Telex From Cuba Page 8

  La Mazière smiled. “You’re too busy cavorting with his enemy.” He had his two hands clasped around her thigh, a garter belt of human fingers banding her leg. “If this was Paris, after the”—he paused and made quotes with his fingers—“‘Liberation,’ they’d shave your head, mademoiselle.” He stroked her coarse blond hair with the attention of a hairdresser assessing locks he was about to shear.

  The French women who’d cavorted with Germans couldn’t hide their Nazi trysts any better than their ears, while La Mazière had woven incredible fabrications and spent his jail time in a luxury cell. His labor assignment, organizing the warden’s formal dinner parties. Until a yellow telex arrived, pardoning him after only five years.

  He was grabbing locks of Rachel K’s hair and running them through his fingers, pulling firmly at her scalp.

  “Friendliness is a service,” he said. “Of course. You need privacy. Ease of mobility. People get in the way, don’t they?”

  They really did, she thought. Even Prio. Near the end, he came around too often, and she felt a wearying boredom in having to keep fixing herself into the same persona, something familiar and consistent he could recognize.

  “Friendship,” La Mazière said, tugging her hair to angle her face toward his, “is a barbaric concept.”

  He was looking at her, and she had the funny feeling that if time and everyone suspended in its viscous grip were just then frozen, only the two of them would be left as they were, sentient and unfrozen.

  “What do you like to do,” he asked, “besides paint your legs?”

  All men at the Tokio asked this. What do you like? It was part of the tête-à-tête of her profession, but what the men wanted was something from a limited variety of set responses: I like pleasing you. I like squirming on your lap. I like being coquettish and slutty. Giggly and deferent. I like to fantasize about a man just like you watching me take my clothes off. I think about it when I’m alone, and I have to put my own little girl hands in my underwear, just to stop the longing to be on your lap. Gullibility was beside the point: hearing these things was a performance the men were paying for. They didn’t really want to know what she liked, and it never would have occurred to her to tell them. But she figured that the Frenchman, with his bemused half smile, was too clever to want such an obvious put-on. He seemed to understand flirtation—real flirtation, and not a bluntly performed simulation of it. She suspected that if she said “I like squirming on your lap” he’d laugh his head off, and at her expense.

  “I like those few days of the year when it’s cold here, at the end of hurricane season,” she said. “It’s cold enough you need a sweater. And at night, blankets. But I don’t fall asleep with blankets over me. I leave them down at the end of the bed and make myself fall asleep uncovered. When I wake up later in the night, freezing cold, I reach down and pull up all the blankets.”

  La Mazière pictured her making herself fall asleep cold and uncovered in order to feel warmth with more intensity. He couldn’t help but imagine being the warm body that smothered this petite girl, cold and naked, on a mattress. Though he didn’t want to be just the warmth, he realized, but the cold as well. What preceded, in this fantasy, was him stripping the bed and leaving her shivering in nothing. Maybe underwear. Him making her cold, and then warm.

  He looked at her face, so obviously middle European. “I think you should tell me your story,” he said. Not that he didn’t believe the orphaned-at-a-burlesque-club tale, but he wanted something else. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted a made-up story or a true story, or even what the difference was. People talked about character, a defining sort of substance. But deception was a substance as well, as relevant and admirable as what it concealed. If it concealed anything, that is.

  “Okay here’s a story,” she said. “A man named Ferdinand K came over from France. He worked in cinema, met a girl named Irene, my grandmother. They had a baby—my mother—the nothing. Then they both dropped dead of venereal diseases. My mother, the orphan, was a street urchin. I don’t know who my father is. I told you the rest of it already.”

  “You’ve told me circumstances. Not story.”

  “Okay, fine. Maybe you should tell me your story,” she said, catching his eye through the tinted lenses, “Ambassador.”

  He smiled as if to say, No problem. Watch me give you nothing. “I’m Christian de La Mazière. And okay, I’m not an ambassador.” He paused. “I’m a journalist.”

  “You’re lying,” she said.

  “There is that possibility.”

  “And you know what else? I have a feeling you dismiss lowly ‘circumstances’ because you’re not willing to cough up your own story.”

  “Why should I divulge what is meaningless?” he said. “A banal dossier of ‘this was my grandfather, I was steered into this or that profession.’ My existence is free of those tedious things.”

  “I bet the opposite is true. I bet your ‘tedious’ past is a prison.”

  “It isn’t a prison,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  If only it were tedious, he thought, but didn’t say out loud. If only.

  In fact it was sordid and remarkable to have been an incidental SS. Left with no war, no army, no country, only floating memories of medals and Maxim’s and going to fight the Bolsheviks, thinking Fascism was better than Stalin and that he was fighting for heritage and class, and then knowing that he wasn’t. That it had nothing to do with politics or ideals, only passion. Of course, there were some with ideals. Not him. Even if he had conviction—you might call it rare—the conviction to enlist at the Hotel Majestic on a stifling, hot August day in 1944, hours before the Allies rolled in. He’d explained his story as best he could in his memoir The Helmeted Dreamer, making his way, chapter by chapter, through the reasonings and events of his life like rows of a shark’s teeth. When the memoir came out he garnered instant cachet, coeds and housewives practically lining up to sleep with a remorseful former Nazi. Overtures to which he responded with special gratitude, though these engagements were marked by a poignant and troubling intimacy.

  Why he enlisted, he still wasn’t sure. He had tried to explain his Huguenot and royalist heritage, a fight against cowardly defeat, against so-called Allies who murdered thirteen hundred French sailors at Mers el-Kábir, in one devastating blow. The impression that the German Army made on a demoralized country and its disheveled, ruined military. The thrill of German boys loitering in the lobby of the Ritz, their muscles pressing up against the perfectly creased fabric of their well-fitting uniforms, anxious to polish his boots. But how to make people understand what had really been at stake? The magnificent glimmer of a traumschloss—a dream castle—and the dream of a glorious Europe. Two great nations, France and Germany, flowing into one historic river, heirs to the rule of Charlemagne. And there was pride, the issue of pride. Rather than manufacture a despicable fiction about having worked all along for the Resistance, he’d chosen honor. The women, especially, were sympathetic to this reasoning. Women always preferred bravery to cowardice, regardless of politics or ethics.

  In the end, these reasons, even reason itself, were beside the point. It had been a pure sacrifice, empty of reasons. A bigger, more grand self-erasure. On his way to enlist on that hot August day, the war already lost, he saw people shuttling into the Velodrome. He won’t deny that he saw them being led inside. He was a helmeted dreamer who waited in a German uniform while Marshal Pétain, their “brave leader” of a crumbling Vichy regime, dozed in his chambers. Pétain in his kepi with the scrambled eggs braid, who refused to see them, the few who were ready to keep going, the only people—correction, the only person—with the conviction to fight to lose, to test nothing but extremes. They all caved, and Pétain slept in his kepi with the scrambled eggs braid.

  He was a man who had to go it alone, fight with conviction and for nothing, a dream castle, with men who didn’t speak his language. The only one who didn’t cave.

  And so here he was, at a burlesque club bel
ow the Tropic of Cancer, in a damp city where dreams were marbled with nothingness.

  She’d disappeared. He was so lost in thought he hadn’t noticed.

  It was time for her show. The blue lights flipped on.

  “Introducing, from Paris, zazou dancer Rachel K!”

  5

  Her mother said it was an insurance policy: Dubuque hams, specially ordered from their Oak Ridge grocer. A just-in-case because the native food might be inedible. Seven bulky teardrop cans that Everly and her sisters had to wedge their feet between in the backseat of the Studebaker for the past three days as they made their way across the length of the island. An eighth ham, which they’d opened, was in a cooler of ice that Duffy propped her legs on as she drew faces on Scribbles. Erased them with a special sponge and drew on new ones.

  They stopped at an Esso station. Marjorie Lederer handed out sandwiches she’d made in their hotel room that morning in Santa Clara, having found a store that sold American things, white bread and mustard to go with the ham.

  “Does ham come from Hamburg?” Everly asked.

  No one replied.

  “Will we be taking a tram?” She knew they weren’t taking a tram. She liked the word. It looked, on paper, like it should have something on the end of it. A b, maybe. Tramb.

  She sensed there was a new policy in the car, of the adults not answering her questions. If they were going to ignore her, she would ask whatever she felt like asking.

  “Is it ‘morbid’ if I think about other people dying, or only myself?”

  “If a person had a face like Scribbles, would she be a brand-new person every time her face got erased and redrawn? Or would she only be tricking people into thinking she was new?”

  Duffy was putting eyelashes on Scribbles, swoopy and outsized like the legs of a tarantula. Even after you were dead, Everly thought, you were trapped in your own face. That is, if anyone had taken photographs of you, which was likely. What if she could change her face and not be permanently trapped in the one she was born with? Or just erase her features? When Scribbles’s face was blank, you really could not tell what she was thinking. Surely there were advantages to being able to make your face occasionally blank, erase it and go around like that.

  As they were getting gasoline, a man approached the car carrying a basket covered with cloths.

  “Americanos! Vende Puffs!” he called. “Hot puffs! Carne o guayaba! Meat or jam!”

  George Lederer said no gracias.

  “Puffs! Hot puffs!”

  A Cuban father waiting at the other gasoline pump bought some and handed them to his children in the backseat.

  “I want a hot puff,” Everly said. “A meat one.”

  She was given a ham sandwich, which seemed plain and ordinary and did not belong. A familiar thing you didn’t want to see at a gas station somewhere in Cuba, electric green all around. You wanted to eat a puff, whatever it was. A hot puff. Meat or jam, they both sounded good.

  Her father drove and her mother navigated. There were tall palm trees along the road, and in the folds between the green hills, clusters of funny little shacks. They looked like yellow jacket hives, molded clumps of mud and leaves. Everly asked if people lived in them. Her father said they did, that they were native huts. That’s how the Cubans live, he said, in huts.

  There were fewer huts, and mostly sugarcane fields, when they had to stop because a river was rushing over the road.

  Her father turned off the car, and everyone sat quietly, waiting as he tried to figure out what they should do. They heard animal hooves, a Cuban family in a horse-drawn wagon. The horse stalled when he reached the water, but the driver whipped him to keep going. The horse stepped slowly into the water, deeper and deeper, dragging the wagon after it, until the wheels were three-quarters submerged.

  Two men were working on the side of the road, hitting a fence post with a large rock. Each wore the straw hats that all the men, once they’d left Havana, seemed to wear. Her father walked over to them. They listened as he communicated with hand gestures and broken sentences.

  He said “Auto,” and pointed at the car.

  He said “Water,” making a wavelike hand motion. “Is it possible to cross?”

  One of them nodded. “Sí, sí.”

  Her father smiled cheerfully, as he and one of the Cubans walked toward the car. He announced that the nice man had offered to guide it across for them.

  “George, this person cannot drive our car,” Marjorie Lederer said. “I won’t allow it.”

  George Lederer was in charge of everything, but he had to be in charge exactly her mother’s way.

  “This man,” her mother said, “cannot even speak English.”

  The man took off his hat, wiped his forehead on his shirtsleeve, and smiled politely at Marjorie Lederer.

  “He doesn’t even understand me! And this is the person you’re giving our car keys to?”

  “Dear, these men are locals,” George Lederer said, “and I think it might be worth—”

  “It might be worth what?”

  “Letting them help us, dear.”

  “Fine.” Marjorie Lederer opened her door and announced to the girls that their father was figuring this one out on his own while she sat in the bar just up the road. Anyone who wanted to come could come. Everly and her sisters got out and followed her.

  George Lederer was always talking to strangers, which irritated and embarrassed Everly’s mother. Everly could tell when other people didn’t feel like chatting. Her father kept on anyway, talking to strangers in line at the bank or the bakery, telling them his name, what type of work he did, what he was buying or sending or depositing. “Sending this to Cuba,” he’d said to a woman behind him in line at the Oak Ridge post office, pointing to the address on the package he was carrying. “The whole family is moving there.” At the Oak Ridge bakery, he told stories to the people in line. “Grandma Lederer was a baker—right, Everly? She lives in St. Louis. She’s retired now, but she ran a bakery downtown. I worked there as a child. She and my father made cheesecakes in flat, rectangular pans that were too big to fit on the shelves. They put the cakes on the floor to cool. One night, when I was very small, probably six years old, I got out of bed to get a drink of water. It was dark and I didn’t see the cake on the floor and I stepped in it.” He could go on and on this way. It was embarrassing, but when her mother scolded her father, it made Everly want to try not to be embarrassed by him.

  The bar was open-air, covered by a palm-leaf roof. Everly’s mother ordered drinks, and the bartender lined up four ice-filled glasses, poured lemonade into them, and trickled red syrup over. It sifted down among the cubes in the glasses like a red dye. As they sipped their red lemonade, rain began to patter on the bar’s thatched roof, making a gentle, creaking sound like water hitting a wicker basket.

  The man spoke some English, and he asked her mother where they were from and where they were going.

  “You arrive in Cuba,” he said, “just in time for el golpe.”

  Her mother asked what he meant.

  “The change in the government, señora. A week ago. It was, how you say, con mucha fuerza. President Prio, he is no more presidente. He’s left to Miami, in un hotel lindo. Batista, el dictador, el general, he is presidente now. But with no vote. You did not hear?”

  Her mother said no, no one had mentioned it in Havana. Had it been announced?

  Yes, of course, he said, but everything was back to normal now. “For one whole day the radio station plays only music. The next day, they make the announcement. But maybe it was not in the American papers.”

  Everly’s mother said it might have been, but she hadn’t had time to read a newspaper since they’d arrived. They’d left Havana immediately and had been on the road for the past few days, navigating maps and trying to get three children and twenty-one suitcases and a Studebaker all the way to Nicaro.

  “And hams,” Duffy said. “We have seven hams!”

  “Eight,” Everly said
.

  “We have eight hams!”

  They had turned around and were taking another route on account of the washed-out road. To Preston, the United Fruit town across the channel, where a boat could take them to Nicaro.

  “There was a golpe!” Duffy said.

  “What’s a golpe?” George Lederer asked.

  “I was getting to that,” their mother said, explaining that it was something the bartender mentioned. Some sort of major Cuban political event had occurred, and the old president had gone to Miami and was now apparently staying at a place called the Hotel Lindo, which was probably a heck of a lot nicer than the fleabag where the Lederers had stayed. The way the bartender had explained it, it hadn’t made much sense. Something about them playing only music on the radio station, and now everything was back to normal. But what if there was trouble?

  George Lederer said he was pretty sure there wasn’t any trouble, that the American government would never have asked twenty-six men and their families to move to a place that wasn’t stable.

  She said she hoped he was right. But that she planned to look up this word “golpe” as soon as they got to Nicaro.

  “Golpe!” Duffy shouted.

  “Golpe! Golpe! Golpe!”

  “Okay, Duffy,” they said, “that’s enough.”

  6

  Del and I had just caught a hammerhead shark, and we were down on the dock cleaning it with cleavers when we first met the Allains. This was in the summer of 1951. That shark bled like a slaughterhouse cow. We’d caught him with a hand line, right off the pier in Preston. When he struck the line he almost snapped it. I figured we’d cut him loose, have the novelty of being able to say a shark bit our line. But Del starts struggling with the line, barking orders at me to hold on and slacken, pull and slacken. I couldn’t believe he actually thought we could catch that thing, or that it was worth trying. “Del, there’s no way—he’ll drag us in,” I said. But Del wasn’t listening. He was leaning against the line so hard I was sure it would break, frantically coiling it to one of the anchors on the dock as if nothing else in the world mattered. I didn’t think there was the slimmest chance we could catch the shark, but I did what he told me.