by Achy Obejas
“And my father?” I ask, dreading his answer.
“They got him, too,” Moisés says. “He was sixteen or seventeen then, I don’t remember. They were just punks, really, but there were so many of them. Your father ended up in a coma in the hospital. I know this because he almost died. Ytzak had no choice but to send word to Oriente. I came with your grandparents to the city, because they were just falling apart and couldn’t really do anything for themselves.”
Suddenly I remember my father’s face the day the Berlin Wall fell, how the young neo-Nazis had caused him to tremble in fear. My own hands are shaking now. I tell Moisés I can’t hear any more, I can’t process the information.
He reaches up to my cheeks, which are wet from tears, and cradles my face in his hands. “You have to,” he says. “I don’t have much time to tell you the rest before it gets dark.”
As the light changes, the multicolored portals aim beams at the western walls of Chevet Ahim. Moisés plucks the photograph I gave him from his shirt pocket.
“Who is she?” I ask impatiently.
He shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t think your father even knew her name.”
“What . . . ?” I’m so confused, I get up, start pacing. My footsteps echo in this ancient place. “Then . . . ?”
He tells me that in 1939, after my father and Ytzak had recovered from the thrashing at the hands of the local Nazis, the Cuban Jewish community was undergoing a massive transformation. Hundreds of European refugees were landing almost weekly in Havana, jamming cruise ships from Hamburg and other German ports and using usually illegally acquired permits to gain entry to Cuba.
My great-grandfather Ytzak had become involved through his beloved American Jewish friends—finally awakened to the need to do something—in helping spring the interned refugees from Tiscornia, Cuba’s answer to Ellis Island, and assisting them in finding housing and temporary, usually under the table, jobs (one of the conditions of their stay was that they couldn’t work, potentially stealing a position from a native Cuban). Needless to say, he’d recruited a reluctant Enrique, then a strapping eighteen-year-old but shy and even a little slow in many ways, into the cause.
“You have to understand, Cuba was very corrupt then, but it was a corruption that was saving lives, so nobody said anything, everybody just went along,” Moisés explains. “And then, well, then there was the St. Louis.”
“Yeah, I’ve read about it,” I tell him as I try sitting down again. “There’s a book, Voyage of the Damned, and a movie, too, one of Or-son Welles’s last.”
“So you know what happened—how Cuba refused to let the refugees disembark; how the Cubans suddenly couldn’t be bribed, there wasn’t enough money in America to satisfy these bastards; and how the ship had to wander from port to port, eventually being forced back to Europe. Many of the passengers ended up in concentration camps where most of them didn’t survive the war.”
I take the photo from his hand. “Is this girl from the St. Louis?”
Moisés nods. “When the ship was docked here—it was out on the bay for almost a week—your father was helping with mail and taking papers out there and stuff. He’d row a boat out and, with the passengers’ relatives who were already here, he’d toss up cans of food, that sort of thing. One day he managed to get about a half dozen pineapples up to the ship, a real delicacy for the Europeans. He was very proud of himself. The girl was someone he saw there, someone, I think, who noticed him, someone he had a fantasy about. Maybe you could call it love; he did, he kept telling me he was in love. It was the first time I ever heard him say such a thing.”
She might have been pretty, I think as I look at her in the blurry photograph. She might have been smart and funny, someone with whom he could laugh, with whom he could find comfort. “They never spoke?”
“Not that I know of,” says Moisés.
A few passengers were able to get off the St. Louis in Havana— some had legal permits, others had mysterious connections (it’s said that the influential crypto-Jewish Maduro family saved its relatives but that’s never been proven)—but most were defenseless, waiting and waiting for help that never came. During the ship’s stay in Havana, it became unbearable for many; at least two passengers tried to commit suicide. When the ship finally pulled up its anchor, a great wail came from the ocean liner as well as the shore.
“Your father followed the journey on the news, listening to the radio for every report,” Moisés says. “When the ship got to Miami Beach—they said the refugees were so close they could see the beach, could wave to the sunbathers on Fourteenth Street— he thought for sure they were saved. He’d managed to get a copy of the passenger list and he sat patiently waiting for the Americans to announce who got to stay—he was sure maybe a couple of hundred of the nearly one thousand passengers would get in. But instead, the Americans sent out the Coast Guard to make sure nobody jumped overboard, and to keep the ship sailing along.”
“This explains so much,” I tell Moisés, recalling our own arrival. I imagine my father’s young heart broken, his alienation, all his fears simmering on the surface. “Cuba was such an open wound to him . . .”
“Hmm . . .” says Moisés as he gets up and stretches. He’s so thin, he seems like a brittle skeleton inside his clothes. “But there’s something else. And this one’s a little harder to tell.”
He steps outside the worship area, breathes deeply, then leans on the balcony’s railing for a second, but when it begins to give, he lets go. Pebbles echo as they land on the courtyard below. I sit and wait for him to come back, rubbing his palms together, running his fingers through what’s left of his once raven hair.
“Please . . .” I say, “just tell me . . .”
After the St. Louis sailed back to Europe, my father was despondent. He was also enraged, feeling betrayed at every turn. Why had Ytzak brought him to Havana? How could he have thought that being a Jew could possibly be a good thing? If he loved him so much, how could he have exposed him to so much hatred and pain? Enrique and Ytzak fought constantly, arguments full of bitterness, nasty words, and recriminations. Maybe his parents, back in the blameless wilderness of Oriente, had had the better idea after all.
“Long after the St. Louis incident—long after the war—there was a lot of international condemnation, a lot of guilt, really,” Moisés explains. “But the Cuban authorities never apologized, they never looked back. And that gave confidence to the Nazis, who began to appear in the Diario de la Marina ’s society pages, well-appointed men and women stupidly giving the Nazi salute for the cameras. I’ve always wondered how they imagined they fit into the Nazi plan . . . if they were so deluded they really didn’t realize that, eventually, they’d be joining the Jews in the gas chambers.”
One day in December in 1939, just six months after the St. Louis debacle, Enrique was wandering down Trocadero to just where it became Tejadillo at Prado, which was full of noise and people shouting. Distracted by the beautiful shimmering blue of the ocean nearby, he was swallowed by the mob, realizing much too late that the gathering was a demonstration by Cubans and Spaniards snapping their hands in the air to the rhythm of a sharp Nazi beat.
Bewildered and terrified, Enrique stumbled and fell, only to be yanked back on his feet by a flushed-faced young man who laughed good-naturedly at his clumsiness. Then a speaker boomed something through a megaphone that caused the young man who’d helped him to stiffen and hurl a salutation to the Führer. Like the others around them, he was wearing a swastika on his bicep. As soon as he relaxed his arm, he noticed Enrique’s panicked expression.
“What’s the matter with you?” the young man said, giving Enrique a light shove that thrust him against another young Nazi.
The second young man turned around, his face distorted and cruel as he looked down at the skittish Enrique, whom he shoved right back. “Weakling,” he hissed. “As soft and gawky as a Jew!”
That was all the crowd needed to hear. Immediately, they began c
ircling a shaking, sweat-drenched Enrique. “No, no,” he protested in meek defense. “I . . . I’m not . . .”
But just then, the speaker spewed forth another forceful declaration and the Nazi boys turned away for just a second, their arms like javelins. “Heil Hitler!” they screamed, their mouths red, the veins on their heads threatening to burst.
And then my father, in a moment of complete desperation, threw his own arm toward the fiery tropical sun and joined in the chorus: “Heil Hitler!” he shrieked, then ran and ran through the streets of Old Havana, down Amargura and Luz and Inquisidor, his throat burning, hating himself, eventually swooning in the doorway of the kosher cafeteria on Muralla Street run by Moisés’s uncle.
XL
It’s sunset, the sky still kindling on the night of Kol Nidrei, and Moisés feels I should accompany him to the Sephardic Center.
“You might find it appropriate in some ways,” he says, both his eyes spinning white.
Kol Nidrei is a haunting prayer in Aramaic chanted on the eve of Yom Kippur, an ancient supplication that goes back to medieval Spain and asks god to forgive and annul promises not kept. It was designed specifically to reconcile those Jews who converted to other faiths under threat of violence or death and, having survived, wished to return. It is a necessary preamble to atonement.
But standing outside the weathered facade of Chevet Ahim, I instantly understand there is another temple I have to visit and other vows to keep. As Orlando’s blue Moskvitch disappears into the narrow labyrinth of the mysterious old city, Moisés gazing back at me through the rear window, I make my way slowly past the crumbling buildings. Fresh drops of rain fall on my skin, a light cool drizzle that makes me shiver.
From nearby, I hear the soft siren of ships in port, long wailings with a primeval timbre. Around the city, white breakers rim the shore with their effervescent froth. The sky rumbles, its groan a deep and faraway ache. The rain generates little streams around the cobblestones, dipping this way then that, taking everything with them. As I walk, I see people step out of their homes to empty a bucket or jar that’s been catching the water coming in through cracks and fissures in their ceilings.
“Compañera, ¿qué hora es?” a young boy asks as he leans against the cathedral wall at the main plaza. He’s undaunted by the rain, his body language already haughty, much more seasoned than his years.
I glance at my watch without thinking. “Las ocho,” I say.
“Gracias,” he mumbles, disappointed, signaling across the way for his home boys to stay put, not to venture from under the protective awning at a local cafe.
What does it mean for me to be here?
Like everyone else in Cuba—land of symbolism and rumors— I’m trying to remember the blessing and the curse, the burnt-out dream, the wellspring, our true country.
Finally, it begins to pour, one of those torrential rains so typical and yet fantastic in the tropics. Thunder blasts like the bombs of years before. Jacarandas and roses, hibiscus and the sweetest tobacco rise up, intoxicating me. I begin to run, splashing my way through the streets.
When I turn the corner to the Menachs’, for the first time since I’ve returned, I spy the lights ablaze in my family’s apartment. Dripping wet, I run into the building only to find David and his wife at dinner, the door to the first-floor apartment wide open. He waves me in and I look around for Celina, but there’s no sign of her.
“This is Alejandra,” David says to his wife. He introduces her then tells me he and Celina have traded apartments because he can’t manage the stairs anymore.
But I’m a gazelle . . . I take the steps two at a time, defying their slickness. The bulb at the top of the hallway hangs naked on a wire as delicate as lace. When I reach the third floor, my heart in my hands, the door is ajar, a faint humming coming from inside.
I find Celina framed by the threshold: a luminous young woman in a loose beige housedress and blue plastic flip-flops, her prodigious hair swimming in the humid air. As I watch, she runs water at the kitchen sink, letting it splash into a large metal bucket.
“Hey,” she says when she finally sees me, smiling and not at all surprised. “I was wondering when you’d show up.”
I step inside and the storm intensifies, the lights flickering above and around us.
“You’d think with this downpour we wouldn’t need to hoard water.” She laughs, tossing her head back, her swan’s neck elegant and fine. “C’mon,” she says, “are you gonna help me or what?”
Together, we fill the bathtub, the bathroom sink, various buckets and other containers, each one to overflowing. When we run out of pots and plastic bottles, Celina points to a cabinet above the kitchen sink.
“There are some more up there—goblets, tumblers, that kind of thing,” she says.
I open the cupboard and reach for my mother’s old wine and champagne glasses, one for every imaginable libation. As I take each receptacle, I hand it to Celina, who fills and places it on the dining room table. There are scores of shiny crystals, twinkling with a gentle music that matches the rain.
When there’s nothing left to fill, Celina steps back, sighs languidly, and runs both hands through her lush hair in relief. “Está escampando,” she says walking out to the precarious balcony and its breathtaking view of Havana. The sky is clearing, the Caribbean shimmers in the distance.
But I remain at the table with its pure waters, its verdant streams flooding the tributaries through the floors, the beams, the stairs, to the very earth.
Hours later, at the Malecón, I pull from my backpack the sealed box with my father’s ashes. I carry it in my wet hand like a talisman, the rain beading up on the plastic. I’m soaked to the spine, my clothes meaningless.
Out in the bay, lightning cuts through the sheer mist like jagged spears. It’s low tide and the green and red coral is exposed, tidal pools rippling with rain. Somewhere out there the St. Louis once hovered, its passengers weary and innocent, the blue of the ocean the least of their perils. My father traversed that watery frontier twice—once to deliver his precious pineapples and other gifts, then again, on a longer journey to deliver my mother and me.
Por el amor de dios, por el amor de dios, por el amor de dios.
When the rain finally breaks, I tear the wrapping and unseal the box, the white powder sticking to my moist fingertips. I hold the treasure to my lips for a kiss but blow instead, my warm breath carrying my father’s remains north. I watch them scatter, even the tiny chips, for a moment swirling into a smoky funnel, a figure that, in another place, another life, could have been Ochún, the Virgin of Charity. Then a fluttering of birds lifts out of the darkness from the rocks, their wings white lines as they soar.
It is on the edge of my city that I offer my father a different, more appropriate kaddish: “I say in the heart of the seas to the quaking heart / Fearing greatly because they lift up their waves / If you believe in God who made the sea / And whose name stands for eternity / The sea shall not frighten you when its waves rise up / For with you is one who has set a bound to the sea.” 5
Judah Halevi may or may not have made it to his Zion, but here, through me, my father is at rest in his.
Para Tania,
siempre
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This novel began in 1994 at New Words Books in Boston, when Judith Wachs and some of her friends came up to me and asked, “Are you Jewish?” They had recognized in my surname ravages of an ancestry to which I had only vaguely paid attention. The next day, Judith invited me to her home and played me the music of the Sephardim. I will always be grateful to her for that special day.
Since then I’ve had the good fortune to have at my side during the journey to this book some pretty amazing people. My agent, Charlotte Sheedy, for whom I have the deepest love and respect, has been my steady copilot. In the last year, Leona Nevler at Ballantine Books has been a gracious guardian angel—all writers should feel this lucky with their editor.
I’m grateful to Howard Tyner
, Geoff Brown, Tim McNulty, Tim Bannon, Kevin Moore, Linda Bergstrom, Jeff Lyon, Marcia Borucki, Margaret Patterson, Larry Kart, Itasca Wiggins, Mo Ryan, Monica Eng, Pat Kampert, Marsha Peters, Tom Heinz, and the Tempo copy desk at the Chicago Tribune. Without their indulgence and good humor, I would never have had the time and space to write this novel. I am most obliged to Gerry Kern, who has never, ever hesitated in his support and has made everything possible.
For his special guidance, thanks go to Moisés Asís. His wisdom and kindness were invaluable.
For assisting with research, I’m obliged to Natalia Bolívar, Maritza Corrales Compestany, Schulamith Halevy, Esther Pérez, Spertus Museum of Judaica (Chicago), Michael Terry, Rallis Wisenthal, and the good people on the anusim list-serve. My parents, José and Alicia, and my cousin, Tony Milera, were free with their memories and insights.
Particular appreciation goes to “Chichi” Fresneda and Juanito González.
In addition, I’m indebted to María Eugenia Alegría, Carlos Augusto Alfonso, Uva de Aragón, Jorge Luis Arcos, Tom Asch and Strong Coffee (Chicago), Ruth Behar, Lourdes Benigni and Casa de Las Américas (Havana), Deborah Bruguera, Linda Bubon and Anne Christophersen at Women & Children First Books (Chicago), Adriana Busot, Suzanne Cohan-Lange, Norberto Codina, Josefina de Diego, Gary Dretzka, Catherine Edelman, Argelia Fernández, David Forrer, Ambrosio Fórnet, Victor Fowler, María Josefa Gómez and Sonia Jiménez, Shannon Greene Robb, Ron Grossman, Charles Halevi, Instituto Cervantes (Chicago), Maria Kostas, Jenny Magnus and Beau O’Reilly at the Lunar Cabaret (Chicago), Mal and Sandra at the Broadway/Montrose Currency Exchange (Chicago), Félix and María Masud, Chris Mazza, Louis Mendez, Ana E. Obejas, Ofra Obejas, Maria Carmen Ovejas (“Manem”), Patricia Peláez, Don Rattner and Nirmala Daiya, Albita Rodríguez and Miriam Wong, Francisco López “Sacha” and the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (Havana), Lucía Sardiñas, Lawrence Schimel, Brendan and Brenda Shiller, Helen Shiller, Paul Sierra, Gini Sorrentini, Art and Pauline Tarvardian, Elizabeth Taylor, Kaarin Tisue, Nena Torres and Matt Piers, James Warren, Teresa Wiltz, Owen Youngman, and my students over the years at the University of Chicago, DePaul University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Columbia College.