The German Girl (24 page)

A young boy without a shirt who is riding a rusty bike comes to a stop alongside us under a traffic light.

“Hello! Tourists? Where are you from?” he asks.

Our driver only has to give him a look, and he lowers his head and pedals off without waiting for a reply.

“A vagrant!” he says, heading for Vedado, the neighborhood Aunt Hannah has lived in since she came here from Berlin. The place where Dad was born.

“It’s one of the best neighborhoods in the city,” the driver tells us. “It’s right in the center. You can walk everywhere from there.”

Leaving behind the airport avenue, we cross a big square, with a gray obelisk beneath a sculpture of one of the island’s historic heroes. It’s surrounded by huge propaganda billboards and modern buildings that, our guide informs us, are government headquarters.

The square opens onto a wide avenue with a tree-lined walkway in the center and run-down mansions on either side. On several street corners, groups of people are lining up outside big buildings with faded paint that appear to be markets.

“Are we in Vedado already?” I ask, breaking the silence, and the driver nods with a smile.

Several young people in uniform wave to us from a school. It seems like the word
tourist
is stamped on our foreheads. We’ll soon get used to it!

Somehow I can tell we are arriving. The driver soon slows down, pulls over, and parks behind a car from the last century. Mom takes my hand as she stares at a faded house with withered plants in the garden. The porch is empty; there are cracks in the roof. A battered iron gate separates the building from the sidewalk, which is raised here and there by the roots of a leafy tree that seems to have been planted there to protect it from the harsh tropical sun.

A boy sitting under the tree greets me, and I smile back. Mom walks toward the house with our suitcases. The boy comes over.

“So, are you relatives of the German woman?” he asks in Spanish. “Are you German? Are you coming to live here, or are you just on a visit?”

He asks so many questions at once that I can’t even think of a reply.

“I live on the corner,” he says. “If you like, I can show you Havana. I’m a good guide, and you won’t have to pay me.”

I burst out laughing, and so does he.

I try to get into the garden without having to touch the iron gate, but the boy gets there before me.

“My name is Diego. So, have you rented a room in the German’s house? Everybody here says she’s a Nazi, that she fled to Cuba at the end of the war.”

“She’s my father’s aunt,” I reply. “When he was my age, he became an orphan and she brought him up. Yes, she’s German, but she fled with her parents before the war broke out. And she’s not a Nazi, that’s for sure. What else do you want to know?” I ask him harshly.

“Okay, okay, take it easy! And I’ll still show you Havana if you want. All you have to do is come outside and shout my name, and I’ll be here in the blink of an eye. I don’t mind if you’re a Nazi, too.”

His boldness makes me laugh out loud again. Then I turn my back on him and am just stepping onto the porch when someone opens the front door. I hide behind Mom and clutch her hand. She squeezes mine tightly.

As the rotting door opens, we can smell the perfume of violet water.

“Welcome to Havana,” says a weak voice in English.

It’s the little girl from the ship.

I can’t see her face yet. From her voice, it’s hard to tell whether she is a young girl or an old woman. Aunt Hannah is standing inside the doorway as if she doesn’t want to be seen. She doesn’t come out to greet us but spreads her arms to invite us in.

“Thank you for coming, Ida,” she says in a low voice, and then looks down at me and says with a smile, “How pretty you are, Anna!”

I go in and hug her quickly, feeling shy. To me, she is still a shadow. Her hair looks the same way it does in the photos of her as a girl, parted on the side, with the ends curling inward and tucked behind her ears. Except that now she isn’t blonde and doesn’t have bangs. I begin to study her curiously. Mom lays a hand on my shoulder, as if to say “That’s enough!”

In the semidarkness of the living room, my aunt looks as young as Mom. She is tall and slender, with a strong jaw and a long neck. As she emerges more into the light, wrinkles appear on a face that seems incredibly calm. I have the feeling I have known this woman for a long time.

She is wearing a beige cotton blouse with pearl buttons, a long, narrow gray skirt, stockings, and low-heeled black shoes.

Aunt Hannah speaks softly. She stresses the vowels and pronounces the consonants at the ends of words with great care.

“Come on, Anna. This is your father’s house, and yours, too.”

I hear her clear voice waver almost imperceptibly. Close up, I can see deep lines on her face, liver spots on veiny hands. Her blue eyes are striking, and her skin is so white it seems as if she has never been exposed to the fierce tropical sun.

“Your father would have been so happy to see you now,” she sighs.

She takes us down a hallway with checked tiles to the back of the house. The windows are covered by thick gray curtains.

In the dining room, there’s a strong aroma of freshly made coffee. We sit at the table; its top is a cracked mirror covered in stains.

Aunt Hannah excuses herself, goes into the kitchen, and returns with an old black woman who has difficulty walking. They serve themselves and my mother coffee, and offer me lemonade. The medium-built black woman comes over and gently holds my head against her stomach, which smells of cinnamon and vanilla.

She says her name is Catalina. It’s hard to tell who helps whom, because they both appear to be about the same age. Hannah stands straight, but Catalina leans forward, due to her height. When she walks, she drags her feet, although I don’t know if this is just a habit or because she’s tired.

“My girl, you’re just like your aunt!” she exclaims, rumpling my hair with a familiarity that surprises me.

While Mom and Aunt Hannah talk about our journey, I look up at the ceiling. There are patches of damp everywhere. The paint on the walls is peeling, and the room is filled with the battered furniture of a family that must have lived well a long time ago.

While Mom is busy telling her about our life in New York, Aunt Hannah doesn’t take her eyes off me. She asks if I’m bored, if it wouldn’t be a good idea to let me go out into the street so that the boy who talks so fast can take me to explore the city.

“You can go out and play for a while if you like,” she insists.

I’m not sure there’s anything around here for me to play with.

“Better if you stay and get some rest,” says Mom. She pulls the envelope with the photographs out of her bag.

This doesn’t seem like the right moment. We just got here. Perhaps it’s asking too much of Aunt Hannah to make her go back to such a distant past, but apparently Mom can’t think of anything more to say.

I’d like to explore upstairs, where the bedrooms must be. I wish they’d leave me alone so I can see where Dad used to sleep, where he kept his toys and books.

Mom lays out the photographs from Berlin on the cracked mirror tabletop. Hannah smiles, although I get the impression she would prefer to go on studying me than to have to return to the past.

“Those were the happiest days of my life,” she says.

As she remembers, her blue eyes grow more intense. She seems to be coming to life, although it’s obvious she is not particularly interested in that dramatic Atlantic crossing. I’m surprised to hear her say those were happy days.

“I was your age, and was free to run all over the ship’s decks, sometimes until really late at night,” she explains. I don’t know what to say.

She pauses for a long while between sentences.

“My mother was so beautiful! And Papa was the most distinguished and respected man on board the
St. Louis
.”

She picks up the photograph of a man in uniform and shows it to us.

“Oh, and the captain . . . we adored him!”

Mom points to a snapshot of a boy who appears both in the images from Berlin and those from the boat:

“Who is this boy?”

“Oh, that’s Leo!” Aunt Hannah falls silent for a moment. “We were very young.” Another silence, before she finally looks at us again. “He betrayed me, so I erased him from my life. But I think the time has come to forgive.” Another pause. “Will we be able to forgive someday?”

We don’t know what to say. We were hoping she would tell us the story of the only person who posed naturally—the one who was obviously the main protagonist of the photo collection. I was intrigued. I wanted to know more about this Leo: if he had reached Cuba at a later date; how, exactly, he had betrayed her. But if I ask her, Mom will kill me. The silence deepens. Then Aunt Hannah picks up a postcard showing the boat in midocean.

“Back then the
St. Louis
was the most luxurious transatlantic liner ever to reach Havana,” she recalls with a sigh. “It was our only hope, our salvation—or so we thought, Anna my dear, until we realized we were being tricked yet again. One man died during the crossing, and his body was thrown into the sea. Only twenty-eight of us were allowed to disembark. All the others were sent back to Europe, and less than three months later, war broke out. Nobody wanted us. We were the undesirables. But I was your age, Anna, and I couldn’t understand why.”

Mom stands up and goes over to hug her. What I want is for the conversation to finish, to end the torture we’ve made this poor old woman suffer. We’ve only just arrived! And it’s obvious she thinks that the only cure for her illness is to forget. She seems more interested in learning about our lives in the present, because we are all that’s left of the boy who grew up to be a man in her house, only to disappear beneath the rubble of two tall towers in a far-off city she never knew.

“Every day I wonder why I’m still alive!” she whispers, suddenly bursting into tears.

T
he car hugged the coast, leaving the port behind. We could hear the
St. Louis
’s horn in the distance, but my mother did not even react. I turned to look through the back window of the car, and saw how we were moving apart. The boat was leaving the bay, while we were heading for the center of the city. I stopped crying. My father was nothing more than a dot in infinite space, lost again on the enormous liner where we had been a family for the last time.

The lady sitting alongside the driver chose to talk to us just as I was drying my tears.

“I’m Mrs. Samuels,” she explained. “We’re going to the Hotel Nacional. I hope it will only be for a couple of weeks, until the house in Vedado is furnished and ready. Mr. Rosenthal left everything well organized.”

When I heard Papa’s name, a shiver ran down my spine. All I wanted to do was to erase the past, to forget, not to suffer anymore. We were safe on land, but my father and Leo were gone.

“So this is the Cuban equivalent of the Hotel Adlon?” asked the Goddess, raising an eyebrow ironically as we entered the Hotel Nacional.

Fortunately, our room did not look out to sea but faced the city, so that we did not have to watch boats entering and leaving the harbor. In any case, the view hardly mattered, for during our entire two weeks’ stay in the hotel, Mama kept the curtains closed.

“We have to protect ourselves from the sun and the dust,” she insisted.

Whenever they came to straighten up the room, she would shout a stern “No!” if the maid tried to draw back the curtains. Each day it was someone different, and we never left before she arrived, just so that my mother could instruct her that she didn’t want a single ray of sunlight in there.

Not once in those weeks did she mention Papa’s name. She met Mrs. Samuels every day on one of the terraces of the inside courtyard—the only place we were sheltered from an orchestra that, in her opinion, knew how to play only those fast-paced Cuban
guarachas
.

“Island music,” she declared disdainfully.

Sometimes she would ask the waiter if the musicians could please play less loudly or even if they could stop playing altogether.

“Of course, Señora Alma.” The reply irritated her still further because the waiter used her first name, possibly because he couldn’t pronounce her German surname, whereas she, a foreigner, could speak perfect Spanish.

Meanwhile, the
guaracha
music continued unabated.

My mother decided to wear the same indigo-blue suit whenever she met Mrs. Samuels. When we returned to our room, she would send it to be cleaned and pressed. This was our routine in the Havana hotel to which she swore she would never return.

In the morning, she would meet with our lawyer, Señor Dannón,
who was handling the permits for our stay in Cuba. In the afternoon, she saw the representative of the Canadian bank where Papa had transferred most of our money, and who was in charge of our trust fund. After that, she would go to see the hotel manager, always with some complaint or other, usually about the orchestra and the noise that invaded the room even with the windows shut.

I could tell she was happy the day our Cuban identity cards arrived. Not because we finally had the legal right to stay, and the right to reside in the house that until then she had refused to visit, but because she could, once and for all, be free of her ancestral name—thanks to Cuban bureaucracy or the ignorance of incompetent officials unable to spell
Rosenthal
. Now that our names had become more Spanish-sounding, she would be known as “Señora Rosen.” My first name was changed from
Hannah
to
Ana
, although I decided to tell everyone it should be pronounced with a
J
, like
Jana
.

Mama never asked for her name to be corrected, although she insisted to her lawyer—a cigar smoker whose hair was thick with grease—that he should immediately try to get her a temporary American visa, because she had to be in New York within four months. He bewildered us with his talk of the decrees and legal resolutions passed by his government where the division of power between civil and military was precarious. When we were back in our room, Mama insisted to me—as if I hadn’t heard it already on board ship—that my sibling would be born in New York.