How Huge the Night

chapter 12





Everywhere





In Trento there was a house; and the house had a door.

It stood in a deserted place between railroad tracks and an old factory with broken windows and weeds growing up from the foundation. Most of the roof was caved in, but the kitchen was whole and had a chimney and a door. The kitchen was where they lived.

At first, Niko slept like the dead. Gustav came and went; Niko woke long enough to wedge the door securely shut behind him and slept again. Gustav brought matches from somewhere and made a fire with bits of broken boards; Niko hung their wet clothes on a string in front of the chimney and slept again. Gustav brought food in greasy brown paper: cold pizza he’d been given at a restaurant’s back door. Niko ate, and slept.

And they lived. Through the long day, Niko lay on her father’s eiderdown, looking into the fire, putting on more sticks and boards when it sank down; and at evening, Gustav came with food and stories. Showing her the routine he used at the back doors of restaurants, big puppy-dog eyes and a hand on his stomach, and “Food? Food for empty belly?” It made them laugh, he said. Italians liked a laugh, even when you were begging. He liked Italians, he said. A camp of Gypsies had settled out that way, he said, in the field across the drainage ditch. He said he liked them too.

Then they would bed down by the fire, but now Niko could not sleep. She lay awake long hours in the dark, by the dim light of the fire, wondering. Wondering what Father knew.

Everywhere there are evil men. It was why she stayed in this house and did not go out with Gustav. Everywhere. Was Uncle Yakov right, then? she asked Father. She asked God. What is this world you made? Father had told her stories of corpses piled up in ditches, just for being Jewish. He hadn’t said what happened to the women. But she could guess. God. Why? Why do you let them? She couldn’t do it, she couldn’t lie here all day and all night with only her and the questions in her head, and a God who did not answer—she couldn’t do it. But outside, she heard voices sometimes; men’s voices, laughing. Outside, for her, there was nothing but fear.

Then came the pain in her throat, and outside, the snow. Niko lay under the eiderdown, shivering, no matter how high the fire was, and sweating. Two, three, four days, and the fever did not go. Gustav felt her forehead, his eyes dark. “I don’t know what to do, Niko. I need to get help.”

“Gustav, no. You can’t tell anyone I’m here. Gustav, promise. Gustav, you have to promise!”

He promised.

She lay staring at the fire, wandering a dark wilderness in her mind. She was in the woods on the border with Uncle Yakov—he was saying run, run, the Cossacks are coming. Father was up ahead, maybe she could catch him and Mother—Mother who ran so fast that she’d never seen her. She called out to them—wait, wait, you forgot Gustav … Don’t worry, Father called. Gustav can look after himself. He knows their language. They like a laugh. And he was gone, ahead of her in the dark woods, over the border, and she couldn’t find the gap. Father, Father come back, Gustav wants you to come back! And then Gustav was there, and a fire, he had made a fire in the woods, but the Cossacks would see it, and he was saying something, he was shouting. “No, Nina, no. I won’t let you. I won’t let you die!”

And then he was gone.