Daniel Zwickel ben Avram’s “Puebla”

Then was then ... (part I)

    Once upon a time I stood on the top of the world, or so it seemed to a Hemet High School sophomore who enjoyed spending his summers trekking ten miles to the peak of Southern California's Mt. San Jacinto ("Mt. San Jac" to the locals.) If I were 21 and so inclined, I could hike an hour or so back and take the tram a 40 degree temperature jump down to Palm Springs and party. In fact, were I so inclined, I might want to get royally plastered just on general principle. I have in my pocket a translation of some Hebrew I got from an old man in La Paz a few years ago and to tell you the truth it scares the hell out of me.

     I was an eleven-year-old kid full of frijoles and mischief and got myself purposely lost on a supply trip to La Paz, the capital of el Territorio de Baja California, Sur. My brother and I were kind of spoiled, my mother being a school teacher specializing in progressive private schools. So when my folks heard about this new one starting up in Baja, they must have thought it would be cool for my brother, David, and I to be their first guinea pigs, so (suckers!) they wound up financing the first nine months of Shimber Berris' existence.

     If you take the train down the mainland of Mexico to the city of Los Mochis, then by bus to the coast, you will end up in one of the loveliest towns the Mediterranean never had, called Topolobampo, terraced down to a bay I once saw filled with thousands of brilliant blue jellyfish. From there you would take a fishing boat called the Blanco which I would have named "Termites-Swimming-Like-Crazy" which was basically what kept us from sleeping with the fishes. Sixty-five miles of desert scrub in an old Dodge army ambulance took us to the town of San Bartolo, home of an experiment I was too young and stupid to be nervous about.   Founder, Dr. David Burden had been a missionary in Africa and had become the town doctor when he and his wife, author Virginia, had this bright idea.
     Something immensely disturbing began that summer that supposedly connected with the death of six million Jews, if you believe in time travel.

     So this gringuito was having too much fun to realize I really was lost, or to even worry about it. The Burdens were getting supplies and I managed to sneak away while they were looking the other direction. It was a typically blazing hot day; a radio somewhere was blaring the jingle, Tome Pacifico—¡y nada más! which sounded pretty good even though I didn’t particularly like beer. And the smell of a street vendor’s tamales reminded me that I was sin pesos (broke, loosely translated.) I turned toward the source and I saw this old man sitting at an outdoor cafe table.

     At least he looked old—I mean really old, much older, I think, than he actually was.
     He looked like a monk, like the skinny ones who thought that starving themselves made them holy or something. Except he had an unlit cigar he was more chewing on than smoking, the thin, almost meatless hand holding a shot of Tequila curiously steady. I may have had a kid’s boundless energy but he made me bone-weary just looking at him, as if, were he to take just one good siesta, he’d never bother even waking up. He was reaching to pick up the ancient fountain pen next to a small leather book that looked like a diary when he noticed me staring. I got a bit nervous, not to say embarrassed, and began to walk on when he reached one of those monk’s hands toward me.

“Eh, ¡niño!” He continued (in Spanish, but a strange kind of Spanish that reminded me vaguely of relatives. Jewish relatives.) “You look thirsty. Hell, you look lost. Let me buy you a Tamarindo and we’ll figure out how to get you back to whoever you belong to.”

     Before I realized I’d decided to take him up on it, in my mind I was already slugging down a cold Squirt (¡Nunca le deja sed!)

“What’re those you’re writing? Some kind of code or something?”

     My Spanish was pretty fluent by now but then he surprised me by replying in English. Now he sounded like my Jewish relatives, except more like French than Austrian.

“It’s Hebrew. That’s what we spoke in Israel.”

“Israel. That’s where all the Jews went. My father talks about moving there some times. How’d you know I was American?”

“Niño, you may sound Mexican but you don’t look it. Do you like to read?”

“Yeah.”

“What kinds of books?”

“Oh, science fiction mostly. You know, I used to live in Tarzana. It’s named for Edgar Rice Burroughs who wrote all those Tarzan books. He wrote science fiction all the time. Once I even wrote a story about shrinking and discovering that atoms were tiny solar systems and discovering a new planet with its own civilization.”

“Aha! A writer, nu? How about time travel. Do you like to read about that?”

     Suddenly the smile faded and he appeared about to collapse and he looked so sad I almost cried. I didn’t know what to say so I just sat there, sipping my Squirt. He seemed lost, distracted. Then he carefully screwed the cap back on the Waterman he had been using and clipped it in his shirt pocket. Funny, I just thought of that. It was a emerald-green, tortoise-shell Waterman. He went through the old leather notebook, pausing here and there.

“Six million dead,” he mumbled.

     I distinctly heard him mutter, six million dead and it gave me goosebumps. I’m sure it was just a kid's imagination but those words carried the smell, almost, of a large number of corpses. And I realized I was looking at a dead man in all but fact.

“You know what your name means in Hebrew?” I had told him my name was Daniel. I nodded. “The same as mine. God is your judge. Well, God is mine, too.

“So you like science fiction.” He looked purposely through his journal and found the pages he was seeking, separating them from the rest, neatly folding them and handing them to me. “I am through,” he said, more to himself than to me. “I am through.” He looked up and searched my eyes, then smiled fleetingly. “You know, by all rights those pieces of paper shouldn’t exist. Ah well. Have a good life, Daniel. Shalom.”

     He rose and walked away.

     My last impression of him as I heard Mrs. Burden's exclamations upon discovering my whereabouts was of the strangeness of his clothes. I hadn’t realized it before but they looked somehow peculiar. They looked maybe European but somehow, well, different. And his shoes. I had never seen anything like them.