Kantika by Elizabeth Graver

Author:Elizabeth Graver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Havana, 1934

CUBA IS A DREAM. Outside of time, outside of place, even, unless you count the room at the end of the hall on the second story of Hotel de Flor in Centro Habana, with its pale blue walls, turquoise drapes and corner sink, the faucet plinking out a rusty tune. The bed, built for two, is dark wood tented with mosquito netting, the satin coverlet light green. Rebecca falls inside the space as if inside the narrow berth on the SS Cristóbal Colón where, for the past few weeks, she’d dozed, slept, floated in a watery hibernation while her roommates, two horse-faced Spanish sisters, went up on deck or to the dining room or slept behind curtains strung on wire that were, along with a child-size pillow and flimsy blanket, the amenities of second class.

Usually exacting and quick to improvise her own improvements, Rebecca had not been bothered by the ship’s accommodations. Usually social, she’d barely spoken to her new companions. Usually hungry, she’d seen her appetite evaporate, though neither was she seasick; she was satiated, in suspension, full. Her thirty-second birthday came and went on the ship, and she didn’t even realize it until the next day. For the first time in years, she’d had no work to go to, no children to wipe, coax, soothe or discipline, no father to placate or mother to amuse with stories of the day. Under her pillow, she stowed her French Bible and a photograph of herself flanked by her sons in the white US sailor suits she’d made them—the picture a copy of the one she’d sent to Corinne to give to Samuel Levy: Look, a pretty lady! Look, her adorable sons, already patriotic Americans! She kept a bulsika—amulet pouch—from her mother around her neck (her father had sent her off with a small packet of rue seeds), said the Shema twice daily and asked God to watch over her children, but she didn’t take the photograph out much nor linger on her prayers. She was tired; that was why. The ocean rocked her, durme durme (she was a baby; that was why. You couldn’t be a mother and baby at the same time). Sometimes as she lay alone in the cabin on the edge of sleep, her hands roamed her body to find it thinner than before and vaguely desirous, and so untethered from its normal obligations that it may as well have belonged to someone else.

From ship to land she’d gone, from dream to dream, to find herself here, in Havana, lying half naked in her childhood best friend’s husband’s arms. What came in between—the meeting and greeting, the drive from port to hotel, the glimpses of the city (pink walls; black, brown, white skin; blue cars) was a child’s picture book, a set of cut-out shapes. In the taxi, Samuel Levy, who had arrived by boat from New York a day early, was quiet to the point of rudeness, leaving Rebecca to make conversation enough for two. Have you been to Cuba before? Si.

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