The Birthday Buyer Read Online Free PDF Page A

Hurbinek.” He says, “This is an elephant,” and every day, with infinite patience, ignoring his useless hand, Henek makes a grotesque imitation of an elephant, and makes a mud cake, and draws a river and bridge on the earthen floor of the shack, and turns a tin into a hat, and points to the sun when the sun comes out, and imitates a cat meowing, and builds a cardboard house for him. But he can never explain to him what a tree is or what a mother is.
    Henek believes in the power of words, but not one could penetrate the eyes of Hurbinek, who understood nothing, shivered, and only wanted that being speaking those sounds so slowly to stay with him for ever and never let go of his hand. And Henek never stopped talking so Hurbinek would learn.

10

    Hanka Silewski and Jadzia Tryzna are two Polish nurses who are not yet twenty. When they call in at the infirmary-shack, they visit Hurbinek’s cradle and caress his fingers and face; they say he reminds them of the dolls they had in their childhood in Warsaw, something they think is so distant though it was only a few years ago. Even so, appalled by everything they have seen, there is love in the kisses they shower him with and in the clean clothes they bring just for him. But they can’t think what else to do when by his side. They overwhelm him and when he looks at them, they don’t want their eyes to meet the gaze of that child struggling to lift his neck up and mutter unintelligible sounds. Hurbinek’s gaze unsettles them. They’d rather not love him. Besides, Jadzia can’t get the image out of her head of what she found in one of the wards when she entered the camp with the Red Army: a woman was dying with her hands and feet nailed into the floor of the barrack where other women, who seemed not to see her at all, drifted by.
    They change bulbs, clean away excrement, dress wounds occasionally, very occasionally, bring morphine, everything in five minutes, they don’t have time to do more, they act frantically, but are perfectly well organized.
    Hurbinek’s hoarse groans arouse an ambivalent sense of tenderness, disgust and sorrow. They observe him in the darkness as they change the bulb yet again. One day they will be mothers. How horrible it would be if that child were their son. And yet they would love him.
    The wheel of life continues to turn and they don’t want to get left behind, they don’t just want to remember the naked skulls, femurs and vertebrae visible under the skin on those bunks or in the mass graves where they are still burying the dead. They are young and they like Henek.

11

    Henek never gets nervous. He is immutable. He does things calmly, as if he is applying a method. He never becomes impatient or irritated.
    Nothing ever works out with Hurbinek and he always has to start from scratch. He doesn’t swallow food and spits out water; he cleans his ass, then he shits himself again; he teaches him a word, and Hurbinek doesn’t speak it.
    Henek is tireless.
    He takes him gingerly in his arms and on to the esplanade so he can feel the fresh air. The air inside is putrid. He walks around the shack with him, but it is freezing cold and Hurbinek’s breathing immediately breaks into a gasping rattle; his body is about to fall apart and he has to bring him back inside. He very gingerly puts him back in the cradle he has made for him. For Henek, his weight is nearly unnoticeably light.
    How could someone so fragile survive like that for three years? I wonder now in Frankfurt. That idea begins to torture me.
    Henek isn’t upset by Hurbinek’s sad, forlorn gaze. He ignores it. Nothing about him disgusts him. He cleans out his ears when they are full of pus; he cleans his legs when he pees on himself; he cleans his tears away when he cries. He cries through open eyes.

12

    Suddenly, one day, Hurbinek said something: some people heard
massklo
, others
matisklo
. It wasn’t Hungarian; it was none of the words Henek had been trying to teach him. Nobody