“I’ll eat elsewhere.” He stopped at the doorway. “And give serious thought to going up to Stocksee with me. It isn’t every day you get a chance to do something like this, Kasia.”
I turned away and heard the door close, my stomach ready to erupt. I watched him through the window as he walked off, hands in his pockets. Halina met him in the street, hauling a black portfolio pregnant with artwork. They embraced and went their separate ways, Halina headed up to the apartment. When she reached our place, I was still nursing a grudge.
“You look awful,” Halina said.
“Thanks.”
“Are you coming to my art show tonight? I was kind of hoping you would.”
Halina looked more like an artist every day, that day dressed in one of Pietrik’s old shirts, splattered with paint. She wore her blond hair piled on top of her head as my mother used to. It was hard to look at her, almost the exact image of Matka.
I tucked Caroline’s package under the table. “I have work to do.”
“You’ve never been to one of my shows, Matka. A teacher wants to buy my poster.”
I looked out the window. “Better run and catch Father. He’ll buy you dinner.”
“They are serving cheese at the show,” Halina said.
“And vodka, I suppose.”
“Yes.”
If the modern art wasn’t modern enough, it would become so after a paper cup of two-hundred-proof alcohol.
“Run along and find Father,” I said.
Halina left without a goodbye. I went to the window and watched her once she made it to the street below. She looked so small. Would she turn and wave? No. At least Halina connected with one parent.
I opened Zuzanna’s letter, a short one and to the point, the way she always handled things when the news was bad. She would not be returning. She had extended her visa again and hinted a wedding was in the works. There was one bright note, though. The doctors at Mount Sinai agreed that her cancer was still in remission.
I drank to that, draining one of my airplane vodkas.
There was only hot cereal in the cupboard, so I made a bowl and poured a glass of Pietrik’s vodka. For vodka made in someone’s basement, it traveled down the throat easily. As Papa used to say, you could taste the potatoes. It was more flavorful than the airplane vodka, and it stayed down as long as I didn’t imagine the contents of my stomach, gray hot cereal and vodka, sloshing around.
No wonder Pietrik drank it on occasion. It made my whole body tingle and warmed arms and fingers, head and ears. Even my brain was numb by the time I slipped into my American dress. I smiled at the mirror. With my tooth repaired, I could look at myself again. Why shouldn’t I go and enjoy my daughter’s big night? The nylon stockings covered the few scars I had left. Even my husband might be happy to see me.
It was a short walk to Halina’s school. I stepped into the gymnasium and found it filled with bright spotlights trained on posters hung on the cinder-block walls. People milled about admiring the students’ artwork. Marthe and Papa stood at the opposite end of the room talking to an arty-looking couple. A card table across the room held bottles of vodka and a paper plate of cheese cubes.
“You came, Matka,” Halina said with a smile. “First time ever. Come, let me show you everything.”
Pietrik stood at the other end of the room, leaning with his hand on the wall, in deep conversation with a woman in a red hat.
“Perhaps some cheese first,” I said, my breath suddenly short.
We went to the refreshment table, and I took some cheese cubes and a paper cup of vodka.
“Since when do you drink vodka?” Halina asked.
“It’s important to try new things,” I said.
I tasted it, then tipped my head back and drank it in one shot. It was smoother and had a more refined taste than ours at home. I was becoming a vodka aficionado.
“Let me show you my self-portrait,” Halina said. She took my hand in hers, and my eyes stung with tears. When was the last time she had taken my hand?
Halina’s work was grouped along one wall, full of bright color. Graphic and strong. A portrait of a woman, Marthe no doubt, cooking, painted as if through a kaleidoscope. Next, a fish with an automobile body full of gears and machine parts.
“Do you like the one in the kitchen?” Halina asked.
“The one of Marthe? What pretty colors.”
“That isn’t Marthe. It’s you,” she said. “I did it in blue. Your favorite.”
More tears came to my eyes, and the colors swirled like paint in a water jar.
“Me?” I said. “How nice.”
“I have been waiting to show you the best one. Teacher wants to buy it, but I may keep it.”
I tried to dry my eyes with my napkin as Halina brought me farther down the wall to her self-portrait. Once I stood there in front of that canvas, it was as if it reached out and bit me, it was so alive.
“Well?” Halina said.
It was the largest painting in the room, a woman’s full face, with golden hair, and a wreath of thorns wrapped around her head.
It was my mother.
I became warm all over, and my head spun. “I need to sit down.”
“You don’t like it,” Halina said. She folded her arms across her chest.
“Yes. Yes, I do. I just need to sit.”
I sat on a folding chair and watched Pietrik laugh with his lady friend while Halina went to fetch me another vodka. There was a reason I didn’t go out much.
Halina grabbed Pietrik’s hand and brought him over.
“Here, Matka,” Halina said, handing me a cup of vodka.
“What got you to come here?” asked Pietrik with a smile. “Wild horses?”
“Certainly not you,” I said.
Pietrik’s smile faded. “Not here, Kasia.”
“You’re enjoying the show,” I said with a jerk of my chin in the red hat’s direction. My vision was blurry, my tongue loosened by the spirits.
“You’ve been drinking?” Pietrik said.
“Only you are allowed to drink,” I said, taking a sip from the paper cup. I felt a new clarity of thought.
Pietrik reached for the cup. “I’m taking you home.”
I snatched the cup back and stood just as Marthe and Papa came by, Halina’s art teacher in tow.
“You are Halina’s mother?” said the teacher, a pretty, dark-haired woman, who wore round, black glasses and a violet caftan. The teacher put one arm, the sleeve like a batwing, over Halina’s shoulder.
“Halina and I have long talks,” said the teacher. “She speaks highly of you.”
“Oh, really?” I said. “She admits she has a mother?”
The group laughed a little too hard. It was not that funny.
“Oh, yes, teens,” said the teacher. “Have you seen Halina’s self-portrait? My colleague at the university says it’s his favorite piece here.”
“It’s my mother,” I said.
“Pardon?” said the teacher.
Marthe and Papa exchanged looks. The room spun like a fun house.
“Halina painted it of herself, Kasia,” Marthe said.
Pietrik took my arm.
“If you knew my mother, you wouldn’t be sleeping in her bed today,” I said.
“We’re going home,” said Pietrik.
I pulled away from his tight fingers. “Halina may not have told you in one of those long talks, but I got my mother killed by working in the underground. After all she did for me.”
I brought the paper cup to my lips, and it collapsed in my hand, splashing vodka down my dress front.
“Pietrik, we’ll take Halina home to our house,” Marthe said.
“Yes, my mother was an artist just like Halina here, but she drew portraits for bad people, Nazis in fact, if you must know.” I felt my face wet with tears. “What happened to her? Only God knows, Mrs. Art Teacher, because she never said goodbye, but take it from me, the woman in that poster is my mother.”
All I remember after that is Pietrik holding me up on the way home, us stopping for me to be sick in an alleyway and to wipe formerly hot cereal off my American dress.
—
I WOKE BEFORE DAWN the next morning.
“Water,” I called out, for a second thinking I was in the Revier at Ravensbrück.