Kantika, page 14
The plot will be on the grounds of the Cementiri de les Corts but its own separate thing—a sunken space, almost like a sunken garden, not large but ample enough for perhaps one hundred graves if laid out cleverly. It is a start. They will need a water source, a small sink, a walled enclosure. Their own door in the wall, from the street. The city will provide some funds, along with the families of the deceased. The Joint Distribution Committee will chip in, too. Though the rules forbid a kohen from entering a cemetery or tending to the dead beyond his own family (as a boy, Alberto wasn’t even allowed under the trees outside the cemetery fence, since they shaded the graves on the other side), there are exceptions if there’s no one else to manage the burial, as will surely be the case for some of the people here.
O Lord, make me know my end and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting I am. The soil is rich, as befits a place that’s nourished by the dead. A few shrubs might be permitted, and a fruit tree if there’s room, to draw the birds. On his last visit to Les Corts, he’d spotted a flock of parrots chattering from a nearby plane tree, escaped pets, perhaps, turned wild now, or maybe even native to these parts. He welcomes the thought of a splash of color in the form of these clever, garish birds peering down at him, or what remains of him. Superstition holds that it’s better to call a cemetery beit hahayim, house of the living, than beit kevorot, house of the graves. So. House of the living. Here, a yellow wing, there a cobalt flight feather, the stony overbite of beak, and at night the birds will huddle together in the branches, old kings in velvet cloaks.
It could almost make you look forward to being dead.
* * *
HE MUST NOT HAVE NOTICED that as he was clearing his garden of stray sticks, the camera was switched on and following him. It is not until some months later, in a high-ceilinged room at Barcelona’s Ministry of Culture, that he attends the screening and sees the finished silent film. Los judíos de patria española is a deeply strange affair, from its opening shot of Giménez Caballero in woolen pantaloons on a rooftop with a camera, to the fat, bearded rabbi on a brass bed in the Balkans, to a man slitting the throat of a hen and another moving along a row of seated women, examining their teeth. People walk through the tumbled streets of the old Juderías of Toledo, Córdoba and Sevilla—the last a place where actual Jewish almond paste makers now live!
Then there’s Alberto (a tottering little fellow in a cardigan; he looks so old, so small) on the front steps of the building with Josef and shuffling around the garden, broken pots in the periphery, a plant in an urn, a decaying shutter. Half the time, his head is chopped off by a camera he ignores. He used to consider himself handsome and took care with his physical appearance, and though he has been vaguely aware of having let himself go, the film is a rude reminder—and now a record for all the world to see.
Then Rebecca and Elsa fill the screen, and Josef, and the little boys. Everyone is moving but jerkily; they might be puppets in a plotless play. And then the film (that’s it?) leaves behind the assemblage—a flesh-and-blood Jewish family in Barcelona!—to comment on the “authentic Sephardic features” of a young writer in Madrid and proceed to this politician, that diplomat. You’d think the whole of Spain was devoted to this little cause. Here is Señor Ángel Pulido, who might indeed—though years have passed and the film is grainy so it’s hard to tell—be the man they met at the embassy in Büyükdere. “Our motto must be, once again,” proclaims the final subtitle, “Spaniard, return to where you once lived!”
The film ends fourteen minutes after it began, leaving Alberto with a headache and dry mouth. Rebecca and Elsa had wanted to come to the screening, but the invitation had been for only two people and Sultana loves a party. I’m taking your mother. A date for the two of them. The children and grandchildren had applauded when the elders left the house dressed for a rare night on the town, but now Alberto wishes he’d sent a daughter in his stead. After a smattering of polite applause, the audience files out into the antechamber, and Alberto is paraded around the room by Giménez Caballero. Sultana, in a pale blue silk dress made by Rebecca, chats easily with the wives, and it’s almost like the old days, servers with wine and canapés, the twinkling of a chandelier, the upper crust, except that he feels distressingly out of place, like a curiosity at the Constantinople Museum of Natural History, which boasts such anomalies as a two-headed baby and a goat with seven legs.
“We are honored to have in our midst this evening a few local Jews, subjects from our little film,” proclaims Giménez Caballero, who will become a Fascist and get sent off to a low-profile diplomatic post in Paraguay, but not before attempting unsuccessfully to Catholicize the Führer and strengthen Spain by marrying off Pilar Primo de Rivera to Hitler.
Meet Señor Alberto Cohen, our esteemed local rabbi, says Giménez Caballero now, with no apparent irony. Alberto glimpses his wife, out of earshot on the far side of the room, her posture dignified, her white hair glowing, and even the love he feels for her is painful. A large gentleman with a mustache extends a hand: Rabbi Cohen, so very pleased to meet you.
Encantado, señor.
Alberto could set the record straight, or he could not.
Barcelona, 1934
15 January 1934
The Bronx, New York
Kerida Rebecca,
I write only to you, to let you think on this first, with an idea that Israel and I hope you will consider. Even after four years, the sorrow of Rahelika’s passing is a dark cloud over us here, as I know it must still be for you as well. Even harder is to watch her little motherless girl, Fanny Luna. The child, as you may remember, was born early with some resulting health troubles but has a strong spirit and loving temperament. Her father, Samuel (Sam) Levy, is her greatest champion. I’ve never seen a father so devoted to a child. Sam is a good man, honest and hardworking. They live in Astoria, a section of New York not too far from the Bronx, where we are. Sam has a candy and newspaper shop that’s doing better than most things around here—I guess people always need the news, and sweets to sugarcoat it! Sam’s mother (also named Fanny) looks after Luna, which is what they call the little girl, who must be six or seven years old. The child is impeccably dressed, with ribbons in her hair, and doted on.
But to come to my point: Sam needs a wife and you need a husband, and your sons need a father and Luna a mother. Being married to a United States citizen, which Sam already is, would be a sure way to get you to America. Our efforts to bring the whole family over at once are going nowhere. We go every few months to the Turkish Consulate, and we tried the Spanish one, but we get turned away. They’re not letting in Turks, and, as you know, even your sons are listed as Hebrew/Turkish on their papers. How to bring you over is increasingly on our minds when we read about what is happening in Europe. Israel follows it closely and says that even if Spain is safe for the moment, there is general unrest and factions among the people, to say nothing of what is happening in Germany, especially for the Jews. I don’t know what you’ve seen, Rebecca, but he showed me an article about a Spanish poster, widely distributed over there, that called Jews a sinister force, along with Bolsheviks and Freemasons. In short, it seems like the tide is turning and could really turn.
Here is our thinking: If you approve of Sam Levy upon meeting him, you marry him, gaining a husband and a father for your sons and giving Luna a mother in you, which I feel sure would have been Lika’s strongest wish. You would marry in Cuba so you could gain entrance to America as Sam’s wife, but that’s simple to do, and the perfect place for a honeymoon. Sam even has a cousin in Havana who can perform the ceremony, and I can tell you which sights to see. Once you’re settled in America, we’ll have a stronger argument to bring the rest of the family.
If you’ll consider this idea, send me a recent photograph of you and the boys. I enclose one of Sam so you have something to picture. I think you’ll agree that he is a good-looking man and looks wise, despite his youth. In real life, he does not look so swarthy as in the picture, and he speaks good English and seems quite American. He knows of our little plot and is open to considering it because of your bond with Lika, his friendship with Israel and me, and his undying love for his little daughter. He says that, being Lika’s cousin, he even met you a few times at home—do you remember it? You must have made a good impression—you were always the prettiest girl in the room. If you won’t consider this plan, I will of course respect your decision, though I’ll worry that you’re not getting a bird’s-eye view. Israel is gifted at that, as you can see from when he got us out of Turkey, a move I cannot regret, though I regret our family scattered to the winds.
Shalom, tu hermana Corinne
AS SHE PREPARES TO LEAVE the apartment on a chilly morning by Barcelona standards in late January, Rebecca finds the letter facedown on the floor beneath the mail slot. Setting out for work—she has her own atelier now and employs five girls—she fishes a crochet needle from her purse and uses it to slit open the envelope, then stops on the sidewalk to scan the letter and squint at the photograph while the morning crowd flows past. Rahelika’s husband? That she should marry him? If her sister had sent a picture of Clark Gable as a potential spouse, she could not have been more astonished. On the page, the word marido looks foreign, in need of translation, despite being written in Corinne’s hand. In her flustered state, Rebecca loses her grip on the crochet needle and watches it fly, a silver arrow, into the street, where it is run over by a bicycle, surely a portent of bad luck.
The news of Lika’s death in childbirth four years prior had also reached her in a letter from Corinne, the irreality of the event compounded by the actual distance so that her grief had felt trapped and muffled, which both intensified it and made it somehow easy to ignore. By that point, it had been many years since she had seen Lika. At first, they had regularly exchanged letters, but after she learned from Corinne that Lika lost her first baby, a boy, most of Rebecca’s letters went unanswered until the correspondence slowly, painfully, petered out. When, in the years before her friend’s death, she heard news of Lika, it was usually from Corinne, who seemed to have replaced her as Lika’s best friend. Then Lika died, terribly, while giving birth to a baby girl who perished, too, leaving the one surviving middle child—also a girl, Samuel Levy’s little daughter, Luna—motherless.
She finishes reading and returns the letter and photograph to the envelope, slipping them into her coat pocket, where they burn a hole. If you’ll consider this idea. On she walks, looking like … what? A woman. A Spaniard. A woman walking to work or (for she makes a point of dressing like a lady who doesn’t have to work) on her way to meet a friend at the museum. Her employees arrive at nine, and she has the only key and should not linger, but as she waits to cross the street a few blocks from the atelier, she fishes out the envelope again. The man in the photograph is no movie star, his chin a little weak and jawline soft, but he is handsome enough, with a thoughtful air about him, and well dressed. Poor fellow, she thinks, to have lost his wife—her friend, his cousin—and two infants and been left to care for a motherless girl. His expression is inscrutable, but everything in the image—hair, shoulders, ears, even the nap of his suit—seems tilted slightly backward, as if tethered to the past by invisible strings.
At work, she hangs her coat on its hook by her station, the one with the nicest machine, and transfers the envelope to her apron pocket. In and out it goes as the day wears on, in a rhythm not unlike the start and stop of the sewing machines. She supervises her workers, takes orders, butters up a fat old señora with a creamy young throat who wants an evening gown in green brocade (don’t lie to them, exactly, she tells the girls. Just find something good to say). At lunch, she reads the letter again, and once more after the girls go home.
As she starts to lock up, she begins to absorb the bigger picture. (But what do Corinne and Israel know from so far away?) They want her to come to America, but without the rest of the family. It seems like the tide is turning and could really turn. It is true, there have been some incidents in the city—a bombing in December in which some people were hurt, strikes and unrest in the streets. Her landlord at the atelier recently installed grilles on the ground-floor windows and doors to protect against nighttime marauders, and the shopgirls regularly gossip about relatives feuding over politics and sometimes even argue among themselves, but Rebecca has never roamed the streets after dark and hadn’t thought the wider canvas would have much bearing on her family, as long as they kept to themselves. Now, though, as she lowers and locks the grille, a sliver of fear enters her, and she scans the street for trouble, finding none (a cat threads along the sidewalk, a lady holds a toddler by the hand). Has she been stupid, keeping her head down, not reading the newspaper? Might her reaction to her father’s pessimism—it galls her, casting a shadow over everything—have caused her to put blinders on?
By the time she gets home, dusk falling, she has nearly memo- rized her sister’s words, and it feels like days, weeks, have passed since the morning, so that it does not occur to her to delay sharing the letter’s contents with her parents. She delivers the news in the kitchen—you won’t believe the letter I got from Corinne!—before she even greets her sons, who are visible through the window, playing in the garden in the dying light.
“I’m glad she finally wrote to you,” Sultana blurts, then clamps her hand over her mouth.
“What, Mama? You knew about this?” Rebecca asks, newly incredulous. “Why did she pretend to ask me first? She said ‘only for me.’ She lied!”
“Lied is a strong word,” Sultana says. “Maybe she hoped to give you time to think it over before discussing it with us.”
“But she’d already written you behind my back! Why would she do that? Why didn’t you say something? I’m not a chess piece you can move around at will.”
“Nobody thinks that.” Her father speaks into his wineglass.
“But you knew? You wanted her to ask me this? Is that what you want? To send me away?” She tries to sound angry, but the hurt breaks through. “To get rid of me?”
Her father looks up at her with his watery eyes. “Don’t ever say that. We want to be together, all of us. But we also want our children to have a future, and for our grandchildren to grow up safe and not feel ashamed.”
Rebecca circles the kitchen table, pounding the tiles, though her feet throb from her day at work. Outside, her sons are giving each other wheelbarrow rides along the garden path. They are flushed and laughing in the dusk, wearing matching blue peacoats she designed and had one of her workers stitch, and red caps knitted by her mother.
“Look at them.” She points at the window. “Look. These are happy children. Loved. So maybe their life isn’t perfect, but whose is?”
“It could be worse,” her father agrees. “But that’s part of what concerns us—where we’re heading.”
“What do you mean? What’s happening? Do you know something, Papa? Will there be a war?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know the ins and outs here. I try to stay abreast, but it’s not my country. But I know this is no life for your children. They don’t know who they are, they have to hide. They’re not in school. David is seven years old and still can’t read a word. Do you want your sons to grow up to be illiterate dummies with dead-end jobs, like their—”
“Alberto,” Sultana cuts in. “Doucement. She’s doing her best for them, she works so hard—”
“I’ll find them a school,” Rebecca says.
She’d tried that fall to send David to a neighborhood charity school, but the director gave her trouble because he had no baptism certificate and then, when the school agreed to make an exception, traumatized her son with strict rules and a statue of Jesus as a bloody dead man, naked but for the scrap of cloth around his waist. For punishment, the children had to kneel in front of the statue and beg forgiveness, a fate that befell David when he bolted for home a few weeks into the school year. After that, Rebecca decided he’d be taught by her father at home, but the boy was fidgety and sensitive to slights, and Alberto often lost his temper, and her mother had too much on her hands to take on the role.
“There must be a better school for them,” she says. “It’s all right if it’s Catholic as long as it’s friendly. You know how much I loved Sion. I can pay some fees now if it’s not too much, or get them scholarships. I’ll start looking tomorrow. I’ll ask my clients.”
“It’s not just about school,” her father says. “This isn’t a nice place for us, and it’s not a stable country. For people like us, America has fewer ghosts.”
“So why did you bring us here?” Rebecca asks hotly. “I suggested New York—I’d have gone in a second and been with Rahelika and Corinne. I never wanted to come, but I won’t be forced out or … or leave without you. I’m calling in my sons for supper, then I’ll give them their bath. Don’t try to help, Mama. I want time with my children.”
As she pushes back her chair, her mother whispers something in her father’s ear, and he raises his hand like a schoolboy waiting to be called on.
“Ke?” Rebecca asks.
“I just—” He clears his throat. “I wrote to Israel and Corinne. I’m the one who started this, just to look into it, to ask about possibilities. They can’t get us all in, not now, but I thought maybe you and the children, if you could marry an American, and then we’d be in a better position to see about the rest. It was Corinne who came up with the idea of this Samuel Levy. We’d like for you to be married, Rebecca, to not have to work so hard. To have a friend, a companion for your days. You know I also had a difficult first marriage, but then God brought me your mother, the great blessing of my life.”
