The White King by Gyorgy Dragoman

Author:Gyorgy Dragoman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

11. Playing Search

MOTHER TALKED everything over with me most of the time, often she told me why things were the way they were, and when she did that, she answered my questions too, or when she didn't, then I knew she thought it best that we didn't talk about it, because what I didn't know, I couldn't tell anyone else even by accident, and I had to admit she was right about that because I knew there really were things it was dangerous to even mention, for example, exactly what happened during the civil war or how much so-and-so could get meat or coffee for, or how much it took to pay off so-and-so, or why the Party General Secretary, who was also commander of the armed forces, was a treasonous brute, or which of the people we knew had been taken away, or who had their homes searched and why. When I asked her about things like that, Mother either said only that this was serious business, let's not talk about it, or else that I should ask Father instead when he finally got home. But lots of times she didn't even have to say this much, no, from the way she looked at me I could tell it would be best if I didn't ask questions to begin with.

That's just how it was when Mother came home one Thursday and asked me if I had any money saved up, and how much. I could tell right away from her voice that she wasn't kidding around, and so I told her the truth, that I had two tens, but I didn't tell her where I got them from because I knew she wouldn't have been happy to find out that I got one of them from my grandfather and that I won the other at cards, because I wasn't supposed to play cards or accept money from my grandfather, but even Mother must have figured it was best not to go asking where I had such a load of money from because she didn't say a thing, no, she just went into the living room and straight to Father's picture, which she took off the wall, there was an envelope stuck to the back of the picture with electric tape, Mother opened it and took out a bunch of bills and licked her index finger and counted the money right away, and then I heard her saying softly, "Five hundred twenty-five plus twenty is five hundred forty-five, so we still have to scrounge up one thousand four hundred fifty-five to make two thousand," and she told me to go look around my room to see what I could do without, and meanwhile she'd pick out some of her clothes and scrape together everything she thought we might get a good price for and didn't really need, and I shouldn't make any plans for Sunday morning, we were going to the flea market because we needed the money by Monday.

I

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