Читать книгу Chasing the King of Hearts - Ханна Кралль - Страница 16

The Sisters

They take the train. Izolda’s hair is stylishly rolled up at the back. Her mother is dressed in black and is her usual sad, silent self. (Her silence is the good kind, from the old days when—mostly over dessert—she would prop her head on her hands and listen to her husband’s tirades on politics or life or love or smiles, especially female smiles—his favorite subject. That and roulette, which he played in Sopot. How the wheel spins and how women smile. The smiles come in two types: consenting and encouraging. And when I see a consenting smile it’s impossible for me to back away—he boasted to his wife and daughter and to the young governess. Mother didn’t show either type of smile, only a sad grimace, her mouth turned down at the corners.)

Izolda looks cautiously around. Do the passengers realize that her mother’s sadness and her black dress come from normal times? That the furrows around her mouth aren’t the despair of the ghetto, but simply the bitterness of a wife betrayed? That she’s in mourning because of her son, who did not die of starvation or in the cattle car, but simply of pneumonia? In a word, do the passengers crowded into the third-class compartment realize that her mother’s black dress and sadness are good, non-Jewish sadness and safe, non-Jewish black?

They arrive at the house of Shayek’s two sisters and his little nephew Szymuś. Izolda leaves her mother with them, but that turns out to be a bad idea. The sisters are terrified. A szmalcownik spotted them at the station and blackmailed them out of a ring, and they worry he might have followed them home. I’ll come back for you as soon as I find another place, she promises her mother. The sisters ask Izolda to look after their brother. And our parents, Hela insists. And our brother, and our youngest sister, Halina. And our parents. Why me? she asks herself in the train on the way back. Absentmindedly she adjusts her hair, which is dyed, in contrast to Hela’s, which is real, genuine blond. Why what? asks the conductor. She realizes that she’s been talking out loud. She smiles at the conductor: Why nothing, nothing at all.