Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  Shortly before they arrived at their planned destination, Daniel, from behind the steering wheel, looked at his old and dear friend through the rearview mirror. “Pepe Manuel,” he said to him at last, overcoming all of his fear, “I need your gun.” The young man’s words resounded inside the car and took all the attention of the other three, forgotten at that moment by the other worries. Daniel insisted, “Do you have it with you?”

  “Of course not, polaco, I’m not crazy.”

  “To whom did you give it?”

  Pepe Manuel looked at Roberto, and Daniel didn’t need an answer.

  Daniel stopped the car at the intersection of Prado and Neptuno, Havana’s busiest corner, and where everyone assumed a man would easily disappear into the masses. Inside the car, over the seats, Pepe Manuel hugged his friends and reiterated his thanks for their loyalty. Then he turned to kiss Olguita’s lips, perhaps too shyly because of the others’ presence. Then he put on his translucent tortoiseshell glasses, squeezed Daniel’s shoulder, and said, “Don’t do anything crazy, polaco.”

  Dressed in a light gray suit, with a small piece of hand luggage, the man with a mustache and glasses who had turned into the ruddy Scatterbrain got out of the car and, without turning around, crossed Prado toward the taxi stand in Parque Central. From the Chevy, Olguita, Roberto, and Daniel saw him get into one of those black and orange cars, which immediately went down Prado toward the sea. Although the three knew how uncertain that journey would be, they trusted in the passport’s quality and in Pepe Manuel’s stoicism as the pillars of his success in overcoming that difficulty. As such, despite the existing risks, none of them was capable of imagining at that moment that they were seeing Pepe Manuel Bermúdez for the last time—the best of men whom, in their long lives, the believer Roberto Fariñas and the disbeliever Daniel Kaminsky had met and would ever meet.

  * * *

  That day in the month of February 1958 on which he said goodbye to José Manuel Bermúdez, Daniel Kaminsky began to live another of the phases of his life that he would have liked to erase from his persistent memory. But it was not one of the recollections that easily fade away. To make it worse, he didn’t know nor would he learn how to fix it save for letting time pass and allowing for the arrival of new concerns that would suddenly take precedence over the evocations and seek to placate them but never serve as a definitive cure. If at another time, the drastic and complicated decision to forcefully remove Judaism from his soul had offered him a strategy to distance himself from a story that was too piercing and, simultaneously, allowed him to feel as if he were reaching a strange but palpable feeling of freedom that facilitated the act of breathing and looking at the sky and seeing clouds and stars as clouds and stars, certain that beyond them was only infinity, from the moment that he said goodbye to his friend, Daniel Kaminsky wed himself to something that he never thought he would possess and which would turn out to be like an indelible stain. The new determination didn’t come from anyone else or many other people’s actions but from his own sovereign will. Because at that moment, he confirmed to himself his decision to kill a man who had robbed him of what he held most dear in his life. He had to kill, no, in reality, he wanted to kill that man.

  At twenty-seven years of age, that young man who was born Polish and Jewish, a convert to Catholicism, essentially and legally Cuban, already had a traumatic connection with death. But the concrete faces having to do with that wound were only the more pleasant ones: those of his parents and his sister, those of his grandparents and his Kellerstein aunts and uncles, that of Monsieur Sarusky, his first piano teacher over in Kraków, and of the maestro’s beautiful wife, Madame Ruth, with whom Daniel fell in love to the point of feeling his child’s heart bursting. All were devoured by the Holocaust. The killers, by contrast, tended to be shapeless shadows, demon-like specters, for whom it wasn’t even worth trying to put a face to one of the Nazi leaders, guilty in the first degree of his losses. Because, in the images brought up by his consciousness, and even by his subconscious, it was impossible for him to connect the known features of the major ones responsible for the massacre with the face of the actual man devoted to threatening, beating, spitting at, and dishonoring the Jews, enjoying his great power to cause fear: the man without specific features who, too many times in his evocations, was pulling the trigger of a gun at the back of his head. But now, to fuel his abomination and pains, he had been handed a real face, a flesh-and-blood look, the petty smile of an individual as he took two twenty-dollar bills after having pocketed ten thousand. He also had, besides and above all, the image of his own face as he fired two, three bullets at the man’s chest, at his head. Didn’t the gangsters in the movies say that lead in the stomach caused a longer and more painful death? All of that represented a new and unexpected connection to violence, vigilante justice, and death for which he had never been prepared, for which, he believed, he hadn’t been born. It constituted a drastic application of the barbarous law of an eye for an eye dictated by that same ruthless God who demanded from Abraham the atrocious sacrifice of his son and later decreed from the heavens, “Then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” “Life for life,” Daniel would repeat.

  That night, when he showed up at Roberto Fariñas’s house, his friend tried to bring him back down to earth. For a few years already, Roberto had known some parts of the story of the Sephardic legacy and, after having witnessed the discovery of the Rembrandt painting at Mejías’s house, it was easy for him to make the mental connections allowing him to imagine Daniel Kaminsky’s purpose. First of all, Fariñas reasoned, the mere fact of walking around Havana with a gun on him could guarantee the Pole a ticket to a police station cell. And if that happened, the fact that he was Tomás Sanabria’s neighbor would put him on the pillory: if they thought—and they would think it—that he was armed because he was going to try to hurt that dictatorship official, and if they connected him with José Manuel Bermúdez—and they would connect him—he wouldn’t escape with his life. But even if they didn’t make any of those connections, given the times in which they were living, he would surely endure the violent and even cowardly reactions of some policemen who were becoming increasingly bloodthirsty, perhaps because they already foresaw the proximity of the end of their reign of terror and the possible revenge that would follow. Last of all, Roberto didn’t know anyone more ill-prepared than Daniel Kaminsky to confront a shark like Román Mejías, and, besides, to charge him what was due (Roberto chose to use the euphemism). But the Pole was determined. It had to do with a mandate that was stronger than his own powers of reason, he said, with a deep call for primary justice that had come in search of him and had found him when he least expected it, to place him before the proof that sometimes the guilty, faceless or not, had to pay, he had said that night, according to what he told Elias, years later. Because, Daniel thought, and he would tell his son this as well, at that moment he was only capable of feeling how in his deepest soul, the gears were moving of a walled-up primitive origin, that of the unrepentant Jew rebelling against submission—the desert nomad, vengeful, immune to containment—and less still to the absurd claim to turn the other cheek, a principle that his millennial line was unaware of. No, not for something like that: Daniel felt closer to the Jewess Judith, dagger in hand, ruthlessly slitting Holofernes’s throat. And Román Mejías had turned into his Holofernes.

  Daniel Kaminsky had an exact idea of the challenge he was facing when that same night he returned to his Santos Suárez house with Pepe Manuel’s Smith & Wesson .45 hidden under the driver’s seat of his Chevy. When he got close to the angle where he had to turn to go to his house, he saw two patrol cars instead of the lone, although habitual, official car stopped in front of the police chief’s mansion, and Daniel almost lost control of his vehicle. His muscles had gone stiff with fear and the only thing that saved him from a barrage of machine-gun shots was that the sergeant
in command of the group of guards that day recognized his car and identified him as Tomás Sanabria’s neighbor, preventing the soldier from carrying out his intention. “Careful with the Bacardi,” the sergeant yelled at him, and, from the steering wheel Daniel made a gesture that tried to make him seem apologetic.

  The fear that invaded him was something so petty and visceral that, as soon as he entered his house, Daniel had to run to the bathroom with diarrhea. As he recovered and wiped off the sweat drenching him, he thought about when would be the best time to tell his wife about the decision he had made and didn’t find any that seemed propitious. That was his problem and he had to resolve it on his own. What about the consequences? Couldn’t his acts lead to tragedy that could even affect Marta? He understood that he didn’t have the right to make his wife face that possibility without even giving her the slightest reason, and at last he thought he found an answer.

  While he drank his café con leche in the morning, in which he dipped strips of crispy bread smeared with butter, he dared to tell his wife what he had thought to tell her. Marta Arnáez knew the story of the painting and what that piece had meant as the dream of salvation of her husband’s parents and sister during the Saint Louis’s stay in Havana. Because of that, Daniel found it easier to only tell her that he had discovered that the painting hadn’t returned to Europe with his parents; it had been in Havana since then. And now he knew whose hands it was in. In reality, he thought it would be complicated, he said, but he was going to do whatever he could to recover it, since it belonged to his family who was massacred by the most perverse hate. Marta, stunned by the news, asked the questions she couldn’t keep from asking, but he barely responded, asking her not to worry. Although it was going to be complicated, as he had already told her, it wouldn’t be anything dangerous, he lied. He took great care, of course, not to mention where he had seen the painting and less still the name of the person who had it. Nonetheless, the woman insisted, moved by a hunch and by her knowledge of the existing environment, “Daniel, for God’s sake, be careful. We have a good life, it’s getting better all the time … We don’t need that painting to be happier … Why don’t you forget about that darned piece?”

  “It’s not because of the money we could get from the painting, Marta. If I had it, I could never sell it, because it belongs more to my uncle Joseph than to me. It’s for justice, only for justice,” he said, and the woman didn’t need to hear another word: from that moment on, she knew what her husband was thinking about doing. And she prayed to her God to dissuade him with His powers. Or at least protect him.

  * * *

  Daniel tried to prepare a plan. “That’s what you usually do, isn’t it?” his father would always ask Elias at this point as he retold the story of the hurricane that would change the Kaminskys’ lives.

  Ever since his father became a participant in that story, Elias Kaminsky would ask himself if in reality their fates would or would not have been different had the reunion between his father and the painting of the young Dutch Sephardic Jew not occurred. Because the concrete fact that Marta and Daniel left for the United States in April of 1958 was perhaps just an acceleration of what was going to happen anyway. One way or another, it was the path marked for his family: since eight out of every ten Jews living in Cuba ended up leaving the island in 1959 or 1960, or, like his Galician in-laws and many of the members of the middle class, would do so in 1961, when they became convinced that their interests and way of life were not only in danger but sentenced to death. Or would Daniel the nonbeliever have stayed in Havana like his uncle Joseph Kaminsky, a believer in his God who was, at the same time, sympathetic to the concepts of Jewish socialism? Or, like his friend Roberto, would he have handed himself over to revolutionary work with the task of building the new society they had dreamed of since the days in which they listened to steamrolling Eddy Chibás’s radio speeches and public talks? Given his father’s aspirations to economic prosperity, those possibilities seemed less probable to Elias.

  After the clumsy, frightening, and brief surveillance that they conducted on Román Mejías, Daniel Kaminsky decided that the best occasion to carry out his purpose was to wait for him very early in the morning in front of his home and approach him just as he was leaving the house to enter his car, always sitting in the carport, since it was within the closed garage that his wife’s brilliant Aston Martin—probably acquired on the basis of fake passports—usually rested. In the house lived, besides Mejías and his wife, his two daughters—still unwed—and the maid. His sister, who had been left disabled by a car accident that killed her husband, lived in El Vedado with her three children—two daughters and a son—and although she visited frequently, she never spent the night at Mejías’s house.

  The young man felt ready to act when he was able to picture his actions as if he were watching a movie screen. Mejías, with his inveterate cynic’s face, his briefcase in one hand and the car keys in the other, was opening the door. The streetlights would have just recently shut off, but the March sun still wouldn’t be up. Besides the maid and Mejías himself, the rest of the house’s residents would still be sleeping. Daniel, after stopping his car a block away, would be waiting for him from behind a flamboyant tree planted in the flower bed of the house across the street. Then he would cross the avenue, protected by the half-light, just as he saw, through the frosted glass of the door, the man’s figure, sheathed in his dark suit, ready to leave. Seconds later, Mejías would be outside the house, with the door still ajar, and he would open the gate, about twenty feet from him. Silently, he would approach Mejías, who, upon seeing him, and, in all probability, recognizing him, would wait for him by the door, thinking that he was seeking him out on some new matter. Daniel would walk toward him and, when only a few feet separated them, would remove his gun and perhaps tell him the reason for his visit. At that moment he would fire (he still had his doubts about where to aim, wanting him to suffer and at the same time to be efficient in his goal, without giving that vermin any chances), and lifting the handkerchief tied around his neck over his face, he would enter the house, stepping over the corpse, take the painting, and run back out, without any risk of being recognized by the maid if she happened to be in the living room, alarmed by the shots. At that early hour—6:45—in that residential and sparsely populated neighborhood, there wouldn’t be anyone on the street. In any event, to avoid the possibility of being recognized, upon leaving the house he would lower the handkerchief but would pull his Marianao baseball cap down to his eyebrows. If he needed to run, he would run, get into his car, and immediately escape. In case things got too complicated, he would take his passport with him, since he could always take the picture out of its frame and hide it. He would buy a plane ticket and leave on the first flight headed anywhere: Miami, Caracas, Mexico City, Madrid, Panama City … The natural end to that movie hastily and unskillfully put together had him watching himself sitting on the plane at the moment at which, in flight already, he left the island of Cuba and started to float over the sea toward freedom and peace of mind.

  * * *

  Eight days after having received his friend Pepe Manuel’s gun, Daniel Kaminsky left his bed at 4:06 in the morning and turned off his alarm clock, programmed to go off an hour later. It was March 16, 1958. As he had imagined, he had barely been able to sleep, feeling the stress of tension, anxiety, and fear. He left the bed trying to not wake Marta and went to the kitchen to make himself coffee. The early morning was brisk, although not cold, and he went out to the house’s small yard to have his hot beverage and to wait.

  Forty minutes later, well ahead of the planned time, he started to get dressed, trying not to forget any detail. He had bought a pair of blue jean overalls, with a shirt made of the same material and color. Behind the bib, he placed the gun and again tested whether he could remove it easily enough. With those clothes, he was trying to look like a painter or mechanic, just with brand-new clothes. He made more coffee and went back to the yard, where he closed his ey
es to watch for the umpteenth time that movie he put together in his head, and he didn’t feel like he needed to correct anything, only change the end: he couldn’t escape on a plane, saving his life, and leave Marta behind at the mercy of any repercussions. He should face, with all of its consequences, the act he was going to carry out and, if necessary and possible, escape, but taking his wife with him.

  At six on the dot, as he had planned, he peeked into the room and looked for a few minutes at the young woman who was sleeping. Despite his goal, not for a single instant did he consider the possibility that he was perhaps seeing her for the last time. Nor did he ponder what his life could be after the execution of the infamous Mejías. He took the paper bag in which he had a suit, a tie, and a white shirt, his work clothes for the Minimax, and went out to the street to get into the Chevy.

  He drove carefully, respecting all lights and signals. At 6:32, he turned off the car, which he had parked on the nearly deserted Quinta D, about five hundred feet from Mejías’s house. He had eight minutes to get to Séptima Avenida and take up his post behind the flamboyant tree. Then everything had to happen in just ten minutes. At that moment, skipping over the most complicated part of his actions, he didn’t focus on anything but getting back to the car with the painting. From there the script had several variants that, in many cases, didn’t depend on him. But he always got to the Chevy with the Rembrandt in his hands after having brought to justice the son of a bitch who had conned his family and sentenced them to return to Europe and die, in any of the horrible ways in which they must have died: starved, afraid, heads full of lice, eyes cloudy with gunk, and legs smeared in shit. “He will pay life for life,” he repeated to himself, to give himself more reasons, and for the first time in years he invoked the Sacred. “The Lord is my strength,” he whispered.