CHAPTER 26

The contact in Managua was able to offer only half a pound of beans, a few ears of corn, and black-spotted tomatoes that were a day from spoiling. Kiko insisted that there was no time to wander in search of better provisions, so they purchased the lot and continued on. Deeper into the countryside, suburbs were replaced by plowed parcels of red earth, wind-combed grass like a horse’s mane, lines of barbed wire fences, cows roving and idling behind them. Broad portions of sky were suddenly visible above a quaint blanket of green. Kiko maneuvered around the occasional ox-drawn wagon or bicycle-riding peasant until, in a half-hour, they reached San Antonio de las Vegas and its soil-dusted streets. They sped through the town’s main road past a bodega, a block of houses with large front yards that dipped below the road, and a cruddy barn-like building that was a storm away from collapsing. They climbed a hill and steered left at the summit. Following Victor’s indications, Kiko led the car on a deserted gravel path for a kilometer before the brothers got off.

“You should turn off your phones,” Kiko said. “Save the battery.”

A dusty, whispering air patted Serguey’s face as he jumped out. The gravel path curved out of view some hundred meters ahead, beyond it a flat expanse of vegetation. He powered off his cell, as Victor was already doing.

He walked to his brother’s side and said, “I need to ask Kiko a favor in private.”

Victor pocketed his phone. “You can kiss him goodbye in front of me.”

“I’m serious.”

Victor turned to Kiko and hugged him, vigorously slapping his back. “I’ll send you some food, you bony bastard.”

From where he stood, Serguey could see Kiko smiling, a smile that served to quell the melancholy frown fizzing underneath. Kiko had no idea that he would get another opportunity to bid his friend farewell.

“You better not mess around over there,” he said. “Make your money the right way.”

Victor grabbed Kiko’s slouched shoulders. “Clean slate. Plus I’ll have Serguey to watch over me, right?”

Serguey was already retrieving the bags from the car. “Right.”

Victor took the two biggest bags from his brother. He dangled them from his shoulders, cupping their strained bottoms. He began to walk into a narrow recess in a wall of overgrown grass, which appeared to swallow him, the crown of his head barely rising above the blades.

“He’s going to miss me,” Kiko said to Serguey.

“And me,” Serguey said.

Kiko leaned his head forward, his eyes opening in astonishment. Serguey shared his plan to pick up Alida, to have her take his place. He didn’t give many specifics as to the reason: with his friend, he didn’t have to. Kiko understood Serguey’s dilemma, though he was disappointed that he’d risk staying in Cuba.

Serguey sighed dejectedly. “Anabel won’t leave her parents, and I can’t leave her.”

“I respect that. The reason I broke up with the Mexican girl your brother mentioned is my parents. I can’t leave them either. My old man is in rough shape.” Kiko agreed that it was best to keep Victor in the dark. “If you tell him, he’ll refuse to go, out of pure stubbornness.”

Serguey would text Kiko the night of the trip from Mario’s car to give him the exact location. Mario had already told him it was in Marhondo.

“I know the area,” Kiko said. He assured Serguey that he’d deliver.

Serguey told him to thank Claudia again. “It’s a shame she couldn’t meet us.”

Kiko looked over his shoulder at the rocky path, tracing his return to the main road. “Now I have to go deal with that, see how it plays out.” He took a glimpse at his watch and said he needed to rush to the city. They shook hands, and his friend got into the car. Serguey watched the wheels grind the gravel, kicking up dust. The exhaust pipe spluttered copious amounts of smoke as the vehicle distanced itself from him.

He carried the remaining bags and his backpack, catching up with his brother in forty meters. Victor had trekked into the thick vegetation keeping the bags close to his knees, winding and sliding to prevent them from being slashed open.

“What was that back there?” he asked without looking at Serguey.

“Just something about Anabel.”

“I didn’t want to ask you about her in front of Kiko. I guess I should’ve. How did she take it?” Victor pushed an oversized branch with his hip as if it were a turnstile.

Serguey struggled to remain balanced. His bum ankle anchored him frailly on the rough terrain. “She knows this is a unique situation.”

“Serguey, cut the bullshit.”

He needed to commit to the lie more emphatically, more believably. He needed to give the illusion of tacit understanding between him and Anabel. “She’s disappointed,” he said, pausing for effect. The sound of crushed twigs and brushed-against leaves accompanied his steps. “I promised her I’d get her out. I’m sure she’s mad at me, and probably at you too, but she trusts me.”

“We’ll get her out. Alida too. Anabel’s not the type of woman who’ll betray you. She’s patient.”

“Like Penelope.”

“I’d love to say you’re exaggerating,” Victor grunted and ducked under a bough, “but this is a fucking odyssey.”

They lumbered on, their bags scraping tree trunks and wedging between the narrow spaces in the foliage. They skirted the clearing where the encounter with the peasants had occurred. Serguey glanced at it twice, thinking the area more congested than he recalled it. Victor didn’t bother to look, and Serguey wondered if he had forgotten the place. Had it been erased from his brother’s consciousness like his unremembered dreams? Quietly, he continued on, recognizing the path to the shack from this point. He anticipated coming across a fallen trunk, the top shaved so flatly that it served as a bridge when rain pulped the soil into mud. Soon they hopped over the makeshift bridge, a lot smaller than Serguey remembered it. The shack’s shoddy shape became visible to their right. The thatched roof was slanted, one side beginning to cave. The unwieldy branches from neighboring trees rested obliquely on it. A series of rocks still remained leading up to the entrance—a walkway their grandfather had set up to combat the trapping sludge. The wooden walls looked sturdy and damp. The window was shut, though one could see a narrow vertical breach created by the uneven size of the panes.

Inside, the air was riddled with a mossy stench. The shadows seemed thick with humid dust. Various cavities burrowed between the baseboard and the ground, ideal shelters for snakes and scorpions.

“We should’ve gotten some repellent,” Serguey said.

Victor dropped the bags in the middle of the shack. “The mosquito nets will be enough.” He went to the window and opened it. One of the panes fell off completely. “I guess we should’ve brought a hammer and nails too.”

Serguey put down his bags and backpack by the door. “We need some palm leaves to use as a mattress.”

“Man, this was our fort.” Victor stood on his toes and stretched one arm, his fingers grazing one of the horizontal beams below the concave roof. When they were children, a tarp had been laid over the beams to ensure water didn’t reach whatever merchandise Larido was storing. Sacks full of rice and potatoes had been stacked along the walls, giving the interior the fort-like appearance Victor was referencing.

“Damn!” Serguey said, slapping his own thigh.

“What?” Victor attempted to sit on the windowsill, but his head hit the top frame, causing him to jerk forward.

“We forgot to bring water.” He stared at Victor wide-eyed, stunned that they’d forgotten something so essential.

Victor scratched his scalp, massaging away the pain. “We better hope the river’s clean. Otherwise, we’ll have to go into town.”

Serguey rummaged through the bags his in-laws had given him. He was relieved to find two tin cups and a cooking pot. They ventured out and gleaned as many feathered palm leaves as they could, arranging them along the floor of the shack like two beds. They amassed dry twigs and a few small rocks for a bonfire and snatched guavas and Spanish limes off nearby trees, nuzzling the fruits in the shawl-like basket formed by their sleeve-tied T-shirts. Their last trip was to the river, two hundred meters way. The water looked clear. There were no animal carcasses or signs of chemical contamination from a turbine, so they filled the glasses, pot, and two emptied-out cans. Returning to the shack, Serguey noticed that his ankle had loosened somewhat, the pain kept at bay by Anabel’s tape job. He still had to drag his foot, however, so he couldn’t avoid tailing his brother everywhere they went.

As night fell upon them, they got the bonfire going below the window outside the shack. They boiled beans in the pot, sliced up a few tomatoes, and warmed up charred chicken drums that Julia had wrapped in tinfoil. They ate with gusto in the faint glow of the flames. They decided to save one can with water and the fruits for the next morning. Serguey switched on the kerosene lamp and hung it from a hook by the door, dimly illuminating the interior of the shack. They put out the fire with their shoes and used the flashlight to properly set up the mosquito nets. They conserved their energy for what needed to be done, refraining from speaking much while they carried out these tasks. Serguey felt drained by the time he blew out the lamp and they settled themselves inside the netting, using clean T-shirts as pillows. Even with the palm leaves, the floor was sharp and toothed, digging into his back. The night air was wet and brisk. Beyond the shack’s walls, the countryside remained awake with chirping and hooting and the disquieting sound of snapping branches. Closer to Serguey, mosquitoes buzzed in the blurred spaces just outside his net.

“Whoever wakes up first has to wake the other,” Victor said.

“Okay,” Serguey said absentmindedly.

He listened for approaching voices as he lay beneath the sheets Julia had provided. He worried about the scenarios he might contemplate now that his thoughts were unhinged by the twilight of sleep. He was putting his brother ahead of everything. The sacrifice Toya had talked about seemed imminent, thirsting to manifest itself. The consequences of returning to the city might involve a fate worse than Felipe’s, and yet, despite the anxiety and fear, his commitment to save his younger brother felt born out of his true self. It was a decision made not just out of responsibility, out of his guilt for owing Victor support, protection, even the simple act of company. It was a decision made out of profound empathy, familial devotion, and fraternal love. He was being selfless because he couldn’t do anything else, and it comforted him that he was capable of it.

He did worry about what Anabel might be thinking, about the future of his marriage to a woman for whom, because of the legal issues he’d be facing, he was now a problem. What he had imagined could happen to his in-laws—the trampled flowers, the broken portraits, Antonio’s humiliation—might be transpiring at this very hour. And this, perhaps, troubled him most of all: the collateral damage of his actions. It was one thing for him to go to prison, another for Anabel and family to suffer as a result. But what choices did he have? He was plunging all the way, as Anabel herself had urged him to. He was doing it intuitively, decidedly, as if nothing else made sense. Would she see it this way? If she or her own parents became victims of this month-long nightmare, would she really be willing to understand, to absolve him of blame?

Though he wished to, he didn’t get the opportunity to delve deeper into her possible state of mind: he fell asleep after a few conscious breaths, physically drained to the point of surrender.

It was Victor who opened his eyes first.

Serguey heard him returning to the shack. His movements were sluggish. He yawned and stood groggily, observing his makeshift bed, unsure of what to do.

“You were supposed to wake me,” Serguey said, releasing his arms and legs from the grip of the sheets. A stiff ache clenched his muscles.

“You want me to hold your hand while you take a piss?”

Serguey hobbled out of his netting like a corpse from a crypt. He squinted and rubbed his eyes, fixating his vision just under Victor’s armpit. “What happened to you?”

Victor gave him a bewildered look.

Serguey walked toward his brother. “The side of your body. It’s all red.”

Victor lifted his arm and examined the area, pulling the skin toward his stomach. “Oh, shit.”

“Does it itch?”

Victor passed his hand over the irritated surface. “Not really. Looks like a rash. Must be the humidity.”

“We have to wash up.”

“I’m used to showering before going to bed. I can’t tell you how uncomfortable I feel right now.”

“Well, clean your hands before you eat breakfast.”

Serguey decided to leave the shack as it was. Victor extracted a plastic bag from the bundle of clothes Kiko had given him. His money was stuffed neatly inside it. He perched the bag on one of the beams and looked at it from different angles, to verify that it was properly hidden. If a person were to come by, he said, they would be able to tell someone was staying there, but at least they wouldn’t take the money.

Serguey followed his own advice and, after taking a piss, rinsed his hands with dewdrops. Victor tossed him a guava, and he dug his teeth into it, snapping off a chunk. They shared the remaining water, grabbed the bar of soap, and headed for the river.

They chose an area bounded by narrow-limbed trees, where the water was deep. The bank was covered in mud, the river bottom mantled by swaying algae. The clearer sections of the stream, pocked with smooth rocks, were too shallow and open, visible from a distance. Here, they had their own private bath, albeit murky. They hung their clean clothes from branches, stripped down to their underwear, and stepped into the cool water. The soft soil twirled and surged around their feet and knees. The algae grazed and tangled their legs, releasing them once they pushed off into the middle of the river, where they could glide more freely.

Serguey had taught Victor how to swim in this very body of water. It hadn’t taken long. Victor was brave and strong, his strokes coordinated enough to allow him to quickly grow confident. He’d looked less gracious, like a frog, as he tried to remain in one spot, his skinny arms and legs frenziedly keeping him afloat. His chin had remained just above the surface as he laughed in delight, thrilled by the result of his effort: he had learned how not to drown.

As the years passed, Victor became the better swimmer, though he never acquired Serguey’s ability to dive with grace. The handful of times Felipe took them to the Social Circles in Miramar—pre-Revolution yacht clubs and private seaside spas that were pillaged and then opened to the public—Serguey had put his innate diving skills in full display. The shoreline was studded with sea urchins and the remnants of broken-down docks, but the water was deep enough to jump into. Other children tried imitating Serguey as he leaned off a ledge—eyes closed, arms stretched as if on a cross—and flew like an arrow into the sea. Diving excited him more than swimming, which he found tiresome and monotonous. There was no moment of silence like the few seconds prior to plunging.

Here, in this mud-blanketed river, he had no choice: he had to wade and swim. He was in Victor’s territory.

After a quarter of an hour of splashing and Victor practicing his backstroke, they washed with the soap. They rinsed their bodies and propped themselves onto a series of weaving roots that sank like deformed fingers into the river. Their heels and toes still touched the water. Serguey removed the tape, which had wicked the pale skin around his ankle. There was no more swelling. Sunlight reached the brothers in drifting blotches, mimicking the oscillation of the leaves above them.

“We should’ve come to this place more often,” Victor said.

“Very relaxing,” Serguey concurred. There was rejuvenation, a revitalizing of the senses by the calm way in which every element—air, water, soil—seemed to cohabit and give way to the other.

“I’ve been to pools at some hotels. But I mostly end up checking out the tourists.” Victor was allergic to sentimentality, even his own.

“You can’t compare a hotel to this,” Serguey said. “This is nature.”

“You’re right.” Victor roiled the river’s plated surface with his soles. “Those tourists weren’t bad to look at, though.”

Serguey laughed, defeated by his brother’s persistence. “You know, I think I’ve always resented that.”

“What?”

“How no matter what’s happening, you can turn everything into a joke. I really envy it.”

Victor turned his head pensively to the side, a ribbon of sunlight spreading to his cheek. From Serguey’s point of view, he looked a lot like their mother. “It gets me in trouble.”

“Yeah, but in some ways it keeps you more honest. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in my posturing, I start to get mad at myself. It’s not healthy. You feel like an old man.”

A flock of birds entered their frame of vision. They flew from right to left, their pattern synchronized. Victor made a rifle with his hands and fired. Serguey watched the birds moving away, fluid dots in the sky.

“How I wish we hadn’t run out of pellets,” he said.

It took a moment for Victor to reply. “Me too.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t do more.” He rushed the words, like yanking out a splinter.

Victor chuckled. “You kind of did nothing.”

Serguey spoke slower this time. “You’re right. I was a coward.”

“We were kids. I got over it.”

“I wish I could say the same.”

Victor removed his feet from the water and dug them into the soaked soil of the bank. “When I got older, I realized we were just wired differently. I think we bring that with us from birth, like it’s in our DNA. We can’t control it.”

Serguey frowned his smile. His brother was giving him his own version of forgiveness.

“I don’t resent you for what happened with the peasants,” Victor continued. “Those assholes are probably eating mud and fucking mares as we speak.”

“We didn’t talk the same way after that,” Serguey said, hoping his brother would meet his eyes. “It’s like we became angry at each other.”

Victor seized a clump of muck and threw it into the river. “I dated this girl once who was studying to be a psychologist. Really nice ass, too. She got me to talk about our childhood and shit. To indulge her, I told her some of our traumatic experiences—she loved that word, ‘traumatic’—and she said that I was probably angry at you before the incident with the peasants.”

“Why did she think that?”

Victor looked at him. “Because of what happened with Mom.”

“How so?”

“You know, about how you froze, same as you did with the peasants.”

“I froze?” Serguey’s heart was thudding.

Victor shrunk his shoulders empathetically. “You were standing by the bed, crying and shaking. I lunged at Raidel, that fucking scum, and he cut me.”

“I thought you got cut by accident, when he was running out of the house.”

“Maybe it was by accident, but it happened when I went at him.”

Serguey was overtaken by a smothering panic. How could he not remember? He recalled the blood, his mother’s body bent on the floor, her mouth gasping. He recalled the sound of his and Victor’s crying, the neighbors bolting into the house, enfolding him and Victor in towels. He recalled uniformed police officers walking to and fro, the lights of an ambulance as they were taken away. Altogether, it was a jumbled assortment of images, an almost surreal montage. He and Victor had met with the psychologist following their mother’s death, but he couldn’t recollect a single word spoken in those sessions.

His voice began to break. “I honestly don’t remember . . .”

Victor shrugged more emphatically. “We were kids. There was nothing either of us could’ve done anyway. It was meant to happen. At least we had Dad.”

Serguey stared at Victor through blurry eyes. Victor smacked his brother’s chest with the back of his hand.

“Don’t break on me now,” he said. “Who the hell knows if what I remember is what actually happened?”

“We’ve never really talked about Mom.”

“It’s a sore subject for Dad. And I wasn’t sure how you felt about it, so I figured I’d just keep it to myself. But I think about her a lot.”

“At least that piece of shit Raidel died in prison.”

Victor put on a smirk. “Fucking pneumonia.”

“I thought it was a lung abscess.”

“Who cares? I hope he choked on his own blood.”

Serguey was unable to speak for a while. The brothers sat together, their skin dry and their heads warm, taking in the view of green and brown and blue. An intermittent breeze flitted over and rippled the water, forming scale-like outlines. Leaves rustled. A frog leapt into the river. Serguey wanted to apologize again, but he kept swallowing instead.

“My ass is really starting to hurt,” Victor eventually said. “These branches need a cushion.”

They threw on the clean clothes, folded the dirty ones, and sauntered back to the shack. After a short nap, they returned to the river for some water, ate fruits and bread for lunch, and again amassed twigs for a bonfire.

During dinner—beans and boiled potatoes—they reminisced about their mother, now more comfortable with the subject. Victor talked about how he often fell asleep in her bed, nuzzled against her neck, Serguey about how she sat them on the bedroom floor and fed them from the same plate, alternating spoonfuls and making airplane sounds.

“It was the only way she could get you to eat,” he said to his brother. “You used to make a huge mess.”

There’d been joy in her face during those moments. There’d been joy for all of them. At the very least, Serguey figured, he and Victor had been good companions to their mother.

As they prepared to fall asleep in the pitch-dark of the shack, Serguey dissected the conversations they’d just had. It had been curative to hear Victor forgive him—or maybe not forgive him, exactly—but refuse to assign him blame. Serguey pulled the hem of his sheets to combat the chill of the night air. His breathing quaked his body like a mild convulsion. There was some rage in him still, perhaps more than was in Victor. There was regret, abhorrence at his own cowardice. Victor’s version of their mother’s death, of how they had each reacted, fit into the narrative of their respective lives. He needed to tell his brother what he felt. He needed to confess more than to receive forgiveness. But there was also great relief to be found in fighting off the State Security scum the day before. Relief in sensing that he might not freeze again in the future, that Victor could count on him to lunge like a rabid animal when required. They had also opened a trustworthy channel of communication. The possibility of confession without ridicule or indictment was now real, as was the possibility of forgiveness in a new light: two adult brothers who genuinely knew each other’s remorse, each other’s pain. Victor hadn’t uttered the words “I forgive you,” but he had offered absolution. He had shown himself capable of grasping the complicated truths behind one boy’s inaction. Serguey had to respond in kind, embrace his brother’s understanding as a pardon. Life had afforded him the chance to come through for Victor, and he hadn’t wasted it. And what was this if not its own form of confession? What was it if not a genuine attempt at atonement?

In the shack’s silence, the slightest of sounds became exponentially amplified. Victor’s snoring, like the snort of a lazy hog, made Serguey think of torpor—a renouncing to the primal need for rest. If he had believed in the human spirit as a presence, he could’ve said that it was leaving him, that the rote flowing of his blood was more independent from his consciousness than ever before. It had been a good day, but it could bear no more. All they could do was rest.

The following morning Victor seemed jittery. He wasn’t adept at waiting, not when there was something significant in store for him. He begged Serguey to take a stroll, maybe skirt the riverbank away from the town, under the claim that they had to “take it all in.” This could be the last time they saw this part of Cuba. Serguey indulged him, despite thinking the idea might be too risky. The last thing he wanted was to bump into someone who could report them to local authorities. They might confuse them for livestock thieves or escaped convicts.

They walked for a couple of kilometers. Serguey’s mind was lulled by the steady sound of grass lapping at his knees, his legs grazing the stalks and narrow leaves. He saw palm trees and yagruma strewn around them. In his first visit to the United States after 1959, Fidel had told the Americans that the Revolution was “mas verde que las palmas.” Greener than the palm trees, not red like communism.

Nothing was greener than this, Serguey thought.

Larido had built the shack in this area for a reason. There was nothing but unkempt country—a sanctuary for the subversive. Just prior to a bend in the river, they found another portion of deep water to swim in. Serguey stayed by the bank, his elbows partially buried in mud, his outstretched feet floating in the soft current. He asked Victor to keep the splashing to a minimum. A block of low clouds coasted in a mild wind. Serguey wondered whether Felipe had already arrived in Spain. He fretted that if either Mario or Kiko told them he hadn’t, Victor would refuse to go to Miami. It was bad enough having to convince him to get on the boat without him. He hoped that Alida would be the wild card, that her being there would force Victor to commit.

Serguey thought also about what was in store for his father. At Felipe’s age, starting over was a colossal task. It didn’t matter how many friends might be waiting for him. Serguey suspected that, at a certain point in life, one begins to feel as though there’s nothing new to experience. The external world changes, but who you are holds too much weight. Your habits, what you’ve accomplished, your errors and successes, what you’ve taken from the particular external world you’ve always known, they feel like the entirety of existence. None of it can be effaced, replaced by the promise of a fresh beginning, not after fifty years. Life in another country, with all its challenges and perks, wouldn’t be a sort of rebirth or transition for his father. It’d be a perpetual reminder that he was no longer home.

In the end—and in this, Serguey found solace—a melancholy existence was better than decaying in prison. And Felipe, the great theater director, had a penchant for playing whatever part he was assigned in all its glory, extracting whatever gratification he could out of it. He’d find a way to get by.

In the afternoon, they slept through a transient rain. The sky had cleared by the time they awoke. As they folded the mosquito nets and bundled them inside the bags, Victor asked Serguey how he planned to get the stuff back to Julia and Antonio.

“We’ll figure something out,” he said. “Maybe drop them off somewhere they can pick it up, or give it to Mario’s cousin.”

“I think the cousin’s leaving too.”

“We’ll figure something out,” he repeated. He signaled at the zip lock bag on the wooden beam and added, “Don’t forget your money.”

They made only small talk during dinner, eating the last of their rations and laughing at anecdotes. Victor reminisced about his illegal activities as if they were little triumphs in the face of absurdity. His tales contained familiar elements: crooked cops, nosy neighbors, idiotic business partners. Victor’s most shameful moment, he admitted, was letting a skinny, needle-marked woman with two missing fingers give him a hand job in an Old Havana slum. She did it in exchange for a pair of oversized sandals he’d bragged to friends he could use as payment.

“It was fucking disturbing,” he said, Serguey joining in his brother’s laughter. “I took so long to finish. I still have nightmares about it.”

Serguey hiccupped his way back to composure. “Why didn’t you ask her to use the other hand?”

Victor scraped the grainy coating of beans from the walls of the cooking pot, shaking his head. “She kept saying she was a leftie.”

Serguey’s stories felt horrifyingly boring: Gimenez and his upper staff making “fat wife” jokes, dissing a foreign dignitary because he had bad taste in prostitutes, satirizing the laws of other countries for being restrictive. Victor found the stories fascinating. He asked about the kinds of meals these men ate, the beach houses they shared, the countries they traveled to.

“You gave up a good life,” he said with a serious expression.

“It was never real,” Serguey said. “Just the prospect of a life.”

“Still, I know guys who’d kill for a shot at it.”

“The shit you have to put up with, it’s not worth it.”

“Everyone has to put up with some kind of shit.” Victor cobbled the last of the beans into a spoonful and said through a full mouth, “I would’ve put up with that asshole Gimenez if he’d given me a house in El Vedado.”

They kept each other awake through the early night, the bonfire crackling between them. Now all they had to do was wait, so they talked, hoping to distract one another, pretending to be in a vacuum where leisure superseded anything, just as they had done at the tourist restaurant. The ground was drenched from the rain. The smell of doused wood intermingled with that of burnt twigs. Serguey pondered whether Victor was right, if this would be the last time they would see the Cuban countryside, Victor voyaging to another country, Serguey shipped off to prison. Serguey realized that there were factors he hadn’t considered. Would he ever get to meet Victor’s children? Would his brother, like Felipe, not be allowed to visit the island? The probability of their return would only increase if the communist government fell, or if it decided to pardon political prisoners and exiles.

“An unlikely scenario,” his father would’ve said.

As the hours vanished, Serguey struggled to focus on the conversation. He began to dread, more specifically, what could be waiting for him in Havana. With Victor and Felipe out of Cuba, he’d be the one remaining to face Montalvo. The former colonel would not be happy that two Blancos had slipped through his fingers. What would Victor make of Toya’s prediction? Serguey refused to believe in Santería, but he couldn’t deny how spirituality was a fitting mask for coincidences, how it was best to have meaning than to accept you were randomly screwed. He had not only derided his brother’s creed, but he was usurping his belief, his wish to be the martyr. He had done the same to his father at the prison. Maybe all the Blancos had a proclivity for martyrdom, after all: the fallen heroes in their own story.

At 11:00 p.m., they used Julia’s flashlight to illuminate their way back to the gravel path. They followed it to the main road and stood, flashlight turned off, anxiously watching for any oncoming headlights. Mario’s cousin would make only one pass, driving very slowly. Serguey was supposed to identify the car and call to it somehow. A truck roared in the opposite direction. Smaller vehicles whizzed by toward Havana. In the dull glimmer of the moon, he and Victor might as well have been two wooden posts. The road became absolutely dark beyond a few meters, except for the remote, static glow of houses. Then a soft rumble echoed, and two headlights appeared in the distance. They were inching closer, stopping at intervals. Serguey flicked on the flashlight and shook it. The car sped toward them. A voice emerged from the passenger seat:

“Get in,” it said. “We have to hurry.”