For a moment, they remind me of the candles at Tita’s place. But I don’t let myself think about that too long, or any of the rest of it.
The cabdriver’s Pakistani. Beaded seats. West Asian artifacts hung on the dashboard. His skin’s dusky, warm, nearly the same color as my father’s; the same color as mine. Christmas evening and he’s working; just like any other day, I guess, for him—nothing particularly holy or unholy about it at all—and the cab radio’s playing Urdu tunes.
Press the buzzer, she said, and wait for a voice. When you hear it sound outside, that means the door is open. You can walk right in.
I tip the cabbie too much, haul my stuff out and walk across the street, check building numbers, smell cold remains of rain mixing with urine, garbage, car exhaust, hear the slosh of shoes and boots and car tires through puddles, along curbs. Here’s the right place; I walk up damp steps. Find the name. Ring.
“Who is it?” crackles a foreign voice. An old voice. Man’s or woman’s, I can’t tell.
Babe Delgado, I say.
“Who?”
“I’m Ellie’s friend—”
The buzzer sounds like an insect swarm in my ear, rattling me all over, but I chill enough to push in and rush through the vestibule, past tiny metal mailboxes, push another door open and hear it slam hard behind as I spill into a dim-lit big red hallway. Then, feeling nothing, I move forward. Until the only lights I really see are the tiny, orange buttons on the elevator panel, blinking down one by one, doors sliding open and the old metal insides glinting out for a moment like hands to take me in; then more blinking buttons, gold-white this time, the doors squeak shut, and I’m heading up.
*
How small.
Weird. But it’s the first thing that comes into my head—when they open the door, when I look into the dim-lit place past them, searching for Ellie, then back at them—and, like a chant, it stays there.
How small.
How small they are. Little, wizened, grayish-white crooked people. Shoulders bent. Stiff knees, arms, bowed necks. It’s as if you took a couple of normal-sized humans and then shrank them a little, somehow—not too much, almost imperceptibly, so that there was something not-quite-normal about their stature at first glance.
How old. For a mother and father.
And, staring up at me, how silent.
“Yo.”
I look past them again and, with relief, see Ellie—who is normal height and build, basically, maybe half a foot shorter than me. She’s still pale and thin from being sick, but seems to tower above them.
“Hey,” I say.
“Zischa, Lottie, this is Babe Delgado.”
By their first names, I think; she called them by their first names, her own parents. Bizarre. For a second I feel like my voice has gone. Then I watch myself offer a hand to them to shake. Not firmly, openly, as in days of old, but in the new almost shy, unfriendly way I have now: slowly, in fact, a little reluctantly.
The little whitish-gray people take my hand. Slowly, wanly, a little reluctantly too. Mumbling, in foreign accent, Well, so, how do you do?
I can’t think of anything to say, and my voice has vanished anyway, so I stay silent.
“Come on in,” says Ellie—like she’s inviting not just me but her parents, too—and I follow her into a little living room with old furniture and cracking off-white wall paint, and a dark carpet worn thin, window curtains closed against the night. It is tiny, plain, womblike. I can feel myself stooping a little, now and then, as if the ceiling might descend to compress me. In here, even Ellie looks too big; I must look enormous, like some kind of freak. But Zischa and Lottie lock about five locks on the front door, then come into the living room and settle on the worn old sofa, side by side, and motion me to sit. When I bounce into an armchair I don’t feel too big, after all; it seems to fit my whole body just right, just right. I grasp the arms comfortably, habitually, like I’ve been sitting there all my life.
“So,” says Lottie, “this is your swimmer friend.”
Ellie is standing in the opening between kitchen and living room, arms crossed, watching us all; only Lottie doesn’t look at her when she talks, but at me instead. Examining me, she nods a little, impassively, as if I am just what she expected.
“Tell me something. What is it with this swimming? You all do it until you’re good and sick?”
Ellie rolls her eyes. “Lottie!”
But I can’t stop myself from grinning.
Lottie continues. “You—you look all right. But her—I never saw her so sick! What is it, some kind of indentured service? They work you to the bone?”
Ellie’s pissed off. “Lottie! Give me a break!”
“Um,” I blurt, finally—like a total, total moron, “you guys don’t have a Christmas tree, do you?”
“Christ,” Ellie mutters.
Zischa claps his hands once, sharply, and stands. “Swimming, shmimming. Enough with the swimming already. She walks through the door, a complete stranger, and already she’s getting criticism. Tell me something, Babe—you like vegetable soup? You like noodles and raisins and bread? Because it’s time for supper. And already, tonight, I have heartburn.”
*
Dinner’s weird. I try to do things right, and be polite, but I realize I sort of don’t know how. For one thing, some of the food is strange: this one dish a mash of cooked carrots and raisins and honey that keeps dripping off my fork—makes me miss the smell of pine trees, I don’t know why. For another thing, I keep staring at the numbers on their arms. Lottie’s is on top of her skinny, weak white forearm up near the elbow; Zischa’s on his arm’s underside, right near the wrist. I can tell that, once in a while, they catch me looking. Ellie does, too. But no one says anything. What they do, instead, is basically almost force-feed me—but with words, and somehow I really don’t mind—urging me to eat this, at least try that, have some more of this other stuff; and they flash looks of alarm when I pass on a second or third portion. Actually I like it, in a way. The desperation of it makes me believe that they care whether I live or die, and that they know how intimately and seriously this matter of food is connected to other things, like life, and death.
“So,” says Zischa after a while, spooning some more potato stuff onto my plate, “your father ran from Castro.”
I nod. Sure, I say, when he was a little kid. With most of the rest of his family.
“Why? They were fascists—they preferred Batista?”
“Oh come on, Zischa!” Ellie shoots him an angry, pleading look. “Don’t bug her, okay?”
But I shrug. I mean, the truth is that I don’t know too much about it, just little things my dad or his relatives have dropped, hints here and there, that basically serve to confuse a lot more than to clarify. I tell him I don’t know the whole story, really; I always thought Castro was supposed to be the big fascist; and anyway, a lot of the people in my family had some money which, if they’d stayed, they would have completely lost. Plus, some of them were very religious. And Communists hate religion.
“So, Babe. You think it was right, what Kennedy did at the Bay of Pigs?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you have an opinion, maybe?”
Actually, I don’t. But that fact makes me blush. I rummage around in my head—which is basically pretty empty when it comes to politics—and try to figure out what answer he wants to hear. Like I’m coming up with the right team motto for some coach. Then I just blurt out the first thing that comes to me.
“I think it’s wrong to fight a war halfway.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning? Um. That, like, those people—I mean, my people”—and I feel myself turn a brighter shade of crimson brown, because I have never used these words before—my people—and there is something forced about it, something weighty, but also something that feels very nice—“they—um, we—got used. By, like, the Americans, I mean. I mean, not like I have anything against Americans, you know; I mean, this is my count
ry now too, it really is. But I think Kennedy, the American government, you know, sent those people out, and never intended to support them, and felt like it was basically okay if they died.”
“They were expendable?”
“Yes, sir. Exactly.”
“Hmmm. You think maybe this capitalist system exists because it holds some people to be more valuable or more worthy of being alive, than other people? You think maybe we can sit here eating, right now, because others are sitting somewhere else starving? Because this system says they are expendable?”
Ellie knocks hands into her head, on purpose. Zischa, she moans, please.
“I don’t know.” My heart is picking up nervous speed; I’m starting to sweat. What comes out of me are words I never even knew I had inside; at least, certainly not in the form of some coherent political thought. “But any system makes some people expendable, doesn’t it? I mean, in reality, in the world today. I mean, Castro’s not so great either. I mean, he says he’s this great liberator, right? but he acts like a fascist, doesn’t he?”
“You think, maybe, that Mr. Castro wouldn’t be so bad, such a strong-arm, if the capitalist governments of the world didn’t carry out a policy of isolating him? And Cuba?”
“Look. All I know is that my family lives a lot better here than they would have there. Anyway, Castro set up concentration camps for, you know, some criminals, and for people who have AIDS. You can’t tell me that’s okay.”
There is silence. Then, Zischa smiles—a quiet, thin smile traces itself across his pale old face, and fades. He swallows more vegetable mash, shoves taped-together glasses up his nose.
“No,” he says, “I can’t.”
“Enough already,” says Lottie. “Enough with your politics. Zischa, pass the margarine and the bread. She needs some more.”
I accept more food. Shoot a glance again—I can’t help it—at the numbers on his arm. Ellie sees me, and rolls her eyes right up into her head.
Zischa reaches across the table, turns the arm up and holds it there, right in front of me, for several seconds. I get a good look: faded green-gray numbers, tattooed in firmly.
“Shame,” Lottie whispers.
“Quiet,” says Zischa. “I think it’s important. I think it’s important to see what kind of a person my daughter loves.”
Next to me, Ellie gets even paler.
“‘Holocaust’ means ‘entirely burnt,’” he says. “That’s the literal meaning, a translation, you see.” He pulls back the arm, passes me some margarine and bread. “I was in Auschwitz, once, for several months. Auschwitz was amazing! It was an enormous city of factories and slaves and pain. In the winter you could see it from a great distance. Its furnaces lit the sky. It was a city that turned a profit for the fascists. The main business was labor—slave labor, of course, since no one went there of his own free will. And the difference between slave labor and free labor is the fact that slaves are used by others—by other people in a system who consider them to be worth less than they are themselves, in other words, expendable—and, when their use runs out, they are discarded or killed and then thrown on a massive junk heap, like pieces of a machine. So it was a great city of endless, mindless, useless labor, and thousands of starving slaves always hurrying, hurrying everywhere, through the mud and the snow, diseased, dying, beaten by drunkards in uniform. Their blood and their pus fell on the snow; they were covered with boils and excrement. They looked like strange, thin insects; they did not appear to be human at all, except for the grief and madness in their eyes. That’s what slave labor does, you see, it makes insects of the slaves, because it is about nothing but perpetuating the cogs of the system, of the machine itself; it does not serve life; it leads the human soul to death. And that, that was really the business of this great burning city in the snow, you see: death. It was so busy with the business of death that it ran twenty-four hours a day, it lit up the winter sky for miles with the fuel of its slave labor and the heat of its death. To survive there, at all, you needed to imitate one of the insect creatures. You needed to pretend that you were already dead inside. So. Some of us pretended. Some of us survived. But no one—no one who survived did so without committing many horrible deeds. Even to do nothing—even that was a horrible deed, under the circumstances, you understand?”
Lottie hisses. “Leave her alone! You expect her to understand what is incomprehensible” She turns to me, for the first time, her eyes shining almost kindly in the worn, bland, colorless face. “Listen, the real truth is incomprehensible. We say others can never understand because they were not there, but the fact is that we, the ones who survived, will never understand it completely either—not what was done to us, nor what we did ourselves, nor what we did not do. I will tell you one thing, and one thing only: All this about politics—it’s all a lie. Political systems are nothing but lies. They cover up the sickness and the rot of people who want nothing but money and power, not for a good purpose, but simply to hoard. When there’s hoarding there is waste; and when there’s waste, there is cruelty. What matters is not this or that political mechanism. What matters is a kind heart. A heart that does not hoard, and does not waste. There. Now, enough of this already. Eat—here’s some more potato—eat now, eat.”
I do. Ellie is silent, her hands in her lap folded over a napkin. I look at her once, but she avoids my eyes.
*
Ellie washes the dishes. I dry them. The dishtowel’s a faded Dutch floral pattern—looks old, almost antique. The counter is battered, dented with brown coffeepot stains. By now the lack of Christmas tree and frills and wrapped presents and colored lights has stopped seeming weird to me. After all, I tell myself, the first African slaves they brought to Cuba didn’t celebrate Christmas, either. So there, white boy. Thinking this, I can feel myself sneer.
But Ellie is white. And, really, so am I. Well, partly. Pretty soon, I stop being angry.
“Thanks,” I whisper, “for saving my butt.”
“What exactly happened?”
“Oh, lots of shit. I’ll tell you later, okay?”
“Okay. But, look—it’s nice that you’re here.”
“Is it? Really?”
“Yes, Delgado. It’s good.”
Later, all four of us sit in the living room reading different sections of newspaper. No one says anything. Everyone is basically just a pair of legs, sticking out from sofa or armchair, wide newsprint expanse covering up each torso and head. Once in a while Ellie gets up and walks around, restless. Then she flops back down and you can hear springs squeak, can hear the rustle of thin sheets as she opens up another section, snorts about some political folly or other, mumbles questions requiring no response. I want to tell her, suddenly, that it is good to be here, too. That—here, in this weird, dim little home, where people rarely speak, with her oddball parents and their damaged bodies and crackpot philosophies and the green-gray tattooed numbers on their arms—I feel, somehow, like I fit right in. Like no one will bother me because they, too, basically just want to be left alone. And maybe it is strange to others, but it feels nice and normal to me, it’s the way I am now; and somehow, some way, the way I am now is acceptable here, it is understood here, no explanation is necessary.
*
Ellie has posters all over her bedroom of swimmers and singers and old movie stars, illustrations of hammerhead sharks she cut out of National Geographic, a picture of the Queen of England with a mustache drawn in. I inspect everything on the walls, glance through her books and cassettes. There’s a photograph on her dresser, too, framed in this practically ancient tarnished silver frame with floral designs—daguerreotype, brownish matte finish—of an infant, round face hemmed by lace. It’s much too old to be her.
“Who’s the baby?”
“Oh, that’s Oskar—Lottie’s son.”
“I didn’t know you had a brother.”
“I don’t, really. I mean, he’s dead, kaput—he wasn’t much older than that when he bought it. They generally killed all the b
abies and the old and sick people first—”
“In the concentration camps?”
“Right. Lottie was in Bergen-Belsen—that’s where Oskar died—I mean, was murdered. Because, I mean, it is murder, isn’t it?” Her face is matter-of-fact, very thin and pale. Eyes very serious, without their usual sardonic glint, and in that moment I realize fully, immediately, how sick she has been. I want to touch her somehow, somewhere, very lightly, with my fingertips, as if that would bring some comic mischievous light back into her eyes and her face. But I don’t.
“Your dad and mom were married before the war?”
“Yeah, but to other people. See”—she bounces onto her bed and sits there cross-legged, right in front of a big black-and-white poster of Dawn Fraser swimming the 100 freestyle in the Tokyo Olympics, 1964. She’d been bashed up in a car crash or something pretty bad the year before, I think, and her neck was all fucked up so she couldn’t do flip turns any more in Tokyo; she had to do open turns. Still, though, she won.
Fraser was big. Ellie isn’t. For a moment, now, against this background, she looks small to me again, and frail. “Lottie and her first husband had this baby boy, who died—I mean, was murdered—in Bergen-Belsen, and her husband died, too. Zischa had a wife, too, only not Lottie, and he and she had kids, two girls, I think—”
“What were their names?”
“He doesn’t say.”
“Not even when you ask him?”
She shrugs. “I asked a couple of times, you know, when I was growing up. He wouldn’t ever say. So I stopped asking. Once in a while, if they feel like it, they’ll tell me things. Sometimes, I swear, it’s like I almost don’t even want to hear it! I mean, they’ll talk about the most horrible, intimate, godawful stuff—and on the other hand, they can be really strange and secretive about details that you’d think would be ordinary everyday kinds of things. It’s not easy to understand them a lot of the time. Sometimes, I admit it, I just sort of give up trying. But in a way, I do understand. I mean, I’ll bet you don’t want people pestering you every day with questions about what it was like when the plane went down.”
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