PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC PLACES : Lights in the Darkness

Here are three stories that are one: three worlds that never seem to touch, and yet are inextricably linked.

Dr. Harvey Weintraub is a small, neat rabbit of a man, a psychiatrist in his early 60s, trim, busy. His office, too, is neat and trim: white brick wall, pale padded carpet, heavy Mexican-style furniture, sapphire upholstery--the accouterments of tasteful listening. He practices in West Los Angeles, in a discreet building of many such suites, a door in, a door out, a box of tissues between.

In this serene setting, men from other lands turn out their guts, grappling once more with the agony of torture. They come here for free--as if they had not paid with their blood. They speak through interpreters sometimes, or to themselves as they climb back into the black hell of their suffering, of inhumanity on their torturers’ faces. In this degradation, all is dark, stained with pain. And the small, slightly plump, decent man from Westwood sits on his sapphire chair and enters these unspeakable worlds.

What makes one man volunteer where so many others turn away? In part, it was the legacy of his parents--old-fashioned, Russian-Polish refugees who carried within them both memories and conscience. There was an epiphany, too. Weintraub was 16 when he went to UCLA--but 17 when he went to the Army and on to occupied Japan, to hospitals in Hiroshima, witness to mutilation, to the beast in man.

Years later, he went with a priest to a big garbage dump outside San Salvador and watched the parents of the missing searching among the bodies for their sons. In his own way, he has tried to bear witness--a visitor from freedom.

On Bonnie Brae, a street rich in old cans, cigarette butts, potholes and scrawny palms, there is a refugee center. The front door is broken, the walls are peeling. Those who go in wear cheap shoes and carry cheap bags. As they sit on broken, cheap chairs in the entryway, their children climb over them, arms clasped around arms, neck, thrusting faces against theirs.

Upstairs is a warren of tiny, overcrowded and windowless rooms--desks, people, papers, stacks of files, the smell of coffee, the energy of purpose. Meredith Brown, tall, dark-haired, Indian somewhere long ago, psychologist, tries to find beds, hope, relief from pain and misery. “It’s where my heart is,” she says of her work. “I wouldn’t be satisfied with less. I think about the hope Salvadoran people have--an incredible persistence that has grafted into my being.”

Some of those who come bear physical scars; some cannot sleep because in their nightmares they relive the horror. Most are humble folk trying to find shelter, a job, a life. Now they sit on the center’s old sofa and at the old desk, trying to fill in forms, to understand the barrage of words. Above the desk, above the tinny radio, is a photograph of a graceful city square--a fountain in its center, old men captured in conversation on shady benches, a Sony sign glimpsed through trees, food stalls and sunshine. It is San Salvador. How odd to see the the great, tugging pull of a place that has been both home and hell.

Eloisa Barahona came to Los Angeles without her children many years ago. She walked up the spine of Central America. She cleaned, swept, laundered; she fed and bathed and loved the children of others. She sent most of her money home to El Salvador and spent the rest on phone calls to houses where her sons often did not come to the phone: the endless ring, the fear, worry, utter loneliness, the hurt of knowing that her calls never mattered to others as they did to her. In the end, she brought her sons to Los Angeles. Friends had disappeared; she was frightened for the boys, and they were her world.

That was long ago. She is over 60, still cleaning and sweeping and collecting her chicken’s eggs from the garden in the evening, holding her granddaughter tight in the night when she wakes from a bad dream. And in those dark nights, she weeps, long, silent, choking tears for her son with cancer. There is no medical insurance, no car, no savings. Her daughter-in-law leaves the house at dusk and cleans offices all night, coming home at dawn to tend the man in his agony and his helplessness. “I was strong for many, many years,,” says this quiet, patient woman, “but it is my son. Why must this happen? Why? Everything was for him.”

Three worlds that do not touch, three stories that are one: the horror of long, dark nights, of comfort for the suffering. The dark and the light.