Rafael Yglesias: Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

I was leery of seeing Grandfather. I remembered from my visit to Great Neck in December that he was confined to a wheelchair. There wasn’t much substance left to his body, a body that was once, especially for an immigrant from Europe, tall and muscular. Indeed, his athletic figure had been the cause of his initial success in life. At seventeen, Papa Sam was chosen for the Tsar’s personal guard. The men selected for that honor were picked because they would look strong and handsome on state occasions. Papa Sam was the only Jew to wear the bright red uniform with gold buttons and a fur collar. His fellow guardsmen regularly abused him for being a Jew. They would form a circle, put him in the middle, and take turns kicking his legs with their hard-tipped boots while they called him kike. He couldn’t fight back. To resist meant a court martial, and a sentence of at least twenty years’ hard labor, if not death. That was the story he liked to tell about his life. Papa Sam would bring out a photograph of himself in the honor guard uniform, standing at attention in front of a palace, and then show us his scarred shins.

One day Papa Sam informed his colonel that his mother was ill; he asked permission to visit her in the small town of his birth. In fact, the news he had gotten was of her death. He was granted a leave. He walked all the way to Paris and eventually made his way to London, where he met my grandmother. The emigrated through Ellis Island to the United States seven years before my mother was born.

Unfortunately, by the time I met Papa Sam, heart disease had shrunk and warped his tall frame. In December, his big head looked precarious atop a skinny torso that scarcely filled his wheelchair. His bony shoulders were hunched forward; they carved a bowl in his chest. His skin was loose and bloodless; his eyes dull and hopeless; the mouth slack and stupid. He probably smelled as well, but I don’t remember that. In any event, the prospect of going to see Papa Sam didn’t thrill me or compensate me for missing out on the Afikomen hunt.

However, this time I was obedient. Ruth led me toward the kitchen. I could see into it. The black women were cleaning and readying the real dessert. The cabinets were closed and there was no sign of Daniel. I heard the hilarity of the grown-up relatives through the service door to the dining room. They were raucous. Some sang, “Chad Gad Ya! Chad Gad Ya!” Others teased the singers about their lack of musicality. My young cousins, of course, raced above, behind, and below — full of their own energy and happiness. Only my mother and I were glum non-participants. Just before we reached the kitchen, Ruth turned into another hallway that was new to me. It led to a short addition to the mansion, built to accommodate Papa Sam and his nurse after my grandmother died. It consisted of two small bedrooms and a bathroom, a kind of motel for the sick old man. During the December visit I had seen him in the living room and I had assumed he lived elsewhere, probably in a hospital, since his nurse looked and behaved like a nurse, with a white uniform and a crabby manner.

Papa Sam was in bed, covered up to his neck, his arms outside the blanket. He appeared mummified. His nurse sat in a chair by the door, reading. Her tensor lamp provided the only light.

“Is he asleep?” my mother asked the nurse in a whisper.

“No …” Papa answered in a groan. He lifted his huge hand — it looked large because his wrist and arm were now so thin — above the plaid blanket and gestured for us to come close. “Is that the Little Gentleman?” he asked.

In the shadows he was a gloomy, dying presence. The nurse got up and turned on his bedside lamp. Its light cast shadows across Papa’s wasted face.

“You remember,” my mother said as we approached. She kissed him on a gaunt cheek. Papa hummed with pleasure at her touch.

“Of course.” I am not reproducing his classic Yiddish intonations and accent. They were very thick. I had to concentrate to understand him, often not realizing what he had said until a few seconds after he spoke. That made me shyer than usual. “You’re the Little Gentleman,” he said, rolling his great head to the side. His lifeless eyes didn’t seem to focus. I wasn’t really sure he could see me. In December he made a speech to my mother that I had always, even as a toddler, been a perfect little gentleman. Ruth explained to me later he was impressed that I had not only sat quietly and listened while the adults talked, but contributed to the conversation. Papa also commented with admiration — the significance of this wasn’t clear to me — that I seemed to be very tall. He was vain about his height and considered mine (I was in fact tall for my age) to be a genetic achievement that was to his credit.

I nodded and looked down. Again I couldn’t meet the eyes of a Rabinowitz elder. I was scared by the old man’s physical deterioration. And, as professionals among my readers already realize, I was no more of a Little Gentleman than any eight-year-old. The polite role I had once played accidentally seemed too difficult to repeat on purpose.

“We just wanted to say hello. We’ll let you go back to sleep,” my mother said.

“No!” Papa croaked with as much energy as he could. “I can’t sleep. Stay and talk for a little.”

I kept my head down, staring at the carpet. I wasn’t seeing it, however. I pictured Daniel, standing on a stool, reaching with glee into the kitchen cabinet to find the Afikomen.

“How are you?” my mother asked.

“I can’t get a breath.” He made a gurgling sound in his lungs, whether to illustrate or involuntarily, I didn’t know. He sounded bad. Death was in the room with us; I felt my mother’s dread in her moist hand.

“You relax, Daddy. Don’t exert yourself.” Ruth talked softly over my head to the nurse. “Would you like to take a break? We can stay here until you come back. Is that all right, Papa?”

“Sure,” he said.

“All right. Thank you, ma‘am. I could use a cup of coffee.” The nurse’s voice was loud. She wasn’t afraid of the implacable presence waiting to take my grandfather. “I’ll come back in fifteen minutes?” she asked.

“Take your time,” my mother said. And yet she was uneasy; I heard tension in her voice. The nurse left quickly, as if worried that Ruth might change her mind.

“Fifteen minutes is probably all I’ve got,” Papa said and tried to laugh. The strangled whine he made sounded like a balloon leaking. It raised my eyes from the carpet. Papa’s face turned a strange color, not red or white, a sort of greenish pallor. He struggled to quell something and ended up coughing. “That’ll teach me not to make jokes. So where’s your handsome husband?” he said in a hoarse voice. Papa sounded relaxed. He seemed to feel no bitterness about his condition. At the time I didn’t know his attitude was exceptional. Perhaps he had avoided so much death during his life — the Tsar’s punishment for desertion; America’s Depression; Europe’s Holocaust; and three attacks from his own heart — that this peaceful finish seemed to be good fortune. Anyway, I never forgot his pleasant humor and bravery.

“He’s still working on his book,” my mother said.

“His book? About that guy with the beard in Havana?”

My mother smiled. I did too. It was amusing to hear the great Fidel, a man who was spoken of by my father as the embodiment of strength and virtue — the bull whom all the women of Cuba wanted to, or had, slept with; the gourmand who ate a dozen eggs for breakfast; the military genius who had defeated a dictator’s army with a band of untrained peasants; the Cicero who could hold a nation rapt for three-hour speeches; the Cuban George Washington and Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson all wrapped into one — to hear him called (in a Yiddish accent) the guy with the beard was funny. “That’s the one,” she said. “Fidel Castro.”