Days of Awe

by Achy Obejas

  “But you studied . . . you were an economist.”

  “I’m not a Jew,” he hisses, bringing his fists down on the table in a controlled, silent pantomime of rage. He spreads his palms on the table. “But you know what, Alejandra? My father-in-law was right. The time came and nobody cared anymore—right now, with the pope practically disembarking here—it’s even kind of chic to be a Catholic Communist, to be religious. But you know what else? Ernesto’s dead and Angela’s in Spain, and the last thing you could call either one of them is a Jew or a revolutionary.”

  The next morning I wake up again with my head in a vise, my temples throbbing. The barbacoa is suffocating, claustrophobic. Immediately, I prop open the window and gasp for air, but the brilliant sunshine hits me like an anvil and I tumble back onto the mattress, nauseous and sick.

  When I finally crawl downstairs, I find Moisés and Paulina at breakfast in the kitchen, drinking café con leches and eating buttered bread. The toast is a bit hard and it crumbles, the table underneath both their hands covered as if by snow. There is an oversized magnifying glass on the table next to Moisés, but he’s not using it. Instead, he stares off through the kitchen window—the one that looks out at Celina’s quiet apartment—as a petulant Paulina reads to him from the day’s thin and smudged Granma newspaper, Fidel’s official rag. When I enter, both of them stiffen but neither looks up.

  “What’s the good news?” I ask as I pry open the coffeemaker and prepare to make a couple of quick cups. The pot’s pieces roll away from me, clanging against the sink.

  “El Duque dumped his wife for a woman he fell in love with walking down the street,” Paulina spurts. “Now he says he wants to leave for Miami.”

  “Paulina!” protests her grandfather, slamming his hand on the table. “Please!” The magnifying glass rattles, my head pounds and pounds.

  “I take it that’s an exclusive report,” I say as I settle uneasily at the table with them. The girl rolls her eyes in disgust.

  “My granddaughter was just reading the news to me,” Moisés explains, his eyes spinning in their rheumy orbits. “The bones of Comandante Ché Guevara are being transported to Santa Clara for burial. Thousands have lined the route. My only regret is that I can’t be there to join them.”

  Paulina huffs and puffs. “You want to read the rest of the paper to him?” she asks, desperate to leave. Every day she looks more and more like the girls who linger around the Malecón: painted-on blue jeans, frilly, flimsy top; and points of red on each fingertip and on her lips. I’m suddenly glad her grandfather can’t really see her. Next year, will she be in Madrid or Milan? Or can she ride this out and find her own space here like Deborah?

  “Sure,” I tell her, willing to take over the chore, no matter how painful in my condition, because I want the time, finally, alone with Moisés.

  “No, no,” he protests, his face contorting into something of a grimace. But Paulina is gone before he can turn to argue with her. He has no choice but to come back to me, Granma in my hands, its ink leaving blotches on my fingers.

  “How about this article here, the one on Ana Quirot, the track star . . . did Paulina read you that one yet?” I ask, trying to be casual, squinting at the tiny letters on the page.

  He shakes his head.

  “Let’s see . . . she won some race then she says, ‘At this time, I have no plans about my future, about records. I am just exhausted. It has been a season for devils’. Hmm, yes, well . . .” My eyes begin to water from the pain.

  “The coffee,” says Moisés as the pot bubbles on the stove.

  When I rush to stop it from boiling over, he defiantly picks up his magnifying glass and scans the paper on his own, muttering under his breath. I decide not to waste the opportunity and by the time he glances up again, I’m sitting next to him nestling a cup in one hand and extending with the other the surviving black-and-white portrait of that curious girl my father handed to me in his final moments.

  Moisés doesn’t react at first. He merely clears his throat, acts distracted. When I finally let the photo drop onto the bed of bread crumbs on the table, he looks at it sideways, almost as if he were afraid of the image.

  From my discreet distance, I examine it again: It’s a girl, a young woman, dark-haired, with raccoon eyes like the Menachs but a stranger, her knees knobby, her smile tragic in its own way. She is on a ship in Havana bay, all the usual landmarks fuzzily outlined behind her. She is wearing a coat.

  “On the back it says, ‘La Habana, 1939,’ ” I say nervously, reaching to flip over the photo.

  But Moisés doesn’t let me. He takes my fingers in his hands and holds them up close to his blind eyes, stroking them with his own all the while. Slowly, a smile comes over his face.

  “You have your father’s hands,” he says.

  I laugh a little. “Now I know you can’t see,” I say. “My nails are bitten, I’ve never had a manicure in my life.”

  He nods. “Neither had your father before 1939, and his nails were bitten, too,” he says. “He should have left them that way perhaps. Anyway, that’s not what I was talking about. I meant the shape of your hands, your strength, your softness. Don’t misunderstand: I’m not fortune telling, just telling you what I see.”

  XXXIX

  The next day is surprisingly beautiful, not a cloud in the sky, the temperatures mild, the blue breeze from the ocean refreshing. I peer out the window of the barbacoa, wishing I was leaning out the balcony from my old family home instead. I glance up at it but its ledge is still troubled, the boards across its door still in place. From one floor down, I envy the panoramic view I know so well of Havana from there, alive with noise and sex, commerce and play.

  In the distance, there’s the sound of laughter and the drone of airplanes coming in from Ottawa and Madrid, Kingston and Miami. Toni Braxton and the gentle sway of an early version of Compay Segundo’s “Chan Chan” compete for airtime from taxi-bound tape players and boom boxes placed on windowsills, entertaining the whole neighborhood. Laundry flaps from every window, white flags of worn cotton and the occasional pastels.

  The man who sings tangos every night across the street from the Menachs emerges with his granddaughter from their home, each of them freshly showered and powdered. They look up, using their palms as protection against the sun, then wave in my direction. I motion back and watch them disappear down the lane, headed in the direction of the Malecón and its spicy spray.

  On a sunny corner, a few adolescent boys approach anyone they don’t recognize, slyly asking them the time as an opening line. When the foreigners bite, asking in their stunted Spanish what they said, the boys descend, suddenly English-fluent (or not), volunteering themselves as guides, quickly offering to take them to a nearby home restaurant out of sight of the authorities, or just outright begging.

  After a bit, I turn my attention next door again, focusing on a beaten old van just arrived. From its passenger side, a large, brawny man appears, his gestures tentative, while a roly-poly rust-colored woman jumps from behind the wheel and, after much effort, produces a folded up wheelchair from the back. I know immediately that the man is David, the man living in my family’s old apartment, and find my heart racing. He plops down in the wheelchair, smiling and gesturing to the neighbors who spill out to the street to welcome him from Trinidad. The rust-colored woman hovers shyly nearby, bunching the material of his shirt at the shoulders as she holds on to him. Everyone shakes her hand, kisses her cheek, or hugs her.

  As bursts of light pop around the scene, I notice a young woman—Medusa-haired, caramel-kissed skin, her lips a perfect Cupid’s bow—snapping at the happy scene with an Instamatic. At one point, she looks up, almost as if she recognizes me at the window, but just as she’s about to wave—I’m stunned, I’m frozen in time—I hear behind me the impatient knocking of Moisés at the mouth of the barbacoa.

  “Alejandra,” he yells up, “we have to go.”

  “Go? Go where?” I ask, confused, rattled.


  His hand reaches up, wraps itself around my wrist, and pulls until my face is positioned above him and Orlando, who is jangling a set of old and heavy keys.

  “Now,” the old man says, his eyes as clear as I’ve ever seen.

  In Cuba, there’s never much of a chance that sunset will catch anyone by surprise. It’s a long, poetic process, as if each hazy line of color on the horizon demands its own contemplation, its own verse. By the time night clamps down, it’s already late, midnight around the corner, epic.

  But on the way into Old Havana in Orlando’s clean blue Moskvitch—Moisés uncharacteristically taking the passenger seat next to his son-in-law and forcing me into the back—all he can talk about is how important time is today, and how so much is still before us before night falls. I try to catch Orlando’s eye in the rearview mirror, but he avoids me, just the slightest smile drawing his generous lips.

  When the car finally stops, no one needs to tell me where we are. I know instantly that the dilapidated storefront on the narrow old-world street of the colonial quarters is Chevet Ahim. We disembark and Orlando struggles with the set of keys at the rusty and giant shuttered door, then finally pushes it open with a shove from his shoulder.

  In truth, Chevet Ahim is only the second floor. The first floor may have been a private residence once, it’s hard to tell; it disappears behind the large, imposing stairway that leads up, above the high ceilings so typical of early-twentieth-century Spanish architecture. The walls were once whitewashed a blush of rose or yellow, but they’re now streaked and chipped. When we reach the top—we climb with only a bit of small-talk, all of us suddenly afflicted with a curious timidity and embarrassment—we find ourselves in front of a long counter that looks suspiciously like a bar.

  “It’s exactly what it seems,” says Moisés, reading my mind and spinning slowly to survey the area. “We used to sell cold beer here. There were also rocking chairs, and tables on which to play dominoes. Of course, it’s a bit disagreeable, on your way to worship, to pass by people drinking. But it wasn’t always like that, only later, when we needed to make a little money in order to keep up the place.”

  He continues down a narrow balcony on which the metal railing is green with mold and looks like it could fall apart with a breath. His pants legs flap against his bones as he walks, his steps uneven, threatening to miss and throw him from the balcony. Orlando and I follow him unsteadily, past a couple of doors that look like offices and an open-air kitchen, then finally we come to what was the first synagogue in Cuba.

  “Look, no foreigners!” Moisés says with a certain bitterness. He turns to me. “Imagine, if you will, this space as a place of prayer. The bima was at the center, with wooden chairs all around, and an oil lamp above. The men would sit around the bima, the women to one side, raised a bit from the floor and separated by a little wooden banister. The ark would be here,” he says, standing just off where the hazzan might have once stood, his voice soaring in ancient song. “There’s no place else like it in Cuba. I suppose, in a way, that it echoes medieval times, maybe Spain, maybe Palestine. I don’t know. Whenever I came here, I always felt transported.”

  As he speaks, the afternoon light streams through dusty stained-glass portals on the walls. Moisés turns his face to its warmth, letting it bathe his brown cheeks, the ashen pools under his eyes. Orlando looks at his shoes, then at the ceiling, everywhere but at us.

  “Services here were in Hebrew,” Moisés continues, remembering with a sad smile. “Although, of course, all the community bulletin announcements were in Spanish. A few ritual songs were occasionally sung in Ladino, but much less so after your great-grandfather Ytzak died.”

  “These songs . . . how did . . . they were passed down . . . ?” I ask, amazed at Ytzak’s persistence, at the inheritance I might have lost. In the background, I hear Orlando now rummaging through one of the other rooms.

  “Oh, no,” Moisés says with a laugh. “He might have known maybe a couple growing up but, you see, after he found out . . . after he came to Havana, he went through everything. He read, he studied. He was voracious. He could have been a rabbi, he was so ardent about it all, but it was mostly new knowledge—indeed, I think that was part of his zeal. To be honest, Alejandra, I’m not sure he knew for a fact he was Jewish growing up, just different somehow. It all clicked for him here, when he met some American Jews.”

  About then, Orlando appears with a pair of wooden chairs and sets them up for us in the center of the room. “Here,” he says humbly, then steps back and away. “I’ll wait downstairs,” he adds, raising the keys to show us he’s still got them.

  Moisés extends his hand in a gentlemanly fashion, suggesting I sit down. When I hesitate, he forgoes chivalry and settles himself in the other chair. He lowers his eyelids slowly, then raises them again with that regal patience.

  “Sit, sit,” he says in a whisper. “I’ve got a story to tell you.”

  According to Moisés Menach, when my great-grandfather Ytzak arrived in Havana in 1932 with my father in tow, it was a much changed city since his last stay. There was a dictatorship, there was an official brutality. Since most of the anti-Machado terrorism exploded in and near Old Havana, the traditionally Jewish neighborhood, repression there was especially savage. The American Jewish community tended to stay away, conducting their own services, concerned mostly with their own situation, embarrassed by the natives.

  Hurt by their indifference but undaunted, Ytzak went about the process of Judaizing young Enrique. He enrolled him at the Teodoro Herzl school, and took him to see plays and recitals at the Kultur Farain. They not only went to Shabbat services but to morning prayers. Young Enrique, it turned out, became more versed in Jewish prayer and rite than the vast majority of Jews in Cuba.

  “He had a pretty good working knowledge of Hebrew,” Moisés says. “I don’t know if you knew . . .”

  “No, no,” I answer from my haze, “he never said, I never knew.”

  Later, for fun, Ytzak signed him up for the Asociacíon Deportiva Macabí, a Sephardic sports club.

  “My father?” I ask, surprised. “Moisés, my father hated athletics. Are you sure?”

  “They had a chess club,” he says with a chuckle. “He was on that team.”

  According to Moisés, these were the years of the Great Depression, a global economic crisis that seriously affected the island. In response, Cuba implemented a series of xenophobic labor laws that eventually served as a foundation for a fierce and increasingly dangerous anti-Semitic campaign.

  “Wait a minute . . . what I’ve always heard is that Cuba has always been tolerant of Jews . . .” I say.

  Moisés nods. “Sure, the average Cuban, yeah. But not in the thirties, not when your father was in Havana as a boy. I’m certain you never heard him say Cuba was tolerant. I’d be shocked if you had.”

  I think long and hard. I try to imagine him here, in this holy space where we’re sitting, but I realize immediately this is another one of those long stretches in his life my father never talked about.

  “In the thirties, just about every newspaper in town, except Ortiz’s Ultra, was on an anti-Semitic campaign,” says Moisés, “especially the Diario de la Marina. I don’t know why, what prompted the gentleman who ran it to write the things he did, but he was adamantly against Jewish immigration, and he was constantly threatening that a Jewish presence in Cuba undermined national sovereignty and native culture. It was a nightmare.”

  It didn’t help that when Jews established themselves in business, they were often competing in the same trades and neighborhoods as the old Spanish guard in Cuba, much of which had Fascist tendencies. In 1936, sympathizers of Spanish fascism founded the Cuban Falangist Party; two years later, the Cuban Nazi Party was born with the tacit approval of Batista, who held the reins of power extra-officially as head of the army. (The Cuban population as a whole, however, was much more impassioned about the other side, sending more than a thousand volunteers to fight in the anti-Franco ranks.)
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br />   “The Nazis had a daily radio show,” remembers Moisés. “It was an hourly anti-Jewish tirade every single day, which would then get repeated in the papers. Every day you could find this idiot—his name was Juan Prohías—passing out anti-Jewish pamphlets by the Malecón. There was lots of espionage in those days, too. Eventually, a German spy was uncovered, and because Batista had joined the war on the American side by then, he had him shot by a firing squad. You can imagine your father, though. I mean, I loved him but he was, you know, a timid sort, easily frightened.”

  For Ytzak, it was all too much. This was his city, his Zion, his place of salvation. And he had waited so long to return, to have a chance to discover and be himself. He had yearned for too many years to just back away now—just because of these ugly, ignorant thugs. He was determined to not let them stop him, not let them intimidate him.

  He decided to answer the taunts by throwing his Jewishness in everyone’s face, just in case anyone had any doubts. When invited to dinner, he would loudly explain why he couldn’t eat so that even the neighbors heard about kosher laws. When asked out on Friday nights, he would submit his friends to long, overwrought explanations of Shabbat celebrations and their importance. On the streets, he didn’t just respond to insults, he could also be alarmingly provocative. He matched every jeer by Nazi sympathizers, who were growing quite bold in the city in those days. After a while, he wore a yarmulke and tried to get Enrique to do the same, but the boy resisted.

  One day, walking in Vedado, they walked past a house displaying a red-and-black Nazi flag, and to my father’s horror, the old man pulled it down off the pole and had just begun to unhook it when the residents of the house—burly German immigrants with ham hocks for arms—proceeded to beat the living daylights out of him.