Until the Dawn's Light (21 page)
Read Until the Dawn's Light Online
Authors: Aharon Appelfeld
“Don’t you have any help?” the gendarmes asked in surprise.
“My late wife used to help me, but since she passed away, I do all the chores myself.”
“Everybody has their own troubles.” The gendarmes’ sympathy was skin-deep.
Blanca was more and more fascinated by their conversation. As it happened, the gendarmes were Austrian. They had been sent there to advise the local police force. The tavern owner told them what he had just told Blanca, that in his youth he had served as a soldier in Salzburg, and that those had been the best years of his life. They spoke about the infantry and the artillery, recalling the camps and the well-known officers. They raised their glasses and cursed the winter that was seeping into their bones.
While the gendarmes were talking, Blanca realized they were speaking in the singsong accent of her hometown. That sound, so familiar, stunned her, and without hesitation she approached them.
“Is it not true that my ears have taken in the voices of Heimland?” she said.
“True, madam,” answered the older gendarme.
“How long have you been here?”
“It’s been a month already.”
“I’ve been here longer. What’s going on in my hometown?”
“Everything is as it was.”
“It’s good to see familiar people. Our accent gives us away immediately, does it not? Don’t you miss home, too?”
“A little. What are you doing here?”
“I’m making my way to the Holy Rabbi of Vizhnitz. My parents of blessed memory were born in this region, and I’m following in their footsteps, to get the Holy Rabbi’s blessing.”
“Strange.”
“Why strange?”
“In these times no one goes to holy men anymore.”
“They are exalted men, sir. Have you never heard the name of Martin Buber?”
“No.”
“He wrote a wonderful book about the faith of the Tsadiks.”
The eyes of one of the gendarmes lit up.
“What’s your name, if I may ask?”
“My name is Blanca Guttmann, and my father had a stationery store in Heimland.”
“And you studied in the municipal high school?”
“Correct, sir.”
“When, then, did you leave Heimland?”
“Right after my father’s disappearance. My father lived during the last year of his life, or rather the last months of his life, in the old age home in Himmelburg, and he suddenly disappeared. God knows where he disappeared to. Since then I’ve been looking for him.”
“How are you looking for him?”
“I go from place to place.”
“And meanwhile you set churches on fire?”
“No, sir. That’s strictly forbidden.”
“I was suspicious of the innocent, apparently.”
“I’m going straight to Vizhnitz from here. Maybe the Holy Rabbi will find the solution to his disappearance.”
“Well, Stephan,” the gendarme said, turning to his comrade, who had been standing silently at his side, “the fox has forgotten his tail.”
Blanca didn’t move or react to his words. She appeared to be caught up in the man’s charm. The many drinks she had downed no longer made her dizzy. She stood on her two feet and placed her trust in those two gendarmes, who reminded her of the two old janitors in her high school. And when they placed handcuffs on her wrists and brought her to the police station, she neither complained nor pleaded.
“I used to go to My Corner with my father almost every week” was all that she said. “It’s an excellent café, and its cheesecake is worthy of every praise. If there’s one thing I miss now, it’s a cup of coffee and their cheesecake. That’s all, nothing more.”
Aharon Appelfeld
is the author of more than forty works of fiction and nonfiction, including
Badenheim 1939, Tzili, The Iron Tracks
(winner of the National Jewish Book Award), and
The Story of a Life
(winner of the Prix Médicis Étranger). Other honors he has received include the Giovanni Boccaccio Literary Prize, the Nelly Sachs Prize, the Israel Prize, the Bialik Prize, and the MLA Commonwealth Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received honorary degrees from the Jewish Theological Seminary, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and Yeshiva University. Born in Czernowitz, Bukovina (now part of Ukraine), in 1932, he lives in Israel.
Also available in eBook format
by Aharon Appelfeld
All Whom I Have Loved
• 978-0-307-48132-0
Blooms of Darkness
• 978-0-8052-4285-0
The Iron Tracks
• 978-0-307-48639-4
Katerina
• 978-0-307-48670-7
The Story of a Life
• 978-0-307-49139-8
Coming Soon in eBook format
Tzili
• 978-0-8052-1253-2
More info @:
http://www.schocken.com
