Mother and Me (56 page)

I repeated the trick several more times, pretending to throw and then pulling the washer out of my hair, my mouth, my nose…. Though he did not roll over to dodge my throw any more, the old man's astonishment at each reappearance was undiminished. After I had pulled the washer out of my nose twice and three times out of my ear, the old man raised a finger to stop me. I opened my eyes wide expressing my eager anticipation of what he would do next and saw him look at that raised finger with equal curiosity—as though he, too, was waiting to see what the finger might be planning to do.

Finally, the finger began to move slowly towards his face. I saw his eyes follow it and begin to cross as the finger approached his nose. Reaching the tip of his nose, the finger pushed it in. Immediately, his tongue propped out of his mouth and his eyebrows shot up in surprise.

Now the finger moved slowly toward his right ear, followed by the eyes. As the finger pressed the ear, the protruding tongue
shot to that corner of the mouth, and the man's whole head jerked back in surprise. Then the finger began to move across the face toward the other ear.

Suddenly, Mr. Vostokos's voice startled us both as he barked something in Hungarian, and the old man straightened up in his chair with his hands folded in his lap. I, too, sat up as I would have in response to the teacher's command in school. Mother seemed to be sleeping, but I could see her eyes behind her eyelashes move from Mr. Vostokos to the old man and then to me.

I thought it best to devote some time to Meesh, whom I had ignored, and began to explain that Mr. Vostokos was angry at the old man and me for playing and that Mother was pretending to be asleep, but was really watching and listening and had a plan. What I did not communicate to Meesh was my skepticism regarding any plan of Mother's. And suddenly it began to dawn on me that we were, indeed, going back to Poland and the Russians. I was not so much concerned about being shot as about not getting to that hotel room in Budapest with a comfortable bed, our own modern bathroom, and a restaurant where you could order anything on the menu, which had by now become my reality.

The policeman stepped down from his platform to switch on an overhead light, and I realized it was growing dark. He nodded to the old man, who got up and went outside. I watched him pass my window without looking at me, and disappear.

A few minutes later, he was back outside the window, pushing a wheelbarrow. He stopped at the wagon sleigh and began shoveling something from the wheelbarrow into the sleigh. Steam was rising from it, and it took a minute or two for me to realize that it was horse manure. He shoveled it all into a pile in the middle of the sleigh on top of the straw. The he put the shovel back into the barrow and wheeled it back to wherever he had brought it from.

A few minutes later he was back again, leading the horse. He led him to where the two sleighs stood, turned him around,
and backed him between the traces of the wagon sleigh. I could barely see in the fast-growing darkness as he fastened the harness. Then the old man climbed into the iron, one-person driver's seat and drove it forward out of my sight.

In a few minutes, the old man was back inside. He reported something to the policeman, who then went to speak to Mr. Vostokos. I could tell that whatever he said didn't please the man. Mr. Vostokos said something angry across the room to the old man. The old man shrugged his shoulders. The policeman said something else to Mr. Vostokos. The old man pursed his lips and shook his head in imitation of Mr. Vostokos, as he had done earlier.

“It is time to go to the train station,” Mr. Vostokos announced. “I hope Missus will come quietly.”

Mother stood up and walked to the railing again. “I will come quietly, Mr. Minister,” she said in a calm and quiet voice that I could barely hear. “I will also get on that train, but I implore Mister that he send my son to the Polish consul in Budapest.”

Suddenly I felt the blood drain from my face. The idea of separating from Mother terrified me.

“No, no!” the words were out before they were in my mind. I was crying. I rushed to where Mother was standing and grabbed her around the waist.

“Yulian, you must be a soldier,” Mother scolded. “You must grow up and come back to fight for Poland.” Then she turned to Mr. Vostokos again. “I implore you as one parent to another. You have two beautiful children. Think of them.”

Much to my relief, Mr. Vostokos was shaking his head. “I cannot help Missus,” he said. “I am not a monster. I would like to help, but I can't. I must file my report.”

He stood up and began putting on his coat. He nodded to the policeman, who put his hand gently on Mother's elbow.

“Put your coat on, Yulian,” Mother said to me. I went back for my coat, my knapsack, and Meesh. In a moment we were
all standing in front of the building by the sleigh. I could smell the manure.

“I have some good new for Missus, at least,” Mr. Vostokos said. “She will not have to bear the aggravation of my company any longer. The constable informs me that the harness on the passenger sleigh is broken and he must take this farm sleigh. The sleigh is not clean, and I am not dressed for such travel at the moment. I will have to walk home.” Then he tipped his green hat and began picking his way carefully through the snow.

The policeman helped Mother into the sleigh. The old man was already in the sleigh, and I saw him fixing a spot in the straw for us to sit at the back.

“It is only in the middle,” I said to Mother. The only word I could think of for manure wasn't one I could use with Mother. “There isn't any at the way back—we can sit there.”

I climbed in after Mother and moved to the back, but saw her move to the front as the policeman settled himself in the single driver's seat.

“Mr. Policeman,” Mother said, kneeling behind him in the straw. “Will you take my son to your home—to your wife? I have money and jewels that will make you and your family rich.”

I again felt that terror at the thought of separation. I could see myself being led by the policeman into a strange house with strange people.

Now I saw Mother tear a button off her jacket and unwrap something, which I knew to be jewelry, and hold it out to he policeman in the palm of her hand.

The policeman didn't respond. But he didn't say no, as the other man had, to relieve my fear. He had a sheepskin jacket on over his uniform, and he hunched over the reins and clucked the horse into motion.

The sky was clear with a large moon and many stars as we drove through the dark village with barely glowing windows.
We moved at a walking pace, but even that small wind effect made me shiver with the cold. I didn't have on the layers of clothes that I had worn yesterday. Mother continued talking to the policeman, though I couldn't hear her words any more. The man remained hunched over the reins in his two hands and seemed to make no response to her. The old man sat with his back against the driver seat and grinned at me. I was in no mood to play games now. I clutched Meesh tightly to my chest, mostly for warmth.

Our trip was not long. The railroad platform with its roof and electric light soon appeared before us.

The policeman stopped the horse beside the platform. I wondered how long we would have to wait in the cold for the train. The policeman indicated with his head that we should descend. Mother and I climbed down.

As we stood beside the sleigh, Mother still held her hand out to the policeman. The two men didn't move.

Then the policeman pointed his whip straight over the horse's head. “Lvow,” he said. It was the first word I had heard him speak. He turned to face the rear of the sleigh, and pointed the whip again. “Budapest, seventh hour,” he said in broken Polish. Then he made a clucking sound, and the horse moved forward. We watched the sleigh turn and head back toward the village. Suddenly Mother and I were standing alone beside the empty platform.

The train to Lvow came a few minutes later. It stopped, but no one got on or off. We shivered deliciously till the Budapest train roared in with a cloud of steam and a splendid rumble and hiss.

It was warm inside the train. Mother and I sat facing each other on the soft plush seats beside the window. I watched the Hungarian countryside fly past us, the moonlight glistening on the crusty snow.

Then I felt Mother take my two hands and turned to look at her. I found myself looking directly into her large brown eyes. Mother and I were the only two people in the whole world.

A ragged and dirty peasant woman hobbles into the lobby of the Hotel Bristol in Pesht, the modern section of the Hungarian capital. She limps badly, and leans heavily on the shoulder of her small son. He is having difficulty concealing his excitement. He holds a small white teddy bear in the crook of his arm. Speaking French, the woman requests a room.

“We have no vacancies,” says the desk clerk, in his cutaway coat and striped trousers. He gives an eye signal to one of the bellhops to stand by. The peasant boy sucks on his lower lip to control his face.

“Nonsense,” the woman replies, “the Bristol is never out of rooms.”

“Madame has stayed with us before?” the clerk asks, unable to resist the temptation for sarcasm.

“Of course, many times,” she says in the haughtiest tone she can muster. She is enjoying this. Her son has to cover his mouth to keep from laughing out loud.

“And when might that have been, Madame?” the clerk asks archly, falling into her trap.

She names a date last summer. Her lips are drawn tight to repress a smile

“Ah, yes,” he says, repeating the date and opening the register with a flourish. “And the name, Madame?” he asks.

“Waisbrem,” she says. “Monsieur and Madame Waisbrem.”

It takes a beat and a half for the clerk to look up from his register. He removes his glasses to inspect her more closely. He
gasps audibly. “Oh Madame, Madame, what has happened?” He is beginning to cry. She is laughing. They hug across the counter.

Mother and I arrived in New York in the spring of 1941 where, with the help of a translator—Mother spoke little English—she wrote her account of this story. The first of the “escape” books to come out of World War II,
Flight to Freedom,
by Barbara Padowicz got considerable media coverage and sold briskly. Of course in her book I'm only six, which made her younger as well, and our relationship is as smooth as glass. But, hey, it's her book.

Mother would never use the name Waisbrem again because of its Jewish sound. Nor would she ever admit to being anything but Catholic for the rest of her life.

Of the families and friends left behind in Poland, I have heard little more than rumors. Kiki, I have heard, did not survive the war, but the family left in Durnoval did, though I understand that they were deported into the interior of the Soviet Union until war's end. Sometime in the fifties, Mother received a letter from an acquaintance who announced that Mr. Herman Lupicki had been elected to government office.

My grandmother survived as well, by hitchhiking from Lodz to Warsaw where no one knew her, so that she could not be denounced as a Jew. When the war ended, my mother brought her to America, but, her health broken, Grandmother lived only a few more years.

My stepfather, Leon, was taken prisoner of war and escaped to join the Polish army in England. Mother, however, soon divorced him, and I had only sporadic contact with him until his recent death at the age of ninety-three.

Not long after arriving in America, Mother found herself sought in marriage by two men, an elderly English millionaire and a penniless handsome Free French hero of the battle of BirHakim in the North African campaign. The choice was not
an easy one for Mother, and I was summoned from boarding school to make the final decision. Since the Frenchman, Pierre, had taken me to several Abbott and Costello movies on prior school vacations, it was he who received my nod.

With the war's end, Pierre entered the French diplomatic service, to be posted eventually to Philadelphia, where, in the 1950s and '60s, Mother was celebrated as one of that city's leading hostesses. Hobnobbing with prime ministers, prelates, admirals, and captains of industry, she led a life of charm, tumult, media coverage, and much general excitement, remaining Beautiful Basia until her death at sixty-two.

As for me, I was quickly shipped to boarding school to be Americanized, or as Americanized as a nine-year-old could feel with a mother who could not pronounce the th sound, thought the capital of New York State was Alabama, and could not understand why a baseball glove was for the left rather than the right hand. As unprepared for the American boarding-school experience as I had been for my French school in Warsaw, I found my familiarity with the Holy Family to be of little solace in the long lonely nights when I longed for the intimacy of Durnoval. In the absence of further spiritual instruction, Kiki's fragile catechism could not stand up to the abrasions of adolescence, and I set out on the often-trod path of nihilism and agnosticism.

Nor have I received any more street lamps or sausage sandwiches from God. But He did send me an angel. In 1986, at a Unitarian Universalist church service, I met Donna and managed to marry her the following year. Born and raised Catholic, and educated by the sisters, Donna has worked to put me in touch with my Jewish heritage. Though I still have not had one minute of Hebrew instruction, following Donna's leadership we do celebrate various Jewish holidays in our home and share them with my grandchildren whenever we can.

In a quiet church, a quiet temple, I can often hear God speak to me again in the same language that Meesh and I used to use.
Sometimes we just listen to the music together—until people come in and begin fussing in English or Hebrew or Latin. Then God grows still, or maybe He is simply drowned out, and I get fidgety and look for the first pretense to leave.

Sometimes, on a busy street corner, waiting for the light to change, or in a crowded elevator or subway, a stranger and I make eye contact and we suddenly realize that we've both found the same thing funny or poignant, and I feel that God is there with us. Or, in the quiet of my study, God will lay a firm hand over mine and cause the pencil to write things that weren't in my mind a moment ago and that I would not have thought of on my own.