Oy, Caramba!

by Ilan Stavans

  He had seen pictures of the Plaza San Martín and the Plaza de Armas in his schoolbook and had thought of Lima as a ghost town where time had stopped without warning, freezing cars as they moved along and pedestrians as they walked. He liked to invent all kinds of stories about those unknown people suspended in midair like grotesque puppets. He had even tried to see if he could make out his father among those men in dark suits and hats. Sometimes he felt sure he had found him sitting on a bench reading a newspaper, or spotted his profile coming around a corner, and he would run to the kitchen and point him out to his mother. Without hiding her amazement at her son’s fancies, she would stroke his head nervously and always tell him no, with an understanding smile. But now, sitting on his father’s right, he didn’t have to imagine him anymore. The city itself seemed to have come out of its sleep, happy to open the night and show him his father’s world. And with all his senses set on the course of this moment so new to him, fluttering around him like a playful butterfly, he accepted that world unquestioning, wholeheartedly, as if it had always been his by right.

  The taxi plunged into the warm shadows of a Salaverry Avenue studded with lights. His father was still just sitting there, his face outlined by the pale flash of the car’s window, oblivious of the clusters of trees reflected in his eyes as they shot past. On the right, the Campo de Marte spread out; deserted, bleak, it disappeared for stretches at a time behind groups of houses and reappeared, somnolent and hazy. Marcos was quiet too, afraid to shift a leg that had fallen asleep and trying with his imagination to lop it off from his body and stop the swirl of bubbles climbing to his groin slowly, noisily. He let the stale air out of his lungs and sank a little into the seat, thinking that old guy is my father, I can tell by the musty odor of his clothes. He smells like dirty synagogue draperies, old velvet, damp wool, like the moth-eaten cashmere and poplin remnants he keeps in back of the store. He’s probably taking the annual inventory right now, setting bolts of cloth on the counter, running his hand over them like a shepherd fondly stroking the backs of his sheep; or maybe he’s repeating over and over the words he spit out at me this morning, “In a few hours you be at last one of us, at last one of us, at last one . . .”

  As the cab made a sharp turn, coming out into Mariátegui Avenue, its chassis seemed to bristle up like a cat; it went down the street, chugging along unsteadily, entered Pumacahua Street, and pulled up at the corner of the second block, where the houses came to a dead end, cut off by the Club Hípico’s garden wall, a solid line of trees and wire. His father helped him out of the car. They walked the short distance to the project entrance and silently headed for the apartment at the rear.

  In the bedroom his father helped him undress; he knelt to take off his shoes and then took them to the foot of the valet clothes stand, dressed up in the rest of his clothes and looking like a silly scarecrow. He knelt down again to help him on with his pajama pants and then stood up with a heavy sigh, seeming to come from somewhere far away; he turned down the covers, settled the boy in the center of the bed, and covered him with a rough sweep of his hand. “So if you want something, you’ll call,” he told him abruptly, going to the door. Marcos heard his father’s footsteps fading down the hallway toward the living room, and now, as he lay submerged in the warmth of the covers, the silence started winding its way through the shell of his ears, humming like the sea, and he could feel the solitude he had been longing for begin to take root in his spirit. He swept the room with his eyes, pausing carefully at each object, trying to figure out what hidden common bond there was between so many disparate things. He sensed that the suffocating mishmash of furniture, spread through the rest of the house like heavy underbrush, summed up his father’s horror of empty rooms. Landscapes and scenes of Israel, torn from calendars, lined all the walls: the Sea of Galilee (or Kineret, as his father knowingly called it), hemmed by a tight ring of hills; a street in Yerushalaim crammed with shops and pedestrians, exactly like Jirón de la Unión Street, right, Marcos? This is the capital of Israel; you wouldn’t believe everyone in streets are Jewish, right? Blond-dark-redhead and even real black children in a tiny school in Tel Aviv; also the vast wilderness of the Negev with red red sand and where are located the mines of King Shlomo, who was very wise; do you know story of two women are fighting for same son and going to King Shlomo . . . ? And also many pictures of Kibbutz Givat Brenner, founded in year ’28. I was one of founders, Marcos, see how beautiful, all people glad working in fields, look how happy everybody, and in fact his father had also worked in the kibbutz, intoning “Erets zavat chalav, chalav, erets zavat chalav,” humming into the wind, land of milk and honey, “Erets zavat chalav, chalav ud’vash,” and in other prints there were young patriarchs, hands twirling the udders of the goats, sinking into the labyrinthine nurseries of the bees . . .

  Marcos remembered the first time he had set foot in the house. Startled by the jungle of furniture as he stepped through the door, he stood rooted to the spot; he felt as if all his bones were giving way under a sudden deafening avalanche of rocks. Then his father took his arm and almost dragged him inside toward his room, saying, “Come, don’t be afraid.” Left standing alone in his bedroom with his suitcase beside him, he could hardly stay on his feet, a weary taste of rancid almonds in his mouth. From the back of the house his father’s voice, as studied as a concierge’s, reached him: “This is your room, here you will sleep. Bathroom is a few steps to your left; in front of bathroom is kitchen. You find everything there, unpack your bag, then fix yourself something to eat.”

  That night, as soon as his mother had gone to her room, the ritual of the bath got under way. “Am going get off all dirt from your body,” his father said, rolling up his sleeves with an air of nostalgia for his ancestral past, like an old Orthodox Jew ready to wind the leather maze of phylacteries around his arm. He made Marcos climb into the tub and he let the stream of water out: it came on by fits and starts with a choking sound, then broke out in spurts till it picked up the steady murmur of an easy flow. Steam filled the bathroom with drowsiness, blurred the solid walls, and turned his father into a shadowy figure kneeling next to the tub and already beginning to soap his body with rhythmic skill, as if he were holding a newborn baby or a body not yet born, molding its form with the nimble fingers of a Florentine goldsmith. The scene was taking on the importance of a ceremony. The image of baptism in the son’s mind corresponded closely to the rites of the biblical patriarch being officiated by his father: an initiation that would take the boy, cleansed of impurities, into his own world. Transformed now into an exterminating angel, his father seemed about to rend his flesh with the pumice stone, a primitive porous knife, without a grip, buried in the depths of his massive fist. The frenzied whirling of his father’s hand had all the appearance of an act of martyrdom, and Marquitos saw himself being subjected to an ordeal but felt so sure he would come through unharmed that he endured the stabbing stone, held back his tears, and smothered his pain by biting his teeth down hard. Everything else afterward—scrambling out of the tub, scampering to his room, the comforting fetal position under the covers—took place in suspended time, on the hazy verge of sleep.

  MEXICO

  Genealogies (excerpt)

  MARGO GLANTZ (b. 1930)

  Translated from the Spanish by Susan Bassnett

  Two favorite immigrant genres, memoir and autobiography, allow for an intimate exploration of the triumphs and obstacles of the new milieu. Genealogies (1981), among Glantz’s best-known works, is precisely that: a family album complete with photos and vignettes of the writer’s family past and present, a narrative of how Mexico has at once welcomed and rejected the Jewish population that emigrated from Russia and eastern Europe and of how the immigrants responded to their exotic new environment. This excerpt, ambitiously framed between 1920 and 1982, views the experience of Glantz’s father during the Bolshevik revolution and his journey across the Atlantic as part of the communal history of the Jews of Mexico. The straightforward prose i
ncorporates techniques from journalism and storytelling. Glantz is also the author of The Wake (2005).

  “A TALL COSSACK and a short one passed by our house, with their hands covered in blood, and my mother, crying her eyes out, washed their hands in a bowl.” My father’s mother wore those broad skirts that we all know now, after reading or seeing The Tin Drum: she hid my two aunts, Jane and Myra, girls of sixteen and seventeen, under them.

  “I was almost out of my mind. I walked (I was only a boy), I ran from one place to another and crossed the town over the little bridge that led to the baths, and I tried to find shelter in my uncle Kalmen’s house. He was my father’s brother. It was 1917. I went into my uncle’s house, and I almost went mad. My uncle had a long curly red beard, all crimson with blood, and he was sitting with the blood pouring down and his eyes open. The fear of death still hadn’t left him. Perhaps he was still even breathing! Beside him, wrapped in a sheet, were all the household utensils, everything made of silver or copper, the Sabbath candlesticks, the samovar. I was scared stiff. I had no idea what to do. I just ran out of the village like a madman. The pogrom lasted several days. I went out into the country and I found an abandoned well, deep, but with no water in it, and I clung to the rungs and spent several days down there. When I heard that everything had calmed down, I came out. Before that, I could hear the terrible cries of the girls and children.”

  It all happened so fast that one pogrom piled up on top of another.

  “In those troubled times different groups were chasing one another, and as they went through towns and villages they sacked everything in their path.”

  It all sounds so familiar. It’s like those revolts that our nineteenth-century novelists wrote about and like what you read in novels about the Mexican Revolution, the revolts and the levies, the confusion, the sacking of towns and villages, the deaths.

  “The Bolsheviks came back, and we had some of the short rifles left by the bandits and some of the horses too; only the reservists who’d been in the world war knew how to defend themselves. The rest of us were saved by a miracle. Many of the bandits were peasants who knew us, and as they were stealing they preferred to kill so that they couldn’t be denounced.”

  Yasha hid in the house of a muzhik, a friend of his grandfather’s, Sasha Ribak, “with an enormous moustache, like the poet Sevshenko” (the great popular poet of the Ukraine). My father stayed hiding in a corncrib, breathing through a hole, even when bandits stuck their bayonets into it. Ribak took him food and water and let him out when things calmed down a little. As soon as things started up again, back my father went to his hideout.

  “General Budiony’s Bolshevik Cossacks arrived. When things were a bit calmer, I came out. When it was dangerous I went back into hiding again. I remember Sasha well; he was very good. I wrote a poem about all that, in 1920, in Russia.”

  “And what about your mother and your sisters, how were they saved?”

  “We survived by chance, by luck. My mother and my sisters hid in the top of the house, where there was a loft used as a storeroom, in the space under the rafter. As the groups were all chasing each other, they hardly had time to look, and they sacked and killed everything they found in their way. My mother was saved that first time because she washed the Cossacks’ hands.”

  My grandmother and two aunts were given permission to leave Russia around 1923 to rejoin their family in America, America (the title of the famous film by Elia Kazan). My father was doing his military service and had to stay in the Soviet Union.

  “Your mother was afraid that I’d get lost in the revolution. I was very impulsive. It was a dangerous situation, and the revolution didn’t tolerate people who were impulsive. What the revolution demanded was total commitment from each individual, and those who tried to see things their own way were put on the list of counterrevolutionaries. Well, I was pretty well done for, as you can imagine, being a gabby Jew. And later on they arrested me.”

  “Why did they arrest you?”

  “They arrested me for . . . you see, I was marked down in the revolution as a man with nationalist deviationist tendencies.”

  My grandmother and my aunts stayed on in Russia for another year after being granted permission to leave, because my grandmother was afraid she might never see her son again. But in the end they traveled to Turkey, and then they couldn’t go any further because the North Americans had restricted their immigration quotas and only the mother was eligible to enter the United States. However, my father was also granted permission to leave, though afterward he went to a protest meeting about unfair practices that prevented people from obtaining work. One of the men who had been refused work threw himself out of a fourth-floor window as a protest. Then the police arrived and put most of the protesters in jail, including my father.

  At this point in the story, a friend of the family turns up, a pro-Soviet Jew who left Russia round 1924 and immigrated to Cuba in 1928, from where he had been chased out by Machado’s henchmen because of his militancy. He has brought some Soviet journals sent him from New York, worth 123.50 pesos.

  “They used to reach me quickly direct from Moscow. They only cost 17.50 pesos then, but you have to pay a full year’s subscription.”

  “When did you leave Russia?”

  “My family left first. My father went to the United States in 1912. He left my mother in Russia with the children. In 1914 he sent us tickets, and we were due to leave on the nineteenth of August and the First World War broke out on the twenty-ninth. My father went back to Russia in 1922, but he couldn’t settle because he was a businessman and they accused him of being a bourgeois, so in 1923 he went to New York with his other two brothers. I went to Cuba in 1924, but then they brought in new regulations about immigration quotas so I couldn’t go on to the United States.”

  “That’s what happened to us too,” says Yankl.

  “I went on to Mexico later, because otherwise I’d have ended up drowned in the bay at Havana sooner or later.”

  His friend leaves, and my father comments: “He stayed you know. He’s one of the very few who stayed on the Left.”

  He insists on recalling that meeting where a worker threw himself down from the fourth floor. I remember something similar in one of Wajda’s films.

  “Then the riot started,” interrupts Mother. “The police were there and they started taking workers away. They took your father along with a friend of his, a journalist who was about forty. Your father didn’t turn up, and I was worried and I started looking for him around the police stations. I asked different policemen about him, and nobody knew anything. I said to one of them, ‘You’ve got your people all over the place. Don’t you know or can’t you tell me?’ He told me he couldn’t say anything. It was a Thursday. On Saturday a lady came to see me. I was playing the piano, and she asked me if I was Glantz’s fiancée. I was surprised, but I said yes. ‘I’ve brought you a message from your fiancé that my husband gave me, because both of them have been arrested.’”

  “I traveled third class, that is, your father and I did. And I couldn’t eat anything, because the food was so awful, even though there were times when we went hungry. There was a very bright woman who got on well with the zeil meister, and she used to give us herring with vinegar and onions, and that was a real treat. I sold everything in Moscow because I was going to Cuba and Russian clothes wouldn’t be any use over there. I had some very smart gray suede shoes, which were open down the front, and a pair of stockings that I had to darn every day. In Holland we got some money from Uncle Ellis and I bought two dresses, a black crepe one, which was very smart, and one in lovely soft green wool.”

  It’s raining. San Miguel Regla is really beautiful, with its gentle countryside and all the trees, the house with its slender columns, that huge, friendly hacienda that I almost like better than Marienbad, a place I’ve only ever seen on film, except that I’m a bit of a snob and it seems rather more exotic to me, as the mother of my Colombian friend said, when we were in Paris and
she was talking about American clothes: “They’re so nice. They look so foreign!”

  Mother goes on talking: “Your father wasn’t worried. In the daytime we stayed under cover and at night we slept in our cabin.” (And to think that so much love can actually wear itself out!)

  “There was a very interesting man traveling with us, a very strange man, he spoke Russian but I think he was born in Poland. We called him Miloshka, which means ‘favorite.’ He disappeared when we got here,” she sighs, then continues: “You know, when we came to Mexico I didn’t know how to use earthenware pots, so at first I boiled milk in a pan a lot, and now I can’t stand blenders. I prefer to mash things in an old Mexican earthenware bowl. You can get used to anything, that’s for sure. Though I still don’t know where I really am.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I still don’t know if I’m on my own or what. I don’t want to send your father’s books because it’ll make the place seem so empty.”

  “You should send his books and his papers so they can be put in order and cataloged. I think it’s the right thing to do; they’ll be very useful for people who are trying to write the history of the Mexican Jewish community.”

  The ground is wet. We have been sitting in a little garden, surrounded by cloistered arches, on antique-style leather chairs, like the rest of the hacienda, like the bedrooms. Later we sit around the fireplace. The cleaning woman says softly, “There’s a bit of watery sunshine.” Everything is so peaceful, so lovely, so melancholy. I’ve eaten so much I can hardly move. I go out for a long walk, through the trees, past the pools, the remains of the old metal smelting furnace, and memories flood back with every step, memories of the former owner, the Marquis of Guadalupe, Count of Regla, my mother’s memories.