Blooms of Darkness by Jeffrey M. Green, Aharon Appelfeld

I’m not a slave.”
    “Our profession, dear, demands a lot of patience of us. Every customer’s got his own quirks. Don’t forget, the whole thing doesn’t last more than an hour, and you get rid of him immediately.”
    “I’m fed up. Let him do what he wants, but not correct my German.”
    The other woman speaks softly, with a country accent. She asks Mariana to go to Madam and apologize. “If you don’t apologize and express remorse, she’ll fire you. It would be a shame to lose a job.”
    “I don’t care.”
    “You mustn’t say, ‘I don’t care.’ Anyone who says ‘I don’t care’ is desperate. We believe in God, and we don’t despair easily.”
    “I don’t go to church.” Mariana persists in her rebellion.
    “But you believe in God and in His Messiah.”
    Mariana doesn’t respond. From her silence, it is evident that her obstinacy is softening slightly. In the end, she asks, “What should I say to her?”
    “Tell her, ‘I apologize, and in the future I won’t make comments to customers.’ ”
    “It’s hard for me to get a sentence like that out.”
    “It’s like spitting and going on. Enough.”
    Hugo listens intently and catches every word.
    Hugo understands Ukrainian. He learned the language from their maid, Sofia. Sofia used to say, “If you learn Ukrainian well, I’ll take you to my village. In my village there are lots of animals, and you can play there with the colt and with the calf.” Sofia was always happy, and she used to sing and chatter from morning till the end of her work at night.
    When Hugo began first grade, Sofia said to him, “Too bad you have to go to school every day. School is a prison. I hated school and the teacher. The teacher used to shout at me. She insulted me and called me ‘stupid.’ True, I had trouble with arithmetic, and I wrote with mistakes, but I was a quiet girl. She liked the Jewish children, and she used to say, ‘Take an example from them. Learn how to think from them. Clear the straw out of your heads and put in some thought.’
    “I hope you won’t suffer. I suffered all the years I was in school and I was glad to leave the walls of that prison. Oh, I forgot, dear,” she said, slapping her forehead, “I forgot you were a Jew. Jews don’t have trouble with arithmetic. You’ll raise your hand. You’ll raise your hand all the time. Whoever raises his hand has the right answer.”
    Hugo loved Sofia. She was plump and merry, and she peppered her words with proverbs and sayings. She was pleased with whatever came her way. When his parents weren’t home, she used street language, like “bitch,” whore,” or “son of a bitch.”
    Once he asked his mother, “What’s a whore?”
    “It’s a word we don’t use. It’s a dirty word.”
    But Sofia uses it , he was about to say.
    Every time Hugo heard that word, he would envision Sofia washing her body with a stiff sponge, because anybody who used that word was dirty and had to wash his body very well.
    Now, in the last darkness of the night, Hugo sees Sofia’s whole body, and she, as always, is singing and cursing, and that obscene word is rolling around in her mouth. The familiar,clear vision restores his house to him all at once, and, amazingly, everything is in its place—his father, his mother, the evening, and the violin teacher, who used to close his eyes in protest every time Hugo played out of tune.
    Hugo’s progress in playing was very slow. “You have an excellent ear, and you even practice, but your desire isn’t strong, and without a strong desire, there’s no real progress. Music has to be in your fingers. Fingers that don’t have music sunk into them are blind fingers. They’ll always grope and always make a mistake or play out of tune.”
    Hugo understood what was demanded of him. But he didn’t know exactly what to do. Sometimes he felt that the music really was in his fingers, and with more effort, they would do what they were ordered to. But in his heart he