Havana, Cuba and the Friends You Haven't Met Yet

“And let’s have no displays of indignation. You may not have known, but you certainly had suspicions. If we’ve told lies you’ve told half-lies… And a man who tells lies––like me––merely hides the truth. But a man who tells half-lies… has forgotten where he put it.

Mr. Dryden from Lawrence of Arabia

I had a grandfather who left Hungary in 1956 as a refugee while Russian tanks were rolling around outside his family's apartment in Budapest. The tanks outside her window are one of my mother's first memories. Ten years later my mother followed him to North America. My grandmother and uncle remained behind for the rest of their lives.

My grandfather and I never had much warmth for one another as people. He shared my mother's eyes yet lacked the warmth and kindness she possessed behind them. My favorite fact about him was that a woman he loved married someone else and he showed up at the wedding and hung himself during the ceremony. I always wondered if his dry, almost gasping voice was a souvenir from this experience.

He expected me to reach out to him and I could never find much about him to justify bothering. There had been cruelty against my mother and I held it against him without ever caring to explore his obvious pain. We had a weird bridge of pragmatism stretching over our divide. There wasn't so much resentment as understanding about the futility of our relationship. Nothing formally was established, but we stopped communicating before I was a teenager and he was dead not long after my 20th birthday and his 80th. We were both born on June the 3rd.

The last year of his life the only times I heard his voice was in the Hungarian songs he would sing my mother on her answering machine. It was such an uncharacteristically sweet, charming act I wasn't even sure how to approach asking my mother about why he'd begun regularly doing it. She visited him at the hospital as often as she could in the last days of his life and seemed to put to rest her own pain with him as he struggled into kindness toward the end.

There were silly, petty issues with his will where obvious desires he's had to look after people were complicated by fears of being exploited. There was very little money in the first place yet desires to offer something to my mother were botched at the end and she never for a moment complained despite her own financial strains. She laughed about how typical it was of him and her expression changed.

"Darling," she began, in the Count Chocula accent, "the two of you never had much closeness. I'm sorry for that. For both of you. He was a better man than I think you realize."

"Maybe I was wrong not to try."

"If you could go anywhere for two weeks. Anywhere in the world. Where do you think you would go?"

"Cuba. I just finished The Old Man and the Sea and found out he's still alive. He's 103. If I could go anywhere I'd go to Cojimar and meet him."

"Okay, then today your grandfather is sending you and your brother to Cuba. I will buy two tickets with the five thousand dollars your grandfather left me. I think he would enjoy this present for the two of you."

"Are you serious?"

"Yes," she smiled. "So you will have look up many of my friends in Havana."

"You have friends in Havana?"

"Of course I do."

"Who? I've never heard you mention knowing anybody in Cuba. I've never heard you mention knowing a Cuban anywhere."

"Why would I mention people I haven't met yet? But they're there. You'll see, Bwinny."

***

And I did. And yesterday one of the nicest, now with her husband, successfully escaped after years of trying.