Read Online The Birthday Buyer by Adolfo García Ortega - Free Book Online
Authors: Adolfo García Ortega
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back to collect his luggage. That same night Yakov took the last train back to Poland.
Why Jamaica? Why those dreams? Does a place called Jamaica really exist? And why? They are questions to ponder in a train travelling across Europe, if you can’t get to sleep.
Ice skating is his favorite sport, for example when the Wislok is frozen and as hard as stone. He’s not sure why, but in that train that first takes him to Krakow and then, many hours later, to Rzeszów, Yakov can only think about two ideas that obsess him, opposed ideas that keep recurring: Jamaica and the frozen river in the city of his birth. “No, Jamaica doesn’t exist, Sigmund, and if it did exist, it wouldn’t serve any purpose,” he would now tell that strange, perhaps cowardly Sigmund if he ever saw him again. But he never would.
8
Fruit
1925. Twenty years before Hurbinek’s death
.
Peaches, apples and wild strawberries in a basket at the feet of Sofia Cèrmik. She is surrounded by the loud voices of men who are strange but not hostile—one only has to see her mother’s relaxed face.
She is barely five years old and her mother Raca takes her by the hand while the men continue filling the basket with the fruit from the piles on the stall.
Sofia has never seen fruit. It is something new for her, as to a certain extent is her awareness that it is midday, that the springtime light is darkened by the pollen and dust in the air and that the smell wafting her way is as much from the fresh vegetables as from the rotten. But it’s a lot to ask of someone so young to distinguish between life and death.
The dense, golden sky is a warning that there will be storms in the afternoon, like yesterday. They will collect snails when it dries out, at sunset.
A man is sitting next to the stall with the peaches, apples and wild strawberries. He is holding a big wooden bucket between his legs. He keeps extracting prickly pears from a sack on the ground next to him. He picks them up very carefully so as not to prick himself on the spikes on their rough skin. Then he peels them with a knife and the moist, greeny fruit immediately appears. He places the peeled prickly pears in the wooden bucket. The man offers Sofia one. She hides behind her mother’s skirt, but Raca taps her on the head authorizing her to take it. The fresh, sharp taste of a prickly pear in her mouth will be a pleasurable sensation that will accompany Sofia in her short life.
In Auschwitz the search for that sensation was often to come to her mind—a raging desire because she so misses that simple pleasure—but it was to be a memory that wouldn’t find a way into that absurd horror. On the other hand she was to remember the morning when she acompanied her mother to the market and watched that man peeling prickly pears and how there was a fire near the esplanade full of peddlers, and black particles of soot started to fly through the air like a downpour of tiny pieces of coal.
Everyone runs to the pond to pump water, but Sofia only feels her mother’s hand squeezing hers. “They look like little black flies,” says Sofia referring to the wandering particles. “No, they are the ashes of the Synagogue, it’s burning.”
Sofia looks at the seven-year-old boy opposite who has just spoken to her. He is carrying a bag of juniper berries on his back and a basket in his hand where a cockerel is stretching its neck out of curiosity. “Do you remember me?” “Yes, you’re Yakov Pawlicka. I sometimes see you through the window when your mother is cutting your hair,” says Sofia as she strokes the cockerel’s crest.
The two of them are older now than their son was to be when he died.
9
Souls
1960. Fifteen years after Hurbinek’s death
.
It is snowing. The tractors with their improvised scoops are clearing the snow off the paths so the cows can water and the few vehicles in town can circulate.
But Raca Cèrmik is averse to all that, or rather lives isolated from all that, because she
Why Jamaica? Why those dreams? Does a place called Jamaica really exist? And why? They are questions to ponder in a train travelling across Europe, if you can’t get to sleep.
Ice skating is his favorite sport, for example when the Wislok is frozen and as hard as stone. He’s not sure why, but in that train that first takes him to Krakow and then, many hours later, to Rzeszów, Yakov can only think about two ideas that obsess him, opposed ideas that keep recurring: Jamaica and the frozen river in the city of his birth. “No, Jamaica doesn’t exist, Sigmund, and if it did exist, it wouldn’t serve any purpose,” he would now tell that strange, perhaps cowardly Sigmund if he ever saw him again. But he never would.
8
Fruit
1925. Twenty years before Hurbinek’s death
.
Peaches, apples and wild strawberries in a basket at the feet of Sofia Cèrmik. She is surrounded by the loud voices of men who are strange but not hostile—one only has to see her mother’s relaxed face.
She is barely five years old and her mother Raca takes her by the hand while the men continue filling the basket with the fruit from the piles on the stall.
Sofia has never seen fruit. It is something new for her, as to a certain extent is her awareness that it is midday, that the springtime light is darkened by the pollen and dust in the air and that the smell wafting her way is as much from the fresh vegetables as from the rotten. But it’s a lot to ask of someone so young to distinguish between life and death.
The dense, golden sky is a warning that there will be storms in the afternoon, like yesterday. They will collect snails when it dries out, at sunset.
A man is sitting next to the stall with the peaches, apples and wild strawberries. He is holding a big wooden bucket between his legs. He keeps extracting prickly pears from a sack on the ground next to him. He picks them up very carefully so as not to prick himself on the spikes on their rough skin. Then he peels them with a knife and the moist, greeny fruit immediately appears. He places the peeled prickly pears in the wooden bucket. The man offers Sofia one. She hides behind her mother’s skirt, but Raca taps her on the head authorizing her to take it. The fresh, sharp taste of a prickly pear in her mouth will be a pleasurable sensation that will accompany Sofia in her short life.
In Auschwitz the search for that sensation was often to come to her mind—a raging desire because she so misses that simple pleasure—but it was to be a memory that wouldn’t find a way into that absurd horror. On the other hand she was to remember the morning when she acompanied her mother to the market and watched that man peeling prickly pears and how there was a fire near the esplanade full of peddlers, and black particles of soot started to fly through the air like a downpour of tiny pieces of coal.
Everyone runs to the pond to pump water, but Sofia only feels her mother’s hand squeezing hers. “They look like little black flies,” says Sofia referring to the wandering particles. “No, they are the ashes of the Synagogue, it’s burning.”
Sofia looks at the seven-year-old boy opposite who has just spoken to her. He is carrying a bag of juniper berries on his back and a basket in his hand where a cockerel is stretching its neck out of curiosity. “Do you remember me?” “Yes, you’re Yakov Pawlicka. I sometimes see you through the window when your mother is cutting your hair,” says Sofia as she strokes the cockerel’s crest.
The two of them are older now than their son was to be when he died.
9
Souls
1960. Fifteen years after Hurbinek’s death
.
It is snowing. The tractors with their improvised scoops are clearing the snow off the paths so the cows can water and the few vehicles in town can circulate.
But Raca Cèrmik is averse to all that, or rather lives isolated from all that, because she
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