* * *
With asphalt separating them, from that corner of Calle Mayía Rodríguez he could look at, in just one glance, the two-story building in which, until just a few weeks prior, Judy Torres had lived and, in the distance, the ruinous project that the house had become where Daniel Kaminsky had lived the happiest years of his life, and where he had also recovered the feeling of fear. After several years without feeling compelled to dig around in anyone’s life, in the span of just a few months, two stories of death had come out to meet him, moved by the same spring: the one that had released a Jewish Pole who had ceased to believe in God, and taken it upon himself to be Cuban who, at the most arduous crossroad of his life, believed himself to have the sufficient strength to kill a man who had held his parents’ and his sister’s lives in his hands. And those stories, seemingly remote, had had one of their points of visible convergence at precisely that Havana corner, a physical space that Conde now devoted himself to looking up as he wiped his face dampened by the sweat being pulled from his deepest insides by the shameless heat of August, and asked himself about the ways in which the life paths of different and distant people were created, progressed, twisted, and even converged. The most disturbing thing however was not the casual proximity of the two buildings or the connection that, without meaning to, young Yadine had fostered, or even the recurring presence of a work painted by Rembrandt three centuries before. What most alarmed him was the coincidence of motivations revealed by the knowledge that he now possessed of the lives and hopes of Daniel Kaminsky and Judith Torres, those two beings’ insistence—each one in their own way and within its possibilities—on finding their own territory, chosen with sovereignty, a refuge in which they could feel like the owners of themselves, without external pressures. And the consequences, at times so painful, that such yearnings for freedom could cause.
The feeling of disapproval, of himself and the whole world, caused by the discovery of the final truths about Judy had not left him for several weeks, although it had begun to recede with time, as could be expected. To accelerate the process and finish ripping that grimy burden from his soul, Conde had decided to distance himself from the only material evidence that connected him to the young girl, and resolved to return to Alma Turró, the dead girl’s grandmother, Judy’s address book and the copy of Blade Runner that, by almost poetic association, had opened the path to the truth. Because of that, from the corner, he was looking at the two houses, with the address book and the plastic DVD case in his hands, focused on thinking, without daring to act.
If he entered that house and spoke with Alma Turró, what could he say to her? Judy was dead, in part through her own will, in part because of the libertarian fundamentalism that she was capable of awakening in others, but dead and buried, and her grandmother already knew the details of the denouement. And any consolation, as far as Conde knew, had never brought anyone back to life. The house’s inhabitants, who could have been an ordinary family, had turned into victims of dispersion. One was dead, another was in Miami, another was in jail accused of a long list of crimes of corruption. Alma and her daughter were damaged, surely depressed, and with reason. Celestial vengeance for sins committed in the past and continued in the present? The satanic price that deceit and ambition must or should pay? Divine punishment for Judy’s insistence that God was dead and buried and finally recycled…? The atheist that, despite everything, Conde carried inside of him was not willing to admit transcendental Olympic organizations but rather strings of cause and effect that were much more pedestrian. You can’t play with what doesn’t belong to you: not with money and less still with the hopes and souls of others. If you do so, always, at some point (sometimes very delayed, it’s true), the arrow of punishment will be released, he concluded philosophically.
He then opted for one of his furtive hunter exits. He entered the porch, walked to the main door of the house trying not to make any noise, and deposited the plastic case and the small book against the white-painted wood. And he fled like a fugitive. He needed to run, distance himself as much as possible from that regrettable story.
He lit a cigarette and quickened his pace along the slope of Mayía Rodríguez toward the house of Tamara, who was again simply his girlfriend, feeling himself freed of all burdens. When he arrived, out of breath and damp, he greeted the concrete sculptures and opened the door. Just by putting one foot over the threshold, he had to recognize that, at least for him, that small territory was the best of all possible worlds. What are you complaining about…? About life: I have to complain about something, he told himself, and closed the door behind him.
Genesis
Havana, April 2009
In his fifty-five years, Mario Conde had never been to Amsterdam (nor anywhere else outside the four walls of his island). The strangest thing was that, throughout what was turning out to be a drawn-out existence, he had never even considered it in a more or less serious or possible way. As a boy, it is true, he had dreamed of traveling to Alaska. Yes, Alaska, with a party of gold-seekers. As an adult, a reader, and would-be writer, he thought that sometimes he would like to visit Paris, but, above all, to travel around Italy, as his deceased friend Iván had also dreamed. But they were always just dreams, unattainable with his means and as a citizen of a country whose borders were practically closed off by walls of decrees and prohibitions, as Judy would remind him. And, he knew, dreams themselves are only dreams. Because of that, like other immobile travelers, he devoted himself to journeying the world through books, and felt satisfied.
But the letter he had just read had stirred some unexpected desires to get to know Amsterdam, a city riddled with past and present myths where, they said, an unusual atmosphere of freedom had been established at one point and this place still prided itself on its pleasant tolerance of faces and virtues, beliefs and disbeliefs. This was the city where the rebellious Rembrandt had displayed his pride, his fame, his irascible nature, and always his marginalization and final poverty, perhaps conscious, nonetheless, that one day he would return triumphant and even in a position to return to the house from which his creditors had expelled him. Because that building from which he had to depart defeated, with his head down, could not be anything but Rembrandt’s house. Fate’s dirty tricks and reparations always arrived with delay.
Mario Conde, although he had never reached the rank of colonel, was also one of those people to whom no one wrote. Because of that, it had been a hundred years since he received a real letter. Not a telephone bill or a note like the one sent by Andrés nearly two years before. No. A real letter: with an envelope, stamps and postmarks, an address and return address, and of course with written pages inside the envelope and … delivered by a mailman.
The return address on the yellow envelope, medium-sized, belonged to none other than Elias Kaminsky, under whose name appeared the address of the Seven Bridges hotel in Amsterdam, Kingdom of the Netherlands. Without opening the sheath that the mailman placed in his grateful hands, Conde had gone to the kitchen of the house, prepared his coffeepot, and looked for his pack of cigarettes. He was so intrigued by the matter of the letter hidden by that manila envelope that, quite on purpose, he prolonged the anxiety of learning its contents, to better enjoy such a rare feeling. Since his departure from Cuba, the painter had called him several times. First to thank him for his help during his stay in Havana that had freed him of so many burdens; then to tell him that he had begun a legal process to recover the Rembrandt painting; later to fill him in on some of the turns of events of the litigation, which had gained new momentum with the information regarding the possible route that the damned painting had taken on its journey from Havana to a British auction house.
His coffee served, Conde carefully slit open the envelope and withdrew a tourist postcard and a wad of sheets, some handwritten on both sides. He spent several minutes looking at the printed card with a photo of the house where Rembrandt had lived for years, on the street then known as Jewish Broad Street, long ago turned into a mu
seum. And he felt the first hint of what could cause him to feel the desire for more intimate knowledge of the sanctuary where that disconcerting painter had created so many works, including the head of the young Jew too similar to the Christian image of Jesus of Nazareth, which, without Conde having asked for it, had gotten stuck in his own head. His mood, perhaps softened by that feeling of closeness, led to his spirit—a few minutes later, as he was reading the pages of the letter and almost without his noticing—flying after the words, until he felt how they surrounded him and were dragging him through some remote worlds that Conde only knew by name and through his readings. Incidentally, he would think a little later, now I have to reread Red Cavalry. Wasn’t Isaac Babel also Jewish?
* * *
Spring in Amsterdam hands itself over like a gift from the Creator. The city is revived, shaking itself from the slumber of ice and cold winter winds that, for months, beat down on the city and oppress its inhabitants, its animals, its flowers. Although temperatures were still significantly low, the shining April sun occupied many hours of the day and the feeling of rebirth became tangible, widespread. Elias Kaminsky, since he already knew and had enjoyed that epiphany that nature tends to gift, had decided to wait until the season’s arrival to travel to the city where everything had begun, before the seventeenth century had reached its midpoint and when Amsterdam was forging the glorious moments of the golden age of Dutch painting.
Elias Kaminsky thought and wrote that perhaps because of one of those many cosmic plans that had appeared throughout Jewish history—and in the drama in which he himself had been caught up and had even tangled up Conde—he had organized his visit to the city precisely when an incredible event was being revealed. Just next to the house where Rembrandt had lived, in the Zwanenburgwal flea market selling old tin pitchers, candelabras missing an arm, bronze lamp stands, and sets of glasses and dinnerware as ancient as they were incomplete, an old document collector had purchased, just a few months prior and for a ridiculous price, a tafelet or sketchbook belonging to a presumed seventeenth-century student of painting, judging by the quality of the sketches and the dominant style. On the book’s leather cover, ill-preserved by time, appeared the engraved letters E.A.
That tafelet contained several studies of the head of a bearded elderly man, obviously Jewish, since in several of the nib-pen or pencil sketches, he was crowned by a kippah or basking in the light of a menorah. In order of quantity, in various states of completion, there appeared a young woman, about twenty years old, portrayed from several angles but with the harmony of her features always standing out with an insistence on contouring her eyes and gaze. The notebook also contained several landscapes—rather, sketches of a muddy countryside, perhaps close to Amsterdam—that much recalled the style of some of Rembrandt’s sketches and engravings with that subject matter. But what would inspire the buyer’s greatest interest and later that of classic Dutch painting specialists to whom the antiquarian had immediately handed over the sketchbook to be studied and analyzed were the nine portraits of a young man, of markedly Hebrew characteristics, whose features offered an unsettling likeness to that of the anonymous model Rembrandt used for a series of tronies of Christ or portraits of a young Jew, as they have been equally called. Could it be possible that it was the same model, used by both Rembrandt and the apprentice? The question appeared and immediately grew to unexpected proportions. And the existence of the strange sketchbook, bearer of other secrets and mysteries, reached the ears of Elias Kaminsky almost at the same moment he arrived in the city.
Since the tafelet was taken apart to submit it to a variety of laboratory tests by the specialists at the Rijksmuseum, a secret door was opened: beneath one of the battered leather covers, several handwritten pages were found. It was undoubtedly a letter, whose first part was missing, although the entire second part was intact. The text, written with exquisite calligraphy, in seventeenth-century Dutch, was signed by the same E.A. to whom, based on the cover, the tafelet must have belonged, and narrated an episode of a pogrom in Poland between the years 1648 and 1653, of which E.A. had been a witness and, for some reason, aimed to involve his “Maestro,” as he called the addressee of that missive. Elias Kaminsky, sharing his speculations and conclusions with Conde, at that point of his narration, transcribed a fragment of the letter found in the tafelet, according to the translation made by a specialist in seventeenth-century Dutch Sephardic culture … And he asked forgiveness for what he would make him read. More intrigued by that request for mercy, Conde began reading the fragment of the found letter, but without being able to glimpse the darkness of the human condition that he would be forced to stare down into from the first to the last lines of what was written.
… I cannot stop hearing the cries of panic of some men driven insane by fear, pushed to undertake a desperate flight. Beings driven away by the vision of the most atrocious torture to which a human being can subject another, warned of their fate by the stench of charred human flesh, blood, and carrion that has taken over that unfortunate country. You will soon understand the reasons for which they flee, but know that not even my greatest efforts will be capable of expressing what these men have lived, nor of drawing the images that their stories have hung in my soul. Not even the great Dürer, who alarmed us so with his infernal visits, considered by many to be the by-products of a sick mind, would have had sufficient mastery to portray what has happened and is happening in these lands. No imagination would be able to journey as deeply into horror as what has occurred here in reality.
Like them, I will also depart, as soon as possible, but in the opposite direction, in search of an improbable breach that will perhaps lead me to atone for all of my mistakes and perhaps even witness the greatest of miracles. Or which will lead me to death.
But first allow me to put things in context. Due to the conversations I had during the first weeks of my stay in this country, I managed to learn something of the customs of the Israelites who live in great quantities in this kingdom. It surprised me greatly when I learned of the very advantageous situation that they have enjoyed in these lands for years, the reason for which numerous Ashkenazi Jews coming from territories in the East, including the Russia of the czars, had come to settle in its cities, many having seemed to amass notable fortunes. Among them, a curious maxim went around which, they maintained, reflected their position very well: Poland, they said, was the paradise of the Jews, the inferno of the country folk, and the purgatory of the commoners … All controlled from above by the nobles, the so-called princes, lords of the land and of souls. According to what I learned, the belief that that Jewish paradise existed was based on the confirmation of a political statute much more benevolent than any which could exist in another country in Europe. In this kingdom, the sons of Israel enjoyed a very notable freedom of religious practice, led by countless rabbis, learned men deeply familiar with the Torah and commentators on the Kabbalah, considered community leaders. However, in contrast to what happens in Amsterdam, there existed for these Jews, as much by Byzantine Christians, the so-called Orthodox ones (they tend to be the poorest Poles), as by Roman Christians, a hostility that has its origins in the fact that the best-known work of these Ashkenazi Jews has been that of serving as money lenders to the princes’ class and, at the same time, of tax and payment collectors to the country folk. The method applied is very simple and petty: the nobles take money from the Hebrews and then pay them with the debts from the people who work in their lands, leaving the management of getting paid in the hands of the Hebrews. As you can imagine, with the Jews as the collectors of some onerous dues, in the minds of the country folk, they are the oppressors, and not the princes, who are Polish, noble, and believe in Christ, although they pay for their luxuries and eccentricities with money borrowed from the sons of Israel.
The recent death of the country’s monarch, King Wladyslaw IV, of the royal house of Vasa, had already awakened the concern of those Ashkenazi Jews. The king, who was on the throne for more than fifty ye
ars, maintained a policy of tolerance toward the Jews. When he died, he was the Monarch of the so-called Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, placed as king of Sweden and at one point in the past even came to be the czar of Russia. The Poles say that his death left them like a flock without a shepherd, since until the pivotal problems of succession are resolved, the country has been left without a head and internally, the scepter is held by the Catholic cardinal Casimir, whom my brothers in faith have always considered a wise and pious man.
When winter began to recede, I at last began my delayed voyage to the South. Still riding over snow, I had some Ashkenazi Jews as guides who were traveling toward the kingdom’s capital. After a couple days’ rest in the city of Warsaw, I returned to the road, always in the direction that would best lead me to the region of Crimea, bathed by what is called here the Black Sea, from where I would try to fulfill my dream of reaching Italy.
Two weeks I spent getting to the city where I find myself today, called Zamość, and to which I arrived on the eve of the holiday of Purim, whose celebration was prepared for with great joy by the very considerable Jewish community in this village. But I had just arrived when alarming news came fast at my heels: the so-called Cossacks from the south had rebelled against the Polish princes and, with the help of a mob of Crimean Tartars, had sent the royal army’s border detachments running. For me, at that moment, the enormous concern caused by that news was a great surprise, as much among Poles as among Hebrews. Today, I now know that, because it dealt with those so-called Cossacks, the consequences of the revolt could be much more complicated.
Sir, these so-called Cossacks are like centaurs of war. They say their origins as a military power are due to King Sigismund, who governed over Poland about a hundred years ago. Knowing that the border with the country of the Tartars had always been a problem for the kingdom, the monarch had thirty thousand serfs chosen from that region and made an army: that of the Cossacks. For their services, those men received the privileges of not paying tribute to the king or the princes. But it was precisely the concession of those privileges that became the cause for the Cossacks very quickly beginning to lead revolts in which they claimed equal rights for other men to join their parties.
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