“I hope they don’t mind living like university students for a while,” Addy had said with a sigh before Kathleen was born, looking around the apartment his parents would soon inhabit. The simple plywood desk he’d built the week before suddenly looked comical compared with the beautiful satinwood writing table he remembered from his mother’s living room in Radom.
“Oh, Addy,” Caroline assured him, “I can’t imagine they’ll be anything but grateful.”
The palm trees flanking Rua Bambina are a streak of green in Addy’s periphery as he speeds along in the Chevrolet he’d borrowed from Sebastian for the occasion. He shakes his head. Part of him still feels as if he’s living some kind of fantasy. Two days ago, he’d felt, for the first time, the tiny hand of his firstborn wrapped around his little finger—and soon he’ll feel the touch of his mother, his father, his sisters, brother, and cousins, the niece he has yet to meet, a new nephew. He’s imagined the reunion over and over again. But nothing—nothing at all in the world, he realizes—can prepare him for what it will be like to see his family in the flesh. To feel the warmth of their cheeks against his. To hear the sound of their voices.
As Addy drives his mind flips back in time to the morning in Toulouse, in March of 1939, when he’d opened his mother’s letter telling him how things had begun to change in Radom. He thinks about his stint in the French Army, about how he’d forged his demobilization papers, which he still carries in his snakeskin wallet. He pictures himself arm in arm with Eliska aboard the Alsina, bartering with the locals in Dakar, talking his way out of the Kasha Tadla tent camp in Casablanca and onto the Cabo do Hornos. He recalls his journey across the Atlantic, his weeks of incarceration on Ilha das Flores, his first job at a bookbindery in Rio, his innumerable visits to the Copacabana post office and the offices of the Red Cross. He thinks of Jonathan’s party, of how fast and hard his heart had drummed in his chest as he’d summoned the courage to introduce himself to Caroline. He thinks of the green-eyed consulate worker who’d introduced himself outside of Porc?o, of the words stamped onto the tissue-thin telegram he’d received—words that, in one swift swoop, changed everything. It’s been seven and a half years since he’s seen his family. Seven and a half! They have nearly a decade of catching up to do. Where will they even begin? There is so much to learn, and he has so much to tell.
Addy reaches the port at eleven on the dot. He parks hastily, nearly yanking the Chevrolet’s emergency brake from its console, and jogs toward the white brick customs building separating him from Guanabara Bay. He’s been to the building four times already—twice when he first arrived in Rio, and twice in the past month to confirm the details of what, exactly, will happen when his family arrives. They’ll be escorted from the ship to a passport control office, he’s been told, and then to another office where they will be asked a series of questions before their visas are confirmed and stamped. He won’t be allowed to greet them until the process is complete.
Too excited to wait indoors, Addy skirts the customs building, stopping short as the bay suddenly comes into view. There are dozens of small fishing crafts in the harbor, and a couple of freight boats, but only one that could be carrying his family. Less than five hundred meters away, a transport vessel floats in his direction, billowing steam from a pair of massive turbines into the cloudless sky. She is huge. The Duque de Caxias. It has to be!
As the ship approaches, Addy can make out the tiny silhouettes of passengers lining her bow, but it’s impossible to distinguish one figure from the next. He shields his eyes from the sun and squints over the horizon as he walks the dock, threading between the dozens of others who have gathered to greet the ship. The Duque moves unbearably slowly. Addy paces at the end of the dock. Finally, he can’t stand it any longer.
“Olá!” he hollers, waving at a fisherman rowing by in his dinghy. The old man looks up. Addy digs five cruzeiros out of his pocket. “Can I borrow your boat?”
Seated on the dinghy’s wooden bench, Addy rows with his back to the Duque, watching the white bricks of the customs building grow smaller with each stroke. He glides past a buoy marking the end of the bay’s no-wake zone, and a captain heading in toward the shore whistles in his direction—Perigoso!—but Addy only paddles harder, into the deeper water, glancing every now and then behind him at his progress.
When the greeters gathered on the dock are but specks on the horizon, Addy sets down his oars, his heart thumping like a metronome at 120 beats per minute beneath his shirt. Panting, he throws his feet over the bench, turning to face the Duque. Shielding his eyes again from the sun, he stands slowly, feet spread wide for balance, scouring the ship’s bow. What he would do to catch a glimpse of a familiar face! No luck. He’s still too far away. He lowers himself to sit, turns so his back is once again to the boat, and rows closer.
He’s thirty meters from the Duque when his eardrums spring to life, sending a shock of energy through his body. He recognizes the voice—the voice that, for the better part of a decade, he’s heard only in his dreams.
“Aaaa—dy!”
He drops his oars into the dinghy and staggers to his feet—too fast—nearly capsizing before catching his balance. And then he sees her, waving a handkerchief over her head, just as she had the day he left her at the train station: his mother. And next to her, his father, pumping a cane up and down as if poking holes in the sky, and next to him, his sister, waving frantically with one arm, holding a large parcel in the other—a baby, perhaps. It would be just like his little sister to want to surprise him with this news. Addy cranes his neck and peers up at his family, his arms stretched wide overhead in a giant V—if he could reach just a little farther he’d touch them. He yells their names and they yell back, and he is crying now, and they are too, even his father.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
The Kurc Family
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil ~ April 6, 1947
Addy and Caroline have squeezed eighteen chairs, two high chairs, and a bassinet around three card tables pushed together in their living room. Most of the furniture is borrowed. The oven has been on for most of the day, churning out heat that has turned their small apartment into a sauna of sorts, but no one seems to notice, or if they do, they don’t care. Chatter, clinking china, and the smell of freshly baked matzah fill the flat as the family puts the finishing touches on a much-anticipated meal—the first Pesach they’ve celebrated together since before the war. Six months ago a ship called the Campana had brought the remainder of the family to Rio. The only people missing are Jakob, Bella, and Victor. Jakob writes often. He has found a job in the States as a photographer, he said in his most recent letter. Typically, he includes a photograph or two in his correspondence, most often of Victor, who will be two years old in a few months. On special occasions he sends a telegram. They had received one earlier that day:
THINKING OF YOU FROM ILLINOIS. L’CHAIM. J
They’ll telephone him from a neighbor’s apartment after dinner, Addy’s decided.
Sol arranges the table, humming as he smooths the tablecloth Nechuma sewed from a small bolt of lace they’d bought in Naples. He sets his Haggadah by his seat at one end of the table and the prayer books they’d managed to collect at each of the chairs.
In the kitchen, Nechuma and Mila dole out bowls of salt water, peel eggs, and check the oven every few minutes to be sure not to overbake the matzah. Mila dips a wooden spoon into a pot of soup and blows on the clear broth before extending the spoon for her mother to taste.
“What is it missing?”
Nechuma wipes her hands on her apron, and guides the spoon to her mouth. She smiles. “Just what I swallowed!”