It was the time of year when the students held wild farewell parties at the university. Thanks to the music, alcohol, and dancing, Alma forgot about the sinister shadow she had imagined, until the Friday before her graduation. She had spent most of the night in a mad whirl, drinking too much and keeping herself on her feet thanks to cocaine—neither of which did her much good. At three in the morning, a rowdy group of students in a convertible dropped her off outside her dorm. Stumbling, disheveled, and carrying her shoes in one hand, Alma rummaged for the key in her handbag but, before she could find it, fell to her knees and brought up the entire contents of her stomach. The dry retching went on for several minutes, while tears coursed down her cheeks. Eventually she tried to get to her feet, covered in sweat and with her stomach heaving. She was shivering and groaning in despair. All of a sudden a pair of rough hands clamped on her arms, and she could feel herself being lifted and held upright.
“Alma Mendel, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!”
She did not recognize the voice from the telephone. She doubled up as another wave of nausea hit her, but the claws only dug deeper.
“Let me go, let me go!” she moaned, kicking and screaming.
A slap to the face sobered her up momentarily, and she glimpsed the outline of a man, a dark face slashed with lines that looked like scars, a shaven head. For some strange reason she felt an enormous sense of relief. She closed her eyes and succumbed to the ghastliness of her drunken state and the danger of being in the iron grip of a stranger who had just slapped her.
At seven that Saturday morning, Alma awoke to find herself wrapped in a rough, scratchy blanket on the backseat of a car. She smelled of vomit, urine, cigarettes, and alcohol. She had no idea where she was and couldn’t remember a thing about what had happened the night before. She sat up and tried to rearrange her clothes but discovered she had lost her dress and petticoat: she was in her bra, underpants, and garter belt. Her stockings were full of holes, and she had no shoes on. Merciless bells were ringing inside her head; she was cold, her mouth was parched, and she was very afraid. She lay down again and curled up in a ball, moaning and calling out to Nathaniel.
Moments later, she felt somebody shaking her. Opening her eyes with great difficulty, she tried to focus and eventually made out the silhouette of a man who had opened the car door and was leaning over her.
“Coffee and aspirin. That will help a bit,” he said, handing her a paper cup and two pills.
“Leave me, I have to go,” she said thickly, trying to sit up.
“You can’t go anywhere like that. Your family will be here in a few hours. Your graduation ceremony is tomorrow. Drink the coffee. And in case you’re wondering, I’m your brother, Samuel.”
This was the resurrection of Samuel Mendel, eleven years after he had died in the north of France.
* * *
After the war, Isaac Belasco had received convincing proof of the fate that had befallen Alma’s parents in a Nazi death camp near the town of Treblinka in northeastern Poland. Unlike the Americans elsewhere, the Russians did not document the camp’s liberation, and officially little was known of what had happened in that hell, but the Jewish Agency calculated that 840,000 people had perished there between July 1942 and October 1943, 800,000 of whom were Jews. As for Samuel Mendel, Isaac established that his plane was shot down in the occupied zone of France, and according to the British war records, there were no survivors. By then Alma had heard nothing about her family for several years and assumed they were dead long before her uncle confirmed it. When she was told, Alma did not weep for them, as might have been expected, because during that time she had learned to control her feelings to such an extent she had lost the ability to express them. Isaac and Lillian thought it necessary to bring closure to this tragedy and took Alma with them to Europe. In the French village where Samuel’s plane was shot down, they put up a memorial plaque with his name and the dates of his birth and death. They did not obtain permission to visit Poland, which was then under Soviet control; Alma was to make that pilgrimage many years later. The war had finished four years earlier, but Europe was still in ruins, and huge groups of people were still wandering around in search of a homeland. Alma concluded that her entire lifetime would not be enough to pay for the privilege of being her family’s only survivor.
Shaken by this stranger’s declaration that he was her brother, Samuel, Alma sat up in the car seat and gulped down the coffee and aspirins in three swallows. The man looked nothing like the brother she had seen off at the Danzig quayside, a youth with rosy cheeks and a playful expression. Her real brother was that blurred memory, not this person standing beside her, lean, dry, with hard eyes and a cruel mouth, sunburned skin, and a face lined with deep furrows and a couple of scars.
“How do I know you’re my brother?”
“You don’t. But I wouldn’t be wasting my time with you if I weren’t.”
“Where are my clothes?”
“At the laundry. They’ll be ready in an hour. That gives us time to talk.”
Samuel told her that the last thing he saw was the earth from above, as his plane went into a tailspin. He had no time to parachute out, he was sure of that, otherwise the Germans would have found him, and he couldn’t explain clearly how he managed not to be killed when his plane crashed and burst into flames. He guessed he must have been thrown out of his seat and ended up in the tops of some trees, dangling down. The enemy patrol found the body of his copilot and didn’t search any further. He was rescued by a couple of members of the resistance, who, when they saw he was circumcised, handed him on to a Jewish group. For months they hid him in caves, stables, basements, abandoned factories, and the houses of kind people willing to help, often changing his hiding place until his broken bones were mended and he was no longer a burden but could join the group as a fighter. The mist in his brain took far longer to clear than his bones did to knit. From the uniform he was wearing when they found him, they knew he came from England. He understood English and French, but answered in Polish; it would be months before he recovered the other languages he spoke fluently. Since they did not know his name, his companions decided to call him Scarface, but he eventually chose to name himself Jean Valjean like the protagonist of Victor Hugo’s novel, which he read during his convalescence. He fought with his colleagues in a guerrilla war that seemed to be doomed. The German forces were so efficient, their arrogance so immense, and their thirst for power and blood so insatiable that the acts of sabotage Samuel’s group carried out did not even scratch the monster’s armor plating. They lived in the shadows, moving about like desperate rats and with a constant sense of failure and pointlessness, and yet they carried on, because there was no choice. They greeted one another with a single word: victory. They said farewell with that same word: victory.
At the end of the war, after surviving Auschwitz, Jean Valjean succeeded in landing clandestinely in Palestine, where waves of Jewish refugees were arriving despite the best efforts of the British, who controlled the region and tried to stop the influx to avoid conflict with the Arabs. The war had turned him into a lone wolf who never dropped his guard. He made do with casual affairs until a female colleague in Mossad, a painstaking and daring agent, announced that he was going to be a father. Her name was Anat Rakosi; she had emigrated with her father from Hungary, the only survivors of a big family. Her relationship with Samuel was above all a friendship, devoid of romance or any thought of the future, which suited them and which they would not have changed were it not for the unexpected pregnancy. Anat had been sure she was sterile because of the hunger, beatings, rapes, and the pseudomedical experiments she had suffered. When she found that the swelling in her belly was not a tumor but a baby, she thought it must be God’s joke. She said nothing to her lover until the sixth month.
“My goodness! I thought you were finally putting on a bit of weight,” was his only commentary, but he could not hide his enthusiasm.
“The first thing we have to do i
s to find out who you are, so that this baby knows where it’s coming from. The name Valjean is too melodramatic,” she told him.
Year after year, Jean Valjean had been postponing the decision to discover his identity, but Anat set to work at once, with the same tenacity that had enabled her to uncover for Mossad the hiding places of those Nazi criminals who had escaped the Nuremberg trials. She started at Auschwitz, Samuel’s last destination before the armistice, and followed the thread of the story step by step. With her pregnant belly swaying to and fro, she traveled to France to speak to one of the few members of the Jewish resistance still in the country. He helped her locate the fighters who had rescued the pilot from the British plane, although this wasn’t easy because after the war it seemed as though every Frenchman was a resistance hero. Anat ended up in London searching through the RAF archives, where she found several photographs of young men who looked like her lover. There was nothing else she could cling to. She called him on the phone and read out the five names.
“Do any of them sound familiar?” she asked him.
“Mendel! I’m sure of it! My surname is Mendel,” he replied, scarcely able to contain the sob choking him.
“My son is four now, and he’s called Baruj, like our father, Baruj Mendel,” Samuel told Alma, who was sitting beside him on the backseat of the car.
“Did you marry Anat?”
“No. We’re trying to live together, but it’s not easy.”
“You’ve known about me for four years. Why did you only come and find me now?” Alma asked reproachfully.
“Why would I have? The brother you knew died in that plane. There’s nothing left of the boy who enlisted as a pilot in England. I know the story because Anat insists on repeating it, but I don’t feel it’s mine. It’s empty, it has no meaning. The truth is, I don’t remember you, but I’m sure you are my sister, because Anat doesn’t make mistakes about that kind of thing.”
“Well, I remember having a brother who had fun with me and played the piano, but you’re nothing like him.”
“We haven’t seen each other in years, and as I said, I’m not the same.”
“Why did you decide to come now?”
“I’m not here because of you. I’m on a mission, but I can’t tell you anything about that. I made the most of my journey by coming to see you in Boston, because Anat thinks Baruj needs an aunt. Anat’s father died a couple of months ago. There’s no one left in her family or mine apart from you. I’m not trying to force anything on you, Alma. I just want you to know I’m alive and that you have a nephew. Anat sent you this,” he said.
He gave her a color photo of the boy and his parents. Anat was sitting down with her son on her lap. She was a very slender, pale-looking woman wearing round glasses. Samuel was sitting next to them, arms folded across his chest. The boy had strong features and his father’s dark, curly hair. On the back of the photo, Samuel had written a Tel Aviv address.
“Come and visit us, Alma. That way you’ll get to know Baruj,” he said as he waved good-bye, after recovering her dress from the laundry and accompanying her back to her dorm.
THE SWORD OF THE FUKUDAS
On his deathbed, his lungs eaten away with cancer, and gasping for breath like a fish out of water, Takao Fukuda was still clinging to life. He could barely speak and was so weak that his attempts to communicate through writing proved useless, as his swollen, trembling hands could not form the delicate Japanese characters. He refused to eat, and whenever his family or the nurses weren’t looking, he pulled out the drip that was feeding him. He soon fell into a heavy doze, but Ichimei, who took turns with his mother and sister to be with him in the hospital, knew he was conscious and troubled. He would plump up the pillows so that he was half sitting up, dry off the perspiration, rub his scaly skin with lotion, put slivers of ice on his tongue, and talk to him about plants and gardens. In one of these intimate moments he saw his father’s lips moving, repeatedly articulating what sounded like the name of a brand of cigarettes, but the idea that in circumstances like these he might still want to smoke was so ridiculous Ichimei dismissed it. He spent the evening trying to decipher what his father was trying to say.
“Kemi Morita? Is that what you’re saying, Papa? Do you want to see her?” he asked finally.
Takao nodded with what little strength he had left.
Kemi Morita was the Oomoto spiritual leader. She was reputed to speak with the spirits, and Ichimei knew her well, because he often traveled to join the small communities who shared his religion.
“Papa wants us to call Kemi Morita,” Ichimei told Megumi.
“She lives in Los Angeles, Ichimei.”
“How much savings do we still have? We have to buy her ticket here.”
On the day Kemi arrived, Takao was no longer moving. He didn’t open his eyes, and the only sign of life was the purring of the respirator. He was suspended in limbo, waiting. Megumi had borrowed a car from a colleague at the factory and drove to the airport to pick up the priestess, who looked like a ten-year-old boy in her white pajamas. Her gray hair, her hunched shoulders, and the way she dragged her feet were in stark contrast to her smooth, wrinkle-free face, which was a serene bronze mask.
Kemi shuffled over to the bed and took Takao’s hand. The patient half-opened his eyes. It took him awhile to recognize his spiritual guide, but then an almost imperceptible smile brought a flicker of life back to his haggard features. Ichimei, Megumi, and Heideko withdrew to the back of the room while Kemi murmured a long prayer or poem in archaic Japanese. Then she bent her head down close to the dying man’s mouth. After several long minutes, Kemi kissed Takao’s brow and turned to the family.
“Takao’s mother, father, and grandparents are here. They have come from afar to guide him to the Other Side,” she said in Japanese, pointing to the end of the bed. “Takao is ready to depart, but before he does he has a message for Ichimei: ‘The Fukuda katana is buried in a garden overlooking the sea. It cannot remain there. Ichimei, you have to recover it and place it where it should be, on the altar of our family’s ancestors.’ ”
When he heard the message, Ichimei bowed deeply, folding his hands in front of his face. The memory of the night they had buried the sword of the Fukudas had become blurred with the years, but Heideko and Megumi knew which garden it was.
“Takao is also asking for one last cigarette,” said Kemi before she left them.
* * *
On her return from Boston, Alma realized that during the years she had been away the Belasco family had changed more than was transmitted in their letters. For the first few days she felt superfluous, like a visitor passing through, and wondered not only what her place was in this family but what she was going to do with her life. San Francisco seemed provincial to her; to make a name for herself with her painting she would have to go to New York, where she could be among famous artists and closer to European influences.
Three Belasco grandchildren had been born: Martha had a three-month-old boy, and Sarah had twins, who by some flaw in the laws of genetics had come out looking like Scandinavians. Nathaniel headed the family law firm and lived alone in a penthouse with a view over the bay. A man of few words and few friends, he filled his leisure time sailing on his yacht. At twenty-seven he was still resisting his mother’s insistent campaign to find him a suitable wife. There were more than enough candidates, because Nathaniel was from a good family, had money, and was extremely handsome. He had turned into the mensch his father had wanted, and all the matchmakers in the Jewish community had their eyes on him. Aunt Lillian had not changed much; she was the same generous and active woman as before. Her deafness had grown worse, and so she shouted all the time. Her hair had turned gray, but she refused to dye it because she had no wish to seem younger; quite the opposite. Her husband had suddenly been hit by the weight of two decades, so that the few years’ age difference between them appeared to have tripled.
Isaac had suffered a heart attack, and although he had recovered, he w
as left weakened. He forced himself to go to the office for a couple of hours each day but had delegated all the work to Nathaniel. He had abandoned social life, which had never attracted him anyway. He read a lot, and above all enjoyed sitting in his garden pergola to enjoy the view of the sea and the bay. He grew seedlings in the greenhouse, and studied books about the law and plants. He had grown sentimental with the years, so that even the most trivial emotions brought tears to his eyes. Lillian would often feel a stab of fear in her guts. “Promise me you won’t die before me, Isaac,” she demanded whenever he was short of breath and crawled into bed and collapsed, his face as pale as the sheets, his bones aching. Lillian had always counted on a cook and knew nothing about food, but when her husband started to decline she took it upon herself to prepare magical soups from recipes her mother had written in a notebook for her. She had forced Isaac to see a dozen doctors, accompanying him to make sure he didn’t hide his problems from her, and she herself gave him his medicines. She also employed more esoteric methods. She called on God, not only at dawn and dusk as required, but at all hours: Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad. For Isaac’s protection he had a blue Turkish evil eye and a painted tin hand of Fatima hanging from the bedpost; a candle was always lit on his chest of drawers, next to Hebrew and Christian Bibles and a jar of holy water that one of the domestic staff had brought from the Shrine of Saint Jude.