Days of Awe Page 3

  “What? What?” Olinsky snapped, slapping my father’s fingers away, leaving a red slash across his right hand.

  “I didn’t mean any disrespect,” a shocked Enrique said, his folded hand stinging from Olinsky’s hard clap. It had been more than twenty years—since his grandmother Leah’s funeral in Oriente— that anybody had hit him for any reason. “I have news,” he finally said, but the words were dull now.

  Enrique watched as Olinsky stood before him, this curved-back little man, shaking, huffing with anger.

  “I . . . I’m really sorry, Señor Olinsky . . . I . . .”

  “What is your news, you stupid man?” Olinsky raged, and as he shouted, a shower of unintended spittle hit Enrique’s cheek.

  My father did not move his hands, he did not cover or wipe his face. Instead he took a breath and closed his eyes in this peculiarly languid way of his. After a pause, he opened them, just as slowly, and looked down at the ground, speaking as gently and evenly as he could: “We got our visas for the United States, we got our permissions to leave, and my wife, Nena, is buying the airline tickets right now, today. We leave in two weeks.”

  “Hrrrmmmph,” said an unimpressed Olinsky.

  “Señor Olinsky, I . . . I’m quitting the floral shop,” Enrique said. “I know you understand, because you’re planning on leaving yourself. You have been very good to me, and to Nena and my daughter, Alejandra, too, and I wanted to thank you—we wanted to thank you, my grandfather Ytzak especially—by perhaps having you to dinner at our house one last time before we leave. I mean, we don’t know when we’ll meet again, if ever. Tomorrow night, Señor Olinsky?”

  But the old Jew just shook his head and frowned. “You’re not getting on that plane,” he said. “Trust me. You’re not flying out of Cuba.”

  III

  On the morning of that spring day in 1961, while my mother prayed at her altar, my father paced anxiously out on the balcony. Below, police sirens howled. Women walked briskly through the streets, babies clinging to their shoulders while older children clutched their hands. Men shouted at one another, their usually robust voices inflected a little higher.

  Up on the balcony, my father rubbed his immaculate palms and stepped deliberately from one end to the other, his face grim. He had a clear view of the city’s confusion, of the way people were beginning to trickle out of their homes in the wake of the bombings, dazed and unsteady. Later, a few avid antirevolutionaries, convinced American forces were about to topple Fidel, jostled with his supporters, screaming epithets and promises of revenge. Fidel’s milicianos—volunteers to defend the nation precisely from foreign attacks—screamed back their own insults and threats. My father knew it was just a matter of time before the hysteria bubbled up to our balcony.

  He stepped inside and dialed the phone, as he had been doing periodically since he first heard the commotion. There was no answer at Olinsky’s apartment or at the floral shop. He’d already called his grandfather Ytzak, the old soldier, who was apparently out in the streets hobbling about on his peg leg and rabble-rousing. At eighty years of age, Ytzak, the family’s most ardent fan of the United States, still felt intimately connected to every ripple and quiver of the island’s political storms. The bombings, thought Enrique, would be breaking his heart.

  Suddenly, there was another boom. I felt it like a hard clap against my child’s flat chest, like something monstrous and mean. My father rushed to the veranda and scanned the Havana skyline. The sound was a heavy, crackling convulsion. Just then, a swarm of crows fluttered past our balcony, their flight path arching upward, even as one of them flapped and struggled, then reluctantly dropped from sight.

  “My god, what now?” my mother asked, nervously emerging from her seclusion. She was wearing an emerald-colored business suit, prudent flats, and an American-made Timex watch, but her hair, with its lush locks, was coiled and waved like a benevolent Medusa. The mole on her cheek gave her a certain exoticism, as if a native off the pages of National Geographic had been dressed for a job in a law office but couldn’t quite hide her more sensuous and precarious origins. Fourteen years younger than my father, she was twenty-seven then, her beauty at its prime.

  “It sounds as if it’s next door,” Enrique said of the bombing. He was surprisingly confident, as if the mere presence of my mother instantly lent him both comfort and credibility. “It’s actually quite far, though, across the water somewhere. The air bases, maybe the airport. But it reverberates, it shakes everything.”

  I was standing between them, a two-year-old without a notion of the weight of moment, aware only of the tangible terror in the air, of the way my parents stared across the room at each other, bewildered.

  Instinctively, my mother bent down to straighten my travel dress, a lacy pink-and-white farewell gift from Ytzak, as if there were still some hope of being received in a modern, northern airport, its fluorescent lights illuminating national airlines to faraway vacation spots like the French Riviera or Singapore. But we weren’t going anywhere; all flights in and out of Cuba had been canceled.

  My mother kissed me, her lips cool against my cheek. “Enrique, what are we going to do?” she asked, standing up again, breathless.

  Before my father could answer, we heard a loud, urgent rapping on the apartment door. For an instant, all the noise spilling in from the balcony seemed to vanish. There was a suffocating emptiness into which each knock exploded, garbled, as if in slow motion. Through the door to the balcony we could see black clouds swelling in the skies.

  My father signaled us to hide in the bedroom. As my mother gathered me to her and inched away, he strode tentatively, bravely, toward the door. I could feel my mother’s heartbeat through the emerald-colored business suit, through the layers of lace, and the skin and bone of both our bodies—a rushed, critical pulse that matched each of my father’s stealthy steps. Then, before his fingers reached the latch, we heard the sharp cry of a familiar voice.

  “Enrich, Enrich,” called Olinsky from the hallway. “Open up, open up!”

  He popped into my parents’ apartment like a lurid jack-in-the-box, his limbs and middle jiggling in his white four-pocket guayabera. His hair stood on end as if he’d stuck his finger in a socket. “We’ve got to go now,” he said, standing in the center of the living room like a crazy person, his big blue eyes even bigger, looking everywhere and at nothing all at once.

  “Go where?” asked my father, quickly closing the door behind the nervous old man. “We’re under attack. Señor Olinsky, are you all right?”

  He was afraid the bombings might have triggered nightmarish memories for the displaced European, that Olinsky might have fallen back twenty years to when the earth shifted under him for the first time.

  “Are you all right?” Enrique repeated, cautiously placing his hands on Olinsky’s shoulders to steady him. It was okay this time, he knew.

  “All right? Yes, of course I’m all right,” snapped the old man, his eyes dazzling azure disks. “But none of us will be if we stay here. Listen to me: They’re not bombing Havana, not yet, but they’re getting closer and the police are out of control. Castro has given orders to arrest anybody and everybody who’s ever looked at him funny. The jails are already full. There are rumors that they’ve started holding people at the Blanquita Theater.”

  (Later, we would learn that Eliana, José Carlos’s wife, had gotten snared in one of the raids and was dragged off to a sports stadium in Matanzas, where she spent the invasion nervously wondering if her husband would be able to rescue her, princelike, and fill in the outlines of their beautiful story for the rest of their lives.)

  “But where will we go?” asked my mother, our bodies still fused together at the door of the bedroom. Standing there inside the frame—the safest place in the house in the unlikely case of an earthquake—my mother could not imagine any other refuge.

  “Where?” Olinsky looked at her, confounded. These Cubans, he thought, so smart but so weak—it all seemed so obvious to him! “Where?
By god, Nena, where else? To the United States!”

  “Señor Olinsky, we’re being bombed by the United States!” my father exclaimed in frustration.

  “That’s why we must leave now,” Olinsky repeated, pulling at my mother’s hand. “I have it all figured out. . . .”

  And he did, although if he’d laid out his plan a day, an hour, perhaps even a minute earlier, Olinsky could have been certified insane, he could have spent the invasion of Playa Girón locked up under psychiatric observation, not allowed to mingle even with common criminals—that’s how deranged his reasoning was.

  His strategy was so simple as to seem impossible: With the American-backed exiles poised to attack, probably in Cienfuegos, every available Cuban military ship, aircraft, and officer would be making its way south to the battle site. The northern coasts of Havana would be virtually deserted. (It would later turn out that this wasn’t true, that in fact the beaches off the capital were heavily patrolled that night and throughout the week of the U.S.-backed attack.)

  It wasn’t because of any inherent faith in Olinsky’s plan that we left that night. It was only because a bomb exploded, killing several people somewhere near an airfield, and the delirium caused by those deaths was just rolling into Havana when Olinsky’s fingers curled around my mother’s wrist. It was in that instant that my mother and father made the decision that would forever change my life.

  “Let’s go,” Enrique said, taking me from my mother’s arms, molding me to his shoulder as if I were rubber or clay while she ran to grab the carefully wrapped box with the Virgin of Charity.

  “Aren’t we cheating . . . ? I mean, we were supposed to be on a plane. . . .” Nena said, hesitating. All her prayers had concerned images of flight, of a huge silver bird that would carry us like nestlings in its beak; all her efforts had been aimed at speed and resolution. Now her husband and his imprudent employer were pushing her out the door toward water, not the sweet, drinkable kind, whose patron was wrapped in a box in her arms, but to the paradox of salt, curative and curse.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” Enrique replied, flustered. His hair and beard were damp, his face as red as Olinsky’s.

  “Goral,” said the old man impatiently, his hands waving in the air in his usual frustrated manner.

  “What?” asked my mother.

  “It’s inevitable,” said my father, carefully closing the apartment door behind him while balancing me—I was hot and fidgety—in his arms. “It’s fate.”

  What else could it be? What else could explain the manner in which we left Cuba that day?

  After hours of battling our way through Havana’s chaotic streets, and even more hours in a strange hearselike car out of the city, we arrived via skinny, dusty roads at what is today known as Hemingway’s marina. We had a dinner of soda crackers and guava paste in the car. Then, as night fell, Olinsky, my parents, and I slipped into suave Johnny Suro’s small-keeled yacht—La Marilyn— and cruised out of Cuba and into the inky black as if we hadn’t a care in the world.

  We left without revving the motor, with Johnny and Enrique using long paddles to guide the boat through the long reeds on the shore and into the path of a northbound current that would take us out of Cuban territorial waters.

  My mother and I watched from the steps to the cabin, unsure about whether to stay outside in support of their efforts, or inside, where it was murky but safer. My mother’s hair danced in the air, forming a halo not unlike the Virgin of Charity’s, whose wrapped figure was resting in the yacht’s cabin. The emerald-colored suit made her seem like a mermaid poised uneasily out of her element.

  As Johnny and my father navigated the silent sloop, Olinsky sat in the bolted chair from which Johnny and his playboy friends normally hauled in giant swordfish, tenacious mackerel, and even the occasional dolphin or shark. When Johnny, an accomplished sailor, was sure we were on the right path, he grinned from ear to ear with satisfaction, the ashes from his cigar sprinkling his bare chest.

  “Nena, please come help me,” he said all of a sudden. As he rushed past us on the steps, he whistled a merry little tune.

  To my astonishment, my mother followed him below deck, handing me to my father who quickly scooped me up to the warm curve of his shoulder. In a minute, we could hear a rattling from the unlit cabin and Johnny’s relaxed, easy laugh.

  But Enrique, who was always cautiously jealous of others (he had no reason whatsoever to be this way, but always twitched when other men noticed my mother, which was, unfortunately for him, often) simply gazed out past the shadowy waves, past the moonlight to the shivering lights of Havana.

  Olinsky, too, was in his own world, his arms at his sides, but instead of staring back at the irreclaimable island like Enrique, he fixed his enormous eyes on the nothingness off the front of the boat.

  “Alejandra,” my father finally whispered, turning me so I could see what he was seeing. There was a catch in his voice as he rearranged my weight in his arms. “Look, look at the city with me,” he said, although he surely knew that I was too little to understand.

  The breeze was cool, the ocean splashed gently against La Marilyn . As the sloop slid through the water, a triangle of fog hovered just before us. From it emerged a gauzy figure, almost human, holding a bundle in its ghostly arms. Olinsky, oblivious until that moment, turned around and blinked.

  Just then there was a fluttering above the surface: a series of thin white stripes lifted off the water, like spirits dancing back to Havana. The two men glanced at each other nervously. (Years later, when my father would tell the story of our escape from Cuba, this apparition was considerably less sensational. It was, he said, just a herd of clearwing butterflies, nothing more, their white-lined transparent wings vibrating as they made their way to shore.)

  It was at that moment that my father choked from the truth of what we were doing. “When I found Havana, I thought I’d never leave,” he confided with a crack in his voice to Olinsky, whose eyes were glassy and round in the night.

  “Hrrrmmmph,” muttered the old man, who’d had to run from many places: from Warsaw, Prague, Marseilles, and all the little towns in between that he’d seen only from beneath a blanket in the back of a cart, the cracked door of a railroad car, or the deck of a ship.

  “Perhaps she’ll come back someday,” my father whispered, patting my back with his hand as I began to drift off to sleep. He had already resigned himself to his own displacement, as if he’d been waiting all his life for this moment, the fulfillment of prophesy. He thought he could see me many years later, a young woman in American-brand sneakers, hopping to the tarmac at Havana’s airport. But when he tried to conjure my mother and himself behind me—telling me to be careful, or to calm down—the image faded. “Maybe she’ll return, a grown woman, and remember something about this moment. I will tell her . . . I will tell her this story so she remembers it, always.”

  Olinsky snapped out of his stupor, spit into the sea, and wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his guayabera. “Enrich, do not be such a romantic,” the old Pole said. He had just saved the lives of this man and his family and here he was, already nostalgic, already full of regrets! “What matters is to go forward. Stop dwelling on your lost city. Look ahead, man.”

  “There’s nothing ahead, it’s pitch black, a wilderness,” Enrique said listlessly.

  “Then look up, look at the stars,” said Olinsky. He thought if he gave Enrique a task, it might absorb him; he was that kind of man, serious always, and that could perhaps be exploited in a moment like this, before he allowed his sentiments to sweep them all back to Havana. “Find our way north, tell us how long it’ll take us to get there.”

  Enrique shrugged. “The stars are good for distance, not for time,” he said.

  “What?” asked a confused Olinsky.

  “Time measured by the stars is about four minutes less a day than when measured by the sun,” my father said. “It’s called sidereal time. I don’t know, I read it somewhere.” He sighed. Ol
insky shook his head, dismayed.

  Just then a festive Johnny Suro came bounding up the steps from the cabin, my mother behind him. She was carrying a short stack of plastic glasses, laughing, although it was obvious her heart wasn’t in it.

  Johnny did an impromptu dance while vigorously agitating a martini shaker. “Gentlemen,” he said in his hopeful, easy voice as my mother served drinks for everyone, “I am pleased to announce that we are now out of Cuban waters and on an official pleasure cruise.”

  It was the closest Johnny would get to a political speech. It was clear his buoyancy came from the adventure, from knowing the events that were unfolding would make a good tale. For Johnny, Havana and Miami, where he’d vacationed often, were interchangeable because in both places he was essentially the same person: a bon vivant, an athletic and privileged young man with charm and smarts to spare.

  As my father sipped the medicinal drink and my mother put me to sleep below deck, a whistling Johnny kicked the yacht’s motor into gear, turned on its lights, and directed us north.

  Olinsky’s perennially startled eyes stared straight ahead.

  The next day, as we drifted in the measureless blue of the sea— La Marilyn’s motor having developed a problem that had Johnny elbow deep in grease but still whistling—I sat on my mother’s lap, drinking a Coca-Cola from the yacht’s well-stocked icebox. An occasional seagull wafted above us as a sunburned, crack-lipped Olinsky walked the deck, circles of sweat darkening the armpits of his guayabera. All the while, he refused to push up his sleeves, refused to display the blue-green number on his arm.

  “Nenita,” my father said, taking a seat next to my mother on one of the boat’s little padded benches. He had been scrutinizing the uninterrupted water, its sumptuous curve along the horizon, thinking that now he understood how men might have believed that the world could just drop off there, into some infinite abyss. “Every one of those men who came with Columbus must have been utterly desperate. What miserable lives they must have had if this terrible, silent unknown was preferable!”