had seen as much of the world or understood grownups as well as I.

  M. Gordet had a car and a chauffeur meet him at the dock, and he gave Mother and me a ride to the pension that he had recommended for us to stay at. On the way to the pension, we drove along a long, curved beach with waves and bright sand and people with skin several shades darker than I was used to seeing. I understood that, in a warm place like this, people would be heavily tanned, but I felt a thrill as I saw that some of the people had the very black and curly hair or the flattened noses that I recognized from a book I had had before the war, as “Negro” features. I had never seen Negros before.

  While on one side of our car was the ocean, the beach, and a sidewalk inlaid with S-shaped black-and-white stripes, on the other side was a city, which I knew to be the capital of Brazil, with tall buildings, offices, stores, and traffic. And the idea of such a city being equipped with its own beach was another concept that had to work itself into my mind slowly. Back in our own capital, Warsaw, if one wanted to go to the beach, he would have to pack a suitcase, go to the train station, buy a ticket, wait for a train, ride that train for a long time, and finally get off at a resort on the Baltic sea and rent a hotel room. Here, all one had to do was cross the street. And on top of all that, as Mother had told me, here it got hotter during the winter and colder in the summer. When I had asked why that was, Mother had said that it was because the earth was round so that it rotated around the sun.

  Our pension was a ways away from the downtown part of the city, and was surrounded by a big, fenced-in yard with grass and trees, and M. Gordet came inside with us and introduced us to the woman who owned it. She was a small and thin woman, like Mother, only older. She had black hair with a considerable amount of gray and very dark skin that looked almost like leather. She had a thin face, a bit of a mustache above her lip, and a gold tooth right at the front of her mouth. Her name was Sra. De la Vega, and M. Gordet said she would take good care of us. This made the senhora smile, lighting up her face with two rows of perfectly even white teeth, except for that one gold one. She spoke French to Mother and M. Gordet, though I could tell that she had difficulty with it.