Loves of Yulian (15 page)

Irenka repeated the entire sentence with surprising accuracy. “That means
I’m going to sit down on the blanket,”
she said.

“N. . . no d. . . d. . don’t you s. . . see m. . . me sit d. . . d. . . down on the s. . . sand?” I was beginning to lose my patience.

“Oh, so you were trying to trick me.”

“No, I j. . . ust d. . . idn’t know the w. . . ord for
b. . . lanket
.”

Now Irenka laughed, and I found that I couldn’t be mad at her.

“Say something else,” Irenka urged.

“
Je m. . . e l. . . eve
,” I said, getting to my feet, and heard Irenka repeat the statement almost flawlessly.

“I stand up?” she said.

I nodded my head. Then I went ahead and gave Irenka several similar statements, which she repeated with equal accuracy. By the time we headed home for lunch, Irenka was able to say a number of things in French, most of them on the first try, and to remember them minutes later. I certainly did not remember my own learning experience as having been that easy, but I put it down to her being a grownup. On the other hand, I did find that I had to alter my earlier assessment of her intelligence.

After lunch, at the swimming pool, Irenka informed me that she had instructions to see to it that I did a lot of swimming, while her own swimming lessons she had decided to put on hold for the moment.

The telephone was ringing when I unlocked the door to our suite, and I rushed across the room to answer it before the caller hung up. Had I been less concerned over the chance of losing the call, I might have given myself some advance warning of the caller’s probable identity and prevented the long pause after Sr. Segiera said, “
Basia
?” mistaking my voice for Mother’s.

“It’s
J. . . ulien
, Monsieur,” I finally said in French.

“Ah,
Julien
. You recognized my voice. How are you?”

“I a. . . m f. . . ine, M. . . onsieur. H. . . ow are y. . . ou?” I responded automatically, as I had been taught. But I had little interest in the state of his wellbeing. Rather, I was concerned over the restarting of his and Mother’s friendship and debating the possibility of not delivering the inevitable message to Mother. If she didn’t know that he had called, she would decide that he wasn’t a gentleman and the diamonds would be safe.

“I have just flown back from ‘the Interior’ in an airplane,” he said. “Would you like to see a picture of my airplane?”

I had no idea what “the Interior” was, but it didn’t matter. I instantly had a mental picture of Sr. Segiera’s head in a leather helmet and goggles, sticking out of the open cockpit of a silver biplane, and the question in my mind was whether he had been the pilot, himself, or whether there was a second head. I had never known anyone who knew how to fly an airplane! For that matter, I didn’t think I knew anyone who had ever flown
in
an airplane.

“Y. . . y. . . yes, M. . . m. . . onisieur,” I said, seeing my scheme go up in smoke.

“May I please speak with your beautiful mother,
Julien
?”

“Sh. . . she i. . . i. . . isn’t h. . . here, M. . . monsieur,” I said. I realized that I was lapsing into my stutter again.

“Then, when she gets home,
Julien
, would you please tell her that I will pick you both up at nine o’clock—no, that would be too late for you—I will pick you up at seven thirty for dinner.”

I said that I would. I wanted to ask if he would be bringing the picture of the airplane with him, but didn’t want to go through all that stuttering. Somehow I was much more conscious of my stutter on the telephone, than when speaking in person. “G. . . oodbye M. . . onsieur,” I said, making a great effort to curb the stutter. Then I hung up.

There was, of course, another good thing about the senhor taking us out to dinner: the menu in the hotel restaurant was limited and the food not very interesting. I wondered whether he would be bringing the picture with him, or whether he meant it for another time.

Because I didn’t have a watch, I wondered how long it would be until seven thirty. Yes, I was sure that he would bring it. To tell me that he had the picture and then not bring it, would be a cruelty that was not in the senhor’s character. Even though I knew that it could not possibly have any effect on the actual outcome, there was a feeling inside me that, if I were to take a piece of paper and draw the image that I wanted to see, that of only the senhor’s helmeted head sticking out of the opening on top of the fuselage, it might, somehow, influence reality. But, while I could see the airplane and its pilot so clearly in my head, I had absolutely no talent at drawing and, if there had been any truth to my supposition that the picture could affect reality, what I produced would have resulted in Sr. Segiera’s piloting a sausage.

“Look what Sra. O’Brien gave me, mother said, when she came in, a little breathless because the elevator wasn’t running. Under her arm, Mother had a leather-bound notebook that was about four times as thick at the spine end as at the other. Laying it on the table, Mother opened it to reveal two, shiny metal rings, sticking up in the air. When she pulled one of the rings apart, the second one snapped open as well, and you could lift the pages right out. “See, you can add pages when you want, or change the order, or whatever you want,” she said. “The paper comes separately, with two holes in it, and you just clip the pages in.”

We both marveled over this invention, with Mother even letting me snap the rings open and closed several times. “I’m helping the senhora write a book,” Mother said. “She was born in Russia, you know, during Tsarist times. You know what ‘Tsarist times’ means, don’t you?”

I did. The count, with whom we had stayed for a while in Hungary, was also Russian and had lived there before the Communist Revolution. I tried to read what was written in Mother’s handwriting on the first page of the notebook, and it didn’t at first make any sense. Then I realized that it was supposed to be Russian, but wasn’t in that crazy Russian alphabet, but the regular one. Mother, I remembered, didn’t know how to write in Russian.

“Y. . . ou’re w. . . riting it in R. . . ussian with P. . . olish l. . . etters,” I said.

“Yes, we’re writing it in Russian, and then Sra. O’Brien will have somebody translate it into Portuguese.”

I had serious doubts that a Russian-to-Portuguese translator could understand Mother’s writing. There were sounds in Russian for which the regular alphabet didn’t have letters. I expressed my doubts to Mother, who laughed. “Don’t worry about that, Yulek,” she said. “You and I will be in America before the book is finished. But, in the meanwhile, I’m getting paid. Look.”

Mother took some money out of her purse. “Look at that, Yul. Your mother is a working woman,” she said and began to laugh at the idea. “We’ll go to a real restaurant for dinner tonight and celebrate.”

Then I had to inform her that there were other plans.

“What, he thinks he can ignore me like that, and then just call up when he feels like it and say to be ready at seven? Ha!”

“S. . . s. . . seven th. . . th. . . thirty.”

Mother picked the pillow off my bed and flung it across the room. “If he ever calls again, you are to just hang up on him, do you hear?” She paused to light a cigarette, and I could see her hand shaking. “Just hang up. Don’t say a single word—don’t let him say anything. Just hang up the moment you hear his voice!”

I could see pitfalls in this strategy. What if it was someone else who sounded like Sr. Segiera, and I hung up on him? But I said, “He s. . . said that he j. . . ust c. . . ame b. . . ack fr. . . om s. . . omewhere in an a. . . irplane.”

But Mother was already laying out a solitaire on the table, and she did not respond.

“When they call from downstairs to say that he’s here,” Mother said, after a while, as though it were the solitaire she was talking to, “tell them that I’m not here, and he can’t come up.”

“B. . . ut they know y. . . ou’re h. . . ere. They s. . . aw you c. . . ome in.”

“They will understand.”

“W. . . hat w. . . ill they u. . . nderstand?”

“People say they’re not in all the time, when they don’t want to see someone. Hotels understand that.”

“W. . . hy d. . . on’t we j. . . ust go to d. . . inner be. . . fore he c. . . omes?”

“Because, when he sees the desk clerk speaking to you, he’ll know that we are here and just don’t want to see him.”

“B. . . ut th. . . at’s l. . . ying.”

“All right, then, we just won’t answer it. The desk clerk will tell him that we are in, but just aren’t answering the phone. He’ll understand.”

I had been instructed not to answer the phone before, when I was alone at night. Now I realized that that had been lying too. Or was it just failing to tell the truth, which wasn’t as bad?

When the phone did ring, Mother and I looked at each other. I had always found not answering a ringing telephone to be very difficult. After a few rings, it would become like an itch that badly needed scratching. Maybe it would have been better to do as Mother wanted in the first place and tell them that she wasn’t in.

Mother did not seem to be bothered by it. In fact, she seemed to be smiling a little, as she continued playing her solitaire.

Finally, the ringing stopped. “We’ll give him a few minutes to leave, then we’ll go out to dinner,” Mother said. “Go comb your hair.”

I was in the bathroom, combing my hair with a wet comb, which was the only way I could get my cowlick to stay down, when I heard a knock on our front door. “Flower delivery for Mme Barbara!” a man’s voice that I did not recognize was saying.

Hurrying back to the living room, I found Mother standing a foot or two from the door, biting on her lower lip. Seeing me come in, she pointed to the door and whispered, “Open it, Yul.” She stepped back to her table, as I stepped to the door.

I opened the door. Behind a large bouquet of red flowers, stood Sr. Segiera, dressed in an all-white suit, his finger to his lips, requesting my silence. “Flowers for the beautiful senhora,” he said in that same make-believe voice.

Mother stepped forward to receive them. “Ernesto!” she cried out, when she recognized him. Then, “No, no! You can’t do that! Get out!”

“But Barbara,” he said in French, in his own voice, “I just got back from the Interior this afternoon.”

“No, Ernesto! I don’t want to see you! Get out! Go away!”

“I couldn’t call you because. . . ”

“Gentlemen don’t behave this way!” Even speaking French, she used the English word
gentlemen
, just as she did in Polish.

“Barbara,” he seemed to be pleading, “there was a messenger waiting in front of my house when I got home after our dinner, telling me that there was a problem I had to fix in the Interior, immediately. It was too late to call you, and there are no telephones there.”

“Just go, Ernesto. Get out and take your flowers with you.” Then she slammed the door shut, crushing the flowers, I was sure, against Sr. Segiera’s white suit.

“Look out the window and tell me when he leaves,” she said to me. Surprisingly, the anger was all gone from her voice now.

Leaning out the window, I saw the top of a very long and shiny black car, parked in front of the hotel lobby. A man in some kind of military uniform leaned against a fender, smoking a cigarette. Suddenly the man flicked the cigarette away and opened the rear door. Sr. Segiera, in his white suit, but without the flowers, came out of the lobby, crossed the sidewalk in hurried steps, and ducked inside the back seat.

“He’s g. . . one,” I said, as I watched the car pull away. With the senhor went my photograph of him piloting the airplane, which I was now sure must have been in one of the pockets of his white suit. But, with him, also went the fear of Mother’s growing to like him to the extent of giving away our diamonds.

Mother had a definite smile on her face now, which I assumed to express her victory. “I think Sr. Segiera likes us,” she said, “don’t you?”

CHAPTER VII

The following day, we began a morning routine that we would follow for a while. At eight thirty, Mother would drop me on Irenka’s floor, then continue on down to the street level, where Sra. O’Brien’s car would be waiting to take her to her job.

More often than not, Mr. K. would still be asleep behind the closed bedroom door, and Irenka would explain that he had had a late-night meeting. Occasionally, I would find him in his bathrobe, in a chair by the window, reading a newspaper. Sometimes he would call out a Portuguese word, and Irenka would go look it up in the little book in the bedroom and then give him the Polish translation. Often, she would already know the word and translate it immediately. It was quite clear that Irenka was picking up the language much faster than the rest of us. The first time that I saw Mr. K. seated there, I did notice a bit of a swelling under one eye, presumably from the fight that Irenka said he had been in a few days before.

Mornings, Irenka and I would usually spend at the beach. We were both developing deep tans and had no fear of sunburn. We continued Irenka’s French lessons, which I soon came to view as similar to throwing fish to seals at the zoo. Each word or phrase that I gave her, Irenka would make her own, right on the spot, and I would soon hear it as an integral part of her vocabulary. Soon, with my own, limited vocabulary, it became difficult to come up with new words, and so we began a game of role playing a variety of situations. Sometimes I might be a chauffeur and she a lady on her way to the theater, or she would be a lady buying meat, and I a butcher. The problem, though, was that it was always I who had to think up the situation and to, even, prompt Irenka in her role.