Black Village by Lutz Bassmann

Author:Lutz Bassmann [Bassmann, Lutz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Letter

19. With Yoisha

I was four years old, my little brother one year younger, at the time we were living in the ruins of the Adiana Dardaf ghetto and in a world where, apart from our tight-knit circle, everything was magical and inexplicable. This world was filled with rumors, impressive characters, male or female fighters draped in coats that smelled like smoke and dust, women flitting past like shadows, young or mustached nurses, silent grandmothers and bellowing grandmothers, and amid all that we were supposed to forge the path of our own independence and creature happiness, at the risk, should something go awry, of enclosing ourselves in our childish shadows and no longer moving. The strangers we met on the landing or in the hallways sometimes crouched down to pat our heads or ask kindly questions about our ages, our favorite animals, or the red heroes we most admired. We generally saw them as uncles when they were men and aunts when women, but most of the time we merely deemed them adults, pure and simple, by dint of their adult smells and their way of talking to us as if we were mentally deficient, stroking our scalps while laughing or crying, as some of them were quite emotional, and then abandoning us to deal with something else, as if we had suddenly upset them or as if we meant nothing whatsoever to them. We expected little of these people, but we always kept our affection in reserve and, until they stood back up after having squatted at our level, until they left us, so long as we were in their presence we acted calmly and patiently. We didn’t complain when they interrupted our games, we practically stood at attention in front of them to receive their sprays of spit and their embraces, which they assumed were sweet but struck us as rude, and to give serious answers to their bizarre queries.

In one of the bedrooms beside ours there was a place with an iron bed, an iron wardrobe, and a chair, where adults of this sort, uncles and aunts whose names we didn’t know or got mixed up, could spend several days without opening the door, except at night when they took advantage of the quiet hallways to wash up and take care of their needs. They stayed as uninvolved as possible in household life, they were rarely to be found sitting at the refectory table or joining the general assemblies. They tried to be forgettable and slipped along walls like shadows and, even if it was the outside world and the street they were hiding from, they lived with us in semi-secrecy. They usually arrived accompanied by my father, who led them through the city via the least monitored lanes and tunnels. They greeted my mother and the women in the house, and the nurses smoking by the entrance, then they went and cloistered themselves in the bedroom where we knew they would collapse on the bed in all their clothes and fall asleep.

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