Beyond the Ties of Blood (19 page)

After he didn't come home that night, when she read the newspapers the next couple of months, she followed the trail of a shadowy red-bearded young agitator who was reported at scene after scene of land takeovers, where poor families with snotty-nosed kids got a chance to build themselves a home. She'd been so angry because he was acting just like Papa. It came back to her then, the mix of chamomile and jail smell, and she'd felt sick. Like her father, he was a mystery. What made these poor, destitute, smelly people more important than his own family? But his only childhood friend had been one of those snotty-nosed kids. Had he been trying to make his own small childhood loss into a human connection by supporting the struggles of people like his friend? Had Papa been compensating for a personal loss as well, the death of his father in Odessa in 1905? Now she would never know for sure, about either of them.

That first night Manuel hadn't come home she'd focused on her own fears, and her mama's from all those years ago. Even now she could not entirely forgive him for what he'd done. When he finally appeared she'd told him he was no longer welcome in their house. Later that summer, he'd left the note on the table with an address in Santiago: “I'm going to enroll at the University of Chile.” That had been the final resolution of the story. But the climax, she realized now, the point at which everything changed forever, had come that earlier morning when he returned from being out all night and she had told him to leave. “I'm sorry,” she whispered to the image of his face, his stubbly cheeks, his gleaming eyes, right before they faded from the room.

As soon as Santiago's shops opened the next morning, she sent Shmooti a telegram that said, simply, “Come. I think we made a big mistake.”

“We lost him a long time ago,” Sara told her rumpled, sleep-deprived Shmooti as soon as he got off the train from Temuco. “But if we're lucky, maybe we have a chance to get him back.”

At first Shmooti didn't know what she meant. They spent several weeks walking the streets of Santiago, through the warm late-summer light. They walked under the weeping willows of the
parque forestal
, next to the drought-shrunken Mapocho River, and sat on a wrought-iron bench near a bridge that, for some reason, day after day, they knew how to find.

“How can we get him back if he's missing?” Shmooti asked over and over. “You know how to find him then?”

In trying to answer his question, Sara also grew to understand more fully the meaning of what she had said. “I don't think I meant just finding him physically,” she began late one afternoon, when they were sitting on their favorite bench, the last rays of sunlight playing along the few thirsty rivulets of water left in the riverbed.

“What then?”

“I'm not entirely sure, but maybe find him spiritually, what he was thinking, what inspired him to do what he did.”

“Now, Sarita, I'm completely confused. We don't find his body, but we get inside his head?”

“I know it sounds silly. But I've been thinking about how losing his father made my papa want to help others, while losing her family made Mama live in constant fear. And Manuel, when we moved into our big house he went to the tailor shop and followed in Papa's footsteps.

“And you know what? Shmooti, you and I … well, like my mama, we've put a lot of effort into not losing. A lot of good it's done us. So maybe now I need to be more like my papa.”

Shmooti picked up a flat stone from the path and threw it at the absent river. It clattered through the boulders that framed the Mapocho along the other side. The power behind the throw surprised Sara, and she looked up into his face. It was closed, almost as tight as that time when she'd asked him how he made it to Argentina. When he spoke, his tone was as flat as the stone.

“So you think he's dead.”

Sara picked up a short branch that had broken off the neighboring willow tree and, for a long time, concentrated on picking its tiny leaves off the stem, dropping them on the path in front of them, and then grinding them into the dirt with her shoe.

“I don't know,” she finally whispered. Then more firmly, after a short pause. “I've been making the rounds—the morgues, the police stations, finally the Archdiocese—for three months now. All these other women, they're doing the same thing. We've all lost loved ones; no one knows where they are. The junta refuses to answer our questions. Of course we all want to believe that our loved ones are alive, in some jail somewhere, their papers misplaced, maybe on purpose. We all want to believe that someday they'll be returned to us alive. But Shmooti, don't you think we need to prepare for the worst?”

He picked up another stone and threw it, even harder. It echoed through the rocks for a long time.

“Well then, what's the point? You did what can be done already. Maybe we should just go home.”

Sara let go of the branch and reached for her husband's hand. Slowly she traced its outline, up from the wrist and along the thumb, then along the top of each finger, and down to the wrist on the other side. When she spoke her voice was very soft.

“My darling. After we went dancing for the first time, you disappeared for a month and I thought everything was over. Then you came back, and we got married. For a long time I was sure you would tell me more about your life, that slowly we would share our sadness. But you never did. And I accepted this, without words, I now think because maybe I, too, was more comfortable not thinking too deeply.

“But things have changed now, at least for me. You say we should go home. But where is home now, my Shmooti? Temuco? All that's there is your business, and a very large and very empty house. At least in Santiago I feel closer to Manuel. I think, maybe, he was happiest here. I want to make Santiago my home, and I want to make my loss into something useful. I want to stand with the other women and demand that the generals answer for our loved ones.

“You don't have to do what I do, my darling. But I would be very happy if you would be willing to live with me here. And maybe, just maybe, even if we don't find him physically, we can find a way to understand.”

Samuel Bronstein and Sara Weisz de Bronstein sold the bakeries in Temuco and moved to Santiago. They bought a small Mediterranean house in a new development along the eastern edge of the city. The house was surrounded by a stucco wall with planted geraniums along the top, and the wrought-iron gate opened into a small front yard framed by cypress trees. In the center was a patio with a fountain, and an avocado and three orange trees. On a clear day, they could sit in their living room and see the mountains.

Samuel began a bakery in the same neighborhood, and together they joined a synagogue in the older, more established part of town. Samuel became a sustaining member of the congregation. “My papa was a cantor in his temple back in Germany,” he told the younger Jews of the community, every
shabbat
and twice on holidays. “It never pays to forget where you come from. I learn this the hard way.”

Sara became a founding member of the Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared, and together she and the women like her with whom she had first begun her search looked for their sons and daughters. Their mingled yearnings for relatives still alive caused their dreams to fly like doves, bringing back their loved ones' hopes for a better world in the lattice of their wings. They also grieved together whenever someone's relative was confirmed dead.

1979

In late January, in the early morning before the summer heat covered Santiago like a thick blanket, Sara heard a knock on the door of the Committee's office. She had already been working for several hours, trying to catch up on the paperwork connected to the recent discovery of bodies at the lime ovens of Lonquén. When the remains of several peasants had been identified and traced to their disappearances while in custody of the military, the case had become an international event for the human-rights movement. The Committee had been helping provide the necessary documentation.

She stood, stretching her shoulders and neck as she made her way down the hall. She opened the large wooden door to find a tall Mapuche woman in typical dress, a flowered apron tied over her
chamal
and her hair drawn back under a kerchief. The woman looked to be about Sara's own age. They stared at each other for a moment, and Sara felt an electric current moving up her spine, lifting the soft, curly hairs along the nape of her neck.

“Can I help you?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper.

“Sara Weisz?”

Sara felt the electricity buzzing along her temples, then a dark current of fear. “How do you know my name?”

“Sara, it's me, Antonia Painemal. Tonia. Remember?”

The current became a bright white light. Tears coursed down Sara's cheeks. “Tonia? From Temuco?”

“Sara, I saw you in this magazine.” Tonia held up the issue of the Catholic Church bulletin,
Solidarity
, that had reported on Lonquén. “The picture around your neck, he looks just like
don
David. It is how I recognized you. Is he your son? Because Sara, I lost my Renato, too. And Sara, remember when you were hurting? Back when we were girls? And I would rub your back to help you sleep? Sara, I need you now. Please. I must help my Renato rest in peace.”

Sara opened her arms. Tonia's
chamal
smelled of burnt wood, and the large, hard muscles of her back were familiar to the touch. It was Sara's turn now to rub along them, kneading out the knots of loss she found there, tears streaming down her face.

For several months, until she found a relative in a downtown neighborhood of Santiago who was willing to take her in, Tonia stayed with Sara and Samuel. In the kitchen after Shmooti went to the bakery, or at the offices of the Committee where Sara began to teach her about the work they were doing, Tonia would take a hollowed-out gourd, silver straw, and
mate
tea leaves from the small bag she carried under her apron. After heating some water on the stove, she pressed
mate
into the gourd and shared the tea with her friend. There was something about sharing a
mate
brew, Sara realized, that made conversation flow more easily.

Slowly Sara learned what had happened to Tonia after she'd gone back to her community. Accepting the inevitable, her parents had apprenticed her to the old
machi
. It had not been easy, and for years Tonia struggled to tame the anger and the visions her grandmother sent her. But she learned to ride the whirlwinds of the spirit world and, through her dreams, to see things others could not see. She finished her education and married a man from a nearby community. According to Mapuche custom, she had gone to live with him. Their son Renato had been adopted after he was abandoned at their doorstep, but he had become so much a part of their lives that, when he disappeared, Tonia's husband died of grief.

“You know, Sarita,” Tonia said one day, “I didn't want to have my own child because I worried about
Kuku's
spirit claiming her, too. You remember what that was like for me, and I wanted to spare my child the suffering. But that would have been easier. After the coup Renato suffered so much, and in my dreams I saw it all. In my dreams I could see what was happening, but I couldn't change it. It would be better not to see, Sarita, because even
machis
can't control the powers of the universe.”

1989

On a warm September morning, Sara left the Committee's offices in the Archdiocese and walked down the stairs to the first floor. After sixteen years of fear, repression, and frustration, it seemed almost unreal that the Chilean people were finally preparing for the first open elections. Through her work in the human-rights movement, Sara had always known there was opposition to Pinochet, to the repression and the harsh measures of the dictatorship, but for a long time it had seemed impossible that things would ever change. Then, six years ago in May of 1983, the copper workers' union had called for a general strike against the military regime. To everyone's amazement, the country had exploded. True, it had taken six more years of violence, death, and the inevitable divisions within the opposition to finally reach a compromise. The Chilean people went to the polls in a plebiscite, voting yes or no on whether General Pinochet should remain in power. When the results were announced the next morning, the “no” vote had carried. The street celebrations that followed reminded Sara of what had happened after Allende was elected president nearly twenty years before.

As Sara walked out of the building onto the street, a man walked up to her smoking a cigarette. She was afraid of him at first, because he walked nervously, constantly looking over his shoulder, and his unshaven face and deep bags under the eyes suggested desperation, perhaps some kind of addiction to drugs or alcohol. But when they came face to face, her fear vanished as she looked into his eyes. Between the slate background and the light blue specks she read the sadness of the world. It was a look she had seen many times in the eyes of her friends and co-workers on the Committee.