Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  Conde thought. He hazarded a guess.

  “The Rembrandt painting?”

  “No … Well, he talked about the painting because, without that, you wouldn’t be able to understand some important things about all of our lives. But what he talked about the most was his relationship with Uncle Joseph. He would tell my son how important to him that man had been, he who seemed so cheap and reserved, who in the most fucked-up moments of his life had been at his side and had guaranteed him the possibility of choosing his options freely … And he told Sammy—well, my son’s name is Samuel—he told him something he had never said to me: that he could never have paid back his uncle Joseph the debt of gratitude that he owed him, not because he had taken him in or because of the money that he gave him, but because his uncle had been capable of pawning even the peace in his own soul in order to save him, his nephew. When I heard him say that to Sammy, I thought the old man was talking about something religious—complicated Jewish things, as Roberto says. But now I know he was talking about more important problems. He was speaking of damnation and salvation. Of life and death. My father was referring to his own life and to the death of a man.

  * * *

  Ricardo Kaminsky could introduce himself as the most unlikely and yet simultaneously most faithful heir of a tradition that went back to Dr. Moshe Kaminsky, a Jew from Kraków. Like that distant Ashkenazi Pole whose blood he didn’t carry but whose surname had been handed over to him, the Havana-born mulato practiced medicine, had achieved a second-degree specialization in nephrology, and was a tenured professor in that field. But, to Elias Kaminsky’s complete surprise, this other Kaminsky, the Cuban one, who was white-haired and sixty-six years old, despite his scientific merits and achievements, still lived in the more than modest little house, built in the 1930s, in the neighborhood of Luyanó, that he had inherited from his parents, Caridad la mulata and Polish Pepe the Purseman.

  In the car, as they closed in on the address Conde had indicated to Elias Kaminsky, the continuous squalor and unstoppable decay of that Havana neighborhood became patent, more still, insulting. The houses, the majority of them without the benefit of any kind of porch, had dirty doors right on top of grimy sidewalks. The streets, full of potholes of historic dimensions, where all kinds of water pooled up, looked like they were the product of a carefully planned bombing. The buildings, many of them made from less-than-noble materials, had outlived the time span for which they were made and gracelessly exhaled their last breath. Meanwhile, the houses that sought to impose a distance in class and size from their poorer neighbors had met the fate of fragmentation in many cases: decades before, they had been turned into tenements, where families crammed themselves together into tight spaces, and, even in the twenty-first century, still had those collective bathrooms that brought such agony to Pepe the Purseman in his day. On the streets, the sidewalks, the corners, people without any hope and at the margins of time, or, worse still, flattened by it, saw the shiny Audi pass by with looks that went from indifference to indignation: indifference to a possible life that never, not even in their dreams (since they didn’t dream anymore), would be theirs, and indignation (their last resort) caused by the visceral reflux from what had been denied to them for generations, despite so many promises and speeches. They were beings for whom, regardless of their sacrifices and obedience, their lives had served as a transition between nothing and a void, between oblivion and frustration.

  “Look,” Conde said. “This is Parque de Reyes. That’s where your father and your uncle had a talk when Daniel discovered the Rembrandt painting at Mejías’s house.”

  What Conde called a park was an undefined territory. Several bins overflowing with trash; piles of litter, old, new, and ancient; the remains of what one could, with plenty of imagination, make out were once benches and playground rides for children; damaged trees with the patent desire to die. A compendium of disaster.

  “Uncle Joseph left the tenement on Compostela to live here?” Elias Kaminsky didn’t understand.

  “It was a working-class neighborhood. But remove fifty years of apathy and abuse and ten million tons of shit … and at least it was a single-family house with its own bathroom to give him time to deal with his constipation, right?”

  “He gave my father a fortune and kept living in shit” was the terrified foreigner’s painful and astonished conclusion.

  Conde gave the final directions for Elias to take Calle Zapotes. They followed the numbers in descending order until they reached number 61. To their relief, the numbered plaque, instead of hanging over the sidewalk, was adhered to the wall of the only house on the block with a porch. A small porch, but a porch nonetheless. In front of the house, a car in its death throes was parked, a Soviet car that, the newly arrived guests would soon learn, Dr. Ricardo Kaminsky had been allowed to purchase, thanks to his profession, almost twenty-five years before.

  From the Audi, they saw the doctor. The man was waiting for them on the porch, dressed up as if for some occasion: cream-colored pants and a shirt with the visible marks of a fresh ironing. The expectations of the person who had once been Ricardito, the little light-skinned mulato who could make up verses and, holding on to his mother’s hand, had stolen the heart of Joseph Kaminsky, were palpable. When the newly arrived guests got out of the shiny vehicle that cruelly highlighted the decrepitude of the car belonging to the nephrologist, the man’s eyes immediately dismissed Conde’s figure—it was so secondary in their search—and concentrated on the ponytailed behemoth. That face spoke to him of his own past. And it did so quite loudly, as Conde and Elias would soon confirm.

  After greetings and initial introductions, the doctor, somewhat nervously, insisted on introducing his family to the son of Daniel Kaminsky, that painter who had come with no prior warning from the mists of the past. His wife, two daughters, respective sons-in-law, and three grandchildren—two boys, one girl—emerged from inside the house, where those beings of various skin colors seemed to have been crouched, awaiting to be summoned. The last figure to peek out stirred Mario Conde’s curiosity, but not Elias’s, who was surely used to those kinds of faces: the girl, who turned out to be the doctor’s oldest granddaughter, a young woman, newly out of adolescence and paler than the rest of her relatives, was wearing an outlandish outfit, full of rivets and metallic pieces, and had her lips, nails, and the corners of her eyes painted black; a kind of striped-fabric tube covered one arm while a silver ring shone in her nose, and she had a collection of rings in the only ear that could be seen, given the piece of hair that, like a dark veil, covered half of her face. The girl stood out in that environment like a dog in the middle of a clowder of cats.

  The introductions were an act that Ricardo Kaminsky carried out with an old-fashioned formality, as if he were placing the members of his clan in front of a shaman or someone of similarly transcendent status. The women, even the young goth, kissed Elias’s cheek and the men shook his hand, all repeating the same phrase, “Mucho gusto, es un placer…” As such, after saying the names and relationship of each of his family members and their pleasure expressed, he addressed them, pointing at Elias. “As you already know, this man is the great-nephew of Pipo Pepe. The son of my cousin Daniel. This gentleman, if he allows me to say so, is my family, my cousin, the only one I have, and, as far as I know, I am the only Kaminsky cousin that he has, since his paternal family was killed by the Nazis. But the most important thing, and you all know it: if Grandmother Caridad was a happy woman and I am the man who I am and you are the people you are, it is because that Pole, this gentleman’s great-uncle, my father, gave my mother and me the three most important things that a human being can have: love, respect, and dignity.”

  Joseph Kaminsky was Pipo Pepe? Daniel Kaminsky, Cousin Daniel? Cuban, white, black, mulato Kaminskys, proud of that outlandish last name that had taken them out of misery? Elias Kaminsky had been attacked again and again, from behind, by surprise. He went mute, and tears started falling down his face, unstoppable. He had c
ome in search of a truth and, as recompense, discoveries were raining down on him that could loosen the tap of his tear ducts.

  “If you would be so kind,” Dr. Kaminsky continued, now addressing the visitors, “we’d like to invite you to have a meal here at the house. It’s nothing special, remember that I’m just a doctor, but for us it would be an honor. I mean, it would bring us great joy if you’d accept the invitation. Since I don’t know if you are a practicing Jew,” he continued, addressing Elias, “we’ve only made kosher dishes, nothing is treyf … I cooked them myself, like my mother used to prepare them for Pipo Pepe…”

  The stabs of emotion wouldn’t let Elias Kaminsky speak; he merely nodded.

  “Great … but, please, sit down. It’s cooler here on the porch. Mirtica…” Ricardo addressed one of his daughters. “The lemonade, please.”

  The doctor’s family asked permission to withdraw and returned to their secret refuge. Elias and Conde settled into their chairs and Ricardo finally took his seat. A minute later, the goth girl (Yadine, Yamile, Yadira? Conde tried to remember the name that began with “Ya”) and her aunt, whose skin was lighter than her sister’s but who had an African ass that Conde couldn’t help but admire, served them from a pitcher frosted over by the cold liquid inside, and handed them some tall, elegant crystal glasses.

  “You know something? These glasses were a gift from Mr. Brandon to Pipo Pepe and my mother when they married. We only take them out on very special occasions.”

  For several minutes, the two Kaminskys spoke of their respective lives, each one giving the other an overview. Elias told Ricardo of his profession, his family, his parents’ final fate. Ricardo spoke of his work as a nephrology expert at the hospital, of the joy that this unexpected meeting brought him, also of his family, who lived with him.

  “Do you all live together?” the visitor asked, perhaps keeping in mind the information that the Luyanó house only had two bedrooms.

  “Yes, all together; what else can we do? And we’re grateful to have inherited this house. Now my daughter Mirtica, who is a teacher, lives with her husband and her two children in the first bedroom. My daughter Adelaida, who studied economics, lives with her husband and her daughter, Yadine, in the second bedroom. My wife and I set up a bed in the living room at night … The problem is the line for the bathroom … especially when Yadine goes in there to dress up…” he said, and smiled.

  “Can’t you do anything?” The painter still didn’t understand.

  “No. The house you get is the one your family left you, the one you had built if you had a lot of money, or the one that, one way or another, the government gave you. I devoted myself to doing my job and only earned a salary … They didn’t give me anything…” Ricardo Kaminsky pondered for a moment whether to continue or not and decided to go on. “The problem is that I’m very Catholic. And when they were going to give something out at the hospital, they always left me out, because I was devout and that was perceived very negatively … It was a miracle that they sold me that Moskovich. It’s funny: now that they don’t give anything out, it doesn’t matter what you believe. When they did, it did. But what I couldn’t do was hide my beliefs. And I paid the price, without regret. After all, I love having my family close by…”

  As he listened to a story he knew well, given how common it was, of the nephrologist Ricardo Kaminsky’s overcrowded dwelling, Conde thought about the immense distance between the doctor’s world and that of Roberto Fariñas. It was the same, more insulting perhaps, as Daniel Kaminsky had found between his own poverty and the possibilities afforded to rich Jews in the Havana of 1940 and the Miami of 1958. And he estimated that, even with five years of college under his belt, the painter Elias Kaminsky wasn’t going to understand the twists and turns of that panorama that needed to be lived to be understood—more or less. The lives of those two men, legally cousins, had gone down paths so divergent that they seemed to be the inhabitants of two different galaxies. But, with mathematical fatality, Conde would prove that in a distant corner of the infinite, even parallel lines could find their meeting point.

  * * *

  “I will never forget, I can’t forget, that your father was the person who took me for the first time to see a baseball game at Cerro Stadium. I was about eight, nine years old and was a die-hard Almendares fan, and I would spend all day playing ball at any of Old Havana’s little plazas. Daniel still hadn’t gotten married or moved, but he was already Martica’s boyfriend, and one Saturday morning, when I was coming down the tenement’s stairs to go play ball, he called me over and asked me if I had ever seen the Almendares play. I told him no, of course. And he told me that that afternoon I was going to see them: that I should go take a bath and tell my mother to get me ready to go to the stadium at two o’clock … Although Daniel’s Marianao beat the Almendares, I think that was the happiest afternoon of my whole childhood. And I owe it to a Kaminsky. You can’t imagine how proud I was when I came back from the stadium with that blue Almendares cap that Daniel bought me …

  “My mother and I were very lucky to meet your uncle and father at the tenement. Especially your uncle, of course, who began a relationship with my mother that gave her something she had never known before: respect. And he offered me something that, according to him, would make me rich: the possibility of continuing my studies. With the passing of years, my mother and Joseph even married, and I ceased to be called Ricardo Sotolongo. I went from being what they called at the time an hijo natural to having two last names, as it should have been: Kaminsky Sotolongo. But before he became my legal father, I was already calling him Pipo Pepe. And your father, when he saw me, would always call me cousin. They made me feel like I was part of a family, something I’d never had …

  “When Daniel left Cuba, Pipo Pepe refused to leave because of us. He didn’t want to leave in 1960, either, when Brandon offered to open a workshop with him in New York as partners. He knew how fucked-up life could be for blacks in the United States, and that’s why he stayed here with us. Although he also stayed because he didn’t have the will to start over. When he got sick and died, in 1965, my mother and I felt that we had lost the most important person in our lives. Then your father, Daniel, told my mother that, if we wanted, he could claim us as the widow and son of a Polish Jew and take us to live with him and Martica. But I was finishing up at the university; things were very difficult here, but we were still living with a lot of hope that everything was going to be better and neither she nor I wanted to go anywhere. In any event, we were grateful that Daniel remembered us, as if we were his family … That’s why I always fault myself for not having had more contact with your father and with Martica, for having been stupid enough to accept what they told us, all of that about how those who left were enemies with whom we shouldn’t have a relationship … In sum, the things they force you to do. And that you accept … until you shake yourself and decide not to take anymore, at the risk of being separated from your tribe.

  “A few years later, it was my mother who got sick. She, who had never even had a beer, was diagnosed with a sudden and raging case of cirrhosis of the liver. One night, almost at the end, when she knew the end was coming, she told me that she had to tell me a story that, she emphasized, I had to know … And from what you’ve told me, now I think that you also deserve to know … Because it’s a story that shows the kind of person that Joseph Kaminsky was and what his nephew Daniel meant to him.”

  The doctor took a deep breath in and rubbed the palms of his hands on the tops of his cream-colored pants, as if he needed to clean them. Conde noticed that his eyes were moist and shiny, as if in the grip of great agony. Elias Kaminsky, meanwhile, was moving his mouth, anxious and pained.

  “Pipo Pepe killed that man, Román Mejías. He did it so that your father, his nephew, wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t have to do it. He killed him with his fixed-blade leather knife … He ran the risk of being executed, of rotting in jail, of Mejías killing him, of Batista’s men hacking him to pieces.
But above all, he killed him to save Daniel from all of those dangers. The old man well knew what he was doing, my mother told me, because not only was he tempting justice and the fury of men but also losing the forgiveness of his God, who, despite having deified revenge, places an inviolable commandment: You shall not kill. I, who knew him, and knew his generosity, can’t imagine how he could have entered the house of that man, delivered several slashes across his whole body, and then slit his neck, practically beheading him. But I can understand his reasons. More than the hate he could have felt toward that man who conned his family and sent them back to Europe, to torture and death, he was pushed by his love for his nephew. Only a man who is very, very upright is capable of making that sacrifice, and losing the most sacred part of his spiritual life, when that life matters to him—and very much at that. That’s why, I think, despite everything, he lived in peace until the end. He knew his soul would have no salvation, but he died satisfied that he had fulfilled his word to his brother, Daniel’s father: to take care of his son in all circumstances, as if he were his own son. And he did so.”