The Mastermind

by David Unger

  He reaches the shore. From the broken-concrete parking lot he sees a rickety pier on ten-foot wooden pilings: it’s almost collapsed into a sea pounding the shore with a steady, thudding rhythm. The pier has remained standing for years in an act of pure defiance. Six-foot waves roll in and adventurous surfers to the left of a stone jetty lie flat on their surfboards awaiting the right wave to carry them to the black, volcanic shore. The sun is trying to peek out of the gray sky. All Guillermo can think about is the pain in his chest: yes, he will return to La Libertad in a year, and the year after that, but he already knows he will come back with increasingly lowered expectations.

  On the way to the point at which the pier drops into the ocean, he passes food shacks with thatched-palm roofs; he glimpses oyster shells on ice, turtle eggs on sea grass, plates of fish and grilled potatoes, but he has no appetite. He senses he could willingly starve himself to death. This would be his penance.

  When he reaches the end of the pier, he stares out at the brown water in a kind of hypnotic trance. The waves come ashore in perfect order, their symmetry astounding. There’s a distance of fifteen feet or so between each crest and the waves break in precise curlicues, in perfect formation, like the flight of seagulls in the lowering sky.

  He turns around and walks back to the square. His eyes are open but he sees nothing, as if a curtain of gauze were blocking his vision. In the square, in front of the church, he spots plenty more buses and hundreds of scantily dressed Salvadorans carrying their clothes in small suitcases or plastic bags, straw mats and thin towels rolled under their arms. The noise is deafening. He goes up to the front of the church; its metallic doors are now shut. He knocks insistently. He has no expectation that anyone will let him in.

  Of course no one does.

  He turns around and starts walking to the plaza. He passes vans with signs saying Sonsonate and Zacatecoluca before he sees the bus that will bring him back to San Salvador. Overcome by disappointment, tears edge out of his eyes.

  When he reaches the bus, the door is open but the driver is still not there. Why should he go in and wait in the heat and smell the accumulated body odor that probably hasn’t been washed off for days?

  Guillermo feels a tap on his shoulder and ignores it. Why would anyone want him? Maybe it’s Archangel Michael ready to accompany him to his grave.

  He feels a second tap and turns around, annoyed. He sees a woman wearing a black-and-white cotton keffiyeh on her head. The scarf hides her nose and mouth. He glimpses green eyes and thick black eyebrows—a familiar sight, but aged with sparrow’s feet. He can’t speak—what could he say from his choked throat?

  “Señor,” the woman whispers.

  Guillermo’s not sure what he’s seeing.

  She begins unwinding the scarf from the base of her shoulders. He recognizes clumps of black hair that is cut short, almost like a pageboy. Oh my God, he says to himself, convinced he’s not hallucinating. God is not unjust, a trickster intent on fooling him—it’s Maryam, somewhat aged, with much shorter hair! “I can’t believe it’s you,” he says to her, leaning in to kiss her forehead.

  “Por favor, señor,” the woman says, backing away from him. “If you aren’t getting on the bus, could you at least get out of the way? This bag is very heavy.”

  Guillermo closes his eyes, overwhelmed by his mistake. His whole life has been a mistake. He has always opted for the easy solution. He has always felt deserving. He is deserving.

  It can not have been an accident he wasn’t shot. People can escape their fate.

  “Por favor,” he hears the woman repeat.

  He can’t even look back at her. Somehow his legs have climbed up to the first step of the bus. He grasps the edges of the doors and with great effort pulls himself up.

  What a mistake to have come.

  His legs wobble, about to give under him. He has always had strong legs, but he stopped exercising in San Salvador, and muscles atrophy quickly. He barely makes it into a seat before he collapses.

  He is sweating profusely. His blue shirt has mackerel and catfish emblazoned on it. At this moment it’s thoroughly wet, as if he has just stepped out of the ocean.

  He realizes he’s on the bus to San Salvador, on his way back to his apartment and his solitary life. He has much to expiate: his foolishness, his years of blundering and wastefulness, the pettiness of so many of his actions, and the devastating comprehension that he does not deserve Maryam, whether she is alive or dead.

  Guillermo curls into his seat, placing his head against the bus window. He closes his eyes and tries to calm his breathing. He is trying to even his breaths, as he did during the weeks he practiced pranayama yoga: dispel all thoughts and concentrate on the soft point of light issuing from a blue cloud of emptiness. He feels the bus throttling along and hears ranchera music and laughter. He falls asleep.

  He dreams he had met Maryam in La Libertad. In the dream she drags him by the hand to a restaurant with lime-green walls and red-tiled floors with four empty tables. It is off the beach and empty.

  They take a corner table near two large windows overlooking empty lots across a muddy street. An overhead fan sputters. As soon as they sit, a boy wearing a torn T-shirt brings them a menu.

  Maryam tells the boy to bring them a basket of chips with guacamol and two Supremas. Before the boy is out of earshot, Guillermo screams, “Frías como los muertos!” As cold as corpses!

  Guillermo takes hold of Maryam’s hand. It is darker than before, but just as smooth and lithe. For a few minutes they sit in silence staring at each other, memorizing each other’s faces.

  But something spooks him and he pulls his hand away as if they are in Guatemala and someone might catch them in a moment of intimacy.

  The boy brings the beers and the chips.

  As Maryam grabs her bottle, Guillermo notices that she’s still wearing Samir’s wedding ring.

  “I wear it out of habit,” she says. “It doesn’t mean a thing.”

  * * *

  When Guillermo wakes up, the bus is approaching the San Salvador terminal.

  As he pulls himself out of his seat, he hears a soothing female voice say, “Inshallah.”

  Guillermo couldn’t agree more.

  Guatemalan novelist DAVID UNGER was awarded his country’s Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature in 2014, despite writing exclusively in English. He is the author of the novels The Price of Escape and Life in the Damn Tropics. His short stories and essays have appeared in Words Without Borders, Guernica, KGBBarLit, and Playboy Mexico. He has translated fourteen books from Spanish into English. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  E-Book Extras

  Excerpt: The Price of Escape by David Unger

  A Note from the Author

  Please enjoy this excerpt from The Price of Escape

  by David Unger

  _________________

  PROLOGUE

  Samuel Berkow could have sent one of the clerks to check on why the Martin belts hadn’t been delivered to the store just yet, but he wanted to go out. The warehouse was in the St. Pauli district near the Elbe shipyards a short distance away. Despite the whorehouses and raucous bars, Samuel liked the docks. It was the only place where he could feel some resistance to the Nazis; at least the fed-up workers still had the guts to protest.

  Though it was June, the sun was nowhere to be seen. In fact, it felt like a day in January. It wasn’t raining, but there was smoke and fog everywhere and it seemed as if soot belched by the cargo ships and factories was drizzly dripping down the sides of the buildings. Samuel walked quickly, past the fish shops and restaurants, and more than a few beer joints and cheap hotels that lined the dreary streets to the river. When he was still a few blocks from the docks, he saw the tower of the Landungsbrücken building on the shores of the Elbe. The clock marked four o’clock. He would be seeing his Uncle Jacob at seven.

  The port area, after sundown, was a dangerous place for anyone who didn’t belong. It was full of
sailors, spies, and agents, not to speak of thieves and muggers who preyed on the emigrants, many of whom were from Eastern Europe and paid exorbitant prices to live in the hotels. They hid gold and silver sewn inside their jackets, which they would give to dubious smugglers who promised to get them on ferries to London or Rotterdam.

  It was here near the Überseebrücke jetty on the waterfront square where the radio had said trouble was brewing. It reported that one of the munitions factories was running well short of its quota and some workers—Communists and anarchists, the radio commentator had said—were claiming they had been working nonstop. They hadn’t been paid for five weeks or given a single day off—so they said—and felt that they had been unduly asked to sacrifice for the soldiers on the front.

  When Samuel reached the square, he saw trouble. A group of workers in green overalls had gathered in front of the customs and shipping offices near the Landungsbrücken building and erected a makeshift stage out of pallets and plywood taken from the nearby warehouses. Speakers were hectoring the workers, stirring them up.

  A dozen stevedores in blue outfits soon joined the factory workers from the shipyards on the other end of the square. Samuel, wearing a raincoat over his suit, looked out of place here, and so he decided to watch the demonstration from under a wooden canopy by an empty loading dock. To his right he saw two other men watching the demonstration; one of them leisurely smoked a cigarette on the running board of a black car and looked through binoculars, while the other spoke animatedly into a wireless radio—he seemed to be reporting on what he saw.

  Otherwise, the square was ominously empty.

  From where he stood, Samuel could see that the demonstrators had sticks, pipes, and wooden struts in their hands. A few were brave enough to carry signs protesting the lack of pay or brandishing a gigantic clenched fist.

  Mass gatherings had been prohibited by the authorities and on several occasions strikers and protesters had been beaten and shot. They were provoking the government. Nothing good would come of this.

  Suddenly the wind blew hard and the voices grew quiet. Samuel heard the creaking and jangling of wires from the cranes in the shipyard across the river and one or two foghorns sounding in the distance. The snapping of the flags that flew above and from the standards of many buildings could also be heard.

  Samuel felt his blood beating faster and then heard a rumbling behind him. The noise grew increasingly louder until his eardrums vibrated. The first thing he saw was the boots, almost in unison, pounding the cobblestones like the running of bulls. And then he saw a dozen men with Nazi armbands passing him with billy clubs and rifles in their hands.

  If he had crossed their path, they would have trampled him.

  A larger group of policemen appeared, rushing the protesters from across the square. They seemed to come out of nowhere, but clearly they had been hiding in the Altereb Tunnel connecting Hamburg to the other docks across the Elbe. They had been waiting for the signal to charge.

  The stevedores suddenly moved back, pulled out their guns, and began firing at the workers as well. They were surrounded now, with nowhere to escape. Bullets and billy clubs started flying and the workers did all they could to protect themselves with their sticks and signs. One or two tried to scale the walls of the customs building and were shot down. Sirens sounded and five or six jeeps with soldiers pulled into the square.

  But the soldiers weren’t needed. The massacre was over. Samuel could see only shadows because of the blue smoke and fog, but he knew that thirty to forty men had been mowed down.

  Just then a man and a boy came into the square holding hands, wearing dark suits, white shirts, and black hats. Samuel made a vague gesture to try to get them to turn back, but they were striding quickly and talking to each other. He saw the Nazi with the wireless radio wink to his colleague before pulling a gun out of his coat pocket. Without hesitating, he fired three or four shots point-blank and the Hasidic Jews staggered to the ground.

  Samuel fell back against the wall. He heard laughter and clapping. His throat and tongue were dry, his chest ached. He couldn’t believe what had just happened. Two people killed in a flash, like ashes flicked from a cigarette.

  He felt disgust, but there was nothing he could do. If the Nazis had seen him, he too would’ve been killed.

  When the car drove off, Samuel turned up his collar and hurried back to the store the way he had come. He would be seeing his Uncle Jacob in a few hours. What would he tell him? That he had come within an inch of being killed, or that the Martin belts had never made it from England?

  * * *

  “Come in, come in,” Jacob welcomed his nephew into the foyer of his apartment hours later. His reading glasses were perched on his deeply lined forehead. He helped Samuel off with his raincoat and hung it on the metal rack behind the front door. “What’s it like outside?”

  Samuel knew that his uncle was not referring to the Hamburg weather. “You know that I wear it more for warmth than rain—”

  “Stop it. You know what I’m talking about. What I heard on the radio.”

  Samuel sucked his teeth. “There was a big confrontation between factory workers and the S.S. Several men were killed near the docks; at least that’s what I heard.”

  “Last week it was a Nazi rally claiming that no country in the world wanted to accept the Polish Jews that Hitler was only too happy to deport. You mix beer with stupidity and before you know it, ten Jews are dead.”

  Samuel shook his head, saying nothing of what he had seen.

  “The only power we have left is to leave—and even that is quickly disappearing,” his uncle went on. He led Samuel by the hand toward the den where he and his cousins were never allowed to play when they were kids. The room hadn’t changed much: the old peeling upright, never played now; the bookcases filled with dusty tomes in gold and brown leather; and the two armchairs where his father and uncle sat when they needed to discuss things privately. On the wall were two Dürer etchings of a printing press seen from different angles.

  His uncle called out as they passed the kitchen: “Lottie, bring the tea to the den. Two cups. My nephew’s here. And any of those English toffee cookies we have left.”

  “Yes, Herr Berkow,” she called back.

  Samuel took the blue chair his father normally occupied. Jacob sat down across from him. He removed his glasses from his head and placed them on the table. “I’ve called you over, Samuel, because any day you’ll be arrested. I want you to leave Germany now.”

  The curtains had been drawn back and pinned behind hooks. The cool June air entered the room; his uncle always left the windows slightly open. Samuel could see the row of chestnut trees that lined Lutterothstrasse down below his Uncle Jacob’s apartment. Across the street was a small park full of linden trees. Samuel had played with his cousins in the park, holding on to the iron bars laughing and squealing as the red carousel spun. It had been a more innocent time.

  He wanted to tell his uncle what he had seen, but he couldn’t. “I don’t know if I’m ready to leave.”

  Jacob put his hand on Samuel’s leg. “I’ve written to Heinrich to tell him you’re coming. Guatemala City is obviously not Hamburg, but Heinrich seems to think it is a welcoming environment for Jews in general. One thing is certain: you can’t stay here. I’ve already bought your ticket for the boat to Panama.”

  “Uncle Jacob, don’t you think I have a say in this? I’m a grown man.”

  “I promised your father to keep an eye on you. There’s no other choice.”

  “I could go stay with my mother and sister in Palma. Mallorca is quiet and Franco is ignoring Hitler’s orders to arrest Jews.”

  His uncle shook his head. “You have to leave Europe, Samuel. Once Franco consolidates power, he will begin rounding Jews up.” Jacob shifted in his armchair, trying to find a more comfortable position. “Besides, your mother’s coming back to Hamburg this week. I’ve tried to dissuade her, but she and your sister, well, they are so much alike th
at they can’t get along. Ha ha. Two years with your sister is enough. I’m sure you know what I mean,” he said smiling.

  Samuel nodded. He didn’t understand his mother. Why had she refused to come back for her husband’s funeral after thirty-five years of marriage?

  “There’s no future for you here.”

  “And what will you do, Uncle?” Samuel asked, trying to change the subject. “Will you join Erna and Greta in London?”

  Jacob was dressed in the same three-piece herringbone suit he had worn to work two days earlier. The only change was that he now wore black slippers instead of shoes. “No, I want to stay and keep watch over the store. The moment I leave, the Nazis will confiscate everything just like they did in Berlin. And you can forget about compensation—all the time and money your father, God rest his soul, invested will be gone.”

  “If I can leave, Uncle, so can you.”

  “I’m an old man. What’s the point of moving to London now? The change alone would kill me. No, I am staying here. Besides, I need to get your mother out.” “That’s my responsibility.”

  “No, no, no,” his uncle replied. “You remind her too much of your father. I’ve already begun making plans for her to go to Cuba with her sister. I will get her out, I promise you, on the St. Louis.”

  Lottie came in carrying a tray with a covered teapot, two mismatched cups, and a small plate of toffee cookies. She had arrived from Leipzig thirty years ago—already thin and tired—and had grown only thinner and more tired over the years. When Jacob’s wife Gertie died years ago, she became a family fixture, taking care of Jacob, along with his son and three daughters. Now that all the children were gone, Lottie was in charge of him.

  Jacob stood up to take the tray from her hand. “You can go now, Lottie. It’s late.”

  The maid looked down at Samuel and offered a faint smile, barely an acknowledgment. He couldn’t understand how his uncle tolerated her all these years since she was always in a bad mood. She rarely talked and when she did, she snapped.