by Ilan Stavans
I never mentioned that business about the thermos, but it was a great invention. I used to place it on a chair beside my bed, and when the damn alarm clock went off, I’d stretch out one arm, trying to wake up as little as possible, and pour some coffee with boiling milk, already sweetened, into a cup I’d left on the chair for that purpose. Once the hot café con leche had run down my gullet, I would be alert and brave enough to climb back underneath the covers and remove my nightgown. Then I’d stick out my arm, grabbing and putting on, one by one, the items I’d laid out so carefully the night before, like the thermos and cup: my underpants; the garter belt—a hateful garment that served to hold up stockings and that was always missing some hook or fastener. Petticoat, shirt, skirt, sweater, stockings. Once my stockings were on, I’d poke my legs out from the warmth of the bed, exposing them to the frigid bedroom air, in order to put on my shoes. Overcoat, scarf, cap, and off I’d go to the bathroom. Crossing the patio in that temperature was no less complicated than crossing Avenida Nueve de Julio. I returned to my bedroom for the thermos, carried it into the kitchen, and consumed the rest of the café con leche, this time with bread and butter. I grabbed my book bag and headed for the street. It was as dark and freezing as midnight. Once, because I had set my alarm clock incorrectly, I arrived at school an hour early. I had to wait for them to open the doors, and then I entered the empty vestibule. At least I had a roof over my head, although inside it was even colder than it was outdoors. In the vestibule was a group of reproductions of impressionist paintings. I studied them in detail, one by one. They had a lot of foliage but not a single human figure. Much later another student came along, and then many others. Some arrived without gloves, their hands swollen with chilblains, like Francisca, the one who danced the muñeira. Others had pretty, knitted angora gloves. We all chatted until the head monitor arrived, a woman whose mere glare was sufficient to cause chills, even in summer. But it was early and school hadn’t officially started yet: she smiled. A bell rang and we filed out to the patio to sing the hymn. Then to our classrooms.
As she calls the roll, our monitor keeps her free hand in her pocket and hops around a little. She’s cold too. This year our classroom faces the street. The window’s very high, so from our desks we can’t manage to see the people passing by. You might say this is a kind of jail, and we can only guess at the faces of the free people walking around out there. But it’s not true. This isn’t my prison: it’s my freedom. In here, I’m not who I am but who I want to be, or rather I’m the most presentable part of myself. I’ve left at home the Jew, the sinner, the girl who replaces the missing fastener on her garter belt with a safety pin, the one who prepares her thermos of café con leche to face the icy mornings, the one who thinks about penises, vaginas, and coituses. To school I bring the nice, lively girl, the one who knows how to make the others split their sides laughing, the one who says she’s Catholic, although nobody believes her, the one who invents lies about her ancestors, but who, on the whole, is acceptable and even envied, because now that the clouds of her earliest years have parted, she understands everything and can even explain it. I’m sixteen years old, seventeen. I’m split in two pieces that are, nonetheless, irreconcilable, and for a long period of my life, I’ll go on that way: split in two.
Celeste’s Heart
AÍDA BORTNIK (b. 1942)
Translated from the Spanish by Alberto Manguel
The protagonist of this brief tale by the award-winning screenwriter of The Official Story (1985), published for the first time in 1989 in Alberto Manguel’s translation, is a rebellious Jewish girl in an authoritarian milieu. Forced to act against her will, against common sense, she slowly and courageously speaks out, expressing her valor not in grand-scale historic events but in silent resistance toward the most conventional of daily acts.
CELESTE WENT TO a school that had two yards. In the front yard they held official ceremonies. In the back yard the teacher made them stand in line, one behind the other at arm’s distance, keeping the arm stretched out straight in front, the body’s weight on both legs, and in silence. One whole hour. Once for two whole hours. All right, not hours. But two breaks passed, and the bell rang four times before they were allowed back into the classroom. And the girls from the other classes, who played and laughed during the first break as if nothing had happened, stopped playing during the second break. They stood with their backs to the wall and watched them. They watched the straight line, one behind the other at arm’s length, in the middle of the school yard. And no one laughed. And when the teacher clapped her hands to indicate that the punishment was over, Celeste was the only one who didn’t stretch, who didn’t complain, who didn’t rub her arm, who didn’t march smartly back into the classroom. When they sat down, she stared quietly at the teacher. She stared at her in the same way she used to stare at the new words on the blackboard, the ones whose meaning she didn’t know, whose exact purpose she ignored.
That evening, as she was putting her younger brother to bed, he asked once again: “When am I going to go to school?” But that evening she didn’t laugh, and she didn’t think up an answer. She sat down and hugged him for a while, as she used to do every time she realized how little he was, how little he knew. And she hugged him harder because she suddenly imagined him in the middle of the school yard, with his arm stretched out measuring the distance, the body tense, feeling cold and angry and afraid, in a line in which all the others were as small as he was.
And the next time the teacher got mad at the class, Celeste knew what she had to do.
She didn’t lift her arm.
The teacher repeated the order, looking at her somewhat surprised. But Celeste wouldn’t lift her arm. The teacher came up to her and asked her, almost with concern, what was the matter. And Celeste told her. She told her that afterward the arm hurt. And that they were all cold and afraid. And that one didn’t go to school to be hurt, cold, and afraid.
Celeste couldn’t hear herself, but she could see her teacher’s face as she spoke. And it seemed like a strange face, a terribly strange face. And her friends told her afterward that she had spoken in a very loud voice, not shouting, just a very loud voice. Like when one recited a poem full of big words, standing on a platform, in the school’s front yard. Like when one knows one is taking part in a solemn ceremony and important things are spoken of, things that happened a long time ago, but things one remembers because they made the world a better place to live in than it was before.
And almost every girl in the class put down her arm. And they walked back into the classroom. And the teacher wrote a note in red ink in Celeste’s exercise book. And when her father asked her what she had done and she told him, her father stood there staring at her for a long while, but as if he couldn’t see her, as if he were staring at something inside her or beyond her. And then he smiled and signed the book without saying anything. And while she blotted his signature with blotting paper, he patted her head, very gently, as if Celeste’s head were something very very fragile that a heavy hand could break.
That night Celeste couldn’t sleep because of an odd feeling inside her. A feeling that had started when she had refused to lift her arm, standing with the others in the line, a feeling of something growing inside her breast. It burned a bit, but it wasn’t painful. And she thought that if one’s arms and legs and other parts of one’s body grew, the things inside had to grow too. And yet legs and arms grow without one being aware, evenly and bit by bit. But the heart probably grows like this: by jumps. And she thought it seemed like a logical thing: the heart grows when one does something one hasn’t done before, when one learns something one didn’t know before, when one feels something different and better for the first time. And the odd sensation felt good. And she promised herself that her heart would keep growing. And growing. And growing.
Remembrances of Things Future
MARIO SZICHMAN (b. 1945)
Translated from the Spanish by Iván Zatz
Critics concur in v
iewing the author of this sardonic tale as the true Latin American inheritor of the tradition of self-denigrating Jewish humor. His famous novel At 8:25 Evita Became Immortal (1981), which won the Ediciones del Norte Prize, describes the three-decade-long pilgrimage from immigration to assimilation of the Pechoff family in Buenos Aires, complete with their change of name to Gutiérrez-Anselmi to hide their Jewish identity.
Set in Poland in 1939—according to the Hebrew calendar the year 5700, a time when Argentine Jews, victimized by the Semana Trágica pogrom and other blunt anti-Semitic attacks, were beginning to recognize the nation as incapable of sustaining democratic values and tolerance—this comic story, published here for the first time, deals with the bombing of Jewish schools, both progressive and Orthodox, and the response of government authorities to Jewish resistance. The narrative viewpoint is that of the mother of Shmulik the galley-proof messenger, a poor woman unable to understand the political implications of her son’s unexpected disappearance. The implicit themes, of course, are the Holocaust and Jewish self-hatred.
AT THE TIME that the people in Pinye Ostropoler’s town began to search for the whereabouts of their family members, the postman got into the habit of calling twice at first, and three times by the end, until there was no one left in any condition to receive the mail.
Every morning of that hazard-filled year of 1939, the postman would show up in his impeccable gray suit, and with a smile he would present the good news. In the afternoon, he would show up rigorously attired in mourning clothes, to deliver the instructions to one of the neighbors. It never failed that someone in town would think, “I am sure that someone in my neighbor’s family must have done something to deserve these instructions.” And those suspicions were usually confirmed. The instructions would order the neighbor to go to the town’s century-old tree and pick up a message left atop the fourth branch from the bottom; thus he would find out that his relative’s whereabouts had been lost after his becoming an infiltrator. It was signed, “A friend.” Usually, after reading the letter, the neighbor would pack up his bundles and take a chartered ship to other lands—ridden by guilt but never by fear, for Poland was a country endowed by laws of a profound humanist content, a beautiful tradition went hand in hand with its population, and may God grant you peace.
One of the few occasions on which this routine was broken happened with Shmulik’s mother. Shmulik was the galley-proof messenger. Until receiving the instructions and finding out that his whereabouts were lost after his having become an infiltrator, the woman had been proud of her Shmulik, because his official whereabouts had been a calendar factory in the mountainous region of N. The woman had thought that such whereabouts were immutable, for she had told her Shmulik the fable of the naughty boy who was kidnapped by the monkey after having taken his hands out of his pockets; and so her son never dared to play around with his own buttons or his salary, thus reaching a position where he earned money by the fistful.
When the poor woman received the instructions, she asked Pinye to come along with her to the tree because she did not know how to climb it. Pinye collected the message and that is how the woman found out that it seemed as if her son’s whereabouts had been lost. “If you had shown concern for your little treasure’s whereabouts, you would have known by now that he is taking his hands out of his pockets. It takes only one step from that to becoming an infiltrator,” said the message, signed by the usual friend.
“How did I go wrong?” wondered the poor woman. Perhaps she had given her Shmulik a secular education? But that had been the only way to keep him out of the fun and games. Other kids of his generation had decided sometime in their puberty to take their hands out of their pockets, and there you have it now: they spend the entire day with their noses stuck in some Talmudic scroll trying to find their whereabouts in an unattainable past splendor, while their women take food out of their own mouths to keep the children fed. But not her Shmulik. Deprived of the use of his hands, Shmulik had to rely on his nose to find the right way to go, and from having used it so many times to steer the sled during the winter, its shape was now aerodynamic. Besides, at the Hebrew calendar-printing shop where Shmulik worked, they were not interested in the past but in the years to come. This was something that, in that year of 1939, the Jews demanded to see in block letters, since they considered it beyond reach. That is why all the members of the community would fight to get calendars; they wanted to lay their hands on a tomorrow riddled with seasons and ceremonies evocative, first, of their martyrs and then of their heroes, sure that the massacre at the hands of Chmielnicki would always be rescinded by the victory of Bar-Kochba.
The calendar-printing shops could not keep up with the demand, and Shmulik’s capacity to maintain his hands in his pockets was highly valued, because his long arms allowed him to create huge openings that the typographers would stuff with galley proofs. And, with a slight turn of the head, Shmulik could follow the direction of the wind at twice the speed of other galley messengers.
The owner of the calendar shop rewarded such skill by depositing two hundred zlotys in Shmulik’s cap every month. This allowed him to pay for his room and board with a family, whose members were in charge of putting the spoon in and out of his mouth, unbuttoning his clothes, and mending his pockets; even so, he still saved 120 zlotys, which he sent his mother through Nusn, the water carrier.
Shmulik had won eight prizes for best messenger of the month, and the medals clinked proudly on his cap. The owner of the calendar shop had even hinted that there was a possibility of making him a partner. And out of the blue, all this was about to be thrown out the window because the selfish child decided to take his hands out of his pockets—such was the mother’s lament to Pinye. Instead of feeling guilty on account of the message in the tree and packing up her bundles, the mother decided to search for her son’s whereabouts so she could reproach him for his sudden decision to ruin his own life.
Pinye listened to the woman’s grief and counseled patience. Maybe Shmulik had no further need of a whereabouts. The poor woman, however, was not ready to resign herself. Everyone must have a whereabouts, ran her argument. Pinye suggested that perhaps her son had taken his hands out of his pockets to reach for a bottle and, stupefied by the alcohol, had awakened the next day married to a Gypsy. One of those days while the mother was needlessly worrying, the son would be getting ready to give her the great nakhes [happiness] of making her a grandma.
The woman reproached Pinye for his insensitivity. It was clear that he had not been the one to give up his life to provide her Shmulik with an education, she told him. Her son was incapable of doing such a thing to his mother.
To placate her, Pinye recommended that she treat her son not only as a youngster who is respectful of tradition but also as an ingrate about to lose his whereabouts. The poor woman, disturbed by such words of consolation, sent a letter in the next morning’s mail to the calendar shop where Shmulik worked, demanding to know his whereabouts. She was one of those old-fashioned mothers whose only concern was to devote her whole life to her son, the letter stated.
When the poor woman received a reply by telegram, indicating that the company could not furnish such information and asking her to please not compromise them further, she decided to modify her strategy by sending reproaches written directly on the envelope. She had the habit of addressing her complaints to “The Ingrate Who Is About to Lose His Whereabouts.” None of her letters received a reply.
The poor woman came back to Pinye for advice. What did he suggest she do? She did not intend to rest until she found out her son’s whereabouts. Wouldn’t it be best to go to the police and search in the Missing Persons Bureau? Pinye pleaded with the poor woman not to involve any of the authorities until she knew what to expect. Could she have possibly forgotten about Gitele? She had searched for a half brother who had been accused of becoming an infiltrator. And what happened? When the authorities finally discovered where he was, Gitele remembered that she had had a whole brother befo
re his disappearance. Pinye recommended that the woman wait for a while. The best thing would be to carry out some discreet inquiries. He could take care of the matter.
The woman thanked Pinye for all the trouble he was taking and this time sent her letter in the afternoon mail, addressed to the owner of the calendar-printing shop. In it she worried about the whereabouts of her son, so respectful of tradition but an ingrate about to ruin his own life. In the postscript she implored the heavens to let there be no suspicious contents in the packages her Shmulik carried.
The owner of the calendar-printing shop received the woman’s message, went to the town’s century-old tree, collected the letter, and read it, fearing that he had sullied his family name because of some infiltrator. He rolled it up into a ball, threw it into some bushes, packed up his bundles (among which were several boxes with brand-new calendars), left his house in the late hours of the night, and took off for other lands in a chartered ship, the Cracow Baroness. The ship obtained denials of asylum in Southampton and Reykjavik and wound up stranded in the Sargasso Sea. Some of the calendar packages were jettisoned to sea when the captain decided to lighten the load on the ship, and they ended up washing ashore in Calais. The cryptographers of the French intelligence service analyzed the calendars and determined that they were texts in code from German spies confirming the invulnerability of the Maginot Line.
Meanwhile, the letter sent by the poor woman to the owner of the calendar- printing shop was found by a park ranger, who unfolded it, smoothed out its creases, examined it by flashlight, adjusted his cap, scratched his head, thought that “he must have done something to deserve this message,” and immediately notified the authorities.
The following day, the police were ordered to discreetly surround the printing shop in order to capture the poor woman’s son. They knew the infiltrator’s description very well: he generally walked around with his hands in his pockets and carried around packages suspicious in nature, as attested by the postscript in the letter written by his mother and the hurried departure of the printing-shop owner.