Aharon Appelfeld - Blooms of Darkness

Thus February passed. In early March the snow melted, and Hugo stood at the cracks in the closet wall and listened to the burble of the rushing water. The sound was familiar to him, but where exactly he had first seen a spring with rushing water he couldn’t remember. His earlier life was gradually slipping away from him, and he no longer saw it with the same clarity. Sometimes he sat on the floor and cried about his former life, which would never return.

Mariana doesn’t conceal from Hugo that the searches for Jews haven’t stopped. Now they’re not made from house to house but based on reports from informers. The informers swarm everywhere, and for trivial sums they turn over Jews and the households that concealed them.

A few days earlier Mariana showed Hugo an opening near the toilet, so that in an emergency he could squirm out through it and hide in the woodshed adjacent to the closet. “Mariana is always on watch. Don’t worry,” she said, and winked at him.

“And won’t Victoria inform on me?”

“She won’t do that. She’s a religious woman.”

But meanwhile the nights have changed and aren’t the way they were. Mariana receives two or three men one after the other. From eavesdropping he knows that the reception is harsh and tense, without any laughter. During the day she stays in bed until very late, and when she appears at the closet doorway, her face is rumpled and bitterness is spread across her lips. Hugo goes over to her, kisses her hand, and asks, “What’s the matter?”

When Mariana says, “Don’t ask,” Hugo knows that the night was cursed. She tries to be pleasant to the guests, but they aren’t considerate of her. They make all kinds of comments to her and ask her to do things that disgust her. In the end they complain about her to the management.

Apparently that’s how it always was, but now the demands have increased, and there are many complaints about her. Almost every day a woman comes into her room and scolds her. “Things can’t go on this way for much longer. You have to accept the guests’ demands. Don’t quarrel with them and don’t contradict them. Do exactly what they ask of you. You have to be more flexible.”

Mariana promises but doesn’t keep her promise. She’s devoted to Hugo, though, bringing him sandwiches decorated with vegetables, and if she has no guests, she invites him into her bed. Those hours are his most beautiful ones.

Sometimes Hugo manages to get her to talk, and she tells him about her life and about what she calls “work.” Her work, so she says, is the most contemptible in the world, and one day she plans to begin her life again. If she could stop drinking brandy, she could return to ordinary work.

One evening she says to him, “Pamper me now.”

“How?”

“Wash me the way I wash you. Mariana needs some pampering.”

“Gladly,” he says, not knowing what it involves.

Before long, she has filled the bathtub with hot water and taken off her clothes. She says, “Now I’m in your hands. Pamper me.”

He begins to wash her neck and back. Suddenly she raises her upper body and says, “Wash everything, my breasts too.” He washes her, and it’s like a dream: a mixture of pleasure and fear.

Now he sees how big and full she is, and how long her legs are. After he dries her, she puts on a nightgown and says, “Don’t tell anyone. This is a secret between you and me.”

“I’ll keep it, I swear.”

“I’ll teach you some other things that will be pleasant for you.”

All night he sleeps embraced in Mariana’s arms. It is quiet and pleasant, but his dreams are nightmares. Soldiers burst into the closet, and he tries to slip out through the opening that Mariana had shown him, but the opening is narrow and he doesn’t manage to crawl through. The soldiers stand there and laugh, and their laughter is roiled with contempt. In the end a soldier walks up to him and steps on him with his boot. He feels the heel digging into him and wants to scream, but his mouth is blocked.

The next morning Mariana goes into town and forgets to bring Hugo a cup of milk. Thirst and hunger torment him, but he is so replete with pleasure from the night before that the hours pass with pleasant visions. Now he remembers clearly the tall chestnut trees along the streets, their thick leaves and their flowering branches, the fruit that would fall from them at the end of the summer, their green skin cracking on the damp pavement. To touch the shiny brown chestnuts always made him happy. Once he talked about it with his mother. She, too, thought that all fruit, even fruit that we don’t eat, had something marvelous about it. It was no wonder that people who observed the traditions blessed fruit before eating it.

While Hugo is consoling himself with memories of having slept with Mariana the previous night, the closet door opens and Victoria stands in the doorway. He has already removed her existence from his mind, and there she is, short, round, her face flushed, her short fingers looking as if they have been soaking in red water.

“What are you doing?” she asks, as though he has been caught doing a misdeed.

“Nothing,” Hugo answers, trying to evade her gaze.

“Do you pray?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t look like it.”

“I kiss the charm,” he says, and touches the cross on his neck.

“It’s not a charm, it’s a holy crucifix.”

“Thank you for the correction.”

“Don’t thank me. Do what you’re supposed to.”

Without another word, Victoria locks the closet, and it’s clear to Hugo that at the first opportunity she will turn him in.

Mariana tried to stop drinking brandy, but without success. On a day without brandy, she confessed, her head felt as if it had been split and her body felt as if it had been raked over. Without brandy, the world was hell. Better to die.

“You have to stop drinking,” the woman with the authoritative voice coaxed her. “You’re a pretty and attractive woman, and the men like you. But they don’t like it when you’re drunk. You have to stop drinking and do what the guests ask of you. That’s our profession. That’s our livelihood.”

Mariana promised, but she didn’t keep her promise. The guests shouted at her and hit her. Hugo saw blue spots on her body, and his heart felt bitter.

“You’re the only one who understands me,” Mariana says, and hugs him. “You’re the only one who doesn’t hit me or abuse me, and you don’t call me bad names, and you don’t order me to do disgusting things.” The compliments that Mariana showers on Hugo embarrass him, but he knows that she needs some encouragement now, and he says, “You’ll get yourself out of this. You’re beautiful, and everybody loves you.”

“You’re wrong, darling. Everybody wrings me out, abuses me, and then they complain about me.”

“We’ll run away from here.” Hugo tries that stratagem.

“Where will we run to? My late mother’s house is about to collapse, and my sister stole what was in it.”

“We’ll work together in a kitchen.” Hugo utters that sentence without knowing how it could be done.

“My darling, no one would hire me. This profession is the mark of Cain not only on your forehead but on your whole self, on your whole life.”

Mariana is frightened, but Hugo, for some reason, isn’t frightened. Mariana feels that and says, “What would I do without you?”

Once she said, in a moment of distraction, “The Jews are more delicate.”

“Than who?”

“Than other people. If you thought that the Germans were polite, you’re mistaken. They fall upon a woman like wild beasts. Only the Jews approach a woman cautiously, hug her and kiss her gently, buy her a bottle of perfume, a pair of silk stockings, give her some extra cash so she can pamper herself.”