"Erasmo Aleman," he introduced himself. "You're Sergei's friend?"
"Yes."
"I've been waiting for you."
Erasmo pushed his cart with wooden blocks edged in tire tread to maneuver around his garage at full speed, washing at a cut-down sink, wiping his hands at a barrel of rags. The radio was down to half throat.
"I saw a policewoman take you upstairs a couple of nights ago. You look... different."
"Someone tried to teach me baseball."
"It's not your sport." Erasmo's eyes went from the bruise on Arkady's cheek to the Band-Aid on his head.
"Is this Sergei?" Arkady produced the snapshot of Pribluda with the Yacht Club.
"Yes."
"And?" Arkady pointed to the black fisherman.
"Mongo," Erasmo said, as if it were self-evident.
"And you."
Erasmo admired the picture. "I look very handsome."
"The Havana Yacht Club," Arkady read the back.
"It was a joke. If we'd had a sailboat we would have called ourselves a navy. Anyway, I heard about the body they found across the bay. Frankly, I don't think it's Sergei. He's too pigheaded and tough. I haven't seen him for weeks, but he could come back tomorrow with some story about driving into a pothole. There are potholes in Cuba you can see from the moon."
"Do you know where his car is?"
"No, but if it were around here I'd recognize it."
Erasmo explained that diplomatic license plates were black on white and Pribluda's was 060 016; 060 for the Russian embassy and 016 for Pribluda's rank. Cuban plates were tan for state-owned cars, red for privately owned.
"Let me put it this way," Erasmo said, "there are state-owned cars that will never move so that private cars can run. A Lada arrives here like a medical donor so that Willy's Jeeps will never die. Excuse me." He turned down a salsa that threatened to get out of hand.
"The reason for the radio is so the police can say they don't hear me, because you're really not supposed to make a garage out of your apartment. Anyway, Tico likes it loud."
Arkady thought he understood Erasmo, the type of engineer who labors happily below the deck of a sinking ship, lubricating the pistons, pumping out the water, somehow keeping the vessel moving while it settles in the waves.
"Your neighbors don't complain about the noise?"
"There's Sergei and a dancer in this building, both out all the time. On one side is a private restaurant, they don't want the police visiting because it costs them a free dinner at the least. On the other side lives a santero and the police certainly don't want to bother him. His apartment is like a nuclear missile silo of African spirits."
"A santero?"
"As in Santeria."
"He's a friend?"
"On this island a santero is a good friend to have."
Arkady studied the picture of the Havana Yacht Club. There still was some message in it that he didn't understand. If he was going to be beaten over the head he wanted to know why.
"Who took the picture?"
"Someone passing by. You know," Erasmo said, "the first time I met Sergei, Mongo and I saw him standing next to his car on the side of the road, smoke pouring from the hood. Nobody stops for anyone with Russian plates, but I have a weak spot for old comrades, no? Pues, we repaired the car, only a matter of a new clamp on a hose, and as we talked I discovered how little of Cuba this man had seen. Cane fields, tractors, combines, yes. But no music, no dancing, no fun. He was like the walking dead. Frankly, I thought I'd never see him again. The very next day, though, I was on
First Avenue
in Miramar and I was fishing with a kite."
"With a kite?"
"A most beautiful way to fish. And I became aware that this Russian, this human bear from the day before, was standing on the sidewalk and watching. So I showed him how. I have to tell you that we never saw Russians alone, they always moved in groups, watching each other. Sergei was different. In our conversation he mentioned how much he wanted a place on the Malecón. I had the rooms upstairs I certainly wasn't using and one thing led to another." For a disabled man, Erasmo was constantly in motion. He rolled backward to a refrigerator and returned with two cold beers. " '51 Kelvinator, the Cadillac of refrigerators."
"Thanks."
"To Sergei," Erasmo proposed. They drank and his eyes tabulated the damage on Arkady, "That must have been a long flight of stairs. Nice coat. A little warm, no?"
"It's January in Moscow."
"That explains it."
"Your Russian is very good."
"I was in Cuban army demolitions in Africa assigned to work with Russians. I can say in ten different ways in Russian, 'Don't step on that fucking land mine.' But Russian boys are always stubborn, so he blew himself into very small pieces and I lost both legs. As a living symbol of internationalist duty and in place of my limbs I was honored with my very own Lada. From that Lada came two Jeeps and, voila, I had a garage. I have Him to thank."
"God?"
"El Comandante." Erasmo gestured as if stroking his beard.
"Fidel?"
"You're getting it. Cuba is a big family with a wonderful, caring, paranoid papa. Maybe that describes God, too, who knows? Where did you serve?"
"Germany. Berlin." For two years Arkady had monitored Allied radio transmissions from the roof of the Adlon Hotel.
"The rampart of socialism."
"The crumbling dike."
"Crumbled. Dust. Leaving nothing standing but poor Cuba, like a woman naked to the world."
They drank to that, the first food Arkady had in a day, the beer's alcohol a mild anesthetic. He thought of the black fisherman that Olga Petrovna had seen with Pribluda. There was time to go to the embassy later and hide away.
"I'd like to meet Mongo."
"Can't you hear him?" Erasmo turned the radio off and Arkady heard what could have been a rolling of stones in surf if stones shifted to a beat.
Walking in the santero's door, Arkady was unprepared. When Russians were taught about Cuba, all they read about was white men like Che and Fidel. What Russians learned about blacks were the Western crimes of imperialism and slavery. The only blacks they encountered in Moscow were the miserably cold African students imported to PatriceLumumbaUniversity. The musicians in the santero's front room were different. They were black men with lined faces, dark glass and blackness wrapped around them, with little accent marks like white golf caps or dreadlocks or Mongo's green baseball cap, but with a mantle of shadow vibrant in the candlelight. The entire room floated in the watery light of forty or fifty candles placed on a side table and along the wainscoting. No more than settling in, a drummer lazily slapped the wooden boxes he sat on, two others cocked their heads to listen to tall, narrow drums as they tapped the heads and Mongo shook a gourd draped in seashells. Bells, sticks, rattles lay at his feet. He put the gourd down to pick up a metal plate that he hit with a steel rod to produce notes so fine and bright it took Arkady a while to recognize the instrument as the blade of a hoe. A tablecloth hung over a mirror. When Arkady tried to approach Mongo, a fat man in a cloud of cigar smoke chased him and Erasmo away.
"The santero," Erasmo told Arkady. "Don't worry, they're just warming up."
The mechanic had changed from his coveralls to a pleated white shirt he called a guayabera, "the very height of Cuban formality," but with telltale grease on his hands and his beard he looked like a corsair in a wheelchair. He pressed on through a kitchen and hallway until he led Arkady to a backyard where, under two spindly coconut palms crossed like an X, an old black woman in a white skirt and a Michael Jordan pullover stirred a cauldron simmering on coals. Her hair was gray and cropped as short as cotton.
Erasmo said, "This is Abuelita. Abuelita is not only everyone's grandmother, she is also the CDR for our block. The Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. Informers usually, but we are blessed with Abuelita, who dutifully watches from her window from six in the morning and sees nothing all day long."
"Did she ever see Pribluda?"
"Ask her yourself, she speaks English."
"From before the Revolution." Her voice was young and whispery. "There were a lot of Americans and I was a very sinful girl."
"Did you ever see the Russian here?"
"No. If I saw him, then I would have to report him for renting from a Cuban, which is against the law. But he was a nice man."
A pig's head bobbed in the stew. A bottle came Erasmo's way; he took a long drink and shared it with Abuelita, who drank daintily and passed it to Arkady.
"What is it?" he asked her.
"Fighting rum." Her eyes took in the tape on his head. " You need it, no?"
Arkady had expected that by now he would be safely tucked away in the embassy basement with maybe a cup of tea. This was only a minor detour. He drank and coughed.
"What's in it?"
"Rum, chilies, garlic, turtle testicles."
More people arrived every minute, as many white as black. Arkady was used to the hushed assembly of the Russian Orthodox Church. Cubans pushed into the yard as if they were joining a party, a few with the somber devotion of worshipers, most with the bright anticipation of theatergoers. The only arrival without any expression was a pale, black-haired girl in jeans and a shirt that said "Tournee de Ballet." She was followed by a light-brown Cuban man with blue eyes, hair silver at the temples, in a formal, short-sleeved shirt.
"George Washington Walls," Erasmo introduced him. "Arkady."
Not Cuban. In fact, an American name that rang a bell. Behind Walls came a tourist with a maple-leaf pin and the last man Arkady wanted to see, Sergeant Luna. This was nightlife Luna, a splendid Luna in linen pants, white shoes and tank shirt that showed off the slabbed muscles of a triangular upper body. Arkady felt himself automatically cringe.
"My good friend, my very good friend, I didn't know you were feeling so good." Luna put one bare arm around Arkady and the other around a girl whose skin and mass of hair were the same amber color. She dazzled in spandex pants, halter, scarlet fingernails, and squirmed so much in Luna's grip Arkady wouldn't have been surprised if a ruby popped from her navel. " Hedy. Mujer mia." The sergeant leaned confidentially on Arkady's shoulder. " I want to tell you something."
"Please."
"There's no Zoshchenko at the Russian embassy."
"I lied. I'm sorry."
"But you did lie and you left the apartment, where I told you to stay, understand? Now you have a good time tonight. I don't want to see you spoil anybody's fun. Then you and I will have a talk about how you're going to the airport." Luna scratched his chin with a short ice pick. Arkady understood the sergeant's dilemma. Half of Luna wanted to be a good host, half of him wanted to plunge the ice pick into someone's face.
"I don't mind walking," Arkady said.
Hedy laughed as if Arkady had said something clever, which Luna didn't like, and he said something to her in Spanish that chased the color from her cheeks before turning his attention back to Arkady. Luna had a smile with broad white teeth and lots of pink gums.
"You don't mind walking?"
"No. I've seen so little of Cuba."
"You want to see more?"
"It seems a beautiful island."
"You're crazy."
"That could be."
The girl in the Tournee de Ballet shirt was named Isabel and she spoke excellent Russian. She asked Arkady whether it was true he was staying in Pribluda's apartment. " I live above him. Sergei was receiving a letter for me from Moscow. Did it come?"
Arkady was so disconcerted by Luna it took him a second to respond. " Not that I know of."
The sergeant seemed to have other duties. After consulting with Luna, Walls told his friend with the maple-leaf pin, "The real thing starts in a minute."
"I wish I spoke Spanish."
"You're Canadian, you don't need to. Investors don't need to," Walls assured him. " And all the investors are coming here. Canadians, Italians, Spanish, Germans, Swedes, even Mexicans. Everyone but Americans. This is the next big economic explosion on earth. Healthy, well-educated people. Technological base. Latin is hot. Get in while you can."
"He's been selling me for two days," the Canadian said.
"He sounds persuasive," Arkady said.
"Tonight," said Walls, "we've organized something folkloric for my friend from Toronto."
"I detest this," Isabel told Arkady.
"Isabel, we're speaking English for our friend now," Walls pleaded in the good-natured way of a man who actually means it. "I gave you English lessons. Even Luna can speak English. Can you speak a little English?"
"He says he'll take me to America," Isabel said. "He can't even take himself back to America."
"I think the show's about to begin." Walls ushered people back into the house as drumming hit a new intensity. "Arkady, I missed something. What are you doing here?"
"Just trying to fit in."
"Good job." Walls gave him a thumbs-up.
Each drum was different – a tall tumba, hourglass bata, twin congas – and each called to a different spirit of Santeria or Abakua, a maraca to rouse Chango, a bronze bell for Oshun, it was all mixed up, like mixing drinks, a little dangerous, yes, Erasmo asked even as he explained. Mongo, eyes shining from wells of perspiration, beat on his blade, his call in a language that was not Spanish answered simultaneously by the drummers and their drums, as if each man possessed two voices. Everyone had crowded into the room and pressed against the walls. Erasmo rocked in his chair as if he could lift it up by the sheer power of his arms to tell Arkady this was the wealth of Cuba, its history of Spanish bolero and French quadrille colliding with the whole continent of Africa, creating a tectonic explosion. The boxes on which they sat and drummed proved the Cuban genius. In Africa the secretive Abakua had "talking drums," Erasmo said. When they arrived in chains to work on the docks of Havana and the slave masters here took their drums away, they simply beat on boxes, and presto! Havana was full of drums. The Cuban musician, like the Cuban fisherman, could not be stopped! All Arkady knew was that in Moscow he had heard a little Cuban music on tape; this was the difference between seeing a picture of the sea and standing knee-deep in the water. As Mongo's deep voice called in a language that was not Spanish, the rest of the room swayed and answered, congas carrying the rhythm, hands on boxes syncopating off the beat. Luna smiled and nodded, arms folded by the door. Arkady tried to plot an escape route to slither through, but Luna was always between him and the exit.
"You know that man?" Erasmo asked.
"We've met. He's a sergeant in the Ministry of the Interior. How can he be involved in a show like this?"
"Why not? Everybody does two things, they have to, there's nothing unusual about that."
"Arranging Santeria?"
Erasmo shrugged. "That's Cuba today. Anyway, it's not really Santeria, it's more Abakua. Abakua's different. When my mother heard there were Abakua in the neighborhood, she'd pull me off the street because she thought they were collecting little white children to sacrifice. Now she lives in Miami and she still thinks so."
"But this is a santero's house, you said."
"You don't do Santeria at night," Erasmo said as if it were self-evident, "that's when the dead are out."
"The dead are out right now?"
"It's a crowded island at night." Erasmo smiled at the idea. " Anyway, Luna must have connections with the Abakua. Everyone is into Santeria or Abakua or something."
"His friend, George Washington Walls. Why is that name familiar?"
"He was famous once. The radical, the hijacker."
Very famous once, Arkady realized. He remembered a newspaper picture of a young American in an Afro and bell-bottom trousers burning a small flag at the top of an airplane ramp.
"What kind of investments can Walls offer in Cuba? When the dead aren't walking?"
"Good question."
Arkady had missed the point when the rhythm had changed and Luna and his golden friend
, Hedy, had taken center stage, dancing not so much separately as skin to skin, hips rolling, the sergeant's large hands sliding around her back as she arched, eyes and lips bright, slipping away only to invite him even closer. Arkady did not know if this was religious or not; he did know that if it took place in a Russian church the icons would have fallen to the floor. As everyone else joined in Walls maneuvered Hedy away from Luna and toward the Canadian, who danced as if he were playing ice hockey without a stick. Now it was even harder to reach the door.
Erasmo pushed Arkady. "Get out there."
"I don't dance." He was doing well just standing, Arkady thought.
"Everyone dances." The rum seemed to hit Erasmo all at once. He rocked back and forth in his wheelchair to the beat until he locked his chair, slid off the seat and danced with Abuelita like a man wading energetically through heavy surf. He said to Arkady, "No legs and I still move better than you."
Embarrassing but true, Arkady thought. It was also true that, in his condition, Arkady found the drumming and darkness and mixed smells of smoke, rum and sweat as overwhelming as an overstoked fire. The drums spoke together, apart, together again, breathless, syncopated, off the beat. As Mongo shook the gourd the shells strung across its belly rippled like a snake. The chant went from call and response to Mongo in his dark glasses, his voice volcanically deep. He swayed, hands a blur. The rhythm spread, divided, split again like rolling lava. Maybe it was the effect of fighting rum on an empty stomach. Arkady slipped into the hall and found that Isabel followed.
"I didn't study classical dance for this," she told Arkady.
"It's not the Bolshoi, but I don't think the Bolshoi does this sort of thing very well."
"Do you think I'm a whore?"
"No." He was taken aback. The girl looked more like a candlelit saint.
"I'm with Walls because he can help me, I admit. If I were a real whore, though, I'd learn Italian. Russian is no use at all."
Havana Bay Page 10
