Distant Star (6 page)

We would often go to his house, Bibiano and I, a little house near the station that Stein, who was a lecturer at the University of Concepción, had been renting since his student days. There were maps everywhere, more maps than books it seemed. That was the first thing that struck Bibiano and me; we were surprised to see so few books (Diego Soto’s house, by contrast, was like a library). Maps of Chile, Argentina and Peru, maps of the Andes, a road map of Central America that I have never seen anywhere else, published by a Protestant church in North America, maps of Mexico, maps showing the conquest of Mexico and the advance of the Mexican Revolution, maps of France, Spain, Germany and Italy, a map of the English railway system and a map showing train journeys in English literature, maps of Greece and Egypt, Israel and the Middle East, Jerusalem in ancient and modern times, India and Pakistan, Burma and Cambodia, a map of the mountains and rivers of China and one of the Shinto temples of Japan, a map of the Australian desert and one of Micronesia, a map of Easter Island and a map of the town of Puerto Montt in southern Chile.

Juan Stein possessed a great many maps, as people often do when they have a passionate but unrequited desire to travel.

There were also two framed photographs hanging on the
wall. Both were in black and white. In one, you could see a man and a woman sitting by the doorway of their house. The man looked like Juan Stein, with straw-colored hair and very deep-set blue eyes. It was a photo of his mother and father, he told us. The other one was a portrait – an official portrait – of a Red Army general called Ivan Chernyakhovsky. According to Stein, he was the greatest general of the Second World War. Bibiano, who knew about these things, mentioned Zhukov, Koniev, Rokossovsky, Vatutin and Malinovski, but Stein stood firm: Zhukov was brilliant and cold, Koniev was a hard man, Rokossovsky had talent and the help of Zhukov, Vatutin was a good general but no better than the German generals he was pitted against, you could say the same of Malinovski really, none of them was a patch on Chernyakhovsky (to equal him you’d have to roll Zhukov, Vasilevsky and the three best tank commanders into one). Chernyakhovsky had innate talent (if there is such a thing in the art of war), he was loved by his men (in so far as the rank and file can love a general) and he was young, the youngest general in charge of an army (known as a front in the Soviet Union), and one of the few high-ranking officers to die in the front line, in 1945, when the war was already won, at the age of thirty-nine.

We soon realized that there was something more between Stein and Chernyakhovsky than an admiration for the strategic and tactical gifts of the Soviet general. One afternoon, during a conversation about politics, we asked him how he, a Trotskyite, could have lowered himself to ask the Soviet Embassy for the general’s photo. We were joking, but Stein took us seriously,
confessing that the photo had been a gift from his mother, who was Ivan Chernyakhovsky’s cousin. She was the one who had requested the photo from the Embassy, many years back, as a blood relative of the hero. When Stein had left home to come and study in Concepción, his mother had given him the photo without a word of explanation. He went on to tell us about the Chernyakhovskys, a family of dirt-poor Ukrainian Jews, and the various destinies that had scattered them all over the world. It turned out that his mother’s father was the brother of the generals father, which made him one of the great man’s third cousins. Our admiration for Stein was already unconditional, but after that revelation it knew no bounds. Over the years we learnt more about Chernyakhovsky: he commanded an armored division in the first months of the war, the 28th Tank Division, which was driven back through the Baltic Republics to the vicinity of Novgorod. Then he was at a loose end until he was given the command of a corps (which in Soviet military terminology is equivalent to a division) in the region of Voronezh; this corps was part of the 60th Army, and when, during the Nazi offensive in ’42, the commander of the Army was dismissed, his post was offered to Chernyakhovsky, the youngest of the eligible officers, which naturally provoked jealousy and suspicion among his comrades. We learnt that, in this new post, he served under Vatutin (who was then commanding the Voronezh Front, which in Russian military terminology is equivalent to an army, but I think I already said that), whom he respected and admired; that he converted the 60th Army into an invincible fighting machine, steadily advancing through
Russia and then through the Ukraine; nothing and no one could stop it. In 1944 he was promoted to the command of a front, the Third Belorussian Front, and during the ’44 offensive he played a key role in destroying the Army Group Center, consisting of four German armies, and this was probably the greatest blow suffered by the Nazis in the Second World War, worse than the siege of Stalingrad or the Normandy landings, worse than Operation Cobra and the crossing of the Dnepr (in which Chernyakhovsky took part), worse than the counter-offensive in the Ardennes or the battle of Kursk (in which he also took part). We discovered that of the Russian armies which participated in Operation Bagration (the destruction of the Army Group Center), by far the most distinguished was the Third Belorussian Front, which advanced unstoppably, with unprecedented speed and penetration, and was the first to arrive in Eastern Prussia. We also found out that Chernyakhovsky had lost his parents when he was an adolescent, and had boarded in other peoples houses, with other people’s families, that he was mocked and humiliated for being a Jew, but proved to those who insulted him that he was not only their equal but their superior, that as a child he had witnessed the followers of the Ukrainian nationalist Petliura torturing then trying to assassinate his father in the village of Verbovo (with its little white houses scattered over the slopes of the rolling hills), that his adolescence was a mixture of Dickens and Makarenko, that during the war he lost his brother Alexander, knowledge of which was kept from him for an afternoon and a whole night because he was in the midst of an offensive, that he died alone in the
middle of a road, that he was twice named Hero of the Soviet Union, awarded the Order of Lenin, four Orders of the Red Banner, two Orders of Suvorov (first class), the Order of Kutuzov (first class), the order of Bogdan Kmelnitzky (first class), and numerous, countless medals, that by order of the Government and the Party monuments to him were erected in Vilnius and Vinnitsa (no doubt the one in Vilnius has disappeared and the one in Vinnitsa has probably been torn down too), that the city of Insterburg in the old Eastern Prussia is now called Chernyakhovsk in his honour, that the kolkhoz for the village of Verbovo in the district of Tomashpol is also named after him (although the kolkhoz is a thing of the past), and that in the village of Oksino in the district of Umanski in the region of Cherkassy, a bronze bust was set up to commemorate the great general (I’d bet a month’s pay the bust has been replaced; Petliura’s the hero now and tomorrow, who knows?). To sum up, as Bibiano said, quoting Parra: that’s how it goes, the glory of the world; no glory, no world, not even a miserable mortadella sandwich.

In any case, on the wall of Juan Steins house, there hung a rather ornately framed portrait of Chernyakhovsky, and that, I dare say, was incommensurably more important than the busts and the cities named after him and the countless Chernyakhovsky Streets, full of potholes, scattered through the Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania and Russia. I don’t know why I’ve kept the photo, Stein said to us. Maybe because he was the only really important Jewish general in the Second World War and he came to a tragic end. Though the real reason is probably
that my mother gave it to me when I left home, like a sort of riddle. She didn’t say a word, just handed me the picture. Was she trying to tell me something? Was it meant to be the start of a dialogue? Et cetera, et cetera. The Garmendia sisters thought the photo of Chernyakhovsky was awful. They would have liked to replace it with a portrait of Blok (
there
was a good-looking Russian) or Mayakovsky, their dream lover. Sometimes, especially when he was drunk, Stein would wonder what Ivan Chernyakhovsky’s third cousin was doing in the literature department of a university in southern Chile. And sometimes he said he was going to use the frame for a photo he had of William Carlos Williams doing his day job as a small-town doctor. In the photo he was carrying a black leather bag and there was a stethoscope, like a two-headed snake, emerging, in fact almost falling, from the pocket of his old jacket, which was showing its years, but comfortable and still warm in the cold weather, and the footpath he was walking down was long and tranquil, edged with picket fences painted white or green or red, behind which you could glimpse little patios or strips of lawn (and a mower left out by someone who had been called away, perhaps). Dr. Williams was wearing a dark, narrow-brimmed hat, and perfectly clean, almost sparkling glasses, yet there was nothing extreme or excessive about their brightness; he didn’t look intensely happy or sad, but content (perhaps because he was warmly wrapped up in his jacket, perhaps because he knew that the patient he was going to see was not fatally ill), walking along calmly, at, say, five o’clock on a winter’s evening.

But Stein never replaced the portrait of Chernyakhovsky with
his photo of William Carlos Williams. Some of us in the workshop, and Stein himself on occasion, had doubts about the authenticity of the photo. According to the Garmendia sisters, it looked more like President Truman disguised as
something
, not necessarily a doctor, walking down the street in his home town, incognito. In Bibiano’s view, it was a clever montage: Williams’s face with someone else’s body, some other small-town doctor probably, while the background was a mosaic: the wooden fences taken from one picture, the lawn and the lawn-mower from another; then there were the birds perched on the fences and even on the mower-handle, the light-grey evening sky; in all eight or nine different photos had been used. Stein was baffled, but he wasn’t ruling out any possibilities. Whatever its origins, he used to call it “the photo of Dr. Williams” and he didn’t throw it out (sometimes he called it “the photo of Dr. Norman Rockwell” or “the photo of Dr. William Rockwell”). It was clearly one of his most treasured possessions, not that, poor as he was, he had many to treasure. On one occasion (I think we were discussing beauty and truth) Veronica Garmendia asked him why he was so attached to the photo when it almost certainly wasn’t Williams. I just like it, said Stein. I like to think it
is
William Carlos Williams. But most of all, he added after a while, by which stage we had already got onto Gramsci, I like its tranquillity, the idea that Williams is going about his business, walking unhurriedly down a calm street to make a house call. And later still, when we were talking about poetry and the Paris Commune, he said very softly, I don’t know; but I don’t think anyone heard.

After the coup, Stein disappeared, and for a long time Bibiano and I assumed he was dead.

In fact everyone assumed he was dead; everyone thought they were bound to have killed that Jewish Bolshevik son of a bitch. One afternoon Bibiano and I went to his house. We were afraid to knock at the door. In our paranoia we imagined that the house might be under surveillance; we even thought a policeman might open the door, invite us in and never let us out again. So we walked past the house three or four times. There were no lights on, and we went away feeling deeply ashamed but also secretly relieved. A week later, by tacit accord, we returned to Stein’s house. no one answered our knock. A woman watched us from the window of the adjoining house, then disappeared, and as well as reviving a host of vague cinematic memories, this intensified the loneliness and dereliction we could feel emanating not just from Stein’s house but from the whole street. The third time we went there, a young woman opened the door, followed by two children, both under three, one walking, the other on all fours. She told us she was living there now with her husband and hadn’t met the previous tenant. She said that if we wanted to find out more we’d have to go and talk to the landlady. She was a kind woman. She invited us in and offered us a cup of tea, which Bibiano and I declined. We don’t want to bother you, we said. The maps and the photo of General Chernyakhovsky were gone from the walls. This man was a good friend of yours and he left suddenly, without telling you? asked the woman, smiling. Yes, we said, something like that.

Shortly afterwards I left Chile for good.

Some time later – I can’t remember if I was living in Mexico or in France – I received a very short letter from Bibiano, so telegraphic in style it was almost a riddle or a piece of nonsense (but one thing was clear, at least: he was happy), accompanied by a press cutting, probably from a Santiago newspaper. The article mentioned various “Chilean terrorists” who had crossed into Nicaragua from Costa Rica with the Sandinista troops. One of them was Juan Stein.

From then on there was no shortage of news about Stein. He appeared and disappeared like a ghost wherever there was fighting, wherever desperate, generous, mad, courageous, despicable Latin Americans were destroying, rebuilding and redestroying reality, in a final bid that was doomed to failure. I saw him in a documentary about the capture of Rivas, a town in southern Nicaragua, with a ragged haircut, thinner than before, dressed like a cross between a soldier and a professor at a summer school, smoking a pipe, his broken glasses held together with wire. Bibiano sent me a cutting in which it was reported that Stein, along with five other ex-members of the MIR, was fighting the South Africans in Angola. Later I received two photocopied pages from a Mexican magazine (so by then I must have been in Paris) which referred to conflicts between the Cubans in Angola and certain international groups, one of which consisted of two Chilean adventurers, the sole survivors (or so they said, and I presume the journalist interviewed them in a bar in Luanda, from which I deduce that they were drunk), supposedly the sole survivors of a group known as the Flying Chileans, which
reminded me of the Human Eagles, a circus that used to do marathon tours of southern Chile every year. Stein, of course, was one of these survivors. From Angola, it seems, he went to Nicaragua. In Nicaragua we kept losing track of him. He was lieutenant to a priest and guerrilla leader who died in the capture of Rivas. Then he commanded a battalion or a brigade or was second in charge of something or withdrew from the front line to train new recruits. He didn’t take part in the triumphal entry into Managua. Then he disappeared again for some time. He was rumored to be among the members of the commando unit that assassinated Somoza in Paraguay. He was rumored to have joined a Colombian guerrilla group. Some even said he had returned to Africa, and was in Angola or Mozambique or with the Namibian guerrilla fighters. He lived dangerously, but as they say in the westerns, the bullet with his name on it was still waiting to be cast. Then he went back to America and for a while he lived in Managua. Bibiano told me that an Argentine poet called Di Angeli, one of his correspondents, had been involved in organizing a reading of poetry from Argentina, Uruguay and Chile at the Managua Cultural Center, during which a member of the audience, “a tall, fair-haired guy with glasses,” made various remarks about Chilean poetry and the criteria used to select the poems for the reading (the organizers, including Di Angeli, had prohibited the inclusion of poems by Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn for political reasons); in a word, he said it was a load of shit, at least the Chilean section, but the way he said it was very calm, not at all aggressive, according to Di Angeli, very ironic and a bit sad or tired, maybe,
hard to tell. (Of the countless correspondents scattered throughout the world with whom Bibiano maintained regular epistolary contact from his shoe shop in Concepción, this Di Angeli was, by the way, one of the most shameless, cynical and amusing. Although a typical leftist social climber, he was constantly apologizing for oversights and errors of all kinds; his gaffes, according to Bibiano, were legendary. Under Stalin, his pathetic existence could have inspired a great picaresque novel, but in Latin America in the ’70s, it was just a pathetic existence, full of little acts of meanness, some of which were not even intentional. He would have been better off on the right, said Bibiano, but, curiously, among the hosts of the left, Di Angeli’s kind are legion. At least he hasn’t started writing literary criticism, remarked Bibiano, adding that it wouldn’t be long. And sure enough, one day in the abominable ’80s, looking through some Mexican and Argentine magazines, I came across various critical articles by Di Angeli. I think he had made a name for himself. I haven’t encountered his by-line again in the ‘90s, but I don’t read as many magazines these days.) Stein, in any case, was back in America. And it was definitely the Juan Stein we knew from Concepción, according to Bibiano, the third cousin of Ivan Chernyakhovksy. For some time, the time of an overly drawn-out sigh, he was to be seen at gatherings such as the aforementioned reading of South American poetry or at exhibitions or in the company of Ernesto Cardenal (twice) or at the theater. Then he disappeared and was never seen again in Nicaragua. He hadn’t gone very far. Some said he was with the Guatemalan guerrilla fighters; others swore that he had joined the Frente
Farabundo Martí (FMLN). Bibiano and I agreed that a guerrilla group with a name like that deserved to have Stein on its side. Although, given the chance, we felt he would have personally executed those responsible for the death of Roque Dalton (viewed from a distance, Stein cut a fierce and implacable figure; he had taken on the epic proportions of a Hollywood hero). How could one dream, or one nightmare, possibly accommodate the third cousin of Chernyakhovsky, the Jewish Bolshevik from the forests of southern Chile, and the sons of bitches who killed Roque Dalton while he was
asleep
, just to shut him up, for their revolutionary convenience? It was inconceivable. Yet Stein was there in El Salvador. And he participated in various campaigns and surprise attacks and one fine day he disappeared and this time it was for good. I was living in Spain at that stage, doing various menial jobs; I didn’t have a television and rarely bought a newspaper. According to Bibiano, Juan Stein was killed in the FMLN’s widely reported final offensive, during which they succeeded in taking control of certain sectors of San Salvador. I remember seeing snatches of that distant war while eating or drinking in bars in Barcelona, but although people were watching the television, the noise of the conversations and the plates and cutlery being carried back and forth made it impossible to hear anything. Even the images my memory has retained (from the war correspondents’ video tapes) are blurred and fragmentary. There are only two things I remember with absolute clarity: the pitiful barricades in the streets of San Salvador, more like fairground shooting stands, and the small, dark, wiry figure of
an FMLN commander. He was known as Commander Achilles or Commander Ulysses and I know that shortly after speaking to the journalist he was killed. According to Bibiano, all the commanders involved in that desperate offensive had assumed the names of Greek heroes and demigods. What could Stein’s name have been? Commander Patroclus? Commander Hector? Commander Paris? I don’t know. But certainly not Aeneas. Or Ulysses. When the battle was over and the bodies were being removed, among them was the corpse of a tall, fair-haired man. A brief description in the police records indicated that there were scars from old wounds on the arms and legs, and a lion rampant tattooed on the right arm. It was a high quality tattoo. A real professional job, honest to God, you couldn’t get that done in El Salvador. In the file at Central Police Records the mysterious fair-haired man was identified as Jacobo Sabotinski, an Argentine citizen and ex-member of the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP).