Loves of Yulian (2 page)

Mother was very beautiful. Her name was Barbara, and before the war all her Warsaw friends had called her,
Beautiful Basia
. She had a round face, darkly blond hair, which I now knew wasn’t really blond, but brown like mine, and large, round, brown eyes. She had even had a “screen test” a few years before, in Warsaw, to see if she could be a movie star, but nothing seemed to have come of it.

Now she turned back to me. “You see how the others are swimming, don’t you? See how they move their arms and their legs?”

The people she was pointing out were doing what Kiki and I had done, wearing our floatation cushions. We had called it, “doing the frog.”

“Just do the same thing they’re doing, and you’ll swim,” Mother said. “If they can do it, so can you. And if you have any trouble, M. Gordet, here, is an excellent swimmer, and he’ll, of course, pull you out, won’t you George?”

Then, turning again to M. Gordet, she said, “The first thing I’m doing when we get to Rio will be to hire a good governess for him, to give him some routine and some discipline again. He was brought up so well in Poland. He had such beautiful manners, but with the war, he’s become very undisciplined. Just a few weeks ago, he even yelled at me.”

The incident she was talking about in Lisbon was after she had yelled at me first for breaking a porcelain figurine that one of her men friends had given her, when it wasn’t me who had broken it. But I had learned that Mother would often talk about how bad I had been to her in order to gain people’s sympathy. And since my protest would just cause her to say, “You see what I mean?” I didn’t say anything and hoped she would forget about my going in to swim.

Then she turned to me again. “Go ahead, get in,” she said. “M. Gordet and I are right here.”

I wasn’t at all sure that M. Gordet could even swim—I hadn’t seen him in the water yet. He had a nice tan and fair muscles, but I wondered how he would feel about getting his hair wet.

“Go ahead,” Mother said.

I lowered myself into the water, took a deep breath, released the board I had been sitting on, and began to “do the frog.”

And I swam. I did, indeed, swim. And, as I slowly breast-stroked my way the length of the little pool, keeping within reach of the side, I was suddenly very excited and aware of several things at the same time. One was that, in finally learning to swim, I had passed onto a new level of maturity. Another was that I had made that passage by myself, without the elaborate swimming lessons that I had seen older children receiving from swimming instructors on the bay side of the Yurata resort. A third was that my poor Kiki, who had been my constant companion until the war began and then had to go back to her own family in Lodz, most certainly had not had the opportunity to learn to swim under the current occupation of our country by the Germans. This meant that I had undoubtedly passed her in that area of development.

A fourth realization did not occur to me till a few minutes later, when M. Gordet suggested that the three of us had had enough sun for one session and should go inside. And that was that, with fresh ocean water being constantly pumped in and out of our makeshift pool, I and my fellow swimmers were, in a sense, swimming our way across the Atlantic.

Our ship was taking us not to America, which
was
our final destination, but Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We had left Lisbon, Portugal a few days earlier and would have to wait in Brazil until we could get a visa to the United States under the Polish immigration quota. But, at least, we were putting an ocean between ourselves and the war in Europe. And when we finally did get to America, which was a very big and very rich country, Mother would get to write her book, and we would become American and rich again.

We had been rich before the war. My stepfather, Lolek, had owned a shirt factory, and we had had a big apartment in the best section of Warsaw. But when the Germans had started bombing Warsaw, on September first, Lolek had gone into the army, Kiki had gone back to her family, and Mother and I had gone to a farm in southeastern Poland to get away from the bombing. Then the Bolsheviks had suddenly invaded from the east, while our soldiers were busy fighting the Germans in the west, and we had spent six months living with the Russians. The moment they arrived, there was almost no food in the stores and no firewood, and people would be detained for questioning and then disappear without a trace. So Mother and I had escaped over the Carpathian Mountains into Hungary, walking eleven hours in the snow, after our hired guide had abandoned us, and everyone called it incredibly courageous on Mother’s part, and a miracle that we had survived.

Of course, before our escape, everyone had told Mother that she was crazy. Yes, people had escaped that way, but they had been strong men, not women with children, and it had been before the mountains were covered with snow. But Mother had just laughed at them, as though they were saying silly things.

That escape was what Mother’s book was going to be about, along with stories about how brutally the Germans treated people in the part of Poland that they occupied. We couldn’t talk about the book while we were still in Europe because the Germans, who had spies everywhere, didn’t want Mother getting to America, which wasn’t in the war, and writing her book. But right now, we were very poor.

Not because she expected to need them, but because of the falling bombs, Mother had wrapped up all of her jewelry in a blue pillowcase when we left Warsaw, and packed them in one of the suitcases we brought with us. We had not expected to be gone long, since Poland had a mutual defense treaty with Britain and France, and the two of them would surely push the Germans back into Germany in a matter of weeks. But that hadn’t happened, and Mother had had to start selling off her jewelry for us to live on and to get from one place to another. The guide who was supposed to lead us across the Carpathians had been paid from the proceeds of the sale of some of that jewelry, and Mother had sewn the rest into the lining and buttons of our clothes before our mountain adventure.

But travel through Europe on a Polish passport was both hazardous and expensive in nineteen forty, and our often urgent financial needs made it a definite buyer’s market in diamonds. Our supply of precious stones was being quickly depleted. Our challenge at this point was to reach America, where Mother could sell our story to a publisher, before the supply of jewels ran out altogether.

Not only did I understand all this very well, but I must have actually understood it somewhat better than Mother, because in Lisbon she had gone out and bought a new bathing suit and three new outfits, including a long evening gown, that she said were just for the ship, which would only be a two-week trip. All I had gotten for the trip, and all I needed, was a bathing suit, and I could have even done without that, and just worn my brown shorts. She had said that it was important for her to look nice, but she didn’t really need new clothes to look nice. Nor did she need to go to a hairdresser in order to have her hair washed, since you could buy shampoo at a pharmacy. I understood that women were more concerned about their looks than men, but we were running very short on finances, and who knew how long we would have to wait for our turn in the Polish quota for immigrating to America.

Of course, I also understood about temptation. I knew what it was to see something in a store window that you wanted to have. I, of course, had never had the opportunity to just walk into the store and buy what I wanted, but for somebody who did, I could well see how that might be hard to resist. And my mother just didn’t seem very good at resisting that kind of temptation. Mother could only speak a few words of Portuguese, which was what they spoke in Brazil, and she couldn’t type or cook or drive a car or even sew—I could sew buttons on better than she could—so I didn’t see any way for more money to be coming in until we got to America and she got to write her book. So it might well be up to me to make sure that our funds lasted for as long as it took to get to America.

“He’s very sickly,” I heard Mother saying to M. Gordet, as he helped her to climb down from the swimming pool on the ladder that was nailed to the side. Mother had on open-backed shoes on very high wedge heels and I could tell she was going to have trouble. Of course, I also knew she was talking about me again, and I dearly hoped she wasn’t going to tell him about the problem with my memory and what I had done in Hungary. I was relieved to hear her say, “He’s just gotten over scarlet fever. He caught it in Barcelona, where there wasn’t any medicine, and I didn’t know if he was going to live.”

The part about scarlet fever in Barcelona was true. I had had to stay in bed in our hotel room for several weeks and been allowed to eat nothing but boiled, unsalted potatoes and boiled, unsalted fish, both of which were disgusting. Mother was out most of the time, trying to sell her jewels or get a visa to Portugal or, maybe, Brazil, and the boredom had been terrible too. The reason why there was no medicine was that, in nineteen forty, Spain had just gotten over a civil war, and they were out of almost everything. On the other hand, the part about my being
sickly
wasn’t true at all. But Mother had told that lie so often, that, I supposed, she had just come to believe it.

Soon after leaving Lisbon, Mother had explained to me that our ship, which had a huge Brazilian flag painted on each side so that German submarines would not torpedo us, was a “mixed freighter” and not a “liner,” which meant that it carried both freight and passengers, and was smaller and not as luxurious as a liner, which carried mostly just passengers. On the other hand, it was also less expensive, which I had been happy to hear. The ship would make several stops along the way to pick up and drop off both cargo and passengers, so the trip would take longer than it would have on a liner.

But we weren’t in any hurry, since we would have to wait months, maybe years, once we got there because America only allowed in so many people from any one country each year. Because the war had begun in Poland, there were a lot of Poles on the waiting list. But she assured me that we would get to America eventually and become Americans. America, she said, was the safest country in the world because it had a huge ocean on each side, and it was the strongest and the richest. Before the war, a friend of Mother’s, who worked in the Polish embassy in America, had brought me back a watch that he had bought for just one dollar in a pharmacy. Anywhere else in the world, you had to go to a jewelry store to buy a watch and pay a lot of money. America was also where they made movies, where they had cowboys, and the buildings were hundreds of stories tall.

Mr. Gordet, whom Mother had met the second day of our voyage, was, Mother had told me, a vice president of the shipping line, and made the trip to South America quite often. He knew a lot of people in Rio, and would introduce Mother to people who were likely to buy some of her jewels. He also got Mother and me transferred to the captain’s table in the dining room, where he ate his meals. To be at the captain’s table, which seated ten people, like each of the other three tables, was considered a great honor, though the captain only ate with us two evenings. His chair, an armchair with a blue cushion on the seat, stood empty the rest of the time. One of the ship’s officers sat at each of the other tables, and I found my eyes constantly attracted to their blue and braid uniforms. In Poland, all the schools, except the one I went to, had navy blue uniforms with brass buttons. Since their meeting, Mother and M. Gordet had spent a lot of time together.

The talk in the dining room went on in several languages, of which I understood the French and very little of the Portuguese and Spanish. On the second day out, we had a “lifeboat drill.” At supper the previous evening, one of the officers had explained to us, in several languages, that we would hear a siren over the public address system, which meant that we should put on the life jackets that were under our beds and report immediately to the spot on deck that we were assigned to by the chart on our cabin door.

Coming out of our cabin, we saw a steward, already in his bulky life jacket, who then helped us to tie our own jackets properly and hurried us onto the deck. Once there, we stood in little groups beside each lifeboat that the sailors were doing something to. One of the officers explained to our group that in a real emergency we would be instructed to climb into the boats and be lowered into the ocean. Also, that there would be a crewmember in charge of each boat, and we were to obey his every command since he was trained in these matters. Then, he went on to reassure us that the Brazilian flag painted on either side of our hull would keep German submarines from torpedoing us.

There were two other children on board, besides me. They were two brothers from Holland, who looked exactly alike, except that one had his hair parted on the right side and the other on the left. Mother asked me why I didn’t go play with them, and I explained that I didn’t speak Dutch, and it wasn’t likely that they spoke Polish. Mother answered that they probably spoke some French, as I did, and, if they didn’t, it would be fun communicating through hand gestures and mime, which certainly didn’t sound like fun to me.

Even if they had spoken Polish, I would not have been anxious to make their acquaintance. I had not had a good experience playing with other boys. They always wanted to pretend we were soldiers, and that I was their prisoner being tortured or that they were cowboys, and I was a robber about to be hanged.

At the hotel in Barcelona, there had been a girl, almost a year younger than me, who was also Polish, and we made believe that we were riding in a car, with me driving, up and down the halls, or climbing the Carpathian Mountains the way Mother and I had done, to get away from Soviet border guards. But it turned out afterwards that it was she who had given me my scarlet fever, since she was just getting over it when we began playing together.