A Scarcity of Condors

by Suanne Laqueur

  Jude was born on the floor of the house in La Reina, attended by the Kings of Death.

  The coffee mug shook in her hands now, because she didn’t remember giving birth. Not remembering was part of the story. It could be funny and ironic, or horrifyingly dramatic, depending on how she told the tale. But she’d never considered the ramifications of that blank space in the narrative. She had no reason to.

  Until now.

  44% Iberian Peninsula.

  30% Italy.

  0% memory of giving birth.

  She remembered waking up in the hospital. She emerged from darkness into a daytime-bright, white room and wondered if she were dead. She turned her head a fraction to the side and the resulting pain made her wish she were dead.

  “Descansa,” a voice said over the pounding clang between Penny’s ears. “Rest now. Just rest.”

  “¿El bebé?” Penny cried, and then gagged with the pain of crying.

  “Lie still now, señora. Hold your head still. You have a serious concussion.”

  “The baby?”

  “He’s resting.”

  “He?”

  “Es un niño, sí. Close your eyes now.”

  She tried to sit up instead. Wailed from the agony of her fractured skull, then vomited. She went on retching with her eyes closed, whispering “¿Niño?” between heaves.

  “Está en la guardería, señora. Ahora, descanse.”

  She retched and rested. She dreamed of soldiers. Rifles cocked and aimed at the row people against the wall. Louis Tholet on his knees, staring straight into the line of fire. Finally hunted down, he was unafraid to face his killers. He’d been here before.

  Penny woke and retched. Fell back and rested under the soldiers’ aimed rifles. Woke again, crying for her baby and finally, they brought him to her.

  “There’s your beautiful mami,” the nurse said, sing-song under her breath. “There she is.”

  Swaddled tight to the chin like a burrito, he was laid next to Penny’s aching head. She rolled carefully to face her son and put her hand on his chest. Two straight-lined eyes beneath the cuff of a knitted cap. Little mouth sucking at the air, tongue thrusting.

  “He’s a bear,” the nurse said, pulling a bit of the cap back to show a thatch of dark hair. “And señora, look. Look…”

  Her fingertip caressed the baby’s face. As his lips rooted, looking for milk, tiny indentations creased his cheeks.

  “Tiene hoyuelos,” the nurse said, laughing.

  He has dimples.

  What was that nurse’s name? Penny thought, huddled over the piano keys. She prided herself on remembering people’s names. Names and birthdays.

  She couldn’t remember.

  I don’t remember giving birth.

  I remember the soldiers in the street. Bullets ricocheting off stone walls. The children screaming.

  Me screaming when they shot Louis.

  I remember waking up. I remember throwing up. I woke up, I threw up, I slept again. Over and over. How many hours was that? Or days? I don’t remember.

  Thirty-six years and she never contemplated the role time played in the story.

  I don’t remember Jude being born. I don’t remember being brought to the hospital. I don’t know how much time passed.

  How long before they brought Jude in? Hours?

  Days?

  I don’t remember.

  That nurse whose name I can’t remember. She showed me his hair and laughed over his dimples.

  Ysidro and Tatán came to see her. One held the baby while the other comforted Penny. Then they switched. Mother and infant passed from embrace to embrace. Tatán promised Louis would be buried in the Jewish Cemetery, with a rabbi to say Kaddish. Ysidro promised a beautiful headstone. The Kings of Death promised to keep going to the Estadio and asking about Cleon, doing anything and everything they could to find out where he’d been taken.

  They passed tissues and passed the baby. Ysidro cradled the infant’s head on his shoulder, singing “Hey Jude,” his favorite song.

  “So much hair,” Tatán said, his index finger tight in the baby’s grip. “He has sideburns.”

  All that thick, dark hair, Penny thought. The blue eyes and dimples. And when Jude got his first pair of glasses, Cleon laughed and laughed. “I don’t believe it. He looks just like Uncle Louis.”

  “Querida.”

  Penny looked up, blinking away the past. Cleon stood by the piano, cane in one hand, her phone in the other, holding it out. “You had a text from him. I heard it ping last night. Late.”

  She took the device and read it.

  I’m so glad you’re my mom and I don’t tell you enough. I love you.

  She smiled above a warm cloud of tentative relief in her chest.

  Cleon had gone to the kitchen to pour himself coffee. “Did you sleep all right?”

  “Not really.”

  “Me neither.”

  Few were the times when Penny regarded her husband’s injuries as injurious to her. Now was one of those times. She wanted a physical rescue. She wanted him to swoop in, crouch down and pull her into his arms. Hard enough to fall on the floor, where he’d fiercely draw her into his lap and rock her.

  He couldn’t swoop, crouch or throw himself to the floor. Couldn’t tolerate her weight on his legs for longer than a minute. As he eased onto the couch, Penny held his mug. It was his favorite—an almost dainty stoneware cup with Good Morning, Asshole in elegant blue script.

  She curled beside him. Walter put his paws on the cushions, all big eyes and quivering nose, but Cleon nudged the little dog away.

  He couldn’t swoop, but he could give Penny his fiercely undivided attention.

  A long quiet moment passed.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “How I don’t remember him being born.”

  He put his big hand on hers. “We’re getting upset over a fluke. A couple of digits got transposed, someone mis-typed.”

  “Cleon, if I walked out of that hospital with another woman’s baby—”

  “Shh.” He squeezed her fingers. “You’re getting way ahead of yourself. This is a fluke. Serena said they’ve processed over three million kits. It was bound to happen. Somewhere out there, a young, Spanish-Italian man is staring at his results, wondering what the hell is going on.”

  A hiccupped laugh in Penny’s chest, the kind that could easily turn into a sob. “I feel terrible.”

  “It’s all a simple mistake.”

  Penny clung hard to his strong grip. Her other hand worried at the scar at the back of her head, as if she could massage memory out of the old wound.

  I don’t remember Jude being born.

  “One day soon, we’ll be laughing about this,” Cleon said.

  Penny’s eyes felt too wide for her face as she nodded, fearing it would be the kind of laughter that quickly turned to weeping.

  Your sister Gloria is wary of Uncle Louis’s long, complicated silences, his anxious sighs and quick temper.

  You think he’s wonderful. He knows everything. He’s the one who renames you Cleón, after a great Athenian general.

  Louis is a masterful storyteller. He never begins a tale with “once” or “once upon a time.” Rather he begins with a German phrase: “Stell dir vor.”

  Imagine yourself.

  Louis is a second-person raconteur, putting the listener in the role of the hero. He tells a story about you, not he or she, and he always tells a story precisely the same way. No deviations, no embellishments, no alternate endings.

  He rarely tells what was done to him in Sachsenhausen, but he will talk at length about his mates, with whom he endured.

  “Was ist das für ein Wort auf Spanisch?” he asks.

  “Compañero,” you say. “Mate.”

  Louis and nine other men
in his block survived together.

  “Some inmates had solitary tactics,” he says. “We ten bonded forces. We made a minyan and we made our own covenant. Not to God but to survival. Ten men. One commandment: thou shalt survive.”

  Thou shalt survive, Arthur Faktor.

  Thou shalt survive, Vojtech Friedmann.

  And Jakob Bergmann.

  Salomon Eckstein.

  Boruch Irom.

  Jolan Zolschan.

  Hermann Bakker.

  Szmul Korenbilt.

  Zigfried Flechner.

  And Louis Tholet, especially. Thou shalt survive.

  “Together, we built a memory palace,” Louis says. “A palace with ten floors. Ten wings to every floor. Ten rooms in every wing. In every room, ten stories. One from each man’s life. A fortress of tales, rich and detailed, built into the walls and ceiling and floor and furnishings.”

  “And you remember them all?” you ask.

  He nods. “As the only one who walked out of there alive, it’s my job. I am the steward and caretaker of the whole palace.”

  One night when you are twelve, Louis sits in his comfortable chair, folds his hands in his lap and closes his eyes. You sit at his feet, watching and counting as he takes ten deep breaths.

  “It’s a simple front door to such a magnificent place,” he says. “You knock ten times and speak the password: stell dir vor.”

  Imagine yourself.

  “Imagínate,” you say, because the old man has tasked you with helping him practice his Spanish.

  “Imagínate.” He smiles. “So. Imagine yourself on the first floor. You walk down the first wing. Come into the first room. Sit down to hear the first story, which is called Arthur Faktor Goes to the Circus.”

  You are twelve. Too big to cry. But the stories from the palace fill you with complex and unexpected emotion. You wish Louis would stop. You want him never to stop. You sit through three tales that night, charmed at the telling by heart, horrified at how they were learned by heart. You’re both annoyed and grateful when your mother sends you to bed. You wait until the house is dark and still before you let down and weep.

  Never again do you ask Uncle Louis about the memory palace. It is far too awesome a place, too full of unfathomable acts of survival, and you are unworthy to walk its halls. You could never achieve such a feat of architectural courage.

  You are wrong about this.

  Ninenteen years later, while imprisoned in the Villa Grimaldi, you will build your own fortress of survival. But it’s a palace with only room for one.

  It was Friday night, which meant Full Frontal Fondue, a moveable feast Jude and his friends had been doing for years. Tonight, the festivities were at Hewan’s place in North Beacon Hill. In addition to the requisite drinks and cheese fondue, she made a killer non-dairy artichoke dip she called cheese fondont.

  Hewan was a witness coordinator for the Western District of Washington and worked mostly with victims of domestic violence. Her longtime partner was named Bert Gesundheit.

  “For real?” Jude asked, the first time they met.

  “For real,” Bert said. “Go ahead, test me. Sneeze.”

  Jude faked an achoo.

  “Myself,” Bert said.

  Bert worked at Seattle University’s Center for Religious Wisdom & World Affairs. If there were a cooler title on a business card than Master of Divinity, someone would have to tell Jude what it was.

  “Can I fall in love with him?” he asked Hewan.

  “Feel free. You’re my gay husband, it’s only fair Bert be your straight-mate.”

  Bert had a harem of straight-mates. Everyone loved his gentle compassion and open ear. Deeply spiritual without being obnoxious, his casual but brilliant insights over the fondue pot could make the food fall out of your mouth. Bert only gave a sheepish smile and said, “Damn, I almost sounded like I knew what I was talking about.”

  Bert had an equal sign tattooed vertically on his right thumb. When he reached to shake hands, the tattoo reminded him to treat everyone as a peer. He had no hair on his head, a magnificent full beard and a PhD in hugging.

  “Dude, what is wrong?” he asked tonight. “Your aura is fucked up.”

  “Everything is fucked up,” Jude said, a PhD in misery.

  “Come here.” Bert wrapped arms around him, hands palpating along Jude’s spine. “I’m not kidding, your aura is brown. Jesus, I’m going to have to smudge the house after you leave.”

  “Sorry.”

  Hewan put a glass of wine in Jude’s hand. “What’s killing you, shmoopy?”

  If he were going to spill about the DNA test, now was the time, while he had Hewan and Bert to himself. But a weird, embarrassed shame had a chokehold on the story, begging him not to bring it up. Besides, the second test was at the lab. Serena paid extra for a rush job. When it all turned out to be a mistake, he’d have wasted a perfectly good bitch session.

  “Residual hangover from Vancouver,” he said. “I guess. All my issues are kicking my ass.”

  “That means they need attention,” Bert said.

  “B, I love you, but sometimes…”

  Bert laughed and kissed his head. “You are a brave, beautiful and resilient soul. Let your issues sit in your lap and whine. Be patient. They’ll get bored with you and leave.”

  “You almost sound like you know what you’re talking about.”

  “Come here, slave,” Hewan said, putting a cutting board and knife in Jude’s hands. “Slice and dice while you’re getting your ass kicked.”

  Hewan was ruled by common sense and compulsive list-making, and never coddled Jude’s propensity for drama and exaggeration. She knew exactly what to do with his moods: give him jobs to feel useful, shower him with physical contact and not ask too many questions.

  “You’re doing great,” she said. “I really don’t see anything unusual about this funk. I can tell it sucks, I don’t want it for you, I’d make it all go away if I could. But I’m not shocked you’re feeling depressed.”

  “Telling you, Jude,” Bert said. “You’re right where you’re supposed to be.”

  “I just want to move on from it already.”

  “You will,” Hewan said, drawing her spatula through the melting cheese. “Bert’s right. You’ll get to a point where you’ve felt enough and you’re bored with being blue.”

  “I thought I was bored with it when I was driving home from Vancouver. I was in this great place, looking forward and moving on.”

  “Well, you were wrong,” Bert said. “Or to be nicer about it, you were misinformed. The optimism you felt was defective. The universe recalled it and will be sending you a better version. Optimism two-point-oh.”

  “Get the fuck out of my face.”

  Bert’s laugh bounced off the walls. “Come on, that was good. You liked it.”

  His vegetables sliced, Jude tossed his glasses down on the table and scrubbed hands through his hair, sighing viciously. “Thing is,” he said, “none of my relationships since Feño have felt like Feño. Do you get one chance at that kind of love? That adolescent euphoria of feeling everything to your bones?”

  “Euphoria isn’t sustainable,” Bert said. “It’s the candy bar breakfast of a relationship. Burst of invincible energy followed by a crash halfway through the day, and you crawl through the final hours doing the bare minimum.”

  “Well that’s depressing,” Hewan said.

  “Love thrives on protein, not sugar.”

  “B, shut up.”

  “All right, smartass, what’s your answer?”

  “My answer is Jude, you are thirty fucking six years old,” Hewan said. “You will never experience teen euphoria again. That ship sailed on your twentieth birthday, same way it does on everyone’s twentieth birthday. The SS Twentysomething Euphoria didn’t come in because your leg was b
roken with a baseball bat, which’ll make anyone cautious. Now Thirtysomething Euphoria is on the horizon. And…” Her head tilted, one corner of her mouth smiling. “What would Penny Tholet say?”

  Jude sighed again, hard enough to make the paper napkins flutter in their basket. “And. Dot-dot-dot. Who are you going to be?”

  The doorbell rang, heralding the rest of the squad. Bert went to answer it and Hewan gave Jude a last squeeze.

  “I love you always,” she said against his head.

  “I’m sorry I’m such a downer.”

  “You’re human.” She poured him another glass of wine. “And this ointment is sweet.”

  “The what is sweet?”

  She shuddered. “Don’t make me say it again.”

  “Ointment.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Moist.”

  “Jude, I will kill you.”

  “I’d like to point out that ointment makes the toilet seat moist.”

  She started whacking him with a dishtowel, screaming like Joan Crawford. “No! O-i diphthongs! Ever!”

  Fondue and fondont and the sweet ointment of friendship soothed him for the next few hours. But as soon as he sat down to practice that night, an enormous surge of emotion nearly toppled him off the piano bench. He gulped it back into his throat, where it stuck like a fist of iron.

  “What the fuck,” he said through his teeth, smashing both fists on the keys. “Fucking enough already.”

  Jude hadn’t cried since he was seventeen. After the attack, he seethed, he raged, he brooded, he freaked out and threw up and melted down. But he never cried. He howled like a dog when blood spurted up onto the windshield of his father’s car. He punched a wall once. Kicked things out of his way. He moped, sulked, picked on his siblings, snotted back to his parents, acted out and acted up.

  He never cried. Not even after agreeing to see Feño one last time, so they could break up properly. Especially not after that.

  He didn’t cry now, but emotion was on him like a fever and he was mourning his youth. Abandoning the piano to reach up to high bookshelves for photo albums and yearbooks, dig in the closet for shoeboxes of notes and mementos.