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By Root 556 0

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