Until the Dawn's Light

32

BLANCA GREW STRONGER, and she would give the baby to the large woman who came to nurse him every day. First it seemed that the baby was gaining strength, but after a week of steady nursing, he began to vomit severely. There was no choice but to go back to the porridge that Christina had been carefully making for him. Blanca’s mother-in-law wasn’t pleased by the sudden change, and she kept saying that if the mother was weak, then the baby would also show signs of weakness. “In our family, thank God, everyone is healthy and strong.”

Celia came to visit Blanca, who was so happy to see her that she started crying. Ever since Celia had brought her Buber’s anthology, the book never left her hands. Even in her days of severe illness, she read it.

All of Celia’s movements were familiar to Blanca, even the tilt of her neck, but she still wasn’t the Celia she had once been. The Stillstein Mountains had changed her through and through. Celia spoke about her distant ancestors like someone who knew what she was talking about. She pronounced the names of their villages in Galicia and Bukovina as if she had just come back from visiting them the day before.

“You haven’t shown Otto to me,” said Celia. “How is he doing?”

Christina brought him in, and Celia said, “He looks like a darling baby.”

“My husband and mother-in-law aren’t pleased by his development.”

“Blanca, my dear, we mustn’t consider other people’s opinions. You have to go your own way.”

“If only I knew the way,” replied Blanca.

The hospital’s situation deteriorated. Dr. Nussbaum was working day and night. He grew so tired that he would collapse on a couch in his office in the middle of the day and fall asleep. The rich people who had promised to support the institution reneged on their promises. Dr. Nussbaum had already sent seven memorandums to the Ministry of Health, and what the municipality sent wasn’t enough even for medicines. In his soul, Dr. Nussbaum knew that he would have no alternative but to send his patients home and close the gates of the institution, but he kept postponing the closure. His voice had changed over the past few days. He walked through the corridor with vigorous steps, shouting, “The rich have luxurious and roomy hospitals, and a well-trained medical staff. But what will become of the public hospitals? What will the poor and oppressed people do? Where will they go?” His speech was frightening, because he spoke to the bare walls.

The thought that one day Blanca would journey to the famous Carpathian Mountains and bathe in the Prut River took shape within her while she was ill, and now it was very clear. She imagined her life in the Carpathians as a simple life, a country life, with hours of prayer that would divide the day into three sections. On holidays everyone would put on white clothes and go to pray in small wooden synagogues. The disciples of the Ba’al Shem Tov’s disciples still prayed in those small synagogues. They had reached a ripe old age and dozed during most of the day. But in the summer, in the drowsy hours of the afternoon, they sat in the doorways of the houses of study and greeted those who arrived with a blessing.

Blanca was sorry that her mother had told her so little about her childhood in the Carpathians. Her family had left the mountains when she was five, but she had retained some images of it in her heart. Blanca’s father, on the other hand, had harbored resentment against his parents because of their poverty and because they had made it impossible for him to study at the university, and so for him everything there had sunk into an abyss.

“Thank you, Celia.”

“What are you thanking me for?”

“For the anthology by Martin Buber.”

Upon hearing Martin Buber’s name, Celia inclined her head, as she undoubtedly did in the convent in Stillstein.