Mother and Me (19 page)

This was the relief we had looked for all along, even though from an unexpected direction. The grownups drank vodka after dinner and wondered how our various apartments had fared after we left Warsaw and what else awaited us on our return. I could not totally rule out the idea that God's pleasure at the sight of three and a half Jews saying the rosary together was, somehow, linked to this new and totally unexpected development. The fact that “Father” Chernievich was mad only reinforced this speculation, since God was reputed to work in strange and mysterious ways.

The next day Auntie Paula rode the wagon into town to find out more about how soon the Russians might be expected to pass through and make us invulnerable. Fredek and I were Russian soldiers roaming the fields around our cottage,
looking for German deserters to take to our prison camp behind the house, currently occupied by the chickens who Fredek said were really German spies. The script was all Fredek's, but this time even I took pleasure in the activity as we probed with our shoes and our bayonets under the large leaves of ground-hugging squash or pumpkin plants, or whatever they were, for the hated Nazis cowering in the field.

In this mode, we were only slightly surprised by our encounter with two elephants driving a wagon along the dirt road, pulled by an elderly, bony horse. The elephants were singing in Ukrainian. Their voices were muffled coming through their trunks, which had originally been gas masks, but had had their air hoses disconnected from the canisters that filtered out the gas, and now hung loose in front.

The wagon stopped in front of us, and the elephants invited us on board in young, accented voices. That I clambered up as eagerly as Fredek, would surprise me later—it was not in my character. But the joyous war news must have worked to permit me to get into our make-believe to a degree that bypassed my customary shyness. Before I knew it, Fredek and I were seated on top of the cabbages behind the elephants, who now sang their song in Polish. It didn't rhyme in Polish, but it praised the strength of Marynka who could pull a wagonload of cabbages and two elephants. Fredek and I joined in the song.

The kids in the gas masks seemed to be about a year or two older than we were, and the one driving had braids down her back. After several repetitions of the song, I volunteered the addition of “… and two soldiers,” to the verse, which was immediately incorporated.

We rode past several cottages. There were people outside some of them, and they waved to us. There were women in their long skirts and kerchiefs, with hoes or babies or baskets of wash. “Hey Marynka!” they called to our horse. We waved back. In the fields, there were men with teams of horses and farm machinery, and some of them waved to us as well.

After awhile, we pulled up in front of a barn and stopped. It was built of stone, and I could see no windows in it, but a large open door on the second floor. The two on the driver seat jumped down and removed their gas masks, transforming themselves into a boy and a girl, and began unfastening Marynka's harness.

Inside, I was struck by the smell of the place. Horse manure and hay were smells you encountered on any street in Poland, but here they were an intense mixture that surrounded and permeated you.

There were several stalls in a row here; they weren't the roomy stalls my grandfather's horse had lived in, but were only wide enough for the horse to stand. I remembered that horses slept standing up. The stalls were all empty, except for Marynka's.

Past the stalls, the boy began to climb a ladder that went straight up the wall into the loft above. I followed. I had never climbed a ladder before. Up in the loft, the smell was different again, with the hay smell much more intense. As my eyes got used to the semi darkness, I could see a mountain of hay filling a great portion of the floor. Several wide beams ran across the width of the barn, and the boy was walking along one of them.

Suddenly the boy was gone from the beam. I looked down in alarm. There he was, on his back, lying in the pile of hay. “Jump down!” he called merrily.

I would have preferred not to. I understood that it must be fun to do and evidently harmless, but then I saw the girl coming up the ladder to our beam with Fredek behind her. I tensed for the jolt and jumped.

The jolt didn't come. Sinking into the deep hay was softer than jumping into water or onto a mattress. But the free-fall itself was the most astonishing feeling I had ever experienced. It was, for that split moment, as though all that I was ever anxious about had dissolved.

In a moment, the other two had joined us in the hay. The older boy was already climbing back up the ladder, and I ran after him compulsively. “My airplane's on fire, and I have to bail out!” he said before jumping. I followed right behind him, spreading my arms like an airplane. As I fell into weightlessness, I heard a cry of joy escape my mouth. It surprised me completely, and I knew I was blushing when I landed. The boy and the girl laughed. Fredek made the sound of a gun firing, staggered, and fell backwards off the beam.

We had done several repetitions of this delicious jump when I was suddenly gripped by terror. We must be, I realized, long overdue for lunch. But I had no idea how to go about telling our hosts that we had to terminate this delightful activity. It was a situation I had never been in before.

I sidled up to Fredek in the hay and whispered that we had to go home. Fredek though about this for a moment.

“We have to go home,” he announced.

Without objection, our host and hostess led the way back downstairs. “You can come back tomorrow if you want to,” the girl said to us.

They walked us out to the front of the barn. “Your cottage is over there,” the boy said, pointing in the direction of some thatched roofs in the distance. “Follow this road till you can make a right turn.”

“Goodbye and thank you,” I said, as I had been taught to do. It felt so grown up. We began running down the road.

I knew there would be anger when we got back, maybe even spanking—something I had never experienced—but the good feeling I now had, somehow made all that seem irrelevant.

In the distance, we could see Auntie Paula standing outside the door of our cottage, shading her eyes with her hand. We could tell she was looking for us, and, when she saw us across the field, she went inside.

As we came through the door, she just said, “Go to my room and sit there quietly. No talking.” Her tone was ominously
quiet, implying that at least part of our punishment would take the form of our contemplating the trouble and worry we had caused everybody. “Miss Bronia is looking all over the farm for you,” she added. She gripped Fredek's shoulder and propelled him towards her door.

As we crossed the room, we suddenly heard sobbing coming from Auntie Edna's room. Through the doorway, we could see Auntie Edna lying on the bed, a wet cloth across her eyes, and my mother sitting on the side of the bed facing her. Fredek broke from Auntie Paula's grip and ran to his mother. His sudden concern for her surprised me. I saw Fredek's mother remove the cloth from her eyes, reach her arm out, and draw him to her. Only she didn't stop sobbing now that we were back, but just sobbed louder.

“They're civilized people,” I heard my mother say. “My mother, you know, is Russian.”

Auntie Edna made an effort to stop crying and sat up in bed. She and Fredek had their arms around each other with his head tight against her breast. “It's going to be all right,” she said to him.

Auntie Paula's interest in my punishment seemed to have waned because she now followed Fredek to his mother's room. “That was twenty years ago,” she said to Auntie Edna.

“It was in nineteen twenty-four,” Auntie Edna corrected her.

“All right, fifteen years ago, but don't forget, he was a Count. We aren't nobility. We are three simple women with children and a servant living on a farm.”

“And our husbands are in the army and own businesses,” Auntie Edna answered. “Lolek even owns a factory.”

“They don't know that,” my mother said. “We are three women with husbands in the army. We are no different from most of the women in Poland.”

I had not the faintest idea what they were talking about, except that I was suddenly reminded of the conversation I had had with the man at the icehouse.

Auntie Edna didn't say anything more, probably because Fredek and I were in the room.

“Basia, you'd better tell him,” Auntie Paula said. Of course she meant me.

“Why don't you tell them both,” my mother suggested. Her voice was suddenly like a little girl's.

“For godsakes, Basia, he's standing right here,” Auntie Paula said. I could tell she was impatient with my mother, and I was pleased—at the same time that I was desperate to know what it was that no one wanted to tell us.

“Well, somebody has to tell the boys,” Auntie Paula finally said. “They'll be finding out soon enough. Frederick, Yulian, this morning I heard in town that the Russians aren't coming to fight the Germans. They're coming to occupy this part of Poland. Do you know what occupy means?”

“Like before Marshall Piwsudski,” I volunteered. I knew that not many years ago Marshal Piwsudski had saved Poland from Russian occupation.

“That's right,” my mother said quickly.

Auntie Edna pulled herself up higher on the bed. “There will be Russian soldiers telling people what to do,” she said in a weak voice, “and we will have to do what they tell us.”

“Or they'll shoot us,” Fredek said.

“No, darling, they're not going to shoot us,” his mother said.

“I won't let them shoot us. I'll kick them in the shins where it hurts a lot, and then I'll hit them in the head.”

“My little patriot,” Auntie Edna said, smiling through her tears.

“No, we're not going to do that,” Auntie Paula said sternly. “The patriotic thing to do will be to get through this as safely as we can until the French and the English come.”

The mothers spent much of the rest of the day cutting collars off their dresses and letting down hems. Auntie Edna even turned one green dress inside out and held it up to herself for
approval. Mother and Auntie Paula approved. When Miss Bronia came back with Sonya from looking for us, she was relieved to see us and probably assumed that our absence had already been dealt with, because she said nothing about it.

The following morning, when Miss Bronia went up to the Big House for milk and news, she told Sonya not to come with her. Auntie Paula drew a line in the dirt outlining a few hundred square feet in front of the cottage, and Fredek and I were told to play inside that area. We immediately began construction on a stockade of imaginary logs and boulders.

When it was time for my trip to the icehouse, Auntie Paula came with me. But nobody was there to cut a piece off the big block for us, though we did manage to find a few small pieces of ice that would do in place of our one big one.

When we got back, Miss Bronia was telling her experiences at the Big House, and she started from the beginning again for Auntie Paula's benefit. It seems that there had been no one to answer her knock on the kitchen door, but the door had been open, so she had gone inside. There, she found Mrs. Metner's mother and several others with their arms in the air while a number of peasants with red armbands brandished rifles. These were not local peasants, but from another town, and they were collecting money and valuables for redistribution among themselves.

Asked for her money and jewels, Miss Bronia explained that she had none, since she worked for a woman in a cottage nearby. “Then you're a worker like us,” they told her and gave her a red armband and a costume brooch before sending her back with a container of milk for the “sick child” she cared for.

That day, the sewing that Kiki taught me was put to use as the mothers pried their valuable gems out of their settings and we sewed them up in layers of cloth as buttons for our jackets. I could see that my stitches were tighter and neater than Mother's. Only Fredek refused to touch needle or thread.
Money and small jewelry pieces were wrapped in cloth and sewn into jacket linings. A bracelet of Auntie Paula's went into a thermos and laid among the cooking utensils. A brooch of Auntie Edna's became a bright green pincushion.

Finished by early afternoon, we settled down to wait for our expected visitors.

“This isn't the place for them to find us,” Auntie Edna suddenly said. “We should be where all good peasant women are, out in the potato field.” Mother and Auntie Paula agreed. “And Yulek can be the sick child Bronia told them she was caring for,” Auntie Edna added. “Bronia can be reading to him. It'll make them sympathetic.” They agreed with this as well.

Then Auntie Edna turned to me. “This is a game we're going to be playing,” she said. “Some people will come here, and you're going to pretend that you're sick. We know you aren't really sick, but they won't know that.”

I knew very well why I had to pretend to be sick, and didn't need Auntie Edna to explain it to me. But I let her go ahead and explain it anyway. In a few minutes, the three mothers and Sonya had marched into the potato field across the road and Miss Bronia was left to care for the sick child. Fredek was posted as lookout, and, on his signal, I was to jump into Auntie Edna's bed and act weak. I knew I could do better than that. I had offered to moan and cough, but the offer was turned down on the basis that I would not carry it off believably. I did, however, determine secretly that I would roll my eyes and drool, as I had seen a beggar do in Warsaw.

Fredek sat by the window and I sat near the door to his mother's room, while Miss Bronia read what had become my favorite story, the one about the toy bear, donkey, and tiger, and the little boy named Christopher. Fredek's signal was to be a sneeze, and when it came I dashed into the bed and pulled the comforter up to my chin.

“Give me your jewels!” came the command, but the high-pitched voice was Fredek's.