Читать книгу Chasing the King of Hearts - Ханна Кралль - Страница 20

Father

She makes her way to Miła Street, her anxiety growing with every step. She walks faster and faster and finally breaks out into a run. The other pedestrians also start running. Not because they want to see her husband, they just think they have to. She dashes into an entrance, the others follow. She stops and they stop. I’m running to my husband, she explains. They look at her, bewildered, and disperse.

Her husband is so sleepy he’s barely conscious. She strokes his hair, which is no longer golden. Is everybody still here? She wants to make sure. He shakes his head. Your father’s gone. He left . . . of his own free will, when they called for specialists.

She begins to understand: her father left the ghetto voluntarily.

I tried to stop him, her husband says, but he said that he’d explain it all to them.

Explain what?

That as a chemist who knew German and a graduate of Heidelberg . . .

But explain what?

That as a chemist . . . I begged him, her husband repeats.

(Her father had pretty, brown, wise eyes.)

They took them to Umschlagplatz, her husband says. Apparently the specialists who knew German were the first to board the train . . .

(One eye was brown; he had lost the other while searching for a new color.

A color that doesn’t exist in the spectrum, at least not yet, a color with a new wavelength. He explained that the colors of the spectrum differ from one another by their wavelengths, and that the gamut of wavelengths is matched by the colors given off by all living creatures. Her father loved to explain things, adored explaining things. Colors, smiles, roulette . . . He was on the verge of making a great discovery but an unfortunate explosion ruined everything. So he gave up working on the spectrum and went into business. He started with the tenants who didn’t pay their rent and resolved to have a serious conversation with them. You see, he explained to them, above all else a man has to make sure his children have a roof over their heads, that’s what makes for a true man. You’re absolutely right, Mr. Furman, the tenant agreed, but what if a man doesn’t have money for a roof? Then he should borrow it, Father advised. You’re absolutely right, the tenant agreed, could you lend me some money so my children can have a roof over their heads? Father lent the money, the tenant paid, Father gave him a receipt, and Mother suggested that maybe he wasn’t cut out for business after all. So Father went to Sopot. From there he sent funny postcards assuring us that he was developing a new method of winning at roulette.)

Izolda doesn’t hold it against Shayek that he allowed her father to leave.

Nor is she surprised at how calmly he talks about it. Just like the tailors in the shop: he’s gone, too bad, but we’re still here.

In the evening they meet up with Bolek.

Before climbing down into the sewer she kneels on a pile of bricks. Ask her . . . she whispers to her husband. Ask who what? Get on your knees and pray . . . She reaches for the Mother of God medallion that Lilusia Szubert gave her (She’ll look after you, she said, as she draped the chain around Izolda’s neck). Pray that nothing bad happens to us . . . She would like to add: Today and until the end of the war—but she reconsiders, they shouldn’t ask for too much. Help us, she says out loud. Please be kind and help us. You won’t forget?