Hotel Cuba, page 4
“Possibly,” says Pearl, preferring to wait before making judgments. She runs through plans in her head. They have to find a rooming house. And work of course, but first, a room. There must be places near the port. How will they find them? How will they make themselves understood in a strange language?
Down the shore, by the retaining wall, stands a man with the darkest skin Pearl has ever seen. The European passengers point and stare. Pearl has heard stories of such men in folktales, sinners whose skin the devil has burnt to black. But this man doesn’t look like a sinner. He’s just a man gazing at the water.
Frieda recites English names, trying to choose one . . . Francine, Florence, Flower. As if Cuba were America, and she can become a new person by simply taking a new name.
Pearl spots a yacht flying the American flag, wishes they could jump onto that boat.
* * *
PEARL AND FRIEDA pack their everyday suitcase, then go to the checked baggage room, filled with teetering piles of trunks and large cases. Some have burst open, spilling pictures, books, girdles, silver Kiddush cups, and dried mushrooms. Pearl, who’s learned by now how to push through a crowd, waves their claim ticket and shouts for the porters’ attention. She retrieves their heavy wicker case, which they lug up the ladders. The upper-deck passengers, whose papers were inspected on board, are ushered into town. Pearl and Frieda follow the crowds from steerage toward immigration.
As she steps off the gangplank, the pressure in Pearl’s shoulders and chest eases. For the first time since their weeks at sea, the noise of the water stops. The solid ground beneath her feet feels both reassuring and unfamiliar. She can walk in a straight line without bending her knees and planting her feet to keep her balance. Frieda also notices the difference and laughs.
The dockworkers speak rapidly in Spanish. Their voices—loud, rough, and male—scare Pearl at first, but she swallows her fear. She asks Frieda to teach her the word for “please,” por favor, which Pearl keeps repeating. From the little book she borrowed, Frieda can already string together broken Spanish sentences.
They stand in a hot, crowded building, or not a building really, just a large tin roof balanced on a metal framework of poles. The sides are open. At the far end, officials slowly ask endless questions. The waiting passengers stand and whisper, trying to guess the right answers. The sophisticated city lady with the dusty-pink hat chews nervously on a fingernail. Not so grand now, are you? Pearl thinks.
“You keep staring at that woman like you’re in love with her,” Frieda says.
“Her I could take or leave,” says Pearl. “It’s her pretty hat I’m interested in.” It sounds plausible enough to be true.
Frieda snorts. “You and your obsession with clothes.”
There are no chairs or benches, so people sit on trunks or on the ground, but Pearl won’t allow it. She and Frieda were brought up better than that. They remain standing. The air smells of oil and brackish water, and the heat feels more oppressive than at sea. Pearl fans herself with her hand. How will she understand the customs officers and their questions?
A bird swoops in, flies to the roof in confused circles, then flies away. Pearl sees no fence to pen them in, and the few guards look bored. Perhaps she could take Frieda’s hand and march past them into town. Isn’t that what a real adventurer would do, a New Woman? Evidently, Pearl has not yet become one.
A handsome woman in a cream-colored blouse and navy skirt walks by, saying in a gentle voice, “Yiddish? Anyone speak Yiddish?” The passengers watch her warily. But Pearl, glad to hear Yiddish in such a strange place, speaks up.
“Yes, Yiddish,” she says, her voice choking.
“Welcome to Havana.” The woman stretches forward to kiss Pearl’s cheek. She’s wearing a light floral perfume, and Pearl is embarrassed about her own smell and her wrinkled, sweat-stained clothes. The odor of the journey lingers in her pores. The woman presses some paper into Pearl’s hand. Three American ten-dollar bills. “Show them to the man in the uniform.”
“Is this a bribe?”
“No, no, he won’t take it. It’s just for show, to prove you’re not indigent. Once you’re through, you’ll give it back to me on the other side, where I’ll explain more.” The woman lets go of her hand. “So good to see you again, dear,” she says in a loud voice.
The woman resumes wandering through the crowd. Are all the women here like this, strong, assured, handsome? If so, Pearl hopes what they have is catching. But what will this woman expect in return for this loan? Is it some kind of scheme?
“Can we trust her?” Frieda asks. “Maybe she’ll accuse us of stealing.”
“She wouldn’t,” Pearl says, tired of being afraid. “She speaks Yiddish.”
“It’s so hot.” Frieda leans on Pearl’s shoulder as she used to when she was a girl. “I want some water.”
“Just a bit longer,” Pearl replies and strokes her hair, but she’s worried. Maybe we’ll wait here forever. Maybe we’ll die here.
Another hour passes before it’s their turn to approach the guard sitting at a little desk. He’s a good-looking man with a thin mustache and a spotless white uniform. The guard accepts their papers, and Pearl draws herself to her full height, which is not so very tall. Frieda’s left foot taps nervously, and Pearl slaps her leg.
The man asks them a question, not kindly or unkindly. Pearl’s throat is dry, and she can barely say her Spanish word for please. Frieda says, “I speak little Spanish,” and she smiles so sweetly that the man in the uniform smiles too. She tells him their names: Pearl and Frieda Kahn. Pearl shows him the money, wishes this handsome man would smile at her too. He looks at her palm, not at her, and miraculously does not touch the money.
The man stamps their papers and waves them through. Pearl gives him a last look—remarkably neat and trim in his clean uniform. She wonders what his name is.
Outside the shelter of the tin roof, the sun attacks their eyes. Where is the lady who gave them the money? Dear God, Pearl thinks, I’m thirsty. Across the road is a small square with tall palm trees and bright red flowers in strange dripping shapes, like fringes on a shawl. The shade is inviting, but they must return their borrowed money.
Frieda spots the lady, standing beside a woman wearing a stylish silk dress and glasses. If it’s a plot, this could be their last chance to escape, but she and Frieda have to be honest.
“We are returning your money,” says Pearl.
“Thank you, you good girls.” She removes it gracefully from her hands. “We’ll use it again.” Her name is Milly, and she explains she belongs to a group called the Ezra Society. They meet the boats from Eastern Europe, to help young Jewish women. “We’ll take you where you can rest. Would you like that?”
“How expensive is it?” asks Pearl.
“Oh, it’s absolutely free. Don’t worry.”
How can it be free? Pearl thinks. Nothing is free.
“Could we get some water?” Frieda asks.
“Of course!” Milly stops a young Cuban boy who runs to a nearby café and brings back a pitcher of water and several glasses. Pearl tears up, feeling the weight of this journey. She wishes to say thank you in the boy’s language, but she only knows “please.”
A cluster of well-dressed ladies are discussing their situation in a mix of Spanish, English, and Yiddish. They are like no Jews that Pearl knows, so refined and proud, like aristocrats who expect service in a good hotel. Beside them, women from the ship, several with small children, have gathered on the sidewalk. The contrast is stark, and Pearl is embarrassed to note which group she fits in with.
“Don’t worry,” Milly tells Pearl and Frieda in Yiddish, beckoning them to follow. “We have for you a nice place to stay.”
Frieda asks if Pearl is sure these women are Jewish. “Should we trust them?”
Pearl, relieved for someone else to be in charge, shrugs off the question. She grabs her wicker case and starts to follow Milly.
“That’s all you have to wear?” Milly asks, taking in Pearl and Frieda’s European-style wool dresses. Milly’s blouse and skirt are made of a light material, like linen or cotton, thin and fine. Pearl imagines it must feel very free to move around in such garments. “We’ll get you cooler clothes,” says Milly. “You’ll suffocate in those.”
They leave the air and light of the harbor behind, moving into the city. Clutching Frieda’s elbow, Pearl studies her surroundings to get her bearings. The streets are cobblestone like in Warsaw, but the buildings are painted in bright colors and decorated with wrought-iron balconies. The narrow space between the buildings traps the humid tropical air. A man with a heavy-looking box strapped to his neck sells chips of ice that people suck like candy, and two men in white outfits stop him to buy a few pieces.
“Those are Americans,” says Milly. “Sailors.”
The men are laughing in a way Pearl doesn’t like, and she looks away. Soldiers are the same everywhere, even Americans.
The streets grow narrower and the women have to walk single file on the sidewalks to avoid the cars and bicycles. The Cubans are watching them. Several of the men have dark, dark skin, and Pearl sees a woman like that too. If I brushed against them, Pearl thinks, would the darkness rub off? The Cuban woman notices them staring and smiles defiantly, her white teeth stark against her face.
Frieda shrinks closer to her sister. “What kind of place is this?” she asks.
Pearl is too nervous to answer.
Mixed in with the locals are Jews, some with beards, others clean-shaven and without hats or yarmulkes yet recognizable to Pearl because of their pale skin and their European faces. It’s all bewildering, as if they haven’t left Europe.
The bakeries sell bread in strange shapes, none of it black like at home, and Pearl remembers she’s starving.
“We’re getting close,” says Milly. “It’s just down this street.”
By “street” she means a tight alley where the sidewalk peters out and there’s barely room for a carriage to pass. The woman pushes open a metal gate and then a wooden door. They move through a dark vestibule to a cobblestone courtyard with a drain in the middle. Across the courtyard is another door. Milly knocks, and Pearl and Frieda set down their cases and catch their breath. Pearl is exhausted from the heat, the walk, and mostly the strangeness of it all.
A woman answers. She has dark hair in wide curls and bright lipstick, which seems the fashion here. “This is Altagracia,” says Milly. “She’ll take care of you.”
“Altagracia,” Frieda repeats slowly, but Pearl can’t quite pronounce this long name. Is it Christian? She, Frieda, and the others follow Altagracia upstairs to a peach-colored room with a window that has iron bars over the glass panes, like a jail. Maybe it is a jail. There are several beds with thin mattresses and rough gray blankets, and between the beds are short tables covered in black lace.
Altagracia says something, but no one understands, so she laughs and calls for Milly, who comes upstairs and explains, “She says she’s sorry we don’t have anywhere to put your clothes for now. We’ll find you something by and by.”
After washing up, Pearl feels calmer. The water for washing is fresh, not salt like on the boat, and she splashes it greedily on her hands and cheeks, behind her ears, even sips a bit from her palms. Then they go to a dining hall for black beans and bright yellow rice. How did the rice turn yellow? It looks as if someone painted it.
Milly has to leave, but tomorrow she’ll return with new clothes, more suited to this climate. They’ll learn a bit of Spanish, receive money to get them started and help searching for work, which will be hard to find. Times are tough here since the end of the Great War. They are now in Old Havana, an area with many Jews, and a synagogue, though not like in Europe. Kosher food is expensive and scarce. “Life here is very different from what you are used to,” says Milly.
Tomorrow they’ll hear more. For now, they can rest.
Some of the women are crying, they’re so grateful. Frieda offers Milly one of her practiced pretty smiles. Pearl says thank you too, but she’s waiting for bad news.
That night, as Frieda snores in the bed beside hers, Pearl dreams she’s back in Turya and badly needs to urinate, but someone has hidden the chamber pot. Voices drift in from outside, speaking a language Pearl doesn’t understand. A man grabs her elbow, rudely, roughly. He smiles, says not to be afraid. She wants to scream, yet nothing comes out. He’s ripped out her vocal cords and holds them up, laughing. They look like raw pink lengths of rope. As she reaches for them, he holds them high over her head.
Something releases inside her chest, like a spring that’s come loose. As Pearl opens her eyes and it slowly dawns on her where she is, safely across the ocean, in the custody of kind women, she loses control of her bladder. These women have promised to take care of her, and this is how she’s paid them back, by wetting her bed.
“Frieda,” she hisses, shaking her sister. “Wake up. You’ve got to help me.”
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING, Pearl’s head is throbbing. At least it’s a new day. At breakfast, no one seems to know what she’s done, or at least no one mentions it. She and Frieda soaked her sheet with soapy water and hung it to dry in the washroom while Pearl lay on the bare mattress until dawn.
The other women are either single girls like Frieda or mothers with children. Yet again I don’t fit in, Pearl thinks. I’m not a girl or a mother, but something in between.
They are served bread and coffee. And white sugar, like snow. Heaping piles of waxy-skinned fruit sit untouched in the center of the table, like a ceremonial centerpiece; the newcomers are flummoxed as to what to do. One woman attempts to bite a piece of fruit through the peel, until another woman who’s been here a few days shows her to remove it, exposing the sweet white flesh underneath.
Eventually Altagracia cuts another kind of fruit to pass around. It’s called mango.
“Maaahn-go,” says Frieda, practicing the word. Pearl insists on trying it first before letting her sister bite into it. She nervously accepts a slice, suspiciously golden. After mashing the soft flesh between her teeth, she makes a face. “Tastes like old eggs,” she complains to Frieda.
“Hmm,” says Frieda, chewing her slice slowly. “Different, but interesting.”
“Like a peach too ripe and not ripe enough at the same time,” Pearl says. There’s something dishonest about the mango’s sour-sweet taste. Why can’t the fruit here taste like normal fruit? With the honest, simple sweetness and crisp bite of an apple, the subtle luscious tang of a fat strawberry?
After breakfast, the women go to a sitting room that’s been converted into a classroom, where Milly greets them. A volunteer will teach them some Spanish. They each receive a new cotton dress, two dollars of pocket money, and postcards to write their families. Pearl composes a brief message in neat, careful handwriting, unchanged since childhood. She tells Father they’ve arrived safely, then passes the card to Frieda, who inscribes her name at the bottom and sketches a flower underneath. After that, she resumes working on her postcard, addressed to Mendel in Detroit, USA.
As Pearl hands Milly her postcard, she mentions that she and Frieda want to go to America. Milly gives her a sympathetic look, then explains, “It’s not easy. The consulate, their ears are closed to people like you. You’ll have to be determined. Or . . .” she pauses. “You’ll have to make your America here in Hotel Cuba.”
We were tricked, thinks Pearl, clenching her hands into fists. She recalls that weaselly, fast-talking travel agent in Warsaw, his crooked necktie and yelping voice. Easy to blame him, but he was just making a living, as weasels do to survive. It’s my fault, Pearl thinks. I’m the one who believed him and got us stuck here.
“We should have waited in Warsaw for a proper visa,” Frieda says later to Pearl.
“Well, we didn’t,” replies Pearl, her ears burning with shame for having trusted the travel agent. But she can never admit her fault to Frieda. “We got from Turya all the way here, didn’t we? Now we’ll get from here to America. We’re so close.”
“I’ll ask Mendel,” says Frieda. “He’ll help us.”
You might as well write to Elijah the Prophet, Pearl thinks.
* * *
OTHER WOMEN AT this place, the Women’s Home, are so weary and dispirited from the journey they don’t even pretend to make an effort at Spanish. They sulk in bed all day, complain of heat rashes, the food, the weather, the hard, bright Caribbean light of “Hotel Cuba.”
Pearl refuses to be weak like these women, already nostalgic for Europe and its familiar miseries. Maybe as the world would define it, she’s uneducated, but she knows a lot and she learns fast, not from books, but by opening her eyes and ears. She finds out there are small garment factories in Old Havana run by Jews who sometimes need seamstresses. Pearl tells Milly that she and Frieda are reliable, skilled, and eager. Someday she hopes to be like Milly, confident and handsome, a lady. For now she needs to work to survive. She labors at her Spanish, volunteers to help the servants with sweeping and dishes. She wears her simple new cotton dress and battles daily with her curly black hair.
On their sixth day in Cuba, Milly whispers to Pearl at breakfast: “You and your sister, come with me.” They follow her into the corridor, where Milly says she’s found them a unique situation, at a workshop that decorates ladies’ hats. “You are two fortunate girls,” she says, her bright red-beaded necklace swinging from her neck. “The Steinbergs are a genteel couple, in reduced circumstances.”
Pearl and Frieda gather their few things in their worn suitcases. Frieda wants to say good-bye to a new acquaintance she’s made, but Pearl, afraid they might lose their opportunity, says there’s no time. “In America, we’ll make real friends,” she says, though she worries that when they get there, she’ll have fallen out of the habit. Then again, she was never good at making friends to begin with.
* * *
THE HAT WORKSHOP is a few blocks from the Women’s Home, on the ground floor of a gray building with sculpted cement walls. They’re greeted by Mrs. Steinberg, who rushes to clasp Pearl’s hands and then Frieda’s. “You poor things,” she says. “You must have suffered terribly over there.”
