Beyond the Ties of Blood (18 page)

When she first got pregnant with Manuel, Shmooti was angry. “Why bring a child into this crazy world,” he muttered over and over. Once the baby started kicking, though, he was transformed. He could sit for hours with his hand on her belly, waiting for the next punch. Then his eyes would light up. “He has quite a step,” he'd say. “Either a soccer player or a tango dancer. We'll see.” And when Manuel was born, Shmooti just melted. Never a day would go by that he wouldn't come home with a gift for the baby, if only a ball or a small stuffed bear.

The circumcision was a struggle. “I know your parents want the
bris
,” Shmooti grumbled, “but I'm not religious. What's there to be religious about? We do nothing but suffer for our religion, day in and day out, for thousands of years. Enough is enough.” In the end he relented. “All right,” he sighed. “But just the
bris
. No religion, no Bar Mitzvah.” And that was that. They drank wine and ate
rugelach
at her parents' house.

Shmooti and Manuel were fine together, as long as Manuel could be consoled with a stuffed bear. But as he grew older Manuel didn't like soccer, or tangos. He wanted his papa to explain the world to him. Where had Papa come from, that he had an accent? But Shmooti had been silent too long. He no longer had a voice to talk about the past.

“Mama, what's Jewish?” Manuel asked one afternoon, when he was eight years old and they were still in the old house. Sara's hand froze on the handle of the teapot as she was serving him the tea with warm milk he always had when he got home from school.

“Why do you ask,
m'hijo
?”

“Because at school another boy said I was, and the teacher told him it wasn't nice to say that.”

Sara struggled for an answer. “Well,” she tried, “being Jewish is a religion, a different kind from Catholic or Protestant, which are the two religions that most of your schoolmates are.”

“But we don't go to any church, Mama. What religion doesn't have a church?”

“Jews do have a church, except it's called a synagogue. But Papa Shmooti doesn't like to keep the traditions.”

“What are traditions?” He stumbled a bit over the word.

“They're things you do to remember who you are, like when Grandma and Grandpa light candles on Friday nights when we're there, or Grandma bakes
rugelach
.”

“Those are Jewish traditions?”

“Yes,
m'hijito
. They are.”

“Then I guess I'm Jewish, Mama, because I like those traditions.”

When Manuel was eleven, the Bronsteins moved into their fancy new house. It was about a year later that Manuel had it out with his papa. It began routinely enough, with yet another fight about soccer. Sara could follow it easily from the other room where she was measuring the windows for new curtains. Shmooti wanted Manuel to invite the neighborhood kids over for a game, but Manuel didn't like soccer, and he didn't like the kids on the block. But at some point the tone changed and their voices rose. Manuel's was the loudest.

“You can't tell me what to do, Papa! What do you know about my life, you're never here, always at that stupid shop of yours!”

“We live here now, so why not make friends? You're not the best soccer player, but with a ball and a field you get people to come.”

“I don't want them here! They're stupid, snotty rich kids! All they can talk about is how much money their papas make!”

“You don't think you're a rich kid?”

“How do I even know
what
I am? You never talk to me about your family, where I come from! You always leave or change the subject!”

And then it was over, and Sara heard the door close as Shmooti walked out. He stayed overnight at the bakery for three days.

After that Manuel spent less and less time at home. Every day, he stayed longer at the tailor shop with his grandparents. He stopped talking to his father, and avoided being around in those few short hours in the early morning or evening when Shmooti wasn't either asleep or at the bakery. The less she saw her son, the more Sara worked to fit into her new neighborhood. She imagined him sitting at her mama's kitchen table, hungrily consuming the stories of her parents' heroic and romantic migration along with the
rugelach
and hot tea with milk. After Papa passed away, Manuel began to stay out later, and she knew he wasn't with his grandma. One day she woke to the realization that he was almost a grown man, and she had no idea who he really was.

1973

Sara's mother Myriam died the first Tuesday in September, exactly a week before the military coup, while the fog still hung milky white over the rooftops of Temuco. The knock on her door came at that moment before dawn, when the sun hesitates just long enough behind the mountains so time stands still and you see the world in two dimensions. “In keeping with Jewish law, we buried her right away. It's what she wanted, so there's no point in your coming back right now,” Sara wrote Manuel that very evening. “We placed her next to your grandpa in a plain pine coffin, just like his. The day was sunny, quite a contrast with his funeral,” she continued. “And by this point no peasants showed up, hats in hand, the water streaming down their faces. I don't know if they, too, have died, or just got so old that they forgot.”

As time went on, Sara grew increasingly glad that her mother had died before the coup. Not that Sara wasn't happy when the military first stepped in. The demonstrations stopped and people weren't afraid any more. Her friends all talked about not having to sleep with revolvers under their pillows anymore when they went out to their farms in the countryside, and about how much more respectful their servants were now. Occasionally Sara wondered what had happened to Tonia, and to her community, with the coup. She knew that the Mapuche had benefited from the land reform, but the military had begun taking it all back. Sometimes she yearned to see her Mapuche sister again, but they had lost touch. How could she look for Tonia now?

When the junta issued its communiqué explaining how the previous government had stolen all the country's wealth, and asked everyone to contribute what they could to a new national fund to save Chile, her neighbors had stood in line to contribute jewels and heirlooms. She had even donated the pearl necklace Shmooti had given her on their fifteenth wedding anniversary. And it wasn't just the rich ladies from her neighborhood standing in that line. She'd seen humble women donating their wedding rings, or taking their one pair of pearls from their ears to put into the donation basket at the bank.

But when a number of Sara's canasta friends got together and wrote a letter of congratulations to the military intendant, at the last minute, she wasn't sure why, she decided not to sign. Of course, if she'd known then what she learned later, she'd have had plenty of reasons not to sign. But she didn't know. Only later would she understand the immensity of her ignorance, and the uselessness of her regret.

So it was good that her mother died before the Army took over the city. “All that yelling and banging,” her mama had said when the street demonstrations got bad toward the end. “It's like Odessa in 1905, it scares me.”

“She died peacefully, sitting in her orange grove in her wicker rocking chair, smelling of cinnamon,” Sara wrote in her note to Manuel. “Don't come back now, there's no point. Just come back for summer vacation.” But the note returned two weeks later, unfamiliar writing across the front, saying he'd moved and left no new address. By then the military had just taken power, but Sara thought nothing of it, at least not until about a month later, when she began to worry just a little. Not that Manuel was a good correspondent before, but at least every time he'd moved he sent them his new address. And these were not normal times. At least he could send a few lines, she thought, just to tell me he's all right. By December, three months after the military took power, she was beginning to worry a lot. “I'll go to Santiago,” she told Shmooti, “to his old place, or maybe to the university where he was studying. Someone will know where he is. Just to make sure,” she added quickly. “I'm sure it's nothing, but it's been too long and classes are about to end.”

When she got to Santiago, she learned the university had been closed with the coup. She rented a room in a
pension
near downtown and made the rounds to all the addresses on the tattered envelopes she'd brought with her, from one of his old lodgings to the next, from rooming house to apartment building to hole in the wall above a dry cleaner's. She said his name out loud but all she got in return was a door slammed in her face. By the time she arrived at the place from which she'd gotten the returned letter, she was crying.

The woman who opened the door took pity on her and invited her in for a cup of tea. “Ah yes, the red-haired young man,” she said as they were sitting in the living room in the gathering dusk. “I remember sending you that note back, he'd just moved out the week before. But
señora
, I need to warn you. Everyone here knew he was a revolutionary. Chances are the soldiers picked him up pretty early. It's too late to check the morgues, that's what people did last month and the month before. Go to the police stations, maybe there's a record somewhere. But be careful. The secret police have eyes and ears everywhere in Santiago.”

Sara spent weeks going from one police station to the next, but there was no trace of Manuel. She wrote to Schmooti every night, short notes that said almost nothing because there was no news. She never got an answer, and sometimes she wondered whether he even read them. But what could he say to the same message, over and over? What could he say to the fact that she could not find their son?

What she did find was other women, the same women at every one of the stations she visited. They, too, were looking. As they began to recognize each other they began to move together from one place to the next, a wave of grieving humanity, finding wordless comfort in each other's presence. When there were no more police stations, they went together to the Archdiocese, and the lawyers who worked there helped them fill out writs of habeas corpus. Together they waited for news sitting on long wooden benches. They didn't find their loved ones, but they found each other.

One night, after an especially frustrating day of waiting, Sara could not sleep. Not that she'd been sleeping that well before, but now she couldn't stop thinking about the woman who had sat next to her on the bench that day. They were about the same age, but the other woman looked twenty years older. She had lost her daughter and husband. She spoke of them in such loving terms, without even a tinge of resentment. Sara couldn't help but compare herself to this woman. Even as she grieved his loss, why did she still feel such anger toward Manuel?

Finally she gave up and sat in the rumpled old armchair in her darkened room, images of her son floating, gleaming on the wall. When he'd refused a ride from their new chauffeur and she'd seen him that one time, crossing the plaza, a frail kid bent under the weight of his books, walking to Mama and Papa's tailor shop. Or when Papa died, and she'd watched him hold Mama up at the graveside, then take his turn with the shovel, heaving a slab of mud into the pit where Papa lay. Or when he'd started to shave, and she saw Papa's same red beard take shape on his chin. There was something hovering right beyond her understanding, in a corner of the room she couldn't reach. Did it have something to do with the first time he'd suddenly hung up the phone when she walked into the room, or was it the first time he'd looked at her with his grey eyes so full of anger? Hate? Disappointment?

Then he started smoking, unfiltered black tobacco cigarettes whose bitter, acrid scent hung in his closet and in every corner of his room. He'd been coming home late for a long time, helping out with her papa and then, even after his death, staying to have dinner with her mama. But when he started coming home so late that she no longer waited for him, still she could not fall asleep until she heard his heavy steps on the stairs. Once, when she went to the bathroom after she heard him close his bedroom door, she caught a whiff of cheap booze. Even worse was the day that, as she tried to tidy up his room before the maid could wax the floor, his overstuffed backpack fell over and a small, slim book fell out.
The Communist Manifesto
.

Was it Papa's copy, passed on to him when Papa died? She never knew. She remembered the weekly meetings Papa had in the sewing room. Crowds of shaggy men with fetid feet sitting on the floor under the single lightbulb, Papa slapping that small book against his trundle machine for emphasis.

She'd lost Manuel at least once already, long before this unbearable loss. But when? The answer to that question was hidden in the furthest corner of the room, too dark and distant in the middle of the night, gone before first light nudged its way past the venetian blinds. Was it that horrible night, when he didn't come home at all? The dawn breaking over her mug of tea grown cold on the table. She should have seen it coming, of course. But the finality of it was so sudden, so terrifying. When he came back, Shmooti was off to work already, not even knowing if his son was alive.

Manuel's face that morning, his baggy, sleep-deprived, yet somehow exhilarated eyes staring at her from above his unshaven, hollowed cheeks, suddenly materialized in the dark corner of her rented room. That exhilaration. She'd seen it once before, when he was very small and they still lived in the tiny house in the working-class neighborhood. It was the same exhilaration in his eyes when he'd brought that little boy home, the one with the torn sweater who kept wiping his nose on his sleeve and only succeeded in crusting more snot on his cheeks. She had turned that little boy away and refused to let him stay over and play. Thinking back on it now, she wasn't exactly sure why. Had she been afraid that Manuel would prefer the poor the same way her Papa had? Or did she fear he would be hurt, like she had been, when social differences had torn her best friend from her? Not that it had helped at all since shortly after that, they had moved. Manuel had lost his friend anyway, and as far as she knew, he'd never had another one. Come to think of it, neither had she.