Blooms of Darkness (12 page)

26

Thus February passed. In early March the snow melted, and Hugo stood at the cracks in the closet wall and listened to the burble of the rushing water. The sound was familiar to him, but where exactly he had first seen a spring with rushing water he couldn’t remember. His earlier life was gradually slipping away from him, and he no longer saw it with the same clarity. Sometimes he sat on the floor and cried about his former life, which would never return.

Mariana doesn’t conceal from Hugo that the searches for Jews haven’t stopped. Now they’re not made from house to house but based on reports from informers. The informers swarm everywhere, and for trivial sums they turn over Jews and the households that concealed them.

A few days earlier Mariana showed Hugo an opening near the toilet, so that in an emergency he could squirm out through it and hide in the woodshed adjacent to the closet. “Mariana is always on watch. Don’t worry,” she said, and winked at him.

“And won’t Victoria inform on me?”

“She won’t do that. She’s a religious woman.”

But meanwhile the nights have changed and aren’t the way they were. Mariana receives two or three men one after the other. From eavesdropping he knows that the reception is harsh
and tense, without any laughter. During the day she stays in bed until very late, and when she appears at the closet doorway, her face is rumpled and bitterness is spread across her lips. Hugo goes over to her, kisses her hand, and asks, “What’s the matter?”

When Mariana says, “Don’t ask,” Hugo knows that the night was cursed. She tries to be pleasant to the guests, but they aren’t considerate of her. They make all kinds of comments to her and ask her to do things that disgust her. In the end they complain about her to the management.

Apparently that’s how it always was, but now the demands have increased, and there are many complaints about her. Almost every day a woman comes into her room and scolds her. “Things can’t go on this way for much longer. You have to accept the guests’ demands. Don’t quarrel with them and don’t contradict them. Do exactly what they ask of you. You have to be more flexible.”

Mariana promises but doesn’t keep her promise. She’s devoted to Hugo, though, bringing him sandwiches decorated with vegetables, and if she has no guests, she invites him into her bed. Those hours are his most beautiful ones.

Sometimes Hugo manages to get her to talk, and she tells him about her life and about what she calls “work.” Her work, so she says, is the most contemptible in the world, and one day she plans to begin her life again. If she could stop drinking brandy, she could return to ordinary work.

One evening she says to him, “Pamper me now.”

“How?”

“Wash me the way I wash you. Mariana needs some pampering.”

“Gladly,” he says, not knowing what it involves.

Before long, she has filled the bathtub with hot water and taken off her clothes. She says, “Now I’m in your hands. Pamper me.”

He begins to wash her neck and back. Suddenly she raises her upper body and says, “Wash everything, my breasts too.” He washes her, and it’s like a dream: a mixture of pleasure and fear.

Now he sees how big and full she is, and how long her legs are. After he dries her, she puts on a nightgown and says, “Don’t tell anyone. This is a secret between you and me.”

“I’ll keep it, I swear.”

“I’ll teach you some other things that will be pleasant for you.”

All night he sleeps embraced in Mariana’s arms. It is quiet and pleasant, but his dreams are nightmares. Soldiers burst into the closet, and he tries to slip out through the opening that Mariana had shown him, but the opening is narrow and he doesn’t manage to crawl through. The soldiers stand there and laugh, and their laughter is roiled with contempt. In the end a soldier walks up to him and steps on him with his boot. He feels the heel digging into him and wants to scream, but his mouth is blocked.

The next morning Mariana goes into town and forgets to bring Hugo a cup of milk. Thirst and hunger torment him, but he is so replete with pleasure from the night before that the hours pass with pleasant visions. Now he remembers clearly the tall chestnut trees along the streets, their thick leaves and their flowering branches, the fruit that would fall from them at the end of the summer, their green skin cracking on the damp pavement. To touch the shiny brown chestnuts always made him happy. Once he talked about it with his mother. She, too, thought that all fruit, even fruit that we don’t eat, had something marvelous about it. It was no wonder that people who observed the traditions blessed fruit before eating it.

While Hugo is consoling himself with memories of having
slept with Mariana the previous night, the closet door opens and Victoria stands in the doorway. He has already removed her existence from his mind, and there she is, short, round, her face flushed, her short fingers looking as if they have been soaking in red water.

“What are you doing?” she asks, as though he has been caught doing a misdeed.

“Nothing,” Hugo answers, trying to evade her gaze.

“Do you pray?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t look like it.”

“I kiss the charm,” he says, and touches the cross on his neck.

“It’s not a charm, it’s a holy crucifix.”

“Thank you for the correction.”

“Don’t thank me. Do what you’re supposed to.”

Without another word, Victoria locks the closet, and it’s clear to Hugo that at the first opportunity she will turn him in.

27

Mariana tried to stop drinking brandy, but without success. On a day without brandy, she confessed, her head felt as if it had been split and her body felt as if it had been raked over. Without brandy, the world was hell. Better to die.

“You have to stop drinking,” the woman with the authoritative voice coaxed her. “You’re a pretty and attractive woman, and the men like you. But they don’t like it when you’re drunk. You have to stop drinking and do what the guests ask of you. That’s our profession. That’s our livelihood.”

Mariana promised, but she didn’t keep her promise. The guests shouted at her and hit her. Hugo saw blue spots on her body, and his heart felt bitter.

“You’re the only one who understands me,” Mariana says, and hugs him. “You’re the only one who doesn’t hit me or abuse me, and you don’t call me bad names, and you don’t order me to do disgusting things.” The compliments that Mariana showers on Hugo embarrass him, but he knows that she needs some encouragement now, and he says, “You’ll get yourself out of this. You’re beautiful, and everybody loves you.”

“You’re wrong, darling. Everybody wrings me out, abuses me, and then they complain about me.”

“We’ll run away from here.” Hugo tries that stratagem.

“Where will we run to? My late mother’s house is about to collapse, and my sister stole what was in it.”

“We’ll work together in a kitchen.” Hugo utters that sentence without knowing how it could be done.

“My darling, no one would hire me. This profession is the mark of Cain not only on your forehead but on your whole self, on your whole life.”

Mariana is frightened, but Hugo, for some reason, isn’t frightened. Mariana feels that and says, “What would I do without you?”

Once she said, in a moment of distraction, “The Jews are more delicate.”

“Than who?”

“Than other people. If you thought that the Germans were polite, you’re mistaken. They fall upon a woman like wild beasts. Only the Jews approach a woman cautiously, hug her and kiss her gently, buy her a bottle of perfume, a pair of silk stockings, give her some extra cash so she can pamper herself.”

“Did you have many Jewish friends?” he asked, and he immediately regretted asking.

“Mainly students. They were attracted to me, and I was attracted to them. One student even proposed marriage. I was afraid. I said to myself, he’s educated, he’ll be a lawyer, and what about me? I’m nothing. Aside from that, non-Jews don’t marry Jews.”

“Why not?”

“Because each one believes in something different.”

“We’re not religious.”

“I know.”

One night, a warm, quiet night, angry voices are heard from Mariana’s room. Mariana swears by God and His Messiah, “Today not even a single drop of brandy entered my mouth. All day long I struggled with myself not to drink, and I didn’t.”

Mariana’s oaths are of no use. The man claims that she stinks of brandy, and he won’t lie with a stinking woman. The man’s words push her over the edge. She screams and shouts. The man slaps her face and leaves the room.

Before long the woman with the authoritative voice arrives, and without first coaxing or trying to persuade her, announces that Mariana has been fired, and that she must leave the room within two days.

Hearing that bitter news, Mariana raises her choked voice and says, “Why?”

“You know exactly why.” The woman’s voice cuts like a knife.

“I didn’t drink, I swear to you.”

“Why didn’t you change clothes? Your clothes stink.”

“I didn’t know.”

“I’m fed up with you,” the woman says, and leaves the room.

Hugo knows exactly what that means, but he sympathizes with Mariana and ignores the anger of the woman in charge.
No matter
, he says to himself,
we’ll find a better place
.

The hours pass, and Mariana doesn’t come into the closet.

Toward morning, defeated and humiliated, she opens the door and says, “They fired me.”

“You’ve suffered more than enough here.”

“I don’t know what to do.” Despite the shock, she grasps the gravity of her situation.

“I’m willing to go anywhere.”

“Darling, don’t forget that you’re a Jew.”

“Can you see it on me?”

“Not right away, but people have evil eyes, and they’ll discover it very quickly. I thought all day about what to do. It occurred to me to ask my friend Nasha, who works here, to keep her eye on you until I find a hiding place.”

“And I won’t go with you?”

“Honey, I really love you, but you can’t walk around with me in broad daylight. They’ll simply kill you. They kill Jews without mercy. Nasha is a good woman, my age. She’s different from me. She’s not excitable like I am. She always has a plan.”

“And she won’t turn me in?”

“Perish the thought. She’s a very good woman. Her grandpa was a priest.”

“I’m afraid,” Hugo says, without meaning to say it.

“Don’t be afraid. I’ll talk to Nasha. Just for a short time, until I find the right place. I swore to your mother that I would watch over you, and I’ll keep that promise under any condition. Come to me, and I’ll give you a kiss. Now you give me a kiss, harder. We’ll always be together,” she says, and then locks the closet door.

28

Hugo suddenly feels that danger is approaching. He checks the opening near the toilet that Mariana spoke of, and it’s a good thing he does, because it’s full of boards and rags. After cleaning it, he crawls through it easily and finds himself close to the woodshed. The thought that in an emergency he can escape makes Hugo glad, and he sits and writes in his notebook:

Mama dear
,

Mariana was fired, and she is about to pass me on to her friend Nasha. The contact between people here isn’t soft. Everyone demands the impossible from others. Don’t worry, it’s not aimed at me. Mariana was fired because she drinks, and she really does drink a lot. Mariana promised me that she would look for a hiding place somewhere. I’m sure she’ll do it. I won’t conceal from you that there are days when I’m scared. In my heart I know that most of the fears are groundless. Everything around me here captivates my heart, and I forget the dangers. Most of the time I’m busy listening and making efforts to understand what I hear. The conjectures, I must truthfully confess, don’t lead me far
.
I feel that I’m changing. Mariana says that I’m maturing
.
It’s hard for me to know what’s happening in my body. I’ve grown taller, it seems to me
.

A few days ago the thought crossed my mind, and it’s hard for me to get rid of it: What harm did the Jews do that everyone is persecuting them? Why do they have to take shelter in hiding places? Mariana says that the Jews are more delicate, and that, too, is something I can’t understand. Are they persecuted because of delicacy? You and Papa always told me, “People are people, there’s no difference among them, the same thoughts and the same pains.”

At home we never talked about what it means to be Jewish. What do we have in us that makes us enemies of humanity? Several times I’ve heard people here saying, “The Jews are a danger to the world, and they have to be destroyed.” I also heard one of Mariana’s guests say, “Our war isn’t against the Poles or against the Russians, but against the Jews.” Opinions like that don’t raise my spirits. I hope that those malicious intentions will never be carried out
.

I think about you all the time,
Hugo

The next day the closet door opens, and Mariana stands there with a woman at her side.

“This is Hugo.” Mariana introduces him.

Hugo rises to his feet, as though exposed and with no choice but to admit that he has been in hiding.

“This is my friend Nasha. Nasha will be your new friend from now on. She will watch over you and make sure you’re not hungry. As soon as I get settled, I’ll come and get you. I won’t forget you, honey. Do you like him?” She turns to Nasha.

“Very much.”

“He’s not only sweet and lovable, he’s also smart.”

“Like all the Jews.” Nasha chuckles in a thin, restrained voice.

“Nasha can keep secrets, and you can rely on her. Her grandpa was a priest.”

“Don’t remind me of that.”