Loves of Yulian (9 page)

Well, what would happen if my mother were to get sick and die? There I would be, all by myself in a hotel suite in Rio with no idea how to go about selling Mother’s diamonds or what to do once that money ran out.

“You sh. . . shouldn’t be s. . . moking so m. . . uch,” I said, avoiding my stutter almost totally with my new technique of dragging the words out instead of repeating the same sound.

“Yes, I know. I will stop as soon as we get to America,” she answered.

“Are you u. . . pset because M. G. . . .ordet isn’t a g. . . entleman?” I had the sense that there was something to his failure in the
gentleman
department that went beyond the dirty-fingernails and failure-to-light-cigarettes issues. In fact, for some time now, I had had the feeling that what I knew of life was, like the lobby of our hotel, just an antechamber to some great mystery which, once I was introduced to it, would explain a whole lot of things. And I had to confess to myself that my question regarding M. Gordet had been motivated only partly out of concern for Mother’s feelings and partly as a probe into that mysterious realm.

“We will never speak of M. Gordet again,” Mother said, instantly slamming the door on my probe.

“Tomorrow I will have to telephone Sr. O’Brien, to make an appointment to see him,” she announced, as though she had just made a difficult decision. “He’s a very rich man, and his wife is Russian. He should be sympathetic to us. I have his telephone number and a letter of introduction from Sr. Santos. Do you remember Sr. Santos, the photographer in Lisbon?”

I remembered Sr. Santos very well. He was the one who made me go to the waiting room after I had watched him shoot some pictures of Mother with her hair blowing from a big fan, because he was going to take some more pictures that I wasn’t supposed to see. As for Sra. O’Brien being Russian, Mother had had considerable luck with Russian people, due to her command of the Russian language. Her own mother, my grandmother, was Russian, and Mother had grown up speaking both Russian and Polish. Before our escape, Mother had been able to gain special consideration from several Soviet officers, due to some degree to her fluency in that language. Russian people always seemed to be particularly pleased when they heard somebody, outside Russia, speaking good Russian.

Now I watched Mother light a fresh cigarette from the end of the old one and hoped we would be going to America real soon.

“And when we’re at Sr. O’Brien’s,” she continued in a very sober tone, “you are not to leave the office unless I tell you to. Do you understand that? If Sr. O’Brien suggests that you go with his secretary to get some ice cream or something, like Sr. Talon did in Lisbon, you are to say, very politely, that, no thank you, but you don’t care for any. Do you understand that? You are not to leave me alone with him unless
I
tell you to.”

I remembered the scene in Lisbon when Sr. Talon had suggested that I go with his secretary to get some ice cream, and Mother had said that I couldn’t. This, of course, was the exact opposite of what had happened at Sr. Santos’s photography studio, when Mother had told me to do as he said and wait in the waiting room. But I supposed that she was afraid that this Sr. O’Brien might try to take her diamonds away by force. Now I wondered if, perhaps, that was what had happened with M. Gordet. Had he tried to steal Mother’s diamonds?

But somehow, I had the feeling that that had not been the case. If it had been, Mother would have referred to him as a thief. This
not a gentleman
business was more complicated than that. At any rate, tomorrow I would go to Sr. O’Brien’s office with Mother and make sure he didn’t try to snatch the diamonds.

I didn’t get to saying my prayers that night before falling asleep. It wasn’t the first time this had happened in recent weeks. But this time, my experience with Irenka at the beach had something to do with it.

The next day, I watched as Mother telephoned Sr. O’Brien’s office and used her very limited Portuguese to explain her letter of introduction from Sr. Santos in Lisbon. As she best understood it, the secretary said to come right away and gave her the address. Mother immediately changed into one of the dresses she had bought for our boat trip, pinned on a little green, feathered hat with a green veil, and made me clean my nails with a brush. Then we set off in a taxi.

Mother and I had both expected the taxi to take us further into the city where one would think the offices of important businessmen would be, but our driver surprised us by driving along the beach until we were out in the country. Mother even leaned over the back of the front seat with the piece of paper that the address was written on, but the driver said, “Si, si,” nodded his head, and kept driving. Mother lit another cigarette.

Then we were driving through a stone and iron gate and turning into a wide gravel driveway with flowerbeds on both sides. There was a large lawn ahead of us and a big stone house with many cars in front of it on a bit of a hill. Our taxi pulled up at the front entrance, where we had to climb some steps and then cross a stone patio to reach the front door.

A man in a black suit met us at the door. “Sr. O’Brien, Sr. Enrique O’Brien,” Mother said, and the man nodded his head and proceeded to lead us across the marble floor of the foyer. Mother took my hand, and I didn’t object.

The man stopped at a massive set of double doors that were open wide and motioned for us to enter. Now we found ourselves in the center aisle of a room where chairs had been set up as for a performance. Three women, dressed in black, sitting in the front row of the section on our left, were its only occupants. The middle woman of the group, considerably larger than her companions, leaned against the back of her chair with one hand seemingly in the lap of each of the other two. Her head was thrown back, and her black, curly hair, hatless and swept straight back from her upturned face, was in contrast to the pinned and lacquered hairdos that the two other women had under their little, black, veiled hats. At the end of the aisle that ran down between the two sections of chairs, huge sprays and wreaths of flowers surrounded what I took to be a long, gold-colored altar. This was no office, but some kind of church.

The two smaller women turned to look at us over their shoulders, through their black veils, as Mother stopped dead in her tracks. They kept looking, and then the large woman in the middle turned to look at us as well.

I felt Mother’s hand pull me forward. We marched right to the altar, where I recognized a padded kneeler right up against it. I had never seen a setup like this, and I wondered if it might be Jewish.

Mother stopped just short of the altar. “We’ll just say a short prayer and go home,” she whispered.

I pointed to the kneeler. “I think we’re supposed to kneel,” I whispered back.

Mother knelt down, and I with her. She crossed herself, backwards again. I crossed myself the proper way and put my hands together. The smell of the flowers that surrounded us was overwhelming.

“Don’t look inside,” Mother whispered.

“Inside what?”

“Oh my God,” Mother whispered under her breath, and I understood from her tone that wasn’t in prayer. Finally with a slight movement of her head, Mother indicated the left end of the altar. For the first time I noticed that a lid was open at that end. I stretched my neck to see what it revealed.

“Don’t look,” Mother repeated. There was no way that I could have seen inside from my kneeling position anyway.

Mother had folded her hands and now, indeed, looked as though she were praying.

Then she crossed herself backwards again and stood up. I crossed myself and stood up with her.

Now she walked to the three women sitting in the front row. “Sra. O’Brien?” she asked.

One of the smaller women answered her. “This is Sra. O’Brien,” she said, indicating the large woman.

Now Mother broke into Russian. “Senhora, I am so sorry for your loss. I didn’t know. I have just arrived from Lisbon with my little son, and I have a letter of introduction to Sr. O’Brien from Sr. Rudolfo Santos.”

I watched the Senhora’s head, which had been tilted back again, slowly right itself and her closed eyes slowly open. It was like seeing somebody wake from sleep to full, wide-eyed attention. “Senhora is Russian,” she said in that language. I saw that her large face had no makeup, while her two companions were made up to the degree Mother’s friends had been in Poland before the war. Mother, herself, I now realized, as I compared her to these two women, wore considerably less makeup than she used to.

“No, Senhora. I am Polish, but my little mother is Russian.”

“And Senhora, you have a letter from Rudolfo?”

“Yes, Senhora.”

“May I see it?” The Senhora, who was totally alert now, held out her hand.

As Mother took the letter out of her purse, I began to understand what was under that open lid. I saw the light blue, silk padding of the lid and the padding along what I could now see of the interior sides, and realized that there must be a dead man in there. I raised myself on tiptoe to see inside and thought that, maybe, I saw a little bit of a forehead and some white hair.

Mother’s elbow bumped my arm, and I automatically dropped from my tiptoes. I had seen people killed by the German planes, as we fled Warsaw, but I had never seen one laid out like this, and, suddenly, I had a deep yearning to see one.

“Ah Senhora,” Sra. O’Brien was saying now, as she read the letter. “You and your little boy have suffered at the hands of the filthy Bolsheviks.”

Words to that effect I had heard numerous times in the past few months, but never with such passion.

“You must have something to eat.” Then she turned to the woman on her right and said something to her in Portuguese. The woman looked up at Mother, then stood up and walked quickly out of the room, her heels seeming to click even on the carpet.

“Please sit down next to me, Senhora, and tell me all about your escape.”

As Mother sat down, I started to edge myself imperceptibly closer to the casket for a better look inside.

“Sit down,” Mother hissed in Polish, and I had no choice, but to seat myself beside her. I had learned to understand Russian, first by listening to Mother and Grandmother talk together, and later from hearing Mother talk with the Russian officers before our escape. Now, for the first time, I realized that talking formally in Russian, as in French or Portuguese, one did not need to speak in the awkward third-person grammar that we did in Polish. Russian, French, and Portuguese all used the word “you” to address a person politely, while Polish only had the intimate version of the term, forcing you into third-person construction when you were speaking to someone you weren’t intimate with.

Mother was telling Sra. O’Brien about our escape over the mountains, as I had heard her tell it numerous times before. I knew that she would tell her about me falling into the stream and her pulling me out, which hadn’t happened at all, and that she
wouldn’t
tell her about getting her leg stuck under a fallen tree branch frozen in the snow and how she would still be sitting there if it weren’t for me. When she had first started telling the story that way, it had made me very angry, but now I had become accustomed to it, and I could even mouth the words along with her.

Then, the woman who had gone out came back in, and I quickly stood up to allow her to sit beside Mother.

Instead of sitting down, the woman stood, quite clearly waiting for Mother to give her back her seat.

But, by this time, Sra. O’Brien was holding Mother’s hand, and Mother did not seem to see the woman. She was telling Sra. O’Brien about some priest blessing us before our escape, though I could not remember any such event, and though it must have been very hard for her not to see the woman standing right in front of her.

“Sit down, Vera,” I understood the Senhora to say to the woman. I had picked up enough Portuguese in Lisbon to manage that.

Sensing an opportunity, I immediately stood up, and Sra. Vera sat down beside Mother, while I began inching my way toward the casket again.

Now a maid, with a little white apron and cap, came to us with a tray. The maid was black skinned with the flattened nose I had seen in my book, and I found her extremely pretty. There were little sandwiches on the tray and two cups. She offered them to Mother, who placed a sandwich on a plate and handed it to me. “Sit down and eat,” she said in Polish

“I’m not hungry,” I said.

“Sit down and eat,” she repeated. Mother was smiling, but I could tell the smile was for the benefit of the senhora.

I took the plate and sat down on the other side of Sra. Vera. Mother took a sandwich for herself and one of the cups.

“Oh, you must eat more,” Sra. O’Brien said, and Mother put another sandwich on her plate.

“And the boy,” the senhora said to the maid.

The maid brought the tray to me, and I took a second sandwich. As she waited with the tray, I realized I was expected to take the remaining cup as well. I could smell the coffee.

I had had coffee once or twice before, and, with four spoons of sugar, it wasn’t too bad. But this coffee was so strong that no amount of sugar would have made it palatable. I pretended to sip it. The sandwich was some kind of chicken salad, and it was all right.