CHAPTER 2

At eleven in the morning, the sun blazed overhead. The chairs on the balcony, unprotected by shade, were hot enough to singe skin. Serguey carried one into the living room to let it cool. He sat on the sofa to read the newspaper and drink a cup of coffee he’d just prepared. At the end of the hall—past the master bedroom, the bathroom, and a second bedroom where Alida had spent the night—Anabel stood by the dinner table, removing weeks-old sand from her beach bag. The laces of her two-piece swimsuit peeked out from her shorts and tube top.

“Hurry up, beautiful,” she said to her sister, who was still in the bathroom.

Serguey chuckled softly, not wishing to be heard. Alida’s presence always brought out a more jovial Anabel. His job, the apartment, their plans, it was all very serious and demanding. They constantly had to handle themselves with decorum, show the world that they were wise beyond their years, deserving of their status and good fortune. This wasn’t easy for Anabel, as she often had to keep her outspoken temperament in check while listening to the boring chatter of insecure men. With Alida, she didn’t have to worry about any of that. They were both brash and honest. They could behave more immaturely. They could be silly and obnoxious, even rude if they wanted. Blood ties at their age could excuse a lot.

The bathroom door opened, and Alida came into view. She was wearing a pink bikini bottom and a blue top. She held onto the doorframe, put a hand on her hip, and stuck her butt out.

“What do you think?” she asked Anabel.

“Whorish.”

“Prudish!”

Serguey caught himself staring at Alida. Her skin was slightly darker and slicker than her Anabel’s, her thighs trimmer and more muscular, splendidly tautened by years of exercise. Nonetheless, there was a striking resemblance in the shape of their bodies. It had been a while since the last time he’d seen this much of his sister-in-law. He let out an inadvertent cough, and both women looked at him.

“Your wife feels threatened by her younger sibling,” Alida said. “Isn’t that sad?”

Serguey didn’t know what to do except force a smile.

Anabel rolled her eyes. “We’re going to be late.”

The sisters had agreed to take advantage of the sunny forecast by heading to a tourist-only resort near Guanabo Beach. They had already arranged for Manny, one of Serguey’s colleagues, to drive them. He was their ticket in. Anabel was hoping her younger sister and Manny, the handsome son of an eminent government official, could hit it off. Anabel had, Serguey now thought quite regrettably, befriended him at a Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ party. He’d been excruciatingly charming. His compliments were like a magician’s handkerchiefs—varied and neverending, and to Serguey’s taste, a little played out. He owned a car, to boot. Not a Soviet-era Lada or Moskvich or Volga, the kind Serguey would be ecstatic to have, but a black, wax-shined, four-door Peugeot. Not even Dr. Roberto Gimenez, Assistant Director to the Chief Legal Executive at the Ministry and Serguey’s boss, could claim ownership of such a vehicle.

Serguey had originally been included in the plan, but he insisted they go alone. He wanted no part of Manny, whom he thought a bad match for Alida.

“You can gossip without having to worry about me,” he had said to Anabel. “Plus I have to prepare for a Monday morning meeting.”

“You’re the only person in your office who works on Sundays,” she told him. She knew how to criticize him without outright attacking him.

“You know I’m still trying to prove myself.”

Anabel walked away and said nothing, as if the conversation had concluded with her last statement.

“Cover yourself up and get your things,” she now said to Alida. “We have to meet Manny downstairs in ten minutes.”

“Si la envidia fuera tiña,” Alida sang in a made-up melody.

“Yes, we’re all very jealous.”

Perhaps it was jealousy that predisposed Serguey to the whole Manny arrangement. Manny was two years younger, and a life of comfort had already been laid out for the guy. He had mastered, quite exceptionally, a smug grin to go with it. A very punchable face, Manny had. Born into the right family—his father was the head of Havanatur, Cuba’s tourism monopoly—with just the right amount of ass-kissing in his personality. He embodied the perfect upper-class individual of the communist state.

Considering how far he himself had come, however, Serguey was aware of his own hypocrisy in resenting a spoiled brat like Manny. He and Anabel lived in the heart of El Vedado. That fact alone would impress plenty of his childhood friends. Their ten-story building, freshly painted and garnished with Cuban flags hanging from several rails, stood highest for a few blocks. It was like a decorated tower, an emblem, as many things tended to be in Cuba. The balconies were long enough to hint at the desirable size of the apartments. There were only four units per floor, a locked entrance to a clean lobby decorated by bamboo palms, and a fully functional elevator. By El Vedado standards, the building was considerably appealing. By Havana standards, it bordered on luxury.

How he’d gotten the apartment wasn’t as admirable. The place belonged to his boss. Gimenez had been a well-regarded defense attorney-turned-government official whose bourgeois relatives survived the Revolution unscathed. They had supported Castro’s clandestine fighters at an opportune time, and unlike other affluent families who were ransacked or betrayed by the new regime, they were rewarded. Gimenez’s sister, a lawyer at the Cuban embassy in France, had lived in Serguey’s apartment with her husband after the building was finished. That was until she got a job as a law professor at the Aix-Marseille Université. Unbeknownst to her brother, she decided to defect. (Why she’d done it, Gimenez had never said.) Perhaps out of personal umbrage or for political reasons, he lost touch with her. Soon after, he offered the place to Serguey—his favorite protégé—rent-free as a sort of wedding gift. He had no one else to give the apartment to, he explained, and Cuban laws didn’t allow him to collect rent.

“The furniture is included,” he had boasted, “though you’re welcome to change it.”

They didn’t, of course. It was a rare kind of Cuban inheritance: a loan, bereft of familial history. The delicately worn quality of the three-drawer chest-like TV stand, the squared glass center table, the upholstered dining room chairs, they were lovely and valuable in their own right. In time he and Anabel could take emotional possession. When Gimenez gave them the keys, she hadn’t been able to contain her tears. Very few people their age could live so comfortably and with so much, especially without having to pay for it. In a communist economy, bequests—almost always meager in nature—were more about subsistence than remembrance or extravagance. What Gimenez had given them was the equivalent of lottery winnings. He and Anabel were among the luckiest twenty-seven-year-olds in the country.

The sisters were now in the dining room, stuffing their beach bags with towels and sunblock. Sure that he wouldn’t have a last minute change of mind, Serguey took hold of the chair he’d brought in with one hand, his coffee cup in the other, and walked cautiously to the balcony. From here, on the seventh floor, he could see the graying, puddle-ridden rooftops of neighboring structures: clotheslines flapping in the wind, wiry antennas with reflectors like lengthy whiskers, moldy water tanks and abandoned tricycles. Still, the view was a huge improvement over his childhood neighborhood in Santos Suarez. In the distance, flags wavered and snapped above schoolyards and medical buildings. Looking to his right, cars and buses trudged down Avenida Paseo toward Malecon, where high rises and hotels occasionally impeded a view of the sea. The air felt crisper, the streets and avenues wider in El Vedado. In Santos Suarez, everything felt aged, narrow, squalid. The sidewalks were riddled with cracks. Street corners had been converted into temporary garbage dumps, refuse piled so high they resembled gigantic anthills. Initially everyone complained about the smell, about the lack of decency. After a while you couldn’t help throwing your own trash into what had become a symbolic monument—a communal middle finger to whoever dared call Cuba a pristine, exemplary island.

“It’s a sad example of how, sooner or later, people give up,” Felipe had told his sons in an ironic lecture, himself a culprit in the trash epidemic.

Living in El Vedado, there was a sense of having been liberated, of being tangibly separate from the more disheartening side of Cuba. Serguey was aware of this, and as much as it might border on betrayal—considering his father and brother belonged to that other side—he was proud of what he had accomplished.

He sat opposite the railing, his ankles drenched in sunlight, the coffee still hot to the touch. A couple of hours before, he had called his father. He wasn’t pleased with how he had dismissed Felipe the previous night, even if his old man had been faking. Presenting Electra Garrigó at Mella Theatre was a big deal. If dinner wasn’t a feasible option, lunch was the least he could do. Anabel had whispered these last words to him in the bedroom, and they’d stayed with him like an accusation. But Felipe hadn’t picked up the landline. Serguey had tried again a half hour later with the same result. Victor had, at some point, bragged about getting his father a cell phone, its own form of luxury, especially for a theater director—nowhere near the top of Cuban society’s money-making strata. But as far as Serguey knew, it had been another one of Victor’s hollow, I’m-the-cooler-brother pledges. The home phone was the only way for Serguey to reach Felipe.

Calling for a third time with no response would irritate him, so Serguey gave up the idea. Best to wait for Anabel and Alida to leave the apartment, he thought, and proceed with the rest of the day on his own terms.

He inhaled the coffee’s aroma as if the drink’s bitterness could magically undo the bitterness in his mind. He succeeded in tempting his taste buds, but before he could take a sip a loud knock came from the front door. He remained quiet for a moment, expecting to hear Manny’s voice. Why hadn’t he just honked, the standard car-owner’s “hello” in Havana? Serguey went to the railing and glimpsed down at the street; he couldn’t locate Manny’s Peugeot. There were plenty of spaces for him to have parked it.

As he approached the door, he was halted by a second, sturdier bang. Someone was slamming the oversized knocker. They were doing it with such force that the wooden frame of the door rattled. He decided not to look through the peephole for fear that his face might be struck.

“Who is it?” he yelled, but no one answered. He fumbled with the lock and finally opened the door.

It was Victor.

“What are you doing here?”

Victor pressed his right forearm against the wall and chewed his nails. His hair seemed to have been slopped in water. His eyes were panic-stricken. “I need your help.”

Victor had been in trouble before, but he’d never appeared this nervous. “What happened?”

“It’s Dad. The police took him this morning.”

“The police? I’ve been calling—”

Victor’s voice was suppliant. “This is some fucked up shit, Serguey.”

He clinched his brother’s wrist. “Where did they take him?”

Before Victor could answer, Serguey noticed his neighbor, Carmina, stealing out of her apartment across the hall. Her hair was wrapped tightly around a set of rollers.

“Is everything okay?” the lady asked.

“Yes, Carmina. Sorry for the noise.” Serguey turned to Victor. “Come in.”

They hustled inside, and Serguey locked the door. “What the hell happened?”

Victor sat on the edge of the sofa, biting his nails again. A streak of wet dust crept down his throbbing neck, his Adam’s apple ascending and falling like a pump. “There was a cop and two guys in civilian clothing. I’m sure they were from State Security. They said they had orders to arrest him.”

Serguey stalled, struggling to remain composed. “What was the charge?”

“They didn’t say.”

“So they just took him?”

Victor didn’t look at his brother. “They searched the house, took his typewriter. They threw all his paperwork and notebooks in boxes, confiscated the paintings and books.” Victor retracted his fingers from his mouth. “Then they barged into my apartment and took my laptop. They fucking knew what they were looking for.”

“You didn’t ask why?” Anabel said. She and Alida had come to the living room. Alida’s eyes were welling up with tears.

Victor raised his own eyes in her direction. “Of course I did. One of them said they were aware of my record and would take me in if I interfered. Dad told me to stay put and shut my mouth. I’ve never seen him so serious.”

“Did he tell you anything else?” Serguey said.

“When they shoved him into the car, he mouthed that I should call Mario.”

“Mario?”

“Dad’s friend. The dramaturge.”

“I met him last night,” Serguey said. “Why him?”

Victor sighed, embarrassed by his answer. “I don’t know.”

Anabel asked, “Do you have any idea what your dad might have done?”

Victor shook his head.

“Maybe it has to do with the play,” Alida said, her voice shaking.

“I doubt it,” Serguey said. “The Department of Culture would’ve been involved.” They were all standing stiffly, arms close to their own bodies, hands near their mouths. They might as well have been at a hospital’s waiting room, a loved one down the hall undergoing a high-risk emergency procedure.

Victor stared expectantly at Serguey. “What do we do?”

Serguey felt his brother’s gaze and those of his wife and sister-in-law fixed on him. He thought about his father, about where they might take him, what they might do to him.

“Serguey . . .” Anabel said.

Her voice sounded like a demand, like an admonishment for his hesitation. “Did you call Mario?” he asked Victor.

“With what number? They took everything, including Dad’s phone book. I don’t think he realized it when he told me to call the guy.”

“Can’t Serguey call someone?” Alida asked her sister.

Anabel looked at him. “Can you?”

Victor said, “I wouldn’t have come here if I had somewhere else to turn.”

“You did the right thing,” Anabel said, giving Victor a reassuring nod.

Serguey resented her assumption, considering Felipe’s arrest could cause problems for Serguey at the Ministry. Mostly, he resented everyone’s belief that they could depend on him to call someone and magically solve the problem.

Victor bobbed his head as if he were sitting in a rocking chair. “If you knew the details of my record, then you’d understand why I can’t go around asking questions.”

Serguey glared at him. “Oh, I know everything about your record.”

Victor stood. The rim of his nostrils contracted as he squinted. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I know everything about your record.”

“Did Dad tell you—”

“Victor,” Anabel said, grasping his shoulder. “Relax.”

Victor faced her. “You know, it makes sense that your husband would study law. All he does is judge people. Here I was thinking he could use that knowledge to help his own family. He never gave a shit, so why would he start now?” Victor moved toward the door. Holding on to the knob, he said, “I’m sorry for bringing you upsetting news. I’ll figure out what to do about Dad. I’m sure you’ll hear what’s going on through the grapevine.”

And with that he was gone.

Anabel gaped at Serguey, blinking as if her eyelids could form words. “Don’t you let him go.”

Serguey stood silent, his hands balled into fists. His neck was hot, his chest heaving. His voice, however, was low and deliberate: “He’s very good at it.”

“At what?”

“Making it seem like it’s someone else’s fault.” He gave Anabel a look of condescension. “Making people take his side.”

“It’s not about him. It’s about your father.”

“It’s not that simple. I can get in trouble at the Ministry. I have to consider—”

“You do what you have to do.” Anabel stepped away from him and hugged her sister. “We’ll deal with the consequences.”

“I’m really sorry,” Alida said to no one in particular.

That snapped him out of his anger. He nodded nervously at her. The sisters walked slowly down the hall.

Serguey threw himself on a chair by the balcony entrance. The towel that Alida had draped over herself suddenly fell, and she bent down to pick it up. He was unmoved by her fine skin, her firm thighs, the strange familiarity of her body. He extended his hand to the rotary phone on the circular table between him and the sofa and dialed Gimenez’s number. He cleared his throat, humming to himself as he had seen actors do before taking the stage and as he now always did before a presentation at work.