Loves of Yulian Read Online Free Page B

again out of people’s ears and places like that. The coin that he had given me to practice with, Mother had taken away from me, because I wasn’t allowed to accept money from strangers, but, long ago, I had found the washer lying on the ground, polished it, and had been practicing with it ever since. So now I slowly reached into my pants pocket and, hoping that Mrs. Kosiewicz did not see me doing it, maneuvered the washer out of the handkerchief that it was entangled in and into my palm. Then just as slowly, I proceeded to withdraw my hand and place it in my lap. For maybe a minute, I sat there looking around at the room, and finally turned to Mrs. Kosiewicz, on my left. “Oh, p. . . please Missus,” I said, in the awkward way the Polish language does these things, “did M. . . Missus know that th. . . there is s. . . something in M. . . Missus’s ear?”
    I saw Mrs. Kosiewicz blink in surprise. “My ear?” she said in a quiet, but genuinely surprised voice.
    “Yes,” I said. Then I reached over and produced the washer, as though out of her ear.
    “Oh,” she said. “You did a magic trick.” As a child, you , was all the form of address that I was entitled to.
    “A m. . . magic t. . . rick?” I said, as though that was the furthest from the truth.
    “Why, you pretended to pull that thing out of my ear,” she said.
    She was smiling as she said it, and I was suddenly emboldened by an idea. I noticed that her surprised voice had made the others turn to look at us. “W. . . what th. . . thing?” I said, making the washer disappear again. “W. . . what th. . . thing is M. . . issus t. . . talking about?”
    To my very great delight, Mrs. Kosiewicz laughed.
    Then I saw Mr. K give his wife a quick, annoyed look, then turn back to Mother with a smile. “She doesn’t speak French,” he said, confirming my suspicion.
    “That was very clever,” Mrs. Kosiewicz said. “Can you do any other tricks?”
    I shook my head. I knew that shaking my head wasn’t polite, but, with her asking for more tricks, my self-confidence had left me. I had hoped she would show me a trick, herself, or tell me a joke or something. But she was looking at me and smiling, as I was at her, but didn’t seem to know what to say either.
    This was a very new experience for me. In the past, all of Mother’s grownup friends had had lots of questions to ask me about where I had been, what I liked to do, what I liked to eat, what grade I was in, where I had spent the summer, and so forth. But not Mrs. Kosiewicz. I put it down to the fact that she hadn’t been grown up long enough.
    On the other hand, since I knew some of those conversation-starting questions, why shouldn’t I ask her them? Mrs. Kosiewicz certainly seemed friendly enough not to feel insulted.
    “S. . . so tell me, please M. . . Missus,” I began. “Where has M. . . Missus been spending the s. . . summer?”
    “Well—I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”
    I realized that M. Gordot’s introductions had been in French. “It’s Y. . . Yulian,” I said.
    “That’s a beautiful name.”
    Everyone said that.
    “My name is Irena. You can call me Irena, if you want, instead of the Mrs. Kosiewicz. In fact I’d like that better.”
    I had never had a grownup lady tell me to call her by her first name before. Except, of course, for Kiki, but I had been calling her that as long as I could remember, and it had probably started before I was old enough to call her Miss Jane. “All r. . . right. . . ” I had intended to add the Irena to the end of that statement, but, somehow, it wouldn’t come out.
    Then I remembered that now that we were out of Europe, I could talk about our escape. I hadn’t been supposed to tell anyone about it before, in case the story got back to the Nazi-sympathizers who were looking for us to stop Mother from writing her book in America. That’s not to say that it hadn’t slipped out a few times, when we were in the company of people who I was