Heretics Read online

  “I don’t understand how someone can be an atheist, but if you say so … God is greater than your disbelief.”

  “Well, I stopped believing a long time ago. You know why. What’s important is that I am incapable of believing.”

  “You’re not the first to think that way. It will pass…”

  “Perhaps, Uncle. Although, I don’t believe so.”

  Daniel had paused after that statement with which, he knew, he was attacking some of the principles his uncle Joseph had clung to in his solitude as a poor emigrant man with no other living family in the world but Daniel himself. “And I have to make a decision that is not important to me, but is to other people. A decision that has a lot to do with faith. With yours and with theirs,” Daniel added, to be more explicit.

  Pepe the Purseman, looking into the young man’s eyes, had allowed himself the slightest smile. A sad one, more than happy, in reality. It would have been difficult for the Polish furrier, who had gone through so many difficult moments and known the most immense horrors, to feel surprised or overcome by anything. Or, at least, that was what he believed, as he used to say to his nephew. “I can imagine where you’re going … And I’m going to make things easier for you. I will only tell you that every man has to resolve his questions with God on his own. For worldly problems, some help is always welcome. I have given you what I could give you. Do you know why Sozna gave you a job and lodging at La Flor de Berlín? I couldn’t let you starve out there. Taking care of you was my moral obligation—more still, an obligation with my faith and tradition. And the result hasn’t been all bad: you are an honorable man and you have a good job, studies that can help you very much, a good life that is going to be even better. Perhaps one day you’ll even be a rich man … Of course, I regret your distance from God and our customs, but even I am capable of understanding them. You wouldn’t be the first Jew to turn his back on his faith … My son, do what you have to do and don’t worry about me, or about anyone. At the end of the day, we’re all free due to divine will, even to not believe in that will.”

  As he listened to him, Daniel started feeling an indefinable sensation washing over him in which gratitude for his uncle’s understanding, handed over like true freedom, mixed with a jabbing impression of his weakness, capable of bringing him to the edge of a convenient acceptance of something his spirit denied. Like never before in his life, at that moment he felt miserable and petty, devoid of soul, identity, the will to fight. If Uncle Joseph had shouted and insisted on his damnation, like the day that the boy had refused to enroll at the Jewish school, perhaps everything would have seemed less humiliating, since he could also have yelled his reasons, become stubborn, and chosen even to act rebellious and offended. But when his uncle revealed that even during Daniel’s rebellion he had been protecting him and taking him away from the possibility of a confrontation, Joseph had surprised him, leaving him alone with his soul, with the void that his life and his own insistence had created in the space where other men, like his uncle or his future father-in-law, housed the consolation of feeling the company of a God, his God, any God. “The same God?” he would sometimes ask the offspring of that painful conflict.

  “I appreciate your understanding, Uncle. To me, that’s the most important thing,” Daniel could barely say. Joseph Kaminsky removed the round-rimmed glasses he had been using for a few years and wiped them off with the edge of his shirt. “You should appreciate Cuba. Here is where I have worked, lived in poverty, suffered disappointments, but I’ve gotten to know another life, and in many ways that changes one … I am no longer the same skittish and fanatical Pole who arrived more than twenty years ago. I have lived here without fearing the next pogrom, which is already enough, and no one cares much which language I use to pray. Despite whatever you may have heard, you cannot have any idea what that means, because you haven’t lived it … Wanting to be invisible, as your father came to think…”

  “So, you’re not upset with me?”

  Pepe the Purseman looked into his eyes, without answering, as if his mind were elsewhere. “Incidentally,” he said at last, “do you know why I haven’t married Caridad?”

  Daniel was surprised by the abrupt change to a subject that had never been brought up by his uncle, at least not with him, and to which Daniel, out of respect, had never referred.

  “Because she has her beliefs and I have mine. And I am not capable of asking her to give hers up. I don’t have the right, it wouldn’t be fair, because that faith is one of the few things that truly belongs to her and that has most helped her to live. And I am not going to give up mine. She is uneducated, but she’s a good and intelligent woman, and she has understood me. For the two of us, the important thing now is that we feel good when we’re together, and that helps us live. Above all, we no longer feel alone. And that is a gift from God. I don’t know if from mine or hers, but a divine gift … In sum, do what you want. You have my blessing. Well, it’s a saying, you don’t believe in blessings…”

  The sky, besieged by dark clouds coming from the south, opened up at that moment in a torrent of water flecked with the flashes of electric discharge that, according to the Pole Pepe the Purseman, were never as resounding in his far-off country. When the men returned to the tenement room, Joseph Kaminsky went in search of the small wooden chest that had accompanied him since he left Kraków and where he kept his now obsolete passport, a few photos, and the tallith that his father had given him for his bar mitzvah, which was held in the city’s great synagogue. He opened it with the key that he always wore around his neck, and from inside took an envelope that he handed to his nephew.

  “What’s this, Uncle?”

  “My wedding present.”

  “You don’t have to…”

  “Yes, I have to. Dignity requires it. If your in-laws are going to help you, you have to contribute. That contribution will make you freer.”

  Daniel, without understanding his relative’s intentions too well, opened the envelope and found the check. He read it. He couldn’t believe it. He reread it. His uncle was making him the owner of four thousand pesos.

  “But, Uncle…”

  “That is almost all of my savings from these years. You need it much more than I do now … For that especially you need money, to buy your freedom.”

  Daniel was shaking his head. “But you could move out of here with this, live with Caridad, help Ricardito with school…”

  “From this moment on, you’re not financially dependent on me, or on anyone, I hope. With what I earn, I believe that Caridad and I can soon move. And I already set aside an amount for Ricardito’s needs. You know, with a plate of rice, black beans, and some kosher meatballs, I have more than I need. And now I’m a better furrier than ever, so don’t worry, I’m not in want of work, thanks to the Most Holy.”

  Daniel Kaminsky couldn’t take his eyes off the paper, which was worth much more than the fortune of four thousand pesos. That money was the product of infinite refusals, privations, and the impoverished situation in which he and his uncle had lived for years. It also represented the valid passport with which Pepe the Purseman could bring joy to his nephew’s life. And, Daniel knew, had been saved to congratulate him on the day he, in a synagogue and before a rabbi, sealed his matrimony according to Jewish Law.

  Overwhelmed by the invasive tide of his heresy, Daniel Kaminsky had begun to cry: while his uncle Joseph handed him understanding and money, Daniel was stealing from him the dream of seeing him break the crystal glasses with the stomping of his foot, to recall with that action the destruction of the temple and the beginning of the interminable Diaspora of the Israelites, and the need to remain united in the tradition and Law written in the Book as the only mode for survival of a landless nation. Unable to contain his sobs, that afternoon, for the first time in many years, Daniel hugged his uncle and kissed his cheeks, always in need of a closer shave, several times.

  Perhaps due to Joseph Kaminsky’s liberating attitude, two months later, when Dan
iel went to the small Church of Espíritu Santo to be baptized and receive the decree certifying his conversion, allowing him to pronounce his marriage vows before a priest, the young man couldn’t help feeling that he was carrying out a shameless abandonment for which, despite his convictions and denials, he was not really prepared. In the company of his betrothed, his future in-laws, and his godparents for the occasion, Antonio Rico and Freckly Eloína, the still-Jewish young man entered a Catholic temple for the first time in his life with the intention of doing something besides satisfying his curiosity. Although he already knew what he would find there—childish images of martyrs and supposed saints, crosses of all sizes, including the necessary one with the bleeding Christ nailed to the wood, that whole exulted imagery—he couldn’t avoid the emotion and visceral, more than rational, desire to run right out of there. This was not his world. But that escape, if it happened, would be fleeing from the earthly paradise that he wanted to enter, that he deserved to enter. Later, he would think that what most helped him to contain his impulses was the unexpected sight of Caridad Sotolongo’s figure, seated humbly in one of the last pews of that small temple, wearing a white dress, doubtless the finest in her closet, and with a handkerchief covering her head.

  Standing before the priest responsible for officiating the ceremony destined to change his religion, Daniel Kaminsky managed to escape his regrettable reality by concentrating on evoking the fable that, many times as a child, his father had told him, in the still-pleasant days in Kraków and, later, in the tense ones in Leipzig and in the desperate ones in Berlin. The young man was able to remember how, just the night before he left for Havana, during the last occasion on which Dr. Isaiah Kaminsky would dress him before bed, his father again narrated that mythical story of Judah Abravanel, the outstanding descendant of the predestined branch of King David’s house, the line charged with the responsibility of bearing the true and awaited Messiah … According to what his father said, and as Daniel would later tell his son on steamy evenings in Miami Beach, the real or fictitious character of Judah Abravanel, already thrown out of Spain like all Sephardim who didn’t accept Catholic baptism, had taken refuge in Portugal, where, soon after, he again found himself in the terrible circumstance of choosing between baptism and the death of his children, his wife, his coreligionists, and of himself. In that Lisbon cathedral where a wicked king had confined the Jews and placed them before the quandary of Christ or the bonfires, the Sephardic wise man, doctor, philosopher, poet, and financial genius decided to set an example and accept conversion, condemning his soul but preserving not only his body but the lives of many of his own and, especially, the fruits of his line that were fated to bring salvation to his people. Perhaps Judah Abravanel—Isaiah Kaminsky used to say—at the moment he felt holy water fall on his head, had thought he was submerging himself in the Jordan to purify his body before going to the resurrected Temple of Solomon to lie down before the Ark of the Covenant. Now, while the water poured by a priest fell on his head, Daniel Kaminsky took refuge in evoking his father. In that protective notion he was again surprised by the vision of a familiar image of the face of a young Jew too similar to that of Jesus of Nazareth and, he was thinking it for the first time, also like the Judah Abravanel of his imagination. Marta’s hug and kiss, overflowing with joy over the gift that her beloved had given her, brought the heretic out of his inner labyrinth and returned him to the reality of the Catholic temple, which, even after the completed conversion, did not cease to appear to him as a scene for fanatical children.

  Daniel, still stunned but feeling free, accepted his father-in-law’s invitation without hesitation for all of them to go out to lunch at the nearby restaurant Puerto de Sagua, where, it was said, they served the best and freshest fish one could eat in Havana. Only when he searched for her as he was leaving the temple did Daniel discover that Caridad Sotolongo had disappeared. Had she been there or had he imagined it? he asked himself. How influential was that woman, the devotee of boisterous black gods, in preventing the recently completed ceremony from turning into a dramatic event that would distance Daniel forever from his uncle Joseph, the mild-mannered and stingy furrier who, for better or for worse, had turned him into the man he was? Daniel would never dare to ask that, but, sensing the answer, he professed a gratitude to the woman that remained steady throughout the years and the distance. Until death.

  6

  Havana, 2007

  Since all that remained of Moshé Pipik were just some foul-smelling ruins incapable of evoking the kosher restaurant that had once shone there, destined for years to satisfy Daniel Kaminsky’s hunger, Elias suggested to Conde that they try their luck at the Puerto de Sagua, where, his father used to say, the fish was always excellent.

  “Was, in this case, could strictly be was,” Conde warned him. “Past tense, imperfect, but past. Like the time of Moshé Pipik and other things you’ve wanted to see … By the way, did you say cuqueado?”

  “Yes,” Elias Kaminsky confirmed, wrinkling his brow. “Did I say it wrong?”

  “No, not that I know of…”

  “My mother used that word. For years, I’ve lived speaking English, but when I speak Spanish, I subconsciously connect with the way she spoke. They’re like old gems. You clean them a bit and they shine again. Let’s see, what do you have to say about the word zarrapastroso? My father was a thin and zarrapastroso Jew … Perhaps no one says that anymore.”

  “He was what we call an habitante. An habitantón.” Conde clinched it.

  Elias smiled.

  “Damn! It’s been years since I heard that. My father also said, when he talked to other Cubans over there: ‘Don’t be an habitante, Papito!’ He would say that to a Cuban with whom he became friends in Miami…”

  As they wandered through the places hinting at the life, memory, and lost words belonging to Daniel Kaminsky the Pole and his wife, Mario Conde had the pleasant feeling of peeking into a world that was nearby yet distant, faded ever since he was old enough to notice. The lives of those Jews in Havana were of a bygone era, of which only a few traces remained and very little will to evoke them. The massive stampede of the Jews, Ashkenazim as well as Sephardim (in agreement for once), had occurred first with the suspicion and then, soon after, with the confirmation that the rebels’ revolution would choose a socialist system. The change had pushed eighty percent of the community to a new exodus, to which many saw themselves forced to depart as they had arrived: with just a suitcase full of clothing. From what those men knew of the fate of the Jews in the vast Soviet territories, few of their customs, beliefs, and businesses would emerge unscathed from the confrontation, and despite their cherished experiences on the island, the Jews left, taking their suitcases, their prayers, their food, and music elsewhere. For the majority, even the converted Daniel Kaminsky and his wife Marta Arnáez, who got a head start by a few months, it was Miami Beach, where other Jews in the United States already lived, the place in which they engaged in the uphill battle of making new lives and, with thousands of years of experience under their belts, established a community that was once again like the sticky ghetto culture. The disquieting difference in dates that encouraged the painter’s doubts lay in the fact that, while the largest part of the community left the island between 1959 and 1961, Daniel Kaminsky and his wife had left in April of 1958, long before others and with a quickness destined to reveal pressing needs.

  They found the restaurant’s spacious salon to be nearly empty. When Conde read the menu’s prices, he confirmed the reason for such desolation. A plate of lobster cost what the average Cuban earned in one month. That place was another ghetto: for foreigners like Elias Kaminsky, for homegrown tigers like Yoyi the Pigeon, and, these days, for a lucky one such as himself, hired with all expenses paid seemingly just to hear the life story of a Jew who insisted on renouncing Judaism and who, at some point, as far as Conde knew, seemed to have killed a man.

  The restaurant’s refrigerator-like atmosphere smelled like beer and the sea. T
he dimmed lights were a relief to the pupils of the newly arrived, burnt by the September sun. The waiters, a true squadron, took advantage of the room’s calm to chat while leaning against the long, polished-wood bar, perhaps the same bar on which, fifty-five years before, the newly converted Daniel, his girlfriend, friends, and relatives had huddled together to toast to the lack of obstacles to a Catholic wedding.

  Elias chose the lobster with chili sauce. Conde selected a hogfish stew. To drink, they asked for the coldest beers in the place.

  “My father could never have been a lone wolf. He needed to belong, to be part of something. That’s why his friends were so important in his life. When he lost the closest ones, it was like he lost his compass … It’s also because of that that he became Jewish again. Although he couldn’t believe in God.” Elias smiled.

  “Now that you mention it, there’s something I haven’t asked you…”

  To the painter’s surprise, Conde lit up a cigarette, colossally and Cubanly telling the supposed prohibition announced by the sign with a red circle to go fuck itself. “Are you a practicing Jew?”

  Elias Kaminsky shrugged his shoulders and imitated Conde, lighting up his Camel after drinking more than half of his tall glass of Bucanero beer in one swig.

  “Strictly speaking, Judaism is transmitted through one’s mother, and my mother was not a Jew by birth. But when my parents arrived in Miami, things went in a different direction, and as part of that direction, my mother ended up converting and it turns out that that automatically made me a Jew—although I’m one of those who only goes to synagogue on Yom Kippur, because it’s a beautiful holiday, and I eat barbecued pork ribs. But let’s say that, yes, I am.”

  “So what does that mean to you?”

  “It’s rather complicated … My father was right when he said that being Jewish is something tricky. For example, the condition of Jews was a problem even for the Germans who killed six million of us, including my grandparents and aunt … Recently, I read a book that explains it in a way that really left an impression on me. The writer explained how the decision to annihilate the Jews was, above all, a form of necessary self-annihilation on the part of the Germans themselves, or at least, a part of their own image that they wanted to get rid of in order to be the superior race … Although they didn’t acknowledge it, and in fact, they never acknowledged it—what the Germans essayed with the elimination of the Jewish attitudes that they called greed, cowardice, and ambition was in reality an attempt to erase those qualities in themselves, in the Germans. The fucked-up thing about it is that when the Jews were doing these things in the German way, it was because they dreamt of seeming like the Germans, because many of them wanted to be more German than the Germans themselves, since they considered the men among whom they lived to be the perfect image of everything that is good and beautiful in the world of the illustrious bourgeois, the civility to which many of them aspired to belong in order to cease being different and to be better … Something like that had already happened in Greece when many Jews hellenized themselves, and later in seventeenth-century Holland …