Blooms of Darkness

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.”