Mother and Me (22 page)

“Bravo Paula!” Mother said, when Auntie Paula had finished presenting her plan, and I, too, was impressed. Miss Bronia quickly volunteered to go to the bakery, and Sonya said she would go with her. The two left immediately. I got the sense that Mother was making a special effort to be nice to Auntie Paula.

Auntie Edna said she would go apartment hunting. “Fine,” Auntie Paula said. “You and Fredek can start looking in that section on the other side of that little park that we didn't have time to get to yesterday. Barbara and Yulek can go left from the front door, looking for food and firewood. Sonya and I will turn right from the front entrance, and Bronia can try the big avenue. Everyone buy whatever they can find in the way of food or firewood. How's that?”

“Paula, you're like a general,” Mother said.

“Why don't you take Fredek with you, and I'll take Sonya,” Auntie Edna said to Auntie Paula.

“Maybe Fredek can go with Bronia,” Auntie Paula said. “He can help her carry things. You won't have anything to carry.”

I could tell that neither one of my Aunties wanted Fredek with her, and I felt sorry for him. Fredek didn't seem to care. “When do we eat breakfast?” he asked.

“In a little while, dear,” his mother said. Then, turning to Auntie Paula and Mother she said, “I never thought that the time would come when I didn't have one scrap of food to give to my child for breakfast.”

“Don't be an idiot!” Auntie Paula snapped. “This is only a temporary situation. We have money, and you can do anything you want when you have money.”

I decided once more that I didn't like Auntie Paula. I could see that Auntie Edna was in pain, but whether I liked her or not, I wasn't sure.

In a few minutes, Sonya came back to say that Miss Bronia was just four people from the door to the shop and that it wouldn't be long now. Then, a few minutes later, Miss Bronia came back with a large round loaf of black bread. “Only one loaf per customer,” she said. The bread would have tasted better with butter, but it was warm and soft and moist and delicious.

Out in the street, a woman with a Russian accent was speaking in Polish over the loudspeakers. The Soviet Union was a paradise where the stores were full of wonderful things, she was saying, and everyone was given as much money as they needed. I wondered what exactly the Soviet Union was. If it was a shopping area somewhere here in town that she was advertising, I wondered why Mother didn't pay more attention to it—it sounded like just the answer to our needs. And the bit about being given money, I didn't understand at all.

“Take my hand,” Mother had said as we first came out of the dark hallway of our building into the not much brighter daylight in the street. In Warsaw I would have taken her hand automatically, knowing I had no viable option. Now I sensed that if I refused, Mother would have a difficult time enforcing her command and there was probably too much going on for her to make an issue of it later. On the other hand, this was wartime, and my making an issue of so petty a matter would have been wrong in terms of the urgency of the times. Realizing quite well how this reasoning distinguished me from my cousin Fredek and maybe anyone else my age, I opted to take Mother's hand.

As we walked in our assigned direction, looking for a greengrocer, a butcher, a baker, or firewood, I realized that Mother
and I were almost the only people walking. There were others in the street, including a Russian soldier with a rifle on almost every corner, but most people did not walk, but stood or sat. They stood in small groups talking, the men with cigarettes and pipes, wearing the flat caps that, to me, implied working class, in contrast to the fedoras and bowlers that one saw on the streets in Warsaw. Women, mostly in black coats and kerchiefs, stood in little groups of their own. Some people sat alone on chairs in doorways. I had the feeling that everyone and everything seemed sad. Mother had exchanged her peasant skirt and blouse for a gray tweed suit and, once more in her own high-heeled shoes, towered over me again.

Most of the stores we passed were closed, their lights off and the steel grates pulled across the glass windows. In one store that wasn't closed, I could see several Russian soldiers lined up at the counter, but couldn't tell what they were buying.

“Oh look, Yulek!” Mother said suddenly. “In that next block there.”

Looking ahead, I could see a line of people outside a store of some sort. “Let's see what they're selling,” Mother said, breaking into a fast walk; I had to run to keep up with her.

This queue was about as long as the one outside the bakery that I had seen from the wagon yesterday. I counted thirty-eight people standing against the wall outside the door.

“What are they selling?” Mother asked the woman at the end of the line.

“Sausage,” came the answer, “one ring to a customer. And they have soap and cigarettes. They had butter for a while, but it's gone.”

My outlook brightened at the thought of sausage. The food situation being what it was, Mother was not likely to refuse me sausage—unless of course Auntie Paula or Miss Bronia came up with ham. We joined the end of the line.

The woman, whom Mother had asked the question, was only a bit taller than I was, in a gray coat and a little basket
of artificial flowers in the way of a hat. She was older than Mother, and a partially filled cloth bag hung from her arm.

“Missus is not from here,” she said to Mother, turning to face us.

“No,” Mother said. “We're from Warsaw. And Missus?”

“I live here. My husband was a captain in the police, but the Russians detained him night before last. There's a place out in the country a few kilometers away where they've taken a number of men, nobody knows why. My husband didn't do anything. He was just a policeman doing his job, but they just came to the house and took him. I'm trying to get a permit to go see him, but you have to stand in line for that too, and I have a son and a daughter to feed in the meantime.”

“I'm sorry,” Mother said. “My husband went into the army when the war started, and I don't know where he is.”

The woman clucked her tongue. “One must survive,” she said. “Missus has her boy to take care of. I don't let my daughter out of the house as long as they are in the streets.” Her head made a little nod towards the Russian soldier across the street.

As they talked, we advanced a few places toward the entrance door. A man stood on the other side of the glass door, unlocking it to let each customer out and a new one in.

“Missus doesn't have a shopping bag,” the woman said to Mother.

“No, it's our first day here. We were on a farm. There was no shortage of food there.”

“Missus will need to sew herself a bag. You never know how many lines you'll stand in and how long you'll have to wait.”

“Yes. Thank you for the advice. What's happened to all the food anyway?”

“The Russians take it all. Their army, you know, doesn't carry provisions. They just live off the land. Everything's stopped since they got here. The stores have nothing to sell.
The soldiers go crazy buying up trinkets, watches, mechanical children's toys. When a store does get some supplies, you stand in line like this.”

There was an old man in line behind us now. He had a white mustache, a little white goatee, and very large ears. “Have you been waiting here long?” he asked me.

I tugged on Mother's sleeve. “Don't do that,” she said, turning away from her conversation.

“Mummy, the man wants to know if we've been here long,” I said, mindful of admonitions against speaking to strangers.

“So tell him.”

I was pleased with this change of policy. “A few minutes,” I said to the man.

“A few minutes?” he repeated. “Do you have a watch?”

I was puzzled by this question. “I do have a watch, but not on me. It's my father's gold pocket watch.”

“Then how do you know it was a few minutes?” His tone and his face were extra, extra serious, and I suddenly realized he was joking. “I counted the seconds,” I said.

“Now, that's a very good way to tell the time when you don't have a watch,” he said in a grave tone. “Do you know how many seconds are in a minute?”

“Sixty.”

“That's very good. And how many minutes in an hour?”

“Sixty.”

“And I suppose there are sixty hours in a day?”

“Of course. And sixty days in a week,” I said laughing.

“And sixty weeks in a month.”

“And sixty months in a year.”

I had never had a nonsensical conversation like this before, and, for some reason, it made me feel very grown up.

“Do you know how many years in a century?” he asked.

I was afraid that if I said sixty again, he might think that I didn't know the real answer. “One hundred,” I finally said.

“Very good. And do you know what century this is?”

“It's the twentieth century and this is nineteen thirty-nine.”

“That's excellent. Here's your reward,” he said, reaching into his coat pocket. Here I was concerned. While the ban on my speaking with strangers seemed to have been lifted, I doubted that it also applied to accepting presents, and I did not want to bring this very weird and funny conversation to a premature end by refusing his gift. The old man fished around in his pocket for a moment, then extracted his hand holding nothing, which he held out to me proudly.

With great relief I accepted the imaginary object, placed it carefully in my mouth and began to chew.

“Oh no, no, no!” he said in mock alarm. “You don't eat it—you wear it on your head like I do.” There was, of course, nothing on his head other than a little black skullcap to keep his bald spot warm, like Grandfather did.

“I am terribly sorry,” I said in equally mock regret. I took the object out of my mouth, blew on it, and carefully put it over my head. The man cocked his head back a little and looked at me. “I think I would wear it a little more over the right eye.”

I adjusted the imaginary headgear.

“No, maybe over the left eye,” he said. I adjusted it again.

Suddenly there was a loud, collective groan from the people making up the queue. “I've been waiting over an hour,” somebody said. Now I saw that a hand-lettered sign had been put up in the glass door. “Closed—out of stock,” it said.

“Is this what happens?” Mother asked the woman in front of her.

“It happens all the time.”

“I wasted half an hour,” Mother said.

The line was quickly dissolving. The man with the white goatee and the skullcap behind us curled his fingers around an imaginary object. I guessed it was a sausage. He took a bite. “Not up to pre-war standards,” he confided to me, “but actually quite decent. Now I have to find some bread to go with it.”

I followed his example. “Not as good as we had in Warsaw, but eatable,” I acknowledged. Remarkably, I could actually almost taste the spicy meat.

Suddenly I felt Mother's hand sliding down my arm. “Give me your hand,” she said. We walked quickly on down the street; Mother's heels clicking angrily on the sidewalk. “I can't waste my time like this,” she said, though I wasn't sure she was talking to me. I looked back for my new friend, but I couldn't see him.

It wasn't long before we spotted another queue on the other side of the street. It was even longer than the first one. Like the other one, it was mostly women in kerchiefs or little flowered hats with shopping bags hanging from their arms. Some of the bags had lumps in the bottom—many hung down empty.

“It's a butcher shop!” Mother said in a triumphant tone when we could distinguish the empty steel hooks in the window and the tiled interior walls.

Edging toward the curb, where the line ended, I felt Mother pulling me, instead, towards the shop door. “Adam, Adam Starecki!” she called, when we were a few yards from the waiting people. In a moment I could see that she was addressing a man, three people from the store entrance, about a head taller than the women in front and in back of him. In a blue, pinstripe, double-breasted suit, like the ones men wore in Warsaw, he looked like someone not from here. He had a long, thin face and a neatly trimmed little dark mustache. His hair was neatly combed and brushed back, and held in place with hair oil. He certainly could have been one of Mother and Lolek's Warsaw friends, except that he didn't respond to the name and he certainly wasn't Adam Starecki, whom I knew because, when he came to our apartment, he often brought a box of chocolates for Kiki and me. And he wasn't as tall as this man and was nearly bald.

“Oh, I'm so glad to see you safe,” Mother said as we kept approaching.

Finally, the tall man realized that it was he who was being addressed, made a little bow with his head and said, “I am sorry, Missus, but my name is Rokief, Roman Rokief.”

“Oh, I'm so sorry, Mr. Rokief,” Mother said, stopping short and holding a hand up to her face. “Yes, yes, I can see now that Mister is not Judge Starecki. But from a few meters away Mister looks just like the judge. And Mister has the same bearing. I would guess that Mister is also a judge. Am I right?”

“As a matter of fact, I am an attorney,” he admitted, “but, I'm afraid, not yet a judge.”

“But Mister is not from Durnoval.”

“No, my wife and I came here from Krakow when the fighting started. I have a bad heart, so they wouldn't take me in the army, and I wanted to get my wife and daughters out.”

“My brother lives in Krakow. Maybe Mister knows him, Pavew Rogacki. I don't know what happened to him. I'm so worried.”

My uncle Pavew's name was Rozenfeld, not Rogacki, and he lived in Lodz where he ran Grandfather's stocking factory.

The man thought for a moment. “No, I don't know that name,” he finally said.

“My name is Barbara Padovich,” she said, and there she was with that Padovich again. I realized that I resented her taking over my name that way.