Until the Dawn's Light

50

THE TRAIN ARRIVED an hour and a half late. Blanca went to the buffet car and ordered a drink. At the counter she met the veteran conductor Brauschwinn, a sturdy man whose bearing had been crushed by the years, but not his spirit. Every year he had accompanied Blanca’s family on their vacation. He had witnessed her mother’s illness, and during the shivah he had come to console her father. Then he had watched her father’s decline, and he had tried to ease his mind with old folk sayings. Blanca had told him about her father’s disappearance.

Blanca’s parents had liked Brauschwinn. They used to buy their tickets from him and tip him. Brauschwinn would sit and tell them about his troubles with his wife, his sons, and his daughters. He got no joy from any of them — from his wife because she was a nag, from his daughters because they had left the house and moved to the big city, and from his sons because they had no ambition, worked like mules, and barely made a living. In his youth he had spent time with Jews in Vienna. He had worked in their stores and in their small textile factories. Had it not been for his wife, who had pulled him to Heimland, he would not have left Vienna. The provinces were a cage that stained a person’s soul, he said repeatedly.

Brauschwinn loved Jews and didn’t hide his love from anyone. It was a long-standing, devoted, and arbitrary love. The other conductors knew about it and made fun of him, but Brauschwinn wasn’t like other people: if anyone reviled Jews in his presence, he upbraided them, and if the reviler was particularly impertinent, he’d get a slap. Because of his love of the Jews, he was called insulting names, but Brauschwinn didn’t relent. More than once he had stood on the platform and shouted: You’ll be asking their forgiveness soon enough.

Brauschwinn spoke Yiddish without an accent and knew some prayers. He had absorbed the ways of the traditional Jews who had migrated from Galicia to Vienna, and nothing was lost on him. Blanca’s father used to tease him with questions, but it didn’t faze him. He used to say that there’s unusual beauty even in removing all the unleavened foods before Passover. When he learned that Blanca had converted to Christianity and married Adolf, he expressed his disappointment in a single phrase.

“Too bad,” he said.

Brauschwinn was pleased to see Blanca now, and in his joy he called out, “Here’s Blanca. You haven’t changed a bit. Thin as ever.”

“And how have you been?”

“Tsoris.” He used the Yiddish word he’d learned from the Galician Jews. Grandma Carole had used that word, but Blanca didn’t remember exactly what it meant.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’ve been sick.”

Blanca didn’t ask any more. His face told the whole story, but in his eyes the fire still burned of a man who cherishes precious memories, those of his youth among the Jews of Galicia who had been uprooted from their home ground and exiled to the big city.

“What came afterward wasn’t life but leftovers,” Brauschwinn had let slip once.

“What attracted you to those Jews?” Blanca dared to ask him this time.

“Their prayer. Have you ever seen Jews praying?”

“I was in the synagogue with my mother a few times.”

“Those weren’t Jews anymore, my dear. Among the Jews of the east there’s a style of prayer, of blessing, and also of human connection.”

“Don’t the Austrians have any style?”

“They do, but it’s clumsy.”

Strange, Blanca said to herself. After all, I was once Jewish.

Brauschwinn sat and spoke, and the more he told her, the more spiritual his face appeared. It was clear that this simple man who had never set foot in a high school, who had worked hard on trains all those years, whose wife vexed him, who got no joy from his sons and daughters, that this man had a secret that nourished him even at this difficult time, a day before he was to be hospitalized.

“Mr. Brauschwinn,” Blanca said, rising to her feet. “Your love for the Jews is a mystery to me.”

“They’re worthy of it, believe me,” he said, removing his cap.

“Will we see each other soon?” she asked when the train stopped at Himmelburg.

“Everything is in the hands of heaven, as people used to say.”

In Himmelburg a pleasant summer light filled the streets. The courtyards and roads were bathed in silence. Blanca wished she could go into one of the little cafés, order a cup of coffee and a piece of cheesecake, and sink into her thoughts, the way she used to do. But her legs refused to do her bidding. They drew her to the old age home.

Theresa saw her from a distance.

“Blanca!” she called out.

Blanca noticed immediately that the corridor had been emptied of its residents, and in the dormitory the old people moved like shadows. Theresa told her that the situation in the old age home couldn’t be worse. The assistance from Vienna had stopped, and though the Himmelburg community continued to support the home, it didn’t have the means to maintain the place. Anyone who had a bit of money ran away. The salaries had been reduced, and they were months in arrears.

They sat in the kitchen, and Theresa served her lunch. She told Blanca that her husband was ill again and had been hospitalized. She spent whatever she made on doctors and medicines. There was never any word from their absent children. Except for her sister, whom she saw occasionally, she had no close relatives. But one mustn’t complain, she said; anyone who was walking on their own two feet and not confined to a wheelchair should bless their good fortune.

Blanca raised her voice. “I felt that I had to come back here.”

“When did you have that feeling?”

“Yesterday I saw my father passing before me.”

“The dead go to their own world, dear, and we’ll see them only at the great resurrection.”

“Sometimes I feel that my father is angry at me.”

“You are mistaken. In the world of truth, our parents speak only on our behalf. They know what we’re going through.”

It was hard to know whether that was an expression of faith or a habit of speech that Theresa had inherited from her mother. She spoke to Blanca the way one speaks to an injured person, to soothe the pain. Blanca took in the words that Theresa showered on her but wanted to say, My guilt feelings can’t be healed by folk wisdom. I’ll wallow in them all my life.

Theresa didn’t say any more. Blanca remembered when she first arrived here with Adolf — how he had surveyed the old people with wordless contempt, and how he had threatened the director so that she, in her fear, had agreed to take in Blanca’s poor father.

“I have to rescue Otto,” Blanca said, rousing herself.

“You have to be patient, to wait and see.”

“To wait, you say?”

“They’re punished in the end, whether by people or by heaven.”

“How many years did you wait?”

“The years pass quickly, and in the end freedom will come. You mustn’t rush things.” In her voice Blanca heard a cruel simplicity, a kind of women’s spell that was passed down from generation to generation, that said again and again, Wait, wait, until the bastard croaks, and then you, too, can go free and enjoy a new life.

Before leaving, Blanca asked, “Do you know a goldsmith or a jeweler?”

“Yes,” Theresa said, and smiled as though she were sharing another secret. “There’s a Jew in this city who has a jewelry store, an honest man. He’ll appraise the jewel and pay you its price. He won’t cheat you.”

“I don’t know how to thank you.”

“What did I do for you?”

“Once again, you pulled me up out of the underworld.”