who sound like chattering
wild birds.
I find the old man’s company
comforting in some ways
and troubling in others.
He is still Russian, still Jewish,
but he talks like a completely
new sort of person,
one without memories
to treasure.
DANIEL
The city of Havana is never quiet.
Sleep is impossible—there are always
the drums of passing footsteps
and the horns of traffic
and choirs of dogs barking;
an orchestra of vendors singing
and neighbors laughing
and children fighting. . . .
Today, when I ventured out by myself,
one beggar sang to me
and another handed me a poem
in a language I cannot read,
and there was an old woman
who cursed me because I could not
give her a coin.
Some words can be understood
without knowing
the language.
I lie awake, hour after hour,
remembering the old woman’s anger
along with my own.
DANIEL
Perhaps it is true,
as my father used to say,
that languages
do not matter as much
to musicians
as to other people.
My grandfather was always
able to communicate
with violinists from other countries
by playing the violin,
and when a French pianist
visited our house, my parents spoke
to him with sonatas,
and when an Italian cellist
asked me a question,
I answered him
with my flute.
DANIEL
All I want to do is lose myself
in dreams of home,
but the Cuban girl who brings food
keeps asking me questions
in Spanish.
I try to silence her
by drumming my hands
against the trunks of trees and vines
in the courtyard
of this crazy,
noisy shelter.
My impatient rhythm is answered
by cicadas and crickets.
If I could speak Spanish,
I would remind the girl
that I am not here in Cuba
by choice.
I have nothing to say
to any stranger who treats me
like a normal person
with a family
and a home.
DANIEL
Weeks at sea
introduced me to a new
kind of music,
endless and constant,
sung by a voice of air and water,
a voice of nature so enormous
that it can be ridden by humans
in tiny vessels—
our huge ships as small as toys
from the point of view
of an ocean wave.
There was also the music
of moaning masses—
babies shrieking, mothers weeping,
and sailors howling
wolflike
as they sang
their hideous
Nazi songs.
DANIEL
The girl gives me an orange.
I cannot bring myself to eat it
because, at home, oranges
are precious.
One orange was a treasure
in Germany, in winter.
My mother would place the golden fruit
at the center of our dining-room table,
and we would gather around
to gaze and marvel,
inhaling the fragrance
of warm climates
like that of the Holy Land.
DANIEL
The orange in my hand
looks like a sun
and smells like heaven.
I cannot believe my ears
when David tells me to peel
the radiant fruit
and eat all the juicy sections
by myself.
oranges in Cuba
that I can eat my fill every day
for the rest of my life.
I glare at David,
hoping he will see
that I am different.
I am not like him.
I have no intention
of giving up hope.
I will not spend my life
here in Cuba
with strangers.
I close my fist
around the orange,
refusing to swallow
anything so sacred.
PALOMA
Germans were in my house last night.
Not refugees, but the other Germans,
the ones who cause all the trouble
that forces refugees to flee.
Papá made me stay in my room.
He sent all the servants home early.
He did not whisper
but spoke in his loud, laughing voice,
the one he uses when he knows
that he is getting rich.
I sneaked onto the stairway
and heard a few fragments
of the German visitors’ plan,
something about showing the world
that even a small tropical island like Cuba
wants nothing to do
with helping Jews.
EL GORDO
Business is business.
Why should I care
about Nazis or Jews?
I find money for my fat wallet
any way I can.
Business is busyness.
A busy life wards off the evil eye
of sadness.
My daughter knows nothing
about business or evil eyes.
She’s just a child
who hides in a tower
with wild doves.
DAVID
The radio and magazines
are filled with hateful lies.
Cuba’s newspaper pages are covered
with ugly cartoons about Jews.
Where do the lies come from—
who dreams up the insults
that make ordinary people
sound like beasts
and feel like sheep
in a forest
of wolves?
DANIEL
Today, a ship
left Havana Harbor.
Desperate relatives
of the people on the ship
rowed out in small boats,
calling up to the decks
where their loved ones
leaned over the railings,
reaching. . . .
One man hurled himself
overboard.
Was he trying
to drown himself,
or was he hoping
that he could somehow
swim to shore?
I picture the German sailors
laughing, and spitting in faces
while they point to the posters of Hitler
in the dining room.
I feel the terror
of the refugees
as they realize
that they are being sent back
to Europe.
DANIEL
Where will the ship go?
What will happen to refugees
who find no refuge?
I cannot bring myself
to imagine the fate
of all those people,
all the children
who traveled alone
just as I did.
Each time I try to picture
my own future,
I feel
just as helpless
as the children
on the ship.
Will those children
ever find
a home?
DANIEL
I stand in a crowd
on the docks,
watching the ship
as it grows smaller
and vanishes
over the horizon.
There is nothing to do now,
nothing but drumming
on the earth
with my feet
and pounding out a rhythm
in the air
with my fingers.
I feel so powerless.
All I can do
is talk to the sky
with my hands
and wonder how
any country
can turn a ship away,
knowing that it is filled
with human beings
searching for something
as simple
as hope.
PALOMA
What would my father do
if he knew that I am one
of many young Cuban volunteers
who help los Cuáqueros, the Quakers
from North America
who come here to Cuba
to care for the refugees,
offering food
and shelter?
Which would bother my father more—
knowing that I am helping Jews
or seeing me in the company
of Protestants?
DANIEL
The green-eyed girl
turns her face away
when she serves our meals
of yellow rice
and black beans.
I cannot tell
whether she is sad
or ashamed.
David explains that Paloma
is not her true name.
She is really María Dolores,
“Mary of Sorrows,”
but everyone calls her Paloma, “the Dove”
because she often hides
in a tower
in her garden,
a tower built
as a home
for wild birds.
No one seems to know
why she feels
the need
to hide.
PALOMA
I sneak out
of my room
at night.
I creep through
the garden, and up
into the dovecote.
I sleep
surrounded
by wings.
EL GORDO
Paloma is not my daughter.
My child is María Dolores.
Paloma is just a fantasy name
the girl dreamed up
to help herself forget
her mother’s treachery.
Until my wife ran away
with a foreigner, our daughter
was content to live in a house
instead of a dovecote.
DANIEL
I rest in the open patio,
a crazy place shared
with so many
other refugees.
I am getting used to sleeping
in a house filled with strangers
and trees.
I am not the only young person
unlucky enough to end up alone
in this crowd.
The nights are as hot as the days.
Glowing insects flash like flames,
and a pale green moth
the size of my hand
floats above my head
like a ghost.
Sometimes I feel
like a ghost
myself.
DANIEL
Tonight, I cannot sleep.
I listen to the chirping
of tree frogs
and the clacking beaks
of wild parrots
and music, always music,
the rhythms of rattling maracas
and goatskin drums
even here, in the city,
where one would expect
to hear only sirens, buses,
and the radios of neighbors
broadcasting news
about Germany.
Sometimes I wish
I was not learning Spanish
so easily—then I would not
understand all the lies
about Jews.
PALOMA
In the morning
I walk past the brightly
painted houses of Havana—
lime green, canary yellow,
and sapphire blue.
The houses
look like songbirds.
I picture them rising
up into the sky
and fluttering away.
With each step
I ask myself questions.
What would Papá be like
if my mother had not
sailed away
with a dancing man
from Paris?
Is she still there?
Did she marry the dancer?
Do they have children?
Are there brothers and sisters
who ask questions about me?
I do not ask myself anything
about the start of a war
in Europe—I do not want to know
if my mother
is dead.
PALOMA
I come from a family of secrets.
No one else knows about my mother.
They think she is dead.
Even her own aunts and cousins
were told that she was killed in a train crash
during a vacation in Paris.
I found out the truth
by sneaking glimpses
of my father’s mail.
There was only one letter from Mamá,
a brief one, where she claimed
that she left Cuba because the island
is too small and too quiet
for her taste.
Now, whenever I think of her,
I picture her surrounded
by huge waves, like mountains
of angry noise.
PALOMA
Davíd assures me that my help is appreciated,
even by the boy who keeps to himself
and looks so unfriendly.
The ice-cream man says
that Daniel is just lonely
and frightened,
so I give Daniel one of the white
guayabera shirts
that my mother embroidered
so long ago,
and I give him one of my father’s
many fine Panama hats,
an expensive jipijapa hat,
cool and comfortable
like a splendid circle of shade
from a portable tree.
Both the hat and the shirt are so big
that the boy’s eyes and hands are hidden,
but his smile is out in the open
and his laughter
sounds like cool rain.
DANIEL
Many Cuban words still sound foreign to me,
but David is a name I can really understand—
David, the boy with the slingshot,
the one who killed a giant.
Now the old man called David tells me I will have
to fight three giants
if I want to get along here in Cuba.
The first giant is heat,
the second is language,
and the biggest is loneliness.
Accept friendship wherever it is offered,
David advises—you never know
when things will change,
and you might find yourself
trying to decide
how to help
the same strangers
who now work so hard
to help you.
DANIEL
At leas
t my family was still together
for my Bar Mitzvah, when I turned thirteen.
Times were hard, but we were all
so overjoyed, following the long
solemn ceremony
with feasting, and laughter.
Paloma speaks of her First Communion
with pride—a white dress, white shoes,
and long prayers.
Catholic rituals seem so mysterious,
but Paloma insists that in Cuba
Protestants are considered
the most exotic people,
with churches as plain as houses
and no gold or silver decorations
and no chanted songs
in an ancient language like Latin
or Hebrew. . . .
So when Quakers come to the shelter,
we ask them if it is true
that they worship without a leader,
and they answer yes,
because they believe that no one
is closer to God than anyone else—
in their meetings