She remembered the return from the village, and her perplexity at not traveling by train (the way they had come) and only then by cart through the fields of rye and poppies, but they covered the whole distance back in a cart, moving continuously alongside the tracks with their thundering, haughty trains, and she loved traveling by train, as did her mother, who had told her that she loved to travel by train, but just now she said she preferred to lurch along the bumpy village lanes, where there isn’t any way to shield your head and so the sun strikes you directly on the pate, right on the crown of your skull. Then they reached the city and Marija said to her mother that she’d had more than enough of this cart and that she would at least like to ride the streetcar at this point, to ride the blue one that went from the train station straight to the corner of their street where the chestnut blossoms were, and she saw, the moment their cart turned past the station: first the tram’s lyre-shaped pantograph, and then the fiacres and the horses snorting in front of the station: and then that little blue streetcar appeared, with a tinkling noise like that of small bells, the streetcar that looked so much like a toy, and she cried out:
“There’s the blue one!”—as if she had run into a neighbor from her building or a classmate or at least run across one of her toys, because she enjoyed riding on this blue streetcar and the blue ones are less common and are prettier, because it’s not at all a matter of indifference whether they are blue or yellow, it matters a great deal, but instead of stopping at the station and knocking the dust off their clothes and finally sending away the cart with the worn-out horses, her mother pointed out the way to the driver in his thick sheep’s-wool coat (she who had been wondering the whole time how he could stand to wear it in this intolerable heat), and Marija said to her mother in a pitiful, imploring voice Aren’t we taking the streetcar? and it seemed, in the midst of so much consternation, that it was simply a matter perhaps of inviting her mother to remember by means of this exclamation the thing that she had perhaps forgotten in the village, namely that you could ride the streetcar all the way to their house, perhaps she had merely overlooked the comfort and other advantages of the streetcar as compared to an ordinary team of horses. And Marija thought that as soon as her mother heard her question and as soon as she had been brought to her senses she would clap her hand to her forehead and laugh about her forgetfulness and say something like, “Aha, you see, I had totally forgotten the streetcar,” but her mother didn’t clap her hand to her forehead and she didn’t say it, for the first little while she didn’t say anything, in fact, but just sat there and looked straight ahead, acting as though she couldn’t hear her daughter and as though looking at the façades of the houses so delighted her that she actually couldn’t hear anything at the moment, nothing at all. Therefore Marija had to express her amazement again, but now (for the sake of caution) with a bit of humor in her voice, as if she were saying, “Hey, want to guess what we forgot?” and as if she had to laugh in anticipation of the way her mother would clap her hand to her forehead and reply, for instance, “The thermos!” and Marija would then produce it from her little travel bag and laugh at herself, naturally, laugh; but none of that occurred, and instead of marveling and laughing, her mother, barely turning her head, said:
Riding the streetcar is forbidden, and before Marija could feel astonishment at that, her mother continued: “That’s the reason you aren’t allowed to tell your father why you got mad at Ilonka Kutaj.” And that was the first time Marija put various facts together and finally comprehended more or less why they had kept her in the village with the excuse that it was good for her health, and why she couldn’t tell the father anything, but precisely because it was still not entirely clear to her and something was still concealed from her she resolved firmly to tell her father everything, naturally not right away, but she would definitely find a good reason to force herself to say it, and she would come up with an excuse to use on her mother and on herself, thus she said to her mother now, as if she couldn’t even understand the little bit that she did understand or suspect:
“I don’t understand why it’s forbidden to ride the streetcar! I just don’t understand. . how could riding a streetcar can be forbidden?”—And at that point mother tapped her head, not in the way she would if something had crossed her mind, or not just in that way, Marija saw her mother raising her hand to her forehead and holding it there, not as someone would if they were wondering about something but as if she were brushing away a broken-hearted resolution from her forehead along with a strand of hair, and then Marija continued watching as her mother stretched her arm out with the same hopeless gesture in the direction where the streetcar stood, like a toy, and her mother stared, still searching with her eyes I don’t understand why riding the streetcar is forbidden as if she were seeing a streetcar for the first time, wondering, lips pursed, what purpose that blue tin can with the lyre on top served, whether it was a vehicle or a children’s toy or maybe something even more obscure, maybe a dangerous or even a sinful thing; and then Marija heard her mother’ voice, like a rebuke:
“My God, you aren’t a child anymore! Haven’t you seen anything around you that might give you a hint?” and then, as if she were pointing out the letters in a primer to someone just learning their alphabet or pretending not to know what was what or even that he couldn’t see them: “Read that. There, you see, the white letters. By the door. . Do you understand? You speak good German. . Yes, that placard on the streetcar. Next to the door. FÜR JUDEN VERBOTEN. Do you understand: für Juden verboten? Do you understand now?”—and Marija grasped it all immediately, at least as far as the translation from German went, of all things her mother hadn’t needed to translate that, but she understood something else too in the murky fabric of events, though still she felt she hadn’t been given sufficient cause to alter the expression on her face or to stop pursing her own lips like that, like a cantankerous little witch, and then she resolved firmly and just out of spite to tell her father everything anyway, in order to find out the remainder of what she didn’t know, the remainder of the truth that was still hiding from her but that she must ultimately find out, lest she remain or become a genuinely cantankerous witch and go on pursing her lips forever, or at least until she finally came to know what it meant that people all of a sudden, while she’d been in the village, had written FÜR JUDEN VERBOTEN on the streetcars, which is to say why this was so, why she was no longer allowed to ride on the streetcar,
What about the yellow one, Mama
Not the yellow one either
child, you aren’t allowed on any streetcar
understand: not any