Until the Dawn's Light (11 page)

ON FEBRUARY 16,
1908, after a long and difficult labor, a son was born to Blanca. At first she wanted to call him Erwin, after her missing father, but Adolf refused. He agreed to the name Otto, after her mother’s brother, who had died young, in the middle of his university studies. Dr. Nussbaum extended her stay in the hospital, and Blanca nursed the infant morning, noon, and night, until she became weak from lack of sleep and, under doctor’s orders, stopped nursing. Adolf heard about it and was angry, but he made no comment. She had noticed: in the hospital he controlled himself and didn’t raise his voice. Dr. Nussbaum’s efforts to restore the hospital to full capacity had failed. Just two wards were occupied. The others were deserted. Day and night, patients pounded on the doors, but he was unable to help them. The maintenance staff refused to work, and, lacking help, Dr. Nussbaum put on overalls and went to clean the toilets and add coal to the boilers to heat water for the laundry. The patients, most of them aged, complained a lot about their pains, about their children who had abandoned them, and about their old age. Dr. Nussbaum loved those old people. He went from bed to bed to examine them, and to tell a joke and make them laugh. Some of the old people spoke Yiddish, and Dr. Nussbaum, to make them happy, told them that he was born in the provinces, in a small town called Zhadova. His family had spoken Yiddish at home, and he was still fond of the language. The old folks forgot their age and their pains for the moment, and they told him what weighed on their hearts. Dr. Nussbaum listened and said, “May God have mercy,” and that of course made them laugh heartily.

Blanca slept most of the day, but when she opened her eyes and saw Christina, the will to live returned to her, and she wanted to get to her feet and approach the window. Christina was devoted to her patients, never leaving them day or night. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, when a patient burst into tears, Christina would immediately rush to his bed, give him something to drink, and calm him down. Now that the staff numbered only two, she never took off her uniform.
If I possessed a love of humanity like Christina’s
, Blanca thought,
I wouldn’t have married; I would, instead, have worked in the public hospital. But I was weak, given over to myself and my own happiness
.

Adolf and his two sisters visited her. After that noisy visit, it was hard for Blanca to keep her eyes open. Drowsiness enveloped her like a blanket, and as she felt herself succumbing to it, she remembered exactly what Adolf’s sisters had said to her and how they had looked at her. A great scream, like the sound of a falling tree, rose up out of her throat.

Christina held her hand.

“Now you look better,” she said.

My life is shattered to splinters,
Blanca wanted to say,
and it can be repaired only by labor and devotion. Otto will belong to his father, and I’ll go to work in a hospital or an old age home
.

Later Dr. Nussbaum came and sat beside her. Now he was not only a physician. He was the hospital, in the figure of a single person. The pharmacist refused to provide medicines on credit, so Dr. Nussbaum paid him out of his own pocket. He took the trash down to the inner courtyard. When Blanca saw Dr. Nussbaum at work, she overcame her drowsiness and opened her eyes, marveling at every step he took.

“How do you feel, my dear?” he asked, leaning over her.

Blanca wanted to tell him that she felt a strong dizziness that pulled her down, that her legs were cold, and that she was afraid of the abyss yawning beneath her. She wanted to tell him, but didn’t dare. She knew that Dr. Nussbaum’s responsibilities were even greater now and that everyone was pressuring him. Dr. Nussbaum looked at her face and knew that Blanca lay in darkness, that she had to be watched over lest she do something desperate.

Sometimes, in the afternoon, when the heaviest drowsiness loosened its hold on her, Blanca felt a strong connection to her father and mother and to the country from which they had emigrated. It seemed to her that the Prut—in whose clear waters her mother and father and their forebears had bathed—was a purifying river, and if she ever managed to get to it, she would be saved from this stifling melancholy.

Thus the days passed. From time to time Adolf or one of his sisters would appear like a thick shadow. Blanca barely recognized them. One evening Adolf’s elder sister came to visit her and asked, “When are you coming home?” Blanca tried to open her eyes. When they were open, to her joy she saw Dr. Nussbaum. “You don’t have to answer,” he said. She was immediately relieved and felt as though he had hidden her under the hem of his clothing.

BLANCA BEGAN TO
feel better; she saw Otto and took pleasure in him. The other patients gathered around her, and they all said the baby was amazingly beautiful, that it had been a long time since they’d seen such a lovely baby. Dr. Nussbaum knew about Blanca’s situation and said, “You’ll stay here for the time being.”

March was warm, and Blanca felt the closeness of her mother and father, and remembered the row of walnut trees that led to the high school. Sometimes she had met her teachers Klein and Weiss there, and they would talk on the steps of the building. The image was bright, as though time had transparently embalmed it.

Now her heart told her that she must go to Grandma Carole and reconcile with her. The last time Blanca had seen her, Grandma Carole was standing silently, her neck stretched upward, the sun’s rays covering her dark face. She had looked like a statue that had been mummified for years, frozen in time. In her dream, Blanca had wanted to approach her and say,
Grandma Carole, don’t you remember me?
But her legs wouldn’t carry her.

When she awakened, Blanca heard a voice in the treatment room. First it had sounded like Theresa from the old age home, but it turned out that her ears had deceived her. It was her mother-in-law. She had come to take the baby to church so the priest would bless him.

“The weather is still chilly, and the child is weak,” Christina explained to her.

“That’s exactly why I came to take him. He needs a blessing to grow strong.”

“But he’s very weak.”

“The cold won’t hurt him. I raised five children, and all of them, thank God, are healthy and strong. The cold just strengthens them. And the blessing before baptism is a good charm for weak children.”

“I can’t give you the baby, only the doctor can.”

“I’m the baby’s grandmother, and I knew exactly what he needs.”

Dr. Nussbaum arrived at a run and declared on the spot that the child was weak and must not be removed from the hospital.

The mother-in-law’s jaw dropped. “Why?” she asked.

“Because he’s weak.”

“I’m taking him to the church. The priest’s blessing will strengthen him.”

“All of that must wait until he’s healthy.”

“I don’t understand a thing,” she said, and headed for the exit.

As she was leaving, Blanca’s mother-in-law met one of her friends, and she complained to her that Jewish doctors had taken over the public hospitals, and they had neither loving-kindness nor mercy in their hearts. They took no account of the priests’ opinions.

“Cursed be the Jews and their behavior.” She didn’t restrain herself now and slammed the door.

The next day, Adolf’s sisters arrived and gathered in the corridor. They asked Christina whether the baby was still weak, why he was so weak, and whether there was any danger that he might be handicapped. They then asked permission to take him to the church. Christina explained once again what she had already explained. Hearing her words, the eldest sister said, “If he lies here all the time, he’ll turn into a slug instead of a man.”

Later, the sisters returned with a big, strong woman from a nearby village. They sat her on a chair and gave her the baby to nurse. Blanca saw the woman, her huge, dark breast, and the nipple that she stuffed into the baby’s mouth. The baby suckled greedily until he choked. Everyone rushed to turn him over and pat him on the back.

When the baby was finished nursing, Adolf’s eldest sister gave a banknote to the wet nurse. She took the bill in her dark hand, stuffed it into her coat pocket, and without saying a word headed for the exit.

BLANCA GREW STRONGER,
and she would give the baby to the large woman who came to nurse him every day. First it seemed that the baby was gaining strength, but after a week of steady nursing, he began to vomit severely. There was no choice but to go back to the porridge that Christina had been carefully making for him. Blanca’s mother-in-law wasn’t pleased by the sudden change, and she kept saying that if the mother was weak, then the baby would also show signs of weakness. “In our family, thank God, everyone is healthy and strong.”

Celia came to visit Blanca, who was so happy to see her that she started crying. Ever since Celia had brought her Buber’s anthology, the book never left her hands. Even in her days of severe illness, she read it.

All of Celia’s movements were familiar to Blanca, even the tilt of her neck, but she still wasn’t the Celia she had once been. The Stillstein Mountains had changed her through and through. Celia spoke about her distant ancestors like someone who knew what she was talking about. She pronounced the names of their villages in Galicia and Bukovina as if she had just come back from visiting them the day before.

“You haven’t shown Otto to me,” said Celia. “How is he doing?”

Christina brought him in, and Celia said, “He looks like a darling baby.”

“My husband and mother-in-law aren’t pleased by his development.”

“Blanca, my dear, we mustn’t consider other people’s opinions. You have to go your own way.”

“If only I knew the way,” replied Blanca.

The hospital’s situation deteriorated. Dr. Nussbaum was working day and night. He grew so tired that he would collapse on a couch in his office in the middle of the day and fall asleep. The rich people who had promised to support the institution reneged on their promises. Dr. Nussbaum had already sent seven memorandums to the Ministry of Health, and what the municipality sent wasn’t enough even for medicines. In his soul, Dr. Nussbaum knew that he would have no alternative but to send his patients home and close the gates of the institution, but he kept postponing the closure. His voice had changed over the past few days. He walked through the corridor with vigorous steps, shouting, “The rich have luxurious and roomy hospitals, and a well-trained medical staff. But what will become of the public hospitals? What will the poor and oppressed people do? Where will they go?” His speech was frightening, because he spoke to the bare walls.

The thought that one day Blanca would journey to the famous Carpathian Mountains and bathe in the Prut River took shape within her while she was ill, and now it was very clear. She imagined her life in the Carpathians as a simple life, a country life, with hours of prayer that would divide the day into three sections. On holidays everyone would put on white clothes and go to pray in small wooden synagogues. The disciples of the Ba’al Shem Tov’s disciples still prayed in those small synagogues. They had reached a ripe old age and dozed during most of the day. But in the summer, in the drowsy hours of the afternoon, they sat in the doorways of the houses of study and greeted those who arrived with a blessing.

Blanca was sorry that her mother had told her so little about her childhood in the Carpathians. Her family had left the mountains when she was five, but she had retained some images of it in her heart. Blanca’s father, on the other hand, had harbored resentment against his parents because of their poverty and because they had made it impossible for him to study at the university, and so for him everything there had sunk into an abyss.

“Thank you, Celia.”

“What are you thanking me for?”

“For the anthology by Martin Buber.”

Upon hearing Martin Buber’s name, Celia inclined her head, as she undoubtedly did in the convent in Stillstein.

AT THE END
of that week the gates of the hospital were closed, and Blanca started for home. She knew that strewn in every corner would be beer bottles and butcher’s waxed paper in which sausages had been wrapped, and that the kitchen sink would be full of dishes. She knew, but even so, she didn’t feel miserable that morning. The sun shone warmly, and Otto made her happy with every one of his gestures. In My Corner she was greeted with cheers. They served her coffee and poppy seed cake, and everyone made a fuss over Otto and agreed that he looked like Blanca.

When she got home, Blanca found the house as she had imagined it. She began at once to wash the dishes, pick up the papers, and empty the ashtrays. Otto fell asleep, and Blanca kept going to his bed to watch him as he slept.

After cleaning the house, she took Otto to her breast and then they went back to town to buy food for dinner. It was eleven o’clock, and Blanca hurried to return home. Near the butcher’s shop, she looked up and to her surprise saw Grandma Carole. This time her grandmother wasn’t standing and shouting; she was just sitting on the steps of the closed synagogue, curled up in a corner. Without thinking, Blanca rushed to the gate.

“Hello, Grandma Carole,” she said. “I’m Blanca. Do you remember me?”

“Who?” she said, startled.

“Your granddaughter, Blanca.”

“What do you want from me?”

“I wanted to tell you that I had a son, and his name is Otto.”

“Who are you?”

“Blanca.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Grandma.”

“What?”

“Don’t you remember me?”

Her sightless eyes began to blink nervously.

“What do you want from me?” she said.

“I wanted to beg your pardon.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m Blanca, your daughter Ida’s girl.”

“Don’t bother me,” Grandma Carole said, and she made a gesture of rejection with her right hand. Blanca recognized that gesture and recoiled.

Blanca knew that Grandma Carole wasn’t rebuffing her in anger. Her memory had faded, and she simply didn’t remember Blanca any longer, just as she had probably forgotten her two other granddaughters who now lived in faraway Leipzig. But she was still angry.

When Adolf came home, he said, “You’ve come back, I see.” It was evident that he wanted to say more, but the essence was conveyed in that sentence.

“I feel better,” Blanca said. For a moment they both looked at Otto while he slept. He was relaxed, and his face, lit by the sun, seemed content.

Blanca rushed to serve Adolf his dinner, and while doing so she told him that Dr. Nussbaum was in despair. The wealthy people who had said they would provide assistance hadn’t kept their promise.

“Why are you telling me all this?” he asked without raising his head.

“What will the poor people do who need help? Whom will they go to? To whom will they turn?”

“Who told them to be poor?”

Blanca fell silent. She was familiar with those coarse pronouncements of his, but now they scraped her flesh with an iron brush.

After dinner, Adolf went to the tavern and Blanca remained where she was. The long day had left her hollow. It took her a while to find the words within her.
Adolf hates me,
she said to herself,
because I’m thin and weak, and because my parents were Jews
.
Apparently my conversion to Christianity changed nothing. And now I’m even thinner. I weigh less than one hundred and ten pounds. What must I do in order to change? I have to eat more and work in the garden, but I’m very weak, and it’s hard for me to stand on my feet
.

Adolf returned from the tavern very late.

“Where are you?” he shouted from the doorway. Blanca, awakened by his loud voice, hurried over to him and helped him over to the bed. He immediately fell down onto it, and Blanca took off his shoes and covered him with a blanket.

That Sunday Otto’s baptism ceremony was held, and everyone wore festive clothes. After the baptism, the priest spoke about love and compassion, and to Blanca it seemed that he was talking to Adolf, asking him to behave like a Christian toward her. The little church was full of people and the fragrance of incense. Blanca made a great effort to remain on her feet, but toward the end of the ceremony she stumbled. Adolf picked her up and reprimanded her for not being careful.

“I’m sorry,” Blanca said, standing up again. Then her mother-in-law passed Otto back to her, and Blanca looked at him and hugged him to her breast.

After the ceremony they served strong drinks and honey cake to the guests. Some girls from school, whom Blanca barely remembered, approached her and hugged her. Adolf looked content in the company of his friends, who surrounded him and congratulated him. He was especially happy with his cronies from work, who looked like him, suntanned and strong.

Now Blanca remembered the bar mitzvah celebrations in the synagogue. Her mother used to take her to them now and then. It was crowded there, too, but most of the people were short, and their presence wasn’t crushing. She and her mother would stand together and watch everyone celebrating. At the end, they would go up to the bar mitzvah boy, congratulate him, and depart. Public places and crowds of people had made Blanca sad since her childhood. Her mother knew that and would bring her to these ceremonies only occasionally. Now she had to learn how to cope with that, too.

“How do you feel?” Adolf’s eldest sister asked her.

“Fine,” said Blanca, glad she had said so.