Loves of Yulian

by Julian Padowicz

  “I h. . . ave s. . . .ometh. . . .ing to t. . . ell you,” I said.

  “What is it?” she asked, not opening the door any wider.

  “Is s. . . omething wr. . . .ong?” I asked.

  “No, no, come in.” She opened the door wide for me to come in. I saw that Irenka was dressed in a bathrobe, which would not have surprised me had it been my mother, but I didn’t expect to see other people dressed in bathrobes at that time of day.

  “What is it?” Irenka said, sitting down on the chair. I had the strong feeling that she wanted me to say whatever was on my mind and leave.

  “I. . . t’s ab. . . .out what h. . . .appened in scho. . . . . ol,”

  “Yes?” I could tell that she was only pretending to be interested. I told her my story as quickly as I could. While I was telling it, it occurred to me that in her present mood she might not find it funny and reprimand me instead. But she didn’t. She did laugh, though not with the enthusiasm I had hoped for, and I went back upstairs. I knew that grownups, particularly women, had moods when they didn’t enjoy things the way they did at other times.

  There was a boy named Gustavo in my class, who was, clearly, the fastest runner of all the boys. He had reddish hair, cut so short you could see his scalp, and freckles, and his skin seemed stretched tight over his face, and when they played tag at recess, no one ever seemed able to tag him. I could tell by the grin on his face, as he evaded his pursuer, that he thought he was pretty good. That look on his face annoyed me. I had been the fastest runner in my class at the French school in Warsaw. It had been the only positive element of that entire school experience, but the title had clearly been mine. And now, to see Gustavo think he was so great really incensed me.

  So I slowly began to work my way into the game of tag. The first day, I stood close to where the others were playing and followed closely with my eyes, with a look of intense interest on my face. But this did not result in an invitation to join, so the following day I proceeded to walk across the playground several times, hoping to get tagged. But I had been tagged, while walking across that playground on the first day, and ignored it, so I wasn’t really surprised that no one bothered tagging me now. But it was just a small step from walking across to actually jogging along behind the others, and pretty soon I was running around just as though I was an actual participant. And, finally, on the fourth day of my efforts, I felt myself being tagged on the arm.

  Immediately, I set out after Gustavo. I saw him at the other end of the playground and made straight for him. The other boys scattered at my approach, and I could have tagged several of them quite easily. But it was Gustavo, with his close-cropped, reddish hair, freckles, and tightly stretched skin, who was my prey.

  I was almost on top of him before Gustavo realized my intent. I had slowed down, because tagging him while he stood still would not have served my needs. For an instant, there was a startled look on Gustavo’s face. I felt immediate gratification and burned that look into my memory. The surprise turned into a grin, as Gustavo dashed off to my right. I followed. I let him get a few steps ahead of me before shifting into my top gear.

  Realizing now that this was a contest between Gustavo and me, the other boys stood still and watched, and, in the corner of my eye, I could see that even some of the girls were looking.

  Gustavo reached the other end of the playground a few steps ahead of me, but I could see that I was catching up. Gustavo turned to his right, and I could have cut across and taken a shortcut, but that wasn’t what I had in mind. I made the same right turn that he had, and in three more steps I had him. I was close enough to reach one hand out and tag him, but I ran another few steps and tagged him with both hands, right in the middle of his back. Gustavo’s arms flayed to his sides, and he took two more steps and stumbled to the ground.

  I stood over him, breathing hard, with my hands on my hips, as Gustavo sat up and began to cry over a skinned knee.

  I had done it again. I had hurt a boy, without meaning to.

  I looked around for one of the teachers to come and make us shake hands. But then I felt my shoulder gripped hard. I thought it was a teacher, but it turned out to be Stefan Stepnanski. He and three other boys, all bigger than me, suddenly pushed me up against the wall of the school building, and held me there, while Stefan began punching me in the stomach.

  “W. . . w. . . why are y. . . y. . . you d. . . d. . . doing this t. . . t. . . to m. . . m. . . me?” I stuttered in Polish.

  “Shut up, Jew!” Stefan answered, in Polish.

  CHAPTER IX

  I had caught Gustavo, tagged him harder than I should have, seen him cry over his skinned knee, and been punched in the stomach a number of times by Stefan, while his friends held me against the wall. Then we had gone back to class and, finally, I got on the bus. But I didn’t remember any of this clearly, the way I usually remembered things that had happened that same afternoon, but hazily, as though it had happened a long time ago, or even in a dream. I couldn’t remember anything about what had happened in class, after the recess, or on the bus, up to that moment.

  Now we were stopped in front of our hotel, and I was fully awake—though I hadn’t been asleep—and I had a terrible headache, though I didn’t remember anyone hitting me in the head. My stomach hardly hurt at all. But I was very afraid.

  I didn’t know what it was that I was afraid of. My classmates and Stefan and his friends were all angry at me for pushing Gustavo. Maybe Sra. Fernanda would find out and punish me. But my classmates in Warsaw had been angry at me as well, and I had been punished before. There was something more. But the bus was stopped in front of our hotel now, and I had to get off.

  It wasn’t till I was up in our suite, waiting for Mother with an anxiety for her return that I had not felt for some time, that I remembered. Stefan had called me a Jew.

  Suddenly, I was filled with an unfamiliar dread. It was the first time in my life that anyone had called me a Jew, and I could now recall the hatred with which I had heard the word directed to others. “Jew” wasn’t just some letters making a word—it was an expletive, an expression of loathing, an utterance spit out through protruded lips and a nose scrunched up as though the word itself smelled bad.

  Stefan, whose parents knew us in Poland, had lashed out at me with that hatred. When we had been introduced originally, he had just not wanted to talk to me, but when he saw me doing something bad, that hatred had come out, and he had attacked me with it.

  I wondered if he had told others that I was Jewish. Would other boys be grabbing me, whenever I made some mistake, or even for no reason at all, and beating me? I could understand now why Mother had said not to ever mention the word “Jew.” What if grownups were to find out as well? Not all grownups hated Jews—many people in Poland had known we were Jewish and not done anything mean about it—but some people, like the Nazis, actually went around killing Jews.

  Suddenly, I was aware of a whole new kind of fear. I had held fear for witches and goblins, when I was alone at night in a strange hotel room—fears that somewhere in my soul I knew were, at bottom, products of my own, childish imagination. But the f ear I felt now was a grownup fear that felt totally real. It wasn’t fear of any specific hurt—not another beating by Stefan and his friends or punishment by Sra. Fernanda—but of something much greater, something that applied not just to me, but to a larger group to which, I now realized, I belonged.

  Mother came home and said that we had to hurry downstairs to the restaurant, where I would have my supper right away, because, later, she and Sr. Segiera were going out to dinner, somewhere, without me. I wasn’t afraid to stay alone, was I? she asked, and I said that no, I wasn’t. If I were, she would ask Mrs. Kosiewicz to come and stay with me till I was asleep.

  I said that no, I wasn’t afraid. I had stayed alone in hotel rooms in Hungary, Yugoslavia, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, and I had been terrified by the witches and goblins that I, myself, had created out of shadows on the wall, ca
st by the doily or the towel that Mother laid over a lamp in an effort to fashion a night-light for me.

  It had been a strange ritual. It would usually begin as a game, with my wondering what there was that could possibly scare me and looking around for a shadow that one could imagine into an old woman, looking at one from behind a tree or some horned, long-snouted apparition that could be called a goblin. Of course there weren’t any. These were just doily shadows. Kiki had taught me that witches and goblins didn’t exist. And then, a breeze might flutter the doily, and a shadow would move. I might catch the motion out of the corner of my eye, or I might see a form I had not noticed being there before, and, instantly, my blood would turn to ice and my game to terror. Suddenly, I would be overtaken by totally unreasonable fears of monsters assembling on my walls to pounce on me.

  But, this evening would be different. This evening, I had the feeling that I was beyond that now, that, as a result of this afternoon’s happenings, I was, now, impervious to such phantasmagoria, and I welcomed the opportunity to confirm this hypothesis. And, as for Irenka staying with me, I just felt that her naiveté—though the word naiveté, itself, was not in my vocabulary—on the entire subject of Jewishness would not be conducive to my present frame of mind.

  To my relief, it turned out that my original hypothesis had been, indeed, correct, since neither witch nor goblin made an appearance that night. I had, of course, skewed the test somewhat, by closing my eyes the moment I was settled in bed and not opening them until the following morning.

  When Mother had first returned from work, the evening before, and hurried me down to the hotel dining room, I had been debating how to tell her about that afternoon’s happenings, or if I was even going to tell her at all. But the following morning, after my victory over the witches and goblins and the maturity status that it implied, I decided that any relief she could give to the situation would not be worth the pain of the disclosure.

  In the first place, she might have become very angry at my even mentioning the word Jew. And, in the second place, sharing a fear with Mother just did not seem like a constructive idea. Mother, who had, after all, embarked on our perilous trek over the Carpathian Mountains last February, against all advice, and who had instructed me to just jump into the pool on board ship, when I did not know how to swim, held little tolerance for fear.

  I put on my uniform and boarded the school bus, knowing full well now that, though I wore the uniform, I did not and never would fully belong to the entity that the uniform represented. And that what I was a member of was a realm that belonged nowhere, held no rights, and was welcome at no table, except its own.

  And then I saw Gustavo come to school with a large square of gauze taped to one knee and a bandage around the heel of his hand. I recalled how painful it had been when I had skinned my own knee and hand, falling on the sidewalk in Warsaw, and knew that that was what I had done to Gustavo. That it was I who had pushed him to the ground and made him cry. I could see his face as I had seen it the day before, his mouth stretched wide in sobs, as the tears ran down his face, encircling his bleeding leg with his arm, and looking up at me for explanation.

  I had done this to Gustavo for no other reason than the fact that he could run fast. That was all that he had done. He had done nothing to me. He had been playing an ordinary game with his friends, and I had chased him down and pushed him to the ground. Gustavo had sat there on the ground, crying from the pain that I had caused him.

  I wanted to wipe the image of him sitting there, crying, from my mind. He kept looking up at me, sobbing and snuffling his runny nose.

  I wished that Sra. Fernanda had done what the governess at Sra. O’Brien’s had and made me shake hands with Gustavo and tell him that I was sorry. That had seemed to prevent what I was feeling now. There had been a certain pain to saying I was sorry for something I had done, but it wasn’t anything like this.

  Of course, I could always walk up to Gustavo, offer my hand and say that I was sorry—I knew the Portuguese expression for that. I could push my way through the other boys who were crowding around Gustavo and do that. But I knew that I couldn’t do that. Besides, I wasn’t sure that, without a grownup’s assistance, it would work.

  I was sure they were talking about me, right now, and about what a bad thing I had done, and they were right. And they were saying how bad I was, and that was all right too. I knew that I was never going to be one of them, and I didn’t care what they said about me. In a little while I would be going to America.

  Except that the picture of Gustavo clutching his knee in pain and looking up at me kept coming back. I kept as much distance between Gustavo and myself as I could. All day, I found myself glancing out of the corner of my eye for anyone approaching me with violent intentions. But none did. I tried to make myself as unobtrusive as possible. When the others were writing in their notebooks, I opened mine and drew pictures in it. Drawing was not something I did well or particularly enjoyed, but it meant wagging my eraser-tipped pencil, while the others did the same with theirs, and, thus, not drawing attention to myself by my idleness. During recess I stayed as far from their game of tag as possible and, in gym class, I made sure that I didn’t dash from one end of the hall to the other any faster than my classmates, or throw the rubber ball with any more accuracy or catch it with more consistency. It seemed as though the school day would never end.

  And the bus crawled at a snail’s pace on the way home. I could not wait to take off the uniform, in which I now felt an impostor and intruder, and go downstairs to talk to Irenka. Maybe telling her how sorry I was, could help me get the image of Gustavo out of my mind. I would not, of course, tell Irenka about the Stefan business, which was quite separate and outside her range of understanding, but whispering to her about how sorry I was for what I had done to Gustavo might be almost like telling Gustavo. I remembered the delicious intimacy of lying on our stomachs on the warm sand and telling each other things we wouldn’t say to anyone else. I knew that there wasn’t time to go to the beach now, but we could sit close together in chairs in her living room, or maybe even lie on her bed, and talk.

  Irenka was very happy to see me this time. “Oh, Yulian, I’m so sorry about not being very interested in what you said the last time,” she said. “I wasn’t feeling very well that day.”

  I told her that was all right. That there were days when Mother didn’t feel very well, too. Irenka was mending the elbow of a white shirt, and it reminded me of Kiki.

  “How is school going?” she asked.

  I pulled a chair close to where she was sitting, sat down, and then lied, telling her that school was going fine. But that was all right, because in a few minutes I would be telling her the truth.

  “I saw you waiting for the bus in your uniform yesterday,” she said. “You looked really nice in it.”

  I was wearing my uniform when I’d come to see her the other day, but she didn’t seem to remember that. “I h. . . ave s. . . omething I h. . . ave to t. . . ell y. . . ou,” I said, before the conversation could get too far afield.

  “Oh, what’s that?” I could tell by her tone that she was expecting me to tell her something fun, and felt guilty.

  “It i. . . sn’t g. . . ood,” I said.

  “What is it?” Suddenly, Irenka’s voice was full of concern.

  I dropped my voice to a whisper. “I h. . . urt a b. . . oy,” I said.

  “You hurt a boy?”

  I told her about watching them never being able to catch Gustavo and how that had annoyed me because I had always been the one that the others couldn’t catch, and how I had joined the game and caught Gustavo, but pushed him too hard so that he fell and skinned his knee and his hand.

  “Oh, that’s nothing,” Irenka said. “Boys are always falling down and skinning their knees. You should have seen my brother coming home from school with his knees.”

  “But I m. . . ade G. . . ustavo c. . . ry.”

  “Well, skinned knee
s hurt. Haven’t you ever skinned a knee and cried?”

  “Yes, b. . . ut. . . .”

  “He’ll be back in school tomorrow, playing tag. You’ll see.”

  “A. . . ctually it h. . . appened y. . . esterday, and h. . . e w. . . as b. . . ack t. . . oday.” I had even seen him playing tag, I realized.

  “There, you see?”

  Irenka didn’t understand. What I saw right then was Gustavo sitting on the ground again, hugging his knee in pain, and looking up at me. My own pain was no less than before. Maybe even more.

  “Now tell me, have you made any new friends?” she asked.

  “I h. . . aven’t m. . . .ade a. . . .ny f. . . friends.” I would have bet that she didn’t remember my telling her, that other time, about making Sra. Fernanda think I was stupid.

  “Because you don’t think you can speak Portuguese. But you can, and you won’t learn unless you try. Would you like to practice with me? I’ll pretend that I’m one of your classmates.” I knew that Irenka had learned a lot more Portuguese than I had, and now she seemed quite eager to play our old role-playing game.

  “No,” I said. I surprised myself with my abrupt answer. But I knew that it had been a mistake to try talking with Irenka about the things that bothered me. I realized that my response had surprised Irenka as well. “Would you like some tea?” she asked.

  “I h. . . ave to g. . . et b. . . ack I h. . . ave h. . . omew. . . ork to do,” I lied.

  That lie surprised me too. I had been taught that God didn’t allow lying, but now, for some reason, that did not seem to matter. What mattered was that I had to get back to our suite.

  Gustavo’s face, looking up at me from the ground, kept haunting me for the rest of the day. Except that, strangely enough, each time it appeared now, in place of tears running down his cheeks, there would be blood pouring from his nose. Then I would remember that the blood had been on his knee, not his nose, and would try to correct the picture. But, somehow, the bloody-nose image kept coming back.