Until the Dawn's Light

14

RIGHT AFTER THAT, Blanca sold the house and paid the debts, and there was some cash left over to give to her father. She was glad she managed to finish that matter. She left for Himmelburg on the morning train to tell her father about the sale. She found him sitting in bed, wearing striped pajamas. A strange merriness glowed in his eyes. Hearing her words, he said, “How is Mama? Do we have to bring her to a rest home again?”

“No.”

“Thank God.”

Then, with no transition, he asked her to bring him his mathematics books because he wanted to freshen his knowledge. About the place itself he said nothing.

It was her father, but he was not really himself. His cheeks were red, and a kind of childish astonishment lit up his face. The things that perturbed him at home still perturbed him here, but now he added, “No matter.”

“How is Grandma Carole?”

“She’s quite fine,” Blanca answered.

“She’s always fine,” her father said mischievously.

The director told her the absolute truth. He wasn’t living in reality, and he had to be treated like a child. The old age home couldn’t bear the expense of taking care of him.

Hearing her words, Blanca buried her face in her hands and burst into tears.

“What can I do?” she cried. “I have nothing of my own, and my husband won’t let me work outside of the house.”

The elderly director, seeing her youth and distress, exerted no more pressure on her.

“Don’t abandon your father,” she said. “Come to visit him often.”

“Of course I’ll come. I have no one else in the world beside him.”

The director also told Blanca that most of the residents were abandoned. The children had converted to Christianity and denied their old parents. The financial condition of the institution was precarious, and were it not for bequests from some of those who died, the place would have been closed long ago. Blanca promised to come and help, and the elderly director hugged her, saying, “You’re a loyal daughter, and the Jewish spark is not extinguished in your heart.”

“That’s my grip on this world, believe me,” Blanca said with emotion.

“There are so few of us, and we are worn so thin,” said the director, and it was clear that the burden on her shoulders was too heavy to bear.

From then on, Blanca’s days were oppressive and disheartening.

“Let me see Papa,” Blanca would beg. “I’ll come back in the afternoon.” But Adolf refused.

“You have to cut yourself off from them.”

“But he’s my father.”

“I said what I said.”

It was power and dread bound up together. Blanca was so weak that everything Adolf said or did seemed correct to her. At night she would wake up and ask, “Where am I?” She was gradually disintegrating.

Again help came to her from heaven. Adolf went off for a week of occupational training in the Tyrolean Mountains, and Blanca rushed out that very morning. This time, too, she found her father sitting on the bed. His face had grown thin, and a strange spirituality glowed in it.

At first he didn’t recognize her. But then he did, and called out, “Look, it’s my Blanca. It’s my daughter.” Not a minute passed before he rose from his bed and asked, “How’s Mama? How does she feel?”

“Fine,” Blanca replied.

“And we won’t have to take her to a rest home?”

“No.”

“Thank God.”

Then it was as if all his words had faded away. Blanca didn’t know what to say, either, so she was silent. The man lying next to him asked, “Who’s that pretty girl?”

“My daughter, Blanca.”

“She looks a lot like you.”

“She’s my only daughter, and I have no other children.”

“I have three sons, but they don’t come to visit me.”

“Where do they live?”

“Not far from here.”

Blanca hadn’t forgotten about her father’s request. She brought a package of mathematics books. Although the books had turned yellow with the years, they excited her father.

“I’ll start right away,” he said in his former tone of voice.

Blanca gathered the clothes that were stuffed into the cupboard and went out to wash them. The laundry, a broad, half-dark room with green stains on its walls, gave off a heavy odor of dampness and mildew. The sink, the washboard, and the water in the tubs evoked images of her childhood and of Johanna, their cleaning woman, who had left the house about two years before her mother’s death because her father could no longer pay her. She was a devout Christian, and her long, narrow room was full of sacred images and the fragrance of incense. While Blanca was still a child, Johanna used to place her on her knees, remove the image of Jesus from the wall, and say, “This is Jesus. He is the savior of the world, and we pray to him morning and night.” This made a great impression on Blanca, and she kept that secret in her heart, without revealing a hint of it to her parents.

When Blanca was in high school, already full of knowledge, excelling in the exact sciences, enthusiastic about Rousseau and Marx, and positive that religion would ultimately disappear from the world, she continued to visit Johanna in her room and talk to her. Once Johanna told her, in the tones of a person firm in her faith, “Whoever refuses to acknowledge our Redeemer will not be saved.”

Blanca wanted to laugh. But seeing the devotion in Johanna’s face, she controlled herself and asked, “And the Jews won’t be saved?”

“No, to my regret.”

“Why not, Johanna?”

“Because they refuse to accept His mercy.”

Back then Johanna’s beliefs had sounded old-fashioned and unfounded. Blanca was confident that those superstitions would ultimately fade away, and that the doctrines of Rousseau and Marx would fill everyone’s heart.

Before an hour had gone by, Blanca had washed everything, and then went out to hang the laundry on the clotheslines. Contact with those familiar shirts, which Johanna and, later, Blanca’s mother used to wash on the rear balcony, reminded her of her mother’s slow, tormented death. A few days before she died, Blanca’s mother had said to Blanca, “Take care of Papa. Life hasn’t been kind to him.”

“Mama, why are you worried?” Blanca had said.

When she returned to the corridor, she found her father immersed in the effort to solve a mathematical problem. He was on his knees next to a small trunk, with the books scattered on his bed. For Blanca this was a sight from earlier times, when she herself had studied mathematics.

“Papa,” she said as she approached him.

“What’s the matter, dear?” He raised his face to her.

“Are the problems hard?”

“Not especially.”

“I have to go home, Papa.”

“Go in peace, dear,” he said distractedly.

“I’ll come back soon,” she said, and kissed his forehead.

“Very good,” he replied, and sank into his notebook.

It was very painful to Blanca that her good father, whom she wanted to sit next to and tell about all the humiliations and fears that had been her lot during the past months, that her good, sensitive father had departed from the world. What remained of him was a high school boy, all of whose grades were excellent. Now the boy was burrowing into mathematics books to show everyone that he was better than Lutzky and Levi, the two Jewish boys in his class who were his competitors. Lutzky and Levi had become industrialists. They had conquered the Austrian market and expanded across the provinces as far as distant Bukovina. And he had remained stuck in his stationery store with his cousin Dachs.