Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  That unfortunate story, the climax of which occurred in Havana’s port just three months before the fascist invasion of Poland, in addition to the successive news of events coming from Germany and German-occupied countries regarding the European Jewish community, led adolescent Daniel Kaminsky to take the path that would turn him into an unbelieving skeptic. If certain stories about God’s relationship with His chosen people had seemed excessive to him as a child (especially the one about Yahweh demanding the sacrifice of Isaac, the son of his favorite, Abraham), from that moment on, he would also dare to ask himself, obsessively, why the fact of believing in one God and following His commandments to not kill, not steal, not covet could make the history of Jews become nothing but a series of agonies. The end result of that sentence had been, undoubtedly, the suffering of the most horrifying of the holocausts, in which, even without the certainty he later had, he was sure that his parents and sweet sister Judith, from whom they hadn’t heard another word, had perished.

  So it was that young Daniel, disoriented, began to question his very identity and the suffocating weight it represented. What did he, Daniel Kaminsky, have to do with everything that was said about those born as Jews? Because their foreskin was cut, they ate certain foods and not others, prayed to God in an ancestral language, did they, he, his sister Judith, deserve that fate? How was it possible that some Jewish thinker came to say that that suffering constituted another test imposed on God’s people because of their condition and earthly mission as the flock chosen by the Holiest? Since the answers eluded him while the questions wouldn’t disappear, Daniel Kaminsky would decide (long before his uncle Joseph would present him at the synagogue to carry out the initiation ceremony of the bar mitzvah that would turn him into a responsible adult) that, due to dozens of historical lessons and practical reasons, and although he would remain so to everyone else, he didn’t want to keep living as a Jew. Above all, he didn’t want to take on that cultural belonging because he had lost faith in the God associated with it. And in all gods. Floating above men, there were just clouds, air, stars, the young man had concluded, because nowhere in any cosmic and divine plan could there be written or ordered the persistence of so much agony and pain as payment for the necessary transit through a bitter earthly life, plagued besides by prohibitions, a life of sorrows that wouldn’t be redeemed until the arrival of the Messiah. No, it couldn’t be. He couldn’t believe in the existence of a God capable of allowing such excesses. And if He had ever existed, it was clear that He was too cruel a God. Or, further still, that that God didn’t exist or had died … And, the young man asked himself many times: Without the oppression of that God and without His tyranny, what was Judaism?

  * * *

  Those were hard years that were simultaneously full of revelations for Daniel Kaminsky. The stabbing feeling of uncertainty came to join the hunger always beating at his door and the city noises determined to besiege him. When the Saint Louis returned to Europe and it became known that Great Britain, France, Holland, and Belgium would accept the refugees, hope was reborn in his heart and that of his uncle Joseph. But with the start of the war, they began to live with that anxiety determined to embitter the lives of all Jews with relatives in Europe, and also those who didn’t have any family there, since no one knew the reach of that avalanche of hate moving and growing like a dark snowball that nobody seemed able to stop.

  They spent all their time hunting down news, always unclear, increasingly more terrible, reading any and every report that fell into their hands with the fear of finding the last name Kaminsky on some list of detainees, transfers, or victims, with the piercing anxiety of not knowing more perverse than even the certainty of knowing. The first devastating blow had come with the news of the easy Nazi occupation of Holland and the confinement and transfer of Jews living there. Later, when the initial news came out of mass executions of people and entire communities in Poland, Ukraine, Turkey, and the Balkans, the details of what was to many the incredible horror of the death camps, in conjunction with the unbelievable addition of those trains loaded with emaciated men, women, and children and of the trucks designed to use their own exhaust pipes as a gas to suffocate the prisoners, a curious and explainable phenomenon occurred in that small family: while Joseph Kaminsky became a fanatic, going to the synagogue more often, dedicating more hours to prayers and clamors for the arrival of the Messiah and the end of time, Daniel, increasingly better equipped to analyze and understand what was happening and what his life had been and could be, became more of a skeptic, an unbeliever, irreverent, a rebel before a suspicious divine plan overflowing with cruelty. Simultaneously, he was becoming more Cuban and less Jewish.

  Daniel knew that, to proclaim his freedom and achieve anything, he would need time and support, and the only person in the world capable of offering these to him was his uncle Joseph. So, at ten, twelve years of age, the boy learned the art of wearing a mask, something that would serve him well throughout his life. The mask he wore at home and in everything relating to his uncle was a caricature painted with the necessary features to satisfy (or at least not irritate) Pepe the Purseman. By contrast, the side he started to develop on Havana’s streets was pragmatic, mundane, essentially streetwise, and Cuban. Using their economic difficulties as an excuse, he managed to convince his uncle to enroll him in a Cuban public school and leave his religious education to lessons taken through Adath Israel synagogue’s free services teaching the Torah Vaddat. The option freed him from the Israelite Center school, allowed him to socialize more closely with Cubans and to start establishing friendships with kids his age, like the twins Pedro and Pablo and Eloína the tomboy, and even with some who didn’t live in the tenement. The ones who would end up being two of his closest friends from that time period were his classmates from public school: un mulato lavado, as they called light-skinned blacks who passed for white, named Antonio Rico, who had amazing eyes that all the girls fell for, and a hyperactive redhead, the most out-of-control and most intelligent in their class, named José Manuel Bermúdez, nickname “Scatterbrain,” because of permanent restlessness.

  With Pedro and Pablo the twins, at age eleven, Daniel learned the pleasure of rubbing his dick. The site where he was initiated in masturbation and where so much of it occurred was a pigeon loft made by the twins on the tenement’s rooftop. From up there, while they melted under the sun, it was possible to watch, through the open window, the pink ass, extraordinary tits, and long, wiry pubic hair belonging to Russian Katerina, who, always overwhelmed by the heat, fearlessly paraded the plump nudity of her thirty-five years around the room where she lived, on the other side of Calle Acosta. Shortly after, Pedro, Pablo, and Daniel went up a notch in their sexual explorations when Eloína the tomboy, who had grown pointy and exciting tits overnight, showed them that, even though she was better than most boys at playing baseball, her feminine sexual inclinations were very well-defined. Thanks to this, as if it were just another outing to send off kites, in the best spirit of camaraderie, the former tomboy initiated them (and initiated herself) in partnered sex, although under the condition that penetration only happen through the rear door, since her Red Diamond (that’s what she called her freckly pussy with its saffron-colored curls) had to reach the marriage to which she aspired without any fissures, since, she said of herself, she was “poor, but honest.”

  Thanks to those hardened street dwellers, Daniel also learned how to speak Havanese (he called his friends negüe, buses were guaguas, food was jama, and the sexual act was singar), to spit out of one side of his mouth, to dance danzón and later mambo and cha-cha-cha, to flirt with girls, and the treacherously, deeply enjoyed freedom of eating pork cracklings, ground-pork spiked fritas, and almost anything that would satisfy his hunger, without caring whether it was kosher or treyf, only that it was delicious, abundant, cheap.

  Antonio and Scatterbrain, for their part, facilitated the greatest and most defining revelations of Havana, which would always remain in Daniel’s memory as trans
cendental discoveries, capable of marking him for the rest of his days. With them, both members of the school team, he learned the infinite secrets of the incredible sport known as “ball” by the Cubans, and acquired the incurable virus of a passion for that game when he became a fan of the Marianao club team, in the Cuban professional league, perhaps motivated by the fact that that club was always losing. With those friends, he learned to fish and swim in the bay’s warm waters. With them, on many nights, he crossed the imaginary border of his neighborhood, marked by Calle Ejido and Calle Monserrate—the path where the wall encircling the old city had once run—to peek into the entrances brimming with lights, announcements, music, and passersby of the Paseo del Prado, where the city exploded, overflowed, came off as rich and prevailing, and where it was possible to enjoy from any corner the acts of female orchestras charged with animating cafés and restaurants on the central avenue, places that never closed their doors, if in fact doors existed. (In a voice that he always lowered, Daniel would later confess to his son that those musical acts led by women had left him forever with the magnetic attraction he felt when he saw a female blowing on a flute or a saxophone, playing an upright bass or some metal drums. A downright feverish attraction if she was una mulata.) With those friends, he took refuge hundreds of times in the Ideal Movie Theater, built with the columns worthy of the dreamlike palace that it actually was, to take in their favorite movies, almost always thanks to Scatterbrain’s congenial generosity, since his father was a driver on Route 4 and earned a fixed salary: Scatterbrain tended to pay for Daniel’s and Antonio’s tickets, at five cents a head, to enjoy a banquet of two movies, a documentary, a cartoon, and a newsreel.

  As he opened the doors of a noisy city in which there were no physical or mental dark corners reminiscent of Kraków and Berlin, Daniel Kaminsky felt like he was leaving himself and living inside another Daniel Kaminsky who would live without a thought to prayers, restrictions, and thousand-year-old laws, but above all, without feeling the pernicious fear that he had learned from his parents (although he was always tangibly afraid of Lazarito el mulato, the neighborhood’s typical tough guy, who owned a mythical switchblade with which, they said, he had sliced up a bunch of asses). The boy was living it up and was able to shout obscenities with the crowd at baseball games, swim like a dolphin in the Malecón’s reefs, sympathize with Hollywood heroes, and live with his love for the ass of a mulata flute player with promising lips while he masturbated gazing at the straight hairs hanging from a Russian woman’s crotch: the perfect combination.

  If that had been his entire life, if that had been the only Daniel Kaminsky, perhaps he would have been able to say, years later, that, despite the poverty, malnutrition, and absence of his parents that marked those years, he had had a happy, almost full, adolescence. But the other Daniel, who lived in anxiety over the war and in desperation to receive any news regarding his parents and his sister, was moving within a lie that made him feel as if he were suffocating. His goal, at that time, was to reach a sufficient age to declare his independence, although he knew he had to do so in a way that wouldn’t hurt the sensibilities of his uncle Joseph, to whom he owed so much and whom, without expressing it physically or verbally, he loved like a father. He would buy his freedom with time and money.

  Daniel the Pole, as his classmates and Havana street friends called him, was able to enroll at the Havana Secondary Learning Institute only one year behind students his age, specifically his future girlfriend Marta Arnáez and his pal in street wanderings José Manuel “Scatterbrain.” By then, he had already been through his bar mitzvah, the war was over, and he had suffered the painful and liberating experience of having read, among the lists of Holocaust victims provided by the Israelite Center of Cuba, the names of his father and mother amid the Jews who, throughout those awful years, had been sent to Nazi camps and crematories, the horrors of which had finally come to light in full and were publicly condemned in the Nuremberg trials. The name of his sister Judith, on the contrary, never appeared, as if the girl had never existed, and for many years Daniel held on to the slight but persistent hope that Judith, by some miracle, had stayed alive: maybe adopted by some Soviet officer, perhaps rescued by some partisans, maybe hidden in the woods and taken in by some country folk … but alive. In his imaginings, Daniel had come to identify his sister with the heroine to which she owed her name and who, according to the books considered apocryphal by biblical compilers, had slit the throat of General Holofernes, who was sent by the powerful Nebuchadnezzar to subdue the unruly Israelites. Thanks to his recollection of one of the many books that existed at his Kellerstein grandparents’ house, Daniel could see his sister Judith transfigured into that beautiful and rebellious woman, painted by Artemisia Gentileschi, dagger in hand, in the act of decapitating a Babylonian general, who in his mind appeared as an officer of the terrible Hitlerite SS from whose claws she was escaping …

  If the end of Daniel’s childhood could be marked by the morning on which he saw the Saint Louis set sail from Havana’s port, the beginning of his adulthood happened in October 1945, at the age of fifteen, as the feeling of absolute loneliness fell on his shoulders when he confirmed that his parents had been killed by the most rational and intellectualized hate. He would make his first decision as an adult a few days later when he refused to please his good uncle Pepe the Purseman by continuing his studies at the Yavne Institute, known for its Orthodox leanings.

  Daniel Kaminsky would always remember that time, so full of difficulties, as one of the most complicated in his life both before and after. In the span of those six dark wartime years, Uncle Joseph had shown Daniel, upon taking him in, his limitless goodness in spades by protecting him, feeding him (more or less), and supporting him as a student, something that was a luxury for the majority of Cuban young people, many of whom barely finished elementary school, as had happened with his friend Antonio Rico. Although in the Kaminskys’ daily life things hadn’t changed too much, Pepe the Purseman’s finances had to be (Daniel would assume, and gratefully confirm it years later) much less tight since he was promoted to main leather cutter and turned into the heart and soul of Jacob Brandon’s increasingly prosperous leather workshop. That American Jew’s businesses had taken off in the years of war and shortage, thanks to the improvements he had introduced to all of them, including the leather goods shop, by reinvesting the earnings gained with the very productive lard contraband. Joseph’s decision to send Daniel to the Jewish high school, nonetheless, had been assumed as an investment, and constituted common practice even among the most impoverished Jews in the community, who were aware that only with higher education could doors be opened in a country where, since the United States’ entry into the war as an enemy of Germany, the relationship with Jews had again come to be cordial.

  Conscious of his obvious inability to support himself, the young man tried to be as delicate as possible when he communicated his decision to his mentor to continue his studies like any other Cuban and to limit his relationship with the family religion to a minimum, since he could no longer spend time faking something he didn’t feel, particularly when it came to a matter so serious for the Jewish people.

  Joseph Kaminsky’s reaction turned out to be violent and visceral, as expected: resorting to Yiddish to best express his disappointment, he called Daniel a heretic, an ingrate, senseless, and demanded that he leave his house. With a small leather satchel that fit his belongings—a few clothes, two or three books, the photos of his parents that he’d had with him since leaving Kraków—Daniel went out to Calle Compostela to go up Acosta and cross through the Arco de Belén, which, without his willing it, introduced itself in his mind as the exit from a rowdy Jewish paradise established in Havana’s oldest neighborhood. But still a paradise at the end of the day.

  His dreams of being able to continue his studies with some normalcy now undone, Daniel was lucky that his friend Scatterbrain got his parents’ permission so that, for a few days, he could sleep on some blankets t
hrown on the floor of the small living room in the Calle Ejido apartment where the family lived. A big question mark hung over the young man, who had neither a profession nor any skill, since he knew that even if he managed to get any kind of gig, he would never earn enough to find a room and pay for a meal every day.

  One week later, a stopgap appeared, at least for his sustenance, both nutritional and, in part, physical, when Sozna the Jew, the owner of the bread and pastry shop La Flor de Berlín, provisionally offered him the arduous night cleaning shift. The German Jew put him in charge of cleanup at the back of the work- and salesrooms, washing trays and utensils and even lugging tons of vegetable oil and sacks of sugar and flour back and forth, to leave it all pristine and in the exact order in which the master baker and his helpers should find it at the start of their first shift, at one a.m. Thanks to the backbreaking work he meticulously carried out (at times, with help from Scatterbrain, Antonio Rico, and Pedro the twin, since Pablo, convicted of several robberies, had been sent to Torrens, a famous and dark reform school), he not only received twenty-five cents per day but could also eat all of the scraps and rejects that the bakers (and the owner himself, who wasn’t Jewish for nothing) hadn’t made off with themselves, scrape the bottoms of the jelly jars, and, removed from the workshop’s own noises, sleep for a few hours atop the mountains of Castilla-brand flour sacks. Although he forced himself each morning to overcome his exhaustion and to attend his classes at the Havana Secondary Learning Institute, the worst part of his situation was the absolute darkness in which his future had fallen, since, while he still didn’t know what path he would take, he had never seen himself as a baker’s helper.