Blooms of Darkness

35

Mariana’s torments as she tries to dry out extend through the whole day. Every morning, after breakfast, Hugo hands her the bottle, and she takes a few long gulps, saying, “You’re my secret, you’re my elixir of life, you keep me alive.” For caution’s sake, she splashes perfume on her body and clothes. “No one will notice that I drank,” she says.

When Mariana is sad or depressed, it’s hard for her to restrain herself. “Just one sip,” she says, “and no more.” Hugo hands her the bottle, and she drinks and whispers, “Hide the bottle fast, so that I won’t see it.” And when her friends discover that she has had a drink, they rebuke her. “Have you sinned again?”

“Just a sip.”

“Be careful,” they warn, “Madam has a sense of smell like a dog’s.”

Sometimes her friend Kitty comes into her room. Kitty is very short, and she looks like a girl who ended up there by mistake on the way home from school. She is charming and cheerful, and she amuses her friends. She has, it seems, customers who are hers and hers alone.

Kitty likes to tell about her experiences, and she sometimes talks about them at length and in detail. Mariana and her friends don’t talk about theirs. Their impressions are usually summed up in a single word or a short sentence, A beast, disgusting, horrid; what do you expect from an unbridled bull? I feel like vomiting. Only rarely do you hear, He brought me a box of candy, he told me about his house in Salzburg.

Hugo learns from them that there is a special unit in the city that hunts down Jews. Every week they find a few. Mainly the Jews are executed, but some are interrogated and tortured until they reveal their friends’ hiding places. The Germans intend to kill them down to the very last one, Hugo hears, and he shivers.

One day the closet door opens, and Kitty is standing in the entrance. “I came to see you. Mariana has told me a lot about you.”

Hugo rises to his feet and doesn’t know what to say. “Good Lord, you’re my height. How old are you?”

“In a little while I’ll be twelve.”

“I’m twice your age, even a bit more. What do you do all day?”

“Nothing. What is there to do here?”

“Don’t you read? Jews liked to read, isn’t that so?”

“I think, and sometimes I imagine things.”

“Are you afraid?”

“No.”

“Mariana told me about you. She likes you.”

“And are you content here?” he dares to ask.

“This is my life,” she says with a simplicity that touches his heart. After a pause, she adds, “I’m an orphan. I’ve been an orphan for twenty years. This is my home. Here I have friends.”

“Don’t you have sisters?”

“I’m an only child,” she says and chuckles.

In the school where Hugo studied, there were some girls Kitty’s height, with the same look. But Kitty isn’t a girl. She reminds him, for some reason, of Frieda, who also had a girlish face. The last time he saw her, she was crushed among the deportees, waving her straw hat.

“Aren’t you bored?”

“No.”

“I would be bored. I need friends. You’re a good-looking boy, and it’s no wonder that Mariana likes you.”

“I help her.” Hugo tries to diminish his status.

“How?”

“In whatever way I can.”

“That’s good of you,” says Kitty. “I’ll come to visit you again. Now I have to go.”

“Did I disappoint you?”

“No. Not at all. You’re a good-looking, smart boy. I was curious and so I came to see you.” She smiles and locks the closet door.

Hugo takes out the Bible and reads the story of Joseph. He immediately visualizes Joseph as a slightly built prince, dressed in a striped coat. His brothers are earthy and coarse of spirit, and their eyes disclose that they are out to harm him. Strangely, Joseph ignores their plots. He is immersed in his princely world. Every time his brothers speak, he smiles, as though he has uncovered their dark interior. In his heart he knows that his brothers would not hesitate to murder him, but he ignores them purposely, and in so doing he expresses his contempt for them.

Reading and thinking about what he has read restores to Hugo, without his realizing it, some of the life he had lost. Before his eyes he sees his German teacher, a converted Jew, who used to formulate ideas clearly. Franz and Anna were his favorites. But it seems to Hugo that the dark days in the closet have secretly taught him things that he lacked, and that when school resumes, he, too, will be able to express his thoughts tersely, without getting tangled up in pointless details.

That little discovery pleases him.