Beyond the Ties of Blood

by Florencia Mallon

  As he made his way back toward the kitchen, his mouth watering in anticipation of the snail-shaped rugelach, their brown cinnamon and sugar syrup trapped between layers of crisp, warm dough, he saw Grandpa David stooped over the foot-powered sewing machine, a single electric bulb hanging above his head. He had his half-moon glasses all the way at the tip of his nose, concentrating on the collar of what looked like a dress shirt. His curly red hair, liberally sprinkled with white and grey, rose to several points along his forehead. Manuel knew he’d been pulling at it as he worked. He put his hand on his grandpa’s shoulder for a moment.

  “Hi, Grandpa. You going to have tea with us?”

  It took Grandpa a full minute to come back into the room from wherever his head had been while sewing. “Ah. Manolito. Rugelach. Yes. Just a moment.”

  Manuel gave his grandpa’s shoulder a squeeze and continued toward the kitchen. For just a second, it crossed his mind that it was taking Grandpa longer every day to focus on the things going on around him. But then Grandma placed a mug of sweet, warm tea with milk and a plate of rugelach on the table and all concerns were swept away.

  A full twenty minutes later, Grandpa emerged from his sewing room. Grandma Myriam had served him some tea, then put it back on the stove, served him some cookies, then put the tray back in the oven, at least three times. She had gotten up a fourth time before her husband had finally appeared at the door.

  “Ach, David, another minute and I come get you. You take so long. What is happening to you these days, you take so long?”

  A puzzled glimmer passed through Grandpa’s grey eyes, then he realized he still had his reading glasses on so he took them off, folded them, and tried to put them in his pocket. He missed twice before he finally managed to tuck them in safely. He smiled down at his wife, putting his large arm around her shoulders.

  “Ah, my soft little peach, you get impatient in your old age.”

  Grandma Myriam relaxed into his arm. When she spoke again, all irritation was gone, replaced by a warm sweetness that matched the cookies she was taking from the oven.

  “Such a charmer. Sit down while I pour your tea.”

  About halfway through his plate of rugelach, when he tried to pick up his mug to wash down a mouthful of sugared cinnamon, Grandpa David’s hand collapsed and the mug fell to the floor, pieces scattering in all directions. Manuel and Grandma looked up in alarm, and Manuel began cleaning up the pieces of the broken cup. A disoriented look in his eyes, Grandpa tried to pick up one of the remaining cookies. But he had lost all function in his right arm. Manuel sat down next to him and handed him the cookie, but Grandpa’s fingers could not close around it. Looking up, Manuel caught Grandma’s gaze and saw his own panic reflected in her eyes.

  Within a month, Grandpa David had taken to his bed, stricken by a mysterious disease that ate away his muscles and turned him into a tiny, wizened fraction of his former self. Though business petered out as people learned of don David’s condition, Grandma insisted on keeping the tailor shop open every day. Except for the stray shirt or jacket that needed mending, which she would then see to herself, she spent her time in the back room, next to the wood-burning stove, stirring simmering soups that wafted rosemary and basil into the shop’s increasingly stale air. Every day, once he got home from school, after drinking his hot, sugared tea with milk and eating the snack his grandma had prepared, Manuel restocked the woodpile next to the stove with small dry logs that kept the fire going. Then, in the late afternoon, rain or shine, he helped Grandma Myriam lug the pots filled with soup and tea out the back door and through the alleyway that connected the shop to the family residence.

  When they reached his grandparents’ living quarters, they entered through a battered wooden door into a narrow passageway. Their footsteps echoed briefly in the dark hall, which quickly opened up onto a spacious, sunny garden planted with geraniums and orange trees. A line of tall doors with shutters bordered the garden along its eastern side, and together they opened the third door from the right. On a sunny day they left it open as they fed Grandpa, because Manuel thought the sunlight might keep the old man from shrinking further down into the furrows of the mattress. He wondered, too, why his mama didn’t come to visit her father. Grandma and Grandpa needed her so much more now, and she never came by. It wasn’t as if she was spending so much time with Papa, who was always at his bakery, anyway.

  Every couple of visits Manuel bent down, putting his hand on Grandpa David’s forehead, the skin so transparent that he could almost see the blood course slowly through the veins. He tried to persuade Grandpa to eat a roll or two by waving a piece in front of his face and holding the bony fingers that peeked out from under the embroidered coverlet, wondering how the capable hands he’d seen darting over seams and collars, tucking and folding in rhythm with the sewing machine, could so quickly have become skeleton’s claws. When Manuel succeeded in feeding his grandpa, even though the old man could no longer talk, a small spark lit up in the back of his grey eyes, and for a second there was a return pressure on his hand. Manuel moved closer, thinking that the remains of the man he’d known only a few months before might still be in there somewhere.

  “Grandpa …”

  But Grandma inevitably cut him off.

  “Manolito, what good this does you? He’s gone, you know. My husband the big charmer, he helps everyone, supports everyone. No matter the worker who needs to sew up his only pair of pants, or the high society lady who comes in with her piece of imported silk. He treats them all the same. But now he’s gone and left me. He’s not in there, you know. And that’s why we can’t stay longer today. Must open the shop. Otherwise what do we eat?”

  Although he knew his papa was paying most of the bills these days, Manuel didn’t correct his grandma but helped her carry the empty pots back through the alley in the opposite direction. He’d settle in to do his homework and, if he was lucky, Grandma would give up waiting for customers and sit down at the kitchen table with him. Every now and then she remembered a story about Grandpa and smiled with pleasure, a delicate patchwork of wrinkles deepening around her green eyes, her sun-freckled skin tightening slightly across her cheeks. Then she put down her mending, refilled their cups, tucked a stray white curl back into the bun atop her head, and painted a picture with her words. Sometimes the glittering images carried them well beyond nightfall.

  “You know, Manolito, your grandpa and I, we meet and fall in love in the fog. We’re both from Odessa. Your grandpa gets caught up in the workers’ movement back then, and the Czar’s police, the Cossacks, they take his papa away. I lose my family, too, in the troubles in the city, but we both make it to Istanbul. One night, when it’s very foggy and I have just arrived, I’m sitting on a bench near the port, under a streetlight. I’m all alone, someone stole my money, and I’m very sad. I’m crying. To make myself feel better, I begin singing Oseh Shalom, the shabbat song I always sing at home with my family.

  “Then a young man dressed in grimy, fishy clothes walks up to me speaking Yiddish. It’s your grandpa! ‘My mama used to sing that song to us on Friday nights,’ he says. ‘I hadn’t heard it in a long time.’ I must look scared, because he says, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you. I was around the corner, and I thought I heard angels singing.’

  “He has nice grey eyes and a red beard, and he’s puffing on a pipe. This reminds me of my papa’s pipe tobacco, and I start crying again. But when I stop, I look up at him and smile, and he smiles back.

  “‘Did you just arrive?’ he asks. I nod. ‘Do you have money? A place to stay?’ My eyes fill with tears, but I don’t start crying again. I shake my head. ‘Are you mute?’ he asks, grinning, and I smile back. ‘No,’ I say. ‘Besides, you heard me sing already.’ He laughs at that and, after a few seconds, I laugh too.”

  But Manuel’s favorite story was about how they had ended up in Chile.

  “We get married in Istanbul, Manolito. Somehow we find a rabbi in the dirty slum near the port and you
r grandpa’s two friends from the Ukraine, Jews like us, are the witnesses. We make plans to go to Palestine together. But weeks pass, and only two ships come through port going to Palestine, each with room for only one passenger. David’s friends leave, and we promise to meet in Jerusalem. Three weeks later, still no ships have room for two, so we think maybe if we go west, deeper into Europe, we have better luck. After many days—on foot, mostly, though once or twice a cart gives us a ride—we reach Trieste. The last man who picks us up says there are ships to everywhere from Trieste.

  “There are plenty of ships, but also plenty of people waiting for them. It takes us a week to understand how the lines work. Most people are going to America, so at first we think it will be easy. But soon we realize almost no ships are going to Palestine, and the few that are, don’t have space!

  “One morning I notice a man in a brown suit going up and down the lines I know are for America. Mainly the men he talks to shake their heads and he goes on down the line. Sometimes, when they talk longer, the man takes a big piece of paper out of his small bag, opens it up, and points at something. Then whoever he’s talking to shakes his head, and the brown suit keeps going. Finally, after everyone in the lines for America has said no, the man looks at our line. He comes right to us, though we’re not at the front. As he gets closer, I notice he smells of lime.

  “First he speaks in languages we can’t understand. When David tries to answer in Russian, the brown suit shakes his head. Finally we figure out that if the brown suit speaks in German and David answers in Yiddish, we can more or less understand each other.

  “‘Where is it you’re trying to go?’ the man asks.

  “‘Palestine,’ David answers.

  “‘You willing to go somewhere else?’ David looks over at me and I nod.

  “‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Me and my wife want to be together, and to have steady work.’

  “‘You heard of Chile?’ the man asks. We shake our heads. ‘You know how to read?’

  “We nod, and the man takes out the same piece of paper he was showing people in the other line. It’s a big map of the world. ‘This is Chile,’ he says, pointing to a long, yellow strip running down one side of South America. With his finger he traces it down, down, down, to a place with a strange name: Angol. ‘A man named Fernando Larraín just bought a big property right around here,’ he says. ‘He needs a couple he can trust to run the farm. You know how to read, so learning Spanish will be easy. You worked in agriculture?’

  “Our eyes meet, and with just a glimmer passing between us, we agree to lie. We nod. The man nods back and smiles. He points to the top of the hill, far away from the port, where the fancy hotels are. ‘Then it’s settled,’ he says. ‘Come with me and we’ll sign the contract.’”

  One night when Manuel came home, having missed dinner yet again, Mama was sitting alone in the living room, reading a book. Aside from the lamplight framing her in the chair, the house was dark. The glasses on her nose made her look like Grandpa David, although the black curls in her hair, punctuated by a few grey exclamation points, were more like Grandma’s. So was her height as she stood to face him, her hands and feet quite small. He noticed as he got close that he had to look down now to see into her eyes, and that deep lines marked their outer corners. The nails on the right hand she passed shakily through her hair were chewed down to the skin.

  “Well, I guess she must prepare something pretty delicious back there in that tiny, smoke-filled kitchen, something you could never get in this house. Otherwise I might get to see you now and then.” She tossed the book on the coffee table for emphasis. “Besides, you never let us know if you’re eating here or not. I keep waiting for you, and you’ve made it so clear to Francisco that he’s not to pick you up. So I never know what you’re doing, where you are …”

  Manuel felt a familiar wave of anger welling up from his stomach and tried to control the tone of his voice when he answered.

  “That’s not true. You just don’t want me over there. But Grandpa David keeps getting worse, and Grandma insists on keeping the shop open, and someone has to help her.”

  “Your papa and I hired a nurse a while back, you know. Who else do you think bathes him and keeps him clean?”

  “I can’t believe that’s all you think it is, Mama. Grandma’s alone now! You haven’t even been over there recently! You haven’t even seen him! Does it ever occur to you to do anything besides pay the bills?”

  His mama pulled herself up taller than her five feet two inches, reached up with both arms, and grabbed him by the collar of his shirt, pulling him down so that they were face to face. He struggled to keep his balance and not fall against her. Her brown eyes, suddenly as dark as charcoal, blazed as she spat out the words.

  “How dare you, niñito! Do you even have a clue about what it was like to grow up in that house, never knowing what he’d do next? One week it was a group of Indians with no land, the next a pile of factory workers on strike. The nights he didn’t come home, us not knowing, and he was locked up in a local jail somewhere. Your grandma crying her eyes out, yet every time he came back, he hardly had his coat off before she’d forgive him. Except now he can’t come back, and who do you think is left to clean up the mess? At least now somebody can pay the bills, which is more than I could say for them when I was growing up!

  “Of course you don’t know what that’s like. You’ve always known where your papa is, working himself to the bone for you! Your papa doesn’t bring home a flock of dirty peasants and railroad workers, stinking of garlic and wine, to mend their pants and fill their heads full of garbage! You’ve never opened the door and had a bill collector spit in your face! Believe me, you don’t have a clue!”

  Manuel slammed his book bag down on the floor of the hall and ran up the stairs to his room. It seemed that every time he saw his mother these days, it ended in a shouting match. He’d become the bullfighter. Manolito. But at least this one was his mother’s fault. Grandma Myriam had told him all about their lives, the adventures they’d had before coming to Temuco. Grandpa David wasn’t the kind of man his mother said he was. He had been kind to everyone, looked out for everyone. And besides, the old peasants and railroad workers who still brought their dirty pants in for mending didn’t smell of garlic or wine. All he could smell in the tailor shop was the cinnamon in the rugelach, basil and rosemary in the soup, and oranges in his grandma’s hair.

  When his grandpa finally died, Manuel was about to enter high school. They took the plain pine coffin to the Jewish cemetery on a gloomy winter day, in a cart drawn by a bony nag of a horse. A crowd of mud-spattered workers and peasants followed them, hats in their callused hands while the rain ran down their faces. Manuel stood in the rain as they lowered the coffin into the ground. Alongside many of the more modestly dressed people present, he took his turn with the shovel and heaved three muddy mounds of dirt into the grave. So did his mama and papa, but when they all said Kaddish, it was Grandma Myriam’s hand he held, listening to her sobs, holding her up. And he held her all the way back to the tailor shop, where she heated water for tea as they all dried their coats and hats before the fire, the smell of wet wool swirling with the pungent tea leaves as they steeped. After they drank a cup of tea, warmed their hands and feet, and waited for the storm to calm, Mama and Papa hugged Grandma and left. Only then did he ask the question that had been inside his brain all day.

  “Why were all those poor people there, Grandma?”

  When Grandma answered, her splintered voice came from a bone-tired place inside her he had never heard before.

  “It’s been so long now, since your grandpa took care of us. All those old peasants and workers, he took care of them, too, Manolito. Sure, he mends their pants and shirts, but he also tried to mend their lives. He helped them write letters to the government, asking for land, for jobs. He helped organize unions and traveled to tiny villages to help the Indians fight the big landowners who moved the fences on them and took away their homes. He got
in trouble, too, like he did back in Odessa when he and his papa organized the workers. But no matter how much I begged him, he didn’t stop. Those old men, they remember the meetings every Sunday night in the sewing room.”

  Temuco, 1967

  Manuel entered high school a few months after his grandpa died. The times were beginning to change, and he often wondered what Grandpa David would have thought about the Cuban Revolution, the young guerrillas in Peru, Colombia, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, the student demonstrations in Mexico, or even in the United States against the Vietnam War. Would he have remembered Odessa? Or the Sunday night meetings in the sewing room? It seemed there’d always been landless people, poor or homeless families, unemployed or dispossessed like the frayed and mud-spattered old codgers who had stood by his side and shoveled earth into his grandpa’s grave. But now, somehow, it seemed different. It was the young who were in the lead, marching, mobilizing, standing up for everyone’s rights. And it was happening all over the world. The young Cubans—Fidel, Che, Camilo—they hadn’t looked that much older than he was now when they’d marched into Havana less than a decade before. And then there were the wars in Algeria and Vietnam, not even to mention the struggles for independence in other parts of Africa or Asia. He looked carefully at the grainy pictures of the young, bearded Cuban revolutionaries in the radical newspapers and leftist magazines his older classmates were passing around in school. “Young idealists cheered by the masses,” read one caption. “When the young barbudos entered Havana, they changed the world,” proclaimed another. And Manuel saw the truth of these statements reflected all around him. Why, even in his school, some of the students in the higher grades were singing new songs on their guitars, sitting in the plazas on weekends and debating the future.