Heretics Read online

  Around noon on June 1, the last eighteen hours began to tick by, which—per the passenger ship captain’s request—President Brú had extended the Saint Louis’s stay in the port, a time period granted with the goal of restocking the ship for a trip to Europe. For all of the Jews confined on the ship and for those hunkered down on land, it was clear that there would be no more delays. As a reaffirmation of this terrible fact, they were able to watch the arrival of new military launches coming from the ports of Matanzas, Mariel, and Bahía Honda, determined to stop escape attempts by the passengers and to force the ship’s departure if the captain didn’t comply with orders. That same afternoon, Louis Clasing, the man from Hapag, again sent around the communiqué in which he informed that, given Cuba’s and the United States’ refusal to take in the refugees, the vessel would return to Hamburg. And at sunset the real bomb dropped: the Joint Distribution Committee representatives were leaving the island with their tails between their legs.

  The macabre displays of joy by the many proponents of the expulsion of the would-be refugees drowned out all cries of protest, the tears, shrieks, and pleas of thousands of Jews who, with relatives or not aboard the vessel, had hoped for a happy ending to that dark story, one that was nearly incredible in the sum of its cruelty. Neither the ones who felt victorious nor the ones who felt defeated were able to ignore what that round-trip could really mean for the passengers of the Saint Louis. Daniel Kaminsky, although he was too young to understand the seriousness of the problem in all its details, felt an uncontrollable urge to throw himself into the sea and swim to the ship where his loved ones were and climb the boat to join them and share in their fate. But at that moment, he also asked himself why his parents and hundreds of other Jews didn’t do the opposite and throw themselves into the sea to play their last card with this action. Because they were afraid of dying? No, it wasn’t fear of death, since everyone said that death almost certainly awaited them in Hamburg with open arms. What was stopping them, then? What improbable hope? The boy wouldn’t have a satisfactory answer until several years later, but it was perhaps on that very day, when he was just nine years old, that Daniel Kaminsky ceased to be a boy: he still had a ways to go to become a man, to acquire the judgment and capacity for decision making that come with years, but that day he was robbed of the naïveté and willingness to believe that constitute the innocence of youth. And, in his case, also of the naïveté of faith.

  * * *

  At eleven in the morning on June 2, machines put the passenger ship’s floating mass in motion. Silent, defeated, it moved forward slowly toward the narrow mouth of the bay, always watched over by the old colonial forts and surrounded by all of those army and police launches. From the decks, the passengers were yelling, waving handkerchiefs, saying a pathetic goodbye. Behind the official launches, several boats with relatives were following the ship’s wake, to be as close as possible to their loved ones until the last minute, as if it were the final moment. On the dock and along the port’s avenue, there remained relatives, friends, curious onlookers, and the expulsion’s proponents. More than fifty thousand people. The scene was of such dramatic proportions that even those who had demanded the rejection of the ship and its load set themselves apart and maintained an embarrassed silence.

  Daniel and his uncle, beaten down by the fatigue of a week on high alert, uncertainty, and unease, didn’t even throw themselves behind the pursuit of the helpless, like other Jews did along the avenue lining the harbor. Seated on one of the benches on the Alameda de Paula—the old Havana promenade that Daniel Kaminsky would never again step foot on for the rest of the years he lived in Cuba—they let defeat flatten even the last of their bodies’ cells. The boy was crying silently and the man was scratching the beard that had grown in those days, as if he wanted to pull the skin off of his cheeks. When the Saint Louis crossed the mouth of the bay, it turned to the north and became lost behind the rocks and walls of El Morro Castle. Daniel and Joseph Kaminsky stood up and, holding hands, went in search of the start of Calle Acosta, to return to the phalanstery where they lived. On the way, they passed close by the synagogue, but neither nephew nor uncle demonstrated any intention to get any closer to it.

  Not one of the two Kaminskys stranded in Cuba, safe perhaps from Nazi threats, harbored any hope for future solutions. The following days would prove them right. On June 4, the United States issued an ultimatum: it wouldn’t accept the refugees who begged for a disembarkment order just off Miami’s coast. The next day, Canada, their last hope, also announced its refusal. Then the Saint Louis would head toward the Europe from whence it came, loaded with Jews and trust, just three weeks before.

  When they learned that news, coming down like the confirmation of a death sentence, Daniel Kaminsky, mired in the depths of pain, made the drastic decision that he, of his own will and from the bottom of his heart, would from then on disown his condition as a Jew.

  4

  Havana, 2007

  He felt a physical tightness in his chest and a strange unease in his soul. Mechanically, Conde dug around in his pack of cigarettes to make sure he had smoked them all. He gestured at the box of Camels resting on the table between him and Elias Kaminsky, who nodded. He needed a cigarette so badly that he was willing to give up one of the most sacred principles of his nicotine faith. That story about the ship weighed down with Jews, in which he was previously interested enough only to learn the most general outline, but that he had now seen from the inside, had shaken him to his very core and chased away any remaining sleepiness. He felt wrecked, but out of an exhaustion more harmful than physical or even mental exhaustion: it had to do with a shameful, visceral wooziness, born in the deepest recesses of his being. Like Daniel Kaminsky’s decision to leave his tribe. Because at that moment, Mario Conde was ashamed of being Cuban. While he didn’t have anything to do with what had happened during those ominous days, the fact that some of his compatriots were won over by political or economic interests to somehow facilitate the commission of a part—minimal but a part nonetheless—of Nazi crimes left him feeling disgusted, exhausted, and with a sour taste in his mouth, a feeling that the Camel, with its yellowish fibers, only enhanced.

  “I warned you that it was a long story,” Elias Kaminsky said, rubbing his hands together vehemently, as if he wanted to rid himself of something abrasive. “Long and terrible.”

  “I’m sorry.” Conde emitted this apology because he truly felt sorry. He couldn’t imagine whether the outsider could infer the reasons for his unease.

  “And that’s just the beginning. Let’s call it the prologue … Look, it’s already too late for us to have breakfast in a little while … I need to sleep for a few hours. The preparations, the trip … this story. I’m exhausted. But we could have lunch. Shall I expect you at one at my hotel and we can find somewhere to eat?”

  Conde noticed that, at that moment, his dog was coming out of the door of the house. Garbage II, with his pompous gait, was walking and taking each step as a chance to stretch and unwind, ready, perhaps to set out on his nocturnal rounds as a hardened dog of the streets. Conde remembered that he had brought a bag of leftovers from Skinny Carlos’s house but that he still hadn’t fed the animal; he felt guilty.

  “Hey, you, don’t leave,” he said to Garbage II and patted him on the back. Then he turned his attention back to his visitor. “Okay, we’ll meet at one. I had things to do, but…”

  “I don’t want to keep you, sir…”

  “Can we be less formal?”

  “We can.”

  “That’s better for both of us. How are you getting back at this hour? It’s almost three in the morning.”

  “I have the car I rented parked here on the corner. Or, at least, that’s what I hope…”

  “I have a thousand questions for you. The truth is, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to sleep,” Conde said, and stood up. “But before you leave, I need to tell you something … What some Cubans did to those nine hundred people fills me with
shame and…”

  “My father understood what had happened and was able to do something that helped him live: he didn’t fill up with resentment. On the contrary, I already told you: he preferred to be Cuban and forget about that pettiness that can show up anywhere. There was a lot of political pressure, from the Americans, from Batista. I myself think that those factors had more influence than the issues of money and corruption. I don’t know…”

  “That makes me happy for your father,” Conde said, because he really felt that way. “But there’s something else that…”

  Elias Kaminsky smiled.

  “You want to know what happened to the Rembrandt?”

  “Yep,” Conde admitted. “I’m dying to know how it got to an auction house in London,” he added, and prepared himself to hear any story, no matter how sad or crazy it was.

  “Well, I don’t know. That’s another reason I’m here. There are still a lot of gaps in this story. But if my father did what I think he did, I can’t understand why he didn’t take the painting. Until it showed up in London, I didn’t know where it had ended up. What I am almost sure of now is that that Rembrandt was never again in my father’s possession…”

  “Hmmm, now I don’t understand a thing … Are you telling me that your father tried to get it back?”

  “Can you wait a bit? If I don’t tell you the whole story, you’re not going to be able to help me … At one o’clock?”

  “At one,” Conde agreed when he understood he had no choice, and he shook Elias Kaminsky’s outstretched hand.

  From his corner, Garbage II looked at them as if he understood what that goodbye meant for him.

  * * *

  Almost every trace of the memories built by words had become so twisted that they showed their crudest insides. To highlight the losses and absences, some places seemed to have taken on the task of saving themselves by stepping aside and allowing disaster to take over. But the majority of references had gone up in smoke, some without leaving the faintest trail that could evoke them, as if the old Jewish neighborhood and the area where it had established itself had been mercilessly crushed up in a grinding machine wound by a universal time accelerated by history and the nation’s apathy. Fortunately, there it remained, challenging, like the last hope of ill-conserved memories, the unprecedented Arco de Belén, carved out of the bona fide cement of the convent through the path of Calle Acosta, which dragged itself, dirty and agonizingly, under the old arcade; there were the unrecognizable ruins of what was once La Flor de Berlín pastry shop and the remains of the hardware store belonging to Poles by the name of Weiss. But, above all, the noise that had so unnerved Daniel Kaminsky was still there. Recognizable, whole, argumentative, exultant, Havanese, the noise ran down the streets as if it had always been expecting the unpredictable arrival of an Elias Kaminsky to hand over the key that could open the gates of time to his father’s youth and adolescence and, with it, the possibility of finding the path of understanding that the foreigner was seeking.

  Like a blind man who needs to cautiously and exactly measure each step, the sweaty, ponytailed behemoth started up the sordid steps of the large nineteenth-century house on Calle Compostela, the former property of apocryphal counts, where the recently arrived Joseph Kaminsky had put a bed, a table, a sewing machine, and his leatherworking tools, and where, for almost fourteen years, his nephew Daniel had lived. The mansion, abandoned at the start of the twentieth century by the descendants of its original owners and very soon turned into a multifamily dwelling with a common kitchen and collective bathrooms, showed the marks of growing apathy and the effects of excessive use over too long a period of time. On the second floor, where once had lived la mulata Caridad Sotolongo—the sweet woman who, over time, would turn into Joseph Kaminsky’s final and forever lover—life had seemed to stop in the persistent and painful poverty of those who are crammed together without any hope. By contrast, the third floor, the building’s most noble back in its day, where the original inhabitants’ bedrooms were and later the Poles’ room and those of six other families of black and white Cubans, besides one belonging to some Catalan Republicans, had lost the ceiling and part of the balconies and warned of the irreversible fate awaiting the rest of the structure. Making the most herculean effort, the foreigner tried to imagine the Jewish boy going up the steps he had just conquered; he forced himself to see him leaning over the no-longer-existent wall of the third floor to watch, in the interior courtyard of that hive, in front of the common kitchen, another blow of the mythical fight between black Petronila Pinilla and Sicilian María Perupatto, in which there was always the appetizing prospect of seeing a tit or two or even four on the days of the rowdiest confrontations, and later he insisted on seeing him go up to the rooftop with the twins Pedro and Pablo, black as embers, and Eloína the tomboy, a freckly blonde, to hold up kites or simpler constructions made with old newspaper sheets. Or to do other things. But he couldn’t.

  Elias Kaminsky, seconded by Conde, asked several neighbors if they remembered the Pole Pepe the Purseman, Caridad la mulata, and her son, Ricardito, who had the gift of making up rhymes, but the memory of the drawn-out stay of those tenants also appeared to have disappeared, like the structure’s top floor.

  They went down to the street and saw that the movie theater that had operated on the opposite sidewalk, where Daniel Kaminsky had acquired his incurable addiction to Westerns and gangster movies, was no longer a theater, or anything at all. And the famous Moshé Pipik, the city’s most splendid and most visited kosher restaurant, looked like anything but a palace of ancestral aromas and flavors: it had been reduced to a brick shell darkened by mildew, urine, and shit, where four young men with prison-worthy faces and undoubtedly atrophied senses of smell were playing dominoes dispassionately while they drank from their bottles of rum, waiting perhaps for the inevitable building collapse that would end it all, leveling the interminable game in process. There, in that place, lively and well-lit in their memories, was where, after a dinner that was, for her, extravagant, and for him, the one he had dreamed of since his arrival to the island, Marta Arnáez and Daniel Kaminsky, Elias’s future parents, had begun a courtship so pure that it would only end on the afternoon of April 2006 when she, with a shaking and wrinkled hand, closed Daniel’s eyes.

  “They met at the Havana Secondary Learning Institute, when my father was seventeen years old and my mother, the daughter of Galicians, but Cuban herself, had just turned sixteen. It wasn’t easy for him to resolve to confront his uncle’s reservations, since, of course, Joseph had expected him to marry some young Jewish girl in order to preserve blood and tradition. It was even harder for him to dare to stand up to the opposition of my Galician grandparents, who were doing quite well for themselves and were not in the least pleased that their daughter was interested in a Jewish Pole who was practically starving to death. But when she fell in love with him, nothing could be done. Marta Arnáez was sweetness itself, but she was also capable of withstanding anything when she set a goal for herself, desired something, or was keeping a secret. Almost a Galician at heart, don’t you think?”

  5

  Havana, 1940–1953

  Once the Saint Louis set sail from Havana, it would take Daniel Kaminsky nineteen years to again hear about that portrait of a young Jew made by the greatest Dutch master, the work on which his parents had pinned their hopes of salvation. By then he barely remembered the painting’s existence and, above all, the presumed existence of a god.

  Each time that Daniel recalled the seemingly valuable portrait that didn’t end up bringing any benefit to the Kaminsky family, he felt frustration overtaking him. He tried to imagine when it could have changed hands, or, even better, he thought, it had been destroyed by his parents, a drastic and terrible solution that seemed more just, given his pained memory.

  From what he was able to learn, the Saint Louis, turned away by the governments of Cuba, the United States, and Canada, was authorized to drop anchor in Antwerp, Belgium. Several
European governments, less small-minded, decided to distribute the refugees among themselves: some would go to France, others to England, some would stay in Belgium, and the rest, around 190, were sent to Holland. Years later, Daniel Kaminsky would learn that his family had been part of that last group. The majority of them had been confined to the Westerbork refugee camp, a swamp surrounded by barbed-wire fences and guard dogs, where they were caught by the unchallenged German occupation of the Low Countries. The invaders immediately began to clear the territory of Jews and the solution was to send them to work and death camps in the eastern territories. It appeared that the Kaminskys, after almost two years spent in a camp in Czechoslovakia—had Judith, the little girl, survived hunger, illness, fear?—were sent in 1941 or 1942 to Auschwitz, on the outskirts of Kraków, precisely from where they had left a few years before in search of salvation from the terror on the horizon. It was a leap to the beginning of everything, the macabre tying-up of the journey through hell of a family and a portrait of a nameless Jew, the round-trip that would lead some of the Kaminskys to the crematories where they would turn into wind-scattered ashes. Many times, Daniel would ask himself if that portrait of a Jew who looked too much like the Catholic West’s popular image of Christ had ended up in the hands of a Standartenführer or some other top leader in the SS, or if his parents, aware of that possible fate, had destroyed it as the useless canvas it had become.