Wartime lies - Louis Begley [40]
Pani Dumont was a large, cheerful woman. All her relatives were still in Kielce; so nothing tied her to Warsaw except the apartment and the income she derived from it. Her lodgers became her substitute family. Monsieur Dumont could not have children; she told Tania that having a young mother with a boy under her roof was a blessing. With Tania’s permission, after I became less shy with her, she would teach me French, naturally without cost. Tania was glad to have a kind and apparently well-disposed landlady. On the other hand, the consequence of Pani Dumont’s vision of her lodgers was that we were in the same difficulty as at Pani Z.’s. Unless we wanted to distinguish ourselves from the others and possibly antagonize Pani Dumont, we had to spend more time in their company than Tania considered prudent. For instance, the French lessons: Would I be able to learn French from her and not get involved in conversations about Tania and me and about the past that might make me step into a trap? Should Tania ask to be present at the lessons so she could come to the rescue? I assured her that she could count on me; I really wanted to learn French, I would be careful. What about those endless conversations at the dinner table and afterward in Pani Dumont’s sitting room? One had to talk, one could not always talk about books, one had to be ready to talk about oneself. Which self? The issue was the limit of one’s inventiveness and memory, because the lies had to be consistent—more consistent, according to Tania, than the truth. And they will all be listening, she warned me, don’t forget that we are interesting, more interesting than they.
We began to visit my grandfather in his room on Sunday afternoons, in addition to seeing him at the Cathedral, the Saxon Gardens and, later, his mleczarnia. He told his landlady Tania was the daughter of his best friend and country neighbor, now dead. There were days I could not go with Tania. I was falling sick again, with long, lingering bouts of bronchitis and, although I saw no children, those few childhood diseases I had not already had. Also, I had my lessons. Pani Dumont took the French lessons very seriously; she found Pani Bronicka to tutor me in general subjects. Unless I was sick, Pani Bronicka came every afternoon except Sunday and left huge assignments to be completed for the next day. She was a gimnazjum teacher out of work, the Germans having closed most schools above the primary level. She brought the textbooks we needed. Forming the mind of a nine-year-old who had never been to school appealed to her. She set out to impart to me information and notions of discipline with all the rigor and energy customary in a first-rate state teaching establishment. Giving private lessons was punishable by death, but Pani Bronicka was fearless and needed money. She told me it was a teacher’s duty to teach and make it possible for a boy to become an educated man. All she asked was that I keep my part of the bargain, which was to learn.
She approved of the way Tania had taught me to read and discuss what I had read; she undertook to drill me in compositions: they were to have a beginning, a development and an end. My clumsy slowness in arithmetic appalled her. Above all, she found intolerable my weak character, by which she meant my habit of insinuating flattery. It