Then silence fell as they turned to me. I was expected to explain how I happened to fall from the sky to catch the skull at the end of the game, two braves out, every base occupied by a grinning Calusa, the winning run standing stick in hand before the lodge. I mimed as best I could the voyage across the water, the storm, the disappearance of my fellow Jews.
A brave entered the hut. A fish smelling of smoke and pine stared glassy-eyed from a bed of palm leaves. Bowing low, he laid it on the ground in front of the chief and drew a sharpened fishbone from his loincloth. With a practiced hand he cut one slice and handed it to the chief. Your grandfather picked up the long, thin strip of flesh and held it to the light of the door. With a snort, he threw the strip out the door, grabbed the fish knife, and knocked the brave to the ground. It was the first time I saw the terrible anger of your grandfather. And his terrible concentration. He took a full minute to cut my slice, another full minute for his own. Placing each piece upon a round wheel of cassava bread, he held a third piece to the light, so I could admire his artistry. I never again saw a man slice fish so thin.
In that orange glow, through that translucent piece of smoked salmon, I first saw your mother.
She is a woman of great faith, your mother. This evening she brought me a broth of wild fowl, boiled in water from the forbidden Fountain of Everlasting Life. I never tasted finer, not here, not home in Córdoba; my hunger will survive till the last. But my faith is from the Old World, and I believe only that these New World waters will be my last meal.
Your mother has poured water on my wound. She has dabbed at the pus oozing from my eye with a remnant of my Franciscan cowl dipped in the water of the forbidden Fountain. It gives me comfort, the copper-colored girl dipping her hem, cooling my wound. I can hear my mother’s viol, a happy melody, no lamentations.
My eyes grow heavy. I look for sleep, for dreams. This wound will not heal. When I am dead, pour water on your anger toward Straight Arrow as you would on a smoldering fire. His name belies his accuracy, but many of us travel by names that seek to hide rather than reveal. His arm threw the ball, his fingers shaped its progress. And yes, perhaps his fingers did move to his mouth and place his spittle upon its seams. But who among us is wise enough to trace the sudden jumps and swerves of a fast ball back to the arm that threw it? Who among us can swear to the God of the Stars that it was not the fault of my own eye to catch what was meant for my bat? Was it my punishment for converting the Mayaimi and the Calusa and the Jeaga from the gruesome human skull to a ball of jay feathers and deerhide? A child’s skull would have fractured harmlessly against my cheek.
Feel no anger against the Calusa. Do not allow my death to become a cause of war. My greatest success was their conversion from the Ball Game of War to the Ball Game of Peace.
Feel no grief for me. I have had a greater fortune than any man since Noah. I have walked upon a great beautiful continent, I have known passion, I have sired a son. I have stood, bat in hand with three men on base, and hit the ball out of the village.
Bury me in the warm beach of the Mayaimi, on the coast of my Florida. Let me lie in the heat of her breast until the continents drift back together.
You are now the only Jew in this new world. What does that mean, you ask me, to be a Jew? I was sent here by Santángel to preserve the Jews. The Expulsion struck the ears of the Minyan in tragic tones, as the funeral dirge of culture, as the death of a rich era of Jewish achievement in Spain. I heard a different chorus. I heard the wailing from the boats as we sailed down the river Tinto from Palos. The tragedy of the Expulsion was the tragedy of three hundred thousand unique voices, each with its own wonderful human melody.
There are those who would argue, since your copper-colored mother is not Jewish, that you are not a Jew. Those others live thousands of miles away. You are one-half my child, and entirely my son. Today the Mayaimi say you are one of them. Tomorrow you will be different. You are a Jew.
You will have children, they will be different. They will grow beside their Mayaimi sisters, they will play ball with their Mayaimi brothers, but ultimately they will become free agents. They will be welcome among any tribe as long as they can still hit the long ball. Then they will be asked to leave, to move, against their will. They will be different. They will be great—but a great, different, new people.
You will have to guide them. You will have to take control of the motion of your people. I, too, began to feel my way alone at the age of thirteen. I had to reinvent, I had to disguise. I had to wear the cloak of a Franciscan, the skin of a deer. I had no rabbi to guide me. By being Esau, I have been a Jew. By being Eliyahu, I have been a Jew. By being a friar, a sailor, a castaway, a Mayaimi, I have been a Jew.
As the wife of the rabbi of Alcaudete said to the apothecary of Córdoba, the grandfather of the lute-loving Kima—you are always a Jew.
Now it is time for you to be Eliphaz.
Games not war, deerhide not skulls. When in doubt, eat, but avoid shellfish. And when they pitch you high and inside, as they will, move. My destiny is secure in your survival. Your survival is assured only in your motion.
Your loving father,
Esau
HOLLAND—SANTA ISABEL LA REAL
Ben, Ben, Ben,
What don’t I believe?
Let me rephrase that.
You have always been the Beacon of Reason, Ben, the Master of Aeronautics, the Grand Invigilator of Steam, Electric, and Internal Combustion Engines. To me, Ben, to me. That’s what you’ve been to me.
Is it really possible that you are different? With other people, other women?
This woman Hanni, your client. Her trip to Spain, for the sole purpose of finding the Esau Letter. Esau, Columbus, Mayaimi Beach, baseball, Jews, Jews, and more Jews, for Christ’s sake! You can’t believe it, can you, Ben? You don’t believe it. Say it.
I knew it.
You are in cahoots with Sandor, with Zoltan, aren’t you, Ben? You knew he had the Letter. You arranged for him to leave it with a student. You undoubtedly booked Isabella in the seat next to Hanni’s on British Armadan Flight 802—Delayed Due to Weather at Destination—reckoning that natural curiosity would effect the transfer six miles above ground. You only wanted to elongate the mystery, pull the taffy of a nice comfortable trip for a crazy old lady from Miami, give her a little flutter before the happy ending, and then send her home minus the largest possible commission a travel agent can squeeze.
You just didn’t count on the Strike.
“Accidents can happen,” Hanni said to me when I ran this thesis by her, back in the fresh air of the courtyard. Hanni stirred the water of the fountain with a little finger. “Look at what happened to Esau and the spitball. Look at what happened to Esau and the Red Men.”
“The Red Men?”
“The Mayaimi. Later on, Eliphaz and his descendants began to call themselves the Red Men, after the translation of the biblical name for the descendants of the biblical Esau—the Edomites.”
“But the Edomites were the Romans, weren’t they?”
“According to whom?”
“And Esau was only named Esau through the accident of conversion,” I argued.
“You see?” Hanni grinned. “Another accident. If travel agents could plan everything, all train travel would be westward, all Germans cultivated, all Russians perfect gentlemen, and all passengers would reach their final destination with passport and wallet intact.”
She ran her fingers through the stone manes of the lions of the fountain. It was almost six a.m. Only a few stars were left in the sky.
“I’m going to try ringing Ben,” I said, to no one in particular, “and the airport. Perhaps they’ve reopened.” I retrieved my handbag from beneath a woven pillow. “Give me your ticket, Hanni, and I’ll check for you, too.”
Hanni walked over to the steamer trunk. Isabella’s violin case sat next to Hanni’s bag, though Isabella had disappeared inside the house. I found Hanni’s coupon.
“You’re trave
lling on to Sosua?”
She looked up at me, those cornflower eyes. “That was my original plan.”
“You should look up some friends of mine.” I searched my bag for my notebook. “They were very helpful—I don’t know if you ever saw my documentary ‘Sosua: Dominican Kibbutz’?”
“Ah,” she said, “that was yours? I have a friend, a boy who once rented a room from me in London, just after Leo died. He called me, it must have been last year, the year before, told me it was on TV. A nice boy, about your age.”
You must know the story, Ben. One of the two good stories to come out of the Dominican Republic—Sosua and baseball—or so said the Dominican taxi driver who shepherded me down to the Plaza de Toros in New York for Hook’s Floating Fiddle Recital.
“We had a dictator, lady, in the Dominican,” he said, “by the name of General Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, who for thirty-one years pissed off everybody and everything, including your President Roosevelt, before they got him in 1961.”
I told him Roosevelt was certainly not my president.
“Back in those days, lady, you’re too young to remember, and me too, but I heard the story. Back in those days, 1937, ’38, the Jews were a very unpopular people in the world. Hitler wanted to get them out of Germany, but nobody wanted to take them. Nobody except Trujillo. He said to Hitler, ‘Go ahead, Adolf, gimme a hundred, two hundred thousand of them Jews. I’ll give them a piece of land for farming, they can make cheese, sausage, write some books. Marry some of our pretty Dominican ladies and put some brains into our banana-heads.’
“Trujillo, he liked to talk big. He also had bad press, on account of accidentally murdering fifteen thousand Haitians a few years earlier. But it’s a good story, lady, a good thing we Dominicans did. Still some Jews down there now.”
I later discovered, when I flew down to Sosua for Rest, Relaxation, and Research, that fewer than seven hundred refugees landed in the D.R., and most of those either stayed in Santo Domingo or migrated to the States after the war. But a few Jews remained, letting cabanas to the Germans and Austrians who had infiltrated the coast. Enough Jews, at least, for a fifty-two-minute film that played abysmally on TV but made a small killing in the home video market.
“There was a group of Swiss Jews that made it to Sosua, wasn’t there?” Hanni asked, leaning back against the fountain. “And another party from Bayonne? We booked their passage, Papa and I, on a boat hauling scrap iron to Lisbon, then over to Puerto Plata.”
“We? You mean MittelEuropa?”
“Not the furniture-moving division, this time,” Hanni said.
“You’re flying over for a reunion?”
“Of sorts,” she said. “I’m doing a favour for Benjamin, in return for my Spanish excursion.” She told me the deal. Oh, Ben. Don’t you think I deserve at least a Bank Holiday weekend in Upper Slaughter for my end of the steamer trunk?
“Ask Benjamin a question, Holland,” Hanni called over to me as I walked across the courtyard to the kitchen telephone. “Ask him if I can ship his trunk as freight.”
“And fly directly back to Miami?”
“And stay here.”
“But you have the Esau Letter.”
“Yes,” she said, and turned back to stroking the lion’s mane.
I tried your Mariposa office. I tried the airport. No success. Through the doorway back out to the courtyard, I could see the shadowed form of Isabella, sitting against a pillar of the far arcade, wrapped in a shawl from Sandor’s bed, violin case now on knees, knees pulled up to chest, neck arched, eyes, those grey eyes, to the sky.
“You want to stay to see Sandor.” I returned the ticket to Hanni. “Zoltan.”
“I’m curious,” she said. “Very curious. But that’s not it.” Hanni let her hand slip from the stone of the lion and walked slowly over to the alabaster pillar next to me. “You’ve had bad dreams, Holland, strange dreams, the night you grew, other times, maybe?”
“Yes.”
“You asked me before, about second chances, about whether I thought our old mistakes came around to us a second time.”
“I didn’t think you’d heard me.”
“There are things that I have done, always wanting to do good, to follow the lessons of Papa, things more horrible than you could ever imagine. Things so simply evil that I have bricked them up behind my dreams and nightmares. I have been more or less successful. The dangerous side effect is that I am no longer certain about what has actually happened in large chunks of my life.” Hanni fingered the veins in the alabaster, her voice in a half-whisper that smoothed the gravel edges into a childlike bedtime murmur of pebbles in a stream.
“The story I told you, about my reentry into Berlin. There’s another story that does battle with it in my memory. In that second story, I am picked up in a two-seater by Albert Speer, the architect of the Third Reich, and flown into Hider’s bunker to try to persuade the Führer to surrender and save the remaining fragments of Berlin and Germany.”
“Do you think that’s true?” I wanted to cajole her back upstairs into Sandor’s bed. She must have been exhausted.
“No.” She looked at me abruptly. “I don’t. Now that I’ve found the Esau Letter, my memory has regrouped itself around an old certainty, the old certainty that I’ve had to doubt for many years to preserve my sanity. I had a son, Holland. In Berlin. I gave birth in Berlin, a boy.”
“You told me,” I said. “The Russian.”
“Maybe not the Russian,” she smiled, “but the boy—no question. Will you help me?”
“Call Ben?” I asked.
“To find him. Will you help me find my son?” I sat Hanni back down on her steamer trunk. I fed her a kipferln. I put my arm around her.
“We should find Ben.” There was a Mariposa address—on the beach at El Palo—below your telephone number on the back of the ticket jacket. “I’ll call the Hotel Mayor, ask them to send up a taxi. We’ll drive to his office—it can’t be far. He gave you good advice last time. On the Esau Letter.”
“You think so?” Hanni leaned against me. Where was the strength that walked her across Europe, that brought her to Spain, hair soft against my cheek?
“Mira.” The voice floated across the courtyard. Isabella’s arm was raised, pointing to the sky above our heads. I helped Hanni up. We walked over to the girl. I crouched down to follow her finger into the sky. The stars. The first light of day was dimming their luster, but the west was still dark enough for the constellations. The Plough, Orion’s Belt. And away and to the right, the Seven Sisters.
“ ‘Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades,
Or loose the bands of Orion?’ ”
I looked down at Isabella. This was the same quiet Spanish girl I had gazed at for the past three hours. But the voice, the language?
“ ‘Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades
Or loose the bands of Orion?’ ”
She handed me a book, and turned it to the proper page. I squinted in the shadows—a bilingual Bible, Job 38:31, Queen Isabella on one side, King James on the other.
“You’ve learned some English?” I asked her. She smiled. I flipped back to the inside cover, in all innocence, if there is such a thing.
I saw the words. I read again. Again.
“ ‘El Convento Santa Isabel la Real, Granada’?” Granada. Granada. Isabella’s smile vanished. I must have looked as if I had just come out of a barrel after fourteen years at sea.
“No, Señora, no send me back.”
“Is it the Convent Santa Isabel, on a hill, above the Albaicín?”
“No send me back.” She began to cry, standing with the violin case tight against her chest. The chord that I had heard in the Santa María, the violin chord came at me. Faintly at first, but growing louder. Not now, I prayed, quiet, not now!
“How old are you, Isabella?” I grasped for the words, “¿Cuántos años tienes?” The chord louder, please, no planes.
“No, Señora, please!”
“The Mother Superior? ¿Cómo se llama? ¿La Superiora …?” I stammered for the word—the face I could see clearly, stern and skeptical—but it would never have been heard over the roar of the jet engines going which way? They flew above, across, inland, out to sea. Not now. Not now, when I need silence, focus, answers.
“Isabella!” I grabbed her arm, took her chin in my other hand, and lifted her face up so the hair fell back and I could look straight into eyes as grey as the morning mist. Were they mine? Were they Hook’s? I wanted to speak, I wanted to shout. I wanted to make her smile, I wanted to say something maternal, to find the twenty-five words that would end in her forgiveness. I wanted to ask enough, to ask fourteen years of questions, to be absolutely, absolutely sure.
But all I saw was grey fear, cold fear, panic. And only afterwards, unable to run after her, out the gate, down the road, did I realize that the sound of the violin, the terrible chord, rang from the violin in the case pressed between our two bodies. The violin, the wood, the strings, knew, beyond all need for proof, that I was Isabella’s mother.
ITINERARY THREE
VILLA GABIROL
LA SUBIDA
EL PALO
LA ROSA NÁUTICA
AEROPUERTO
Over the years, in my personal search for the Perfect Sound, I have made several recordings of scales, both diatonic and chromatic, in an attempt to condense the sum total of my many years of string playing into the individual notes that are the atomic particles of all music.
Time being what it is, my experience is finite and the result necessarily imperfect. The act of recording poses its own problems of hiss, click, and vibration. The act of listening, changing as it does from hall to hall, from room to room, from ear to ear, further complicates the quest, editing out vast possibilities from the enormous repertoire implied by my scales.
A Guide for the Perplexed Page 23