Until the Dawn's Light

by Aharon Appelfeld

  But there were also moments of clarity. The clouds of fantasy in which he had entrenched himself would disperse, and he saw what he didn’t want to see: his misery. Then he would suddenly say, “Blanca, I’m hopeless. I have to get out of here as soon as possible. I don’t want to be a burden.”

  “Why are you hurting me, Papa?”

  These, of course, were merely flashes. The clouds would surround him once more, and his face would darken or suddenly change and become awkwardly merry. Adolf’s opinion was uncompromising. “We have to bring him to the old age home in Himmelburg and give the institution no alternative. Don’t worry, they won’t dare contradict me.”

  She tried to stop him. “Not yet,” she said.

  “You’re too preoccupied with him,” he declared.

  The next day they went. Her father didn’t object. A simple, awkward smile sat on his face, as though he knew that he would not escape from Adolf’s grasp. The train trip took about an hour, and they reached the old age home before lunch. The manager, not a young woman, explained to them that the place was full beyond capacity and that even the corridors were taken. Adolf was determined to leave her father there, no matter what.

  The elderly manager listened and repeated her arguments. She showed him the corridor, crammed with beds. “There’s no room, good people,” she said, spreading her arms.

  “If there are twenty beds, one can be added,” Adolf argued with force.

  In the end, when she proved to him how wrong he was, Adolf didn’t restrain himself. He pounded on the table and said, “The Jews have to take him in. If they don’t take him in, this building will go up in flames. You can’t talk to Jews in any other language.”

  The manager turned pale, asked for consideration, and finally raised her hands and said, “What can I do?”

  Thus was Blanca’s father abandoned. He stood there, stunned. Then he hugged Blanca and said, “Go home, child. Everything is all right.” Blanca promised to bring him more clothing and his shaving kit.

  “Don’t forget to bring the chess set.”

  Adolf rushed Blanca out. Her father suddenly raised his right hand and called out loud, “Be well, children, and take care of yourselves.”

  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 a
nd 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.

  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 s
he 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.

  16

  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.