Blooms of Darkness Read Free

through the sewer pipes. The pipes are wide, and after midnight little sewage runs in them. Hugo’s mother tries to speak in her ordinary tone of voice, and from time to time she gives it a tinge of adventure. Hugo knows she is doing that to calm him down.
    “Where is Otto?”
    “I assume that he’s also hiding in a cellar.” His mother speaks curtly.
    Since his mother told him they would make their way to Mariana through the sewer pipes, Hugo has been trying to recall her face from his memory. His efforts evoke only her height and long arms, which hugged his mother at the meetings when he was present. Those meetings were mostly fleeting. His mother would give her two packages, and Mariana would hug her warmly.
    “Does Mariana live in the country?” Hugo gropes in this new darkness.
    “In a village.”
    “Will I be able to play outside?”
    “I don’t think so. Mariana will explain everything to you. We’ve been friends ever since we were girls. She’s a good woman, but fate hasn’t been kind to her. You will have to be very disciplined and do exactly what she tells you to.”
    What is the meaning of “fate hasn’t been kind to her”? Hugo wonders. It is hard for him to imagine that tall, pretty woman dejected or humiliated.
    His mother repeats, “Everyone has his own fate.”
    That sentence, like the one before, is inscrutable.
    Meanwhile, Hugo’s mother takes a knapsack and a suitcase down into the cellar. She places books in the knapsack, and the chess set and the dominoes. She packs clothes and shoes in the suitcase. It is stuffed and heavy.
    “Don’t worry. Mariana will take care of everything. I spoke with her. She liked you,” his mother says with a trembling voice.
    “And where will you go, Mama?”
    “I’ll look for a hiding place in the nearby village.”
    His mother has stopped reading the Bible to him, but after Hugo puts out the lantern, he hears her calling to him. Her voice is soft, melodious, and penetrating.
    “You must behave like a grown-up,” his mother says, not sounding like herself. Hugo wants to reply, I’ll do everything that Mariana tells me to do , but he stops himself.
    At night sounds come from outside and shock the cellar. They are mainly the sobbing of women whose children were snatched away from them. The women were daring and ran after the gendarmes, pleading with them to return their children. The pleas drove the gendarmes mad, and they beat the women furiously.
    After the kidnappings, silence reigns. Only here and there a suppressed sob is heard.
    Hugo lies awake. Everything that happens in the house and in the street affects him. An expression that he heard by chance returns to him at night with intensified clarity. It is hard for him to read and hard for him to play chess. Images and sounds fill him.
    “Where is Otto?” he keeps asking his mother.
    “In a cellar.”
    Hugo is sure that Otto, too, has been snatched, thrown into a truck, and is now on his way to the Ukraine.
    His mother sits with her legs crossed and describes the place where Mariana lives. “She has a big room and within it is a big closet. In the daytime, you’ll be in the big room, and at night you’ll sleep in the closet.”
    “At Mariana’s, are they also liable to seize me?” Hugo asks cautiously.
    “Mariana will watch over you like a hawk.”
    “Why will I have to sleep in the closet?”
    “For safety’s sake.”
    “Will she read out of the Bible for me?”
    “If you ask her.”
    “Does she know how to play chess?”
    “I imagine not.”
    The short questions and answers sound to Hugo like final preparations for a secret journey. Sitting in the cellar oppresses him, and he is eagerly looking forward to the day when he’ll put the knapsack on his back and go down into the sewer with his mother.
    “Is there a school there?” he suddenly asks.
    “My dear, you aren’t going to go to school. You have to be in hiding,” his mother says in a different tone of voice.
    That