Seven years had passed since El Hombre ended his term as Cuba’s elected president. Now, having returned to the country as a senator, he had taken refuge on his estate, apparently uninterested in wielding executive power. Still, his return had altered the rhythms of the Bernal family. Martín’s father, confined to a wheelchair since his heart attack, spent more time at home than in the presidential palace. He passed the time organizing what Oscar called trivial political campaigns, all while trying to convince Senator Batista to run for the presidency.
Although the world war had ended six years earlier, in Havana the explosions, attacks, and gun fights between rival gangs were endless. “One war leads to another. We don’t know how to live in peace,” Lilith would say to Oscar, shaking her head.
For her, the end of the war meant nothing, she had already lost those she loved the most. She still spoke to Beatrice and Albert in German, and avoided the stories of mass exterminations, concentration camps, piles of corpses and skulls that had filled all the magazines in Havana. There had been celebrations all around, but she’d had nothing to celebrate. The war had annihilated her family, and given her another name, another country, another language, another mother. She had nowhere to go home to, despite Beatrice’s endless letters to European refugee help groups and the Red Cross. Beatrice wanted the world to know that she, her husband, and Lilith were still stranded on an island that to them would always be a place of exile. Her letters were smoke signals, lost in thin air, thought Lilith. How many letters had crossed, all of them wishing for an impossible reunion? For her to know that now she wouldn’t be spit at in her native country, where previously she’d had to hide away, was cold comfort.
When the war ended, a girl at school asked Lilith if she would leave Cuba.
“Where do think I should go?” she replied.
“Lilith’s not going anywhere,” Martín said. “She’s just as Cuban as you and me.”
Now, five years after the war ended, the economy of the island was booming. Rickety trams gave way to shiny new buses and there was a sense of modernity in the air. People were proud that Cuba was one of the countries that repaid its foreign debt on time. The Banco Nacional was set up, bringing a wave of prosperity to the country. However, what most transformed the lives of the Bernal family was the arrival of air-conditioning. Martín and his father hermetically sealed the house and installed a metal box in every room except the bathrooms and kitchen. The motors made the whole house vibrate, and the noise gave the Bernal home the feeling of a constantly throbbing factory. From outside, it looked as if the house were crying. The air-conditioning units dripping at the windows formed a river of tears that ran down to the Herzogs’ yard. Helena cursed these electric boxes, complaining that if all the rich families decided to install them, Vedado would turn into a swamp.
The Herzog household also changed after the war was over. Albert spent all his time in his office, reading old newspapers from overseas, which was how he referred to anything to do with Germany, brought to him by a customer at the furniture store. He also began winding down his businesses.
“The war’s over. What’s the point in carrying on, if the only place we’re going, when we leave here, is to the cemetery? We have more than enough to see us through.”
Albert still called Lilith “the little girl,” which always brought back a memory she had from their time aboard the St. Louis. A few days into the voyage, he whispered in her ear, “You’re a clever little girl. You’ll find a way to go on. Not just for you, but for your mother.” Then he kissed her forehead. Albert had always supported her, even taking her side against Helena, who thought Lilith was too independent and headstrong. “Leave her alone, she knows what she’s doing,” he used to say.
With her husband holed up in his office, Beatrice began to go to Old Havana in the afternoons, to have tea at the Hotel Raquel. Countless refugees from Europe were arriving every day. Some showed signs of terrible malnutrition, and they usually refused to talk about what had happened. The families arriving at the hotel on Calle Amargura at the corner of San Ignacio, on the other hand, were people who had been able to hold on to some money and possessions. Beatrice still harbored the hope that she would find a neighbor, or someone from the village where her family had lived. Day after day, she would come home at dusk, empty-handed, and shut herself away in silence.
The heat at that time of year was suffocating, and they spent most of the day in the kitchen, where they could open all the windows onto the yard, protected by the shadows of the trees with German names. The living room was hellish in the afternoon, with the sun nosediving in, devouring the color of the rugs and the paintings on the walls. Lilith started complaining about the heat, in the hope of convincing first Helena, then her mother, that air-conditioning would make their lives much more pleasant.
Oscar left on a trip to Europe with his parents and when he returned a few months later, he surprised Martín and Lilith by introducing them to a friend he had met on the ocean liner returning from Barcelona. Ofelia Loynaz was eighteen years old and belonged to one of the island’s oldest and most distinguished families. Her ancestors included heroes of the War of Independence as well as presidents of the republic, a legacy that Oscar’s father enjoyed boasting about. Ofelia gradually became a part of the three friends’ adventures.
One day Martín took Oscar with him to practice flying and suggested the two young women spend the day together. Oscar wanted Lilith and Ofelia to get to know each other better, hoping that Lilith would warm to the girl. Lilith never went flying with Martín; she was scared of heights, and sudden movements could turn her stomach. For Lilith, the mere thought of getting into one of those noisy planes brought back the dizziness and vomiting that had plagued her during the endless ocean crossing from Hamburg to Havana. They didn’t even ask Ofelia, since she was so small and fragile, they thought she might collapse the moment the plane took off.
At first, Lilith couldn’t understand how Oscar had formed a tie with a woman as quiet and delicate as her. Ofelia’s voice was so weak that Lilith often struggled to hear her. It was made worse by the slow lilt of her Spanish, and the way she separated the words as she spoke, adding silences and swallowing her s’s. He didn’t even use her name, he referred to Ofelia simply as “she” whenever he mentioned her. The truth was, Lilith had long suspected that Oscar was in love with Martín. Oscar was always captivated by Martín’s stories of his daredevil flights, and at times she had seen Oscar’s eyes lingering on Martín’s strong, veined hands. She thought of something Helena had once told her: Nobody knows where our heart will lead us.
While Oscar and Martín were flying, Lilith and Ofelia shared coffee, and after sipping her cup of coffee for over an hour, Ofelia told her that she planned never to marry, because she had no appetite for parties, nor the need for a husband. Her life’s purpose was to worship Jesus, she said. Ofelia spoke of Jesus with such familiarity—He was the only one she trusted, she was completely devoted to Him—that Lilith was sure there was no way this helpless young girl would ever become romantically involved with Oscar, who always insisted his future would take him off the island.
After coffee, Lilith accompanied Ofelia to make a donation at the church. She and Ofelia walked along the pedestrian promenade down the middle of Avenida Paseo, under the shade of the trees, until they came to an enormous neo-Gothic building with two towers, which occupied an entire block. On one corner, the construction became more classical, as if the architect had grown bored while he was building the church. Ofelia said this was the convent of Santa Catalina de Siena. They climbed the modest stairs, and as they entered the building, Ofelia dipped her fingertips in a fountain and crossed herself with a slight curtsy.
Ofelia told Lilith she had wanted to be a nun since she was a little girl. Not just any nun, she said breathlessly as they walked along, every now and then dabbing the sweat from her brow with a pink lace handkerchief. Ever since she was born, she had been destined for contemplation and prayer, she said, and one night before bed she had silently made a vow of perpetual enclosure, as valid as one made before the Lord in the cloister. Her parents thought it merely a childish whim, until they realized she had become very close to Sister Irene, one of the nuns at the convent, who cared for lepers and found homes for abandoned children. Ofelia viewed the well-to-do families who visited her parents’ home as selfish and frivolous if they didn’t donate to the church causes. When her father watched her insistently pester his friends’ wives, he understood that, despite her submissive appearance, Ofelia was something of a rebel. She had begun a battle on all fronts on behalf of an omnipresent being, he would say of his daughter to the rest of the family.
“One day you’re going to come home with leprosy and infect your younger brothers and your mother,” he yelled at her one day.
“Father, forgive him,” Ofelia responded, raising her eyes skyward and muttering a prayer.
While they waited for Sister Irene, Lilith was hypnotized by the faces she could make out in the darkness behind the latticework of a window near the altar, beside the stained glass windows. They must be the cloistered nuns, she thought.
Sister Irene was a tall, stout woman. Lilith had imagined all devout nuns to be like her friend: small, fragile, and docile, but she was met with a strong woman, affable and affectionate, who clasped Ofelia’s hands for several minutes while they chatted. Ofelia handed her an envelope containing a cash donation, and the nun made the sign of the cross in the air.
Looking at the heavy black and white robes the nun wore, Lilith couldn’t understand how anyone could bear to wear that suit of armor in the tropical heat. She imagined her always in the shadows, lit only by stained glass windows, sleeping in a cell that was empty except for a hard, wooden bed and a cross. It was an image straight out of the novels she had read, where women shut themselves up to pay for their guilt after being jilted by a lover, casting off all their worldly goods.
Ofelia and Sister Irene discussed a newborn baby who had no home. The mother had died during childbirth, and Ofelia promised to do everything in her power to find a good family to take the baby in. Sister Irene had an almost maternal relationship with Ofelia, and Lilith began to get a glimpse of the world where her new friend had been tempted to lock herself away. To spend all day reading, praying, and meditating didn’t seem strange to Lilith. She thought it must be challenging to memorize the Bible word for word, learn Latin, and navigate the twists and turns of a religion that felt entirely foreign to her, even though she knew in some way it was hers. At least on her mother’s side.
Since the day they met the nun, Lilith decided to become closer to Ofelia. She let her talk, without trying to understand her every word. The main thing was to seize an idea, not to understand every sentence murmured by the girl who swallowed her consonants as if she thought that by letting them go, they might take all her energy with them.
On weekdays they went to Calle Obispo, spending hours leafing through the books in La Moderna Poesía, where they would eventually buy the latest editions of Cuban authors. They went for long walks to nowhere in particular, and every month went together to see Sister Irene to give her Ofelia’s donation. Lilith also began donating, placing a sealed envelope in the nun’s hands, never knowing if it was an adequate amount, or similar to Ofelia’s offering. Lilith had never met a girl so young and so devout, a calling she herself had never experienced. She thought that if God did indeed exist, he had obviously forgotten about her and her family.
As the months went by, Ofelia became more and more a part of the group. Lilith began to feel close to her. Ofelia’s parents allowed her a freedom that other society girls could only dream of. They didn’t insist she was chaperoned on her dates with Oscar, and even let her go overnight to Varadero with him, Lilith, and Martín. They knew that for their daughter God was ever present, and therefore her virginity was not at risk: her devotion to the Lord acted as a permanent chastity belt. They also thought the trip to Varadero might help her forget the idea of cloistering herself, which for them would mean losing their only daughter. Sons, when they marry, leave home and never come back. If Ofelia became an enclosed nun, who would look after them when they grew old?
Oscar and Martín had been happy to see Lilith, who didn’t make friends easily, form a bond with Ofelia. And Martín was pleased to see Oscar with a girlfriend. He no longer had to feel uncomfortable during the prolonged hugs his friend gave him. They were like brothers, he thought, and they would be inseparable all their lives. If Oscar had feelings for him that were not reciprocated, Martín knew his friend understood that he was devoted to Lilith, whom he was certain he was going to marry and have children with.
One afternoon, Lilith was in the kitchen with her three friends when Oscar announced that he was going to the United States with his parents for an extended trip. Ofelia paled; it was clear this was the first she was hearing of this. Lilith took her hand. Oscar, without even glancing at Ofelia, said that they would first go to San Francisco, and then to New York, where Cuba, as a founding member of the United Nations, had opened a consulate. Oscar had already accompanied his father on a couple of trips to Manhattan, which he called a “real” island, and had returned obsessed with a new dance, created by a Cuban, that had begun to take hold across the world. Helena was preparing lemonade when the radio news broadcast ended, giving way to music.
“Mambo!” Oscar shouted and began dancing wildly.
He took Helena’s hands and taught her a few steps, which she copied almost perfectly. They took two steps, lifting their toes and stretching one arm forward and then back, together with a syncopated hip movement. Lilith tried to do it, which made Martín laugh. Everyone—even Ofelia—could follow the rhythm. Except Lilith. She could barely comprehend the movements.
“I can’t breathe!” Helena said with a huge smile on her face and went back to preparing the lemonade.
Oscar took Ofelia as his next partner. He directed the choreography, with the four of them forming a chain, and Lilith let herself be swept along. She truly believed that for the people born on the island, dancing was a part of their birthright. Their gestures, the way they walked, sat down, shrugged their shoulders: there was a musicality to all of it. Martín took Lilith’s hands so that he could define the rhythm for her. Just at that moment there was a knock at the front door.
Helena excused herself and went to see who was at the door. A moment later Helena called for Beatrice. An echo of a conversation drifted through to the kitchen. It was a man’s voice, speaking German. Lilith went to the living room, where she saw Beatrice talking with an old man with a haunted face, dressed in what were surely someone else’s suit and shoes. He was carrying a narrow black leather case, edged in bronze.
“You must be Lilith,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I was one of Professor Bruno Bormann’s students.”
Lilith realized the man wasn’t old. Helena returned from the kitchen with a glass of water and a cup of coffee, which the visitor hadn’t asked for. He drank the water and the coffee without pausing for breath. Color gradually returned to his face, though his voice remained choked.
“This is for you,” he said, and handed Lilith a sealed yellow envelope.
Lilith opened it, and inside found a dirty, tatty little notebook, its corners worn, in sharp contrast to the impeccable packaging it had been sent in.
“It’s yours,” the man went on, without taking his eyes off her.
Beatrice was silent, frightened the man would tell Lilith more about her mother’s death than she had told her.
Martín, Oscar, and Ofelia came into the hall and the man introduced himself.
“Señor Abramson,” he said. “An old friend of Lilith’s family.”
“Everything okay?” Martín asked Lilith.
She didn’t answer. Her eyes were glued to the little notebook.
Her fingertips touched the line written in German on the front cover: For Lilith, my night traveler. She carefully opened the book and saw what appeared to be a riot of words and ideas, many of them crossed out or worn away, making them difficult to read.
Lilith looked up at the man, wanting to ask him so much: about her mother, Opa, Franz. Then she returned to the pages, written in faded ink, trying to decipher them. She lifted the book to her face, to smell it, and blushed when she noticed everyone watching her. Her mother’s notebook must have crossed borders, rivers, and mountains before navigating the Atlantic to reach her. What trace could possibly be left of Ally?
“Mother had beautiful handwriting,” Lilith said, unsettled by her own words.
It had been a long time since she had referred to her real mother as anything other than “Ally,” especially not in front of Beatrice. She didn’t dare look at her. From the corner of her eye, she saw her adoptive mother’s frozen smile. She tried to follow what the man was saying, a halting story that had no beginning and no end.
“… so, bringing you this notebook was for a debt I had to settle,” he said in Spanish, with a Castillan accent. “Now I can die in peace.”
She understood that Herr Professor had been his mentor. When he was expelled from the university, during the first round of racial cleansing, Herr Professor continued reading his poems and essays, and, when he learned his family had been stripped of their businesses, helped pay for him to flee Berlin, first going south, and then eventually to Spain. While his parents were being taken to a concentration camp, he took a train across the Pyrenees. He arrived in Spain during the final throes of the civil war, and as that ended, the next began, the war that drew in the rest of Europe, leaving him stranded in a village with no official borders. When he finally had a place to live, he began to write to Herr Professor. The letters between them, he said, always arrived late, and in the wrong order.
Before Herr Professor was sent to Sachsenhausen, he managed to send the notebook. “The only thing I could save from the bonfire,” he wrote Abramson, begging him to guard it with his life. It was all that remained of a writer he greatly admired, he said. This notebook, and a poem that must still be in her daughter’s hands in Cuba, he had added.
Hearing this, Lilith shuddered, overwhelmed by an unfamiliar sense of guilt. Since arriving in Cuba with the couple she now called her parents, she had refused to look back. The poem she had traveled with had ended up tucked away in a drawer in her nightstand, along with a chain and a crucifix she had never dared to wear, out of respect for her new family. She had never returned to her mother’s words and didn’t even know if the writing had faded away, like in the notebook. The only details Herr Professor had given Abramson were Ally and Lilith’s names, and the name of the family she had traveled with to Havana.
Abramson had found the Herzog family thanks to all the letters Beatrice had sent around the world, searching for the whereabouts of any surviving members of her family.
“The paths destiny takes us along…” he said in wonderment.
Hearing people speaking German, Albert came down from his office and stood in the doorway at the foot of the stairs, out of sight of the others. He didn’t want to be part of a story that, he knew, was bound to end in tragedy. What else could happen to his family? He had lost his son and his home and his business, and now a stranger came along to torment Lilith, who had managed to escape hell and rebuild her life.
Lilith waited anxiously for the man to mention Franz. Until Martín, nobody else had ever made her feel as secure and protected as Franz had. Being with him had been like having an entire army behind her. At first, she had imagined Franz alongside fiendish soldiers, dodging bullets, surviving the trenches, fighting for a cause which he never believed in. In one of her dreams, she had seen him asleep in a woods, which she took to mean he had died peacefully, his face intact, not disfigured by a grenade, as she had also once dreamed. The image of Franz handing her the rag doll was seared in her memory. For her, that had been his goodbye.
One of Abramson’s uncles had ended up in Panama, he explained. He had set up a business trading with Cuba and had moved to Havana after the war, because according to him it was the most prosperous country in the Americas. His uncle had accepted the invitation of an old friend who had offered to help him set up a channel for live transmissions via a lightbulb in a wooden box, which displayed images. Cuba was to be the second country in the world to have television.
Homeless, with no family and no money, in the midst of a continent in ruins, señor Abramson decided to join his uncle in Havana, and thus fulfill the promise he had made to his mentor. Now he could die in peace, he repeated. Abramson went on his way, looking even gaunter than when he had arrived, as if telling his story had depleted him of some of his life force.
Lilith ran to her bedroom so that nobody would see the tears in her eyes. She sat on the bed, the notebook still in her hands, not daring to open the drawer to see if the poem she left Germany with over a decade ago had faded away.
She read through some of the passages in the notebook, trying to piece the random words together so they made sense. She changed the order, started at the end, went back to the beginning, and when she finally gave up, she opened the drawer. The first thing she saw was the little box. She picked it up. Underneath was the sheet of paper with the poem, folded in half inside its pink envelope. She opened the box, and the sight of the crucifix brought to mind fragmented phrases and the sound of broken glass underfoot. She read the inscription on the little cross: Lilith Keller. Beneath it, a number: 7. She carefully unfolded the piece of paper and read a verse: The night you were born, Berlin was at its darkest… When she finished reading the poem, she went back to the beginning, lingering on every line. She memorized every word, every gap, every space, the stroke of the letters, the color of the ink. She didn’t want anything to be forgotten: the past had returned to her.
With the poem, the cross, the rag doll, and the notebook on her chest, she lay down and eventually fell asleep.