Blooms of Darkness

7

A moment before awakening, Hugo manages to see Anna shrink down to the dimensions familiar to him. He is so glad that she hasn’t changed, that in his excitement he claps his hand and shouts, “Bravo.”

Without meaning to, he surveys the closet. A broad-brimmed, colorful hat, hanging on a nail, catches his eye. It looks like a magician’s hat. Mariana is a magician, the thought flashes through his mind. At night she entertains the audience at the circus, and in the daytime she sleeps. The circus suits her. He immediately imagines her uttering bird calls, throwing balls up very high, and, with marvelous balance, carrying three brightly colored bottles on her head.

The door opens, and once again Mariana stands in the doorway. Now she is wearing a pretty floral-print dress, her hair is up, and she holds a bowl of soup in her hand. “Straight from our kitchen,” she announces. Hugo takes the bowl, sits down, and says, “Thank you.”

“What’s my sweetie been doing?” she asks in a slightly artificial tone.

Hugo immediately notices the new tone and says, “I was asleep.”

“It’s good to sleep. I also like to sleep. What did you dream about?”

“I don’t remember,” he says, not revealing any secrets.

“I dream, and, to my regret, I remember,” she says, and laughs with her mouth open.

At home, neither his father nor his mother had called him “honey,” “sweetie,” or other common words of endearment. His parents were repelled by those verbal caresses.

Hugo is hungry and eats the soup eagerly.

“In a moment I’ll bring you the second course. Did you manage to play chess?”

“I fell asleep. I didn’t even open the knapsack.”

“After the meal you can play in my room.”

“Thank you,” he says, and he is glad he is following his mother’s instructions diligently.

Only a day has passed since Hugo parted from his mother, and the new place is no longer strange to him. Mariana’s arrivals and disappearances seem to him, perhaps because of their regularity, like his mother’s appearances in the cellar. A few hours ago, he felt as if his mother was about to enter the closet. Now he sees her moving farther into the distance, gliding on waves of darkness.

Meanwhile, Mariana comes back and brings him a meatball and some potatoes, saying, “I have a greeting from your mother. She reached the village, and she’ll stay there.”

“When will she come and visit me?”

“The roads are dangerous, you know.”

“Maybe I can go to her?”

“For boys the road is even more dangerous.”

Now his day is a stretch of naps, sometimes soaring high and sometimes on a gloomy cruise. The sudden separation from his parents and friends has left him feeling cut off on this strange floor covered with long carpets embroidered with giant cats that look out at him.

It’s strange — he doesn’t receive the news that his mother has reached the village safely as a good omen. In his eyes, his mother always belonged to him. She sometimes disappeared but always returned on time. Now, too, he takes the news that she exists as self-evident. He does not yet know that every movement outside that ends well is a miracle.

Hugo takes the chess set out of his knapsack, arranges the pieces on the board, and immediately starts to play. Reading books and having long conversations until late at night — that was an area that belonged to his mother. Chess and walks in the city and outside it — that was his father’s realm. His father did not talk a lot. He listened and responded with a word or two. His parents were pharmacists, but each was a world unto himself. Chess is a game of great strategy, and Hugo’s father was excellent at it. Hugo knows the rules of the game, but he didn’t always use proper caution. He took unnecessary risks and lost, of course. His father didn’t reproach him for his haste and risk-taking, but he laughed softly, as if to say, Everyone who takes unnecessary risks is bound to lose.

When his father was seized and sent to the labor camp, Hugo cried for days on end. His mother tried to persuade him that his father hadn’t been snatched away but had been sent with many other men to work, and that he would return soon, but Hugo refused to be consoled. He visualized the word “snatched” as being taken by wolves. No words could uproot the wolves from his mind. From hour to hour the pack grew, dragging away the people they had snatched with their mighty teeth.

After a few days, he stopped crying.

Hugo raises his eyes from the chess board and the strange, pink room perplexes him. On the dressers pictures of Mariana shine in gilded frames. She is dressed in exotic bathing suits. Her waist is narrow, and her breasts bulge like two melons.

This is an odd room, he says to himself, and tries to imagine a similar room, but he can see only the beauty parlor, which was called Lili’s Hair Salon, where rich and spoiled women came to recline on chaises longues, and his mother was disgusted by everything that was there.

While Hugo is immersed in the game, he hears a woman laughing. He is still unfamiliar with the house, and he can’t tell if the laughter comes from the adjacent room or from the yard.

He senses that his life is surrounded by many secrets. What is their nature? He can only grope for answers, and the groping leads him to strange and unusual places. This time it seems to him that his physical education teacher was the one who laughed. She was entirely unrestrained, spoke loudly, and laughed at the janitor and at the pupils. She was the omnipotent ruler of the school yard.

Hugo rises to his feet, goes over to the window, and pushes the curtain aside, revealing a small, neglected courtyard, fenced in with thick stakes. Two brown hens stand in the middle of the courtyard.

He remains where he is and listens. The laugh keeps ringing, but now it is restrained, as though someone put a muzzle on the laughing woman, or she herself stifled her laughter. Strange, he says, surprised by the quiet courtyard left to itself.

The sky grows redder, and Hugo sees his friend Otto before his eyes. A defeated expression has crystallized on Otto’s face and is very obvious, especially on his lips. Now Hugo clearly remembers how Otto would wave his hand when he lost at chess. Because he waved that way every time he lost, the gesture was engraved in Hugo’s memory — a frozen motion.

Hugo’s mother used to say, “Otto is hiding in a cellar,” but Hugo sees him crammed into one of the trucks that take the captured people to the railway station.

For a moment it seems to him as if Otto were standing at the door.

“Otto,” he whispers, “is that you?”

There is no response, and Hugo understands that he was mistaken. Mariana’s instructions were unequivocal: “Don’t answer if somebody knocks on the door.”

He curls up in a corner of the room and doesn’t move.