Mother and Me (33 page)

“But you had a record of his being here two days ago. I saw it in your hand, Comrade Colonel. There were several pages clipped together and you said it was nothing.”

“Yes,” the colonel said, and suddenly I saw his ears turn a bright red. I had heard Kiki talk about someone's face turning red, though I had never seen it. But I had never heard of ears turning red.

“Is there a list of detainees?” Mother asked.

The colonel didn't answer immediately. He was looking through the files again. “There is,” he finally said, not looking up. “But he isn't on it.”

“Any more.”

“Yes, he is not on it… now.”

“What does that mean?”

“That means that he was never here.”

“But we know he was.”

“We were mistaken,” the colonel said quickly.

“But you had his papers in your hand.”

I really wasn't following this conversation. I had seen the papers in the colonel's hand and heard him read Mr. Rokief's name. He couldn't have forgotten that.

The colonel moved his head to the side, signaling the lieutenant to leave. Then he leaned forward and in a quiet voice asked, “What is Comrade Rokief to you?”

“A friend. He and his wife are friends of mine. They've been kind to me … as you have.”

“Then you should forget about Comrade Rokief. Tell his wife to go to another town … quickly.”

Mother was sitting very, very straight and still in her chair now. Only her lips were trembling a little. And suddenly I understood that something terrible had happened to Mr. Rokief.

“It is a political matter,” the colonel said. “I can do nothing. I will write a travel permit to Lvow for Rokief's wife. She can take a train or a bus, but she must go quickly. What is her name?”

“It's Helen,” Mother said. “And she has two daughters.”

Suddenly I thought of poor Mrs. Rokief, who maybe would never see her husband again, and it was as though something had shot through me. There was a deep ache inside of me, and I was crying so that I couldn't get my breath. I felt myself shaking. I was swaying from side to side on the chair.

I heard the colonel shout for water. Then he had his arm around me.

“What's the matter with him?” Mother was asking. “He hardly even knows Roman.”

The lieutenant was there with a glass of water, and the colonel poured some on a cloth, which he held against my forehead. The he put the glass up to my lips. “Just sip,” he said in a commanding tone that surprised me. Then to Mother, “Tell him to take just a little sip.”

Mother translated and I sipped the water.

“He did this once before,” Mother was saying. Then, to me, in a gentle voice she asked, “Did something frighten you, Yuletchku? Tell us.” It was the second time someone had used that very diminutive form of my name.

Nothing had frightened me, but there was that deep ache that was like the one I would have when Kiki took her day off in Warsaw, and I would lie on the floor crying. I had no more understanding of it now than I did then.

But the colonel's arm around me was comforting. His shirt smelled of a very strong soap. “He may be remembering about his own father going to the war,” he said.

Then I could smell Mother's perfume, and he was releasing me. I felt Mother's arm around me. “Don't be afraid, Yuletchku,” she was saying.

I wanted to tell her that I wasn't afraid. But more than that I wanted her not to let go. Then I felt her other arm encircle me. She wasn't soft, like Miss Bronia, and her jacket was scratchy and smelled of her strong perfume and cigarette smoke, but it felt very good, nevertheless.

Mother and I waited in our apartment until someone came home. “You have to come with me to see Helenka,” she said to Auntie Edna when she came back with Sonya soon after lunch-time. They carried armloads of firewood. “I have to tell her that her husband is probably on his way to Siberia and she has to leave Durnoval immediately,” she explained when Auntie Edna asked what it was all about.

Auntie Edna stopped in the middle of stirring the embers from last night's fire in the stove. “To Siberia?” she said. “Siberia? No, how do you know?”

“Sonya, please take Yulek into the other room and read to him or something,” Mother said.

Sonya cut herself a piece of the sausage we had brought from the commissar along with the three jars of herring and said, “Come on,” heading into the other room. I followed.

Sonya sat down cross-legged on her pallet, and I sat down near her. Instead of picking up a book, she leaned toward me. “What happened at the commissar's?” she whispered.

“He said it's a political matter,” I whispered back.

“What does that mean?”

“I think political means that it's a big secret.”

“That's not what political means,” she said angrily. “I know what political means. What does it mean that it's a political matter?”

“The colonel can't find his records. He sent Lieutenant Rostov back to look some more, but they can't find them. But it's not the colonel's fault—somebody else lost it.”

“Are you sure he was there in the first place?”

“Yes, because when we were there before, the colonel read his name out of the file.”

“Maybe they released him.”

“No, because they have a list of people they released and he wasn't on that list either. And the colonel said that Mother should forget about him, and Mrs. Rokief should go away from here. He wasn't nasty about it. He even gave her a permit to travel to Lvow.”

“So what does Aunt Barbara think happened?”

“She said that they're taking him to Siberia. I don't know what that's all about.”

“It's where the Russians send prisoners. It's so cold there, they can't escape.”

“He hasn't done anything,” I said.

“Fredek says he's a spy.” I had forgotten about this, having convinced myself that it would have been childish to assume that he had passed my fib on to Capt. Vrushin. Now I found myself revisiting my logic.

“Childish nonsense,” I said scornfully, availing myself of that powerful phrase for the first time in my life. “How would he know?”

“Sometimes he knows these things.”

“All I know about Mr. Rokief is that he comes from Krakow and he's a lawyer,” I said with finality. Sonya picked up a file from beside her pallet and began filing her nails. My mind turned back to the colonel's arm around my shoulders.

Auntie Edna came home without Mother. “I don't really even know the woman. What do they expect me to do?” she said to Auntie Paula, who had come home just before her. “I went over with Basia and sat with her while she told the poor woman about her husband, and I thought my heart would break. And
she has those two daughters, you know. But I don't know what to say to her. We're not even on a first-name basis.”

“I didn't even know they existed until she showed up here the other day,” Auntie Paula said. “Basia mentioned once that she had met a lawyer from Krakow, but I had no idea she was seeing them secretly. The man may well be a spy. Why else would they be sending him to Siberia?”

“Basia says he's disappeared from their records. She says his name was there before, but it's not there now. There's no record of sending him to Siberia or anywhere,” Auntie Edna said.

“Then maybe they didn't send him to Siberia.”

“Basia is afraid they may have shot him.”

Auntie Paula didn't say anything. Then, after a moment, Auntie Edna said, “Basia says the colonel told her to forget about ever knowing the man and that his wife should leave Durnoval. He said the matter is totally out of his hands. That sounds like a warning to me—a clear warning to have nothing more to do with those people. The political commissar could have them all arrested as well, and Basia's colonel wouldn't be able to intervene.”

“Basia could get us all arrested,” Auntie Paula said.

“Where are Fredek and Bronia?” Auntie Edna suddenly asked. “Shouldn't they have returned by now?”

“Don't worry,” Auntie Paula said. “There's nothing connecting them to this Rokief man. And I'm not sure he isn't a spy of some sort. We'll just have to sit Barbara down and tell her she can't do this kind of thing anymore. Children are involved. Or she can take Yulek and go live by themselves somewhere.”

If Mr. Rokief was a spy, he was on our side, and he must have been spying on the Russians for Poland and that made him a hero. And then I thought of poor, sweet Mrs. Rokief again, and I was beginning to feel that ache, but I wouldn't let myself cry this time. It had taken me totally by surprise before, but I was better prepared now, and I would not let Auntie Edna and Auntie Paula see me cry.

Then Auntie Paula's last statement registered with me, the one about Mother and me going to live by ourselves. That would mean leaving Miss Bronia, and now I could feel that ache getting stronger. But I wasn't going to give into it in front of the Aunties. My mother was being a good friend to Mrs. Rokief, staying with her in her time of pain, and the Aunties were worrying about things that might happen. And I was worrying about things that might happen, which was not the way soldiers behaved. Soldiers didn't worry about things—they acted.

I picked up the little blanket that we would put around our shoulders when we went out into the hall to go to the privy, and let myself quietly out the door. Auntie Paula looked up, hearing the door open, but she had seen me heading for the privy many times before.

Turning the other way in the hall, I was out in the street in a few steps. It was dark out, but I was sure I knew the way to the Rokiefs.

I ran to the corner and stopped to look both ways before crossing. There was no traffic, and I ran on, my heart pounding not from the run, but the urgency. It was the first time I had been on a city street alone. I didn't care if I looked stupid with a blanket wrapped around me.

I looked for the name of the street I had to turn left on. But I couldn't read the sign. There was only one light at each intersection, and this one was diagonally across from the street sign. Its brightness didn't reach the street sign. The stores, all of them shuttered now, looked nothing like the way they did in the daytime when some were open.

Now for the first time, I was aware of how empty and dark streets could be. In Warsaw there had been many street lamps, bright store windows, people, cars, horses, trolleys. Older boys would be darting in and out among pedestrians. Here there was only one lamp at each intersection and the light from apartment windows. A few figures moved through the shadows. Six soldiers marched by down the middle of the street, counting
cadence in Russian. A horse and wagon clopped noisily across the next intersection.

A figure came out of a dark doorway and walked quickly toward me. It was a man in a long coat and flat cap. Instinctively I pressed myself against the cold building wall, and he walked past me. I should have asked him what street this was, I realized when it was too late. The next person that came by, I would hold my hand up to stop him or her and say, “Excuse me, is this Mikowanski street?” After all, I had marched up to the general in Warsaw, saluted and asked for his autograph.

I saw two people scurry by on the other side of the street. I should run across and ask them, I knew. But I would have to stop them from behind, and I didn't have a strategy for that. Maybe if I walked one more block, I would recognize something.

I resumed walking, staying close to the wall. If I were to stop someone, I would have to walk in the middle of the street where they could see me. I shouldn't jump at them out of the shadows and scare them. It felt safer near the wall, but I moved out into the middle of the sidewalk.

At the next corner, there was no street sign at all. This could have been the street. I didn't think it was the next one—that would have been too far. It was either this street or the one before or the one before that.