Days of Awe

by Achy Obejas

  I fumbled on my interpreter’s oath, standing there in her sky-scraper shadow. Then I bungled the amazingly simple last name of the poor man Karen was representing—a recently arrived Cuban named Levi, which I kept pronouncing like the denim manufacturer instead of the Spanish variant, lev-eee. He was short but stocky, with a bushy patriot’s mustache and a thick head of curls.

  Levi, who looked to be about forty, had lost his right arm when an ambulance spun out of control and crashed through the doors of Cook County Hospital’s emergency room, where he worked as an orderly. The industrial steel bucket he was using to help mop the place had somehow gotten in the ambulance’s crush and whirl and been transformed into something of a rotary saw, a mighty machete that cut through Levi’s flesh and bone as if his arm were a tender stalk of sugarcane during the harvest in his native Camagüey.

  Karen was suing for several million dollars and Levi, who’d since acquired a fabulous, skin-colored and derma-textured prosthetic that worked through some kind of magical patch with his own live neurons, sat with his new arm as lifeless as an empty sock, anxiously waiting for his fortune.

  “Don’t let this act fool you. I can do anything with this,” he boasted to me before court, patting his new limb with his old hand. “I can play basketball if I want—can you imagine?—just like Michael Jordan! But today, here, I have to be very careful. Miss Kilberg does not even want me to scratch my head with my new hand if it itches. No, I have to do it with my real hand, even if it’s not as natural—you know, my new arm is totally a part of me now, I’ve just assumed it. But you come see me later, you come to my house if you like and we’ll have a little mentirita—that’s a rum and Coke, a Cuba Libre, but Cuba’s not really free so that’s why I call it a mentirita, because it’s a big lie—and I’ll show you all the things I can do with this arm. I tell you, it doesn’t itch, it doesn’t hurt—it is much better than my old one!”

  I thought for sure Karen would ask for a continuance—an interpreter is a vital part of the proceedings and I knew nothing about her strategies, her client was obviously somewhat unreliable as well, and the defense seemed very confident, sitting there chewing on their dried apricots. But to my surprise Karen stood tall and went on as if nothing was wrong, as if every piece was in place.

  After a series of experts attested to Levi’s suffering, Levi himself testified for nearly two hours—long, convoluted discourses on everything from the plantation he’d lost after the Cuban revolution to the numb shock of seeing his own blood spraying out of his shoulder as if it were a showerhead.

  Although as an interpreter I’m only supposed to repeat exactly what’s said to me, it soon became clear from the way Levi talked to me—“Okay, so this is the part where I say about the mental trauma of bone breaking, right?”—that he’d rehearsed built-in clues with the originally scheduled interpreter. I kept looking up at Karen, who absolutely reigned over me, but she’d just stare back impassively, as if there was nothing particular in my gaze. That should have kept me on track professionally, but instead I shifted ever so subtly, so imperceptively, handling the interpretation in ways that could only help her case.

  By the time Levi got off the stand for the afternoon, the two guys with the kippot and dried apricots had surrendered, calling for a recess and whispering madly with Karen while Levi and I sat and watched. Levi tapped his new, motorized fingers on his thighs, over and over, as if they were impatient to play basketball or make love.

  “You were great!” Karen said later, after she and I waved off an excited Levi and went back to her office. “I want to work with you again, but let’s skip the agency. They already know I’m mad so it’s no big deal. I’ll spend less, you’ll make more. Here’s my card.”

  It was white, with robin’s-egg-blue raised lettering (like the Israeli flag), and read: “Sima Karen Kilberg.”

  “Sima?” I said, looking up at her again, all blond, all six feet of long, long legs and nonexistent hips. “That’s Spanish. Are you Hispanic?” I felt like an idiot the minute I heard myself.

  She blinked. “No, of course not. And it’s not Spanish.”

  “Sure it is,” I insisted. “Si-ma; it’s phonetic.”

  She chuckled. “It’s Hebrew.”

  “It’s my grandmother’s name.”

  “Are you Jewish?”

  “I’m Cuban,” I said.

  “Levi’s Jewish,” she said. “There are lots of Cuban Jews.”

  “No, no, we’re Catholic,” I said. “I mean, c’mon, San José?”

  “Aw . . . yes, of course,” she said, looking at me as if for the first time. “Ask your grandmother about her name,” Karen said. “Maybe you’ll get an interesting family story out of it.”

  “She’s dead,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Was she your father’s or your mother’s mother?”

  “My father’s,” I said.

  “Ask him.”

  “Ask him what?”

  “If you’re Jewish,” she said.

  I never worked for Karen again—I don’t know why, maybe because I felt so transparent, so like a terminal patient suddenly aware that all the medicine I’d been taking may have just been placebos administered to a control group in some macabre experiment. Karen called but I just erased the tape each time. Seth looked at me funny, a little jealous, but too genuinely threatened to ask any questions.

  I might have forgotten all about her, except for two things: I began to have recurrent sexual dreams in which Levi would use his mechanical fingers to enter me like a flawless vibrator, then pull out, lick my juices, and nod at Karen, who would take her own licks then say “Yep, yep, yep.” I would wake up in a panic, unable to tell a frightened Seth what was going on in my head, or why I was so unusually wet between my legs.

  The other reason is that I raced from Karen’s office that day, past the giant Picasso sculpture at Daley Plaza with all its ambiguity and into a nearby cab—one of those bubblelike yellow taxis that are getting rarer and rarer—and dashed home, where I ran up the stairs two and three steps at a time and breathlessly called my father.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, hearing my winded voice.

  “Are we Jews?” I demanded.

  “Are we what?” he asked, horrified.

  “Are we Jews?”

  “You’re Catholic; you’ve been baptized,” he said, as if that was evidence.

  “Was Abuela Sima a Jew?”

  “Abuela Sima . . . ?” He was startled, his voice sank. “Why . . . why are you asking this, Ale?”

  “I want to know,” I said. “Sima’s a Hebrew name.”

  “Well, and what if it is? What does that mean? Do you think everybody named David or Miriam is Jewish, too?” He was clearly angry now.

  “That’s precisely the point,” I insisted. “I mean, Sima’s not that common—I just met the second Sima of my life today, and she’s Jewish, and she asked if I’m Jewish, and when I said no, she was rather adamant that I ask Abuela Sima, or you—I told her Abuela’s dead—whether we’re Jewish, and she said there might be an interesting family story here.”

  There was a hollow silence on the phone, as if the line had suddenly gone dead.

  “Papi?” I said. I clicked the button a few times.

  “She converted,” he said matter-of-factly. I waited for him to elaborate. “She converted,” he said again, as if I hadn’t heard.

  “Converted? From what to what?”

  “To Catholicism,” he said. “What else?”

  “From Judaism? So we’re Jewish, at least part Jewish?”

  “We’re Spaniards, we’re Catholic,” he insisted. “We’re like everybody else in Cuba.”

  XIV

  My father, Enrique, dropped from my grandmother Sima’s womb on a cloudy August day in 1920 in a tiny house on a muddy acre near the one-lane town of Mayarí in Oriente. For good luck, a rooster’s severed head hung from the door of the room like mistletoe. “Adim chanath chouts Lilith” was written in the a
nimal’s blood on the door frame.

  It was a time of great prosperity in Cuba—the natives called it “the dance of the millions.” No one could know that, less than a decade later, the country would be practically bankrupt and under one of the bloodiest dictatorships in its history.

  Enrique’s father was Luis San José, like Sima, a secret Jew, but unlike Sima, who held on to their inherited fear of discovery as if it were the breath of life itself, Luis was less sure of punishment, and, indeed, less sure of what, if anything, they might be punished for. Luis’s family had been in Cuba so long, their worship hidden and passed on in such subterfuge that, like the distortions inherent in a child’s game of whispers, by the time it was Luis’s turn he had no real understanding of Hebrew, no concept that common words and expressions in the hills of Oriente—such as bizcocho, chinelas, facha—were all transparently judeo-español. He knew he was a Jew, but he wasn’t altogether sure he really understood, or cared, what that meant.

  According to what Moisés Menach has told me in letters that began arriving shortly after my first trip to Cuba, Luis and Sima were simple folk, common to the core. They made the torturous trek to church in Santiago de Cuba at Christmas every year but changed their linens and lit candles now and then on Friday nights. Because Luis and Sima lived deep in the woods, through nearly un-passable roads bristling with orchids and bromeliads and hung with vines, they felt safe enough to be somewhat careless about their faith.

  Moisés Menach tells me my grandparents had braided homemade candles and a brass menorah in plain sight, right next to a small icon of the Virgin of Charity, who was said to have first appeared not far from where they lived. He tells me his family, recently arrived from Turkey, instantly recognized Luis and Sima as marranos, and that they were astonished that there were any anusim at all left in Cuba, since Jews, for so long banned from the Spanish colonies, had for years been emigrating from Cuba to Mexico, Venezuela, and Costa Rica as they each declared independence and dropped the anti-Semitic prohibitions of their colonial master.

  “We couldn’t imagine how Luis and Sima arrived at their situation, if they were just so isolated that they never knew anyone but each other, or if their fear kept them from ever making more than cursory contact with others,” Moisés wrote me. “They were to us, and perhaps to themselves, too, the last living marranos in the New World.”

  Still, other than to the trained eyes of the Menachs, Luis and Sima remained indistinguishable from the rest of the peasantry in the provinces. If their Christianity appeared perfunctory, it only matched that of their neighbors. With high illiteracy in the countryside, a large black population that relied on its own forms of venerations, and the near total absence of any sort of Catholic institutional presence, Luis and Sima’s lackadaisical approach didn’t even draw curiosity, much less suspicion.

  Indeed, there were times when the two of them inadvertently fit right in, such as in the days before Yom Kippur, when Luis would wake up before dawn and take two chickens—a white cock for him, usually a speckled hen for her—and swing them by their feet around his and her heads, the animals screeching and flapping, while the two of them chanted the necessary prayers of thanksgiving and atonement. To anyone who might have spied them performing the kaparot, it would have seemed like just another campesino family, infused by the fevers of santería, cleansing themselves of whatever evil had been afflicting them.

  What might have horrified anyone peeking in later is that, after the chickens were properly slaughtered and their guts tossed on the roof for birds, Luis and Sima did not leave the animals to rot as sacrifices to the gods—according to santería, the dead birds were now the repositories of all the wickedness absorbed from the lives of the supplicants—but instead prepared them for a delicious and hearty feast.

  But back then, hardly anyone was looking. In those days in Oriente, what mattered most was sugar, not god, and the most devout efforts were reserved for the hard work offered by the ubiquitous mills. Dark, silent Luis, who was stout and strong, made his living by working in the fields, wielding a machete like a swordsman. On his own time during the dead season, he’d work his own small acre, growing malanga and sweet potatoes, and even his own tiny tobacco vega.

  A woman with the kind of plain beauty that unfolded as you got to know her, Sima knew how to handle her own sharp points, taking in sewing between her extensive and arduous duties with the black women in the mill’s kitchen. During the months away from the refinery, she’d help in the garden, slipping into Luis’s arms between the vines of tobacco, emerging hours later, intoxicated and freed from her fears for a little while, laughing, with earth and leaves in her hair.

  My father wasn’t baptized, but that was not so unusual in Oriente. Fidel, who was born nearby on his father’s farm on the same steamy August day six years later, once talked about how the families in the area had to wait for a priest from Santiago to visit in order to receive the sacraments. Sometimes it was months between visits. Inevitably, some of the children slipped through the cracks, always busy or elsewhere when the priest arrived to douse them with holy water. Their faces remained dirty, their souls stained.

  “I remember that those who weren’t baptized were called Jews,” Fidel once told an interviewer. “I couldn’t understand what the term Jew meant—I’m referring to the time when I was four or five years old. I knew it was a very noisy, dark-colored bird, and every time somebody said, ‘He’s a Jew,’ I thought they were talking about that bird. . . .” 2

  Certainly Fidel, who wasn’t baptized until he was about five years old, might have been mistaken for a Jew in those early years, but he’d surely shrugged it off. To be a Jew meant nothing to him, except perhaps the possibility of a clamorous flight.

  But my father knew that Jews were flightless birds—without the keel on their breastbones, their leg bones and toe structures exactly like his: big and heavy, thick and strong for running. That was how they’d get away if someone came for them, not in a lyrical flight above the tall mahogany forests.

  For my father, who saw his parents scurry to hide the menorah and candles whenever a stranger showed up, being a Jew was something tangible: It was the void between Cuba and Spain, between him and everybody else.

  The truth is that Luis and Sima, whom I met only as a child, only when I was small enough to be carried in their arms, were not especially religious. From what I’ve heard, being Jewish to them was like being left-handed, something innate that becomes problematic only when others notice and whisper.

  I confess I’ve often thought Luis and Sima were more secret assimilationists than clandestine Jews. They wanted their families, after more than four hundred years in Cuba, to take root, to blend into the vast garden of Cuba. It’s not that they wanted to be Catholic—I’ve heard the story from Moisés Menach about the string of obscenities my otherwise gracious grandfather spewed while they ran around to prepare for a visit by the regional priest to meet me, the infant granddaughter just baptized in Havana.

  What Luis and Sima wanted was to be like everyone else; to be, in effect, Cuban—to walk in and out of the shadows of the giant laurels on the plaza in Santiago (now gone) and order anything on the menu at the marble-floored Hotel Venus; to speak only Spanish, forget their slangy judeo-español, and both Ladino and Hebrew, which were too abstract and too much effort; to think about Havana, not a lost paradisiacal Seville; to feel connected to the verses of José Martí, resting right there in the cemetery in Santiago, instead of Judah Halevi, who wrote about how his body was in Spain and his heart in Jerusalem: “How can I find flavor in food? How shall it be sweet to me?”

  But my grandparents lacked a clear enough vision of their own, and the strength to impose it. Besides, they lived a short trek from my great-grandfather Ytzak, Sima’s father. He liked to say that he was more Cuban than the Indian chief Hatuey (apparently forgetting that Hatuey was born in Hispaniola, modern-day Haiti), but what he desired more than anything was to be openly Jewish. He thought it was possi
ble to be both, and to be whole.

  What Ytzak wanted was to sit in his rocker and tell stories in which Jews were the proper heroes, to invite friends—Jews and non-Jews—to his home for Pesaj, to be able to explain and have others understand why he wrapped tefillin around his head and arm each morning. Luis and, especially, Sima, who performed the rituals better than they understood them, were horrified: To them, to be a public Jew was to risk their lives. As much as they were alienated from the sources of their Jewishness, they were also trapped. This was the only way they knew how to be.

  But Ytzak’s desire was such that, though he was raised in the same double-life of crypto-Jews all over Europe and the Americas— publicly Catholic, privately Jewish—he eventually created his own version of Halevi’s dilemma, spatial as well as spiritual: In Oriente, he respected his family’s insularity and acted Catholic, keeping quiet, hiding his paraphernalia. But in Havana, he was a Jew, a public Jew, a shamelessly slap-happy Jew.

  Unlike Luis and Sima, who were raised in the countryside betrothed to one another practically since birth, Ytzak had grown up in Santiago, a city that had throughout its long history mastered a certain urbanity. From Santiago’s pink and turquoise houses spilled children who spoke French and English as well as Spanish. Ytzak noted that the Americans who came and went lived as though they were still in New York or Texas. The same Cuban Catholics he saw in church on Sunday morning drank blood from the severed jugulars of live goats at toques de santos in the dead of night. The Haitians in the city, scorned and often treated like animals, never ceased being African. Even if they wanted to escape their destiny, their skin color marked them—they couldn’t be anything else. Everybody, it seemed to him, lived openly with their burdens and contradictions.

  Yet he and the handful of other crypto-Jews he knew in Santiago all went about their lives pretending, fearful. Unlike their neighbors, they occupied a kind of netherworld: White enough, even the darker Sephardim, to separate themselves from the misery of the Africans, but never sure how long their passing would last, or what their fates would be if their lies were uncovered. Never officially allowed in the Spanish colonies, their misery came from both within and without: Essentially illegal, formally nonexistent, survival required compromising the most basic aspect of their souls— to survive as Jews they had to pretend to be otherwise. (Often this meant identifying via nationality, so that, generations later, they still told other Cubans they were Portuguese or Turks, and later Poles or Germans—even though they’d have been openly persecuted by most of those whose nationality they pretended to share.) Most of the time, they were blessed with how well they could pull off the subterfuge. But their curse was that, quite often, the disguise became their lives in such a way that they no longer recognized who they really were.