Loves of Yulian

by Julian Padowicz

  Because Mother had gotten word that our entry permit to America would be coming soon, she decided that I did not need to go back to school, which was a big relief to me, particularly since it would save us money.

  Three weeks after Christmas, January 13th, was my ninth birthday, and I got a cowboy hat from Mother, to go with my gun belt. Irenka gave me a leather-bound notebook, to write my poems in, and I immediately set to transcribing my existing poems into it, so that Irenka would know how much I appreciated it.

  Then, Mother said that Mr. and Mrs. Tuwim had a present for me as well. We had met Mr. and Mrs. Tuwim a number of times at that café, and we set out for the café that afternoon.

  I wore my gun-belt and hat, so as not to hurt Mother’s feelings, though it was not the image I wanted to project to Mr. Tuwim. As usual, the Tuwims were there before us, Mrs. Tuwim immediately happy to see us, with a kiss for Mother and a birthday hug for me, Mr. Tuwim sitting back in his chair, his legs thrust out in front of him, and deep in thought. Mother immediately ordered a dish of ice cream for me, chocolate and vanilla. “I can’t get him to eat anything,” she said to Mrs. Tuwim, and I felt instantly guilty over my lack of appetite. “Look how thin he is.”

  “He looks fine to me, Basia,” Mr. Tuwim said. “He’s busy growing.” What he was saying was that the process of growing somehow took effort and concentration on my part, and I appreciated fully the humor and the creativity of the remark.

  “Give the boy his present,” Mrs. Tuwim said to her husband, when we had been sitting there a while.

  “I don’t have it,” Mr. Tuwim said. “You have it.”

  “I gave it to you before we left,” Mrs. Tuwim said. “You put it into your left trousers pocket.”

  Mr. Tuwim felt both his pockets and said he didn’t have it.

  If Mr. Tuwim had lost it, I was embarrassed for him, but I didn’t much care about the present itself. All of us refugees, facing uncertain futures, had little money to spend on things like birthday presents.

  Then Mr. Tuwim found a flat box with a gold bottom and a blue top, about six inches long, and tied with a little bow, in the pocket of his jacket. “You must have transferred it to your jacket,” his wife explained.

  Mr. Tuwim tried to hand it to his wife.

  “No, you should give it to him,” she said.

  “It’s from both of us.”

  “Yes, but it’s better coming from you.”

  Mr. Tuwim handed me the box, and I thanked him.

  “Kiss him,” Mother whispered.

  I pretended not to hear. There was no way that I was going to kiss Mr. Tuwim.

  A box of those dimensions could contain a fountain pen, a mechanical pencil, both, or a wristwatch. But wristwatches were expensive items, and I guessed it to be a pen or pencil, with which to write my poems. I ruled out a pen-and-pencil set, because the same gift gesture could be achieved with just a single item.

  I untied the bow slowly and opened the box. Lying inside was a wristwatch.

  I had received a wristwatch from my parents for my seventh birthday, in Warsaw. I was told that it was a “pilot’s” watch because it was shockproof, waterproof, antimagnetic, and glowed in the dark, and I took it as a mark of my maturity. I was immediately told to wind it carefully every night and lay it on the table beside my bed, where I could see it, and to take it off and lay it aside before washing my hands, all of which I promised to do faithfully.

  From my uncle Jacob I had received another symbol of maturity, a sheath knife, about eight inches overall. This, I was allowed to wear, hooked to the button that connected my short pants to my shirt, as long as I never took it out of its sheath.

  Then, when my stepfather, Lolek, went into the army at the beginning of the war, he had taken my pilot’s watch, because his own watch was gold and expensive, and because he said he had the right to take it, since he had given it to me. He also took my sheath knife, with which, I supposed, he would be able to kill some thin German soldier.

  But the generosity of the Tuwims’ gift surprised me. This one wasn’t a “pilot’s” watch—it wasn’t waterproof, shock resistant, or antimagnetic, and it didn’t have the green numbers that glowed in the dark—but it was from Yulian Tuwim, the great poet, which made it doubly or triply precious. But I didn’t feel any of the thrill that I had felt on that day, two years ago. I wound my new watch, set the time from Mr. Tuwim’s watch, and had my mother buckle it onto my wrist. Then I sat and watched the little second hand, at the bottom of the dial, go round and round, while I tried to appreciate how generously I had been treated.

  It was at that same café, with the Tuwims, a few weeks later, when I was studying the metal pipes that held up the awning, as I had that day months earlier, that I suddenly heard Mother say, “Oh Yulian, tell me what I should do.”

  She was, of course, talking to Mr. Tuwim, but it was the note of pleading in her voice that pulled my attention from the overhead rigging.

  “Basia, dear, it’s a decision you have to make for yourself,” Mr. Tuwim said.

  “But I don’t know what to do.”

  I had never, before, heard Mother make that particular statement in any form.

  “I think I am in love with him,” Mother continued, and I knew immediately that she was grappling with the decision that I had seen coming for some time.

  “Oh, I have no doubt that you are,” Mr. Tuwim said.

  “So tell me what I should do.”

  “I can’t tell you what to do.”

  Now I saw Mother turn to Mrs. Tuwim. “What do you think I should do?” she asked in that little girl voice I had heard her use on occasion.

  Mrs. Tuwim shook her head. “I can’t tell you, Barbara.”

  I knew very well that it was the question of whether to go to America or marry Sr. Segiera that was on Mother’s mind. She was wringing her hands and biting her lips now, and, suddenly, I was feeling very sorry for Mother. I had seen her angry and sad, but I had never seen her seem so helpless.

  “He’s so sweet and so understanding and good to me,” Mother was saying now. “I’ve been a real bitch to him sometimes, but he just worships me. And he has that lovely, crippled boy, who would be a good friend for Yulian. He’s the only boy Yulian has ever gotten along with. But then, on the other side, there is Yulian becoming an American and my book and. . . ”

  I found that I was hurting for Mother. I was feeling her pain. I remembered the agony of my separation from Kiki, more than a year ago now, and not wanting Mother to have to endure the same thing.

  “You can write your book in Portuguese as well as in English,” Mr. Tuwim interrupted her. “As far as I know, you can’t write in either language.”

  I couldn’t agree more with him. In either case, she would have to have help writing her book, so why not stay here and write it in Portuguese.

  “But I want Americans to read my book. Americans can do something about this war.”

  That was true. I knew that America had many more people than Brazil, and that it was America that had influenced the outcome of the last war.

  “So go to America,” Mrs. Tuwim said.

  “But I love Ernesto.”

  I knew exactly how that felt, and I hated Mother having to endure the pain of separating from him.

  “So stay,” Mr. Tuwim said.

  “But I want Yulian to become an American.”

  I didn’t need to be an American. I could be very happy being Brazilian.

  Now I could see a tear on Mother’s face, and Mr. Tuwim changed the subject suddenly. “Yulian, what plans do you have for Carnival?” he asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders. I had heard mention of the Carnival, but assumed it to be a place you went to and paid admission, which put it beyond our budget.

  “It isn’t for him,” Mother said.

  “Why not? It’s a time when people dress up and become somebody else. They step outside of themselves for a few days, and everyo
ne has a good time.”

  “It’s for the common people,” Mother said.

  “Oh come on, Basia. Everyone in Rio gets involved.”

  “And what are you dressing up as, a circus clown?”

  Mr. Tuwim laughed. But I knew that he wasn’t going to dress up as anyone.

  But the idea of becoming someone else had an immediate appeal for me. I would get a wheelchair and become Paolo. I would wheel around in it, talking to all sorts of strangers, and everybody would have to talk to me and be nice to me because I was crippled and because I was coping so well with my disability.

  Irenka told me that she and Andre were going to do something with some other people for Carnival, and Mother was going to go on working at Sra. O’Brien’s as usual. For weeks, my mind was filled with vignettes and entire scenes of me wheeling my way around the street in front of our hotel, zipping up to groups of people, who would turn to let me join them and then return my greetings, marveling at how unaffected I was by my handicap. Way in the back of my mind was the question of where in the world I was going to get a wheelchair. But the knowledge that there was, really, no way for me to obtain one, kept the thought in its back corner.

  Then, two days before Carnival was about to start, I finally realized that, even if I did find my wheelchair and learned to operate it the way Paolo did, I did not have the capacity to wheel, uninvited, up to strangers and start a conversation. In a word, my plans for becoming Paolo were not going to happen.

  So the start of Carnival found me leaning out of our window, looking at the activities on the street below. In the morning, there were people, individually or by twos and threes, in brightly colored and strange clothing hurrying up or down the street, as though late for an appointment. There were women in skirts that were cut very short in front and dragged on the ground in back, men in trousers with one leg of one color and the other different. Shirts had collars that were large and pointed or very round with large bows or just with long strips hanging down. There were hats of all sorts, usually very large. Some hats were made of fruits or vegetables; some fruits were worked right into hairdos. Some people wore masks that covered their entire faces, some had their masks on top of their heads, as they hurried to their destination. They weren’t, mostly, masks that made people look better, but uglier, with long noses, weird beards, huge, hairy ears, or, even, horns. I thought of Irenka’s impression of Jews.

  Then, as the day progressed, a sort of parade developed, moving from right to left along the street. But it wasn’t a parade like any I had seen before. There were no soldiers marching in step and no brass bands with brass-buttoned uniforms. The people walked or rode on the back of trucks or open cars, the walkers making no particular effort to keep in step. Every once in a while a group of musicians passed, sometimes playing a marching beat and sometimes music to dance to. Some of the people in the parade danced to the music, others seemed to ignore it completely.

  People, along the sidewalk, stood watching the parade, or ignored it, going about their business. Every once in a while, someone, or two or three, from the sidewalk would join the parade and be acknowledged by the people they had joined, as though they had been expected.

  I wondered whether you really had to be expected or whether anyone could join. I wondered whether I could put on my cowboy hat and gun belt and march along with the parade for a few blocks.

  I didn’t have a mask, but if I tied a handkerchief around my nose and mouth, the way the crooks did in cowboy movies, people wouldn’t know who I was and might think that, maybe, I was someone who was supposed to march with them.

  In my mind, I now saw myself marching in the parade with grownups in their weird costumes all around me and accepting me as one of them and all of us marching in the same direction. It would be a wonderful feeling, I was sure, and I stepped away from the window to sit in the armchair, close my eyes, and concentrate on the image.

  When Mother came back from Sra. O’Brien’s she asked me whether I had watched the parade, and I said that I had. Then she asked whether I had gone downstairs in my cowboy outfit, and I assured her that I hadn’t, though I had the feeling that she no longer felt as negative about the parade and its participants as she had talking with Mr. Tuwim. In the evening, we both leaned out of the window, as the street lights cast a whole new character on the activities below.

  “The music is going to be playing all night,” Mother said. “Why don’t you sleep with me. We’ll close the bedroom door, and it won’t be as loud. Irena won’t be back tonight.”

  I said that the music wouldn’t bother me, and Mother said that, of course, it would, but, in the end, she agreed to let me sleep in my own bed, certain that I would regret it.

  As Mother had said, and I had known it would, it took a long time for me to fall asleep, as I lay, tense with anticipation of my proposed plunge the next day. But I would have had a difficult time entertaining these thoughts with Mother’s presence beside me, even though I was sure she couldn’t read minds.

  In an effort to be realistic and knowing my own self, I realized that I might, very well, not have that courage to do what I was planning. I knew that I would probably just stand there or walk along the sidewalk, without finding the nerve to make that step. But, maybe, I would find a way to, as Mr. Tuwim had said, “step out of myself.”

  The next day, Mother asked whether I wanted to come to Sra. O’Brien’s with her and swim in the pool, while she worked with the senhora, but I said that I would rather watch the parade some more.

  The moment I saw Mother pull away in Sra. O’Brien’s black car, I stepped away from the window to strap on my guns. I did that deliberately, lest I lose my nerve for the whole adventure. The parade hadn’t formed yet, and I expected that it would take some time before it did, but I was also aware of a need for precautions against my loss of nerve. The more prepared I was, I figured, the harder it would be to back out, if my nerve disintegrated.

  Then, when there was a parade again, I forced myself out of our suite and onto the landing. I hoped that I would not encounter anyone in the elevator, and I didn’t. Then I was out on the sidewalk within a few steps of the moving stream, wondering what I should look for as an appropriate place to make my move.

  A number of the revelers did wave to me, as they walked or rode by, but none seemed to be extending a definite invitation to join their ranks. And then I saw seven boys, about my own age, walking by with their arms around each other’s shoulders and singing. They weren’t in any sort of costume, except that one of them had some sort of cap on his head.

  Before I realized it, I was walking along the sidewalk, keeping abreast of them. Then, one of them raised his arm and waved for me to join them. I was positive he was inviting me to join them. And then the others waved for me to join as well.

  Not permitting myself to think about it, I made the few sideways steps necessary, and soon I had my arm around the shoulders of the nearest boy, and his arm was around me. I didn’t know the song they were singing, but I marched in step to their rhythm.

  Then, at one corner, as though by previous plan, my companions veered out of the parade and down a side street, I, of course, right with them. We stopped in front of a store, and one of the boys went inside. He came out a few minutes later with a paper bag of candy that he proceeded to distribute among us. I got a cylindrical, chewy, chocolate something that I had never tasted before, but was delicious.

  In a moment we had rejoined the parade. Our mouths full of candy, we were not singing, but marching to the beat of some nearby musicians.

  Conscious of being the only one in any sort of costume, I had pushed my hat back to hang from my neck by its strap and pulled the kerchief down to hang on my neck as well. We were now some five or six blocks from the hotel, at the limit that I had set for myself, and I knew that I would have to leave the group. But that was all right. The exhilaration that I felt from the few minutes of this experience would last me for some time. My only problem
was how to make my exit, particularly since I was now in pretty much the center of the line.

  Then our entire group veered away from the parade again and turned down another side street. In the middle of the street we stopped. Then the boy, who had gone into the store last time, addressed me with words I didn’t understand at first. Seeing the confusion on my face, he repeated them louder.

  Now I understood that he wanted me to give him my guns.

  My exhilaration turned, suddenly, into fear. I shook my head.

  The other boys took up his cause, repeating his command in my ear.

  I shook my head again.

  I felt hands grab my arms and the boy in front of me reach for my belt buckle.

  Instinctively, I raised my arms, breaking the grips on them. Then I began to run.

  I heard their shouts for me to stop and the footsteps behind me. I did not dare look back, but ran as fast as I could back to the parade street.

  They were still calling, and I felt a hand graze my back. But I was still running. One boy, bigger than me, was on my left now, so I angled to the right and increased the distance between us.

  I was running in the opposite direction of the parade, heading back to the hotel. The bigger boy on my left seemed to have dropped back, and I, suddenly, had the certainty that I could outrun my pursuers.

  Their shouts were beginning to turn into hard breathing and their footsteps grew fainter. I was now filled with a new exhilaration, far greater than what I had felt while marching. I had outrun them all.

  I could no longer hear them behind me, and I knew that I could turn my head to make sure, then slow down to a walk. But it felt too good to be running. I felt as though I could run forever, maybe even rise off the sidewalk and soar through the sky.

  CHAPTER XIV

  I noticed that Mother had stopped smoking altogether, or, at least, when I was around. Instead, she would drum her long, red nails on the table a lot. She also seemed to hold herself extra straight, and I often saw her biting her lip now. I knew very well that she was either trying to decide whether to continue on to America or that she had already made a decision and that it was hurting her. I imagined what it would have been like if I had known, weeks in advance, that Kiki would be leaving me, and I would, probably, never see her again.