The Collected Stories

by Leonard Michaels

  “I think you said get down on my knees.”

  “Say that your Uncle Zev continues to worship the ground she walks. Say he kisses her feet. Get a pencil and paper and I’ll tell you how to say it in Spanish.”

  “I already feel guilty. Chester and I used to be close. We went to high school together.”

  “Chester is in the construction business. A Manhattan contractor. Last month was very bad. He made two hundred fifty thousand. You think he gives a shit about human feelings? I’m telling you about undying love in the heart of an old man. Are you a sensitive writer or what?”

  “Should I kiss her feet, assuming I find her?”

  “She works at the Tropicana. I’ll fill in the background. Listen.”

  In a few minutes he’d told me a long story …

  Zev worked in Havana from the late forties to the mid-sixties. When Fidel made his triumphant progress through the streets, with Che Guevara and Celia Sánchez, a doctor and the daughter of a doctor, Zev stood in the delirious crowds, trying to figure out what to do with his life. Not political, he was indifferent to the revolution, except that it cost him his job, but he was madly in love with Consuelo Delacruz, who refused to leave Cuba with him. To struggle with English, in a Brooklyn grocery store, would be an insufferable humiliation. Besides, Zev was married.

  He lingered in Havana, doing this and that, and didn’t leave until obliged to do so by the revolutionary government. In 1966, the Ministry of Economics unearthed ledgers in the Hotel Capri, where George Raft once had the penthouse suite, and discovered Zev’s initials beside certain figures, again and again, right up to New Year’s Eve, 1959, suggesting that he had been in possession of great sums of gambling money, not only from the Capri, but from the Nacional and Tropicana, too. The revolution wanted it. He showed them a receipt, the same he’d shown the mob, proving he’d turned over the money to Batista before his flight to the Dominican Republic. In a fit of moral disgust, Fidel personally ordered Zev’s expulsion. He said, “I wanted only to burn the money in your face.”

  Zev had been a runner between the casinos and Batista’s officers. On the night Batista fled, Zev rushed with conga drums on his shoulders down O’Reilly Street to the docks and then into a receiving shed. Two soldiers emerged from behind crates, took the drums, which contained over a million dollars, and gave Zev a photo of Batista. This was the receipt. Across the eyes of the photo, Batista always signed his mother’s name. The photo was signed, but across the mouth, not the eyes. Zev understood that the soldiers, whom he’d never seen before, intended to hand the money over to the revolution and thereby escape Fidel’s tribunals and the firing squad. Neither here nor there, as far as Zev was concerned. He had to present the authentic receipt to parties who also had firing squads. Zev laughed. “I see it’s over with Batista, eh, amigos?” The soldiers laughed, too, and Zev broke the neck of one with a forearm blow and disemboweled the other with a knife even as their laughter resonated in the shed. Searching their uniform pockets, he found the authentic receipt. He spent that night with Consuelo, in her apartment, brooding.

  “Return the money, or give it to the revolution.”

  “The soldiers are in a crate at the bottom of the harbor. I have the receipt. The money is for you and the child.”

  “Nobody will need money anymore. What child do you mean?”

  Now, 1987, considering the economic misfortunes of the revolution, Zev figured Consuelo would be glad to have the money, but he wanted her to come to the States. I was to explain this to Consuelo, reading from the Spanish dictated to me by Zev over the phone. She knew about the money. She didn’t know what Zev had done with it.

  That night in Havana, twenty-eight years ago, lying in the arms of Consuelo, Zev made a plan — to be put into effect only if he continued to love Consuelo. “I am a realistic person. Feelings die,” he said. Seven years later, a few weeks before Zev was deported, his child was born. He was still in love with Consuelo.

  From the pattern of whorls in the tiny thumbprint, Zev worked out a formula. It translated into a graph. This graph described the proportionate distance between peaks and valleys along the shaft of a key that opened a bank box in Zurich. The original key was destroyed. To reconstruct it, Zev’s child — now twenty-one years old — had to supply the thumbprint. That’s how Zev planned it in 1959. Only one person in the world, his Cuban love child, could lay hands on the money. Zev had waited seven years in Cuba and loved Consuelo. He’d waited over twenty years away from her. He loved her no less. The old man cried himself to sleep at night.

  On December 22, at 10:00 p.m. I walked into the Tropicana and began looking for Consuelo Delacruz to tell her that she and the child were rich in dollars and the undying love of my uncle Zev Lurie. I imagined he was at that moment huddled in a heavy wool coat, his face bent against the blades of winter, hustling through freezing New York streets from his office to his limousine. My heart went out to him. I was delivering warmth to the lonely winter of his life and I was glad. He’d confessed to me. I felt honored, grateful. I valued his intimacy.

  I passed through an entranceway of pointed arches, then a lobby, and entered the largest outdoor nightclub in the world. Tiers of white tablecloths, in a great sweep of concentric circles, descended toward a vast curved stage. There were trees all about, tall palms and flamboyants, the towering walls of a natural cathedral open to the nighttime sky. I went to a table near the edge of the stage. A waiter approached. I pulled out my notebook and asked, “Dónde puedo encontrar Consuelo Delacruz?”

  “Ron y Coca-Cola,” he said.

  Music started, lights began flashing, dancers appeared onstage.

  I raised my voice. “Consuelo Delacruz. Ella trabaja aquí.”

  “Cuba Libre?”

  “O.K.,” I shouted. He left. Was I reading incorrectly? Mispronouncing? I’d try again when the drink came.

  The Marxian adage “Nothing can stop the course of history” is incontestable, but here was the Tropicana, in a Havana suburb, the creation of fifties architecture, airy and geometrical, and, on its stage, just as in the prerevolutionary days, the garish, glitzy artificiality of Las Vegas tits-and-ass dance routines.

  At the next table, two men in identical white shirts, with pale, expressionless robot heads, from East Germany, were sipping beer. Beyond them, on platforms built high in the air, on either side of the stage, appeared an orchestra, chorus, and dancers, performing in the trees, with the fantastic sensationalism of show-biz Americana. Viva la Tropicana! I said to myself, and looked about for my waiter and my drink. It was coming to me in the hand of a tall, slender black woman, very handsome, about fifty or so. I got right down on my knees and started reading the Spanish in my notebook. When I glanced up, she was half smiling, her eyes softly inquisitive.

  “Zev?”

  I nodded. She set the drink on the table, tugged me to my feet, kissed me, and pulled me after her along the aisle that curved with the stage front, and then behind it into darkness tangled with wires. We stopped only to gape at each other, to see what couldn’t be said. She asked fifteen questions. Spanish is the fastest language in the world. Cuban Spanish is even faster, but if she’d spoken with the slow lips of death, I’d have understood none of it. She continued to hold my hand, hers quivering with eagerness to know what I couldn’t tell her. Gradually, she made out in my eyes no hope, no Spanish.

  “Norteamericano? Brook-leen?”

  Then, more strongly, she pulled me after her through the dark and around behind the stage into an alley, like another part of the city, no longer the Tropicana, and pulled me toward two near-naked women, their heads glorified by mountains of feathers, their bodices all spangles. They practiced dance steps together, not noticing our approach until Consuelo thrust me in front of one of them. To me she said, “La niña, Zeva.” To her she said, “Tu padre lo mandó. Anda hablar con él. Háblale.” La niña looked from her mother to me, then just at me, fixing me with large dark eyes rich in incomprehension. Words came, a
s if experimentally. “You are from Zev?”

  “He sent me to see your mother.”

  She was Chester’s half-sister, Zev’s love child, my cousin. I had to tell this to myself, review the facts, before saying, “I am your cousin.” She told this to her mother, who, while she’d had no trouble kissing me earlier, seemed now to show faint reserve, though she smiled and said, “Ah.” Zeva stepped toward me. In a sweetly formal way, she kissed my cheek, whispering, “Did he send us money?” I whispered, too: “More than you can imagine.”

  After the last show, I waited for them at the front gate. Zeva emerged wearing blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and sandals. She looked like an American college student. Consuelo had gone ahead to get their car, an old Chevy, like the one Chester drove years ago, but very rusted, battered, and loud. We drove along the Malecón, where waves smashed against the seawall, stood high in the air, and collapsed along the sidewalk and onto the avenue. Facing the ocean were rows of old, grim, suffering buildings, arcades and baroque ornamentation, much decayed, and very beautiful in decay. I had glimpses of Arabic tile work and the complicated glass of chandeliers hanging amid clotheslines in rooms where the rich once lived. We turned right, passing through a large square, then along empty streets with hardly any lights. The Chevy sounded very loud, echoing in the darkness, because there were no other sounds, no voices, no music, and nobody about.

  This was the Old Town, where Zeva and Consuelo had an apartment in a three-story building with a much broken façade, elaborate mortar work along the balconies fallen away, iron railings loose in their moorings, and tall windows eaten up by water and fungus. The apartment was long and very narrow, with a linoleum floor throughout. Lights hung from the ceiling by naked wires. Chests and tables were loaded with porcelain figurines, ashtrays, framed photos, and innumerable bright little cheap glass nameless things, like junkshop memorabilia. We sat in the kitchen at an oval Formica-topped table. The surface was imitation gray marble with an aluminum border. The pipe·legs were also aluminum. Right out of the fifties. In an L.A. antique shop, it would sell for about a thousand bucks — with the four chairs.

  Zeva looked at her hands when I finished the story and said, “Which one?”

  “Aren’t they the same?”

  “Maybe only one is good. I could give you impressions of both thumbs, or I could cut them off and you bring them to him.”

  “He wants all of you,” I said.

  Consuelo, respectful of our deliberations, waited for us to conclude. Zeva told her where we stood. Then an argument started. I couldn’t understand it, but it touched old disagreements. Zeva wanted to go to the States. Consuelo didn’t. Consuelo rose, stood with arms folded across her chest, looking down at us. Then, from her angry rigidity, she bent abruptly and hugged me. She did the same with Zeva, then walked off down the narrow hall to a bedroom. Zeva said, “She’s tired. She’s going to sleep. You stay here tonight. She wants you to. I’ll fix a bed for you by the windows, or take my room. I won’t be able to sleep, anyway. This is terrible. Terrible. I don’t know Zev, but he must be a thoughtless man. How could he do this to me? To us? We have lived for years with promises. This apartment is ours. Almost ours. We are buying it slowly. Now you bring new promises from him. She wants to tell the authorities. It won’t be too good for you. I’m sure you’ll be detained. Come, I’ll show you.”

  I followed her to the window.

  The street was empty except for a man at the corner, ordinary-looking, wearing a hat, brim pulled down front and back.

  “The police?”

  “They will want to know what we talked about.”

  “We’re cousins. We talked about Zev. You told me about yourself, how you learned English. How did you learn English?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “You don’t?”

  “After Zev was thrown out, my mother was in ill favor. She lost her job at the Tropicana. They gave it back to her later, but for years she did other work, mainly cooking and cleaning for the family of a diplomat. She took me with her every day. I played with their children. They spoke English. I spoke English. When they switched to Spanish, so did I. There were also other languages. The family had lived in different countries. I spoke maybe five languages. It was all language to me and I never knew which I was speaking.”

  “You don’t speak a child’s English.”

  “I studied it later in school. If you speak one language as a child, then another, you are left with a child’s knowledge of the first. Like changing lovers.”

  “Have you changed many lovers?”

  “I can count them on one thumb, but I imagine you grow and mature with the next lover, and the next. With the first you are always a child. I wanted to be in the foreign service, so I studied English. I would like to travel. I’m good at languages, but I’m a little too black, a little too much like a woman. Opportunities didn’t come my way. My mother says Zev speaks nine languages. She refuses to admit she understands a word of English.”

  “Zev still loves her.”

  “She obliged him to speak to her in Spanish. If a man loves you, she says, he must prove it every day. When Zev spoke to her, always in Spanish, he reminded himself of what he felt for my mother. She’s a real Cuban, very warm and loving, but when she tells me what Zev did to Batista’s soldiers, there is no pity in her voice. I ask her why not. She says, Your father is a man.”

  The man in the street lit a cigarette and glanced up; the flare of the match revealed his eyes. I waved to him. He looked away.

  She said, “Americans think anything can be made into some joke. Do you like rice and beans? If not, you may have to learn.”

  We stood near each other, easy in our nearness, familial. It wasn’t an American feeling. My cousin was very attractive, but I had no trouble with that. I put my arm around her shoulder. She leaned against me, as if we’d grown up together, two Latin kids, always touching. “I like rice and beans,” I said.

  I wasn’t detained in Cuba. Nothing was done to me; nobody asked questions. On the last night of the film festival, I was invited to a grand dinner, with hundreds of others, at the Palacio de la Revolución. Long tables in parallel lines, with wide aisles between them, were laid out with Cuban foods. Guests walked the length of the tables, loading their plates, then returned for more. At the end, they served cakes and excellent Cuban ice cream. Without announcement, Fidel appeared and the crowd swarmed toward him, surrounding him, but this was an elegant crowd of well-dressed people, and they felt the necessity of leaving him a little space in front. I couldn’t approach closely, but I could see his head and shoulders, the top of his green army uniform, his beard and intense black eyes. He was the tallest man in the hall, perhaps six-foot-five. His head was large, leonine, heroic, bending slightly toward those who asked questions, listening with utter seriousness. I saw a monument, not simply the man called Fidel, but the living monument of himself. He seemed, in that instant, while talking to a man in the crowd, to be talking beyond that man to me. “Of course,” he said, “we would publish the works of Kierkegaard. If somebody came to me with the manuscript, say, of his great work Either/Or, I would think it is worth a million dollars.”

  When my plane landed in Miami, I went to a phone and called Zev. It was 5:00 a.m., but he’d said to phone him the moment I arrived. I was sure he’d want to hear from me. Besides, I was too excited to wait. As soon as he said hello, I began telling him I’d met Consuelo, and I told him about his brilliant daughter, Zeva, how she spoke several languages, how well she danced, though I’d seen her only as a spangled figure among others, all burdened by colorful feathers. “Zev, why didn’t you say the baby was a girl?”

  “I couldn’t remember for sure.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “When you get a little older, the differences between boys and girls matter less.”

  I told him Fidel is willing to let them go to the States, but with conditions. Either the million dollars is returned to the revolution,
or Zev’s women never leave. “It’s up to you.”

  “He spoke to you personally?”

  “Not exactly. It was indirect, but we were in the same room. I’d been followed by the police. He certainly knew who I was.”

  “Right, right. Well, I have the bank and the number, but only Zeva can open the box. The key is her thumb. Wait in Miami. I’ll catch a plane this afternoon. Stay with my friend Sam Halpert. I want you to call him, but listen carefully. When you hang up, look around, look at the people. Look good. Then take a walk. Make four or five turns like you’re lost, you don’t know the airport. Don’t go into toilets. Stay in plain sight. Then find another phone and call Sam — Sam Halpert — and then look around again. You’ll recognize the one who’s following you. Describe the guy to Sam. Whatever he tells you, do it.”

  “Zev, you’re scaring me.”

  “I’ll see you soon.”

  The phone went dead as I shouted, “Wait a minute.” I dialed him again. What the hell did he think I was, a person with nothing to do but hang around Miami? The phone rang at his end. Nobody answered. Too damn bad. Zev would fly here for nothing. I slammed down the receiver and started toward my San Francisco flight, so angry that I forgot to look around at the faces, but there were none, anyhow, just a man lying on a bench with a Miami Herald covering his face, sleeping.

  I didn’t notice him.

  I didn’t notice his white shoes, either.

  Blind with feeling, I thrust along the passageways where slender neon tubes of pastel light floated, a modernistic touch, suggesting a chemical bloodstream fed the airport’s extremities. My big leather shoulder bag slammed against my hip, my breathing was loud. I talked to myself, finishing the conversation with Zev, telling him he was my favorite uncle. I’d admired and loved him since I was a kid, but … I owed him a lot, nevertheless … I’d never forget that he paid my college fees, still … that he pulled strings in New York to get me summer jobs, and, when my high school sweetheart became pregnant, Zev found us the doctor in New Jersey and paid for the operation. Then I stopped raving and let myself wonder if maybe it wasn’t anger that I felt but fear.