Mother and Me (34 page)

Another man was walking toward me. ‘Excuse me, is this Mikowanski street?' I was going to say. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest.

Then I heard my name called from behind. “Yulian!” it was Miss Bronia's voice. “What are you doing out here?” she demanded.

Turning around, I saw Miss Bronia and Fredek hurrying down the street toward me. In one hand, Miss Bronia held a headless chicken by its feet—a sight I had seen before on these streets. “What in heaven's name … are you doing … out in the street?” She asked again. She was out of breath, and I realized they must have been running to catch up to me.

“My mommy's at Mrs. Rokief's,” I explained. “They sent her husband to Siberia. Or maybe they've already shot him.”

“They shot Mr. Rokief?” Fredek repeated.

“Hush!” Miss Bronia said. “Here!” She handed the chicken to Fredek. Fredek demurred holding the dead bird. “Take it!” Miss Bronia commanded, transferring the feet to his hand. “Yulian, give me your hand!”

I obeyed. Her hand wasn't as gentle as it usually was. She held me as though I might try to run away. I saw her take a deep breath. “Isn't anyone home?” she finally said.

“Auntie Edna, Auntie Paula, and Sonya.”

Miss Bronia took another deep breath and let it out slowly. “How did you get out?”

“I pretended to …” I began, but she interrupted me. “It's all right,” she said in a calmer voice now. She lowered herself to one knee and put her arms around me. “I know,” she said. “I know. Let's go back now, and we'll wait for Mommy to come back. She'll be home soon.”

Miss Bronia didn't really understand. “Mrs. Rokief …” I began, but didn't know what else to say.

“Mrs. Rokief will be all right.”

I must have begun to cry, because I felt Fredek's hand on my shoulder. “She'll be all right,” he echoed. “You'll see. We'll go home and wait for Auntie Barbara.”

My urge to go to Mrs. Rokief and her daughters wasn't as strong anymore, and I was glad for the encounter as we walked home.

Auntie Edna and Auntie Paula were on the sidewalk in front of our house when we got there. “What did you think you were doing?” Auntie Paula demanded as we got close.

“He's very upset,” Miss Bronia said, leading me straight inside. I heard Fredek say, “He'll never do it again.”

“Take off your clothes and get straight into bed,” Miss Bronia said. “I'm going to make you some tea. Have you had any supper?”

I shook my head.

“I will bring you something. Don't get out of bed. Cover yourself up well.”

As I was undressing under my covers, Fredek came over to our pallets. “What were you going to do there?” he wanted to know.

“There,” of course, meaning at the Rokiefs, and I had no answer to give him. “I don't know,” I admitted.

“So why were you going there?”

“I don't know,” I said again, and, actually, I had no idea anymore why I had had such a great urge to be with Mrs. Rokief. I still felt sorry for her—very sorry—but now I could see no way that my presence might have mitigated the tragedy.

“The woman cut the chicken's head off right there on the street,” Fredek said. “She had a little log standing on end, and she put his head down and just went chop!”

Then Miss Bronia brought me a cup of tea and told Fredek to leave me alone.

In a few minutes, I could hear her speaking to Auntie Edna and Auntie Paula. She was speaking quietly, but she sounded angry. I had never heard her speaking angrily to the other grownups before.

Sonya bought me some bread and ham. “I'm not supposed to talk to you,” she announced. I got the sense that there was something more she was trying to communicate, but it eluded me.

The following morning, Mother still hadn't come home. But nobody seemed concerned. It was only Fredek who asked at breakfast why Auntie Barbara hadn't come home.

“Hush,” his mother said. “We're not going to talk about that.”

“Just answer his question,” Auntie Paula said.

“All right, Auntie Barbara is spending the night with a sick friend.”

“Why did they send Mr. Rokief to Siberia or did they shoot him?” Fredek asked.

“That's what we're not going to talk about.”

Auntie Paula broke in. “Miss Bronia has heard that the Russians have arrested a few men and we don't know why.”

“Was Mr. Rokief a spy?” Fredek asked.

“We don't know. None of us knew Mr. Rokief.”

“You said ‘knew.' Does that mean they shot him already?”

“We don't know.”

Now it was Miss Bronia who broke in. “Because it's too cold and rainy to go out, the boys and I are going to do what we've needed to do for some time.” She paused long enough for us to wonder what that was. “We're going to start washing and re-stuffing the pallets.”

We had sewn an extra pallet cover over the previous week for someone to sleep on while theirs was washed and hung on the clothesline that Miss Bronia had rigged above the stove. We had been collecting straw for a change of stuffing for some time, and now Fredek and I welcomed the opportunity for the physical activity. The Aunties and Sonya, who had proper weather gear, albeit some of it makeshift, went out on their rounds of foraging.

Mother came home that evening. Her eyes were bloodshot and most of her makeup had been wiped off. She spent the night, she said, convincing Mrs. Rokief to go to Lvow, as Col. Bawatchov had advised—and the day waiting for this morning's train to Lvow to leave the station.

“It's very different in Lvow,” Mother said. “I talked to people who have been there. There is food. There are restaurants. There is coffee, and matches.”

Mother said we should pack up and go there. She could get Col. Bawatchov to give us travel permits.

Auntie Edna said that it had been announced that children between certain ages all had to be registered for school and she and Auntie Paula had registered Fredek and Sonya. Mother answered her that the teachers weren't going to chase her to Lvow if Fredek failed to show up for class.

For a change, Auntie Paula agreed with my mother. She had also heard that conditions were much better in Lvow, and if Mother could really get us travel permits, and if we could be sure we could find housing, then we should go. Mother said she would go see the colonel the next day.

“Isn't he going to get tired of seeing you so often?” Auntie Edna asked.

“He likes Yulek,” Mother said.

“My throat hurts,” said Fredek.

As we climbed the stairs to the colonel's office the next morning, I was well aware of my own importance. Col. Bawatchov genuinely liked me. He wasn't like some of my mother's friends who made a big show of being nice to the little boy.

Perhaps we were wrong about calling the Russians our enemies. They had said that they had come to stop the advance of the Germans, whom we weren't strong enough to resist because Poland was a smaller country than Germany, and they did stop them. The food and firewood supply systems had been disrupted, but that couldn't be helped in view of all the extra people who were in town now, and it would, as the colonel said, get all straightened out. I only regretted that we had lied to this kind man about my ability to understand Russian. I started to climb the steps two at a time, but Mother pulled me back.

This time we had to wait a few minutes outside the colonel's office until an elderly couple came out. The woman was crying, and the colonel had, himself, opened the door for them.

“I do what I can,” he said to Mother when the door had closed behind us, “but there's only so much one can do.”

They shook hands. “You have a very difficult responsibility, Comrade Colonel,” Mother said.

I saw the little footstool from last time now under the colonel's desk. Reaching with my foot, I slid it over to my chair

“Ah, Yulli,” the colonel said, “you are at home here.”

I wasn't sure if that was a greeting or a rebuke, and I was grateful for the opportunity to wait for Mother's interpretation—which, of course, didn't come. Mother had forgotten again. She appeared not to notice my intentionally blank look and answer for me, “He admires you very much, Comrade Colonel.” Since I had never discussed the colonel with Mother, this was pure fabrication—even if partially true.

“And I am very grateful to you,” Mother went on. She had sat down in her chair and crossed her legs, but the colonel had pulled up a third chair so that he was now sitting on our side of the desk, and Mother turned to face him. “I put my friend and her daughters on the Lvow train yesterday,” she continued.

“Yes, I know,” he said.

Mother laughed. It was a throaty laugh that I had not heard from her before. “You know everything that goes on in your town, Comrade Colonel.” In view of his ignorance of Mr. Rokief's fate, I thought this somewhat of an exaggeration.

“I try to know everything I need to know,” he said. “I'm sorry you and your friend had to wait so long. The engineer is sick, and his assistant was ….” and the colonel put his thumb to his lips and lifted his head quickly to simulate drinking from a bottle.

“It gave me a chance to speak with some people who have been to Lvow lately,” Mother said. “They tell me the conditions there are better than they are here.”

“And you would like to move to Lvow.”

“Yes, Comrade Colonel.”

“I can't give you a permit,” the Colonel said.

“But Comrade Colonel…”

“I did it for Rokief's wife because she was in danger, but I can't do it for you.”

“But Comrade Colonel…”

He cut her off again. “I am watched closely, too,” he said.

Mother didn't say anything.

“But I can take you to visit Lvow,” he said. “It's a beautiful city. It's our regional headquarters, you know. The commissar there is a general, and I have to report to him next Tuesday. My driver drives me and they have a room for me at the George. It's the best hotel in the city. Would you like to come with me?”

Mother looked quickly in my direction. I could tell he had taken her by surprise. She had hoped for a permit to travel and suddenly he was offering transportation. Of course, if it was just going to be an overnight trip, I didn't understand why Mother should be so anxious about me. It didn't matter to me whether or not I went too.

Then the colonel was shouting for Lt. Rostov again. “Take Yulli and get him a glass of tea,” he said to the young man.

“Go with the lieutenant,” Mother said to me. “Our talk will just bore you.”

That was fine with me, though I hoped the lieutenant spoke Polish so I wouldn't have to carry on the charade that I didn't understand what he was saying when I really did.

He led me out through the side door from which he had come. The room on the other side was barely large enough to hold the two desks in it. Nobody sat at one, and I presumed it to be Lt. Rostov's. It was covered with papers. A soldier sat typing at the second desk. “I'm taking this child to get him some tea,” the lieutenant said.

“Yes, Comrade,” the soldier answered, and only then did I realize that this soldier was actually a woman. I had never heard of women soldiers before. Her hair was short, a little longer, I realized, than a man's, and I could now see that her chest bulged. But her features were hard; her mouth turned
down in the corners. While she would have made a possibly handsome man—less handsome than the black-haired, unsmiling lieutenant—she was, I decided, a definitely ugly woman. I would not have enjoyed her hugging me.

“The colonel is blah-blahing his mother,” the lieutenant added, using words that I could not even decipher from their context. The woman gave a little laugh as we passed through into a narrow hall.

A few doors down, Lt. Rostov opened a door and led me through it. It was a large bathroom with a tub, a sink, a toilet, a bidet, and an enameled stove. A board lay across the bidet, and on it stood a brass samovar. A wisp of smoke came out of its chimney and around the little ceramic pot in which, I knew, the tea leaves were steeping. My grandmother made tea in a samovar.