The Birthday Buyer by Adolfo García Ortega Read Free Book Online

family is waiting, Sofia Cèrmik adjusts her new tulle dress in a dark, neat and tidy bedroom that looks over Targova Street, the most commercial street in the city of Rzeszów, in the Carpathians of Upper Galicia.
    Gathered there already are Raca her mother, Simon her father and Uncle and Aunt Pitlik and the Vigos, her single aunts, Sara and Mikaela, her elder brothers, Max and Aaron and the young Stefan and Anna. Friends and customers of her father also visit the house and bring small token presents. They are all happy and are all going to celebrate her birthday with her. She is sixteen.
    She is young and beautiful with a bright, cheerful face, and to that day she has lived without worrying about what is happening beyond the Vistula and the San and its small tributary the Wislok that flows very close to their house, very close to Simon Cèrmik and his partner, Uncle Gork Vigo’s salted fish and meat and spice store, beyond the wooded Carpathians and beyond the great city of Krakow, where she has never set foot and whose bookshops she dreams about.
    When she emerges from the small bedroom in the new tulle dress that is her mother’s present, she is greeted by a loud burst of applause in the dining room and hallway. The hurrays ring out like the green branches of trees lashing a tanned hide.
    All the family relatives start to kiss Sofia, as do neighbors who keep coming and her girl friends from school, and suddenly a luminous party atmosphere spreads throughout the Cèrmik household.
    It was a special Spring day.
    The china cups are brimming with hot chocolate and they eat sponge cakes baked by Raca.
    It’s five o’clock in the afternoon and a guitar strikes up a romantic song that speaks of love and travel.
    Gradually, chocolate splashes every face, moustache and beard, and the women’s red lips and children’s pale cheeks. The dogs of the house lick up the leftovers on the plates in the kitchen.
    There are garlands and flowers in every corner of the living room held up with the many books in the house. Shopkeeper Cèrmik brings out bottles of anisette and other liqueurs he offers to his guests. His eyes ooze with satisfaction behind his glasses.
    Simon Cèrmik makes a toast to his favorite daughter who sips on her glass, glowing and blushing.
    Sofia is slim, but her shape is subtle, firm and well defined. Just a few months ago she abandoned the last traces of herself as a little girl and changed into a woman with a slender waist and broad hips. Her skin is smooth and her hair fair, fragrant and very curly. Her voice, sweet, low and enveloping.
    Yakov, the son of the Pawlickas, the schoolteachers, has come to the birthday party and can’t take his eyes off her. Although she is rather taken aback, Sofia returns his look and offers him a cup of hot chocolate.
    They have known each other forever but it is the first time they have looked at each other like that. Tall as houses, dreams are sometimes real and can be reached like the stars, Sofia thinks as she watches Yakov and feels her fingers brush his as they have never done before. Or are the stars dreams? People in Rzeszów are still not sure. Some went on singing deep into the night.

2

Portrait

    1945. Seven months after Hurbinek’s death
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    Targova Street in Rzeszów has hardly changed in these years of war. The shops are the same, although they have lost the color they had and it has been a long time since they sold anything new or truly useful.
    Targova Street, the old business hub in the small city, is now swept by gusts of wind that blow up clouds of dust that were never so thick in the pre-war years.
    Grandmother Raca Cèrmik, Zelman by her maiden name, stares through the window at that end-of-autumn wind. Russian troops had knocked on her door yet again asking her for milk and meat, but the houses have no cows, hens or rabbits. The gardens bear sparse produce that soon rots. Raca gave the three baby-faced soldiers a couple of fresh turnips and a head of