Mother and Me (41 page)

Mrs. Potkanskova, the woman with the husband locked up in the bedroom, who had a room for us in her apartment, wasn't a painted woman either. She had gray hair pulled back into a bun and glasses with one lens dark, like in sunglasses, and one regular glass. She had a funny way of looking at you, a little sideways.

Our room was the third door on the right when you came in. It was a pretty big room with one wall lined with books and a large, carved-wood desk pushed into one corner. Mrs. Potkanskova spread a white tablecloth over the desk when we arrived, and Mother told me that I shouldn't ever touch it—a statement meant, I thought, as much for Mrs. Potkanskova's benefit as mine. Mrs. Potkanskova, in turn, promised to have the maid bring a table for “the boy” to draw on. There was also an armoire for our clothes, four chairs, and, thankfully, two separate beds, against two walls.

The bathroom was two more doors down the hall, and Mrs. Potkanskova told Mother that “the boy” should be admonished not to loiter, since numerous others, including a professor, had to use it. In the room next to ours, our landlady said, there was a young couple from Lodz with a baby. The baby cried sometimes and you could hear it in the hall, but the walls were thick and we wouldn't hear it in our room. I looked forward to seeing the baby. Then, for some reason, Mother told Mrs. Potkanskova that she must have been very beautiful when she was young, which made the landlady blush. The kitchen,
where Mother could cook our meals or make arrangements for the maid to do it, was at the end of the corridor. I wondered behind which door the crazy husband lurked.

Later that day, I did see my second painted woman. She had thin yellow-white hair, a flowered hat that only partially covered a bald spot on top of her head, and skin that hung down well below her thin face. For eyebrows, she had only black, painted lines plus blue eyelids and heavily rouged lips and cheeks against a very white skin. She sat at a table, in a café that we went to, with a younger woman, dressed in a man's brown suit with gray hair cut almost as short as a man's. Neither of them seemed to deserve being turned into pillars of salt.

We did, however, run into a couple that Mother knew from Warsaw, whom she had apparently met here on her previous visit. Mrs. Gnimar wore a long woolen skirt with men's work boots and a man's jacket, fitting Mother's earlier description. She had black hair that I could tell was gathered somehow on top of her head under her cap and billowed out all around. But she had no makeup that I could see, besides some rather ordinary lipstick.

The man, who turned out to be her husband, was thin, mostly bald, and sat very straight in a sheepskin jacket far too large for him. Two other men and a woman sat at their table.

“Basienka!” Mrs. Gnimar cried out, using the diminutive of the diminutive of Mother's name. “And that's Yulek?” The surprise in her tone was one with which I was familiar. It would usually be followed by, He's grown so big!

“He's grown so big!” Mrs. Gnimar said.

“I'll have to start introducing him as my brother,” Mother said, at which everyone laughed. Then she explained where we were now living and that we had come alone from Durnoval.

“Yes, Edna is like that,” Mrs. Gnimar said, “and Paula, of course, wouldn't move without her.”

Mr. Gnimar got two chairs, and I drank tea with milk, but there was no sugar. The grownups talked and did a lot of laughing, though, as far as I could tell, not about anyone being dead.

The following morning, Mrs. Potkanskova's maid Bogda brought us breakfast on a tray. Mother had a soft-boiled egg, but I, Mother said, could not have eggs again because I had had them the day before and would get a rash. I had toast and cheese instead. For my tea, I had a lump of sugar, but there was no milk.

Then, just before lunchtime, Bogda brought a tray with sandwiches, a pot of tea, and three plates and three cups. The extra plate suggested a visitor, and I found myself intrigued by who our lunch guest might be. Having brought no reading or drawing materials from Durnoval, I had spent most of the morning reading book titles off the many volumes that I wasn't to touch on our book-lined wall, under instructions not to leave the room or let anyone in. Mother had spent a good part of her morning in the bath.

“We're going to have a guest for lunch,” Mother finally volunteered. Her name was Mlle, de Kessenholtz, and she would be taking care of me for the near future. I was to address her as Mademoiselle. I, of course, knew what this meant in French. Mademoiselle would tutor me in reading, writing, arithmetic, and French, as well as introduce me to some boys of my age whom she knew.

The last item was the most disturbing. While reading, writing, arithmetic, and French were chores to which I didn't look forward, the last boys of my age that I had been introduced to were my classmates back in Warsaw. And that had been an experience I did not care to go through again.

Mademoiselle was of noble French blood, Mother went on to explain, and not just a simple governess like Kiki and
Miss Bronia, but, until very recently, the long-time companion of a Countess Valoska. The elderly Countess's constitution had proven too delicate for the demands of wartime, and she had died from overexposure to the autumn sun in her open carriage on the congested road leading out of Warsaw. A devoted companion, Mademoiselle apparently had not fully recovered from her loss, and I must be on my best behavior.

I now knew a great deal about Mlle de Kessenholtz, but had not the slightest idea what to expect, other than a French accent … attached to a German-sounding name. This, regarding the woman who would be successor to Kiki and Miss Bronia, to say nothing of the enigmatic Miss Vanda.

It was only after Mother had checked her wristwatch several times, that there was a knock on our door. Opening the door at Mother's instruction, I felt myself brushed by the folds of a black veil as a very tall lady rushed into our room with, “Oh, Madame, I am so sorry to be late. They have closed off one of the streets, and I had to go several streets out of the way to get here.”

I had, of course, been right about the French accent, though it was fainter than I had imagined. To my relief, Mademoiselle spoke Polish almost like a native.

Much taller than Mother, she was also very thin, dressed in a gray coat topped by the kind of black hat and veil that women in mourning wore. I remembered that the Countess she had worked for had died at the beginning of the war.

Removing her coat, she showed a gray wool suit and, turning the veil up over her hat, revealed a narrow, olive-shaped face with a large and thin, somewhat hooked, nose. Her eyes were gray and distorted by the thick lenses of her glasses. The hair, pulled tightly back, was dark, streaked with gray, and she wore no makeup at all. Mademoiselle was not at all pretty.

“It is all so terrible, Madame,” she was saying, somewhat breathless from her trip. “These Bolsheviks think they can do
anything they want. Yesterday they forced my landlady to take in four Russian women, when we're already three and four to a room. Madame can't imagine.”

“This is Yulian,” Mother said, changing the subject.

“Yes,” Mademoiselle said, turning to me. “Yulian. Is that with an a or an e? My brother is Yulian with an e, the French way, Julien.”

“With an a, Mademoiselle,” I said.

“Blah, blah, blah?” she asked, and I realized she was addressing me in French. Then she added, “Blah, blah?” in response to my blank stare. “Blah, blah, blah, blah?”

“Answer Mademoiselle,” Mother said to me.

“I don't know what she asked me,” I said.

“But of course you do, darling,” Mother said, smiling. “She is speaking French to you. You spent a whole year at the Ecole.”

“Blah, blah, blah, blah,” she said to Mademoiselle. This, I was sure, meant either that I was very shy or very stubborn. Then, to me, she said, “Blah, blah, blah, blah?”

I shook my head.

“You mean you didn't learn any French in school?” Mother asked incredulously.

“I learned bonjour and crayon and Padovich dans le coin.” The last of these was “Padovich, into the corner,” and I saw Mademoiselle laugh behind her hand.

Mother didn't consider it funny. “That's all you learned?”

I smiled weakly.

“That's all?”

I nodded.

“So why did we send you?”

I did know other words, like for notebook and paper, blackboard, boy, and girl, but I enjoyed Mother's frustration. I shrugged my shoulders.

“That's all right,” Mademoiselle said, bending a little towards me. “We will speak French this afternoon.”
Mademoiselle had a funny way of bending. She didn't bend just at the waist, but sort of all over, like a banana.

“Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” Mother said, shaking her head sadly. Mademoiselle clucked sympathetically.

The two of them spoke French through lunch, and then Mother went out, leaving me with instructions to do everything Mademoiselle told me.

“Alors,” she said, once she had removed her black hat and we had put the lunch dishes out into the hall, “we will start from the beginning—Chaise,” and she put her hand on the back of one of the chairs. “Repeat after me, chaise.”

I repeated. We went on to table, book, shelf, window, floor, and numerous other objects around the room. Then she tested me, walking around the room to suddenly lay her hand on an object, which I would name in French. “Tres bien,” she said, which I recognized as meaning very good. In the space of half an hour, my French vocabulary more than doubled.

“Now we will write them,” Mademoiselle said. “Go get your notebook.”

I explained that I didn't have one. Nor did I have a pencil or pen and ink.

This created a definite problem. She asked if I had any books in French or Polish, and I explained that we hadn't brought any from Durnoval. And the books on the bookshelves, I told her, we were forbidden to touch.

“Alors,” Mademoiselle said again, “Madame, voici votre parapluie.”

“Madame, voici votre parapluie,” I repeated, recognizing all the words except the last.

“Missus, here is your umbrella,” Mademoiselle translated. Then she added, “La voiture de Monsieur vous attend devant la porte. The gentleman's automobile is waiting for you in front of the door.” This I repeated as well.

“L'opera commence dans une demi heure. The opera begins in half an hour,” she continued.

In similar manner, we eventually found ourselves settled in the front row of the Paris opera house waiting for the curtain to go up on something called
The Barber of Seville,
the story of which she was eager to tell me because it was funny. But before she would do that, Mademoiselle felt it necessary to test me on what I had learned to date. It turned out, however, that the automobile, the umbrella, the tickets, the ticket-taker, the carpet, and virtually all of the verbs had failed to take root in my mind.

Mademoiselle's disappointment was unmistakable. “Ah, your mind is tired, poor boy,” she finally said. She put her hands together and brought them up to her face in thought. “What shall we do to divert you?”

I shrugged.

“Do you have cards?” she finally asked.

Yes, we did have the cards my mother did her solitaire with. They were well worn. Then, did I know how to play gin rummy? In the next few hours, I learned to play gin rummy.

I had watched my grandmother play gin rummy with Lolek, and I had seen Mother and Lolek play bridge with other couples, and I had always admired the dexterity with which these card players shuffled the cards. But, except for Mr. Lupicki's card tricks, I had never seen cards move as quickly or with as much flourish as they did through the hands of Mademoiselle. Her long, thin fingers seemed magnetic, as they led the nimble cards through their acrobatics.

“Do you miss Warsaw?” Mademoiselle asked, when I no longer needed her guidance to play my hand.

The question was either silly or totally beyond my experience. “Yes,” I said, sensing that to be the desired response. I recalled the card players in our Warsaw apartment not looking up from their cards as they mumbled around cigarettes hanging between their lips.

“I miss it very much,” Mademoiselle said. “You had a nanny whom you loved very much, your mother told me.”

“She was my governess,” I corrected her.

“And you had a beautiful apartment and all your little friends.”

I acknowledged this to be so, wondering where it was all heading.

“We had a beautiful home too—that is, Mme. la Contesse, whose companion I was, and I. Madame had wonderful, charming friends. And now they're all gone—the house is gone, the friends are gone, and even the poor Countess is gone.”

Mademoiselle sniffed, but I detected it to be a sob. I speculated that she had played gin rummy a lot with the Countess and now it made her sad. I wondered if I should show her a trick with my washer, which had cheered up poor Mrs. Rokief when her husband had been detained. But something told me that Mademoiselle would not be so easily cheered up.