Blooms of Darkness

18

The winds die down and snow falls without letup. Hugo stands next to the cracks in the closet wall and watches the thick snowflakes slowly floating down. The white sight reminds him of home on Sunday mornings: Sofia went to church to pray; his father, dressed in casual clothes, prepared a festive breakfast; his mother put on a new housecoat. The gramophone played Bach sonatas, and the blue porcelain stove roared and gave off pleasant heat.

Hugo loved that relaxed atmosphere, with none of the tension of rushed weekday mornings. On Sunday mornings worries were erased, the pharmacy was forgotten, and his mother didn’t even talk about all the poor people she took care of. The music and the quiet enveloped the three of them.

When Sofia returned from church, she would be all covered with snow. Hugo’s mother would help her shake off the snowflakes, and then prepare a cup of coffee and a piece of cake for her. Everybody would sit down beside her. Sofia would tell them about the service and the sermon, always bringing back a parable or proverb that had impressed her. One time she recited, “For man does not live by bread alone.”

“What impressed you about that verse?” asked Hugo’s father.

“We sometimes forget why we’re alive. It seems to us that making a living is the main thing. Or that physical love or property is the main thing. That’s a great mistake.”

“So what is the main thing?” Hugo’s father tried to draw her out.

“God,” she said, opening her eyes wide.

Sofia was full of contradictions. Every Sunday she would make sure to go to church, and sometimes also in the middle of the week, but in the evenings she liked to pass the time in the tavern. True, she didn’t get drunk, but she came back merry and a bit tipsy. Some of the men she had spent time with promised to marry her but changed their minds in the end. Because of those false promises, Sofia decided to return to her native village. In the village, no man would dare to promise marriage and not keep his promise. If a man promised marriage and didn’t keep his promise, they would lie in wait for him and beat him till blood flowed.

Hugo liked to listen to Sofia’s stories. She spoke to him in Ukrainian. She loved her mother tongue and wanted Hugo to speak it without an accent, too, and without mistakes. Hugo tried but didn’t always succeed.

Sofia was so different from his parents and his friends’ parents, as if she had been born on another continent: she spoke loudly and with broad gestures, and when it seemed to her that people didn’t understand her, she used her large face to imitate her neighbors and suitors. She sang, too, kneeling on the floor and making everyone laugh.

The cold in the closet is unrelenting. Mariana often comes late with Hugo’s cup of milk in the morning, and sometimes she goes into town and forgets him all day long. But sometimes she says, “Come to Mariana, and she’ll hug you, darling,” and so she brings him from the cold darkness to her vibrant breast. In the hours he spends in her bed, embraced in her long arms, marvelous oblivion envelops him. For whole days he looks forward to those hours. When they come, he is stricken, or paralyzed, and he doesn’t know what to say or do. But this doesn’t happen every day. Most days Mariana is drunk, grumpy, and she falls on her bed in a stupor.

So it is, day after day. There are gloomy days when Hugo sees only the closet walls and Mariana’s faded housedresses hanging on hooks. The narrow cracks in the closet walls reveal only the fence and the gray bushes that have shed all their leaves. This is a prison, Hugo says to himself. In prison it’s impossible to read. It’s impossible to do homework. It’s even impossible to play chess. Prison stifles thought and imagination. That realization has come to reside within him over the past few days. Since then he has been afraid that his head will slowly empty. He will no longer think or imagine. One day he will fall over like the tree in the yard of their house did last winter. But when Mariana finally remembers him, opens the closet door, and says, “What’s Mariana’s darling doing?” Hugo’s fears evaporate all at once, and he rises to his feet.