Number 16, Grand Pohulanka, is the Vilna address where a childhood scene of public ridicule became, in Romain Gary’s later account, one of the defining episodes of his life. Its flat and staircase hold two sharply different kinds of exposure: the family’s private struggle to survive and his mother’s bold public insistence on her son’s future. The same building is also where Mr. Piekielny entrusted a small, unlikely ambition to the boy—and where the promise that followed eventually reached beyond Vilna.

Setting and the Family’s Circumstances

The family was living in Vilna, a town the narrator describes as then Polish, formerly Lithuanian, and now Russian, during what his mother called a temporary stop on their way to France. She pictured France as the place where her son would settle, study, grow up, and become somebody. That assured future stood against the immediate circumstances of the address: the family’s remaining jewels were gone, winter snow piled along the wooden sidewalks, and his mother’s attempt to sell hats was bringing in little.

She had no previous experience designing women’s hats, but set up a supposed Paris fashion salon in the flat, using false labels that led customers to believe the designs were by the celebrated Paul Poiret. She carried hatboxes from house to house while Romain stayed home with Aniela. When his mother returned exhausted and frozen, the building’s owner might be waiting on the stairs to threaten eviction unless the rent was paid within twenty-four hours. The rent was always paid; the stove was lit, and tea, bread, butter, and eggs were set before the child. Her kiss and the pride in her eyes made the flat not merely a record of hardship but the place where she repeatedly made care and confidence visible despite it.

Neighbors and the Staircase

The building’s neighbors disliked his mother, and her movements through Vilna with mysterious boxes drew suspicion. They reported her to the Polish police as a receiver of stolen goods. She managed to confound the accusation, but the encounter left her crying among the hats. She then took Romain by the hand, told Aniela that the neighbors did not know whom they were dealing with, and led the boy out onto the stairs.

There she went from door to door, calling the tenants out and trading insults with them. She placed her son beside her and presented him to the assembled residents as destined for extraordinary distinction: an Ambassador of France, a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, and a great dramatic author in the lineage of Ibsen and d’Annunzio. To complete the prophecy with a final emblem of worldly success, she declared that he would have his suits made in London. The staircase turned a private maternal conviction into a public spectacle. The neighbors’ laughter and contempt wounded the eight-year-old Romain deeply; he remembered the humiliation as an animal-like panic trapped in his breast.

His mother, by contrast, stood straight and proud, held him with both arms, and showed no embarrassment. The scene’s mixture of comedy and pain remained central to the narrator’s memory: the extravagance of the claims did not protect the child from the crowd, but her refusal to retreat gave the humiliation a lasting counter-image. Looking back, he connects the laughter on the staircase to the person he became. He also notes the irony that he later became a Consul General of France and an officer of the Legion of Honor, while the literary careers his mother forecast did not come to pass. The London suits, too, became a pointed detail in the fulfilled prophecy, although he says he disliked the English cut and had no choice.

Mr. Piekielny and the Promise

Not everyone in the audience treated the mother’s declaration as a joke. Mr. Piekielny, a neighbor in the same building, was a quiet, meticulous man whose appearance reminded the narrator of a melancholy mouse. He took the prophecy seriously. Passing Romain on the stairs, he began to look at him with respect and sometimes patted his head. He gave the boy lead soldiers and a cardboard Foreign Legion fort, then invited him into his flat and served him pastry and Turkish delight.

During one of these visits, Mr. Piekielny asked the boy to promise that, when he became somebody and met important people, he would tell them that a Mr. Piekielny had once lived at Number 16, Grand Pohulanka, in Vilna. His request made the address more than the setting of the mother’s performance: it became the identifying detail by which a modest neighbor hoped to enter the future his mother had imagined. Romain nodded and accepted the obligation. The scene links the child’s anticipated greatness not only to his mother’s ambition but also to the hopes of someone who otherwise appeared to keep himself almost invisible.

Memory Beyond Vilna

At the end of the war, while serving with his squadron at Hartford Bridge Airfield in England, the narrator met Queen Elizabeth, the mother of the present sovereign, when she came to inspect the squadron. Asked where in France he came from, he answered Nice. Then Mr. Piekielny’s request returned to him. The narrator recalls feeling driven to fulfill the small man’s dream and beginning, aloud before the Queen, to identify the neighbor who had lived at Number 16, Grand Pohulanka.

In this recollection, the address travels from a Vilna apartment building to a wartime encounter in England. The staircase’s public laughter had once made Romain feel exposed and powerless; later, before a queen, he used his own public standing to speak for someone who had asked not to be forgotten. Number 16 thus anchors both ends of the remembered promise: the boy’s first experience of his mother’s prophecy among hostile neighbors, and the adult narrator’s effort to carry a neighbor’s name beyond the building where they had lived.