Until the Dawn's Light_ A Novel - Aharon Appelfeld [79]
At first Blanca was put off by Rosa’s religiosity—it seemed contrived to her—but now she saw that her worship of God was neither artificial nor bitter. There was simplicity in her ways and in her faith, and that faith is what she sought to instill in the children.
During one break Rosa said to Blanca, “I’m trying to bring the children close to the faith of their fathers. A person who is connected with the faith of his fathers is not an orphan.”
“Will they be religious children?” Blanca asked, immediately sensing that there was a flaw in her question.
“We teach them how to pray,” Rosa replied.
“In my house we didn’t observe the tradition,” said Blanca, realizing that it wasn’t the full truth.
In the afternoon Blanca would go down to the market and buy groceries for The Home. The market extended out over a broad, bustling plaza. Peasants displayed their produce in improvised stalls or on long linen cloths. The bustle filled Blanca with a marvelous feeling of forgetfulness, and for a moment it seemed to her that she hadn’t just arrived in Struzhincz, but that she had been working in The Home and shopping in this market for years. Toward evening she would return from the market, laden, and lay the baskets on the mats next to the sink. She would prepare supper together with Rosa.
At night Blanca would return to the pension, and Otto would stay and sleep with the children in The Home. Mrs. Tauber was childless, and the sorrow this caused her was apparent in everything she did. Years ago she had traveled to a well-known doctor in Vienna. He had treated her and promised wonders, but later it became known that his methods were fraudulent and that he had deceived hundreds of women. Since then she had not gone anywhere else to seek a cure. For twenty years she and her husband had run the pension. They had regular clients who came from Czernowitz.
“Our needs are not many,” she would say, “and our life is simple. For what we have, we say a blessing.”
It was evident that the faith of her fathers, which she had brought from her village, sustained her here, too, and there was an innocence in her speech. Nevertheless, Blanca refrained from revealing even a hint of her secret to her. She merely said, “I married very young, and my life wasn’t easy. Now I have to bring Otto to a safe haven.”
Thus November passed. In early December Blanca noticed that the WANTED posters that had hung on the walls of the railway station were now displayed on public buildings as well. For a few days she tried to ignore them, but they cried out from every wall.
I have to tell you something important, she was about to say to Rosa, but she checked herself. She was afraid and didn’t know what to do. It seemed to her that gendarmes were lying in wait for her in every corner.
December was gloomy and cold. After work she would return to the pension and ask, “Has anything come for me?”
“No, nothing, my dear,” Mrs. Tauber would reply.
She would go up to her room immediately, curl up in bed, and say to herself, Otto is so busy with his friends that if I disappear, he won’t notice my absence.
Blanca’s life seemed to have slowly disintegrated. First her conversion, then the hasty marriage, and, immediately afterward, her mother’s death. In those two ceremonies and in the funeral, parts of her soul were amputated. And after her father’s disappearance, her body was emptied of all its will. Just one desire remained within her now: for drink. She tried not to drink in Otto’s presence. She would drink only at night, when she was by herself.
“Don’t forget the notebooks that are in your backpack,” she would remind Otto whenever she was with him.
“What notebooks?”
“The notebooks that I wrote for you.”
“I won’t forget,” said Otto distractedly.
Blanca knew that her requests were pointless. Still, she confused and embarrassed him with them.
With every passing day, the threat to Blanca increased.