Postcard From Belize

Daddy Needs a Sandwich

We are in Belize, on Ambergris Caye, the largest of this small Central American country’s islands and the terminus of the Yucatan peninsula. I’m writing this on the second story deck of our villa. The ocean wind blows through the coconut trees and stirs the blue water of the pool. It’s 30 degrees, lovely in the shade. The history of this place we parachuted into is as complicated as anywhere in an area subject to innumerable predations and colonizing influences. Originally the island was part of the remarkable Mayan empire, the most successful civilization of the pre-Colombian Americas, complete with several million citizens, elaborate trade networks, an agrarian economy so advanced it allowed many of the farmers to work the crops only six months of the year and spend the rest of the time developing other aspects of their culture, the remains of which are still to this day discussed, pored over, trekked through. We could take a day trip to Mayan ruins on the mainland, should we choose. We don’t choose. I am leery of guided tours. In fact, I’m leery of tropical vacations, don’t like to drop into some random inevitably poorer country and make like the English lording over what was once British Honduras. But in family matters my opinions generally matter very little.

The plan was to travel with my parents, in their early Eighties, stay ten days, make sure they are comfortable and established, and then leave them to winter for the month. It was a good plan artfully and somewhat laboriously concocted by the females who make the plans, pay for the plans and ask only that we, the kids and the males (hard to tell which are which), shut up and enjoy ourselves. But both demands are nearly impossible for us. My father, a garrulous complainer, a man ever able to find unhappiness in paradise. Like father like son, goes the saying. It is too hot for me here. (Naturally being a creature from Ottawa via Poland, my summer tolerance is minimal.) There are tiny black mosquitoes that ravage my ankles. The food is good, but so expensive, reminding me of the classic Woody Allen gag – Woman: “The food is terrible here!” Man: “I know! And the portions are so small!” The only reason this trip was hatched was so that we could get the parents out of what has proven to be a ridiculously cold and snowy winter. In point of fact, I am driven mad travelling with my parents, my father in particular, his every complaint like a sliver of bamboo shoved under a toenail. My parents! Born into deprivation and hunger at the end of World War 2 – they never miss a meal. They must sit down and slowly consume every morsel of breakfast, lunch and dinner. “Daddy needs a sandwich,” my mother will pronounce at random intervals regardless of whether we are at an airport, driving to dinner, on a seaside boat tour, watching a movie at a volume that causes the sofa to literally shake due to Daddy’s near deafness…Pause movie. Pull over. Return to shore. Daddy needs a sandwich.

It's minus 14 in Toronto with what looks to be two bloody feet of snow on the ground and I’m standing on our deck unhappily pondering a perfect horizon. The source of my unhappiness is of course Daddy, but here’s the rub: Daddy isn’t in Belize acting out the pantomime of post colonial tourism along with all the rest of us. Where is Daddy? He is stuck in the frigid city slogging out the worst winter in a decade. I’m unhappy because I’m being deprived of my usual unhappiness. The parents aren’t here. I can’t spend my holiday complaining about how they are driving me crazy and ruining my holiday. This to me is patently unfair. Classic Daddy. Why can’t he think about me for a change? But he has passed this on to me — our never-ending id, our impulse to consumption as a kind of destruction, to eat is to eat is to eat is to get ready to die with a full belly and a clean pair of socks. He will not die the death of his grandparents and uncles and aunts and innumerable cousins, the death of starvation and disease and slaughter. He will die with a full belly. He will eat until the cows come home. And then he will have dessert and that will be his last laugh, though it will sound a bit like a cry.

Daddy can’t eat and Daddy isn’t here. Like I said, he’s at home with my long-suffering mother, slogging through the winter. In the month leading up to the trip there was a series of health crises including a ten day stay in the hospital. When the smoke cleared, we discovered that having been diagnosed with throat cancer and “cured” in his Seventies, he now has new complications from that treatment. In his penchant for bizarre illnesses – a one in a million hernia that pushes through the side of the ribs and can’t be corrected via the usual simple surgery – he has really outdone himself. Now he has a one in every 500,000-throat cancer complication that involves, wait for it, the slow death and decay of the jawbone. Ridiculous! The “cure” if you can call it that is to cut out the dead piece of jaw and replace it with living bone from the leg and hope it all works out. And so he’s at home, chewing on mush, complaining about the pain and the cold, and leaving me to luxuriate on a tropical island without him.

Typical Daddy. I console him by saying that if he gets the surgery and makes it we’ll go again next year. Then again, I say, if he doesn’t make it, he’ll be dead and won’t need a vacation from the winter. So either way he’ll be all good. We employ a lot of gallows humour in our family. My father was born in a Kazakhstani Soviet hellhole, his parents just recently released from a Siberian workcamp. The only reason he was born in the first place was so that his mother, my grandmother, could use pregnancy as an excuse to not work in the mines. So there you go. That’s what passes for humour with the Niedzvieckis. On vacation I bring along some light reading. It’s a book about called Lost Landscapes by a Polish writer named Agata Tuszynska. Inspired by the writing of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Agata wanders through first Poland then the US and Israel trying to fathom the utter, sudden destruction of Polish Jewry after the NAZIs invaded her country. The book is spare and lyrical, gently exploring both Jewish and Polish memories of this seismic event:

I attempted to enter that world. I disturbed people's memories and the earth itself in search of the traces…I was seeking something I had never known: imagined tastes and smells…But I was always intruding from outside. "You are a tourist in this world," someone said to me. "And you?" I asked. "I? I live here."

My father is one of those people who has lived, at least partially, in that lost world, an old Jew who grew up speaking Yiddish and eating his mother’s klops and kreplach. He is dying, of course, slowly but inevitably, and truly no one knows if he will ever make it to sunny Belize. The kids call him Zadie and take him to the Starbucks across the street from his apartment. There he stands in front of the register waving the chain’s app on his phone aggressively in the direction of his grandchildren while demanding they get whatever they want. Suddenly he rounds on the cashier taking the order, yelling: “What’s good here!?!”

In the island’s only town there is a café called Marbucks. We don’t go there. The town is ramshackle and funny, with random dogs running in and out of the traffic that is primarily made up of golf carts. There are various tourist shops ranging from well lit and air conditioned to dark, hot and dusty. Prompted by two little sisters I wander into a shop run by their mother and we randomly buy something simply to support this hapless store. “Mister,” one of the sisters says to me. The other little kid holds up a magnet portraying the seashore. Both collapse in giggles. The next day we go snorkeling with a man who says his name is Eddie Lover. For some reason, channeling my inner Daddy, I start referring to him as Tony Love. He taxis us out to a reef area called The Mexican Rocks and we float around the underwater home of Grey Snapper, Hog Fish, Gar, Flounder, an impressively relaxed sea turtle and a rather put upon bright green moray eel. It’s all very beautiful and I am hyper aware of my body as an alien thing in this environment, a floating skin bag of air longing more than anything for a beer. On the way home, kid #2 throws up.

That night we watch a movie which we stream via first world magic from my computer in Toronto to the app I install in the Samsung tv here in this dark compound guarded by the indomitable Vladimir who patrols our villa from six pm to six am armed with a flashlight and who knows what else. Inspired by our underwater adventures we watch a documentary about the rescue of a Thai soccer team trapped in a flooded cave system. It’s an incredible story in which thousands of people from Thailand, Australia, the UK and the US come together to rescue all 12 youngsters and their coach. I can’t help but think back to my father’s formative years in which he languished in a German displaced person’s camp with his shell-shocked young parents. In Poland their entire families were herded into camps or to the edge of town, systematically murdered. No international coalition of well-meaning middle classes came to help them. Nobody cared. Toward the end of our week of holiday, Hamas returns the bodies of two brothers, three and not-even-one-years old, that they kidnapped and murdered. There was no international coalition aimed at rescue. In many places, including in my country, it was the opposite – the murderers were praised, students took to the streets to pray for monsoons, fiercer flooding, bodies in caves.

It's hard to be embittered on a Belizean island, but if anyone can do it, I can! I owe it to my Dad, to the patriarch, to the Daddy. If I could, I’d bring him home a catch-of-the-day sandwich, beautifully grilled snapper on a soft bun. Instead, we send pictures. My mom writes back. “It looks beautiful there. Daddy isn’t feeling well. How’s the food?”