Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  In the letter, he told his son that, ever since his return, he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the certainty that, as in all Jewish history, the most regrettable thing, which he would never be able to abide, was related to what he considered a deep sense of obedience, which times had devolved into the acceptance of submission as a survival strategy. He was speaking, of course, of his always problematic relationship with the God of Abraham, but, especially, about what occurred during the Holocaust, in which so many Jews assumed their fate as unchallengeable, considering it a divine curse or a heavenly decision. He couldn’t fathom that, their fate decreed, many of them even collaborated with their victimizers, or prepared themselves almost religiously to receive their punishment; that they went to the pits where they would be executed on their own two feet without any attempt at rebellion; that they boarded the trains where they would die of hunger and dysentery; that they would organize themselves to live in the camps where they would end up gassed. And he spoke of the way in which the hope of surviving contributed to the submission. The combination of the totalitarian powers of one God and one state had crushed the wills of thousands of people, strengthened their submission, and even snuffed out the desire for freedom that, to him, was the essential condition of a human being. Many people—millions—had accepted their fate like a divine mandate so that, in the end, among a few thousand of them, there would be explosions of rebellion, partisans in antifascist guerrillas, and rebellions in ghettos like the one in Warsaw. “Although,” he said at one point in his letter, “you should also keep in mind that so many of those submissive men and women came to view death almost with joy, in comparison to the life of pain and fear they were living. If you look at it that way, perhaps you can see many of their attitudes through a different perspective. You can even, Goddamn it, you can even justify the submission and I refuse to justify it … Or is what they repeated to us at the Israelite Center classes a lie, what the rabbis, Zionists, pro-independence activists declared when they told us that today’s Jews were descendants of Joshua the Conqueror and his indomitable Jewish peasants, of King David, the victorious general, of the warrior Hasmonaean princes…? How was it possible that, in the end, submission would overcome us?” Perhaps that conviction, which in 1948 was just a shapeless shadow in his consciousness, was the one that, with its dark weight, had kept him from the idea of getting on a ship to Israel and leaving with his friends to participate in the war for independence, he confessed to his son. The mark of that resigned behavior, which his grandparents and Kellerstein uncles and perhaps even his parents participated in, was impressed so deeply upon him that he had lost not only his faith in politics and in God but even in the spirit of men, and as such he preferred to remain at the margins of that delayed rebellion, hunkering down in his more comfortable self as a Cuban. Living with his choices and at ease at the margins of the tribe, in that corner where he had found freedom.

  * * *

  As could be expected, Polish Daniel’s dearest friends at the time were all Cuban and Catholic—in the unorthodox way practiced on the island. He was still very close to his old mate José Manuel Bermúdez, whom no one called Scatterbrain anymore, but rather Pepe Manuel. That boy had grown and become strong, while the saffron color of his hair was now limited to some highlights, and even his freckles had disappeared. His natural intelligence, all the more developed, had turned him into one of the best students at the Secondary Learning Institute and, because of his magnanimous character and his habitual loquaciousness, into one of the student leaders. Another of his friends was called Roberto Fariñas and was the black sheep of one of Havana’s bourgeois families, the coproprietors of a small rum factory and of apartments on the outskirts. Roberto had refused to study at a private school and, less still, with priests, whom he detested, and as such had enrolled at the public school where the least privileged went. Thanks to his unlimited budget, Roberto tended to be that friend who more often than not paid for ice creams, shakes, sandwiches, and burgers at the area’s eateries, especially at the sophisticated one that had just opened on the ground level of the new Payret Cinema building. Pepe Manuel’s girlfriend—Rita María Alcántara—and Roberto’s—Isabel Kindelán—had also become friends with Marta Arnáez, and the six young people had made up a sort of informal club, despite their differing origins, economic circumstances, and family relationships. They had more important things in common: their passion for dancing, their connoisseurship of baseball, their love for the sea, and the comfort that they didn’t keep too many secrets from each other—those clear waters on which true friendship floated. And, further down the road, they would also share an interest in, or at least (in Daniel’s case) politics or political sympathies.

  When Roberto Fariñas turned eighteen and could finally get his driver’s license, one of his older brothers put at his disposal a 1944 Studebaker, which became his friends’ daily wheels. With the permission of the girls’ families, they were able to start going to the beach at Guanabo and they even went to Varadero for the first time to see the superfine sand in that practically deserted haven. Of the three couples, only Roberto and Isabel had crossed the complicated border of premarital sexual relations. Pepe Manuel, who was so revolutionary in everything, ended up being conservative on that specific issue, while Daniel, although he was dying to take things to the next level (especially since Katerina’s decision to go live in the far-off neighborhood of La Lisa as the concubine of a black trucker), didn’t dare ask Marta, who years later confessed that, had he asked, she would have said yes, since she was seething with envy when she knew Roberto and Isabel were doing it. “Five years of courtship with no sex, how scandalous!” Marta would once tell her son Elias.

  Living in that pleasant universe of girlfriends, friends, schoolwork, outings, and work, to earn something of his own, Daniel Kaminsky made his way through life, distancing himself from his ancestors and their worries, to the point that he removed himself so much from whence he came from that one day he even believed he had forgotten that part of his identity existed. It was then that the head of a young Jew painted by Rembrandt crossed his path, determined to complicate his life and warn him that some things are hard to give up.

  * * *

  What had happened to his parents aboard the Saint Louis during the six days that the passenger ship had been berthed in Havana Bay? How badly did they dream of going on land thanks to the negotiations based on those few inches of canvas stained with oils three hundred years before? To whom had they given that painting? And how? From the moment that he again had the unexpected and moving certainty that the family relic had remained on the island ever since that bitter May week in 1939, those and other questions knocked around in his head so much and so violently that Daniel Kaminsky felt he was on the edge of delirium.

  When Daniel finished his studies at Havana’s Secondary Learning Institute, his future was already decided. While his in-laws agreed to support Marta in her stubbornness to study education at Havana’s Normal School, he would look for a more appropriate and better-paying job than that of cleaning crew at a pastry shop, and, at the same time, would enroll in courses at the business school to become an accountant. The plan included a wedding celebration, set for a year later, and an agreement with the gallego Arnáez that they could live in his own house until Daniel graduated and the couple was in a position to proclaim their independence. That whole project was being forged in a country where, again, they were living amid sharp tensions, ever since, in March of that year, 1952, General Fulgencio Batista brought soldiers out onto the streets and took power in order to prevent an election being held in which, with all certainty and despite the death of its leader—Eddy Chibás—the increasingly more numerous militants and sympathizers of the Cuban People’s Orthodox Party would have won, under its slogan and program of “Shame against money.”

  The military coup polarized Cuban society and a substantial majority of young students, including Pepe Manuel Bermúdez and Roberto Fariñas, Orthodox Par
ty militants for several years already, and Daniel himself, who sympathized with the party under the influence of his friends. Due to the charismatic attraction of its founder—the already deceased Eduardo Chibás—they believed in the dream of a political renewal in the country. The three friends, like so many Cubans, took Batista’s actions as an assault against a defective democracy, but still a democracy when all was said and done and which the Orthodox Party could have improved with important social changes and the full-on struggle against corruption that the deceased Chibás had championed with his promising program for a civic and political housecleaning.

  While Pepe Manuel and Roberto became more involved with the opposition movement, Daniel, as was his tendency in life, concentrated on himself. During the first two years of his studies to become an accountant, at the exact time set for his wedding, his life entered another phase. Thanks to his uncle Pepe the Purseman’s friendship with the increasingly powerful Jacob Brandon, now co-owner of the nascent and revolutionary supermarkets named Minimax, the young man had obtained a part-time job as a clerk in the very modern establishment opened in El Vedado, where he was also in charge of daily accounting and managing requests to the suppliers. Daniel was already earning thirty pesos per week, a more than worthy sum in a country where a pound of meat cost ten cents.

  That saving gesture by Uncle Joseph Kaminsky, who was in a position to receive favors from one of Cuba’s richest Jews, never ceased to be a mystery to Daniel. The young man wouldn’t understand the relationship uniting the furrier and the magnate until a few years later when, under very delicate circumstances, his uncle would again save him with a surprising gift. Pepe the Purseman, who until his revolutionary intervention in 1960 served as the cutter and maestro of Brandon’s leather workshop, had also turned into the maker of the special shoes that the businessman’s bunions required; into the crafter of belts that, like saddle straps, circled his belly; and into the designer of fine purses, luggage, cigar cases, and even gloves for trips to New York and Paris—always made with the best and most appropriate leathers for each item and the most exquisite cuts and seams, learned by Joseph years before from Bohemia’s artisans.

  Without a doubt—as his nephew thought and would say—Joseph Kaminsky must have been earning a salary with which any man could have left the increasingly dark rooming house at Compostela and Acosta and moved to an apartment or even a small stand-alone house in any Havana neighborhood. But Pepe the Purseman remained surrounded by Jews, hunkered down in the motley phalanstery and living as parsimoniously as always. Daniel thought he found the main reason for his uncle’s insistence on remaining in the tenement when he discovered that that fifty-something-year-old conservative Pole had found an outlet for his loneliness in la mulata Caridad Sotolongo, who some time before had become a tenant in that ruinous building. Thirty-something, a widowed concubine, and very shapely, Caridad was also the mother of Ricardo, a fairly mischievous young mulato for whom Uncle Joseph always showed a certain weakness, perhaps born from the boy’s innate capacity for inventing poetry and reciting it as if he were a machine.

  Caridad’s story was soon known by all of the neighbors. Her lover, a white man, Ricardito’s never legally recognized father, had been one of the revolutionaries from the 1930s who, frustrated and disappointed by the small political and economic gains obtained from his often violent struggles, strayed with some of his other mates toward the groups of gangsters who, with increasingly less political sheen, used the barrel of a gun for the political and economic rewards they said they deserved. That man had died in 1947 during a confrontation between gangsters and policemen who were no less gangsters, and, immediately, Caridad’s life, which had been comfortable to a degree, evaporated, since she had never been more than a gunman’s lover. She was thirty-six years old, nearly illiterate, but still very beautiful, and, together with Ricardo, who was seven years old at the time, they had to leave the little house in Palatino, where they couldn’t pay the rent, and ended up in the tenement at Compostela and Acosta, so that she could dedicate herself to the poorly remunerated job of washing and ironing for others.

  In contrast to the rest of those crammed into those quarters, Caridad was discreet and silent, for which she was quickly deemed a proud and haughty mulata, and even a capirra, as people in Havana called blacks and mulatos who preferred to marry whites. At some point, thanks to some favors they exchanged, a certain friendship grew between that woman and Joseph Kaminsky, who had just crossed the threshold of his fifties. Daniel had a flash of intuition of what was going on the day that Caridad brought them a clay pot of thick black beans—dormidos, as they called them in Cuba—redolent of cumin and bay leaf, those legumes that Joseph Kaminsky had never seen in his Polish days but that in his Cuban stay had become his favorite dish … and his nephew Daniel’s weakness. The look the Pole and la mulata exchanged at that instant was more revealing than a million words. Words that Uncle Pepe wouldn’t say to his nephew until years later. The words acknowledging Caridad’s existence and the feelings she had awoken in the furrier that so influenced Daniel Kaminsky’s fate.

  Thanks to his salary at Brandon and Company’s market, Daniel threw himself into the preparations for the wedding, which occurred in the summer of 1953 and ended up being much more magnificent than the young man could have afforded and even desired due to his natural discretion. But Marta’s parents, resigned at first and later taken with the young Polish man who was climbing the social and economic ladders, and content to see their only and dearest daughter’s exultant joy, spared no expense. The most difficult demand on Daniel came when it was time to discuss the type of ceremony they would have. For his betrothed’s parents, it was practically a matter of honor that the marriage, after being notarized, would take place before God and be consecrated in a Catholic church. Daniel invested weeks in discussing the options with Marta, coming from a position that seemed fair and clear to him: since he himself was not capable of asking her to marry before a rabbi, she shouldn’t demand that he should do so before a priest. His reason was simple: he didn’t believe in the rabbi of his ancestors or in the Catholic parish priest. It wasn’t that hard to convince Marta, since the young woman could do without the religious ceremony, although she found its pomp and circumstance attractive—among her reasons was the fact that even Pepe Manuel Bermúdez himself, who was turning more red by the minute, as everyone remarked, had agreed to marry Rita María in the falsely Gothic church on Calle Reina, to the beat of a wedding march composed by a German Jew … Marta understood her groom’s reasons. The ones who wouldn’t understand were Manolo Arnáez and Adela Martínez, without whose support the marriage could not happen, or would happen under different circumstances, she said to him.

  Daniel Kaminsky thought a lot about his options. The easiest and simultaneously most complicated would be to take Marta, get married before a notary, and forget about the Arnáezes. For someone who had lived in an old Havana tenement for so many years without ever being able to fully satiate his appetite and with just a couple of cheap shirts to his name, that to-do with ball gowns and crowded parties seemed optional and unnecessary. But it seemed cruel to the girl, and even to her parents, to deny them the dream with which they crowned a climactic moment in their socially successful lives. The most difficult, though simultaneously perhaps less disruptive, of his options was to accept the formality of a required Catholic baptism and a marriage officiated by a priest, since neither of the two acts held any meaning for him. Many practicing and believing Jews throughout the centuries had had to accept Catholic sacraments in varying life circumstances, even while knowing they would never be able to later save themselves from selling out like that, since their God ordered them to die venerating His name. Why had it always been so complicated to be a Jew? He had asked himself this many times before sitting down to discuss this excruciating conflict with his uncle Pepe the Purseman. Around that time, as if in anticipation of what would happen soon after, Daniel thought several times of the portrait of t
he young Jew who looked like the image of the Catholic Christ under whose watch he had lived out his earliest years, without it meaning—for him or for his parents—anything more than that: a beautiful portrait of a young Jew with his gaze lost somewhere on some corner of the painting.

  As he would always remember, for weeks Daniel put off the time to have the conversation that he imagined would be the thorniest one of his life, since it implied not only a break with his origins and the religion of his ancestors, but also because it might gain the understanding of or cause the most heartbreaking disgust of the good man who—without expressing his affection with a single gesture or word—had allowed him to have a worthy life in its poverty and served as the steady support from which Daniel Kaminsky would soon obtain the benefits of economic mobility and even of social respectability. For many years before, Uncle Pepe would talk to him, for as long as he could and always in passing, about some of the young Jewish girls in the neighborhood, trying expressly to push the boy’s interest, although with the greatest discretion, toward a woman of his own background, to perpetuate with a union of that kind what they themselves were and what their children should be for many more centuries.

  “You know I am an atheist, Uncle Joseph,” the conversation began. Daniel had preferred to hold the dialogue in Spanish, since he was no longer confident in the depth of his Polish nor of his Yiddish for matters of great subtlety. Since the spring afternoon was brisk, thanks to a dense covering of clouds, he had chosen to speak to his uncle on the section of the rooftop of that crumbling little palace where he had lived since the day in 1938 when he had ended up in Havana and felt alarmed by the ruckus that he hadn’t noticed now for a long time.