SYLVIA, DO YOU REMEMBER

Sylvia, do you remember the women working in the house.

It always seemed that father did nothing.

Smoking his short birch pipe hands clasped behind him he paced like a
rabbi, mysterious in a cloud of smoke.

Looking back it seems to me there was something asiatic about him.

Maybe he had been a lord of Bessarabia who had freed his serfs in the days
of the Czar,
or perhaps he would rest in the oat fields and at threshing-time bent over
sleepily would sit in his threadbare coat in a damp place among the ferns.

I imagine he'd become transfixed upon discovering on the steppe an apple tree.
He who knew nothing of the sea.

Doubtless he would struggle with the image of foam, confusing anemones for sky.
The weeping mass of eucalyptus leaves would have frightened him.

Imagine then what he must have felt when Rosa Luxemburg, tract in hand,
appeared before the Czar's court.

Forced to emigrate from Odessa to Vienna, Rome, Istanbul, Quebec, Ottawa,
New York.

Weary of traveling poor father would arrive in Havana like one document and
five passports.

Do you remember his return from the Muralla Street stores, the women of the
house quivering with excitement.

I swear to you that when he entered through the livingroom door in
two-toned shoes a striped blue suit and a thin tie decorated with ovals
it would seem that papa

had done nothing at all.