XIII

I had just returned from that first visit to Cuba when I met Karen Kilberg, a smart, neatly dressed young lawyer who impressed me foremost with her size: She was over six feet tall, a giant who moved with the ease and power of a leopard. She even had its coloring, with golden hair, wide dark eyes, and thin dark lips; her business suit was spotted with a surprisingly tasteful jungle motif.

I was with Seth then, a lanky tousled-haired secular Jew studying photography at the School of the Art Institute. Younger, sweeter than me by far, he was an exquisite lover, pliable, poetically moody, and silky to the touch. I wasn’t in love with him but I thought that I could be. My parents treated him with warmth, though it was also clear that they perceived him as, if not a phase, a kind of temporary respite. He had none of the volatility of my earlier lovers, none of the danger I was usually attracted to. (By contrast, it was clear his family, while obviously fond of me, considered his time with me a kind of exotic adventure.)

I was clearly committed to Seth when I met Karen, but I still thought of all that was unthinkable the minute I walked into her office and introduced myself as the last-minute Spanish-language interpreter for her afternoon court hearing. She barely looked up, tossing a file at me and immediately dialing up the agency that had sent me and calmly informing them that, since she’d wasted her time the week before giving background on the case to someone who had failed to show up on the critical court date, she had no intention whatsoever of paying. I put the file down fast but she reached over and, while still arguing with my boss on the phone, squeezed my arm as if to tell me not to worry.

I can’t say it helped. I was a wreck going into court, watching her surveying the scene from the plaintiff’s table, coldly eyeing the defense—a short, pale hospital administrator and his egg-shaped lawyer, both wearing kippot and eating dried apricots from a plastic bag.

I fumbled on my interpreter’s oath, standing there in her sky-scraper shadow. Then I bungled the amazingly simple last name of the poor man Karen was representing—a recently arrived Cuban named Levi, which I kept pronouncing like the denim manufacturer instead of the Spanish variant, lev-eee. He was short but stocky, with a bushy patriot’s mustache and a thick head of curls.

Levi, who looked to be about forty, had lost his right arm when an ambulance spun out of control and crashed through the doors of Cook County Hospital’s emergency room, where he worked as an orderly. The industrial steel bucket he was using to help mop the place had somehow gotten in the ambulance’s crush and whirl and been transformed into something of a rotary saw, a mighty machete that cut through Levi’s flesh and bone as if his arm were a tender stalk of sugarcane during the harvest in his native Camagüey.

Karen was suing for several million dollars and Levi, who’d since acquired a fabulous, skin-colored and derma-textured prosthetic that worked through some kind of magical patch with his own live neurons, sat with his new arm as lifeless as an empty sock, anxiously waiting for his fortune.

“Don’t let this act fool you. I can do anything with this,” he boasted to me before court, patting his new limb with his old hand. “I can play basketball if I want—can you imagine?—just like Michael Jordan! But today, here, I have to be very careful. Miss Kilberg does not even want me to scratch my head with my new hand if it itches. No, I have to do it with my real hand, even if it’s not as natural—you know, my new arm is totally a part of me now, I’ve just assumed it. But you come see me later, you come to my house if you like and we’ll have a little mentirita—that’s a rum and Coke, a Cuba Libre, but Cuba’s not really free so that’s why I call it a mentirita, because it’s a big lie—and I’ll show you all the things I can do with this arm. I tell you, it doesn’t itch, it doesn’t hurt—it is much better than my old one!”

I thought for sure Karen would ask for a continuance—an interpreter is a vital part of the proceedings and I knew nothing about her strategies, her client was obviously somewhat unreliable as well, and the defense seemed very confident, sitting there chewing on their dried apricots. But to my surprise Karen stood tall and went on as if nothing was wrong, as if every piece was in place.

After a series of experts attested to Levi’s suffering, Levi himself testified for nearly two hours—long, convoluted discourses on everything from the plantation he’d lost after the Cuban revolution to the numb shock of seeing his own blood spraying out of his shoulder as if it were a showerhead.

Although as an interpreter I’m only supposed to repeat exactly what’s said to me, it soon became clear from the way Levi talked to me—“Okay, so this is the part where I say about the mental trauma of bone breaking, right?”—that he’d rehearsed built-in clues with the originally scheduled interpreter. I kept looking up at Karen, who absolutely reigned over me, but she’d just stare back impassively, as if there was nothing particular in my gaze. That should have kept me on track professionally, but instead I shifted ever so subtly, so imperceptively, handling the interpretation in ways that could only help her case.

By the time Levi got off the stand for the afternoon, the two guys with the kippot and dried apricots had surrendered, calling for a recess and whispering madly with Karen while Levi and I sat and watched. Levi tapped his new, motorized fingers on his thighs, over and over, as if they were impatient to play basketball or make love.

“You were great!” Karen said later, after she and I waved off an excited Levi and went back to her office. “I want to work with you again, but let’s skip the agency. They already know I’m mad so it’s no big deal. I’ll spend less, you’ll make more. Here’s my card.”

It was white, with robin’s-egg-blue raised lettering (like the Israeli flag), and read: “Sima Karen Kilberg.”

“Sima?” I said, looking up at her again, all blond, all six feet of long, long legs and nonexistent hips. “That’s Spanish. Are you Hispanic?” I felt like an idiot the minute I heard myself.

She blinked. “No, of course not. And it’s not Spanish.”

“Sure it is,” I insisted. “Si-ma; it’s phonetic.”

She chuckled. “It’s Hebrew.”

“It’s my grandmother’s name.”

“Are you Jewish?”

“I’m Cuban,” I said.

“Levi’s Jewish,” she said. “There are lots of Cuban Jews.”

“No, no, we’re Catholic,” I said. “I mean, c’mon, San José?”

“Aw . . . yes, of course,” she said, looking at me as if for the first time. “Ask your grandmother about her name,” Karen said. “Maybe you’ll get an interesting family story out of it.”

“She’s dead,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Was she your father’s or your mother’s mother?”

“My father’s,” I said.

“Ask him.”

“Ask him what?”

“If you’re Jewish,” she said.

I never worked for Karen again—I don’t know why, maybe because I felt so transparent, so like a terminal patient suddenly aware that all the medicine I’d been taking may have just been placebos administered to a control group in some macabre experiment. Karen called but I just erased the tape each time. Seth looked at me funny, a little jealous, but too genuinely threatened to ask any questions.

I might have forgotten all about her, except for two things: I began to have recurrent sexual dreams in which Levi would use his mechanical fingers to enter me like a flawless vibrator, then pull out, lick my juices, and nod at Karen, who would take her own licks then say “Yep, yep, yep.” I would wake up in a panic, unable to tell a frightened Seth what was going on in my head, or why I was so unusually wet between my legs.

The other reason is that I raced from Karen’s office that day, past the giant Picasso sculpture at Daley Plaza with all its ambiguity and into a nearby cab—one of those bubblelike yellow taxis that are getting rarer and rarer—and dashed home, where I ran up the stairs two and three steps at a time and breathlessly called my father.

“Are you okay?” he asked, hearing my winded voice.

“Are we Jews?” I demanded.

“Are we what?” he asked, horrified.

“Are we Jews?”

“You’re Catholic; you’ve been baptized,” he said, as if that was evidence.

“Was Abuela Sima a Jew?”

“Abuela Sima . . . ?” He was startled, his voice sank. “Why . . . why are you asking this, Ale?”

“I want to know,” I said. “Sima’s a Hebrew name.”

“Well, and what if it is? What does that mean? Do you think everybody named David or Miriam is Jewish, too?” He was clearly angry now.

“That’s precisely the point,” I insisted. “I mean, Sima’s not that common—I just met the second Sima of my life today, and she’s Jewish, and she asked if I’m Jewish, and when I said no, she was rather adamant that I ask Abuela Sima, or you—I told her Abuela’s dead—whether we’re Jewish, and she said there might be an interesting family story here.”

There was a hollow silence on the phone, as if the line had suddenly gone dead.

“Papi?” I said. I clicked the button a few times.

“She converted,” he said matter-of-factly. I waited for him to elaborate. “She converted,” he said again, as if I hadn’t heard.

“Converted? From what to what?”

“To Catholicism,” he said. “What else?”

“From Judaism? So we’re Jewish, at least part Jewish?”

“We’re Spaniards, we’re Catholic,” he insisted. “We’re like everybody else in Cuba.”