Promise at Dawn, Page 6

  I can still remember a certain singer from the Vilna opera, whose stage name was Mademoiselle La Rare. I was then a little more than eight years old.

  My mother had left the room with the fitter, to put some finishing touches on the “Paris model,” and I was left alone with Mademoiselle La Rare, who was in a state of considerable undress. I looked her over inch by inch, dreamily licking my Turkish delight. Something in my expression must have seemed very familiar to the lovely singer, for she suddenly seized her dress from the chair and covered herself with it. Then, since I continued my detailed inspection, she took refuge behind the dressing table. I was furious and, walking around the obstacle, planted myself solidly in front of her, with my legs apart and my stomach pushed forward, and went on licking my Turkish delight. When my mother returned, she found us standing motionless, facing one another in an icy silence.

  I remember that, having led me from the showroom, she clasped me in her arms, and looked at me with a smile of extraordinary pride, as though I had at last begun to justify the hopes which she had placed in me.

  Unfortunately, from then on the salon became forbidden ground for me. I often tell myself that, with a little more cunning, and with a little less frankness in my stare, I might well have enriched my experience by at least six months.

  CHAPTER 9

  The fruits of our prosperity were showered upon me. I acquired a French governess and sported elegant velvet suits, silk shirts with broad lace collars, and Pompadour ties. In cold weather I was made to wear a most revolting, to my budding manhood, coat of squirrel fur; their poor little tails shook as I walked, to the great delight of my playmates, who mercilessly pulled them. I was given lessons in deportment, was taught to kiss ladies’ hands, to bow before them, when introduced, with a formal plunge of the upper part of the body, at the same time clicking my heels, and the delicate art of choosing and offering flowers to members of the beautiful sex was revealed to me. On these two points, the kissing of ladies’ hands and the homage of flowers, my mother was particularly firm.

  “Without that,” she told me, rather mysteriously, “you will never get anywhere.”

  Often, before falling asleep, I saw my mother come into my room. She leaned over me with a sad smile and whispered: “Raise your eyes, Roma. . . .”

  I sleepily raised my eyes. She remained leaning over me for a long while. Then she would throw herself suddenly forward, put her arms around me, and press me against her bosom, shaking with sobs. I could feel her tears on my face and always ended by crying myself, out of some sort of obscure, heartbroken sympathy. I felt confusedly that there was a mystery behind those tears, that there was something strange in my eyes, and I began to stare at them in the mirror, wondering what there was in their color or shape that made my mother cry. One day I took the bull by the horns and put the question to Aniela, who with our newly attained and steadily increasing prosperity had been promoted to the rank of “personal assistant,” and given a handsome salary. She detested my French governess, whom she accused of keeping me away from her, and did all she could to make life difficult for the “Mamselle,” as she called her.

  “Aniela, what is there in my eyes that makes my mother cry?”

  Aniela showed some signs of embarrassment: she had been with us since my birth and there was very little she didn’t know.

  “It’s their color.”

  “But why? Is something wrong with my eyes?”

  “They make her dream,” she said evasively, with a sigh, and turned away.

  It took me several years to understand that answer. But a day came when there was nothing more left for me to know. My mother was by that time sixty and I was twenty-four, but she still kept looking into my eyes as if she were leaning over some secret source of memories, and I knew that it was not at me that she was looking and that in her sighs and tears I played no part. She didn’t have to ask me any longer: I had become a grown man, there were things she could no longer ask, and so, God forgive me, I often deliberately raised my eyes to the sun and held them thus as long as I could, helping her to remember. I always did everything I could for her.

  Nothing was omitted from the education I was receiving, the purpose of which was to make me a thorough man of the world. She herself taught me the polka and the waltz, the only dances she knew, or at least cared to remember.

  As soon as the last of the customers had departed, the carpets were rolled back in the brightly lit showroom and the gramophone was placed on the table. My mother settled herself in one of the recently acquired Louis XVI chairs, I bowed, clicked my heels, took her hand and, one-two-three! one-two-three! off we went on the floor under the slightly disapproving eyes of Aniela.

  “Keep your back straight! Mark the beat with your right foot! Raise your head, look proudly at your partner with an enchanted air!”

  I raised my head proudly, looked at my partner with an enchanted air, and . . . one-two-three! one-two-three! we hopped along on the polished floor. Then I led her back to her chair, kissed her hand and bowed. She thanked me with a gracious movement of the head and fanned herself. She sighed and sometimes said with admiration while trying to recover her breath: “You will win prizes at the Concours Hippique!”

  No doubt she saw me in the white uniform of the guards officer, leaping obstacles under the lovelorn eyes of Anna Karenina. There was something astonishingly old-fashioned in the nature of her imagination, a sort of outmoded romanticism. She longed for the world of the Russian novels before 1900, the date at which, for her, all truly great literature had come to a stop. Pushkin and Lermontov were her gods; she saw me as Eugene Onegin, and recited that lovely poem to me so often that, without ever actually learning it, I know to this day a great deal of it by heart.

  Three times a week, she took my hand and led me to the riding school–shooting gallery–gymnasium presided over by Lieutenant Sverdlovski, where I was initiated into the arts of riding, fencing and pistol shooting. The lieutenant was a tall, elderly, dried-up man with a bony, martial face and a white mustache á la Lyautey. At the age of eight, I was certainly the youngest of his pupils, and had great difficulty in lifting the enormous pistol which he held out to me. After half an hour with the foils, half an hour with the pistol—a friend of my mother’s, who still lives in Nice, claims that the sight of the little boy with the enormous pistol in his hand was one of the most outrageous sights he had ever seen—and half an hour in the saddle, I was given a round of gymnastics and breathing exercises. My mother sat in the corner, her legs crossed, smoking a cigarette, observing my progress with a delighted smile.

  Lieutenant Sverdlovski, who spoke in a sepulchral voice and seemed to have no other passion in life than to “score a bull” and “aim at the heart,” had an unbounded admiration for my mother. We were always warmly welcomed. I took my place at the barrier in the company of my fellow shots—officers of the reserve, retired generals and elegant young bloods with nothing to do—put one hand on my hip, rested the heavy pistol muzzle over the lieutenant’s outstretched arm, held my breath and fired. The target was then presented to my mother for inspection, she looked at the little holes, commented on my progress, and gave a satisfied sniff with a rather menacing air. After a particularly successful session, she put the target in her bag and took it home. It was not difficult to guess the longing in the lonely woman’s heart: she must have been hurt badly and often. She frequently asked me: “You’ll always defend me, won’t you, Romouchka? They’ll see. In a few years’ time . . .”

  This with a wide, vague, sweeping gesture, a truly Russian gesture. As for Lieutenant Sverdlovski, he stroked his long, stiff mustache, kissed my mother’s hand, clicked his heels and said: “We’ll make a cavalier of him.”

  He himself gave me fencing lessons, and he took me on long tramps across the country with a military rucksack strapped on my shoulders. At home, I was taught French, Latin and German—English at that time did not exist in those Eastern provinces. A Mademoiselle Gladys gave me fox trot an
d shimmy lessons, and I was introduced to the tango. On the days when my mother was giving a party, I was frequently wakened from my sleep, dressed, led into the showroom and asked to recite some of La Fontaine’s fables. I was obedient, eager to please, completely bewildered, but instantly rewarded whenever I saw on my mother’s face a smile of happiness. With such a program, I had no time for school; however, since the local schools taught, quite naturally, not in French but in Polish, as far as we were concerned they might as well not have existed at all. Vilna, in my mother’s mind, had never been anything but a temporary stop, a resting place, on our journey to the land where all the beauty lies.

  I was taught arithmetic, geography, French history and French literature by a succession of tutors whose names and faces have left no more trace on my memory than the subjects they were trying to teach me.

  Sometimes my mother would say: “Tonight we will go to the movies.”

  Then, when darkness fell, warmly dressed in my squirrel fur coat with its tails or, if the weather happened to be pleasant, wearing a white raincoat and a sailor’s cap, I sauntered along the wooden sidewalks of the town with my mother on my arm. She kept a fiercely watchful eye on my manners. I had always to hasten ahead of her to open the door and hold it wide until she had passed through. When one day in Warsaw I politely stood back to let her step from the tram ahead of me, she started a row in the presence of twenty persons queueing at the tram stop, and I was informed that the male escort should always get out first and help the lady down. As for hand kissing, although seven years of soldiering and adventures have, to be quite frank, taken care of most of my good manners, this is one habit I have never managed to get rid of, in spite of all my other successful efforts to adjust. I don’t know why this particular mark of courtesy has become so deeply part of my nature, but I can’t dispense with it. In the United States, it has been a source of constant misunderstanding. Nine times out of ten when, after a considerable muscular struggle, I succeed in raising the hand of an American lady to my lips, I am either rewarded with a surprised and blushing “Oh! thank you!” or else, taking my courteous mark of attention for a more sinister kind of approach, she hastily snatches her hand away with a quick, worried glance toward her husband. Worst of all, particularly when the lady in question happens to be of a rather ripe age, she gives me such a coquettish smile that I have the most irritating feeling of having just confirmed some of the more trashy and corny aspects of the reputation Frenchmen enjoy abroad.

  I do not know whether it was one of the movies we thus saw together, or my mother’s behavior after the show, which left me with such a strange and uneasy impression. The famous star, then completely unknown to me, who was playing the lead, wore a black Tcherkesse uniform and fur hat. His pale eyes under the wide brows raised like open wings seemed to keep staring at me from the screen, while the pianist was playing a halting and nostalgic little tune. When the picture was over, and we were walking back hand in hand through the empty streets, I felt my mother’s fingers pressing mine so hard that it almost hurt. When I looked at her reproachfully, I saw that she was crying. As soon as we reached home and she had helped me to undress and tucked me into bed, she leaned over me with her handkerchief pressed against her face, and then, of course, came the old request, which I had been hearing for so many years. I did as I was told, rather bored, and stared at the ceiling lamp. For a long time, she remained leaning over me, with a curious smile of triumph, of conquest and possession upon her lips. Then she dried her tears and kissed me good night.

  It so happened that some time after this particular visit to the cinema a fancy-dress ball was given for the children of the fashionable society in our town. Naturally, I was invited. My mother reigned supreme over local fashion, and we were then much sought after. No sooner had the invitation arrived than the girls in the workroom devoted themselves excitedly to the job of making my costume.

  I hardly need to add that I went to the ball dressed as a Tcherkesse officer, exactly modeled after the uniform worn by the man in the picture, complete with the dagger, dashing fur hat, breast cartridges, silver spurs and all the tra la la.

  CHAPTER 10

  One day an unexpected present reached me, apparently out of the blue: a miniature bicycle exactly appropriate to my size. The origin of the mysterious gift was not revealed to me, and all my questions on the subject were left unanswered. Aniela, after staring for a long while at the bicycle, merely said, with a strong note of animosity in her voice: “It comes from very far.”

  There was a long whispered animated discussion between her and my mother, the purpose of which was to decide if I should be allowed to keep the present or if it should be returned to the sender. I was not allowed to join in this all-important argument. Sweating with apprehension at the thought of the marvelous machine being, perhaps, snatched from me, I did some anxious eavesdropping at the door and caught a few odd words of a mysterious dialogue: “We don’t need him any longer.”

  It was Aniela who was speaking and my mother was crying in the comer. Aniela pressed her point: “It’s a bit late in the day, for him, after all these years, to remember our existence.” Then I heard my mother’s voice, strangely timid and almost beseeching: “All the same, it’s nice of him.”

  Aniela had the last word: “He might have thought about us sooner.”

  The only thing that interested me just then was whether I was to be allowed to keep the bicycle. Finally, my mother gave me her permission. It was a habit with her to surround me with a crowd of “professors”—a “professor” of elocution, a “professor” of deportment—there again I did not show much aptitude, and the only thing I remember of all he tried to teach me was that I must not stick out my little finger when holding a cup of tea—“professors” of swimming, of shooting, of fencing, of . . . A father would have done far more for me. And so, having acquired a bicycle, I also acquired a “professor” of cycling and, after a few customary falls and minor disasters, I could soon be seen proudly pedaling my miniature machine over the cobbles of Vilna, in the wake of a tall and melancholy young man who wore a straw hat and who was famous in our neighborhood for his sporting accomplishments. I was strictly forbidden to ride unaccompanied in the streets.

  One fine day, on returning from a ride with my “professor,” I found a small crowd gathered near the entrance to our block, gaping in admiration at a huge yellow Packard convertible drawn up outside our house. A liveried chauffeur was seated at the wheel. My mouth opened wide, my eyes goggled and I remained as though rooted to the ground before this marvel of all marvels. Motorcars were still a rare sight in the streets of Vilna, and certainly none of them could compare with the prodigious bright yellow creation of human genius which I saw before me. A buddy of mine, the son of the local shoemaker, whispered respectfully in my ear: “They are in your apartment.” Dropping my bicycle, I dashed upstairs.

  The door was opened by Aniela. Without a word of explanation, she grabbed me by the hand and dragged me into my bedroom. There she subjected me to a tremendous process of cleansing, the like of which I have never known before or since. The workroom girls helped her in her task and they all set upon me like maternal hawks, rubbing, brushing, washing, undressing, dressing, perfuming, combing, pomading and otherwise attending to me with a devotion the memory of which still fills me with nostalgia. Often, I light a cigar, plump myself down in an armchair, and wait for somebody to come and do something about me. But I wait in vain. I try to find consolation in the thought that no throne is safe these days, but the little prince in me still keeps waiting. In the end, I have to take off my shoes and change my clothes without assistance, and even run a bath for myself. I am afraid that I have lost my kingdom for good.

  For almost half an hour Aniela, Maria, Stefka and Halinka buzzed busily around me. At last, with my ears bright scarlet from much hair brushing, dressed in blue pants and white shirt, with an immense silk Pompadour tie around my neck and blue ribbons in my shoes, I was shown into the salon.


  The visitor was sitting in an armchair with his legs stretched out in front of him. There was something almost animal in the fixity of his pale eyes, staring at me from under sweeping brows like open wings, something slightly disturbing in the hint of an ironic smile on his immobile lips. I had seen it two or three times on the screen, and recognized him at once. He looked me over, coldly and leisurely, with a sort of detached curiosity. My ears were still hot and buzzing from Aniela’s attention, the smell of eau de cologne in which I had been drenched made me sneeze, I had a confused feeling that something important was happening, but I was completely at sea about what it could be. I was still in the very early stages of my progress as a man of the world. And so, already stunned by the girls’ ferocious attack at me with brush and soap, thrown off by the stranger’s fixed stare and enigmatic smile, by the curious silence which had greeted me, as well as by my mother’s stricken appearance—I had never seen her so pale and so tense, and her face looked like a mask—in short, utterly confused, I committed a most dreadful faux pas. Like a performing dog who goes on automatically doing its tricks, I stepped forward, bowed, clicked my heels, kissed the hand of the lady who accompanied the stranger, and then, losing my head completely, I saluted the gentleman in the same manner, kissing his hand as well.

  My blunder had the happiest results. The atmosphere of icy constraint suddenly melted. My mother took me in her arms. The beautiful lady in the apricot-colored dress kissed my cheek, and her companion took me from my mother and perched me on his knee. Only too conscious of the enormity of my slip and of the irreparable damage I had done to my reputation as a man of the world, I burst into tears, and so our visitor suggested a drive in his car, a proposal which made me prick up my ears and forget my tears instantly.