Blooms of Darkness (18 page)

“I love you,” Hugo quickly confirms.

“Wait, wait. You don’t know everything yet.”

After repeated warnings, the guard finally runs away. Madam announces that she’s now locking up The Residence. The kitchen will be closed, and everyone will have to take care of herself.

“And what will happen to us?”

“I can’t support you. I’ve already spent what I had. For more than a month, there’s been no income. I can’t feed seventeen girls. The bakery won’t give me bread, and the butcher won’t give me meat.”

“You’ll be sorry. You can’t close an institution. The German army will return and take revenge against everybody who spread rumors about its defeat and closed the institutions that served them,” one of the women warns her.

“What can I do?” she says in a different tone of voice.

“Don’t be hasty.”

“I’m not being hasty,” she replies. “I’ve been running this place for twenty years. Managing a residence like this is no small matter. I know what’s possible and what’s impossible. Now things have gone too far. The pantry is empty, and so is the cellar.” She bursts into sobs.

There is silence, and Madam withdraws to her apartment.

Later Victoria comes out of the kitchen and says in a whisper, “I have supplies for another week, if we’re sparing. After a week—God help us.”

“Thank you, Victoria, may God preserve you.” They bless her.

Mariana seems unaffected by the commotion. Since she began drinking again, her mood is steady—elevated, actually,
but without any decline. Whatever happens hardly touches her. She tells Hugo about her childhood and early youth, and about the days when she was a girl in love with a boy named Andrei. He was handsome. One day his parents moved to a different village, and he forgot her. She cried a lot over him and kept looking for him. He disappeared and left her wounded.

“I won’t abandon you,” Hugo quickly confirms.

“Let’s hope not,” she says. Then she laughs and hugs him.

43

Now come the days they had all been looking forward to: everyone sleeps late, eats breakfast together, shares pleasant dreams, and keeps asking what good food is left in the kitchen.

Mariana doesn’t stop drinking, obviously seeking to recover what she had lost during the time of her abstinence. She often speaks about her youth, about the moves from brothel to brothel until she arrived at The Residence. She talks and talks, but her words make no impression. Her friends look at her as if to say,
We’ve all been through that. What’s so special?

But when she says, “Now I want to introduce my young friend to you,” everyone is silent. Most of them already know the secret, or have guessed. Hugo is stunned. His mind always pictured the women of The Residence in the image of Mariana. Now they sit in the hall around the table, seventeen young women, each with her own hairstyle, looking like girls at a class reunion. At first glance, they remind Hugo of Sofia’s friends, young men and women who used to gather in their home on her birthday. They had come from the village and also went shopping while they were in town, thereby combining practicality with amusement. Hugo had been charmed by their way of speaking, their gestures, and their colorful village language.

After inspecting Hugo from head to foot, one of the women asks, “What’s your name?”

“Hugo,” he replies, pleased that he didn’t lower his head.

“A nice name. I never heard of a name like that.”

“It doesn’t sound Jewish,” another woman comments.

Kitty stands out in her childish clothing and with her big eyes. The others are wrapped in colorful robes, as though they just got out of bed.

“Shall we make Hugo a cup of coffee?” one of them asks.

“Hugo drinks milk,” says Mariana.

Mariana’s comment provokes loud laughter.

“What’s so funny?” asks Mariana.

“He’s a big boy. He’s a sturdy lad, a boy for coffee and not for milk.”

“Why don’t you say something?” one of the women asks Hugo.

“What do you want him to say?” Mariana tries to defend him.

“I thought he was a child. It turns out I was wrong. He’s a lad by any standard.”

“You’re wrong. He’s just tall.” Mariana protects Hugo again.

“I’ve learned the difference, thank God, between a child and a lad.”

That argument displeases Mariana. She takes his hand and says, “Hugo’s got a cold, he has to rest.”

“He doesn’t look as if he’s got a cold,” the woman replies provocatively.

“He’s got a cold, and a bad one,” says Mariana, extricating him from the women’s covetous gaze.

Hugo has hardly entered the closet when he hears the women’s laughter. His name and Mariana’s rise from the laughter. The laughter keeps swelling, and for a moment it sounds
like gloating, because they managed to raise the veil from Mariana’s secret.

In the afternoon, Mariana prepares a hot bath and says, “Now I’ll wash my puppy. My puppy’s growing from day to day, maturing. In a little while he’ll be Mariana’s height. In a little while he’ll be even taller than her. I’m looking forward to that moment. Don’t be afraid, honey. Mariana’s swallowed a good bit, but she’s not drunk. I hate drunks.”

When she puts the big towel on his shoulders, she says, “You’re maturing. You’re maturing very nicely. It’s a pleasure to see you.” Hugo hears a didactic tone in her voice, as though she were explaining something to him about the laws of nature. Then she rubs his body with fragrant lotion and says, “My puppy smells like first fruit.” The phrase “first fruit” captivates him. He remembers another phrase, “bud and flower,” that Mariana also uses sometimes.

Now Hugo sees that most of the clothes in the suitcase are too short for him, and in some of the outfits he looks ridiculous. Mariana inspects the clothes and says, “Mariana will get you some older boy’s clothes. These clothes are simply too small on you. You’ve grown up properly.”

That night, after the bath, is a whirl of pleasures and dreams that come one after the other. Hugo has learned that dreams aren’t uniform. Pleasure is mingled with fear. Suddenly Mariana says, “Too bad we can’t stop time: if only we could always live this way, Mariana with her puppy. Mariana doesn’t need anything else. This is exactly what she needs. Hugo will grow up and defend her. The brave puppy.”

In time Hugo will say to himself,
It was too hasty
. For that reason the experience wasn’t absorbed in full detail. He regrets that the decorative bottles were lost. Sometimes bottles are no
less important than their contents. Mariana’s marvelous mouth always gives off a smell of brandy and chocolate, sweet to the palate, and the passage from her neck to her breasts is short and full of softness. “Delight, dear,” Mariana keeps saying, “that’s what a woman needs, the rest is dessert.”

44

The next day Kitty comes in to visit him. The surprise in her eyes seems to say,
What sin did you commit that you’ve been given such a severe punishment? You’re a sweet kid, and your place is at a desk in school, not in a dark, damp closet
.

Hugo had previously noticed that astonishment.
I’m a Jew
, he wants to say,
and Jews apparently are undesirable. I don’t know why. I presume that if everybody thinks we’re undesirable, there’s a reason for it. I’m glad that you don’t think so
. That’s what he wants to say, but those simple thoughts refuse to garb themselves in words, and he replies with a shrug of his shoulder.

Kitty’s gaze widens even more. “Strange,” she says, “very strange.”

Hugo has noticed that Kitty’s attentiveness takes him back to his home and to the vocabulary he used there. He wants to use the expressions “let us assume,” “most probably,” and “there must be something to it,” which were often heard in his house. But those words are meaningless here, as though they weren’t really words but simply their remains.

“What school do you go to?” Hugo asks, and immediately realizes the stupidity of his question.

“I’ve been out of school for many years,” Kitty says. “I finished elementary school, and I’ve been working since then.”
She smiles, and the smile reveals her little teeth. The brightness adds a touch of youth to her cheeks.

“I’ve forgotten school, too,” he says.

“Impossible.”

“I promised my mother that I would do arithmetic problems, read, and write. I didn’t keep the promise, and so I’ve forgotten everything I learned.”

“A boy like you doesn’t forget easily.”

“That’s true,” Hugo replies. “You’d expect that a boy who had studied in school for five years, whose mother read to him every night and conversed with him—you’d expect him to continue to read, write, do arithmetic problems, but it didn’t happen to me. I’m separated from everything I had, from everything I knew, even from my parents.”

“You speak very beautifully. It shows that you haven’t forgotten what you learned.”

“I haven’t progressed, I haven’t progressed in any area. Lack of progress is marching in place, and marching in place is forgetting. I’ll give you an example. In algebra we were about to begin equations, and we had started to learn French. Everything is erased from my memory.”

“You’re excellent,” Kitty says, astonished by the torrent of words.

The things he told Kitty opened the seal on Hugo’s memory. He now sees his house before his eyes—the kitchen, where he liked to sit at the old table, the living room, his parents’ bedroom, and his room. A little kingdom, full of enchanted things—a parquet floor, an electric train, wooden blocks, Jules Verne and Karl May.

“What are you thinking about, Hugo?” Kitty asks in a whisper.

“I’m not thinking. I’m seeing what I haven’t seen in a long time.”

“You’re very well educated,” she says with a kind of authority.
“Now I understand why everybody talks about ‘smart Jews,’ ” she adds.

“They’re wrong,” Hugo responds curtly.

“I don’t understand.”

“They’re not smart. They’re too sensitive. My mother, if I may use her as an example, was a pharmacist with two diplomas, but all her life she gave to poor and suffering people. God knows where she is now and who she’s taking care of. She was always running, and because of that, she always came home exhausted and sank, pale, into the armchair.”

“You’re right,” Kitty says, as though she understands his words.

“It’s not a question of being right, my dear, but of understanding the situation as it is.” The moment that sentence leaves his mouth, Hugo remembers that it’s what Anna used to say. It was hard for him to compete with her ability to express herself. Only Franz, the constant competitor, could equal her, and everyone else appeared to stammer, to pile up words, adding and taking away as needed and not as needed. Only Anna knew how to phrase an idea clearly.

“Thanks for the conversation. I have to go,” says Kitty in her childish voice.

“Thank you.”

“Why are you thanking me?”

“Because of my conversation with you, my parents, my house, and my school friends appeared before me. The months in the closet had deprived me of them.”

“I’m pleased,” says Kitty, and she steps back.

“It’s a present I hadn’t expected,” Hugo says. The words choke in his mouth.

Hugo thinks of writing in the notebook and clarifying some of the feelings that arose within him after the conversation with Kitty. But he immediately senses that the words available to him won’t do that.

Every time he writes—and he doesn’t write often—Hugo feels that the days in the closet have dissolved his active vocabulary, not to mention the words he had adopted from books. After the war, he’ll show the notebook to Anna. She’ll read it, lower her eyes for a moment—a lowering of self-assurance—and say, “It needs, it seems to me, further thought, also reduction and polishing.” She would always relate to a page of writing as if it were a mathematical exercise, removing all the superfluous steps. In the end she would say, “It’s still not enough, there are still unnecessary words here, it still doesn’t ring true.” Sometimes Hugo would look at her work and feel inferior.

When he read a weak or careless composition, Hugo’s German teacher used to say, “Is this all your thinking came up with? You’ve succeeded: not a single sensible word. A composition like this should never have been created. In the future, don’t even hand in such a composition. You’d be better off writing on the top of the page or on the bottom,
I have not yet attained the level of a thinking creature.”

45

The winter continues, and covers the fields and the houses with a thick veil of snow. Again the frost returns, but not to worry, Hugo is sleeping with Mariana. Every night he’s wrapped in warmth and softness. They sleep like everyone else, until late. Sometimes, in her sleep, she draws him to her. He already knows what to do.

“I have food for another four days,” Victoria keeps reminding the women. “After that, you can chew on the walls.” Now every minute is precious, and everyone knows it. They drink, play cards, reminisce, and confess. Hugo sees a woman kneeling before a crucifix, crossing herself and praying. For meals, Mariana takes Hugo out of the closet, and he sits with everyone. They are a merry bunch, full of life, and they have received an unexpected vacation in the middle of winter. They enjoy one another’s company and do whatever they please.

“Now Hugo will speak.” One of the women halts the flood of happiness.

“What do you want from him? He’s still a kid.”

“He’s been with us for a year and a half. It would be interesting to hear what’s running around in his head.”

Mariana intervenes. “You can’t think about anything else,” she says. “Always the same thing.”

“Twelve-year-olds already know what sin is.”

Hugo listens and enjoys the humor, the sassiness, and the insights. He has noticed that there isn’t much difference between their thoughts and their words. Women speak about everything that gives them pleasure or pain, though not in the same tone of voice.

Victoria’s repeated threat, that the supplies are steadily dwindling, no longer frightens them. “It’s a good thing you’re not threatening us with hell,” one of the women says.