The German Girl (31 page)

“Take it, Anna,” she tells me. “It’s yours. It’s been put away ever since we arrived in Havana, so perhaps it still works.”

Before she shuts the drawer, I catch sight of the back of a photograph that has something written on it. I manage to read: “New York, August 10, 1963.”

Seeing my interest, she picks up the photo and stares at it for a long time. It shows a man in an overcoat at an entrance to Central Park.

“That’s Julian, with a
J
,” she says, smiling.

I had never heard that name before, so I wait for her to explain.
From the way she is gazing at it, and also because it wasn’t in the envelope that reached us in New York, I guess he can’t be from our family.

“We met when we were both studying at university in Havana. It was a very chaotic time.”

She continues to stare at the black-and-white photograph, which is blurred and creased slightly.

“We didn’t see each other for some years, because he had gone to study in New York. Then he came back, and we met again at my pharmacy. We were inseparable, but then he left again. Everybody leaves here, except for us!”

When I ask if he was her boyfriend, she laughs out loud. Then she returns the photograph to the drawer, struggles to her feet, and goes out onto the landing.

Between her room and ours, there are two locked rooms. Aunt Hannah realizes that even though I can’t bring myself to ask her, I am studying the doors with great curiosity.

“That was Gustavo’s room! It was our fault we created such a monster! I didn’t have the nerve to put your father in there when he came here to live with us as a child. In those years, your father was our only hope. Now you are.”

I hold on to the banister behind Aunt Hannah, who carefully places her foot on each step as we go downstairs. Not because she is afraid of falling, but to maintain her upright posture. I touch the walls with my hand, trying to imagine Dad on these stairs at my age, following the aunt who saved him from growing up alongside a “monster.” His parents had been killed in an airplane accident and his grandmother was prostrate in bed, and it was his aunt who devoted herself to looking after him. He grew up protected by this small fortress in Vedado. He was to be the only one who left the island where the Rosenthals had made a vow to die.

Aunt Hannah seems to have come to the end of her explanations. But ever since she said that word
monster
to describe Gustavo, she knows I’m curious. There’s a big gap between the years when Gustavo was a
student and the airplane accident. But I’ll get another chance; there’s a time for everything.

We stand together in the front doorway. We stare for a few moments at the garden, where, she tells me, there were once poinsettias, bougainvilleas, and multicolored croton bushes.

“Everything here dries out. And I so much wanted to grow tulips. My father and I loved them.”

For the first time, I sense a deep nostalgia in her voice. My aunt’s eyes seem to be brimming with tears that never fall but well up and make them seem an even brighter blue.

I leave her with Mom, because Diego is waiting to take me to discover another secret part of the city. When I meet him, he says something awkward, as usual:

“I think your aunt must be at least a hundred!”

T
hings in Cuba change without warning. You go out into the street under a scorching sun, then the breeze pushes along a cloud, and everything gets transformed. You can be soaked in a second, even before you have time to open your umbrella. The rain comes lashing down, the wind buffets you, branches are snapped off, gardens flood. When the rain stops, a stifling vapor rises from the asphalt, all the smells mingle, paint has been washed from the housefronts, and terrified people run everywhere. In the end, you get used to it. They’re tropical downpours: you can’t fight them.

I felt the first raindrop on the corner of Calle 23. I turned right into Avenida L, but by then, I was soaked to the skin. By the time I climbed the stairs to reach the Faculty of Pharmacy, the sun was shining again, and my blouse was starting to dry, but water still dripped from my hair.

In the blink of an eye, dozens of students began rushing down the
steps, pushing and shoving one another as if they were running away from something. I saw others perched on top of the
Alma Mater
sculpture, waving a flag in the air. They were shouting slogans I couldn’t make out because they became confused with the police sirens from patrol cars that had pulled up at the foot of the staircase.

One girl next to me was so frightened that she clung to my arm, squeezing it without a word. She was crying, panic-stricken. We didn’t know whether to climb the stairs or to run off down Avenida San Lázaro and get away from the university.

The shouts became deafening. Then there was the sound of something striking a piece of metal; it might have been a gunshot. We were petrified. A boy came down the stairs telling us to fling ourselves to the ground. We did, and I found myself facedown against the wet steps. I buried my face in my hands. All of a sudden, the girl next to me stood up and ran off down the staircase. I edged over as close as I could to the wall to avoid being trampled on, and then stayed as still as possible.

“You can get up now,” said the boy, but I didn’t respond at once.

I lay there a few seconds longer, but when I saw everything was calm again, I looked up and saw he was still there, with my books under his arm. He held out his hand to help me.

“Up you go; I have to get to my classes.”

Without looking at him, I leaned on him as I straightened my skirt and tried without success to clean my blouse.

“Aren’t you going to introduce yourself?” he asked. “I won’t give you your books until you tell me your name.”

“Hannah,” I replied, but so quietly he didn’t hear me. He frowned, raised an eyebrow: he hadn’t understood, and insisted in a raised voice, “Ana? Your name is Ana? Are you in the Pharmacy Department?”

Yet another one! I had to be forever explaining what I was called.

“Yes, Ana, but pronounced like it begins with a
J
,” I said irritated. “And yes, I’m a pharmacy major.”

“A pleasure, ‘Ana pronounced with a
J
.’ Now I have to run to my classes.”

I saw him bound up the steps two at a time. When he reached the top, he paused between the columns of the building, turned, and shouted:

“See you later, Ana-with-a-
J
!”

Several professors did not come in that day. In one of the rooms, some scared students were whispering about tyrants and dictatorships, coups and revolution. I wasn’t frightened by anything happening around me. The university was in turmoil, but I wasn’t interested in finding out what the protests were about, and still less in taking part in something that had nothing to do with me.

When it was time to leave class, I stayed behind for a while trying to do something about my blouse in the lavatory. But no use: it was completely ruined. When I finally left the building in a bad mood, I saw him again, leaning against the doorway.

“You’re the boy from the staircase, aren’t you?” I asked without stopping, pretending I wasn’t really interested.

“I didn’t tell you my name, Ana-with-a-
J
. That’s why I’m here. I’ve been standing in this doorway for an hour.”

I smiled, thanked him again, and continued on my way down the stairs. He kept pace with me, observing me in silence. His presence didn’t bother me; I was more intrigued to know just how far he was going to follow me.

The sky had cleared a little. Dark clouds were visible in the distance, at the far end of Avenida San Lázaro. I thought of saying that possibly it was raining a few blocks away, but I preferred not to talk nonsense just to make conversation. A few moments later, he decided to speak to me again.

“My name is Julian. You see, it’s the
J
that unites us.”

I didn’t think that was particularly funny. We reached the bottom of the stairs, and I still hadn’t said a word.

“I study law.”

I had no idea how he expected me to respond to that, so I stayed silent until we reached Calle 23, where I would turn left each day to head home. He had to go down Avenida L, so we said good-bye on the corner. Or, rather,
he
said good-bye, because all I managed to do was to shake his hand.

“See you tomorrow, Ana-with-a-
J
,” I heard him say as he disappeared down the avenue.

He was the first Cuban boy who had ever taken notice of me. And apparently even Julian refused to say my name properly. His hair was a bit long for my taste, with unruly curls that cascaded down his brow. He had a long, straight nose and thick lips. When he smiled, his eyes narrowed beneath a pair of thick black eyebrows. At last I had met a boy who was taller than me.

But what struck me most about Julian were his hands. His fingers were very long and thick. Powerful hands. He was wearing a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, no necktie, and his jacket slung nonchalantly over his shoulder. His shoes were scuffed and dirty, possibly because of the chaos we had been through a few hours earlier.

Ever since we had arrived in Havana, I had never had the slightest interest in making friends in a place we still thought of as being temporary. But when I got home that day, I found myself still thinking of him. What most puzzled me was that whenever I remembered his face or his voice when he called me Ana-with-a-
J
, I caught myself smiling.

Going to classes had been my escape. Now there was another reason to escape: to see “the boy with a
J
” again. The following day I arrived early at the department, but didn’t see him. I even waited at the entrance for a few minutes, until I was afraid I would be late for my class. Better to forget somebody who hadn’t even bothered to try to pronounce my name properly, I told myself. Just as I was about to enter, a few minutes before they would close the door to my class, I got a shock when I felt his hand on my arm. Before I knew what I was doing, I turned to Julian and found myself smiling.

“I came because you didn’t tell me your family name, Ana-with-a-
J.
”

I could feel myself blushing uncontrollably. Not because of what he had said to me, but out of fear that he would see how delighted I was.

“Rosen,” I told him. “My family name is Rosen. But now I have to go, or they won’t let me into class.”

I should have asked him his last name as well, but I was too nervous.
When I left that afternoon, I was disappointed to find he wasn’t there. Nor the next day. A week went by, and the boy from the staircase did not appear again. Yet I continued thinking of him. Whenever I tried to study or sleep, I recalled his laugh or saw his curls and wanted to straighten them.

But I didn’t see him again.

When I finished my university studies, I talked with my mother about opening a pharmacy I could run myself. She wasn’t very enthusiastic about my project, because it implied a sense of permanence she was still refusing to accept, even though, after seventeen years, everything seemed to indicate we had no other choice. She discussed the matter with Señor Dannón, and he was the first to support me enthusiastically, especially as it would mean a new and stable source of income.

We opened the Farmacia Rosen one cloudy Saturday in December. It was very close to our house, opposite the park with the flame trees. Mother wasn’t keen on the idea of opening a business on the weekend. She would have preferred a Monday, but for me, Mondays were too close to Tuesdays. When I didn’t back down, she decided not to come to the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

That was a time when I spent all day, and very often part of the night, preparing prescriptions in a world measured in grams and milliliters. I employed Hortensia’s sister Esperanza, who became the “face” of the pharmacy. Or of the “apothecary,” as she liked to call it. She was the one who attended customers behind the narrow counter. She was “good with people,” as they say, which was something supposedly not common among Cubans. She was extremely patient and listened indulgently to the locals’ complaints. Sometimes they came in not for medicine but simply to be listened to, and to relieve their woes by talking to that placid woman with candid eyes. Although she was much younger than Hortensia, they looked the same age. Esperanza didn’t pluck her eyebrows or wear lipstick: there was never a trace of makeup on a face that looked harsh and yet radiated goodness.

Esperanza brought her son, Rafael, from middle school, and he started helping us with home deliveries. Rafael was tall and thin, with straight, dark hair, an aquiline nose, almond eyes, and an enormous mouth. He was as polite and respectful as his mother. Both of them lived in a state of constant agitation. On an island where most people belonged to the same religion, they had a different faith: they shared the sin of being different.

That was the reason I could never understand why, although they lived in fear, both of them sometimes took the opportunity to slip “the word of God” into their consoling messages. “Our mission is to spread the word,” they would tell me. Fortunately, they never attempted to convert me. I was sure that Hortensia had told them I was a Polack, and that it was best to leave all Polacks in peace.