For a long time Hugo stands still, wondering about the nature of this roomy place. Finally he sums it up for himself: it’s not a beauty parlor. There isn’t a broad bed in the middle of a beauty parlor.
Meanwhile, Mariana comes back with a tray of little sandwiches and says, “This is for you. Sit in the armchair and eat as much as you want.”
Hugo remembers that at weddings the waitresses would serve sandwiches like that. At home the sandwiches were simple and served without a paper wrapping. “These are sandwiches for a wedding, isn’t that right?” The sentence slips out of his mouth.
“We eat that kind of sandwich here. Are they tasty?”
“Very.”
“Where were you recently?”
“In the basement of our house.”
“If they ask you, don’t say that you were in the basement.”
“What should I say?”
“Say that you’re Mariana’s son.”
Hugo doesn’t know what to say and hangs his head.
Hugo senses that he is now standing at the threshold of a new period in his life, a period full of secrets and dangers, and he has to be cautious and strong, as he promised his mother.
Mariana keeps staring at him. Hugo feels uncomfortable, and to evade her gaze, he asks, “Is this a big house?”
“Very big,” she says, and laughs. “But you’ll only be in my room and in the closet.”
“Am I allowed to go out into the yard?”
“No. Children like you have to be inside.”
He has already noticed: Mariana speaks in short sentences and, unlike his mother, she doesn’t explain.
After he finishes eating the sandwiches, she says, “Now I’m going to tidy up the room and take a bath. You’ll go back into the closet.”
“Am I allowed to play chess with myself?”
“Certainly, as much as you please.”
Hugo goes back to his place, and Mariana closes the closet door.
Three weeks earlier, when the Actions became fiercer, his mother started talking about great changes that were about to take place in his life, about new people that he would meet, and about an unknown environment. She didn’t speak in her usual, simple language, but in words with many meanings, words that bore a secret. Hugo didn’t ask. He was bewildered, and the more she explained and warned, the more bewildered he became.
Now the secret bears the face of Mariana.
Hugo had met Mariana several times in the past, mostly in dark alleys. His mother would bring her clothes and groceries. The meetings between them were emotional and lasted only a few minutes. Sometimes they wouldn’t meet for a while, and the image of Mariana’s face would depart from his eyes.
Hugo curls up in his dark corner, wrapped in one of the sheepskins, and the tears that were blocked in his eyes burst out and flood his face. “Mama, where are you? Where are you?” He whimpers like an abandoned animal.
He cries himself to sleep. In his sleep he is at home. Rather, in his room. Everything is in its place. Suddenly, Anna appears and stands in the doorway. She has grown taller, and she is wearing a traditional Ukrainian dress. The dress suits her.
“Anna,” he calls out.
“What?” she answers in Ukrainian.
“Have you forgotten how to speak German?” He is alarmed. “I haven’t forgotten, but I’m trying very hard not to speak German.”
“Papa says that you don’t forget a mother tongue.”
“I assume that’s correct, but in my case, the effort was so powerful that it drove the German words from my mouth.” She speaks in a torrent of Ukrainian.
“Strange.”
“Why?”
“Strange to talk with you in Ukrainian.”
Anna smiles the restrained smile he knows well: a mixture of shyness and arrogance.
“Is it also hard for you to speak French?”
She smiles again and says, “In the mountains people don’t speak French.”
“When you come back, after the war, we’ll speak German again, right?”
“I assume so.” She speaks like an adult.
Only now does he see how much she has changed. She has grown taller, and her body is full. She looks more like a young peasant girl than the Anna he knew. True, some features still remain, but they, too, have filled out and grown wider.
“Anna,” he says.
“What?”
“Until the end of the war, you won’t come back to us?” he asks, and is surprised by the question.
“My spirit is here all the time, but my body, for now, must be in the mountains. And you?”
“I just got to Mariana’s now.”
“To Mariana’s?”
“My impression is that she is a good woman.”
“I hope you’re not wrong.”
“Mama also told me that she was a good woman.”
“Be careful, in any event.”
“Of what?”
“Of those women,” she says, and disappears.
7
A moment before awakening, Hugo manages to see Anna shrink down to the dimensions familiar to him. He is so glad that she hasn’t changed, that in his excitement he claps his hand and shouts, “Bravo.”
Without meaning to, he surveys the closet. A broad-brimmed, colorful hat, hanging on a nail, catches his eye. It looks like a magician’s hat. Mariana is a magician, the thought flashes through his mind. At night she entertains the audience at the circus, and in the daytime she sleeps. The circus suits her. He immediately imagines her uttering bird calls, throwing balls up very high, and, with marvelous balance, carrying three brightly colored bottles on her head.
The door opens, and once again Mariana stands in the doorway. Now she is wearing a pretty floral-print dress, her hair is up, and she holds a bowl of soup in her hand. “Straight from our kitchen,” she announces. Hugo takes the bowl, sits down, and says, “Thank you.”
“What’s my sweetie been doing?” she asks in a slightly artificial tone.
Hugo immediately notices the new tone and says, “I was asleep.”
“It’s good to sleep. I also like to sleep. What did you dream about?”
“I don’t remember,” he says, not revealing any secrets.
“I dream, and, to my regret, I remember,” she says, and laughs with her mouth open.
At home, neither his father nor his mother had called him “honey,” “sweetie,” or other common words of endearment. His parents were repelled by those verbal caresses.
Hugo is hungry and eats the soup eagerly.
“In a moment I’ll bring you the second course. Did you manage to play chess?”
“I fell asleep. I didn’t even open the knapsack.”
“After the meal you can play in my room.”
“Thank you,” he says, and he is glad he is following his mother’s instructions diligently.
Only a day has passed since Hugo parted from his mother, and the new place is no longer strange to him. Mariana’s arrivals and disappearances seem to him, perhaps because of their regularity, like his mother’s appearances in the cellar. A few hours ago, he felt as if his mother was about to enter the closet. Now he sees her moving farther into the distance, gliding on waves of darkness.
Meanwhile, Mariana comes back and brings him a meatball and some potatoes, saying, “I have a greeting from your mother. She reached the village, and she’ll stay there.”
“When will she come and visit me?”
“The roads are dangerous, you know.”
“Maybe I can go to her?”
“For boys the road is even more dangerous.”
Now his day is a stretch of naps, sometimes soaring high and sometimes on a gloomy cruise. The sudden separation from his parents and friends has left him feeling cut off on this strange floor covered with long carpets embroidered with giant cats that look out at him.
It’s strange—he doesn’t receive the news that his mother has reached the village safely as a good omen. In his eyes, his
mother always belonged to him. She sometimes disappeared but always returned on time. Now, too, he takes the news that she exists as self-evident. He does not yet know that every movement outside that ends well is a miracle.
Hugo takes the chess set out of his knapsack, arranges the pieces on the board, and immediately starts to play. Reading books and having long conversations until late at night—that was an area that belonged to his mother. Chess and walks in the city and outside it—that was his father’s realm. His father did not talk a lot. He listened and responded with a word or two. His parents were pharmacists, but each was a world unto himself. Chess is a game of great strategy, and Hugo’s father was excellent at it. Hugo knows the rules of the game, but he didn’t always use proper caution. He took unnecessary risks and lost, of course. His father didn’t reproach him for his haste and risk-taking, but he laughed softly, as if to say, Everyone who takes unnecessary risks is bound to lose.
When his father was seized and sent to the labor camp, Hugo cried for days on end. His mother tried to persuade him that his father hadn’t been snatched away but had been sent with many other men to work, and that he would return soon, but Hugo refused to be consoled. He visualized the word “snatched” as being taken by wolves. No words could uproot the wolves from his mind. From hour to hour the pack grew, dragging away the people they had snatched with their mighty teeth.
After a few days, he stopped crying.
Hugo raises his eyes from the chess board and the strange, pink room perplexes him. On the dressers pictures of Mariana shine in gilded frames. She is dressed in exotic bathing suits. Her waist is narrow, and her breasts bulge like two melons.
This is an odd room, he says to himself, and tries to imagine a similar room, but he can see only the beauty parlor, which was called Lili’s Hair Salon, where rich and spoiled women came to recline on chaises longues, and his mother was disgusted by everything that was there.
While Hugo is immersed in the game, he hears a woman laughing. He is still unfamiliar with the house, and he can’t tell if the laughter comes from the adjacent room or from the yard.
He senses that his life is surrounded by many secrets. What is their nature? He can only grope for answers, and the groping leads him to strange and unusual places. This time it seems to him that his physical education teacher was the one who laughed. She was entirely unrestrained, spoke loudly, and laughed at the janitor and at the pupils. She was the omnipotent ruler of the school yard.
Hugo rises to his feet, goes over to the window, and pushes the curtain aside, revealing a small, neglected courtyard, fenced in with thick stakes. Two brown hens stand in the middle of the courtyard.
He remains where he is and listens. The laugh keeps ringing, but now it is restrained, as though someone put a muzzle on the laughing woman, or she herself stifled her laughter. Strange, he says, surprised by the quiet courtyard left to itself.
The sky grows redder, and Hugo sees his friend Otto before his eyes. A defeated expression has crystallized on Otto’s face and is very obvious, especially on his lips. Now Hugo clearly remembers how Otto would wave his hand when he lost at chess. Because he waved that way every time he lost, the gesture was engraved in Hugo’s memory—a frozen motion.
Hugo’s mother used to say, “Otto is hiding in a cellar,” but Hugo sees him crammed into one of the trucks that take the captured people to the railway station.
For a moment it seems to him as if Otto were standing at the door.
“Otto,” he whispers, “is that you?”
There is no response, and Hugo understands that he was mistaken. Mariana’s instructions were unequivocal: “Don’t answer if somebody knocks on the door.”
He curls up in a corner of the room and doesn’t move.
8
The hours pass. The evening lights pour into the windows and change colors. The dangers that were lying in wait for Hugo seem to have withdrawn, and the pink room is not only pleasant but also protected. Great desire draws him to enter the wide, soft bed and cover himself with the quilt, but his instincts tell him that it is Mariana’s domain and forbidden to him.
Again he sees his house—the living room, his parents’ bedroom, and his room. The house was neither spacious nor fancy, but it was comfortable. Otto’s and Anna’s parents would come every Sunday. Hugo would entertain his friends in his room, serving them lemonade or fruit. On weekends his parents used to buy dates and figs. That exotic fruit would bring the distant, warm lands where they grew into the house.
During the visit coffee and cake would also be served. The fresh fragrances would fill the house. Everything was handled smoothly and pleasantly. After the visit a sudden melancholy would settle on those remaining. His parents would immerse themselves in reading, and Hugo would sit in his room and call up the faces of his guests in his memory.
• • •
The lights in the windows become gray and a small cloud descends on the bushes next to the fence. Hugo sees that they are lilac bushes, like in his yard, and happiness floods over him, as if he had seen someone he knew.
When he was five or six, he became sad and cried about the lilac flowers that suddenly withered. His mother, seeing his sorrow, promised him that in the spring they would blossom again, and everything would be as it was. He loved his mother’s optimism. She always knew how to make a gray color into a bright one, pleasant to the eye.
Hugo’s father, by contrast, did not know how to prettify situations, or how to reverse or change them. Beneath the veil of his silence dwelled a quiet skeptic. He didn’t spread gloom about him, but it was clear that he would not beautify reality. Hugo loved his father, but he was not drawn to his spirit. In his mother’s presence, he always felt elated. His mother sweetened every sorrow, as if to say, Why sink into melancholy when it’s possible to help people?
Now he sees his father again. For some reason it seems that he’s grown older since he was snatched away. His hair has turned gray, and many wrinkles have been plowed into his face. Hugo is sad that his father has suddenly changed, and, as his mother used to do, he says, This is an illusion, a thought that’s out of place. At the first opportunity it will go away, and everything will again be the way it was.
While he is exchanging one thought for another, the evening descends. From Mariana’s room the closet looks dark, and even the colorful gowns draped on hangers are enveloped with gravity. Hugo is sorry he has to be alone, far from his father and mother and his friends.
While he is mired in self-pity, Mariana appears. She is wearing the same dress she wore in the afternoon, but now she is gayer, her lips are red, and her hair is done up, showing off her long neck.
“How is my young and darling friend?” she asks in a hoarse voice.
“I played chess with myself.” He rushes to apologize. “Too bad I don’t know how to play. I would gladly play with you.”
“I’ll teach you. It’s not so hard.”
“Mariana’s head is already blocked up. A head that doesn’t study gets blocked up. Since I finished school, I haven’t studied.”
“You can try.” Hugo speaks in his mother’s tone of voice.
“It would be a waste of time,” says Mariana, making a dismissive gesture with her hand.
The light in the room is dim. Nevertheless, he senses that Mariana has drunk too much and apparently forgotten that Hugo is a boy, calling him “my young and darling friend.” Now she suddenly changes her tone and says, “Honey, in a little while you’ll have to go into your closet.”
“I’m ready,” says Hugo, and holds on to the box in which the chess set is stored.
“Good night. Sweet dreams.”
“Do you perhaps have a lamp?” Hugo asks, forgetting that he is under the protection of strangers.
“A light!” She laughs. “In the closet, you mustn’t light a lamp. In the closet, you close your eyes and go to sleep. If only I could sleep at night.”
“Pardon me,” says Hugo.
“Why are you asking
to be pardoned?”
“Because I asked for a lamp.”
“You don’t need to beg pardon for little things like that. Come over to me and I’ll give you a good-night kiss.” Mariana kneels down and Hugo approaches her. She hugs him fully against her breasts and kisses his face and lips.
The smell of brandy strikes him.
“Don’t I get a kiss?”
Hugo kisses her cheek.
“That’s not how you kiss. You kiss hard.” Hugo holds her face again and kisses her. “I’ll have to teach you how to kiss,” she says, and closes the closet door.
Hugo stands there as though he’d been struck: he has never known contact like that.
The transition from Mariana’s room to the closet is an uprooting from a world full of colors to a world of darkness laden with the smell of sheepskins. He has already gotten slightly used to the smell, but not to the darkness. When Mariana locks the closet door, he feels more heavily stifled. When the suffocating feeling grows stronger, he rises to his feet and stands near the cracks.
In daylight hours Hugo can see the meadows where horses and cows graze, the gray fields, and two houses covered in vines. He has already seen children carrying schoolbags, on their way to school. How strange—all the children are going to school, and only I am forbidden to study. Why was that punishment imposed on me?
Because I’m a Jew, Hugo answers himself.
Why are we Jews punished? he asks again.
At home they didn’t talk about it. Once he had asked his mother how people knew who was a Jew and who wasn’t.
His mother answered simply: “We don’t differentiate between Jews and non-Jews.”
“Why are they kicking out the Jews?”
“It’s a misunderstanding.”
That incomprehensible answer stuck in Hugo’s mind, and he tried to understand where that misunderstanding lay, or who had caused it.
“Is it the Jews’ fault?” he asked once.
Blooms of Darkness Page 3