Loves of Yulian Read online

  I had not been paying much attention to their talk until I heard her mention the word beach. “I go to the beach every afternoon,” she was saying, “and your son can come with me. It’s just short walking, you know.” And it was arranged right then that directly after lunch today, I would accompany her to the beach.

  Our room was a corner room, with windows on two sides, which Mother opened immediately, letting a fresh breeze into the warm room. The furniture was wicker, something I had never seen indoors before, and there was only one bed. This meant that I would have to sleep with Mother, something I had done before in some of the hotels and pensions across Europe, but preferred not to. Whenever I rolled over or even scratched my leg, Mother would complain. “Don’t do that, Yulian,” she would say, even though I thought she was sound asleep. If I got out of bed, however slowly and carefully, Mother would wake up. And since Mother went to bed considerably later than I did, and since my bladder tended to get very full during the night, mornings were particularly difficult for me, when I didn’t have my own bed.

  But I noticed that the bed had sheets with green vines and blue flowers printed on them. I had never seen sheets with anything printed on them before, but these might give me something to look at as I lay in bed with nothing to do, while waiting for Mother to wake up. And these vines and flowers certainly went well with the wicker furniture.

  When we went downstairs for lunch in the pension’s dining room, Mother and I were both surprised to see M. Gordet waiting for us. Whether he had been waiting all that time or gone out and come back, I had no idea, but Mother kissed his cheek as though she had not seen him for a week. He would have lunch with us, he said, and Mother told him how pleased that made her.

  M. Gordet translated the lunch menu into French for us, after which Mother asked, “What do you want to order, Julien?”

  I looked at Mother in surprise. Nobody had ever asked me what I wanted to eat before. If I had heard Mother correctly, her question marked for me a transition into a higher state of being. . . which, on reflection, made perfect sense since this was our first meal on a new continent. Mother gave no indication of there being any sort of significance attached to her question. In fact, there was a definite possibility that she had asked the question quite absently, since M. Gordet had just lit her cigarette, from a pack with a label I had never seen before, and Mother seemed to be in the act of savoring its essence.

  “They’re American,” M. Gordet said about the cigarettes.

  Whatever meaning lay behind Mother’s question to me, I decided that I should assume my original impression to be correct and respond in kind. One of the items that M. Gordet had read off was an omelet with ham and some other ingredients, whose French names I did not recognize. I loved eggs in any form—scrambled with chopped spinach, they even made that dismal vegetable palatable—and I was sure that this is what Mother expected me to order. But, as I now knew from experience, an omelet of some sort was likely to be on the pension’s lunch menu on most days, and I would get a chance at it tomorrow. On the other hand, the acknowledgement of my maturity that I assumed to have just been handed to me, deserved an equally mature selection. There was a fish item on the menu. On numerous occasions Mother had tried to make me eat fish, and it had never been a pleasant experience for either of us. When I had scarlet fever in Barcelona and had had to eat that boiled, unsalted fish, that had been really awful. But the fish on the menu here was described as fried in butter, which even made cauliflower taste good, and also some kind of almond things.

  “I. . . I. . . I would like the f. . . f. . . fish,” I said. I seemed to have more trouble getting the words out than I usually did, which tended to happen when I was excited about something.

  “Don’t do that,” Mother said in Polish, and I knew it was the stuttering she was referring to, and not the fish. Then she turned to M. Gordet. “When he gets excited about something, he does that,” she explained. “The doctor said it’s just temporary. It’s from the stress of what we’ve been through and having to move all the time. It’ll stop once he’s settled and in school.” This wasn’t the first time that she had tried to explain my stuttering to M. Gordet.

  I certainly had not heard the doctor say anything about school, but I knew how much my stuttering embarrassed Mother.

  “The fish,” M. Gordet repeated. He had a little piece of paper on which he was supposed to write our order for the waitress.

  “Y. . . yes M. . . monsieur,” I said.

  Then the waitress, who seemed to know M. Gordet, brought two Martinis on a little tray and took the order slips from him.

  “George, how nice,” Mother said, but I could tell that she wasn’t really at all pleased. Anything stronger than one glass of wine tended to make Mother sick. But they clinked glasses and M. Gordet leaned his head toward Mother’s, as he had not done in the ship’s dining room, and talked in a low voice.

  Unlike some of the men that Mother had met during our travels, he did not seem like a bad sort. I had definitely not liked the photographer in Lisbon, who had shot photographs of her in his studio, which she wouldn’t let me see afterwards, or the fat man in Rome who had taken us to his old mother’s house for dinner, tried to make me eat octopus, and then laughed at my revulsion. I didn’t even hold it against M. Gordet that he had marched me to our cabin that way when the two Dutch brothers had tried to push me off the ship. They must have told him some story regarding that kick in the eye, and he had no reason not to believe them. No, while M. Gordet rarely spoke to me and did have a habit of running his comb through his hair quite frequently, I did not have any negative feelings toward him.

  I counted eight other tables in the dining room. The furniture here was wicker, just like in our room, but painted a light green, and the tablecloths had floral designs on them, just like our bed sheets, though not the same design. I saw no other children in the room, which was a relief to me, though some of the tables were empty. When our food arrived, I was further relieved to discover that, as I had hoped, the fish was quite good. This was particularly welcome since, so far, Mother had taken no notice of what I had, voluntarily, ordered.

  I had finished my canned pears and was staring out of the dining room window when I sensed somebody standing behind me. Turning, I saw that it was Sra. De la Vega in a beach jacket and a scarf tied around her hair. A pair of very large sunglasses covered her eyes and made her small face look even smaller. “Time to go to the beach, my little one,” she said.

  “Ah, Sra. De la Vega,” Mother exclaimed, noticing her for the first time.

  “Gabriella,” the senhora corrected.

  “Gabriella, you’re on your way to the beach,” Mother said. “I’m so grateful to you for taking my son.”

  “He can help carry my things,” she said. Then, to me, “Go upstairs and put on your bathing suit. Do you like lemonade?”

  I said that I did.

  “Go upstairs, shoo! I will wait for you on the front porch.”

  I went upstairs and exchanged my pants for my bathing suit. In Poland everyone had always brought a second bathing suit to the beach, so you could change into a dry one when you came out of the water, but I only had the one.

  Sra. De la Vega had a folded beach chair, a beach blanket and two thermoses, besides her large, flowered cloth purse. I had expected to be handed the two thermoses and/or, possibly, the folded beach blanket, but the senhora surprised me by handing me the folded, wood-frame-and-canvass beach chair, plus the blanket. The beach chair wasn’t heavy, but, because of its size, awkward for me to carry. The senhora had held it with ease, because she was taller than I was, but I had a great deal of difficulty keeping it off the ground. I tried to manage it with as little struggle as possible, so that she would not take it away from me, but, much to my delight, I saw that the senhora took little interest in my problem and set right out down the street. Several times I had to stop and shift the load to my other hand, but my companion didn’t embarrass me by
stopping to wait for me. A few running steps brought me even with her each time, before having to set it down and switch it to the other hand.

  The beach was only one block away, and the senhora set a brisk pace. And she didn’t make me hold her hand to cross the wide avenue or even tell me to look both ways. She crossed the street by herself, and I, some paces behind, decided to wait for some cars to pass before plunging ahead. Making this decision was also a first for me, and I couldn’t help a little pride.

  Sra. De la Vega was a considerable distance ahead of me by the time I reached the sidewalk with the S-shaped mosaic lines that I had seen from the car. As I crossed this sidewalk, I tried to determine whether it was white with black S’s or the other way around. There were a lot of people on the beach already, some in the water, some on blankets, and two men and a lady smacking what looked like a beanbag with feathers, back and forth with their hands. The bathing suit that this lady was wearing was not the one-piece kind that I had always seen on women before, but what looked like the panties and brassier that my mother wore under her dress.

  Sra. De la Vega did not seem to stop and look for a good spot, as Kiki and I always did when arriving at the beach, but walked directly to a spot as though it had been reserved for her. As she passed other people, they seemed to know her and exchange greetings with her.

  Once she had reached her spot, the senhora stopped and waited for me to catch up. With both my arms sore now from the load, I had had to stop for a short rest, and was embarrassed now to keep her waiting. I hurried as fast as I could, my feet sinking into the soft sand at each step.

  When she had taken the blanket from me and spread it out, and then set up her chair, the senhora removed her beach jacket, revealing a bathing suit similar to the one worn by the lady playing with the feathered beanbag, though a different color. Except that while the top half of the other lady’s suit had covered the lower half of her breasts, the senhora’s top was so much smaller and her breasts so much longer, that a good three quarters or more of each leathery breast was open to the air.

  I looked away quickly. Back in Poland, people coming out of the water would frequently change from a wet bathing suit to a dry one right in plain sight, and you were supposed to, automatically, turn your head away and not look. That had been fine with me, and when, on occasion, someone did catch me inadvertently looking at them, I would be very embarrassed. But now, the smooth swellings above the suit top of the lady playing the beanbag game had a fascination I had not experienced before. Suddenly I found myself watching in the hope that in stretching for the feathery projectile she would, somehow, stress the mechanism holding up that top to the point where it could no longer perform its function and I would be treated to a glimpse of one or both of the hemispherical treasures.

  There were some things to this whole business that I didn’t understand. I knew that men had, what Kiki called, birdies, and women didn’t. I had one, but Mother did not. In place of a birdie, Mother had hair, and she would, sometimes, come out of the bathroom with nothing on, but holding one hand over her hair, while covering her breasts with the other forearm. It always embarrassed me for her to see me looking at her. Had she not been able to see me, I would have looked more closely to find out exactly what was there.

  But Kiki had also told me that if I touched my birdie when I didn’t need to, such as when I had to negotiate it out through the leg opening of my shorts to go to the bathroom, I would go crazy. I could not understand how simply touching a part of your own body could make you go crazy, but, as with God and Jesus, I had taken it on faith. On the other hand, since I understood it to require a certain accumulation of touches to achieve that dreaded result, I had developed an inexplicable craving to tempt fate by sneaking my hand under my nightshirt, at night, and make split-second contact between the tip of my finger and the purple tip of the hazardous organ. But, once I knew Kiki to be wrong on the subject of Jews and Heaven, and particularly since I believed myself considerably more grownup than my peers, rather than going crazy, I had accepted her as being wrong on the subject of birdies as well and the entire adventure lost its appeal.

  “Be very careful in the water,” Sra. De la Vega was saying now, “because there is a very strong current.”

  I had been taught to face anyone addressing me, and I automatically turned back toward the senhora. But the senhora had seated herself on the reclining beach chair, and I saw that the bottom half of her suit was as limited in its coverage as the top, ending a good distance below her brown bellybutton. Had these same body areas belonged to the beanbag lady, and had they been similarly displayed, I would have feasted my eyes for as long as I could manage. But, things being as they were, I only turned away in embarrassment.

  “I. . . I. . . I am not s. . . s. . . supposed to go in the w. . . w. . . water so soon after ea. . . eating, S. . . s. . . senhora,” I said, looking toward the water.

  “So sit down next to me,” she said, patting the blanket. I sat down, still examining the ocean.

  Sitting beside the senhora and facing the huge expanse of ocean, I realized that what I was hoping for from that other lady’s bathing suit top had scant chance of happening. She had, undoubtedly, played this beach game many times before and was well familiar with the limits of her equipment. On the other hand, I reasoned that, on this beach, there must be other ladies, more youthful than the senhora, but similarly reclining and similarly exposed. And if I were to equip myself with a pair of sunglasses, like the senhora wore, I could wander this beach, harvesting all those sights, without fear of embarrassment.

  But the moment I thought that, I realized that sunglasses would be an unessential drain on our precarious budget. I could tell Mother that the sun hurt my eyes very badly, and then she would certainly buy me a pair. But, in my self-appointed role as sentinel against unnecessary spending, I could not justify such a subterfuge to my own conscience.

  “You are so quiet, Julien,” the senhora said, breaking into my reverie. Suddenly I was embarrassed. I knew that there were certain people who could read minds, and what if the senhora was one of them?

  “Are you missing your home and your little friends in Poland?” she asked.

  “Y. . . Y. . . Y. . . Yes, S. . . S. . . S. . . Senhora,” I said. I tried to think about Warsaw and Kiki to cover my shameful thoughts from her sight. And I was stuttering terribly. The senhora would certainly tell me to stop and think of what I wanted to say, and then to just to say it, as everyone else did.

  “Give me your hands, Julien,” the senhora said suddenly.

  “M. . . M. . . My h. . . h. . . hands?” With both my hands in hers, she would be able to read my thoughts even more thoroughly. Or was it so that I wouldn’t be able to get away?

  “Just turn to me and give me your hands,” she said.

  I turned to face the senhora in her beach chair and saw that she had sat up and turned her shoulders and those long breasts squarely towards me. A cigarette was dangling from her lips. She held her palms up, and I carefully laid my fingers on hers.

  I felt her fingers draw my hands until they had a solid grip on them. She was looking into my eyes, and I didn’t dare turn away. Her eyes were very dark brown, and she had thick, black eyebrows.

  She was looking inside my head now. I tried to picture myself and Kiki walking to the park in an effort to give a benign image to my thoughts.

  The softness of Sra. De la Vega’s hands surprised me. I had expected the feel of leather.

  There was a black disk in the center of each of the senhora’s eyes, but now they seemed to be receding so that I felt that, maybe, I was looking inside her head too, even though there was nothing to see. But I didn’t have the power to read minds. I wonder if, in my eyes, she could see me and Kiki, walking along the street to the park, as I was visualizing us.

  “I want you to say after me, My name is Julien, and I don’t have to stutter. And say it without stuttering.” I felt the Senhora’s tight grip on my hand
s.

  “My n. . . name is J. . . julien, a. . . and I d. . . don’t have to st. . . tutter,” I said, trying hard not to stutter, but it not working.

  “Pay attention,” the senhora said severely, and she shook my two hands for emphasis.

  “Say, I used to live in Warsaw, but now I am in Rio de Janeiro.”

  I stuttered my way through her sentence.

  “Look deep, deep into my eyes,” she said.

  I tried to look more intently into her eyes. I opened my own eyes as wide as I could, and now her black ones were beginning to rotate in little, tight circles. “I used to live in Warsaw,” she repeated, her voice seeming to come from further away now, as though our arms had stretched several meters. “I used to live in Warsaw,” she said again. “Say that!”

  I had made her impatient with me. I wanted desperately to say it correctly for her. I watched her eyes describing their circles. “I. . . used to l. . . ive in W. . . arsaw,” I said, dragging out the first sound of each word, but not stuttering.

  “Say it again, quicker.”

  “I used to live in Warsaw.” I said it without stuttering.

  “But now I am in Rio,” the senhora prompted.

  “But now I am in Rio,” I said.

  “Rio is a magic place.”