Cubop City Blues Read online

  CORNELIA’S STORY

  Loss is my secret name. In the war I lost the land that had been in my family since the days of the empire. I lost my husband and children. I lost my dignity the way women do at the hands of victorious soldiers. I resisted at first, but they beat me until my mouth bled and there was a constant ringing in my ear. The ringing drowned out the moans of the soldiers. After the third one I felt nothing. When the fifth came along, I helped him unbuckle his pants. He was very young and nervous and had never been with a woman. A captain appeared and put a stop to the affair, threatening to shoot the next man who came close to me.

  Out of habit more than hygiene, I washed myself and found a dress in the clothes chest the Germans had not stolen, a white dress with violet trim that smelled of mothballs. My husband gave it to me for our tenth anniversary. His secret name was give, my children his greatest gift. I thought maybe the future would bring a life outside the nightmare. Perhaps the nightmare was all anyone had a right to expect and life in it was better than no life at all.

  The next day I cleaned the house and the garden, what was left of it, and hired a girl from the village to help me. I promised her a salary as soon as money came my way. The soldiers had not touched the stables, and there were several saddles and reins I could sell and a good anvil and forging tools the village blacksmith would pay for, even if it was in next-to-worthless pengös. The village girl loved getting those pieces of colored paper. I counted them out on her palm and she folded them and put them inside her dress, an awful green dress.

  That afternoon the German officer returned and apologized for all his men did to me. He said war turns men into beasts, as if that excused them. He asked if there was anything I needed. I told him I had no food, and the next day the captain’s adjutant appeared with potatoes, onions, and flour, followed by tea, tobacco, and brandy the day after. Toward the end of the week the captain himself came and he brought a large kolbász. I wanted to take that kolbász from his hand and bite into it right away, but I controlled myself and asked him in. Hunger drove me, nothing else. Right then the captain was my savior. I served him some tea with a touch of brandy, along with the kolbász and slices of peasant bread the village girl had baked. He spoke of the war. I listened, not caring much what he said, and ate the sausage and the bread, trying to be decorous. He was from Stuttgart, an engineer by training. He worked for Mercedes-Benz. When he left at dusk he took my hand, bowing toward it as if to kiss it. I pulled it away. With my stomach full I had the luxury of hating him. Yet, at the same time, I recognized in him a certain grace, which predated the war to a time when such behavior was the norm. The captain was an educated man. I missed educated people and found myself hoping he would return.

  That he did, every afternoon. My loneliness was greater than my rage. We spoke about literature and music and my years studying in Germany. He spoke of his wife and children and I told him how my husband and sons were killed when a German plane bombed the train they were on. He was very sorry and tried to console me. He mused about the sadness of war, the distances it made, the chasms it created. He seemed wistful. I thought he must be a terrible soldier. Once soldiers kill, they keep killing. I’ve seen it. This captain wasn’t like that. He was tormented. I couldn’t hate him.

  I changed the conversation and recited a poem by Heine. He mocked my Hungarian accent and we laughed—rare thing then, to laugh. He asked if he could kiss me and I said yes and responded more ardently than I would have imagined a week before. He asked if we could make love. His words were not those of an officer in the German army but of a man tired of slaughter and longing. I was destitute and desperate for kindness. I whispered yes—igen—and then in German—ja. I took him by the hand—he had long, elegant fingers—and led him to the bedroom, where we made love as people in a war make love, knowing only the present and promising each other nothing.

  One day the captain stopped coming and the Germans withdrew, driven away by the Russians. They came in a large wave of conquering they called liberation. They parceled out my land among the peasants. They gave them flags to wave and hymns to sing and told them it was their turn now—the dictatorship of the proletariat—and the peasants were happy even though they didn’t know what that meant. Worse than the Germans they were, dirty Cossacks. They shat everywhere, in my garden, whatever was left of it, on the fields the Germans had destroyed, in back of the house by the well, even on the porch. I went to see the Russian officers and pleaded with them to build latrines. The accumulation of the feces of five thousand men is something to be reckoned with. Despite the latrines, my land, or what had been my land, and the village, or what had been the village, began to resemble hell. This is the dictatorship of defecation, I told the Russian officers, in Hungarian, of course, so they wouldn’t understand.

  Someone in the village informed the Russians of the captain’s visits and charged me with collaboration. The Russians sat complacently in my chairs and heard me defend myself. I asked them to speak to a family of Jews that had survived in the village. I’d given them food and found them a barn where they could hide. They vouched for me. The Jews were sent east and were never heard from. I was left alone for the time being. I was allowed a room in the back of the house, which I left only to retrieve the remnants of vegetables that grew in the garden and the scraps of food the village girl passed on to me when the Russians were asleep or drunk on their vodka.

  The Russians raped me, too, but by then I was smart enough to negotiate. When one of them, a lanky fellow with an empty look in his eye, wanted me to fellate him, I asked for a bottle of vodka, which I could trade for food. He agreed but when he was done he gave me only half a liter. I took a swig, swirled it in my mouth, and spit it out. At that moment I decided I would leave my house and my country and never return, no matter what I found elsewhere. The next day, at first light, I packed a valise with some clothes and jewelry I had hidden away under the floorboards, and walked out to the main road. No one stopped me.

  In those days following the war, entire populations were moving. The city dwellers who’d been displaced to the countryside were wandering back to the cities, only to find ruins. The country folk returning to their farms found them overgrown and fallow, their houses pilfered for wood, their orchards cut down or trampled. I saw empty towns, empty faces, a man without shoes crawling on hands and knees, women lying on the side of the road, too tired to take another step, an awful look in their eyes, and a pack of hungry dogs circling around them. I saw columns of Russian soldiers going in one direction and columns of American soldiers going the opposite way. The Americans waved and smiled and offered chewing gum. So this is victory, I thought.

  I was in Vienna for two months, almost starving amid the defeat of a beautiful city, and from there I went to Paris. From Paris I traveled to Lisbon and from Lisbon by boat to Havana. I survived by taking on lovers, of which I had plenty—brutes, dandies, intellectuals, idiots, savants, dullards, men of substance, wispy men, one assassin that I knew of, one potential saint, several homosexuals, and three women of different ages. Some might say I was a kept woman, but I never stayed anywhere long enough to earn that title. In Havana I found a mason. He had rough hands and an eager heart. I was as unstable as a sand dune blown by the wind, and soon I abandoned the mason for a politician. Like all his breed the politician was a chameleon, changing color to suit his circumstance, wanting money more than votes and power more than money. Most of all he longed for approval. He was in love with me as he was in love with several other women, including his wife, and never doubted the legitimacy of his love or the constancy of his multiple affections. My affair with him might have gone on forever, even into old age, but one day he found himself pursued by enemies intent on his elimination. He escaped into exile in the United States with his wife and three daughters and a suitcase full of cash.

  One of the last things the politician did before leaving was get me a job teaching philosophy at the university.
It was there I met Vicente Iriarte, the anatomy professor, early in the first term. He was a pale man with thinning black hair that he combed straight back and held down with pomade. Out of his nostrils grew tufts of nose hairs and on his face was a permanent five-o’clock shadow that gave him the appearance of a sinister cobbler. But Vicente was a jovial and cultured man who could recite Schiller in German and sing Italian arias in our bedroom. His large belly bounced when he laughed, which he did loudly and often. His laughter was the perfect antidote to the dark moods I had dragged from Europe like a chain of misery around my neck.

  After work he would sit in the front porch to catch the afternoon breeze and I would bring him a beer, then go back in to cook for him those casseroles and stews Cubans liked to eat in those days when food was plentiful, as well as Hungarian peasant dishes my mother’s gypsy cooks had taught me—he liked those, too. I learned to please him sexually, rubbing his fantastical belly, then moving my hand down to find his little nub hidden in a nest of pubic hair. Once he got hard I mounted him and rode him until he giggled, laughed, squealed, and came in quick spasmodic jerks of his pelvis. He fell asleep quickly and I took care of myself. It was best that way. I’d reached the age when I knew my body better than any man. All I wanted now was the erasure of the past that I had been seeking all the years after the war, through all the cities I’d passed, people I’d loved or who had loved me. In Havana the darkness dissipated, the glue dissolved. I began inching my way toward hope. No one suffers forever, I told myself, not even Job. I was wrong.

  Off in the mountains there was a rebel army fighting the government, and in the city student groups were leading demonstrations, attacking police barracks and stations, planting bombs in shopping areas. As a professor I was asked to provide funds, hide guns, and give the student leaders passing grades. I refused. Not that I was against their ideals, no. Ideals are good in young minds. I was simply tired of war. My family was dead. My land was gone, my country, or what had been my country, under the heel of the Soviets. The police responded as police everywhere respond—by rounding up suspects, torturing and killing them at random, and dropping their bodies on street corners and parks. I knew how all this would end. I told Vicente but he reassured me that these upheavals were part of life in Cuba. Our society needs cleansing every few years, he said. Things will settle down, the students will go back to their studies, and the unionists will return to work.

  I distracted myself with Vicente and my German students, whom I taught privately at home. I took up sewing and wrote poetry. I could feel the breath of the past on my neck.

  Vicente was mistaken. The revolutionaries triumphed and the country went on a binge of celebration. The university closed its doors and on every street corner were groups of armed men, all young, puffed up with victory. I wanted to leave the country. Vicente was dismissive in his jovial way. You can’t run away every time there’s trouble. It was easy for him to say that. Cuba was his country, not mine. I had no interest in any struggle except self-preservation. I insisted.

  Where would we go? he asked. We were sitting on the front porch. Vicente was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt tucked tightly into his gray pants. The flab of his belly flopped over his belt. He had just taken a shower and his black hair glistened in the late afternoon sunlight. There is no better place than this, he said, moving his arm in front of him in an arcing motion.

  Al norte, I said. The United States was not a place I had thought of living in. It had just occurred to me because so many Cubans were going there at the time.

  What will we do, work in a factory? he said. For once I saw him angry. Sweat was beading on his forehead and the tip of his nose had turned red. He paused to compose himself. No, we stay here.

  I wanted to tell him the victors can do anything they want. I wanted to tell him about all I’d gone through at their hands, but I refrained. Vicente waved me away, laughing. How could he understand? All that mirth made him light-headed. I held my tongue and went inside to make dinner.

  That night after Vicente fell asleep I made the decision to leave as soon as I could. It was difficult to abandon him, but it would be more difficult to stay behind and wait for the tide of loss to swallow me. The following week, when he’d gone downtown to meet a friend, I packed my old leather valise and left a farewell note. There are things that have no solutions, I wrote, and solutions that are worse than the problems they are meant to resolve. I thanked him for his attentions. I did not write the word love.

  I arrived in Cubop City in February, and my tropical clothes, mostly cotton and linen dresses, were inadequate for the weather. I spent fifty dollars on a coat and gloves and rented a room in a residential hotel on the West Side. I knew how to make my money last. Finding a job was easy. I played stupid. I did not list my doctorate in the application, and in two days I was working for a temp agency. It was a job as jobs go and it paid my bills. When someone called the agency asking for a European nanny to care for a blind boy, I volunteered for it immediately. I was, after all, the only European there. I lied that I had plenty of experience in Hungary and Cuba, where I’d served as private tutor for the children of a prominent family. I told my boss I spoke five languages—that was no lie. He was unbelieving; nevertheless he allowed me to go to the interview.

  The couple who interviewed me were Cubans of the old order who expected me to do housecleaning and food preparation and laundry and silver polishing, chores hardly befitting a private tutor. I was about to excuse myself and walk away when the boy appeared in the living room. He walked directly to me, stiff backed and mechanical, and put out his hand for me to shake. His blurred eyes and smeared eyelids startled me, but the delicacy of his voice awakened in me the maternal instinct I had long suppressed. It entered my mind that he would make a good dog. I took the job.

  The mother was a stern woman who spoke in commandments. You will do this, you will not do that. Whatever love existed in her had long ago been burned out. The father turned out to be needier than the son. He was a good, sweet man who tolerated his wife and her infidelity because he didn’t know what else to do. I took him out of loneliness and charity, but he turned out to be a good lover, willing to please me before pleasing himself. He was a teacher and got home before the wife. That allowed us some time together and we made love quietly so as not to disturb the boy in his room. I think he heard us anyway. It was a different matter the few times the father came to my apartment. There we gave vent to our passion. Eventually the wife became suspicious, feigned outrage, and fired me. That same night I had a dream of a black bridge stretching back to Europe. I was sorry to leave the blind boy who was smart and gentle. He moved in and out of happiness and was desperate to know the world. I was sorry to leave the father. I felt pity for him mostly. The mother was a witch who had a love affair with her boss. Her commandments did not apply to her.

  I found myself out of a job and had prospects for none. For weeks I lost track of myself. I would wake in my apartment and not know what I’d done or where I’d been. Sometimes I smelled of liquor and cigarettes; other times of sex. On the bed lingered the scent of strangers. I found piles of unopened bills on the table by the door and food spoiling in the refrigerator. My clothes were scattered on the floor and the bed was a jumble of sheets and pillows. Beyond myself with fear at what I’d done in my amnesia, I called my former lover, the Cuban teacher with the blind son, who gave me the name of a psychiatrist and hung up.

  The suggestion that I needed a psychiatrist struck me as absurd. It was God who needed one, not I. God, the miserly master with the wide buttocks and the huge testicles, sat on his sofa and fanned himself as the world burned. All this time I’d expected him to come down in his mercy machine and make my life tolerable. Life is neither tolerable nor intolerable. It just is; otherwise, I wouldn’t have come to be in that room at that time in this city. I opened the blinds and let the morning light flood in. I surveyed my apartment and thought of fleeing as I’d f
led other disasters, but I didn’t. I showered and put on the last clean dress I owned. Then I cleaned as I’d never cleaned before, even when I was with Vicente and it was my happiness to do so. That simple act did more to bring me back to my senses than all the roaming I’d done and all the lovers I’d had over the years.

  All the money I had was in my purse, enough for breakfast and a newspaper. As I ate, I leafed through the classified ads and found my current job, which I’ve had for fifteen years arranging tours for people who like to visit the world I left behind. They find it quaint, restored to a postcard version of what it once was. They don’t know about the ruins on which that world is built. They don’t know about the hunger or the splinters of souls that litter the ground on which they walk, or about the walking dead, like me, for whom Cubop City is a last resort. We are born again here. We take our first steps. We learn the new language, the rhythms of the days and nights, the hymns of false virtue that keep us in our place, moving nowhere but deeper into ourselves, where a minotaur waits.

  A WHITE BIRD

  CROSSING THE SKY

  Angel didn’t die. Eventually a Good Samaritan passed by, saw his bloody shirt, his bloody belly, his body splayed on the sidewalk against the newspaper box, and called the police. The pedestrian crouched over him, his hand resting softly on Angel’s shoulder until the officers came. Angel didn’t learn the name of the man who saved his life. Now that Angel is healthy, the pedestrian comes to him in dreams; he is sometimes long and lanky, sometimes short and round, holding a cell phone to his ear. Behind him a crowd is pointing and gesticulating in Angel’s direction. The crowd has no faces, only hands and fingers. They don’t bother lowering their voices, and they all speak together, making it impossible for him to make out individual words or the sense of what they’re saying. Rutabaga, watermelon. Even if he could, it wouldn’t much matter. Soon the emergency medical technicians gather around him to work on his wound and the crowd disperses into the night.