One of the men got up from the table, a scowl on his face. He was a thickset man, with a bulbous nose, bulldog cheeks, and dark, heavy eyebrows. Josef knew that face from somewhere. Had he been their steward at dinner? Set up their beds one night? No—Josef remembered. This was the man he had seen in the balcony the morning of the Shabbos service. The man who had been angry that the portrait of Hitler had been taken down and removed.
The man staggered a little, bumping into things as he tried to move through the tight little room. Josef had seen drunk people leaving pubs in Berlin the same way.
“The captain has given these children special permission to visit the engine room, Schiendick,” Petty Officer Jockl told him.
“The captain,” Schiendick said, his voice dripping with disapproval. Even from where Josef stood, he could smell the alcohol on his breath.
“Yes,” Jockl said, straightening. “The captain.”
On the wall of the common room, Josef saw a bulletin board with Nazi slogans and headlines from the rabidly anti-Jewish newspaper Der Stürmer pinned to it. He felt a shiver of fear.
“Jewish rats,” Schiendick said, sneering at Josef and the other kids. Many of them looked at their shoes, and even Josef looked away, trying not to draw the big man’s attention. Josef clenched his fists, and his ears burned hot with frustration and embarrassment at his helplessness.
After a few tense moments, Schiendick staggered back to his seat, the threat of the captain’s rank still worth something even so far away from the bridge.
Petty Officer Jockl hurried the children along, and Schiendick and his friends broke into another Nazi song, even louder than before. Josef heard them sing, “When Jewish blood flows from the knife, things will go much better,” before Jockl ushered them down another flight of stairs. Josef’s legs felt weak, and he clung to the railing. He thought they had escaped all this on the St. Louis. But the hatred had followed them even here, to the middle of the ocean.
With its huge diesel engines and generators and dials and pumps and switches, the engine room should have been fascinating, but Josef had a hard time getting excited about it. None of the other children were excited, either. Not after what had happened with Schiendick. The tour ended solemnly, and Petty Officer Jockl returned them to the surface, being careful to take them back by a different route.
It was a different world below decks, Josef thought. A world outside the magic little bubble he and the other Jews lived in above decks on the MS St. Louis.
Here, below decks, was the real world.
Isabel watched as Papi, Se?or Castillo, Luis, and Amara huddled over the boat engine, trying to figure out why it wouldn’t start. It had something to do with it overheating, Se?or Castillo had said. Amara was pouring seawater over it, trying to cool it. Meanwhile, Iván and Isabel had been tasked with scooping the water back out of the bottom of the boat. The sock stuffed into the bullet hole was soaked through, and it drip-drip-dripped water onto Castro’s face at the bottom of the boat like a leaky faucet.
They had been drifting north in the Gulf Stream with the motor silent for more than an hour now, and no one was singing or dancing or laughing anymore.
Ahead of Isabel, her mother and Se?ora Castillo slept against each other on the narrow bench at the front of the boat, where the prow came to a point. Lito sat on the middle bench, right above Isabel and Iván.
“You do have family in Miami,” Isabel’s grandfather told her as she and Iván worked. “When that news lady asked you if you had family in el norte, you said no. But you do,” Lito said. “My brother, Guillermo.”
Isabel and Iván looked up at each other in surprise.
“I didn’t know you had a brother,” Isabel said to her grandfather.
“He left in the airlifts in the 1970s. The Freedom Flights, when the US airlifted political dissidents off the island,” Lito explained. “But Guillermo was no dissident. He just wanted to live in the US. I could have gone too. I was a police officer once, like Luis and Amara. Did you know that? Back before Castro, when Batista was president.”
Isabel knew that—and that Lito had lost his job during the Revolution and been sent to cut cane in the fields instead.
“I could have pulled strings,” Lito said. “Called in favors. Gotten me and your grandmother off the island.”
“Then you would have been born in el norte!” Iván told Isabel. She paused in her scooping, thinking how different her life might be right now. Born in the United States! It was almost inconceivable.
“We stayed because Cuba was our home,” Lito said. “I didn’t leave when Castro took over in 1959, I didn’t leave when the US sent planes in the ’70s, and I didn’t leave in the ’80s when all those people sailed out of Mariel Harbor.”
Lito shook his head at the tight cluster of people worrying over the engine at the back of the boat and thumped his fist against the side.
“It was a mistake, leaving on this sinking coffin. I should have stayed put. All of us should have. How is Cuba worse now than it ever was? We’ve always been beholden to somebody else. First it was Spain, then it was the US, then it was Russia. First Batista, then Castro. We should have waited. Things change. They always change.”
“But do they ever get better?” Iván asked.
Isabel thought that was a good question. All her life, things had only gotten worse. First the Soviet Union collapsing, then her parents fighting, then her father trying to leave. Then her grandmother dying. She waited for Lito to tell her different, to tell her that things would get better, but he looked out at the black water instead. Isabel and Iván shared a glance. Lito’s silence was answer enough.
“Someone would have done something,” Lito said at last. “We should have waited.”
“But they were going to arrest Papi,” said Isabel.
“I know you love your father, Chabela, but he’s a fool.”
Isabel’s cheeks burned hot with anger and embarrassment. She loved Lito, but she loved her papi too, and she hated to hear Lito say bad things about him. But even worse, he was saying these things in front of her best friend. She glanced quickly at Iván. He kept his eyes on his work, pretending not to have heard. But they were right at Lito’s feet. He could hear everything. And Lito wasn’t finished.
“He’s risking his life for this—he’s risking your life, and your mother’s life and his unborn child’s life—and for what?” Lito asked. “He doesn’t even know. He can’t say. Ask him why he wants to go to the States and all he can say is ‘freedom.’ That’s not a plan. How is he going to put a roof over your head and food on your table any better than he did in Cuba?” Lito raised his eyebrows at Isabel. “He’s taking you away from who you are. What you are. How are you ever going to learn to count clave in Miami? The US has no soul. In Havana, you would have learned it without even trying. Clave is the hidden heartbeat of the people, beneath whatever song Batista or Castro is playing.”