Until the Dawn's Light (6 page)

WHEN SHE RETURNED HOME
in the early afternoon, Blanca realized that her life was now merely a smoldering ember. Overcome with fear, she went to the sink and washed the dishes. Then she began to chop the vegetables and dice the meat the way Adolf had told her to.

While she was cutting and preparing, Blanca remembered that Adolf wasn’t coming back that night. Six full days still lay at her disposal. She cautiously stepped over to the armchair and sank into it. For a long time she sat, withdrawn into herself. Only after the sun began to set, so that its light fell upon the wall opposite her, did a feeling of ease, such as she had not felt for a long while, spread down her back and arms.

Later, she changed her clothes and went outdoors. The afternoon light was full, but chilly and colorless. At this time of the year, the examinations in school were at their most intense. Blanca would study hard, delving into complicated subjects and resolving mathematical problems. The examinations required an exhausting effort, but victory was not slow in coming.

“I have one ‘Excellent,’ ” Dr. Weiss would announce, and everyone knew whom he was talking about. There was a Jewish boy named Theo Braunstein in her class, a student of average ability who tried to claim a piece of the crown for himself. He was self-important, squinty-eyed, and ridiculous in his ambition. Everybody knew that no one was better than Blanca at solving complicated problems. Theo tried to woo her by showing off his mathematical prowess. Everybody knew that two private tutors were helping him and equipping him with all sorts of unusual examples to make an impression on the teachers. He didn’t impress Blanca. Blanca didn’t like the way he made a show of his knowledge, flattered the teachers, and acted insulted when a grade didn’t suit him. She rejected his attentions.

Now he is probably studying at the university,
she thought.
Soon he’ll be a doctor or a lawyer
. Strange, but that passing thought imperceptibly restored something of herself. She was pleased that she had those memories. Once she had been an admired student; anyone who couldn’t solve a mathematics problem would turn to her, and she would solve it. It occurred to her that it would be nice to visit one of her friends, the way she used to do not many years ago. But then she realized that she had no close friends; the few that she once had were married or had gone off to other cities. There had been one good friend, Anna, a tall, attractive girl, with whom she liked to converse. They used to talk about school—about the teachers and, of course, about the other students. Anna had insights that made Blanca laugh: she noticed the way the students dressed, how they sat, and how they raised their hands. Blanca, on the other hand, was immersed in her books. They were her whole world, and if she wanted conversation, she talked with her parents. She didn’t know how to observe people. In the last two years of high school, a great change took place in Anna’s behavior. The pretty, open girl gradually closed up. She spoke little and hardly took part in classroom discussions. She grew thin, and her face became shriveled. One day she told Blanca that she had decided to enter the church and follow a religious way of life.

Blanca was stunned. “Do you pray every day?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to you?” Blanca asked, and immediately regretted the question.

None of the Jewish girls Blanca knew well was devoted to her faith. Nor were the Jewish converts to Christianity. But among the Christian girls, there were some who spoke about the convent as a possibility for their lives. Anna confided in her: only a religious life was meaningful. Any other life was insipid and miserable. At the time, Anna’s words had seemed like a narrowness of mind to Blanca. Blanca saw the world in the form of mathematical and chemical formulas and, sometimes, through the struggle to change society.

“I don’t want to be like my parents,” Anna told her.

“Why?”

“There’s a kind of weary insipidity to their lives.”

The expression “weary insipidity,” which Anna pronounced sharply, revealed the change that had taken place in her. She was no longer that lighthearted Anna who observed people and noticed their weaknesses. Now she was a different Anna—inhibited, and with a few deep lines of sorrow already creasing her face. Blanca kept her distance from her. From time to time they met, but their conversations weren’t as they had been in the past. Blanca was certain that Anna had been captured by a useless faith, and that she would regret it.

The grocer told Blanca that Anna was now a nun and that she had been living for several years in a convent in the Mensen Mountains. Once a year, right after Christmas, she would come down from the convent and visit her parents.

“How far is it to there?”

“There’s no regular transportation. You go up from the railway station by foot.”

When she went back out into the street, Blanca saw Grandma Carole standing in front of the synagogue’s locked doors. Her blind face was taut and her eyelids quivered. Passersby looked at her with contempt and called her names, but she stood at attention in her place and didn’t react.
That old blind woman, my mother’s mother, is now standing alone against the mob, receiving insults but not leaving her post,
Blanca thought. That thought erased the feelings of estrangement that had for years dwelled in her heart, and Blanca looked upon Grandma Carole not as her prickly grandmother but as a brave woman who was fighting for her principles.

While Blanca was observing her, the blind woman began to cry. From her shattered syllables, it was hard at first for Blanca to understand why she was crying. But then Blanca recognized names that she knew, among them the daughter who had died too young and Grandma Carole’s three grandchildren, who had become apostates. It wasn’t the weeping of someone who was disoriented, but of a mourner. Passersby, as well as the nearby shopkeepers who had gotten used to her shouting and curses over time, stood in amazement. No one approached her. Her sightless eyes continued to roll, and her weeping became swallowed up inside her.

Eventually she stretched out her cane and turned right, in the direction of her house. Blanca wanted to follow her and accompany her home, but she didn’t dare. Instead, she went into the nearby tavern and drank two glasses of cognac. The burning liquid seeped into her and its warmth spread throughout her body.

In her parents’ home, they didn’t drink. Blanca had her first drinks under Adolf’s direction. Adolf had known how to drink from his youth. At first drinking disgusted her and made her dizzy, but in time she found that two or three drinks drew her out of her despondency. Later on, after Otto’s birth, Blanca fell into a deep depression, and cognac was what saved her. Now, too, cognac brought her relief. She rose and went outside, certain, for some reason, that her broken life was no longer going to be held captive. Now she had to stride forward, which is what she did. She proceeded in the direction of her house, imagining the bed upon which she would soon lay her heavy head.

OTTO AWOKE IN
the middle of the night.

“What are you doing, Mama?” he asked.

“I’m writing.”

“What are you writing?”

“My memoirs.”

For a moment he was perplexed, as though he realized he had already asked that question and had been answered.

Over the past week they had spent many hours together. The days grew longer, and now the twilight lasted until midnight. Otto was awake for a long time, and Blanca didn’t start writing until he collapsed on the mat. At first the sentences flowed, but now she found it hard to write a complete sentence. Fatigue and fear of coming events blocked the flow, and her sentences were fragmentary and scattered. To correct the flaws, she rewrote again and again.

Otto did not make things easier for her. He demanded attention and kept bringing up memories he had of their house. These few memories were not without meaning for him, but he knew that his mother didn’t like it when he asked about the toys they had left behind. While he seldom asked questions, when they passed by the chapel and he saw the image of the crucified Christ, he didn’t hold back. “Why did the Jews crucify Jesus?” he asked.

“Didn’t I tell you that the Jews didn’t crucify Jesus?” she replied impatiently.

“So who did crucify him?”

“The Romans.”

“I didn’t know.”

“So get that fact into your head. The Romans crucified Jesus and not the Jews.”

The years Blanca had spent with Adolf left more than physical scars on her. When she got angry, she noticed, she imitated his voice. More than once she had sworn to herself that she would uproot that violent voice from her throat, but, as though in spite, every time she got angry, it returned.

“When are we going?” Otto suddenly asked before falling asleep.

“Why are you asking, dear?”

“It looked to me like we were about to leave.”

“Perhaps. Do you want to?”

“Where will we go?”

“I guess we’ll go farther north.”

Otto was sensitive to every movement. Two days earlier, two men who were looking for a woman named Anna Tramweill aroused Blanca’s suspicion. They went from house to house, and finally they stood in the street and questioned passersby. They looked like two peasants who were searching for a debtor or a witness in a trial. In any case, she didn’t like the looks of the men, and she said to Otto, “Maybe we’ll have to leave soon.” He usually reacted to her fears belatedly.

The landlady was very friendly to them. She told Blanca scraps of her life and praised her daughter. Her daughter not only lengthened her mother’s days, but she also broadened her world. God had mercy on all His creatures, and upon her He showed particular mercy. Blanca didn’t usually like that way of speaking, but from the old woman’s mouth it sounded truthful.

That morning the landlady brought them a loaf of bread she had just baked, and a jar of prune jam.

“I’m sorry,” Blanca said. “We might have to leave soon.”

“Why so fast?”

“What can I do?” Blanca said, without going into detail.

Since encountering the two men in the street, Blanca hadn’t felt tranquil. She locked the door and didn’t walk as far as before. When the sun set, which was very late now, they walked up from the riverbank and Blanca made dinner. First Otto observed her handiwork, then he sat with his toys.

The day before he had asked, “When are we going to see a soccer game?”

Otto used to go to the soccer field with Adolf. After the game, Adolf would take him to his friends in the tavern. When they returned home, Otto’s face would be red from the sun, and his movements would be wild. When he shouted, Adolf would slap his face the way he slapped Blanca’s face, with no warning.

“A boy must behave properly. He must listen, and not get fresh,” he would say. Every time a slap landed on Otto’s face, Blanca would cringe, but she never said anything to Adolf. She would hug Otto and kiss the place where he was hurt, and for that she was scolded, of course.

Meanwhile, Blanca’s writings piled up on the wooden table. She hadn’t written since the end of high school, and the letters had become alien to her. She tried to stick to some order and to the facts, and of course to block the anger that sometimes welled up in her. She repeatedly told herself that the facts came before anything else. Without facts, there could be no reliable testimony.

TWO DAYS WITHOUT
Adolf, and Blanca’s body began to thaw out a little. Though her movements were still constricted, she was no longer afraid to go into town. A week earlier, in great despair, she had put on her mother’s wristwatch. For a whole day she felt the burning touch of the strap. Now she felt that the watch was protecting her.

Blanca rose early the next morning and rushed to catch the train to Himmelburg. She had packed a bag full of vegetables and fruit, and a cheesecake she bought in a bakery, and she knew that as soon as he walked through the door Adolf would ask her about the extra expenses. But the full bag made her so happy that Adolf’s return didn’t concern her at all. She walked to the railway station energetically and with a self-esteem she had forgotten she had. Within a few minutes she was there.

The train arrived on time, and Blanca found a comfortable seat next to a window. Since Adolf had left the house, some visions of her distant childhood had returned to her. When her mother had taken her to school for the first time, and she had seen how rowdy the school yard was, Blanca had heard her mother say to herself,
Good God, what will my daughter do in this mob? She’ll be lost
. Then, when the principal, with her sturdy appearance, called Blanca’s name and told her to part from her mother and go into the classroom, her mother had taken her with both hands and said, “May God watch over you, my good little girl!” Thus, with trembling hands, she had let go of her mother. Now Blanca clearly remembered the long, high-ceilinged corridor through which she had walked every day. She also saw the frightening principal, whom she hadn’t seen for years.

Blanca went to the buffet car and had two drinks, one right after the other. The thought that in less than an hour she would be with her beloved father filled her with happiness. For a moment it seemed to her that she wasn’t going to the old age home in Himmelburg but to their enchanted vacation home in the Winterweiss Mountains, where they had imbibed the pleasures of the summer, reading or just sitting in silence. If there was a piano, Blanca’s mother would play Mozart sonatas. In the mountains, what was hidden inside each of them—a desire to withdraw from the noisy world, a yearning for solitude—found expression. They would walk through the valleys, far from the main roads, immersed in silence.

Blanca found her father in a good mood. He told her at length, and not without humor, about the routines of the place and the ridiculous arrangements, but his cheerful behavior, which reminded her of better times and other places, filled her with sudden melancholy. She understood then that her father didn’t grasp what fate had ordained for him, and where he had ended up. He was sitting on his bed in his old striped pajamas, his big impish eyes wide open. The sight of her father in his new incarnation brought a catch to her throat, and she had to stifle her tears.

When she showed him what she had brought, he kissed her forehead and said, “I have one daughter and Blanca is her name, and she is better to me than two brothers.” It was no coincidence that he said “two brothers.” He really did have two brothers in South America; they had sailed there when they were young. At first they had sent postcards. Then they disappeared, and not a word was heard from them.

Then Blanca’s father introduced her to the people lying alongside him in the corridor. In his short stay, he had become acquainted with them. The smell of mold and burned food hung in the air. The people lying in their beds raised themselves slightly in honor of the guest. They asked about the weather and about the arrival and departure of trains, and they complained about their sons and daughters, who had not come to visit them in months.

“Your papa is a young man. What is he doing in this stable?” one of the old men asked her.

“I’m not so young, sir. I’m fifty-three already,” her father answered.

“You’re a child, sir. Entry here is restricted to people over seventy. People live here for a year or two and die off.”

“Isn’t my presence welcome?” her father asked mischievously.

“Most welcome, and very pleasant. But you mustn’t be in this stable. The old horses are brought to this stable so that no one will see the torments of their demise.”

“Silence!” an old man called out from a corner of the corridor.

“I’m just telling him the truth. I’m neither adding nor detracting.”

“Why don’t we go out and take a little walk?” Blanca was surprised to find that her voice had returned to her.

“What for, dear?”

“To see Himmelburg, an ancient and beautiful city.”

“I don’t feel like getting dressed.”

“Not even in honor of me?”

That sentence did what only a magic word can do. Her father put on his fine winter suit, he placed his hat on his head, and they left the corridor as though they were visitors. Her father, she found, was familiar with Himmelburg from past years. At one time he had wanted to buy a bookstore there, and the deal almost went through, but Grandma Carole had interfered. She claimed that the store wasn’t profitable and that he would do better to buy a store in Heimland, where people knew one another.

For a moment it seemed to Blanca that her father had returned to his old self and in a little while he would come home. But then she remembered that the house had been sold, and if Adolf knew that he had slept in their house, he would beat her.

“Papa,” she said.

“What, dear?”

“Himmelburg is a very pretty city, prettier than Heimland.”

“In my youth I used to come here often.”

“What for, Papa?”

“I had a girlfriend here.”

“And what happened?”

“I liked your mother better.”

They sat in a café, and Blanca’s father told her that although he had all the qualifications to be accepted as a student in the mathematics department at the university in Vienna, his parents, who had the means to support him, wouldn’t let him go. Blanca knew very well how things had turned out. But this time her father added new details, and it was clear that he had never forgiven his parents for that injustice. And that was also why he had distanced himself from everything Jewish. Blanca’s father spoke in an orderly, logical way. He mentioned his partner Dachs and Grandma Carole, and Blanca was glad to see that he was once again the father she knew so well, that what had happened to him was just a temporary condition.

But later, as he continued to speak, he began to talk about another injustice, much graver and unknown to her, that had caused him great sorrow and blocked his way in life. He declared that when the time came he would bring a lawsuit against that good-for-nothing. Blanca tried to find out more about that injustice, and who the man was who had committed it. But as he plunged deeper and deeper into the details, Blanca realized that her beloved father had lost his way in dark labyrinths and was trying with all his strength to extricate himself.

On their way back to the old age home, he continued to speak angrily against everyone who had stood in his way. His face grew taut, and his words burned. When they parted, he said, “Go in peace, my daughter. It’s good that you at least are happy in life.” All the way home, Blanca tried to hold back her tears.