A Lucky Guy

By Theodore Kohan

Chance encounters, altered plans, unexpected turns of events—all seem to propel Gabriel in directions he is unable or unwilling to control. But somehow his luck always carries him through.
Fusing the very different cultures of South America and North America, A Lucky Guy brings to life the rich range of events that sway and motivate Gabriel, ultimately prompting his individual evolution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Theodore Kohan
• Release date: Nov 23, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452410456

Theodore Kohan

Born and raised in Santiago, Chile, Theodore Kohan undertook graduate studies in the United States. Following a brief residence back in Chile, he moved permanently to the United States, where he has lived most of his adult life. He and his wife currently reside in Sharon, Mass., and Boynton Beach, Fla.

Book preview

A Lucky Guy

A Novel

by

Theodore Kohan

Smashwords Edition

This book is available in print at most online retailers

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Published by:

Theodore Kohan on Smashwords

Copyright © 2010 by Theodore Kohan

ISBN: 1-4033-8814-8 (ebook)

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Prologue

My luck started at birth. I was healthy, robust, and the son of good, loving and hard-working middle class parents. And, given the fact that I was born in 1940 to a Jewish family, I was lucky to come into the world in Santiago, Chile, a peaceful, tolerant, and, most critically in those uncertain days, out-of-the-way country, far removed from the theaters of war. Had I been born in the small shtetl near Kishinev, in today’s Moldova, from which my father escaped at age twenty to avoid conscription, or in Bucharest, Romania, from which my mother’s family emigrated when she was three years old in search of less anti-Semitism and greater opportunity, my chances of survival past the age of five would have been virtually nonexistent.

I suppose it took guts on my parents’ part to bring a child into the world during that terrifying period. Was the fate being thrust upon European Jewry still unclear to them in those early war years? Or was my mother’s pregnancy simply an unforeseen accident—not so easily rectifiable in a less medically sophisticated age and in a deeply Catholic country? I never asked and I do not know the true circumstances of my conception, yet I do recall my father reminiscing about how he would spend long, somber moments contemplating his newborn son, peacefully asleep in his crib, and wondering what the future had in store for him—or if he had any future at all.

I consider myself, as many Jews of my generation do, a holocaust survivor, even though I was spared the horrors of Dachau, Auschwitz or Treblinka. I was lucky to be born and I was lucky to grow into adulthood. Not a fate to be taken for granted. Not then and not now.

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Part I: In The High Section

Chapter 1

My father was fond of saying that I was born with a loaf of bread under my arm. The early years following his immigration to Chile were a mighty struggle. He faced the triple challenge of fitting into a new country and its unfamiliar ways, learning a new language, and scratching out a living—all without the benefit of a full high school education, his having been cut short by the urgency to contribute to his family’s income. And, as if those challenges were not sufficient, he had the additional responsibility of supporting his elderly parents left behind in Europe, for whom the little money he could scrounge and send every month was the only means of sustenance.

Have you sent the money yet? my mother reminded him each month.

No, not yet, he muttered, his thick eyebrows, overhanging bright gray eyes, coming together. Soon, soon, as soon as I can.

This responsibility ended abruptly when his mother, along with all other family members left in Europe—his father, mercifully, had died before the war—were liquidated swiftly by the Nazis, helped enthusiastically by the Romanian locals, as they steam-rolled with murderous efficiency through their shtetl.

By the time of my birth, though, my father, through hard work and determination, had succeeded in converting a small gold exchange business he had started five years earlier into a full-fledged jewelry store, La Joyeria Real (Royal Jewelers), and he was beginning to reap the benefits of his labor. As his fortunes improved and as the Jewish community became more confident that, perhaps, there would be a future after all, my parents were able to realize a long-held dream—a house of their own. In 1945, when I was five years old and my sister, Beatriz, ten, we moved into our new home in the high section of Santiago.

Santiago is divided, to this day, into a high section and a low section. High and low, in this regard, are meant both literally and figuratively. Literally, because the terrain rises from west to east towards the Andes Mountains, which are visible from almost anywhere in the eastern part of the city. And figuratively, because Santiago expanded from the older and poorer western part to the newer and more affluent eastern part, to which the well-to-do families were moving at a furious pace.

Our old home was a two-family house, aged already in those days, with salmon-colored stucco walls and an imitation marble stoop going right onto the sidewalk. A small but prominent balcony sprouted on the second floor, immediately above the front entrance. This balcony figured ominously in my dreams, for little kids weren’t allowed on it, and that imbued it with an aura of mystery and adventure. I often imagined myself on the balcony, up on my toes, with my hands on the guardrail, trying to see down to the street.

Mommy, Mommy, pick me up, pick me up I demanded. I want to look down! Where was my mother and why wasn’t she picking me up? Was I in terrible danger by being on it?

The balcony took on an added dimension when, late one night, I was awaken by the muffled, rumbling noise of what at first I took to be a horse-drawn carriage passing by in the street. The next thing I knew, my mother was picking me up from my warm bed and dashing with me to the front entrance, trailed right behind by Nana Rosita carrying my sister Beatriz.

Quickly, quickly, out! they yelled.

No, wait, wait, yelled my father, interposing his slender yet vigorous body between them and the door in an attempt to block the way. The balcony…careful! It may come down on us!

They pushed past him, though, pouring onto the street, and there we all waited in helpless terror, along with thousands of others, until the earthquake’s rumblings and tremors finally came to a stop. My mother carried me back into the house. As we passed underneath the balcony, still firmly in place, I took a furtive look at it. Would I ever be allowed to be on it? And would I ever want to be?

The owners lived on the upper floor and we rented the lower one. They had two sons, the younger of whom was my age. He was a big-boned, chubby boy with a sunny disposition. Apple-cheeked, soft and dimpled, he had hands and feet much too small for his bulky body, and he seemed to be constantly off balance. He had shiny brown hair and a meaty nose. He hollered my name through an interior patio whenever he wanted to play with me.

Gabriel, where are you! Are you there?!!!

The moment I heard Jaime’s call I ran to my nana. Nana, Nana, Jaime is calling me. Take me upstairs.

I’m busy right now, she teased me.

Nana!

Maybe later, when I’m done, she said, peaking at me out of the corner of her eye.

Jaime is calling me!

Nana Rosita took me upstairs to a huge room so full of toys that not a single piece of furniture could fit in it. Jaime was with his nana, and the moment he saw me his expression opened into a bright smile that flashed perfectly white teeth.

Now, are you going to play by yourselves like good little boys so that we can talk? the nanas asked.

No, no, give us a ride. We want a ride, we want a ride, Jaime yelled, and I mouthed the words along.

Again? Can’t you kids think of anything else? We want to talk.

A ride fffffirst, then you can tttttalk, demanded Jaime with an air of self-importance that filled me with admiration, in spite of the stuttering that took a hold of him whenever he got excited.

The two women placed us side by side on a small red carriage and dragged us along for a ride around the room, bumping left and right against the toys scattered all over the floor. Jaime and I held on tightly to each other, and as the ride got progressively faster, we giggled nervously with a mixture of panic and delight. When the two Nanas finally stopped, Jaime bolted out of the carriage, dashed to a corner of the room and stood there motionless with his back to us. The nanas stared at each other in puzzlement. His nana approached him and, bending down, took a whiff of his bottom. Pyoo!! she said, pinching her nose and laughing good-naturedly.

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I was sick in bed and my cousin Betty came over to keep me company. She was fifteen and the subject of my unconditional admiration. Tall and willowy, thin-legged yet broad-hipped, she had a high bosom and a narrow waist. Her eyes were black and sparkling, and her eyebrows nearly met. Her hair was velvety black although her complexion was fair.

How do you feel? she asked.

I shrugged my shoulders.

I asked you how you feel. She waited for my answer for a second or two. You are not going to answer me?

I remained silent and motionless.

Then I won’t do what I was going to do for you.

I sat up suddenly animated, my back against the pillow, my head banging against the headboard.

So? she asked, her eyes brimming with laughter.

What were you going to do for me? I asked.

Oh, so you do have a voice. But you haven’t told me how you feel.

A little better.

I bet you do. You sure look a lot better than yesterday. By tomorrow you’ll be up and running again.

So what were you going to do for me?

Oh, I can do lots of things…

What, what!

Well, I don’t know. Is there anything in particular you’d like me to do?

A drawing? I asked shyly, with hopefulness in my voice.

Perhaps…

Make a drawing of the window and curtains, I blurted out.

She sat on the bed next to me, a pad of paper on her lap, a pencil in her right hand, and in no time at all an uncanny resemblance of the window and curtains appeared on the pad. It was a work of art, an accomplishment that I couldn’t dream of duplicating. It confirmed what I already knew—cousin Betty was the greatest. None of the adults could even come close to her.

Do it again, I commanded.

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Uncle Vicente came by our house at noon every day without fail to use our telephone. A telephone in the house was a luxury that not too many families could brag about, especially in the low section. The day before the move to our new home, though, early in the morning, the telephone company came to remove the phone.

Let’s not tell Uncle Vicente when he comes in, said my mother with a wink.

I could not contain my excitement, and when noon finally came and Uncle Vicente arrived, I followed him, giggling and twisting my hands, to the spot on the wall where the telephone used to be. He stared at the discolored rectangle of wallpaper and turned around, mouth and eyes wide-open, feigning surprise. I couldn’t stop laughing. What an incredible prank we had played on him; I couldn’t wait to tell Dad about it when he came home from work in the evening.

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For the day of the move, my parents had arranged for me to stay with Jaime and his family until the evening, at which time they would bring me to the new house. But when the movers finished loading the horse-drawn moving carriage and my parents, along with Beatriz and Nana Rosita, got in a cab to follow them, I insisted on going with them. Jaime was terribly disappointed; inconsolable tears streamed down his chubby cheeks.

I ttttthhhought you wwwwerrre gggoing to sssstay, he managed to utter.

So, prompted by my mother, I moved to console him, and realizing that words alone would not suffice, I steeled my heart and handed over to him my most prized possession: a stand-up cardboard figure, twice my size, of a Foreign Legion soldier promoting Extra Suave razor blades. It was a gift from Uncle Vicente, my mother’s brother and the only family member of that generation to go to college. He was a pharmacist and owned a bustling drugstore in Barrio San Pablo, a busy, low-income part of town, and the figure was a discarded display from his store. I handed the figure over to Jaime, tried my best to hug his barrel-shaped chest with my short arms, and, believing deep in my heart that I would never see him again—after all, we were moving to the high section and he was staying in the low one—I got in the car and we drove away.

Chapter 2

Our new home was an enormous and mysterious castle, an exotic palace in a far-away land, a mansion in the midst of a thick jungle steeped in peril and adventure. It stood tall and bright, inviting inquiry and examination; it was a passage into a world of fantasy, a stimulant to high-flown imagination.

At first I cruised around the house back and forth on a mission of exploration. A one-story structure, it consisted of three bedrooms and a bathroom on the left side of a deep and echo-filled hallway, a living room and dining room on the right side, and a large, well-lit kitchen in the back. Here I found a most prized new feature: a refrigerator, as opposed to the icebox we had had in the old place.

As my confidence surged, I began to venture, tentatively, into what made our new home truly amazing—its fenced-in yard. A bit narrow but extremely deep—it took all of my courage to travel by myself to the far end of it—it started as an eye-pleasing garden of beautiful flowerbeds and well-kept lawns. Then, as one moved further in, it took on the look and feel of a country farm, parading a small vineyard that the former owners had planted to make their own wine, vegetable patches of cucumbers and tomato, and an enormous variety of fruit trees. The crowning jewel among these was a magnificent apricot tree with luxurious branches that produced much more fruit every summer than we could possibly eat or give away. A great number of apricots just fell naturally to the ground where they slowly rotted, permeating the entire property with a sweet and pungent odor that hovered like a cloud in the still summer air.

A gardener came on his bike every Thursday to take care of the garden. Gomez was his last name, and that’s what we all called him. I have no reason to doubt that he had a first name, but I wonder if any one of us ever knew it. He was a short, broad-shouldered man with an enormous head and powerful hands with fingernails resembling claws. A member of Jehovah’s Witnesses and a natural preacher, he entranced me with intricate stories, in which Christian doctrine and pagan superstition easily commingled. Biblical characters and folk heroes appeared and disappeared, were dead one week and back alive the next, all exhibiting confusing yet fascinating interchangeable traits. I followed Gomez tirelessly along as he tilled the soil, pruned the vineyard or mowed the lawn, absorbing like a sun-dried sponge every one of his words. He knew I was Jewish, and although he had only a murky idea of what Judaism was all about, he respected it and never made overt attempts to proselytize me or anyone else in the family. Yet the moral of his stories always contained a veiled affirmation of the superiority of the Christian faith. He disliked Catholics profoundly and made no bones about it; idol worshippers, he called them with undisguised contempt.

On the left side of the yard, against a tall brick wall that separated our property from our neighbors’ stood a large chicken coop where a rooster and a dozen hens put forth a perpetual racket of energy and color. Nana Rosita took me into it in the evenings to help her gather the eggs the hens had laid during the day, and the warmth and smoothness of their brown shells felt like a caress to my hands. Early every Sunday morning, Nana Rosita climbed into the coop and, in a blur, with the rooster and hens flying and multi-colored feathers fluttering all around, she picked out a hen and took it outside. She put it under her left arm and with her right hand she wrung its neck in one swift motion. She then held it by the legs, head hanging, while the hen flapped its wings in death’s agony until, eventually, it fell motionless, wings spread. It was a spectacle that both attracted and repelled me, but one I could not miss. Nor did it prevent me, later on at lunchtime, from digging happily into the steaming, delicious cazuela that Nana Rosita prepared with the unfortunate bird.

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In the old neighborhood I had attended kindergarten at a small private school owned and run by two old spinsters, the Arebalo sisters. The classes were small and casual, the discipline lax, and the educational level undemanding. Cousin Betty, in fact, with no more than a high school education, taught third grade there some years later. But now I was ready for first grade, which was serious, and the question was whether I would be going to a private or a public school. My father was leaning towards a public school. I was a rather small and timid child, and he hoped that the rougher environment of a public school would toughen me up. But my mother wouldn’t hear of it. She insisted that I attend a prestigious boys’ private school, the Instituto Ingles, whose claim to fame was that they taught the English language right from the first grade—as opposed to only in high school in the public schools—and that the students came out of it totally bilingual. Because my father always deferred to my mother in child-rearing matters, I soon became a first-grade student at the Instituto Ingles.

Sponsored by the British Embassy, the Instituto Ingles was located on a huge campus of rolling lawns and age-gnarled trees, with ivy-covered three-story buildings scattered about. It was quite a distance away from my house, and on the first day of classes I waited nervously by our front gate, clad in my brand new uniform, for the school bus to pick me up. I found a seat in the back and sat quietly by myself. After a number of other pickups, with the bus going back and forth by a circuitous route, we entered the campus through a massive wrought iron gate, drove up a long unpaved driveway, and came to a stop in front of the administration building. Alright, children. Go to it, the driver yelled, opening the door, and the whole noisy bunch of us tumbled out. Suddenly uncertain where to go, I focused on a small group of five or six kids who seemed to be my age and tried to follow them. All at once, though, they seemed to scurry in different directions. Two kids were left and I latched onto them, but they too quickly disappeared. I stopped and tried to orient myself, a rush of panic beginning to take a vise-like hold on my guts. I had attended an orientation session with my mother the week before, at which time I had been shown my classroom, but now all the buildings looked the same and all the other students were gone. They all knew where to go; how come I didn’t? I was alone and forlorn in the immensity of the empty campus. My panic surged out of control. I became nauseated, my head began to spin, and a cold sweat covered my body from head to toe. I leaned against an ivy-covered column and, unable to restrain myself, I retched onto a patch of knotty ground. A tall, skinny man with a shock of red hair streaked with gray came by at that moment.

What happened to you? he said in British-accented Spanish. Look at your clothes. I tried to speak, but empty and painful heaves from deep within my chest prevented me from doing so. Ok, Ok, calm down, he said. Let’s clean you up a bit first. He took me into the bathroom and, balling up almost a full roll of toilet paper, he rubbed the vomit stains off my previously clean gray uniform. Where is your classroom? he asked. I shrugged, still unable to speak. What grade are you in? I raised one finger. Alright, we’ll find it together. He held my hand and we walked together to my classroom. The teacher was standing behind her desk, talking. A wall-mounted blackboard was behind her, and above it the Chilean flag’s tricolors glimmered in the morning light. Fading murals of patriotic scenes—Bernardo O’Higgins riding with Jose San Martin in front of the liberation forces, Pedro de Valdivia founding Santiago at the foot of Santa Lucia hill—adorned the side walls. A pile of books lay on top of the teacher’s desk. The class came to a hush when we came in.

Another student for your class, said my companion. This one got a little lost.

The teacher pointed to an empty desk and, with my head down and my sight to the floor, I rushed to it. I felt stupid and diminished. All the other boys were there; they hadn’t had a problem finding the place. Was there something wrong with me? What an introduction to first grade!

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I learned to read very quickly, and the teacher called on me almost every day to read aloud to the class.

He reads like a third grade student, she announced proudly to my classmates.

The moment this happened, one or two of my classmates broke into a singsong: Teacher’s pet, teacher’s pet.

I want you to read loud and clear, she said, pretending not to hear them.

Teacher’s pet, teacher’s pet, others joined in.

Go ahead, read. Silence, children.

It embarrassed and disturbed me. I didn’t want to be a teacher’s pet. I wanted to fit in, to be one of the boys. Yet, to my chagrin, she kept selecting me.

There was another price to be paid as well, now that I could read by myself. For, had there ever been anything more pleasurable in life than cuddling up against my mother and abandoning myself to the grip of a storybook, no matter how many times I might have heard it before? My mother was not the only recipient of my insistent reading requests. I was never shy about pestering Cousin Betty, either, who was always patient and willing, and, occasionally, my sister, if I could get her attention. With Nana Rosita it was a different story. Every time I handed her a book and asked her to read it, she just stared at it and laughed quietly. Read it! I insisted. She simply shook her head and I could see a mixture of sadness and amusement in her eyes. I just could not understand it.

Wednesday afternoons were soccer time at the Instituto. The entire class swarmed behind Mr. Vargas, the gym teacher, as he took us along the campus’ shady walkways to the soccer field. There, in our regular uniforms and street shoes—why waste time having us change into gym clothes?—he simply let us loose to kick the ball. He did occasionally try to organize us into positions—goalkeeper, defenders, midfielders and forwards—but this was like trying to herd wild beasts, and the game soon degenerated into a stampede of unruly little kids chasing after the soccer ball. It was during one