by David Unger
“I’m really sorry I didn’t bring my drawings. I did some wonderful watercolors of toucans and macaws and a drawing of Indians cutting down banana stems in the field.”
Samuel listened in quiet astonishment, not recognizing a single scene that Blassingame described. After his tongue had galloped for twenty minutes straight, he asked Samuel about his own experiences, to which he mumbled that he had rested in his air-conditioned hotel in Puerto Barrios.
What else could he do? Tell him about the Nazis in Germany; the dwarf Mr. Price; the aborted trip to Livingston; his cousin Heinrich? Should he tell Blassingame about how he had crawled like a slithering worm until he had salvaged his self-respect, if not his life, by killing someone?
How would this tireless chatterbox understand? Samuel wasn’t even sure he could explain the last forty-eight hours to his old friend Klingman, a man who knew him inside and out. He realized that he had been through something so unique that he would never ever be able to explain it to anyone.
The locomotive whistled loudly, and the train began slowing down again. Nearly an hour had gone by. It was none too soon for Samuel, whose legs had fallen asleep in his cramped position and whose brain couldn’t absorb any more of Blassingame’s optimistic chitchat.
When the train stopped, the American struggled up to gather his trappings. “I’ve enjoyed your company and I’m sorry we haven’t gotten to know one another better.”
When Samuel gave him his hand, Blassingame pumped it up and down nearly a dozen times and then hurried out of the compartment. He was met by a gray-haired man in a white poplin suit who was probably Dr. Clifford, and a barefoot servant who relieved him of his belongings.
There was no station in Quirigua, but a handful of Indians zoomed to the side of the train to sell food. A minute later, the train pulled out of the station. The green shoulders of bananas gave way to brown savannas and eventually to desert and cactus. The air grew hotter, drier. Samuel could finally breathe again without feeling his lungs clotted with moisture.
Orange dirt extended for miles till it met up with a blue wall of mountains. Samuel saw a rapidly flowing river, the Motagua, where oarsmen struggled to keep their cayucas from banking on sandbars and running aground.
The desert fascinated Samuel. The cacti were so proud and unyielding, dark olive sculptures whose many arms opened supplicatively to the sky or angled sideways and down for no apparent reason. Though locked into a barren and dusty landscape, they managed to not only survive, but also to flower and bear pink fruit.
Samuel glanced up at the sky. Not a shred of cloud marred the blue umbrella over which the sun blazed—it wasn’t simply a mass of burning gases, but a holy stone, a ball of fire that could force people down on their hands and knees to pray for its strength and power …
What were desert nights like? Samuel saw a bone-white moon against a sheet of black velvet. He felt the cool of evening spreading over him and watched numberless stars coming into view. He saw constellations sliding across the sky like slow-moving desert caravans. He would learn to identify and trace the Great Bear, Aries, the Twins, the giant hunter Orion, the Pleiades, the archer Sagittarius. He would be able to recognize Scorpio, his own zodiac sign, with its curved stinger poised tensely in the sky.
At some point along the way, the train stopped abruptly. It was stuck in the desert, halfway to Zacapa. Dazed and dreamy-eyed, Samuel stuck his head out the window. He saw the trouble. Two boys were frantically herding dozens of goats across the tracks. The engineer hooted impatiently, but the procession of hooves and ringing bells continued at its own pace.
The children in the compartment began racing down the aisles, while their parents called to them in laughter. There was nothing to celebrate—after all, the train was being delayed—but the passengers didn’t care. Their travel had no sense of urgency. They were free to enjoy the moment.
The gaiety around Samuel infected him, and soon he too was yelling good-humored insults and baaing sounds to the goats.
Fifteen minutes went by. The goats crossed the tracks only to suddenly buck and go back the way they had come. The hooting and howling and dancing kept up in the car. Finally, a shot rang out and the goat herd stampeded. The train lurched forward and the passengers settled back down into their seats.
Samuel soon fell asleep.
An hour later, around midday, the train pulled into the Zacapa station. Samuel didn’t know if he should disembark. He had momentarily escaped capture, but he was still being sought. Lewis had suggested that he spend a few days in Zacapa until all the excitement had waned.
The train wheels locked. The conductor opened the compartment door and shouted that the train would be making a half-hour stop for repairs; the passengers could leave their belongings on their seats—there was enough time to get off and eat lunch.
The children squealed and rushed past the conductor, and the parents hurried after them. When the car was completely empty, Samuel grabbed his suitcase, paid the conductor for the latest segment of his trip, and went down the metal steps to the platform.
The bright sun stung his face—it felt so good. Chills ran up and down his body as if the heat were drawing the mustiness out of his joints and sockets. He put his suitcase down on the platform and stretched back till every bone in his body seemed to crack.
A young girl of nine or ten approached. “Tacos, señor, with beans or goat meat. Cheap.” She was barefoot and clothed in a simple cotton sack. She was squinting even though she had a straw hat to shade her eyes.
“Do you have any bread and cheese?” Samuel asked.
The girl giggled. “Bread? We don’t have bread in Zacapa.”
“No bread? How’s that possible?”
The girl tossed her head back and shouted to a woman with gray hair tied in a bun who was peddling tacos to other passengers from a shaded spot on the floor.
“Isn’t it true, Mamá, that there’s no bread in Zacapa?”
Without slowing her deft hands, she answered: “You know that the nearest bakery is in El Progreso.”
“See?” the girl answered.
Samuel smiled.
What he had missed these last two weeks, first on the liner from Hamburg and then in Puerto Barrios, was a sense of usefulness, a purpose to his life. Too much free time. He needed to work!
He fished out a few coins and bought two bean-filled corn tortillas from the girl. He wolfed them down without chewing and bought two more.
His appetite had returned. Bread, he kept thinking giddily, that’s a good idea. He didn’t know how he could do it, but he was convinced that without knowing anything about Zacapa or bread making, he could open a bakery here! Not baking fancy rye or date-nut bread, but something simple and wholesome—flour, yeast, salt, and water.
Samuel sat down on his suitcase to think. A couple of young whelps came up to him and stuck out their hands for money. He obliged by dropping pennies in their hands. They seemed so pleased. Next to the mother selling tacos, an old hag argued with a cripple over who had permission to sell roasted cashews from this spot—they seemed on the verge of hitting each other.
Then a boy came up to Samuel, flashed him a stained card, and offered to carry his bag to the very best hotel in Zacapa. Samuel shook his head, but the boy wouldn’t leave.
He looked out to the town and stared at a leafless ceiba. What did he know about baking? It would be foolish. He couldn’t stay in Zacapa. He was on a mission. Whether Heinrich wanted to see him or not, Samuel had promised his Uncle Jacob to bring him his personal regards.
He finally asked the young boy to carry his suitcase and follow him into the train station. They headed over to the telegraph office and he asked the clerk for a message form, which he filled out.
Heinrich. Am arriving later today on the train from Puerto Barrios.
Work or no work I must see you. We have much to discuss.
The train whistled and Samuel paid for the telegram. He asked the boy to follow him to the same compartment h
e had been in before. Fortunately, no one had claimed his bench. He gave the boy some coins and snuggled into his seat, trying to fall back asleep.
* * *
As the train continued on its way, Samuel began thinking about what precisely he wanted to “discuss” with Heinrich. Certainly he wanted to talk about “the incident,” the one that had driven them apart when they were boys. It was time for Samuel to face the truth and admit he had failed his cousin.
They had been such good friends, inseparable, playing together and going on common escapades. With so many girls in the family, they were almost like siblings. Once, when Samuel was spending the weekend at his uncle’s apartment, Heinrich confessed that he looked upon him not just as his cousin, but as his brother and very best friend. We are like twins, Heinrich had said, milk brothers.
Lying in the single bed next to his cousin so many years earlier, Samuel had wondered what he had meant. Instead of saying something—You are my best friend too—he had felt smothered by Heinrich’s confession. He had been unable to speak.
“Samuel, did you hear what I said?”
Samuel feigned sleep, actually letting out a false snore.
Heinrich had rolled over, confident that they were best of friends.
Summer was almost half over. The next day, Heinrich, his sisters, and his parents went away to a spa in Interlaken, Switzerland.
Toward the end of August, the families got together again at his Uncle Jacob and Aunt Gertie’s apartment. Heinrich had been bored spending so much time with his sisters. He beamed when he saw Samuel and gave him a big hug. Again, Samuel had been disturbed by the show of emotion and he gravitated toward his girl cousins who were only too happy to have another male companion.
After lunch that first day, Samuel’s mother and aunt took the girls shopping to the center of Hamburg and the boys were left alone while the uncles talked. Heinrich asked his cousin if he wanted to go swimming with him in a nearby lake. After some hesitation, Samuel nodded and the boys went off, walking in the shadows to avoid the hot sun, picking blackberries along the way, acting as if everything were normal between them. But something was different.
The lakeshore was crowded with summer picnickers. After splashing around and tossing a ball with some boys Heinrich knew from synagogue, the two cousins decide to swim across the lake to their favorite spot—a forested island in the middle where they could swing on a rope from a tree and jump into the water.
It was a half mile to the island, but they were both good swimmers. Once they got there, they climbed up the steep banks and lay on a flat rock just below the rope to catch their breath. After a few minutes of lying there together, Heinrich asked Samuel if he was angry at him for something.
Samuel had shaken his head, but a minute later he confessed that his parents were constantly fighting. He was worried that they would be divorcing.
“You seem so quiet,” Heinrich said, his already high voice cracking.
Samuel looked across the lake. “I don’t know, Heinrich, but lately I’ve really enjoyed being alone. It gives me a chance to think. I want to be a friend to myself.”
Heinrich sat up. “What do you mean by that?”
“I need to find out what it is that I want to do.”
“But Samuel, aren’t I your best friend?”
Before Samuel could answer with some sort of pat, innocuous lie, Martin Gibbel, a gentile a few years older than the cousins, came out of the woods. Heinrich knew him from gymnasium, and he and his classmates considered the boy a bully. He told Heinrich and Samuel to leave, for this rock was his. He was a brawny-shouldered boy, already sprouting fuzz on his upper lip. His eyes were a deep blue, like cobalt, and very cold.
Samuel was no fighter and he got up to leave. Heinrich, on the other hand, felt that in principle the rock belonged to no one and said so.
Martin pushed Heinrich hard. He fell on the rock and started screaming in pain. A huge gash had opened up on his back. Martin fell on top of Heinrich and the boys started fighting. They rolled and tumbled, arms locked, onto a bed of pine needles. Heinrich was shouting out for Samuel, as the stronger boy pummeled him.
It would have been a simple thing for Samuel to go over and help his cousin.
Instead—without knowing why—he simply rushed over and grabbed the rope, pushed off the rock, and plunged into the lake. He let himself go down in the water till his toes touched the squishy bottom. Then he pushed himself slowly up. He felt his lungs were about to explode from the pressure, but he was not about to rush his ascent. When he broke the surface of the lake, he coughed and gasped for oxygen. He exaggerated his effort, as if to say to any witness that he had not come to his cousin’s aid because he had slipped off a rock and nearly drowned.
Samuel swam slowly back to the rock, keeping his head just under the surface so that he could not hear any sound. When he reached the island, Heinrich was standing on the rock holding his left elbow. His right eye was black and closing, and his bottom lip had swollen to double its size.
“You did nothing to help me,” he wailed.
Samuel was panting. “When I got up to help you, I slipped off the rock and nearly drowned. Didn’t you notice?”
“You didn’t slip,” Heinrich cried. “When Martin attacked me, you dove—to get away.”
“Liar. You don’t care a thing about me. I almost drowned. I thought Martin was your friend from school and you were just horsing around!”
“Horsing around? Look at me!” Heinrich screamed, pulling on his bottom lip so more blood oozed out. “Does this look like a game to you?”
Samuel pushed his cousin away. “So who told you to start a fight with that big lug? Anyone could have seen that he could whip us both. It was stupid of you.”
“You betrayed me.”
“You’re nothing but a big baby,” Samuel shot back.
Heinrich glared at his cousin and spit blood to the ground. “I will never forgive you for that.”
“Good. I’m tired of you,” Samuel said before jumping in the water and swimming back.
The two cousins never discussed the incident again. That was all they said to each other that afternoon, and for many afternoons to come.
Months later, they started talking to each other again, but it was in a completely different framework, almost like relatives forced to be civil to one another. Their friendship was never the same again.
Samuel sat on the bench with his eyes closed as the train wound up a mountain. He kept seeing Heinrich’s bloody face. He realized that not only had he failed to help his cousin, he had refused to take any responsibility for his cowardice. In fact, he had secretly taken pleasure in Heinrich’s thrashing, as punishment for having tried to make their bond more intimate earlier in the summer.
All these years, Samuel had refused to accept blame for what had happened. He had seen so much brutality and carnage on the battlefield, and had become an expert at picking up injured comrades and dead bodies after an onslaught.
He had felt no responsibility for what had been, for Heinrich, perhaps his most terrifying afternoon. He had abandoned his cousin.
And was Samuel so stupid, so self-absorbed to think that his cousin had ever forgotten that incident?
The train stopped briefly in El Progreso, a small town known for its cashews, before beginning its rise out of the country’s central plains. Three hours later, the train pulled into the station house in Guatemala City. Dozens of passengers disembarked rapidly.
Samuel was among the last to leave his compartment. The sun was going down and the gas lamps had already been lit. The air was crisp and cool, almost like a September evening in Hamburg, when it seemed as if the day was pivoting between returning to summer or beginning the slow descent toward winter.
On the platform, he let one of the countless shoeless urchins carry his suitcase. The boy seemed to know exactly where to take him. They moved down recently cobblestoned streets until the boy stopped at a small hotel on Séptima Avenida with the unlik
ely name of La Casita. While the boy waited just inside the hotel gate, Samuel crossed under the wooden lintel and filled out the registry forms at a small table in the lobby. As soon as the clerk gave Samuel a key to a room on the second floor, the boy came into the hotel carrying his bag.
Samuel opened the door to his room and the boy placed the suitcase on the bed. Samuel tipped him generously and awaited a response. The boy pointed to his throat, indicating that he was a mute. Samuel smiled and shook his head in thanks.
The room had heavy wooden furniture and a woolen Indian blanket on the bed. Samuel closed the door, opened his suitcase, and put his few shirts, pants, and undergarments in their proper places in a closet that smelled of mothballs. He glanced around the room; a moth was frantically trying to free one of its wings from a crack in the window.
Samuel went back downstairs and entered the first restaurant he saw. After eating a simple meal of steak, potatoes, and squash, he walked along the stores in El Portal. He enjoyed the chilly evening air and sat down on a stone bench under a rubber tree in the Parque Central. Bootblacks approached him and pointed to his dusty shoes, but Samuel shook his head no. He wanted to sit quietly alone. He was enthralled by the façade of the Metropolitan Cathedral, austere with its orange stones, directly in front of him; and, to his left, the blocks of green stone set in piles behind barbed wire that would become the National Palace.
Tradition and renovation.
Soon he returned to his room to bed down for the night. Would he sleep soundly? He sensed that this kind of respite was still months away.
He took off his clothes and slipped into the cold sheets of his bed. He was exhausted, but wide awake. In quick succession he saw the faces of Lena, Alfred Lewis, Mr. Price, Joshua, and finally the bloodied head of Menino. But he had escaped and was glad to finally be in Guatemala City, even if he still felt somewhat ill at ease.
Tomorrow would be a significant day. Could he make amends with his cousin by simply apologizing for what had happened decades ago? It might not make a difference, but in the morning he would go to his cousin’s store, La Preciosa, and say hello. He would look into his eyes and apologize.
