Beyond the Ties of Blood by Florencia Mallon Page B

Temuco’s municipal land and building shacks on it? Every day there was a new issue, a new statement to make, a new leaflet to explain the historical context for their position.
    But he also had to admit, while combing himself just so in the mirror one morning, that even as he tried to look like Che Guevara, in the end he looked most like Grandpa David, red hair and all. He couldn’t go to the shop that often anymore. There were too many demonstrations to attend and pamphlets to distribute. He drank his tea unsweetened now. Sometimes, when he dropped by on a Friday, he only had time to give his grandma a quick hug. She stopped baking rugelach . Now that he didn’t come by that much, she told him, she just wasn’t strong enough to haul the wood and start the oven in the back. All she could do was cook soup on the new gas-powered stove his mama had brought in. When he remembered, he took her a tray of good European pastries from his papa’s bakery on the other side of town.
    One Friday, Grandma asked him to clean out the sewing room in the back. “Since David got ill, I haven’t touched it,” she said. “Can’t look at it. Full of ghosts.”
    Full of dust is more like it, he thought. He took a broom and dustpan and began in the corners farthest from the old sewing machine, working his way toward the center of the back wall. He borrowed a fruit crate from the grocery store next door and gathered up the junk and old clothes lying in mounds along the sides. Once he was done picking up all the junk and had given the whole room an initial sweeping, he began again from the same corners, washing the floor with soap and water. Making his way toward the middle of the room again, he scrubbed and scraped first, then used the cloth he kept wetting in the bucket to finish picking up the grime. After rinsing the brush and cloth out, he moved to a new position. During one of the moves, he happened to look up and his eyes fell upon a small, dusty, forgotten book jammed in between wall and table, right behind the sewing machine.
    Brush, cloth, and bucket forgotten behind him, he stood up and moved closer. Giant dustballs flew up as he struggled to dislodge it, but it seemed glued to the spot. Coughing and sneezing, he pulled at it for a while, but his fingers kept slipping on the accumulated dust. Finally it burst free, and when his eyes stopped running he used the brush to get some of the settled grime off the cover, enough to glimpse the familiar title. It was different from his own thumbed-through, well-worn copy, but it was the Communist Manifesto without a doubt. The design was from an earlier time and it looked like it was written in German, not Spanish. He could just make out the title cobbling together familiar letters. The authors’ names were the same in any language, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Grandpa’s original copy, from Odessa, all those years ago. So this was what the world-historical movement for socialism looked like.
    At least that’s what he told Armando, the Young Socialist from the university, when he came by the school to leave off a fresh bundle of leaflets. Armando seemed impressed when Manuel showed him the booklet. He held it gingerly.
    â€œWow,” he said. “This was behind the old man’s sewing machine? What did you say his name was?”
    â€œDavid Weisz. He was my grandfather.”
    â€œWow. I don’t know the name, little compañero , but that doesn’t mean anything. I’m not originally from here, you know. I’ll ask some of the old guys at party headquarters if they ever heard of him. This is quite a family heirloom, my friend.”
    Armando reported back on his next weekly visit. “There’s one old guy who knew your grandpa,” he said. “They worked together further north a long time ago. Says your grandpa had just been thrown off a farm he was in charge of, because he sided with the little guy.