Cubop City Blues Read Online Free PDF Page A

them flags to wave and hymns to sing and told them it was their turn now—the dictatorship of the proletariat—and the peasants were happy even though they didn’t know what that meant. Worse than the Germans they were, dirty Cossacks. They shat everywhere, in my garden, whatever was left of it, on the fields the Germans had destroyed, in back of the house by the well, even on the porch. I went to see the Russian officers and pleaded with them to build latrines. The accumulation of the feces of five thousand men is something to be reckoned with. Despite the latrines, my land, or what had been my land, and the village, or what had been the village, began to resemble hell. This is the dictatorship of defecation, I told the Russian officers, in Hungarian, of course, so they wouldn’t understand.
    Someone in the village informed the Russians of the captain’s visits and charged me with collaboration. The Russians sat complacently in my chairs and heard me defend myself. I asked them to speak to a family of Jews that had survived in the village. I’d given them food and found them a barn where they could hide. They vouched for me. The Jews were sent east and were never heard from. I was left alone for the time being. I was allowed a room in the back of the house, which I left only to retrieve the remnants of vegetables that grew in the garden and the scraps of food the village girl passed on to me when the Russians were asleep or drunk on their vodka.
    The Russians raped me, too, but by then I was smart enough to negotiate. When one of them, a lanky fellow with an empty look in his eye, wanted me to fellate him, I asked for a bottle of vodka, which I could trade for food. He agreed but when he was done he gave me only half a liter. I took a swig, swirled it in my mouth, and spit it out. At that moment I decided I would leave my house and my country and never return, no matter what I found elsewhere. The next day, at first light, I packed a valise with some clothes and jewelry I had hidden away under the floorboards, and walked out to the main road. No one stopped me.
    I n those days following the war, entire populations were moving. The city dwellers who’d been displaced to the countryside were wandering back to the cities, only to find ruins. The country folk returning to their farms found them overgrown and fallow, their houses pilfered for wood, their orchards cut down or trampled. I saw empty towns, empty faces, a man without shoes crawling on hands and knees, women lying on the side of the road, too tired to take another step, an awful look in their eyes, and a pack of hungry dogs circling around them. I saw columns of Russian soldiers going in one direction and columns of American soldiers going the opposite way. The Americans waved and smiled and offered chewing gum. So this is victory, I thought.
    I was in Vienna for two months, almost starving amid the defeat of a beautiful city, and from there I went to Paris. From Paris I traveled to Lisbon and from Lisbon by boat to Havana. I survived by taking on lovers, of which I had plenty—brutes, dandies, intellectuals, idiots, savants, dullards, men of substance, wispy men, one assassin that I knew of, one potential saint, several homosexuals, and three women of different ages. Some might say I was a kept woman, but I never stayed anywhere long enough to earn that title. In Havana I found a mason. He had rough hands and an eager heart. I was as unstable as a sand dune blown by the wind, and soon I abandoned the mason for a politician. Like all his breed the politician was a chameleon, changing color to suit his circumstance, wanting money more than votes and power more than money. Most of all he longed for approval. He was in love with me as he was in love with several other women, including his wife, and never doubted the legitimacy of his love or the constancy of his multiple affections. My affair with him might have gone on forever, even into