“Would you excuse me if I read this letter?”
“Of course. I would be dying to read it.”
Conde smiled. He opened the door to his house and the first thing he saw was Garbage II lying on the sofa, in the precise spot left open by various piles of books. The dog, rude and sleeping, didn’t even move his tail when Conde turned on the light and tore open the envelope.
Miami, September 2, 2007
Condemned:
The end of year phone call is a long way away, but this couldn’t wait. I heard from Dulcita, who came back from Cuba a few days ago, that you’re all well, with less hair and more fat. The bearer of this letter IS NOT my friend. His parents ALMOST were, two super-cool old folks, especially the father, the Polish Cuban. This gentleman is a painter; he sells pretty well by the looks of it and inherited some things ($) from his parents. I THINK he’s a good guy. Not like you or me, but more or less.
What he’s going to ask of you is complicated, I don’t think that even you can solve it, but try, because even I am intrigued by this story. Besides, it’s the kind that you like, you’ll see.
Incidentally, I told him that you charge one hundred dollars per day for your work, plus expenses. I learned that from a Chandler novel you lent me a shitload of years ago. The one that had a guy who talked like Hemingway’s characters, you know the one?
Sending hugs for ALL OF YOU. I know that next week is Rabbit’s birthday. Please wish him a happy one on my behalf. Elias also has a gift for him from me and some medicines that Jose should take, besides.
With love and squalor, your brother ALWAYS,
Andrés.
P.S. Oh, tell Elias that he must tell you the story of the Orestes Miñoso photo …
Conde could not help his eyes getting misty. He lied to himself immodestly that with all the fatigue and frustration logged, plus the heat and surrounding humidity, his eyes got irritated. In that letter, which hardly said anything, Andrés said it all, with those silences and emphases of his, typed out in all caps. The fact that he remembered Rabbit’s birthday several days beforehand betrayed him: if he didn’t write, it was because he didn’t want to or couldn’t, since he preferred not to run the risk of falling apart. Andrés, across the physical distance, was still too close and, by the looks of it, would always be so. The tribe to which he belonged for many years was inalienable, PER SAECULA SAECULORUM, all caps.
Conde left the letter on the defunct Russian TV set that he hadn’t made up his mind to throw out and, feeling the weight of nostalgia that added to his most exposed and dogged frustrations, he told himself that the best way to bear that unexpected conversation was to soak it in alcohol. From the bottle of cheap rum he had in reserve, he poured two good doses in two glasses. Only then did he gain full consciousness of his situation: That man would pay him one hundred dollars per day to find out something? He almost felt woozy. In the falling-apart, poor world in which Conde lived, one hundred dollars was a fortune. What if he worked five days? The wooziness got stronger, and to keep it at bay he took a swig directly from the bottle. With the glasses in hand and his mind overflowing with financial plans, he went back to the porch.
“Do you dare?” he asked Elias Kaminsky, holding out the glass, which the man accepted while murmuring his thanks. “It’s cheap rum … the kind I drink.”
“It’s not bad,” the foreigner said after cautiously tasting it. “Is it Haitian?” he asked, as if he were a taster, and immediately took out another Camel and lit it.
Conde took a long drink and acted as if he were savoring that catastrophic crap.
“Yes, it must be Haitian … Well, if you want, we can talk tomorrow at your hotel and you’ll tell me all the details…” Conde began, trying to hide his anxiousness to know. “But tell me now what it is that you think I can help you find out.”
“I already told you, it’s a long story. It has a lot to do with the life of my father, Daniel Kaminsky … For starters, let’s say that I’m on the trail of a painting, according to all information, a Rembrandt.”
Conde couldn’t help but smile. A Rembrandt, in Cuba? Years ago, when he was a policeman, the existence of a Matisse had led him to get caught up in a painful story of passion and hate. And the Matisse had ended up being more false than a hooker’s promise … or that of a policeman. But the mention of a possible painting by the Dutch master was something too compelling for Conde’s curiosity, which was all the more amped up, perhaps because of the chemical reaction between that horrific rum that appeared to be Haitian and the promise of a solid payment.
“So, a Rembrandt … What’s that whole story and what does it have to do with your father?” he egged on the foreigner, and added statements to convince him: “At this hour there’s barely any heat … and I have the rest of the bottle of rum.”
Kaminsky emptied his drink and held the glass out to Conde.
“Count the rum in your expenses…”
“What I’m going to count is a lightbulb for the lamp. It’s better if we can see each other’s faces well, don’t you think?”
While he looked for the lightbulb, searched for a chair to climb up on, placed the bulb in the socket, and at last turned on the light, Conde was thinking that, in reality, he was hopeless. Why in the hell was he pushing that man to tell him his father’s story if he probably wouldn’t be able to help him find anything? Is this what you’ve come to, Mario Conde? he asked himself. He preferred, for now, not to make any attempt to respond to that question.
When Conde returned to his chair, Elias Kaminsky took a photograph out of the extraordinary pocket of his business casual shirt and held it out to him.
“The key to everything could be this photo.”
It was a recent copy of an old print. The photograph’s initial sepia had turned gray and you could see the irregular borders of the original photo. In the frame was a woman, between twenty and thirty years old, clothed in a dark dress and seated in an armchair with brocade cloth and a high back. Next to the woman, a boy, about five years old, standing, with one hand on the woman’s lap, was looking at the camera. By the clothing and hairstyles, Conde assumed that the image had been taken sometime in the 1920s or ’30s. Already alerted to the subject, after observing the people, Conde concentrated on the small painting hung behind them, above a small table where a vase with white flowers rested. The painting was, perhaps, fifteen by ten inches, based on its relation to the woman’s head. Conde moved the photo, trying to shine better light on it so he could study the framed print: it was the bust of a man, with his hair flowing over his scalp and down to his shoulders, and a sparse, unkempt beard. Something indefinable was transmitted from that image, especially from the gaze, halfway between lost and melancholic, coming from the subject’s eyes, and Conde asked himself if it was a portrait of a man or a representation of the Christ figure, quite close to one he must have seen in one or more books with reproductions of Rembrandt’s paintings … A Rembrandt Christ in the home of Jews?
“Is this portrait by Rembrandt?” he asked, still looking at the photo.
“The woman is my grandmother, the boy is my father. They’re in the house where they lived in Kraków … and the painting has been authenticated as a Rembrandt. You can see it better with a magnifying glass…”
From the pocket of his button-down shirt now came the magnifying glass, and Conde looked at the reproduction with it as he asked, “And what does that Rembrandt have to do with Cuba?”
“It was in Cuba. Later, it left here. And four months ago, it appeared in a London auction house to be sold … It came out on the market with an initial price of one million two hundred thousand dollars, since rather than being a finished work, it appears to have been something like a study, one of the many Rembrandt made for his great Christ figures when he was working on a version of Pilgrims at Emmaus, the 1648 one. Do you know anything about the subject?”
Conde finished his rum and looked at the photo again through the magnifying glass, and couldn’t help but a
sk himself how many problems Rembrandt—whose life was pretty fucked-up according to what he had read—could have taken care of with that million dollars.
“I know very little,” he admitted. “I’ve seen prints of this painting … but if memory serves me, in Pilgrims, Christ is looking up, isn’t he?”
“That’s right … The thing is that this Christ figure appears to have come into my father’s family in 1648. But my grandparents, Jews who were fleeing the Nazis, brought it to Cuba in 1939 … It was like their insurance policy. And the painting remained in Cuba. But they didn’t. Somebody made off with the Rembrandt … And a few months ago someone else, perhaps believing the time was right, began to try to sell it. That seller gets in touch with the auction house through an e-mail address based in Los Angeles. They have a certificate of authenticity dated in Berlin, 1928, and another certificate of purchase, authenticated by a notary here in Havana, dated 1940 … at the exact moment my grandparents and aunt were in a concentration camp in Holland. But thanks to this photo, which my father kept his entire life, I’ve stopped the auction, since the whole subject of artwork stolen from Jews before and after the war is a very sensitive one. I’ll be honest with you when I tell you that I’m not interested in recovering the painting because of whatever value it could have, although that’s not negligible … What I do want to know, and the reason I’m here, talking to you, is what happened to that painting—which was a family heirloom—and to the person who had it here in Cuba. Where was it hiding until now?… I don’t know if at this point it would be possible to find out anything, but I want to try … and for that, I need your help.”
Conde had stopped looking at the photo and was watching his visitor, intrigued by his words. Had he misheard or did he say that he wasn’t too interested in the million-something that the piece was worth? His mind, already on overdrive, had started seeking the ways to jump into this seemingly extraordinary story that had crossed his path. But, at that moment, he hadn’t the foggiest idea: he only knew that he needed to find out more.
“So what did your father tell you about that painting’s arrival in Cuba?”
“He didn’t tell me much about that because the only thing he knew was that his parents were bringing it on the Saint Louis.”
“The famous ship that arrived in Havana full of Jews?”
“That one … Regarding the painting, my father did tell me a lot. About the person who had it here in Cuba, less so…”
Conde smiled. Were the fatigue, the rum, and his bad mood making him more stupid, or was this his natural state?
“The truth is that I don’t understand very much … or understand anything,” he admitted as he returned the magnifying glass to his interlocutor.
“What I want is for you to help me find out the truth, so that I can also understand … Look, right now I’m exhausted, and I’d like to have a clear head to talk about this story. But to convince you to listen to me tomorrow, if we can, in fact, see each other tomorrow, I just want to share a secret with you … My parents left Cuba in 1958. Not in ’59 or in ’60, when almost all the Jews and people with money left here, fleeing from what they knew would be a communist government. I am certain that my parents’ departure in 1958, which was quite sudden, had something to do with that Rembrandt. And since the painting showed up again for the auction, I’m convinced that the relationship between my father and the painting and his departure from Cuba have a connection that could have been very complicated…”
“Why very complicated?” Conde asked, already convinced of his mental anemia.
“Because if what I think happened, happened, my father may have done something very serious.”
Conde felt he was about to explode. Elias Kaminsky was either the worst storyteller who ever existed or he was a certified moron. Despite his painting, his one hundred dollars per day, and his business casual clothing.
“Are you going to tell me once and for all what happened and the truth that is worrying you?”
The behemoth took up his glass again and knocked back the rum Conde had served him … He looked at his interrogator and finally said, “It’s not that easy to say you think your father, whom you always saw that way, as a father … could have been the same person who slit someone’s neck.”
3
Kraków, 1648—Havana, 1939
Two years before that dramatically silent morning on which Daniel Kaminsky and his uncle Joseph were getting ready to go down to Havana’s port and witness the awaited docking of the Saint Louis, the increasingly tense situation for European Jews had become more complicated at an accelerating rate with the promised arrival of new, great misfortunes. It was then that Daniel’s parents decided that the best thing would be to place themselves at the center of the storm and take advantage of the speed of its winds to propel themselves to salvation. Because of that, making use of the fact that Esther Kellerstein had been born in Germany and that her parents still lived there, Isaiah Kaminsky, his wife, and his children, Daniel and Judith, after buying a government permit, managed to abandon Kraków and travel to Leipzig. There, the doctor hoped to find a satisfactory departure, along with the other members of the Kellerstein clan, one of the city’s most prominent families, known manufacturers of delicate wood and string musical instruments that had given soul and sound to countless German symphonies from the times of Bach and Handel.
Once established in Leipzig, supported by the Kellersteins’ money and contacts, Isaiah Kaminsky had started to evacuate his family members with the very complicated purchase of an exit permit and tourist visa for his son, who had just turned seven. The boy’s initial destination would be the remote island of Cuba, where he would have to wait for a change in his visa status to travel to the United States and for the departure of his parents and sister, who trusted they would emigrate with a certain quickness, if possible, directly to North America. The choice of Havana as the route for Daniel was due to how complicated it was to immigrate to the United States, and to the positive fact that, for a few years already, there lived Joseph, Isaiah’s older brother, who had already been converted by Cuban chutzpah into Pepe the Purseman and was willing to show up before the island’s authorities as the boy’s financial provider.
For the other three members of the family stranded in Leipzig, things ended up being more complicated: for one, there were the German authorities’ restrictions against resident Jews emigrating anywhere, unless they had capital and handed every last cent to the state; and then there was the increasing difficulty that getting a visa entailed, especially to the United States, where Isaiah had set his sights, since he considered it the ideal country for a man of his profession, culture, and aspirations; and, finally, there was the stubborn belief among the Kellerstein family’s patriarchs that they would always enjoy a certain consideration and respect thanks to their financial position, which should facilitate, at least, a satisfactory sale of their business, an act capable of allowing them to open a perhaps more modest one in another part of the world. It must have been that sum of dreams and desires, along with what Daniel Kaminsky would later deem a deep spirit of submission and a paralyzing inability to understand what was happening, that would rob them of precious months to try any of the means of escape that had already been carried out by other Leipzig Jews who, less romantic and less integrated than the Kellersteins, had convinced themselves that not only their businesses, houses, and relationships were at risk but, above all, their lives, by the fact of their being Jews in a country that had become sick with the most aggressive case of nationalism.
Their deep trust in the German kindness and courtesy with which they had coexisted and advanced for generations did not save the Kellersteins from ruin and death. While by that time German Jews had already lost all of their rights and were civil pariahs, another turn of the screw came then that turned their religious and racial condition into a crime. From the night of November ninth into the tenth of 1938, six months after Daniel’s departure to Cuba, the Kellersteins lost p
ractically everything during the blackness of Kristallnacht.
Inclined to seek out a visa to any part of the world where they wouldn’t be in the same danger, Daniel’s parents and sister went to Berlin, taken in by a Gentile doctor, a former classmate of Isaiah Kaminsky’s from his university years. There, Isaiah, as he ran from one consulate to another, witnessed large Nazi marches and was able to gain a definitive notion of what was in store for Europe. In one of the letters he wrote to his brother Joseph at the time, Isaiah tried to explain, or perhaps explain to himself, what he felt in those moments. The missive, which years later Uncle Pepe would give to Daniel and, several more years later, Daniel would put in the hands of his son Elias, constituted a vivid confirmation of how fear invades an individual when the forces unleashed and manipulated by society choose him as an enemy and take away all recourse, in this case simply for professing certain ideas that others—the majority manipulated by a totalitarian power—have deemed a danger to the public good. The desire to escape from himself, to lose his uniqueness in the homogeneous vulgarity of the masses, was offered as an alternative against fear and the most irrational manifestations of a hate repackaged as patriotic duty and internalized by a society altered by a messianic belief in its fate. In one of the missive’s last paragraphs Isaiah declared, “I dream of being invisible.” That sentence, the summary of his dramatic will for a submissive evasion, would be the inspiration capable of changing many of his son’s attitudes and would push him, more than the desire of acquiring invisibility, to the search to turn himself into someone else.
Heretics Page 3