Until the Dawn's Light

15

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 For a long time she sat, withdrawn into herself.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.