Until the Dawn's Light_ A Novel - Aharon Appelfeld [18]
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