Beyond the Ties of Blood

by Florencia Mallon

  Sara lost count of how many little triangular cones of peanuts he bought her Sunday after Sunday as they walked, in silence, around the plaza. Candied ones, salted ones. A fine haze of sweat would gather across Samuel’s forehead, and somehow that endeared him to her. For weeks he barely opened his mouth. She occasionally made a comment about the weather, the hard work at the shop, how good the peanuts were. Anything to break the silence. He would nod gratefully, there would be an audible intake of breath, as if he were about to answer. Then nothing. Each week as she waited for him to arrive, she wondered what the point was. But then she counted the number of Jewish families in Temuco, added up the ones with young men more or less her age, and came to the unavoidable conclusion. If she wanted to marry, he was her only hope.

  One Sunday evening when he brought her home, she took his hand. “Shmuel,” she said, using his Hebrew name. “Let’s do something different next weekend. Why don’t you come by on Saturday night, after the end of shabbat, and we can go out and have a schnapps. It isn’t as if we’re little kids, you know. Maybe we can even go to a movie.” He seemed startled. But he said yes.

  The following Saturday, right after sunset, they took a walk to the river. A four-piece band with an asthmatic accordion was playing waltzes and polkas. Several older German couples were turning stiffly on the wooden boards that served as a makeshift dance floor. The remaining dusky light glittered in the beads of sweat on the bald pates of the men. They stood watching, and Samuel was silent as usual. But she noticed that, in spite of himself, he would tap his right foot when an especially lively number came along.

  Suddenly the band seemed to come alive and launched into the new tango that was on all the radio stations. She was utterly amazed when Shmuel took her hand and led her gently out onto the floorboards. He swept her up into his arms, pressed his slightly sweaty cheek to hers, and carried her off in the wave of his smooth steps. She closed her eyes, letting him guide her; they dipped and turned for what seemed like hours and she did not stumble even once. She only opened her eyes when she realized they were back on the grass by the side of the bandstand. He was looking down at her, a smile playing along the edges of his lips.

  “Where did you learn to do that?” she asked. His smile opened up and took over his entire face. He was almost handsome then, his green eyes sparkling.

  “When I left Germany I lived in Argentina for seven years before coming to Temuco. The bakery business, it was too cutthroat, and I had no entry capital, so first I made some money bartending at a tango bar. Sometimes they needed an extra man to dance. I found I have a knack for it.”

  They danced several more sets, wrapped in a silken cloud softened even further by several glasses of wine. She was sorry when the moon began to set, and the band packed up its gear. They walked back through the deserted streets, arm in arm, her head resting on his shoulder. “So,” she asked, looking up at him, “how did you end up in Argentina?” He stopped and let go of her arm. “What’s wrong?” she asked. His face closed up, harsh and jagged. He didn’t say anything for a long time and just kept staring at her, his eyes suddenly flat. His right hand, claw-like now, clutched her left elbow. They walked in silence to her door. He didn’t even say goodnight.

  For several weeks he did not return to the tailor shop. What had happened to him that he had reacted in such a way? True, he wasn’t her knight in shining armor, and maybe she should be glad he was gone. But as time went by she realized she missed him. Why had he been so upset when she’d asked him about leaving Germany? Finally she decided to ask her father about it.

  “Papa,” she asked, putting her hand on his shoulder as he worked at his pedal-powered sewing machine. “Was there something that happened to Jews in Germany before the camps?”

  As usual it took her father a few minutes to react. She could see he was working on an especially demanding design. “Germany? Well, I’m not sure exactly, but as soon as the Nazis came to power, you know they weren’t kind to the Jews.” He took off his sewing glasses and turned around to look at her. “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, it’s just that … Shmuel immigrated to Argentina before the war, and I think something pretty terrible must have happened to make him leave Germany.”

  “Well, then, why don’t you go to the library and look in the European history books? Maybe you’ll find something there. Or if not, maybe the old newspapers.”

  She went to the library every day after they closed the shop and finally, in a new European history book they’d recently received at the Temuco library, she found a short paragraph. “On November 9-10, 1938,” she read, “throughout Germany almost every window in every synagogue and Jewish-owned business was shattered. In German, Kristallnacht means night of broken glass. Ninety-one Jews died and thirty thousand were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Survivors tried to leave the country, but only the lucky few made it out.” Sara shut the book. That must have been it, she realized; the dates worked with when he arrived in Argentina. Shmuel was one of the few who got out alive.

  One Thursday right after lunch, he walked in and stood at the counter. His eyes were a muddy shade of grey, and under them his lack of sleep had gathered in smudges of soot. He had no clothes to put on the counter, no wad of bills. He just stood there and looked straight into her eyes. He still smelled of yeast.

  “I know about Kristallnacht,” she whispered. “Your family … you were the only one who got out.” His eyes closed. “My mama and papa,” she continued softly, “they were the only ones, too. From Odessa.” He opened his eyes, then his mouth. But nothing came out. She reached a hand across the counter, but he turned away. He stood, his back to her, for a moment. Then he walked out.

  When he came back a month later, he placed a small, worn velvet box on the counter between them. She opened it to find a diamond ring. It had been recently cleaned and polished, but the setting was antique. Though he never said anything, over the years she grew convinced that it had belonged to his mother, perhaps even his grandmother. She pictured him smuggling the box out in the pocket of his pants.

  They were married the following week in a civil ceremony, her parents the only witnesses. Mama and Papa never took a shine to him, she was never sure why not. Maybe it was because they saw her Shmooti, as she took to calling him, the way she’d first seen him, plump and sweaty, shy and needy. They’d never seen him dance tango. Sara had been sure that, after that first magical tango evening, and especially after she told him about her mama and papa, he’d slowly open up to her. The more he’s in love, she’d thought, the more we live together, the more he’ll want to tell me. Over the years she’d come to realize what a worn and weary masquerade that was. She lost count of the number of women she met who fell in love with the ideal man into whom they hoped to turn their husband. She, too, hadn’t married Shmooti the man, but the smooth tango dancer who would surely become the man she’d imagined. And they stayed together, she’d come to understand, largely on the strength of her imagination.

  When she lay awake in the night, listening to the keening and rumbling of his frequent nightmares, she imagined the scene of his dream by focusing on his movements. She watched him as he turned and groaned in his sleep, protecting his head with his arms from what must have been the soldiers’ kicks when they broke into his family’s house and shop. She began to imagine the other side of his reactions, to visualize a pas de deux in his lonely, frightened movements. To every protective move Shmooti made, she added the opposite aggression, until she pieced together a narrative of a battle to the death. It was a battle she relived, almost on a nightly basis, in her matrimonial bed. It was a battle scripted only on one side, to which she added her own stage directions.

  When she first got pregnant with Manuel, Shmooti was angry. “Why bring a child into this crazy world,” he muttered over and over. Once the baby started kicking, though, he was transformed. He could sit for hours with his hand on her belly, waiting for the next punch. Then his eyes would light up. “He has qu
ite a step,” he’d say. “Either a soccer player or a tango dancer. We’ll see.” And when Manuel was born, Shmooti just melted. Never a day would go by that he wouldn’t come home with a gift for the baby, if only a ball or a small stuffed bear.

  The circumcision was a struggle. “I know your parents want the bris,” Shmooti grumbled, “but I’m not religious. What’s there to be religious about? We do nothing but suffer for our religion, day in and day out, for thousands of years. Enough is enough.” In the end he relented. “All right,” he sighed. “But just the bris. No religion, no Bar Mitzvah.” And that was that. They drank wine and ate rugelach at her parents’ house.

  Shmooti and Manuel were fine together, as long as Manuel could be consoled with a stuffed bear. But as he grew older Manuel didn’t like soccer, or tangos. He wanted his papa to explain the world to him. Where had Papa come from, that he had an accent? But Shmooti had been silent too long. He no longer had a voice to talk about the past.

  “Mama, what’s Jewish?” Manuel asked one afternoon, when he was eight years old and they were still in the old house. Sara’s hand froze on the handle of the teapot as she was serving him the tea with warm milk he always had when he got home from school.

  “Why do you ask, m’hijo?”

  “Because at school another boy said I was, and the teacher told him it wasn’t nice to say that.”

  Sara struggled for an answer. “Well,” she tried, “being Jewish is a religion, a different kind from Catholic or Protestant, which are the two religions that most of your schoolmates are.”

  “But we don’t go to any church, Mama. What religion doesn’t have a church?”

  “Jews do have a church, except it’s called a synagogue. But Papa Shmooti doesn’t like to keep the traditions.”

  “What are traditions?” He stumbled a bit over the word.

  “They’re things you do to remember who you are, like when Grandma and Grandpa light candles on Friday nights when we’re there, or Grandma bakes rugelach.”

  “Those are Jewish traditions?”

  “Yes, m’hijito. They are.”

  “Then I guess I’m Jewish, Mama, because I like those traditions.”

  When Manuel was eleven, the Bronsteins moved into their fancy new house. It was about a year later that Manuel had it out with his papa. It began routinely enough, with yet another fight about soccer. Sara could follow it easily from the other room where she was measuring the windows for new curtains. Shmooti wanted Manuel to invite the neighborhood kids over for a game, but Manuel didn’t like soccer, and he didn’t like the kids on the block. But at some point the tone changed and their voices rose. Manuel’s was the loudest.

  “You can’t tell me what to do, Papa! What do you know about my life, you’re never here, always at that stupid shop of yours!”

  “We live here now, so why not make friends? You’re not the best soccer player, but with a ball and a field you get people to come.”

  “I don’t want them here! They’re stupid, snotty rich kids! All they can talk about is how much money their papas make!”

  “You don’t think you’re a rich kid?”

  “How do I even know what I am? You never talk to me about your family, where I come from! You always leave or change the subject!”

  And then it was over, and Sara heard the door close as Shmooti walked out. He stayed overnight at the bakery for three days.

  After that Manuel spent less and less time at home. Every day, he stayed longer at the tailor shop with his grandparents. He stopped talking to his father, and avoided being around in those few short hours in the early morning or evening when Shmooti wasn’t either asleep or at the bakery. The less she saw her son, the more Sara worked to fit into her new neighborhood. She imagined him sitting at her mama’s kitchen table, hungrily consuming the stories of her parents’ heroic and romantic migration along with the rugelach and hot tea with milk. After Papa passed away, Manuel began to stay out later, and she knew he wasn’t with his grandma. One day she woke to the realization that he was almost a grown man, and she had no idea who he really was.

  1973

  Sara’s mother Myriam died the first Tuesday in September, exactly a week before the military coup, while the fog still hung milky white over the rooftops of Temuco. The knock on her door came at that moment before dawn, when the sun hesitates just long enough behind the mountains so time stands still and you see the world in two dimensions. “In keeping with Jewish law, we buried her right away. It’s what she wanted, so there’s no point in your coming back right now,” Sara wrote Manuel that very evening. “We placed her next to your grandpa in a plain pine coffin, just like his. The day was sunny, quite a contrast with his funeral,” she continued. “And by this point no peasants showed up, hats in hand, the water streaming down their faces. I don’t know if they, too, have died, or just got so old that they forgot.”

  As time went on, Sara grew increasingly glad that her mother had died before the coup. Not that Sara wasn’t happy when the military first stepped in. The demonstrations stopped and people weren’t afraid any more. Her friends all talked about not having to sleep with revolvers under their pillows anymore when they went out to their farms in the countryside, and about how much more respectful their servants were now. Occasionally Sara wondered what had happened to Tonia, and to her community, with the coup. She knew that the Mapuche had benefited from the land reform, but the military had begun taking it all back. Sometimes she yearned to see her Mapuche sister again, but they had lost touch. How could she look for Tonia now?

  When the junta issued its communiqué explaining how the previous government had stolen all the country’s wealth, and asked everyone to contribute what they could to a new national fund to save Chile, her neighbors had stood in line to contribute jewels and heirlooms. She had even donated the pearl necklace Shmooti had given her on their fifteenth wedding anniversary. And it wasn’t just the rich ladies from her neighborhood standing in that line. She’d seen humble women donating their wedding rings, or taking their one pair of pearls from their ears to put into the donation basket at the bank.

  But when a number of Sara’s canasta friends got together and wrote a letter of congratulations to the military intendant, at the last minute, she wasn’t sure why, she decided not to sign. Of course, if she’d known then what she learned later, she’d have had plenty of reasons not to sign. But she didn’t know. Only later would she understand the immensity of her ignorance, and the uselessness of her regret.

  So it was good that her mother died before the Army took over the city. “All that yelling and banging,” her mama had said when the street demonstrations got bad toward the end. “It’s like Odessa in 1905, it scares me.”

  “She died peacefully, sitting in her orange grove in her wicker rocking chair, smelling of cinnamon,” Sara wrote in her note to Manuel. “Don’t come back now, there’s no point. Just come back for summer vacation.” But the note returned two weeks later, unfamiliar writing across the front, saying he’d moved and left no new address. By then the military had just taken power, but Sara thought nothing of it, at least not until about a month later, when she began to worry just a little. Not that Manuel was a good correspondent before, but at least every time he’d moved he sent them his new address. And these were not normal times. At least he could send a few lines, she thought, just to tell me he’s all right. By December, three months after the military took power, she was beginning to worry a lot. “I’ll go to Santiago,” she told Shmooti, “to his old place, or maybe to the university where he was studying. Someone will know where he is. Just to make sure,” she added quickly. “I’m sure it’s nothing, but it’s been too long and classes are about to end.”

  When she got to Santiago, she learned the university had been closed with the coup. She rented a room in a pension near downtown and made the rounds to all the addresses on the tattered envelopes she’d brought with her, from one of his old lodgings to the next, from rooming house to apartment build
ing to hole in the wall above a dry cleaner’s. She said his name out loud but all she got in return was a door slammed in her face. By the time she arrived at the place from which she’d gotten the returned letter, she was crying.

  The woman who opened the door took pity on her and invited her in for a cup of tea. “Ah yes, the red-haired young man,” she said as they were sitting in the living room in the gathering dusk. “I remember sending you that note back, he’d just moved out the week before. But señora, I need to warn you. Everyone here knew he was a revolutionary. Chances are the soldiers picked him up pretty early. It’s too late to check the morgues, that’s what people did last month and the month before. Go to the police stations, maybe there’s a record somewhere. But be careful. The secret police have eyes and ears everywhere in Santiago.”

  Sara spent weeks going from one police station to the next, but there was no trace of Manuel. She wrote to Schmooti every night, short notes that said almost nothing because there was no news. She never got an answer, and sometimes she wondered whether he even read them. But what could he say to the same message, over and over? What could he say to the fact that she could not find their son?

  What she did find was other women, the same women at every one of the stations she visited. They, too, were looking. As they began to recognize each other they began to move together from one place to the next, a wave of grieving humanity, finding wordless comfort in each other’s presence. When there were no more police stations, they went together to the Archdiocese, and the lawyers who worked there helped them fill out writs of habeas corpus. Together they waited for news sitting on long wooden benches. They didn’t find their loved ones, but they found each other.

  One night, after an especially frustrating day of waiting, Sara could not sleep. Not that she’d been sleeping that well before, but now she couldn’t stop thinking about the woman who had sat next to her on the bench that day. They were about the same age, but the other woman looked twenty years older. She had lost her daughter and husband. She spoke of them in such loving terms, without even a tinge of resentment. Sara couldn’t help but compare herself to this woman. Even as she grieved his loss, why did she still feel such anger toward Manuel?