Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  The morning when he was leaving La Flor de Berlín and found his uncle Joseph sitting on the curb across the street, along with a cardboard box, he knew immediately that the light was returning. No, his uncle couldn’t be bringing bad news, because the quota for that type had already been exceeded. And he wasn’t wrong … Pepe the Purseman was coming to look for Daniel so he would live with him again in his room in the Calle Compostela tenement and so Daniel could attend the school of his choice as a normal student. The man had given a lot of thought to it and made the decision to allow his nephew to come back since he believed he understood the reasons behind his decision: he himself, he then confessed, his eyes teary with a good dose of fear or pain over the losses he had suffered, more than once had felt, like the boy, an uncontrollable urge to tell it all to go to hell, tired of shouldering an ancestral stigma that persisted when he hadn’t done a thing, in any regard. The price paid by that family was already too high to increase it with separations and punishment, he said, and Daniel was old enough to exercise the free will that the Holy One had given him along with his life. Besides, his uncle added, the truth was that he missed him and felt alone. So alone that he had done something excessive, the man said, pointing at the cardboard box and then asking Daniel to open it. Then the young man almost fell over in shock in the middle of the street. His uncle had gone nuts and bought him a radio!

  His tutor’s timely reconsideration and the freedom from the weight of a double life turned young Daniel Kaminsky, at the age of sixteen, into a real man, who then enjoyed the best years of his life, enhanced by the enjoyment of musical programs, the play-by-play of baseball games, and the adventures of the Chinese detective Chan Li Po, which he could now enjoy as much as he wanted with that brilliant radio device. The peace and kinship existing in Cuba, where being Jewish or not didn’t seem to matter much to anyone, where Poles, Germans, Chinese, Italians, Galicians, Lebanese, Catalans, Haitians, people from all corners of the world came together, allowed him a fullness that no Jew had imagined even in his dreams since the distant times in which the Sephardic people had been allowed into Amsterdam. Among Cuba’s Jews, besides, there were devouts and skeptics, communists and Zionists, rich and poor, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, some days at war with each other, other days living in harmony, but nearly all of them were almost always willing to pursue two aspirations in those propitious lands: money and tranquillity. What most annoyed Daniel about the efforts made by that community to which he belonged less and less, from whose orthodoxies he increasingly distanced himself, was how it sought to isolate and close itself off precisely in the places where they were welcomed and had doors opened to them. The ghetto spirit had left a mark on their souls after centuries of experience and persisted in hounding them, even in freedom. The sustained attempt to live and progress as a closed, inbred group, with businesses among Jews, marriage between Jews, ceremonies between Jews, food for Jews (although always differentiating between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, rich and poor) seemed absurd to Daniel and was something that his liberal, open spirit rejected, despite knowing that his attitude was considered integrationist by rabbis and by any believer in the significant fate chosen by divine plan as the mission of the sons of Israel. Luckily for Daniel and his happiness, despite that stubbornness, there were increasingly more Jews established in Cuba who thought like him and, further still, who lived according to their own wills.

  It was true that in those years the country’s prosperity and its Republican democracy, which allowed the Jews’ progress, had to endure the rise of one of the worst social scourges: corruption. The quest to get rich in the shortest amount of time possible was so visceral that it overtook politicians, business owners, investors, military leaders and policemen, and more or less public figures so that even violent wars between factions occurred with a certain frequency, as exemplified by the so-called Cuban gangsters. But when it came to a student without two pennies to rub together like Daniel, those dealings barely touched him, or so he thought in his naïveté at the time as he enjoyed the pleasant feeling of living fearlessly (completely fearlessly, since Lazarito was locked away at the Castillo del Príncipe jail for his excessive use of a switchblade). As his years and experiences as a Cuban added up, the young Jew would rectify many of his first impressions about the Cuban character, cheerfulness, and levity. He would learn that, as part of the human condition, on that sun-blessed island, with all the physical benefits to generate wealth, where cultures and races mixed and everyone sang or danced, hate and cruelty could also flourish, even the most sadistic kind; social climbing and the ever sordid social and racial differences could spring up; and, especially, an evil could appear that seemed to have invaded the hearts of many in the country: envy. Was this permanent and petty envy an inherited quality or, on the contrary, was it a patentable and specific result, like all the mixtures that made up a Cuban? Many years later, a friend would offer him a plausible answer …

  Despite his improved situation, Daniel Kaminsky decided to continue working on the cleaning crew at La Flor de Berlín while going to high school so that he could have some money to cover his growing needs for clothing, school supplies, the luxury of a snack, or the possibility of spending an afternoon at the Grand Stadium of Havana when his favorite team, los Tigres de Marianao, played. During his second year and after several weeks of saving, that salary was even enough to take the little gallega Marta Arnáez, with whom he had fallen desperately in love, to dinner at Moshé Pipik. At the restaurant of his dreams, besides impressing the young girl who still hadn’t accepted him but always listened to his declarations of love, Daniel wanted to satisfy the persistent and old desire to sit at one of the red-and-white-checked-tablecloth-covered tables, at the center of which reigned a blue bottle of seltzer water, and to enjoy those foods that, had he not been spellbound with the vision of his almost-girlfriend (as he thought of her), perhaps they would have transported him to his Polish childhood down the path between his taste buds and his so-called emotional memory. Especially if that path is taken after a plate of kneidlach in which the balls of egg and flour floated in chicken stock and, upon entering the mouth, crumbled with their pleasant softness, drowning everything with their taste of heaven.

  * * *

  It took Daniel Kaminsky a year of persistence, initiated with looks, smiles, and any creative ploy he could think of, followed up by declarations of love, both verbal and written, to win a yes from Marta Arnáez. And it wasn’t because the young girl didn’t like, from the start, that Pole with the unruly curls, whose eyes were more stunned than large, and who was thin as a rod but muscular. As he told his son Elias many times, seated below a canopy of bougainvillea in the yard of their Miami Beach house, or on a white-painted bench under the shade of the leafy acacias belonging to the exclusive Coral Gables nursing home, from the beginning she felt a certain sympathy for, and soon after, a definite attraction to Daniel. But she felt forced to respond to his amorous pretensions with a phrase that neither rejected him nor accepted him: “I need to think about it,” she would repeat to her stubborn would-be boyfriend. “That’s how it was back then,” she would explain to her son Elias Kaminsky years later, always with a smile on her face.

  They became a couple at the end of the spring of 1947, when they were finishing up their second year of high school, and from that moment on they began to wander around the city holding hands, at least until they approached the young girl’s house on the corner of Virtudes and San Nicolás, close to busy Calle Galiano. Then they would separate, without even a kiss on the cheek, and she would go on to her house without turning around and he would return to Old Havana, very pleased with himself, with the hope that Russian Katerina, with the help of vodka, rum, or gin, would have one of her hottest days and, as had been happening for a year already, would motion to him with her finger, implying an invitation to come up to her apartment, where she would offer the young man another lesson in her free, hands-on course on Slavic abandon.

  A few weeks later, it
was summer vacation, and Marta, along with her parents, went to spend it in the remote and supposedly flourishing town of Antilla, in the northeast of the island, where a brother of her mother’s lived and worked. Although old man Arnáez returned after a week to man his store, which specialized in liquor and provisions, mother and daughter remained for an outrageous eight weeks in that part of the world—the longest eight weeks in the life of Daniel Kaminsky, who felt he was about to go crazy as he counted the days and, at times, even the hours separating him from a reunion, when he imagined himself going out to Antilla and kidnapping his beloved to then take her to another of the island’s remote spots. He was so desperate that he didn’t even seek out another invitation from the Russian woman, and, out of sheer lack of alternatives, he even returned to the synagogue to numb himself with prayers and the reading of the Torah’s passages. He also put in more hours working at the German Sozna’s bakery so he could save up enough money to buy himself the suit with which he would, at some point, appear before his future in-laws to formalize the courtship by asking for his girlfriend’s hand.

  While neither Daniel nor Marta knew it, the women’s prolonged stay in the east was part of a strategy meant to cause their separation and encourage them to forget each other, since neither Manolo Arnáez nor Adela Martínez found the discovery that their daughter was going out with a scruffy Polish Jew to be a pleasant one. But both parents, already familiar with the young girl’s ways, chose to use subtle methods before a full-on confrontation from which, they predicted, they would emerge defeated. Because Martica was more stubborn than a mule, according to her own father, an expert mule raiser in the finest Galician style.

  The solution her parents sought had the opposite effect to what they had hoped for. When she returned to Havana and dove into her studies, Marta Arnáez, who was already seventeen, decided to allow her boyfriend to move forward one more step in their courtship and they at last kissed for the first time. Although passion was coming out of their respective pores, from that point on, despite the desire filling their heads with naughty thoughts, they had enough restraint to limit themselves to kissing and light caresses. “Of course, again, those were the times,” Marta would occasionally say to her son. “And to let off steam, your bastard of a father had Katerina, free for the taking, the whore of all whores, but from me … nothing more than innocent kisses.”

  Unwillingly, the young girl’s parents accepted the formalization of the courtship when Daniel and Marta were about to finish their third year of high school. Daniel had arrived wearing the cheap fake muslin checked suit that he had bought from the Lebanese vendors on Calle Monte and the blue-striped tie, a gift from the owner of La Flor de Berlín. Sitting for the first time in the living room of the Calle Virtudes house, after telling his presumed in-laws about his serious intentions, Manolo and Adela asked him to come back the following day for their verdict. Once they were alone with Marta, her parents asked the girl what she thought of that declaration. She answered with the phrase that would mark her life, and with such a tone that made it clear to her parents it was best to give her freedom in that respect. “Daniel is the man of my life” were the girl’s words, and she remained true to them until the end.

  * * *

  Just when he was trying to, and succeeding at, finally formalizing his courtship, Daniel Kaminsky had a deep identity crisis that shook all of his deep-rooted beliefs. At the end of that year, 1947, in the land of Palestine, the new state of Israel had been born and its entry into the world had been chaotic and painful, but full of hope. Like almost all Jews spread around the world, Havana’s Jews greeted the development joyfully, even when, as seemed to occur in every important or unimportant case, they processed it from the perspective of different factions, running from militant Zionism to outright apathy toward a set of events so removed from their daily lives. But between one extreme and another, there were numerous positions, encouraged by communists, Zionists, socialists, Orthodox, reformists, moderates, liberals, militarists, pacifists, Sephardim, Ashkenazim, atheists, or believers of a messianic bent, and as many mixtures of positions or identifying subtleties as one could imagine.

  Daniel, who thought he was so removed from those debates, then felt the ungovernable call of tradition deeper and more dramatic than he could have imagined. After several years of dogged and beneficent distance from Judaism, now the fate of Eretz Israel and its ongoing earthly and heavenly problems had come back to shake him. The much-anticipated and necessary birth of the Jewish state came with the conviction that merely by having their own country, precisely in the lands that their God had promised them, the Jews would be able to avoid the horror of another Holocaust like the one they had just suffered, the dimensions of which they learned more with each terrible revelation. To obtain that refuge, the Jews channeled all of their passion, their peaceful and violent tricks, and their talent into exerting economic and moral pressure. They came to count on the support of the same North Americans who nine years prior had prohibited the docking of the Saint Louis, and even of the powerful Soviet Union, which was interested in a strategic friendship with the Jewish state. Even though the Cuban government refused to recognize Israel, the entire process, which focused international attention, reached Daniel Kaminsky in mysterious ways, as if to remind him that, in the end, he had more than a cut foreskin in common with those people. He was also tied to them by blood, and, further still, by death. That feeling of kinship besieged him so that, a few months later, when the fate of the recently born state was jeopardized by the military response of several Arab armies, he, like other young people in the community—mainly the children of Turkish Sephardim, hardened proletarians—came to wonder whether he shouldn’t also volunteer to go defend the resurrected country of the Israelites, lost so many centuries before.

  The Saturday morning on which, after a long absence, he went with his uncle Joseph to the Adath Israel synagogue to catch up on the serious events occurring on the opposite side of the world, the rabbi’s words set off remote fibers of his consciousness that Daniel Kaminsky had thought had disappeared. “God gave every nation its place, and to the Jews he gave Palestine,” the officiant said, standing among the rolls of the Torah. “The Galut, the exile in which we have lived for so many centuries, meant that we Jews had lost our natural place. And everything which leaves its natural place loses what sustains it until it returns. We know that well. Since the Jews have shown national unity since the time of the patriarchs to a degree that is higher than that of other nations, since it was the will of the Holiest one, blessed may He be, it’s necessary for us Jews to return to our real state of unity, which we can only obtain in contact with the sacred land of Eretz Israel, there where it all began, a land whose ownership is confirmed by the sacred book and divine word.”

  Perhaps it was the vital perspective that the formalization of his courtship offered that most influenced his final decision to distance himself from the temptation circling him and in which some of his neighbors and former classmates from the Israelite Center and many of the young men enrolled at the Yavne Institute had fallen. Or, at least, that was what he told his uncle Joseph when they discussed the issue. Because, in reality, after the initial feelings brought up by his ancestral instincts, Daniel Kaminsky felt that he found himself too far from that world of Jews in search of a fatherland to risk his own life in a military conflict of unpredictable proportions. Beyond egoism, he would say, what was at play in his case was an absolute lack of faith, of commitment to a cause dressed up as messianism and rebellion against old and limiting religious precepts rescued by the newborn country. All of it resting on a very rational stubbornness: his dramatic and nearly puerile purpose, in principle, of leaving Judaism, and his decision, stronger now, to share his life with a Cuban woman who—Daniel was horrified when he found out—could never be his legal wife in a country that, before it was born, had proclaimed the exclusion of Gentiles and, in the name of God’s laws, had forbidden so-called mixed marriages. Without his no
ticing how deep the process went, that defensive feeling of cultural and definitively rebellious distancing had grown more than he himself believed and left a generous space for his decision to be nothing but Cuban, living and thinking like a Cuban, a desire that became an obsession capable of dominating him consciously and subconsciously, so much so that it didn’t seem to have left too much room for any Jewish fanaticism to reach greater proportions.

  Many years later Daniel Kaminsky would revisit the dilemma of that defining decision of his life in a letter sent to his son Elias, who by then was established in New York, where the young man was trying to start his career as an artist. It happened in the late 1980s, a few months after Daniel had undergone a successful operation for prostate cancer. Pushed by that mortal warning, as soon as he recovered, he surprised his family with the decision to return to the city of Kraków, to which he had never previously wanted to return. In addition, against all logic, Daniel Kaminsky chose to carry out that journey to his roots, as Ashkenazi Jews the world over called it, alone, without his wife or his son. When he returned from Poland, where he spent twenty days, the man, who was generally loquacious, barely made a few banal remarks regarding the trip to the place of his birth: the beauty of the city’s medieval plaza and the strikingly vivid memory of the horror embodied by Auschwitz-Birkenau, the visit to the ghetto to which the Jews had been confined and the impossibility of finding what could have been his house in the Kazimierz neighborhood, the visit to the New Synagogue, with its candle-less candelabras, gloomy in the solitude of a country that was still uninhabited by Jews and sick with anti-Semitism. But the emotion over his encounter with the cradle of his past that he had tried to cover up for years, from which he had even seemed to free himself a long time before, had touched on the darkest corners of Daniel Kaminsky’s consciousness. So, months later, he finally carried out that unforeseen confession.