Days of Awe

by Achy Obejas

  Orlando shades his eyes with his left hand. “Why do you ask?”

  Rene laughs nervously. “Oh, nothing, really. Just curious. You wouldn’t happen to know, would you, who here was, what do they call it, a rabbi?”

  “Why a rabbi?” I ask.

  Rene shrugs. “Rabbis, you know, aren’t they the most powerful Jews?”

  “So you’re really gonna stay home for seven days and mourn?” Leni asked as we walked by the lake after Olinsky’s departure. She wore her stylish black funeral dress, not making the slightest attempt to hide the scars on her legs.

  The water opened up beside us, a blue slate. In the distance were sailboats, waterskiers, a few parasailers. Bikes whizzed by on the park trail my father had loved and strolled so many times.

  For a moment, I imagined us—Leni and I—in Miami Beach. In this picture, her skin is the color of rust, her scars thick rivers of magenta. When we get in the ocean, Leni dives in, even though it’s shallow, and disappears under the lather, emerging ahead of me like a seal pup, vigorously shaking the water from her head and laughing. In the dream, I just watch her, out of my element, depleted and doomed.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, back in reality, back overlooking the vast expanse of water. “I’m really gonna mourn for seven days, really.”

  As we approached my mother’s house again, we noticed a group of mourners gathered like crows in the front yard, hands like claws around their rosaries, which dangled like entrails. It was at that moment I told myself I’d do it all: sit on boxes, say kaddish for eleven months, pray every day.

  “Oh, Ale, you’re such a good Jew,” Leni said with a smirk and a little laugh, “you’re even better than the real ones.”

  XXXV

  After the memorial service, after the obligatory get-together, dispatching Olinsky and saying good-bye to Leni at O’Hare, I went home by myself for the first time in weeks. When I wearily stepped into my place—a third-floor two-bedroom in Uptown—it was a wreck. Dirty clothes littered the floor. Sourness leaked from the cups in the sink, lined with green moss around the rims. Spiders dropped spit from my office ceiling to the floor.

  I took my backpack from around my shoulders and plopped myself down on the living room floor. My apartment seemed dark and cold and small. I could feel my heart in my chest, its steady and dumb beat; I could hear my own hollow breathing. My head felt heavy. This was it, this was life now, I thought to myself, surveying the emptiness.

  To my surprise, after my father’s death, my tía Gladys had suggested I move in with my mother—there was certainly enough room and, with the Farraluque translation still outstanding, I’d be spending time there over the next few weeks anyway. Years before I would have automatically sniffed at such an idea—I had a life, after all, with an edgy rhythm that would be unsettling to my mother— but now I found myself considering the possibilities. We could be roommates of a sort, my mother and I; we could certainly respect each other’s space, live openly with one another yet with discretion, too.

  But when I mentioned it to her, my mother laughed. “I’m not ill, I’m not so old,” she said. “I don’t have to be taken care of.”

  I stopped in my tracks. “Well, what about me? Maybe I need to be taken care of,” I said, hurt and offended and sarcastic all at once. I must have sounded like Leni, though I knew even then it was my pride that was injured.

  Wisely, my mother decided not to take me too seriously, joking instead about what a nice gesture it was on my part, how sweet but unnecessary. “I can manage,” she said. Then she looked serious, determined. “And if I can’t, I need to learn how.”

  The summer my father died, Fidel disappeared from the world stage. For weeks, no one saw him, there were no traces of his slow black Mercedes-Benz limos slithering through the streets of Havana, no marathon speeches on television, no coy commentaries from the maximum leader as he strolled through a hospital or sports stadium. In Miami, rumors swirled about his demise.

  My mother listened to her maddening cacophony with even more ardor than usual. “If it’s true, what a gift!” she said, the radio in each room tuned louder and louder. She imagined herself returning with me to a Fidel-free Cuba, suddenly resurgent and glittery, just like in the vintage postcards sold in thrift shops all over the world. On the Internet, she began engaging in chat room discussions, tentative at first but then more confidently. “I don’t think Jorge Más Canosa’s plan is the answer,” she posted in one of her messages. “I don’t think exchanging Soviet influence for American influence is the way to go. We’ve done that before; it’s a lesson we should have learned by now.”

  She told me she knew she’d experience shock on first sight of Havana—she had read and heard so many other reports of first trips back—but she was just as convinced she could acclimate. “I read in one newsgroup,” she told me, “that there are exile retirees who spend almost the whole year there already, their pensions and Social Security checks routed through Mexico or Canada.”

  “Mami, we’re just going for a visit,” I reminded her, “not to stay.”

  “Oh, I know, I know, but someday—just you wait!—someday . . .”

  “Someday what? You always said it was this life, events here, that mattered.”

  “Yes, but . . .” And she would drift off.

  As the days passed, her basement altar became more and more elaborate: wild yellow bouquets lined the walls, water vessels—jars and clear-glass pots, goblets, vases of all sizes—covered the floor. The plaster-cast Ochún my father had pieced back together so many years before reigned mightily on her throne, dried peaches turned to stone on an offering plate, shriveled pumpkin slices and petrified pieces of cakes giving testimony to my mother’s devotion. A cigar burned continuously. The room had a vaguely nautical feel, sea smells and tobacco, an imaginary breeze that gently kissed the water and made it sway.

  As my mother dreamed of her return, I tried to get our papers in order to fulfill my father’s last wishes. Her Cuban passport (required by the Cuban government) posed a major bureaucratic problem. In a moment of defiance after her U.S. citizenship hearing, my mother had burned all the paperwork tying her back to the island. Gone were her original birth certificate, her University of Havana I.D., and her passport. Holding on to my father, she had severed Cuba from her life like a rotten limb, then catherized the joint. I was just a child then—just twelve years old—but I’d argued with her before she set the Cuban papers ablaze, begging her to keep the documents as a kind of patrimony for me.

  “You will have your own connections, your own memories,” she had said, “you don’t need mine—you’re an American now, that’s who you are.”

  Now, as I called the Cuban Special Interests Section in Washington, D.C., and travel agencies in Miami that specialized in Cuba trips, I helped my mother fill out the many forms required for reinstatement into her native land. I thought of my father back then, how he smiled wanly when they toasted their new status, how I found him sobbing in his office the next day. When I asked him what was wrong I noticed the papers on his desk—his rescued Cuban passport, his spared Havana driver’s license—his smooth hands passing over them as if they were written in Braille.

  Trying to piece my mother’s Cuban life together, I had those same papers before me as I filled out the questionnaire from the island authorities. To my astonishment, my father had not updated his passport after marriage; it still said he was single and claimed an Old Havana address.

  “Mami,” I called out to my mother, crouching next to one of her transmitters, “your last official address in Havana . . . that was the apartment you rented from the Menachs, no?”

  “No, no—San Miguel 1112,” she said without hesitation. She underscored the number by holding her fingers above the noise— one, one, one, two. “That was our first apartment together, just before Moisés bought his building.”

  Her fingers lingered in the air long after I copied her, as if she were trying to locate something to hold on to.

&
nbsp; When I find San Miguel 1112 on my return to Cuba—Orlando convincing the current tenant that mine is a visit of reconciliation, not reclamation—a young mother with two small toddlers clinging to the hem of her robe lets me in, following me curiously as I look around my first home on earth. It smells of boiled plantains here, of rancid butter.

  “This is Centro Habana,” Orlando says, “not Vedado.”

  I understand what he’s telling me between the lines: This housing is older, smaller, more practical, nothing as elaborate as the sculpted fantasy mansions to the west. But it isn’t quite the bland Soviet bunkers either.

  As I enter what was my parents’ first bedroom together (and where I was most likely conceived), I notice the window’s astounding view: the spire of the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel at Infanta and Neptuno. There, framed by the window and slashed by faded wooden slats, floats a bronze messiah, brown as mud, and from here it looks like a man walking across the heavens.

  When my father died, my mother left it up to me to call the Menachs, to tell them what had happened. Later, when I return with my father’s ashes, Ester and I sit alone one sticky night on the front steps of their house. She’s just finished explaining how her family sat shiva for my father, all of them except Rafa, who doesn’t care about anything, and Yosemí, who has become an evangelical Christian—although she never quite says that in so many words.

  “Yosemí prayed in her own way,” Ester tells me. She is silver-streaked now, rounder than when I first met her, her face still beautiful but marked with an infinite sadness. “What matters, I think, are the prayers, their intention and intensity. And Yosemí prays with all her heart.” When Ester swallows, I can’t tell if her discomfort is because of my father or her own losses. Her enormous bosom trembles.

  “The last time I was here,” I say, almost in a whisper, “I sat on these same steps with Ernesto . . .”

  She sniffles. We have never spoken about her son’s disappearance—with the exception of Orlando, the entire family avoids the topic to the exclusion of Ernesto’s name.

  “He liked you very much,” Ester says (meaning he was enchanted with me, the way Cubans delight in each other’s company).

  “I liked him, too,” I say, using the same construction. “By the time I left, I felt that I cared about him.”

  “The day he left,” she continues, entering a kind of trance, “the balsero crisis had been going on for days. I had to have a tooth pulled—I’m sure you’ve noticed, in spite of what everyone says, everything here is very, very behind. It’s not our fault, of course, but the Americans—If the blockade were lifted, everything would be different.”

  “Yes, yes,” I say. (In Cuba, this is not a political position, but an assertion of reality, like saying that the island is surrounded by water.)

  “I went to the dentist that day,” Ester remembers. “It was so hot we could barely breathe but they couldn’t turn on the air conditioner because it was prohibited, we had to save electricity.”

  Sitting outside the house tonight, our only light is the moon, a slice of tangerine in the hazy skies above.

  “When the doctor was about halfway extracting my tooth, the lights went out and the old fan they’d had going sputtered to a stop,” Ester recalls. “Suddenly the dentist couldn’t see what he was doing. He asked the nurse to use a hand mirror to catch a ray of light coming in through the window, and to direct it into my mouth. Just imagine! Then he asked her to please mop his brow. He was perspiring so profusely, his sweat was dripping on me, into my open mouth.”

  She stops, gazes at me intensely. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” she asks. I look away, shift my bones on the steps. Do I understand?

  “I thought it would taste like salt—the sweat, I mean. I’ve kissed my children, my husband, when they’re perspiring. I’ve even licked them, like a cat,” she says. “I always thought sweat was made from the same thing as tears. But the dentist’s perspiration was sweet, like sugarcane juice. At first, it was too intimate, too urgent. But then it was okay, like we were at a crucial moment in saving a life, and we were both part of the effort.”

  I imagine the nervous nurse, the light fluttering in the cavern of Ester’s mouth.

  “The nurse, she was barely paying attention to him, to the dentist,” Ester continues as if she can read my mind. “She was busy being horrified, telling us what had happened on her way to the clinic that morning, when she’d gone by the Malecón, where they were dragging in the remains of a human torso, the clear arch of shark’s teeth on its skin.”

  Suddenly, Ester stands up with one quick, unexpected motion. She holds her arm out to balance herself against the door frame, as if she’s dizzy or numb.

  “That’s when I knew,” she says, her voice level and hard.

  She goes back in the house without saying another word, but I can’t move. I sit out on the stoop for what seems forever, watching the shadows stir, trying to decipher the difference between angels and ghosts.

  In the days after my father’s memorial service, after the promise I made to myself to say kaddish for the next eleven months, I tried to find a temple that seemed appropriate for my task. For a couple of days, I attended morning prayers at a well-appointed synagogue on Lake Shore Drive. The rabbi was kind—I’d called ahead—but I found myself among a group of elderly Yiddish and Russian-speaking Jews who seemed as distant to me as those first Askenazis in Havana must have appeared to Ytzak. It’s not that I didn’t recognize their ruddy faces and customs, it’s just that I didn’t see myself or my father in any of them.

  I tried a reconstructionist congregation up in the suburbs, where the rabbi fingered my father’s tefillin before I could put them on, but their earnestness overwhelmed me—they touched me too much, seemed too eager to include Ladino prayers just for me, to talk about Cuba.

  At the recommendation of my old neighborhood friend—the Latvian boy—I finally tried a tiny Tunisian storefront temple up on Devon Avenue, just west of Rogers Park, situated near a bunch of Russian émigré bookstores, Pakistani and Asian Indian groceries, and Chinese restaurants bearing kosher seals on their menus. I’d get up at the crack of dawn and drive up there without the radio or tape player, remembering how my father always said silence was like a cleansing fast for the linguist. In the early hours, Devon was invariably deserted, debris skipping across the pavement, the security gates still crisscrossing the facades all along the avenue.

  Inside the temple, the men looked like my father and his domino partners: Yemenites, Lebanese, Portuguese chanting a softer Hebrew, sprinkling in a little Ladino; they could have all been Cubans claiming Spanish ancestors. Their hair and beards were lush, jet, unruly; their eyes pools of Indian ink. They would nod at me, a little embarrassed, just as if I were their lost daughter.

  “Hallowed and honored, extolled and exalted, adored and acclaimed be the name of the Holy One,” I prayed silently. Each morning I went, I was the only woman there, relegated behind a plywood partition with see-through lace curtains at the top. “Let us say amen,” I continued in prayer, knowing no one would join me in that amen, no one would count me in the minyan, preferring to go without one before including me.

  One day when ten men showed up almost by accident and the low gurgle of prayer became more pitched and ecstatic, I pulled my father’s velvety bag from my backpack and began to strap his phylacteries on my arm. There was an instant commotion on the other side of the partition, a desperate whispering and ruffling of shawls and prayer books. Finally, one of the men undid his straps and, with his head exposed, walked back to my section.

  “Excuse me,” he said apologetically, “but you . . . you can’t do that here.” His English was rushed but imperfect, too open-mouthed to be natural to him.

  I stared at him, dumbfounded. “Levi?” I said. It was Karen Kilberg’s bionic-armed client.

  “Excuse me . . . ? Oh my god,” he stammered, wide-eyed. “Alejandra?”

  We laughed nervously and he hugged me with h
is robot arm, which caused a major rustling in the congregation—someone slammed a book down somewhere—then, after undoing my phylacteries and putting them away, we stepped outside where we could talk. I heard the door close behind us, then the click of a lock turned by hand.

  “My god, Levi!” I said.

  He flexed his mechanical fingers like an octopus showing off its tentacles for tourists at the aquarium. “So good to see you, so good,” he said, then squeezed my hand too hard with his, “but you can’t do that, Alejandra, you can’t wear tefillin.”

  “Nothing says that, you know. It’s just tradition, not law,” I said in my own defense.

  He shook his head. “No, no, you can’t do that, not here. Don’t come back if you’re going to do that.”

  The first day of September 1997, after a three-week blackout, Fidel popped up in Havana, laughing and joking about how his brief disappearance had Miami television and radio stations actually declaring he was dead.

  “Dream on!” shouted Fidel at a school opening ceremony. When the skies turned gray and it began to drizzle, the old lion was defiant: “Those of you with colds, those of you with delicate conditions should go home,” he intoned, pointedly holding his ground against the heavenly downpour. His olive cap drooped, his military fatigues darkened to an algae of navy blue, but he continued.

  My mother and I watched him on the Spanish-language news in my parents’ den, all traces of my father’s last few days there now removed. Both of us sat on the couch, as always, his rocking chair like a monument neither one of us could consider defiling with our own weight. It was on a bookshelf here that we kept my father’s ashes in a small, innocuous cardboard container. It was our equivalent of a pine box, plain and humble. I peeked inside once, finding the powdery white ashes, the little chips I took for bits of bone.

  “He thinks he’s fooling us,” my mother said of Fidel on the tube, “but look at him—he’s shaking, he’s old. He thinks he’s so tough but he stands out there long enough and he’ll catch pneumonia— wouldn’t that be something, if he died like that just because he’s so full of himself that he thinks he can defy the elements?”