Blooms of Darkness Read Online Free PDF

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 Marianashine 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.

8
    The hours pass. The evening lights pour into the windows and change colors. The dangers that were lying in wait for Hugo seem to have withdrawn, and the pink room is not only pleasant but also protected. Great desire draws him to enter the wide, soft bed and cover himself with the quilt, but his instincts tell him that it is Mariana’s domain and forbidden to him.
    Again he sees his house—the living room, his parents’ bedroom, and his room. The house was neither spacious nor fancy, but it was comfortable. Otto’s and Anna’s parents would come every Sunday. Hugo would entertain his friends in his room, serving them lemonade or fruit. On weekends his parents used to buy dates and figs. That exotic fruit would bring the distant, warm lands where they grew into the house.
    During the visit coffee and cake