Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  Elias Kaminsky had listened to the doctor with his gaze fixed on the porch’s ceramics, worn by the rain and sun. The definitive confirmation of his father’s innocence came with the clamor of that epiphany that revealed the capacity for sacrifice of a man who, out of love and duty, had turned into a ruthless killer and condemned himself with complete consciousness and of his own volition. Mario Conde, observing the attitudes of those two beings from different worlds, interconnected through the infinite kindness of Pepe the Purseman, decided to risk being impertinent enough to try to reach the remaining far corner of an exemplary story.

  “Doctor,” he said, pausing and then jumping in, “your mother, Caridad, did she ever talk about the painting that Mejías had conned out of Joseph’s brother?”

  Ricardo Kaminsky nodded but remained silent for a few seconds.

  “Pipo Pepe took it out of Mejías’s house. It was in a frame and, with the same fixed-blade knife he had used to kill the man, he cut out the canvas and put it inside his shirt. Since at that moment he was the owner of that work, and since that work was the only thing that could connect the Kaminskys to Mejías, he decided that he didn’t want it and burned it in the yard. He didn’t care that that painting could be worth a lot of money. He didn’t want the money that, when it could have done so, had done nothing to save his family … My mother didn’t dare tell him that burning something so valuable was crazy, because it was his property and his decision, and she thought she should show respect. She knew that through that act, Pipo Pepe was giving his soul some peace…”

  As Ricardo Kaminsky was explaining the extreme actions of his adoptive father, Elias had started lifting up his head, and then, compulsively pulling at his ponytail. He turned his gaze toward Conde. The former policeman, meanwhile, felt his heart speeding up with the doctor’s revelation.

  “So he burned the Rembrandt painting?”

  “Yes, that’s what my mother told me.”

  “Knowing that it was a Rembrandt and that it was worth a lot?”

  “It was a Rembrandt and it was worth a lot,” the doctor confirmed, incapable of understanding the ins and outs of those questions or thinking that his present interrogator was experiencing a cerebral cortex spasm caused by a serious urinary tract infection.

  “How did he know?” Conde insisted.

  “He knew it because he knew it, I’m telling you! It was a portrait of a Jew who looked like Christ. He had seen it many times at his house, in Kraków.”

  “And of course, before he burned it, he didn’t show it to any expert?”

  Ricardo Kaminsky felt the effects of the panic overtaking Conde.

  “Of course not. I don’t know. How would he … But, what’s going on?”

  Conde looked at Elias Kaminsky and the painter understood that it was up to him to explain.

  “Well, that original Rembrandt is now in London and they want to sell it. It has been proven and authenticated, of course … Uncle Joseph thought he took the original and that he had burned it, but it was a copy.”

  Ricardo was shaking his head, having reached the limits of his capacity for understanding and surprise.

  “The terrible thing is,” Elias continued, “my uncle thought he was destroying the original, a painting that was worth a lot of money that he didn’t mind losing. He only wanted to protect his family.”

  * * *

  The beer and the wine that Elias Kaminsky brought contributed greatly to softening the formality of his Cuban relatives, all crammed around the dining room table of the Luyanó house. To the painter’s surprise, the dishes they served were Cubanized re-creations of old Jewish and Polish recipes, although they included the indispensable black beans that all of the Kaminskys gathered there, by blood or by name, considered their favorite dish.

  In one corner of the dining room, solid though lackluster, still hummed the Frigidaire that Daniel and Marta had given Joseph Kaminsky in 1955 when he rented the house. Alongside the appliance was the glass cabinet where they kept the plates and elegant Bohemian crystal glasses that were a gift from Brandon the magnate. Over that piece of furniture, Elias found a wooden cross and the menorah, the eight-armed candelabra brought from Kraków by Joseph Kaminsky and with which, according to his father, their uncle celebrated Hanukkah every year, lighting one candle each evening in memory of the Maccabean victory at the Temple. While regarding that candelabra and crucifix, Conde listened to the conversation and learned that, through his dialogues with his grandfather, Elias’s son Samuel had decided to become Jewish through the ceremony of ritual circumcision and the celebration of his bar mitzvah at a New York synagogue. A return to the flock carried out by his own free will by the grandson of a man who, persuaded by blows, had never again believed in the existence of God. Any god.

  “So what do you have to do to become Jewish?” Yadine—her name was Yadine—wanted to know. Apparently, she was intrigued by differences.

  “That’s very complicated, leave that alone,” her grandfather interjected.

  “What about being a private detective in Cuba?” the young goth kept asking as she looked at Conde.

  “That’s harder than becoming Jewish,” her target replied and the others, with the exception of Yadine, laughed at his response, making Conde clarify, “I’m not a detective. I was a policeman … Now I am nothing.”

  The goodbyes, around midnight, after all of those hours of increasingly relaxed company, had been happy and emotional, with promises to keep in touch and even Elias’s promise to return to the island with his children, Samuel and Esther, so they could meet their Cuban relatives and all go to enjoy a baseball game together at the Havana stadium where many years before Orestes Miñoso had shone so brightly.

  In the painter’s rental car, as they traveled toward Tamara’s house, Elias Kaminsky relayed his decision to Conde to return to the United States the following day.

  “I’m going to hire some lawyers to do whatever is necessary to recover the Rembrandt painting. Now I am determined: I can’t allow those people to get rich off that painting. People who fucked up the lives of my family…”

  “So if you get it back, are you going to donate it to the Jewish Museum or any of the others that you told me about?”

  “Of course. Now more than ever,” Elias said, emphatic, seemingly wound up by everything he had had to drink.

  “That seems beautiful … even glorious and worthy of your family name. But can I say something?”

  With one hand, Elias removed a Camel from the pack he carried in the pocket of his Guess button-down shirt. How many packs of cigarettes fit in that damned pocket? Was it the same shirt he’d worn on the first day or did he have several that were alike? He looked for his lighter and lit it up. The smoke went out the open window into the steamy night.

  “Well, tell me,” he said at last.

  “Who was it who said that when someone experiences misfortune, he should pray, as if help can only come from divine providence; but at the same time, should act as if only he himself can find the solution?”

  “Uncle Joseph used to say that to my father…”

  “Uncle Joseph, the most Jewish of all of you, was a damned pragmatist! Elias, doesn’t it seem like that noble, symbolic act of donating the painting is what we in Cuba would call a great old comedera de mierda? In that museum it would do well and would keep alive the memory of a Jewish family massacred in the Holocaust. But come on, man, what about the living? Can you imagine what the lives of those people we just saw would be like with just a fraction of that money? Yes, you can imagine … but … May I continue?”

  “Go on, go on,” the other man said as he drove with his gaze fixed on the road.

  “That painting belongs to Ricardo Kaminsky as much as to you. Legally, he is the son of Joseph Kaminsky. What’s more, in fact, I think it belongs to him more than to you, although it would never occur to him to ask you for anything, because he is a decent man and because the gratitude he feels for you wouldn’t allow him to … But do yo
u think that because you are a natural-born Kaminsky you’re the only one who can decide? After what you heard today, would you have the balls to be so egotistical?”

  Elias threw the half-smoked cigarette out to the street. He shook his head defiantly.

  “Does everyone in this country have to beat up on me?”

  “Maybe that was your destiny … To come back here and leave all beaten up, but more intact.”

  “Yes … And Ricardito’s destiny is being more of a moron, as you say, than Uncle Joseph. Do you think he would accept money from the painting if he wouldn’t even accept the two hundred dollars I offered him?”

  “The thing is, there’s a big difference between charity and having a right to something. All Ricardo Kaminsky has is his dignity and his pride.”

  “So you think…?”

  “I already told you what I think. The rest, and what really matters, is what you think.”

  * * *

  On the hotel terrace, they ordered two coffees and aged rum to toast their goodbyes. Mario Conde, who had spent so many days immersed in those tangled-up stories, full of the guilt and atonement of a Jewish family, was already starting to feel how finding the truth was only good for putting six hundred dollars in his pocket and a void in his soul.

  “I brought this letter,” he told Elias Kaminsky, and held out the envelope. “It’s for Andrés.”

  “You don’t write to him via e-mail?”

  “What’s that?” Conde asked. Elias smiled at his supposed joke, which, in fact, it was not. Definitively, Elias Kaminsky was still a foreigner.

  “I’ll take it to him as soon as I get there … Besides, I have to thank him for his help, for your help.”

  “I didn’t do anything. Just listened to you and helped you get things straight in your mind. Incidentally, I know almost everything about you, but not the most important thing.”

  “The most important thing?”

  “Yes. You haven’t told me about your own painting. What the hell is it that you paint? Don’t tell me it’s like Rembrandt…”

  Elias Kaminsky smiled.

  “No … I paint urban landscapes. Buildings, streets, walls, stairs, corners … Always without any human figures. They’re like cities after a total holocaust.”

  “You don’t paint people because it’s forbidden by Jewish Law?”

  “No, no, that doesn’t matter much to anyone anymore … What I wanted was to represent the solitude of the contemporary world. In reality, there are people in those landscapes, but they’re invisible; they’ve become invisible. The city itself has swallowed them up, has taken away their individuality and even their corporeal nature. The city is the jail of the modern individual, isn’t it?”

  Conde nodded as he tasted his rum.

  “So where do the invisible people find freedom?”

  “Inside themselves. In that place you can’t see but that exists. In each one’s soul.”

  “Interesting,” Conde said, intrigued but not persuaded. Sparked by that conversation, a concern he had put off then came to mind. “What about the Sephardic Jew who was going around Poland saying he was a painter. Do you know what he painted? What in the hell was he doing in Poland when they were killing Jews there?”

  “No idea … I don’t even know his name. But … do you read French?”

  “I read a lot when I was in Paris. I always had breakfast at the Café de Flore, bought Le Figaro, swam in the Seine, and went everywhere with Sartre and Camus, one arm around each of them…”

  “Go to hell,” Elias said when he realized the nonsense the other man was telling him. “Well, there’s a book written in Hebrew but translated into French called Le fond de l’abîme. It’s the memoir of a rabbi, a certain Hannover, who witnessed the massacres of Jews in Poland between 1648 and 1653 … Earth-shattering, as you say here. If you read it, you can guess where that Sephardic Jew lost in Poland ended up. I’ll send you the book…”

  “And what did the Sephardic Jew paint?”

  “If he really studied with Rembrandt and left Moshe Kaminsky a portrait of a Jewish girl, I can imagine what he painted and how he painted it.”

  “Let’s see…”

  “Rembrandt was magnetic,” Elias began. “And a bit of a dictator with his students. He forced them to paint according to his ideas, which sometimes seemed quite clear, but other times were rough, according to what you see in his work. Rembrandt was a seeker; he spent his life searching, until the end, when he was in the fuácata and dared to paint the eyeless men of The Conspiracy of the Batavians Under Claudius Civilis … What he did have quite clear was the relationship between human beings and their representation in a painting. He saw it as a dialogue between the artist, the subject, and the model. And also as the capture of a moment that was already fleeing into the past and demanded to be fixed in the present. The power of his portraits resides in their eyes, in their gaze. But sometimes, it went beyond that … and he even came to paint them without eyes, and that made the painting even more powerful. But the gaze is what makes that study of the portrait of a young Jew—who was perhaps his student—stand out. That small piece of canvas is a masterpiece. Beyond the eyes, in that portrait—just like in that of his friend Jan Six and in some self-portraits—Rembrandt was searching for the man’s soul, the permanent thing, and he found it … Perhaps that is what that heretical Jew learned from his master and tried to do with his own painting … In my opinion.”

  “By painting, he was a heretic?” Conde wanted to clarify.

  “Yes, that man violated a rigid law of the time … Although, perhaps, like my uncle, he died without feeling remorse. No one can force you to paint. So if he did so, it’s clear that he was acting of his own free will. And he had done so at Rembrandt’s side, no less. Or so I imagine…”

  Conde nodded, drank his coffee, and lit his cigarette.

  “That Jew could have been condemned for painting people. While you, who are, practically speaking, not Jewish and could give a shit about being condemned, are not interested in painting people. That’s really crazy…”

  “No one knows why he is a painter or why he isn’t. Nor why you end up painting in one way and not another, no matter how much you try to explain the matter … My mother liked my painting. My father didn’t. For him, people were always the most important thing.”

  “Your father was one of my kind. People, noise, friends, baseball, black beans, women with flutes or saxophones…”

  “You’re not Jewish, are you?” Elias smiled.

  “Maybe … And my Jewish spirit asks you, What are you going to do, finally, if you recover the painting?”

  Elias Kaminsky looking into the eyes of the seller of old books. He raised his drink and emptied it in one go.

  “There’s still a ways to go to get to that point. But I promise you something: whatever I do, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “Good,” Conde said. “Here’s hoping you don’t do something idiotic…”

  * * *

  The idea had been circling Skinny Carlos for days; he was just waiting for the right time to focus on making it happen. When he found out that Conde had finished his Jewish job, wanting to be brought up to speed on the search’s most recent turn of events, he channeled his skills as an organizer and, at five in the afternoon, the friends were arriving at the beach of Santa María del Mar in Yoyi the Pigeon’s spacious Chevrolet Bel Air and in the car rented by Dulcita, Skinny’s long-ago ex-girlfriend, who had just arrived from Miami.

  For Carlos, the act of spending the afternoon’s final hours facing the sea on that beach, where one could watch a spectacular sinking of the sun into the marine horizon, represented much more than caprice or desire: it was a way of communicating with the young man he had once been, the man with two useful legs, like the majority of men, capable of playing squash on the nearby courts, of running on the sand, of swimming in the sea. That is why all of his friends agreed to his proposal and threw themselves into the afternoon at the beach, afte
r having made the indispensable collection of necessary beverages.

  The September sun was still beating down when they arrived. Between Conde, Rabbit, Candito, and Yoyi, they carried the now-obese Skinny on his obligatory throne to the edge of the sea, where they arrived faint and sweaty. Tamara and Dulcita took care of transporting the drinks placed in plastic thermoses, then laid out some sheets on the sand.

  While Conde relayed the grand conclusions of his search, the sun began the final phase of its daily descent and the few other people still on the beach made their departures, giving the friends exclusive use of the area. In the solitude of that place, and caught up in a story of death and love, once again that feeling of time stopping (even being inverted) took over the tribe’s spirit. Those gatherings of the fundamentalist followers of friendship, nostalgia, and complicity had the beneficial effect of erasing the pains, losses, and frustrations of the present and relegating them to the impregnable territory of their most emotional and beloved memories.

  The alcohol was fulfilling its mission of catalyzing the process. To Conde’s frustration, neither Dulcita, with her conscience befitting an American driver; nor Yoyi, who knew he was the owner of a diamond on wheels; nor Candito, because of his dealings with the great beyond; nor Tamara, who wasn’t up to facing those nearly Haitian rums, allowed themselves to be carried away by the ethylic temptation, to which Conde, Skinny, and Rabbit had submitted with abandon, until they reached the perfect state: that of enjoying talking shit. As was inevitable that afternoon, the subject came to the possibilities that would open up for them if they owned and sold a Rembrandt painting. Worth how much? Two million?