Until the Dawn's Light by Aharon Appelfeld Read Free Book Online Page B

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