Free Loves of Yulian by Julian Padowicz Page B

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 tone, 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