The Radical Element

by Jessica Spotswood

  Susana’s heart raced. She felt so foolish. “No. I’ve never stolen anything.”

  Linda arched her brow, waiting. “Really?”

  Susana sat back down and stared at the incriminating evidence on her feet. What had she been thinking?

  “I’m sorry. I’m not myself,” she began. But the words dried up on her lips. The truth was that she had no idea what being herself actually meant. “It’s that . . . my relatives are coming,” she finally whispered.

  Linda frowned. “That won’t hold up in court, miss,” she said. “A family visit doesn’t make it cool to take a five-finger discount on my boots, if you know what I mean.”

  “I wasn’t stealing them,” Susana mumbled. “I was trying them on — that’s all. And it’s not just a family visit. They’re coming from Cuba. To live.”

  Linda’s eyebrows shot up. “Cuba?” she said brightly. “It must be beautiful there.”

  Susana fell silent; in truth, she didn’t know. All she had were Iris’s stories and those awful scraps of memories.

  “And El Che was gorgeous,” Linda added. “So sad about him. Damn CIA murderers. They’re killing all the heroes.” She shook her head and took another deep drag.

  Susana flinched at the mention of the guerrillero’s name. It wasn’t allowed to be spoken in their apartment. He’d been executed in Bolivia a few years earlier; that much she knew. But these days, his face was on posters in even the most unlikely places. Iris had been recently stopped cold in front of a record shop window on Main Street, staring at a velvet interpretation of El Che in horror. He’d been Fidel’s handsome number-one man, the soldier who had led the firing squads of Batista’s old sympathizers. That’s all Susana knew. But what if her parents weren’t telling her everything? Was he a hero or a villain? Who got to decide the truth?

  Disoriented, she began again. “They’re finally getting out. They weren’t allowed to leave. But now we’ll all live together.”

  Linda shrugged. “I take it you don’t dig them?”

  Susana’s thoughts jumbled into a thicker knot. Did you get to dislike your family — even if you didn’t remember them? Even if they had been trying to reach you for years? “I’m not sure,” she confessed. “It’s been twelve years since I’ve seen them.”

  “Twelve?” Linda repeated. Then she smiled. “I’ve got a few relatives I wouldn’t mind losing for twelve years.”

  Susana regarded her quietly. Linda Turner, the American girl. Linda, whose name meant pretty. Linda of the peace-sign earrings. Linda, who went to college in stylish boots and had good-looking boyfriends following her every move. Everything was easy and happy for Linda. She was older by at least three years, but suddenly it was Susana who felt as if she had lived an entire lifetime more than her neighbor. How was that possible?

  “Twelve years,” Susana said again. “They’ll need my room now, and we’ll take care of them. Everything will be different.”

  An ambulance raced down the street, flashing lights but no siren, like a silent scream. Linda finished her smoke quietly. “Well, I’ve got an early class tomorrow,” she said, her blue eyes resting on the boots.

  Susana started to pull them off, but Linda held up her hand. “Keep them,” she said, shrugging. “The glue won’t hold for long, anyway.” She held up two fingers. “Peace.”

  Then, nimble as a cat, she slipped back inside.

  Susana stayed on the fire escape for a long while after the light in Linda’s apartment went out. She watched the night world go by beneath her as she sat thinking. One thing was clear: these boots were fashion to Linda, nothing more. A girl like Linda could give them away without a look back. Nothing would change for her if she discarded them.

  But what if you were a different sort of girl? Susana wondered. What if you wanted all that breezy happiness but already knew the sting of having the most important things taken?

  X.

  That Friday, Susana waited in the kitchen for her grandparents’ arrival from the airport. She had barely slept the night before, so her mother had allowed her to stay home from school. She had, however, left clear instructions.

  Susana had made ham sandwiches and wrapped them as her mother had asked. She had dusted the apartment, put clean sheets on her grandparents’ bed and on the cot that was now pushed up near the kitchen window. There was fresh fruit on the kitchen table to welcome them. The coffee pot was loaded with Café Bustelo.

  The last thing her mother had asked was that she look nice. “Ponte linda,” she’d said. Get pretty.

  When the cab pulled up to the curb, Susana was ready.

  She watched as her father paid the cabbie and then pulled the single suitcase from the trunk. The elderly couple that stepped out from the backseat wore gray coats that looked too heavy. But at the sight of them, Susana’s heart squeezed into a fist. She could hear her patent-leather shoes clicking against the shiny airport floor. She could feel the heat of someone whispering in her ear: Quiet, now, mi amor, until Fela leaves. She could smell lilac water caught in the fabric of her drying sundress.

  The intercom buzzed a few seconds later. Susana’s hands trembled as she pressed the button that let her family into the lobby. Then she checked herself in the full-length mirror one last time. First impressions, as her mother always said, were the most important.

  She opened the apartment door and paused at the top of the landing, listening. There was no sign of Linda next door, just the faint scent of incense.

  The sound of footsteps grew louder until her relatives rounded the corner of the staircase and came into view one floor below. Her grandparents looked around the gloomy hallway in uncertainty.

  “We’re one more flight up,” Iris said, out of breath, pointing up the stairs. “This way.”

  That’s when her eyes fell on Susana. She frowned, and her mouth dropped open.

  But before Iris could scold her, Susana swallowed hard and climbed down the steps. She was dressed in a miniskirt and V-neck sweater, both borrowed from Martha. And on her feet were the recently shined white patent-leather boots, glue and all.

  “Susana,” her mother began in a sharp tone. “What’s this?”

  She glanced down at her boots and smiled. “You said ponte linda, and I did.”

  With that, she walked directly to her grandparents. “Soy Susi,” she began. But then, all she could do was search their faces.

  Her grandfather bit his lip as he regarded her with watery eyes. When he pulled her close, she was surprised by the earthy scent that was at once familiar, like palms and tobacco, like an old wooden swing that she suddenly recalled without the slightest prompt from her mother.

  Then her abuela nestled in for her turn. The embrace was long and sweet, and Susana felt something open gently inside herself, a small crack that seeped drops of all that had been missed and erased. They stood together for a long while.

  If her grandmother was surprised by what Susi was wearing, she didn’t say so. Instead, when she finally pulled away, she took Susi’s face in her freckled hands and gazed at her. They were Iris’s eyes and Susana’s, too.

  “I would have recognized you anywhere, mi vida,” Abuela whispered. “How I’ve waited to see you again, Susi.”

  And with that, Susi took their hands and led them on the steep and uncertain climb for home.

  Fidel Castro (1926 – 2016) was the leader of Cuba from 1959 until 2008. He took power with widespread support of Cuban citizens in response to a coup by his predecessor, President Fulgencio Batista. Fairly quickly, however, he allied himself with the Soviet Union and communist doctrine. Over the course of his almost fifty years in power, he remained a defiant neighbor of the United States and a critic of what he felt were its imperialist policies. Worldwide, he is both revered as a revolutionary hero and reviled as a ruthless dictator.

  Over the course of Fidel Castro’s leadership, more than 1.5 million Cuban citizens would eventually leave the island nation. Whether via the early Freedom Flights initiated by Preside
nt Lyndon Johnson or by taking to the ocean in handmade rafts, many sought to flee from the difficult economic conditions that unfolded and from the strict political and social controls imposed.

  “The Birth of Susi Go-Go” looks at the realities of Cuba’s exile community as its children began to merge into American culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For Americans, those years are remembered for social change, free love, and the important fight for civil rights. But how did those social movements look to refugees who had only recently fled a communist ideology?

  Susana’s struggle to embrace her life as a “normal” American teen while coming to terms with personal loss is an experience that I think the newly arrived will recognize. How do we reconcile competing accounts of history when we’re caught in between? How do we respect our parents and still find our own way among new friends who neither know nor understand what we have experienced to get here?

  I used to have a life, until a war ripped me away from it.

  My little cousin Amir and I sat on the steps of our apartment building as we ate ice-cream cones and watched people walk their dogs. I still found that strange. We had stray dogs in Tehran, but hardly anyone ever claimed ownership and no one picked up their feces.

  I was not used to the humid August heat, either. Tehran could get blistering hot, but it was never wet the way Boston was. I had only been here a month, and I missed walking to school with my girlfriends. I missed the fruit trees at my grandfather’s house. I missed Friday nights when the family would get together and go to a restaurant for dinner.

  I had just started to get used to the new rules in Iran — not that I was enthusiastic about them — but in America, all those rules went out the window. Things I was trying to get used to now: not having to wear a head scarf when I left the house, my aunt and uncle fighting about money, and the homesickness that I couldn’t escape, even in my dreams.

  Amir and I watched the cars drive by, blasting music from their radios. I recognized a song from one of my favorite shows, Solid Gold. Most of my days in America had consisted of watching copious amounts of television and trying to expand my English vocabulary while looking after Amir. I loved Solid Gold. The men and women dancing to the sounds of the latest hits felt so . . . outlandish. I mean, who wore leotards like that in real life? Back home, pop music was a very private experience. After the Islamic Revolution, I was only able to get bootleg recordings, and it was even more difficult to find new music from the West. If you wanted to dance to a new record, you had to stay inside and hope the police would not break up a private party. I wore out my contraband ABBA tape back in Iran.

  Now I couldn’t listen to “Waterloo” without feeling a pang of homesickness. I told myself that was okay, because ABBA was passé and for children anyway. The singers featured on Solid Gold, like Irene Cara, were the sound of now. ABBA was no Irene Cara. Irene Cara could sing!

  As the car drove away, I began to sing, continuing even after it was out of earshot. I didn’t know all the words to “Time After Time,” but I remembered the chorus and made up some noises to fill in for the words I didn’t know.

  “Hey!” A young Asian woman with short hair stuck her head out of her apartment window. “You’ve got a decent set of pipes!” I didn’t understand what she meant, exactly, but she was smiling, so I took that as a sign that I wasn’t disturbing her.

  “She doesn’t speak English so good,” Amir shouted back, and I flushed. “And we’re not supposed to talk to strangers! Are you a stranger?”

  The young woman shouted again, and then disappeared from the window.

  “What did she say?” I asked Amir in Farsi. His face was splashed with chocolate from his cone, and he was looking more and more like a Monchhichi doll the longer his hair grew out.

  “She told us to hang tight. That means she wants us to wait here.” His Farsi was tinged with a slightly American accent.

  “Why?” I asked him. He shrugged. He was more concerned with licking dribbling chocolate from the side of his hand. How stupid was I to have to rely on a He-Man enthusiast to be my translator?

  The woman met us on the steps wearing neon-yellow shorts, a blue tank top with a picture of a blond woman singing on it, and a guitar strapped to her back. Her cropped black hair had a purple streak in it, and the toenails on her bare feet were painted black. I thought I was looking at someone from outer space.

  She blinked at me a few times and said something in English. I looked at Amir desperately to help translate.

  “She says you look like Apple Own Ya,” Amir said, wiping his hands on his shorts. I was going to have to wash those, the little devil. But he was my little devil and I loved him. How humiliating was it that my only friend in the United States was my six-year-old cousin?

  The way the young woman looked at me, I wondered if I had some ice cream on my face too. What was an “Apple Own Ya”?

  “Sorry! Where are my manners? I shouldn’t stare at you like that. My name’s Mai! I live upstairs on the fourth floor.” The young woman stuck out her hand in that very confident American way I’d seen on TV.

  “I am Soheila. Hello. It is very to be nice meeting you,” I said, self-conscious of my accent. Amir laughed at me a little. But Mai beamed, so I guess I introduced myself well enough.

  “Do you go to college around here?”

  “No . . . I am not a student.” I didn’t know how to explain my situation.

  “She’s here because of the war,” Amir interjected. That I understood well enough. “War’s bad. Except in the movies. Then it’s fun.”

  “Oh. Where’s um . . . sorry . . . where’s the war?” Mai asked.

  My uncle had warned me not to advertise where I was from. Back when he was a college student during the U.S. embassy hostage crisis in the late ’70s, he was beat up by some American students.

  But I wasn’t ever going to be ashamed of where I came from, no matter who was in charge of the government. “I’m from Iran,” I said with pride.

  “Oh, bitchin’! Right on. You must have seen some crazy shit, huh?” Mai asked.

  “‘Shit’? What is ‘shit’?” I asked in English, which made both Amir and Mai laugh.

  “It’s a bad word that means poop! Poop!” Amir shouted joyously in Farsi. Now I knew a new word in English. This was progress.

  “Listen, do you guys live here? Do you want to come visit my apartment? I’m not a weirdo or anything — I promise.” Mai crossed her heart with her index finger. I didn’t know what that gesture meant — or what “weirdo” meant.

  “Do you have ice cream?” Amir asked.

  “Lots of ice cream. Brigham’s ice cream, too. The best kind,” Mai said.

  “You play the guitar?” I asked.

  “Oh! Yeah. I go to Berklee College of Music.” Mai swung the guitar around to her front and began to play a familiar tune.

  Since I had come to Boston, I had been having the same nightmare: my mother and father were alone in their basement, hiding from Saddam’s missile strikes. My mother yelled for me. I tried to run to her, but I couldn’t move. Then I woke up sweating, my heart thumping so loudly, I hoped it wouldn’t wake Amir in the bed next to mine.

  The only thing that calmed me down was the acoustic guitar music coming from the apartment above my uncle’s. I didn’t know who played such gorgeous music, but I had vowed that if I ever met him, I would thank him. Now I had met the mysterious musician — Mai! I felt stupid for assuming the guitar player was a man. I just didn’t know many women guitar players. There had been women pop singers before the Revolution, but I hadn’t seen a woman play the guitar before in person.

  I absolutely loved it.

  Amir always jumped up whenever he heard his father sing from down the hallway, alerting us (and perhaps the whole building) that he had returned from his garage space. Mostly Uncle Khosro would sing a lot of off-key disco like the Bee Gees. He forgot many of the words and made up his own lyrics depending on his mood.

  He was still singing
loudly as I opened the apartment door for him. He held our dinner in his greasy hands: a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and a two-liter bottle of Pepsi.

  “Hello, my beautiful family! Tonight we feast because of a great military man named Colonel Sanders,” Uncle Khosro exclaimed in Farsi. I took the soda and chicken from him so he could scoop up Amir and hang him upside down.

  “Khosro, don’t do that! All the blood will rush to his head!” Aunt Fariba hissed. She never greeted her husband with the enthusiasm Amir did. I got the impression that when Aunt Fariba came here in 1975, she thought she was marrying a man who would give her a fancy American lifestyle: expensive cars, large homes — the way the people on Dallas lived. Khosro was a good man, but he was not Bobby Ewing (portrayed by the incredibly handsome Patrick Duffy). To be fair, Fariba was no Pamela Ewing. I think it had dawned on her that she never would be.

  My family back home came from means, but my uncle had a much different life than he would have had if he had stayed in Tehran. He hadn’t exactly been truthful about the life he was living when he spoke to my mother on the phone. Uncle Khosro had told my mother that he lived in a “luxurious condo” and had “an incredible job.” The condo was actually an apartment on Gainsborough Street in a run-down building full of low-income tenants, including many college students. His incredible job was as a mechanic at a BMW car dealership instead of working for my grandfather in the import-export business. But I didn’t tell my mom the reality of my uncle’s situation during our weekly phone conversations. I felt it wasn’t my truth to tell.

  “But he’s enjoying it so much!” Uncle Khosro was hanging Amir upside down, swinging him from side to side. The little Monchhichi screamed with glee. I had a pang of longing for my own father. The way Uncle Khosro looked at his son reminded me of how my father and I used to play when I was little.

  God, I missed him.

  “Keep it down or you’ll disturb her,” Aunt Fariba warned in Farsi.