Blooms of Darkness

49

Toward morning there was a great panic, and all the women fled. Mariana and Hugo slept through it all, and when they wake up, no one is left in the house except for Victoria and Sylvia, and they are dressed in their coats and about to set out.

“What’s the matter with you?” asks Victoria.

“I was asleep and didn’t hear a thing,” says Mariana.

“There’s no one in the house. The girls left most of their belongings. They didn’t want to drag anything along. Too bad.”

“Have the Russians come?” Mariana wonders. “They are spread out through the whole city.”

“Frightening.”

“There’s nothing to fear.” Victoria doesn’t forget her principles, even at this early hour.

“I’ll take a suitcase. I can’t live without brandy or cigarettes. Then I’ll leave, too,” says Mariana, as if it were a minor transition.

Mariana stuffs a few garments into the little suitcase, along with some shoes and the brandy and cigarettes. Hugo’s knapsack is ready. “I don’t need anything else. This is exactly what I need.” Mariana speaks in her ordinary tone of voice.

The Residence suddenly seems like a big body whose soul has been removed. Victoria hurries Sylvia along. “The house is full of ghosts,” she says. “Come, let’s get out of here quickly.”

The sky is high and blue, and the sun is bright and dazzling. While he was in the closet, Hugo imagined his liberation as a winged run that couldn’t be stopped. Now he staggers after Mariana with heavy steps. “Too bad we didn’t get up earlier,” says Mariana. She makes a sharp turn toward a grove of trees.

The grove is sparse, and the short, bare trees leave them even more exposed. Mariana doesn’t feel comfortable in the open air. She changes direction and finally sits down under a tree and says, “We have to find a protected place. Here everything is wide open.” Hugo knows that she will soon take a bottle out of the suitcase, have a swallow, and her mood will improve.

“Aren’t you cold?” she asks, shivering.

“No.”

Hugo loves the tilt of her head and the question that comes in its wake. Her body still radiates warmth and the smell of perfume. He takes her hand and kisses it. Mariana smiles, takes a bottle out of the suitcase, drinks, and says, “The sky is beautiful, isn’t it?”

He sees her in daylight for the first time now and is astonished at her beauty.

“We have to find a house. We can’t live without a house. I won’t go to the convent. In the convent they slave away and pray all the time. I love God, but I don’t feel like praying all the time.” Hugo listens attentively to her mutterings. In them she always expresses her true heart’s desires, and they are usually fantasies that have no basis in reality. Now he can follow them, because she’s speaking slowly, sad and happy by turns, and in the end she sums it up for herself. “I’ve suffered enough, and now I’ll live in the country, just me and Hugo. You understand me, don’t you?” She turns to him.

“It seems to me that I do,” Hugo answers cautiously.

“Don’t hesitate, honey.”

Hugo doesn’t expect that response and laughs.

“You should know that hesitation is our undoing.”

They are outside the city, in the heart of the snow-covered fields. From here Hugo can see the white church, the water tower, and some buildings that he can’t identify. The months in the closet have distanced him from the city that he loved. Now, when he sees its edges, he remembers the long walks he took with his father along the river, in the alleys alongside the park, and in secret places that only his father knew.

Mariana guesses what he is thinking and says, “We’ll always be together.” She hugs him and covers his mouth with hers. He feels her tongue and the taste of brandy.

They could have sat there for a long while, enjoying the landscape and the closeness that warmed them both. But then an unidentifiable noise is heard in the distance — perhaps a tractor or a tank that is stuck and struggling to move. The sudden noise spoils their feeling of closeness.

“We’ve got to move on,” Mariana says, and rises to her feet. “We mustn’t be lazy.”

They advance without speaking. Suddenly Hugo sees the closet before his eyes — the straw mattress, the sheepskins, and the jumble of Mariana’s clothes. That was the home of his imaginings for a year and a half. For hours he would wait painfully for her to come, but when she did appear in the doorway, his despair would vanish like the morning fog.

“Strange.” The word slips out of his mouth.

“What’s strange, dear?”

“The bright light and the sky,” he says.

“It’s a sign that God is watching over us.”

When Mariana drinks from her bottle, she sometimes utters sentences that make no sense, or whose logic is faulty. But they always have a tone of exaltation and wonder. Sometimes she utters an expression or a simile that surprises Hugo with its brilliance. Once, after she had drunk half a bottle and was foggy, she said, “You should know, my dear, that God dwells within you, even in your belly button.”

While they are plodding along, a peasant suddenly appears before them. Mariana is frightened, but she quickly recovers and asks, “Have the Russians come yet?”

“They’re at the outskirts of the city.”

“And when will they get here?”

“Today, apparently,” says the peasant in a subdued tone of voice.

“There isn’t much time,” says Mariana, unwittingly betraying her fear.

The peasant fixes his gaze on her. “Aren’t you Mariana?” he asks.

“You’re mistaken,” she immediately responds.

“I was sure you were Mariana.”

“People sometimes make mistakes.”

“Is this your son?”

“My son? Can’t you see that he’s my son?”

“Mistakes keep happening,” he says, and turns away.

“There are ghosts everywhere,” she mutters as the peasant walks away. Hugo now realizes that the lives of all the women who lived in The Residence — who entertained Germans in their rooms, had sex with them, and partied with them all night — are in danger. In his imagination he nurtured the illusion that Mariana didn’t belong to them. She only pretended she belonged to them. She was secretly always his, and now she really is all his.