“Things that you say to him he doesn’t repeat to anyone, does he?”
I assured her that he didn’t and suddenly got an inkling of where this might be going.
“And do you keep the secrets that he tells you, too?”
There really weren’t any secrets that Meesh ever told me, but I assured her of this as well, because I would have if there had been any.
“You know that when somebody tells you a secret, you can’t repeat it to anyone.”
“Y. . . y. . . yes,” I said, my stutter getting the best of me this time.
“Well then, maybe you could become my Meesh.”
Suddenly I could feel my heart thumping. Of all the things that an eight-and-a-half-year-old boy could become, I could think of none I would rather be than Irenka’s Meesh.
Now Irenka was saying something else, and I had missed it. I didn’t even know if it had been a statement or a question. “Y. . . es,” I said. For the first time, I was glad for my slow speech, since it enabled my response to be taken for either an answer or an acknowledgement. And my yes was an unequivocal agreement to anything she might have proposed.
Now I felt Irenka give my hand a little squeeze. “You and I are going to be very good friends, aren’t we,” she said. Overwhelmed, I responded by giving her hand a firm squeeze in return.
“We’ll have a nice talk when we sit down,” she said, smiling. And the smile stayed on her face, as we completed our walk to the beach in silence.
The next thing I heard from Irenka was her exclaiming what a beautiful beach it was, as though she had not seen it before. “And look how long it is,” she said.
“I w. . . as . . . here . . . yesterday,” I said, though I was sure she already knew it. “N. . . ot ex. . . actly h. . . ere, but f. . . urther up. N. . . ear where our p. . . ension w. . . as.”
“Where shall we spread our blanket?” Irenka asked.
There were a lot of empty spaces in front of us, but I didn’t know if she liked to sit near the water or far from it. “H. . . ow ab. . . out there?” I said, pointing to a space half way down, though I wasn’t sure she could tell which one I was pointing to.
“Fine.”
Then I realized that she was waiting for me to lead the way, so I stepped down from the sidewalk, onto the sand.
When we had spread our blanket, and Irenka kneeled down and began to twist her shoulders in order to remove her shirt, I could see a lot of people watching her, and I was suddenly glad that she was not wearing one of the skimpy, two-piece bathing suits. In fact, I would have preferred that, in front of all these people, she even not remove the shirt. I looked her directly in the eyes and even raised my chin so that she would know that that was where I was looking. “The s. . . un is . . . very h. . . ot on th. . . is beach,” I said, “m. . . aybe M. . . issus, I m. . . ean y. . . ou sh. . . ould k. . . eep your sh. . . irt on.”
“You’re right, Yulian. I’ll put it back on in a few minutes,” she said, “but the sun feels so good on my shoulders.” Then she put her hands down on the blanket and lowered herself to her stomach. She removed her sunglasses, and then I watched Irenka’s hands reach back and unbutton the two shoulder straps from where they attached at waist level behind her back. “Would you lay the straps down on the blanket for me?” she asked, crossing her forearms as a pillow under her cheek.
I reached carefully for the strap nearest to me and laid it, with equal care, across her upper arm. Irenka now raised her arm to make the strap drop to the blanket. As she did so, she raised her shoulder, exposing, for an instant, the entire side of her round, white breast, with its pink nipple.
I instinctively turned to see if anyone had seen it. To my great relief, nobody who might have seen past me seemed to be looking in our direction.
This still left the strap on the other side, where her breast would be exposed to viewing by anyone looking in this direction. I gathered up the strap and laid it carefully on the blanket, through the space between Irenka’s upper arm and the back of her head so that she wouldn’t have to move her arm.
“Thank you, Yulian,” she said. “Now, why don’t you lie down beside me where I can tell you something.”
I did as asked.
“We were talking about secrets,” she reminded me, “remember?”
I assured her that I did.
“So now if I tell you a secret, will you promise that you won’t tell it to anybody?”
“Y. . . es.”
“You’re sure?”
“Y. . . es.”
“All right. Well, you see, Yulian, Tadek, and I did something really bad.”
“Y. . . y. . . you d. . . d. . . did s. . . something b. . . bad?”
“I feel terrible about it, Yulian, and I’ve wanted to tell it to someone for the longest time. You won’t tell anyone, will you?”
I assured her that I wouldn’t.
“You see, back in Poland, we were servants in somebody’s home. Tadek was a chauffeur with the Romanskis, and Mrs. Romanski was teaching me to be a maid and to do hair. Then, when the war began and the Romanskis were in Italy, Tadek took an axe from the tool shed and broke through the wall, where they kept their valuables in one of those safes, and he put all the jewelry into a little crocodile leather bag, and we drove away in the Romanskis’ Packard car.”
“B. . . b. . but it w. . . was w. . . w. . . wartime,” I broke in, anxious to relieve her guilt with the explanation that the Germans or the Bolsheviks would have gotten it anyway. .
But Irenka continued talking. “I wanted Tadek to take Alicia, the cook, too,” she said, “but Tadek wouldn’t take her. He said that he had a plan. Because he and I knew manners and could speak properly, we could pass for gentry as a newly married couple on their honeymoon, but Alicia, who spoke like a peasant, would give us away.”
It was the pass-for-a-newly-married-couple part that hit me the hardest. “Y. . you m. . . mean y. . . you and y. . . your h. . . husband aren’t m. . . m. . . married?” I stammered, incredulously.
“No, we’re not, but, remember, you can’t tell that to anyone. You promised.”
“No, i. . . t’s a s. . . ecret,” I said, but my mind was racing to grasp the fact that what she had just shared with me was much more grownup than I had expected. There was a major transformation taking place at this moment—Mrs. Irena was changing from just a lady who permitted me to call her by her first name to somebody who really wanted or needed something from me.
I felt myself overwhelmed by the confidences being revealed to me. She was telling me not only her own secrets, but Mr. K’s, meaning that she was becoming friendlier to me than she was to him.
“I told Tadek that we should take her with us because the Germans were coming, and it was dangerous, but he wouldn’t. We just drove off without telling her.”
Now my Irenka was lying there with her eyes closed, and I had the fantasy that she was waiting for me to say something comforting to her. But I had absolutely no idea what to say. I tried hard to think of something. Irenka—my Irenka—was feeling guilty and sad because they had left Alicia, the cook, behind, and I had no idea how to make her happy. I knew that pulling a brass washer out of her ear wouldn’t do it. Besides which, I didn’t have the washer with me.
I realized that I had started tracing and re-tracing a small circle in the sand with my finger. I had made a little hollow, but, as my finger continued going around, the sand kept sifting in from the sides and prevented the hollow from getting bigger.
It was interesting the way that worked. Just turning my finger around in a tight circle had created the hollow. If I lifted my finger out of the sand, the hollow stayed there until, I supposed, something came along to disturb it, like someone stepping on it. But when I put my finger back in and continued turning, it wouldn’t make the hollow any bigger. The faster I turned it, the faster the sand sifted back into the hollow.
I cupped my hand and scooped out a handful of sand. It
made a bigger hollow, and sand, again, sifted in from the sides, filling in part of the hollow, but not all of it.
“You won’t tell anyone, will you?” Irenka was saying.
I shook my head, without turning to look at her. And I hoped she wouldn’t tell me anything more.
Then I thought of going into the cool water. Ordinarily, I would have asked for permission, but I had the sense that my relationship with Irenka was such that it wasn’t required. On the other hand, my simply announcing my intention to her seemed unfeeling. And to just stand up and go, would have been rude. I pondered my course of action.
To ask permission, as had been my custom with Kiki, certainly would not have been in any way rude, but it would also mean the surrender of a certain prerogative that I felt in this unique relationship. The term, prerogative, of course, was not a part of my vocabulary at the time, but I had an unmistakable sense of its presence there on the blue hotel blanket with Irenka and myself. Now that I knew her to not be married to the nasty Mr. K, I saw Irenka, lying there with the straps of her bathing suit unbuttoned and, possibly, asleep, as someone needing my protection. While I, kneeling at the edge of the blanket, was someone desperately in need of protecting her.
And then the solution to my dilemma presented itself in all its obvious logic, while I chided myself for not thinking of it sooner.
“I. . . renka?” I asked, not sure that she was awake enough to hear me. I saw her open her eyes. “W. . . ould y. . . ou l. . . ike to g. . . o into the w. . . ater wi. . . th me n. . . ow? Just don’t f. . . orget to do up y. . . our sh. . . oulder st. . . raps.”
To my relief, I watched Irenka’s hands feel for the straps on the blanket without her raising either shoulder. In a moment she was kneeling, safely secured within her bathing suit. “I saw how well you swim, on the ship,” she said. “Would you teach me?”
I lowered myself from my kneeling position to sit on the blanket, as Irenka was doing. There was a definite purpose in this. I wanted to compare my height to hers and to see if, by some phenomenon, a length of time had elapsed without my realizing it, and I was now a grownup. The things that my companion had said to me since leaving our hotel would, certainly, support such a conclusion.
But, as I had to tilt my face up in order to watch Irenka tuck her long hair into a rubber bathing cap, I realized that the suspected phenomenon had not, after all taken place.
Now I turned my mind to recalling exactly how I had gone about learning to swim. I could remember standing on a dock, two or three years earlier, with Kiki and looking down at people doing the breaststroke in the water. Then, at some point, we had acquired the orange, inflatable floatation cushions with the straps to tie around our waists. In water that came up to my chest, we had let the cushions support us as we did our best to imitate the swimming motions that we had seen, and found ourselves actually moving forward a little. It was, of course, the incident with Mother and Mr. Gordet on the ship that had taught me that I did not need a floatation device to stay afloat.
“Y. . . ou h. . . ave to go l. . . ike th. . . is,” I said now, demonstrating the arm motion, sitting there on the hotel blanket.
Irenka seemed to imitate my example without any difficulty. “Th. . . at’s r. . . ight,” I said. “And w. . . ith your l. . . egs y. . . ou. . . ” I paused to lie down on my stomach, “go l. . . ike th. . . is.”
“I see,” Irenka said.
“No,” I said, “Y. . . ou tr. . y it n. . . ow.”
Irenka copied my arm movements.
Then I told her to lie down and do the leg kick. “Th. . at’s all there is to sw. . . imming,” I said. “J. . . ust do th. . . at in the w. . . ater and you’l sw. . . im.”
“I want to try it now,” Irenka said, getting up. “You’ll make sure I don’t sink, won’t you?”
I nodded my head. Irenka started running down towards the water, and I followed.
But the moment we were knee-deep in water, I realized that it would be unlikely that either of us would be able to do any swimming, as waves, much bigger than the ones I had seen in Yurata, came crashing, one after the other, onto the sand. Quite a ways further out, I could see people’s heads bobbing on the bumpy water, but those near the shore only dove into the oncoming waves and let them redeposit them close to shore.
“I don’t think we can do any swimming here,” Irenka said, and I agreed. Then I watched her plunge headfirst into an oncoming wave.
Diving headfirst was not an action I had yet attempted, but I knew that I had little choice, but to follow her example. In fact it was I who should have set the example. I straightened my arms in front of me, closed my eyes and lunged into the next wave as it bore down on me. Instantly, I felt myself whirled around by the force of the water, turned upside down with salt water going up my nose. Then, as I thrashed to reach the surface, my head hit something very unyielding, which I realized must have been the bottom. I had been going in the wrong direction. Now panic grabbed me as I felt the lack of oxygen in my lungs. I tried to turn so as to put my feet against the sandy bottom and thrust myself toward the surface, but the force of the wave had not finished with me, and I felt myself lifted again and suddenly crashing against the beach, face and shoulder first.
“That was wonderful!” I heard Irenka shout and realized she was sitting on the wet sand right next to where I had landed. “Let’s do it again!” She stood up and reached for my hand.
My shoulder hurt, my face hurt, and my head ached from my impact against the sand. But I let my companion pull me to my feet. Hand-in-hand we charged the next incoming wall of water.
CHAPTER IV
Our hotel occupied half the space between two larger buildings. This would have provided an alley between the side of the hotel and the building to its left, except that the hotel lobby took up one story of that empty space. So that what you saw from the street was an entrance to a small, single-story, flat-roofed structure sandwiched between a large building on one side and the five stories of the hotel on the other. Except that inside the lobby had a big opening into the dining room and the elevator that were the bottom of the hotel.
Our bedroom window, on the fourth floor, looked out onto that space above the hotel lobby, and the two windows of our living room, where my day-bed was, faced the street. One creaky elevator served the hotel grudgingly, and the stairs, which I preferred to use, also had windows that opened on the alley space above the lobby roof.
As Mother and I had our supper the first evening, I could not keep my eyes from wandering to Irenka and the man pretending to be her husband, at a table across the room. I noticed that they didn’t talk to each other, which made me glad. There was so much that she and I had had to talk about that afternoon. And then there was that glimpse I had had of her bare breast, with its pink nipple, like a plump little mushroom.
As a matter of fact, Mother and I weren’t talking to each other either. Mother ate only a salad, which she just picked at, and she smoked all through the meal. This concerned me. My Uncle Martin had died from smoking cigarettes. And Kiki had not approved of people smoking. She never actually said that people who smoked or drank alcohol or wore makeup weren’t nice, I suppose because my mother did all those things, but it was easy to tell that she didn’t approve.
And once, a few months ago, when Mother and I were in Yugoslavia and Mother was very tired from trying hard to get us a visa to go somewhere further away from the Germans and the Russians, I picked up a cigarette that she had left burning in an ashtray and put it in my mouth. I had done it to show my support and appreciation of Mother and all her efforts to get us out of danger. The cigarette tasted terrible, but I had thought that my doing such a grownup thing would please Mother and demonstrate that I did not disapprove of her anymore, the way that Kiki had.
But Mother’s reaction had expressed the very opposite. She had torn the cigarette from my surprised fingers and crushed it out with quick, angry gestures. Then, a few moments later, in a calmer to
ne, she told me that I was never, ever to touch a cigarette again. She said that cigarettes made people sick. She told me again about Uncle Martin dying from cigarettes, which I had already known about from Kiki, and said that she only smoked them because they calmed her nerves, but would stop when she didn’t have to worry about our safety anymore. She even told me that someday she would buy me a gold lighter so that I would be able to light cigarettes for ladies, as was expected of a gentleman, but I was never to smoke, myself.
Well, what would happen if my mother were to get sick and die? There I would be, all by myself in a hotel suite in Rio with no idea how to go about selling Mother’s diamonds or what to do once that money ran out.
“You sh. . . shouldn’t be s. . . moking so m. . . uch,” I said, avoiding my stutter almost totally with my new technique of dragging the words out instead of repeating the same sound.
“Yes, I know. I will stop as soon as we get to America,” she answered.
“Are you u. . . pset because M. G. . . .ordet isn’t a g. . . entleman?” I had the sense that there was something to his failure in the gentleman department that went beyond the dirty-fingernails and failure-to-light-cigarettes issues. In fact, for some time now, I had had the feeling that what I knew of life was, like the lobby of our hotel, just an antechamber to some great mystery which, once I was introduced to it, would explain a whole lot of things. And I had to confess to myself that my question regarding M. Gordet had been motivated only partly out of concern for Mother’s feelings and partly as a probe into that mysterious realm.
“We will never speak of M. Gordet again,” Mother said, instantly slamming the door on my probe.
“Tomorrow I will have to telephone Sr. O’Brien, to make an appointment to see him,” she announced, as though she had just made a difficult decision. “He’s a very rich man, and his wife is Russian. He should be sympathetic to us. I have his telephone number and a letter of introduction from Sr. Santos. Do you remember Sr. Santos, the photographer in Lisbon?”
Loves of Yulian Page 6
