“Ill-ih-mahni.” I rolled the word across my tongue. So much faded in the shadow of that great peak; so much was restored.
The buildings were shabby in such majestic company. Among the mud-brick huts were scattered half-finished square houses of red brick and ugly, round-edged modern apartment buildings. These homely structures were huddled so close together that I could see the tiny roofs of nearly every building all at once. Vienna had to be absorbed piecemeal, one street, one building, one canal at a time. While the population of La Paz was only an eighth of Vienna’s nearly two million, the mountains gave the city a gravitas and scale that even the mansions of the Ringstrasse failed to evoke.
My eyes remained on Illimani. Hers was a savage kind of beauty, not the gentler, eroded beauty of our mountains. The mountains of La Paz had no need for admiration from us, mere ants clinging to the hems of their skirts.
If I had felt small gazing up at our ship in Italy, I felt a thousand times smaller now.
Third Movement
LA PAZ
Twenty-six
It makes sense that our Bolivian story began, like that of so many foreigners in the country, with food poisoning. After we emerged from the train in La Paz we stood on wobbling legs, gulping mouthfuls of thin air. I searched the crowds for my brother, Willi. Maybe he had arrived in Bolivia before us, because he left Austria first. Surely he had already gotten out of Switzerland. But the crowds before us were empty. A crown of pain tightened around my head. I wanted Willi. I wanted to lie down. I wanted water.
Across from the station was a woman like no woman I had ever seen. As round as an onion, she appeared to be wearing many bell-shaped skirts all at once. This woman—I can still picture her because she was the first Bolivian I saw after stepping off the train—wore a turquoise overskirt with tiered ruffles and a purple and turquoise shawl pinned at her collarbone with a gold brooch. Her shiny black hair hung in two long braids, like the hair of a fancy doll. On the middle of her head perched a small bowler hat, so precariously positioned it appeared in danger of flying off at any moment.
I wanted to touch her. “Sie sind hübsch,” I said to this grown-up doll. You are pretty. None of us spoke more than a few words of Spanish. The round woman looked at me, her creased brown face breaking into a smile. She reached out her hands to take my small one between them. Her fingers were hard and smooth. “Que linda,” she told my mother, “que linda su hijita.” My travel-numbed parents just stared at her. Before her was a waist-high wooden cart and a stack of oranges. With a small glass juicer she had been squeezing half oranges into a pitcher before pouring the juice into cups.
Nothing had ever looked as tempting as that juice. Our mouths were parched and it seemed like hours since I had had anything to drink. Months. But when I looked imploringly at my parents my mother shook her head. “Wir haben kein Geld,” she said, turning up her empty palms.
The man who had sat across from us on the train, who was still fiddling with the straps of his suitcase, stepped forward and pressed a crumpled note into the woman’s hand. “Jugo para toda la familia.” My parents, who would normally have refused any kind of charity, didn’t protest. They were as thirsty as I was.
That first taste of Bolivia. That sour sweetness. The sun warming our pale skin as the pulpy juice slid down our throats. The austere beauty of the mountains against the sky, forming a protective ring around us. Dusty children with uncombed hair stared at us. I smiled, the skin of my lips cracking.
“Do you think Willi is here yet?” I touched my mother’s sleeve.
With her hand shielding her pale eyes from the sun, she scanned the city’s silhouette, as if she could find him there. “Probably not.” She and my father had repeatedly reminded me that they didn’t know how long it would have taken him to get a visa and book passage. They didn’t even know how long it had taken my mother’s note containing news of our Bolivian visas to reach him. “We can see if anything has arrived from Violaine.” My mother’s friend had promised to send word from Paris via poste restante once she heard news.
If Willi were with us, he would be holding my hand. He would already have made friends with the orange-juice lady and found a way to communicate with gestures. He would know what to do with our parents, small and stunned against these new mountains.
As we finished our juice and gave the doll-lady back her tin cups, a tall short-haired woman in a navy-blue dress and jacket hurried toward us. “Willkommen! I’m Chani from SOPRO. Austria, Germany, or Poland? Name? Oh yes, the Zingels. We were told to expect you. Is anyone else with you? We’re expecting many more families. You must have all met on the ship. How are you doing with the altitude? Do you mind if we walk to Plaza Murillo—the main square? It’s downhill, don’t worry. I find it’s more pleasant than the buses. But we can find another way if you don’t think you can make it. That’s where our offices are. We’ll take you there and help you sort out your paperwork and fees, then to somewhere you can sleep until you’re on your feet.” She kept talking, hardly leaving room for us to reply, which was fortunate given my sudden, heavy exhaustion and the dryness of my mouth despite the juice. Like a shepherdess, she gathered a group of other refugees and herded us together. We followed her in a ragged line down Avenida de América. It was just as well we had so few possessions to carry. The buildings we passed looked dirty and half built, steel rods sticking out of the brick. I peered curiously into the few shops. Roasting chickens turned slowly on spits in the window of a narrow storefront called Café Restaurant Goliat. The smell made my mouth water.
The people on the streets stared openly at us as we passed. Many of the women were dressed similarly to the woman who had sold us the juice. Some men wore dark hats and suits, while others were draped in colorful blankets. I wondered what we looked like to them, if they found our clothing strange or wondered why we were here in their country or if they knew.
* * *
• • •
WE TURNED DOWN a street called Ingavi, where Chani pointed out the recently opened Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folklore. “They have some beautiful textiles and some wild carnival masks. If you want to learn a bit about the country.” Most of us didn’t even look up from the pavement, too exhausted to contemplate tourism. A few minutes later, Chani stopped in front of a dingy metal door that apparently led to the offices of the SOPRO, where volunteers waited to break our fall into this new life.
While my parents talked with volunteers about our paperwork, I lingered in the doorway of the dim, cramped office. “Little girl.” A white-haired lady beckoned me over to her desk. “I have something for you.” From a drawer she pulled out a cloth doll with a hard plastic head. It wore a yellow dress with a blue apron—an Austrian dirndl—and had blue eyes that opened and shut.
I did not want the doll. I had never wanted dolls. But it would have been rude to say so. “Danke,” I said, and took it in my arms.
* * *
• • •
THAT NIGHT WE BECAME ILL, taking turns in the bathroom down the hall from the room we were sharing. Our hosts, another Jewish family from Austria, shook their heads in recognition. You have Bolivia belly, they said. It happens to all of us. You will get used to it.
Hanna Gruber, who was a little older than my mother, brewed us pots of a strange, grassy tea and made us drink it. “It will help,” she promised.
“With what, precisely?” My mother looked skeptically into her cup.
“With everything.”
She was right. The band of pain around my head loosened and my stomach settled. My exhaustion was not quite so complete.
“The Indians here chew it, you’ll see. They chew it all day long. Anything wrong with you, they say chew coca. It’s their entire apotheke.”
The Grubers shared their three-room home, their food, and their rudimentary bathroom with us and their twin toddler girls. They were also hosting a newly arrived young couple, who
slept on the floor of the kitchen after we had all gone to bed. The Grubers were strangers and yet not, compared with the world beyond the walls of their home. They too spoke German with Viennese accents. They too had endured the long journey from sea level to the sky. They too ate strudel and challah, though it wasn’t anything like it was at home. The first time I saw a flat, misshapen loaf of challah in Bolivia I nearly wept to see something so familiar. My parents asked about how to find an apartment of our own, but I wasn’t sure I wanted a home separate from the other refugees. I liked sharing a bed with my parents, tucked securely between them where I could listen to the sighing of the wind outside and not feel lonesome. In Vienna, they had always sent me back to my bed after reassuring me that my nightmares were nothing but flimsy shadows of my fears. But here in Bolivia, they never sent me away. There were nights my mother’s arms closed so tightly around me in sleep I had to pry them apart so I could breathe.
We were lucky. Hundreds of other refugees who couldn’t be squeezed into private apartments had to sleep in SOPRO-leased houses that held as many as fifty beds. Chani from the SOPRO offices had told us that she didn’t think La Paz could hold many more of us. More than four thousand European Jews had already arrived, and the local people were complaining of food shortages. Mauricio Hochschild, a rich Jewish man who owned more than a third of the mines in Bolivia, was working on a project to save more of us by starting a colony in the jungle, she said. Jews with agricultural visas would be sent there, once they found land. I was grateful for our regular visas. I didn’t want to travel anymore.
Our third morning, when Frau Gruber returned from her errands with a sack of crusty white rolls, I discovered one link between La Paz and Vienna. These marraquetas that the Bolivian women sold on the streets in the morning were not so different from our Viennese rolls. I broke one apart and inhaled the yeasty warmth rising from the soft interior. The white fluffy insides melted on my tongue. After a few days, I could not remember the taste of Stefi’s rolls.
Like us, the Bolivians liked to dip their rolls into a hot beverage. Though both the definition of “hot” and the definition of “breakfast beverage” were different here. Because of the high altitude, water boiled at a lower temperature, making it nearly impossible to brew either strong coffee or strong tea. I found this confusing; surely boiling temperature was boiling temperature? But then one morning I accidentally poured boiling water over my left hand and was surprised to discover that my skin did not even blister in protest.
Bolivian coffee, according to my mother, was an unacceptable substitute for the coffee of Vienna. While farmers here grew coffee, there were no cafetières, no espresso makers, no evidence at all that the Bolivians made coffee in a recognizable way. Rather, they made their morning cups by mixing a syrupy black coffee concentrate with hot water. Because the concentrate was usually cold, the coffee was never more than tepid. Aggravating my mother further, there was no fresh milk or cream. Powdered milk came in a tin and was called Klim (only years later, as I learned a bit of English, would I figure out that this was “milk” spelled backward). Before too long, I rarely remembered that milk had ever come in a glass bottle with cream on top.
* * *
• • •
IN THE EVENINGS, when my mother kissed me and tucked the coarse woolen blanket more tightly around me before going back to talk with the adults, I still asked her for a song. Every night, I asked her for a song. And every night, she touched my cheek with her cold fingers and shook her head. I thought perhaps it was the presence of the other children in the room, the crowd of adults gathered in the kitchen next door. That perhaps she was shy to sing in front of strangers. But that wasn’t it, she finally told me one night to make my questions stop. “Singers require two things: air and joy. Here I have not enough of either.”
“But you sang on the boat,” I protested. “You sang when we left. There was no joy then.”
My mother’s fingers dug into the muscles along my spine, releasing them all the way down. “There was air. There was relief. We had escaped. I still had hope,” she finally said. “And a great need to communicate something to the world I was leaving. I had to say good-bye.”
“Don’t you still?” I rolled over and looked up at her. “Don’t you still need to communicate?”
I wanted to ask, “Don’t you still have hope?” but I was too afraid of her answer. Of course it was hard, of course we were still breathless, but we would adjust in time, wouldn’t we? Everyone said we would adjust.
She stood up, slipping from my grasp, and turned out the light.
* * *
• • •
DURING THE DAYS, we walked up uneven cobbled streets to nearby apartment buildings to look at rooms. The floors were coated with grime and the hallways dim. What we could afford with the loan from SOPRO was smaller than my room at home. Many apartments lacked lights or water. “Dear God,” said my mother. “It’s like going back in time.” Her despair deepened with each apartment we saw. “Do they not have soap and water here? Do they not have paint?”
Walking the streets by her side, I saw pretty red and yellow electric trams carrying passengers up and down the sides of the city, their bells ringing out as they rounded a corner. I saw men in brightly colored blankets sitting on the steps of the church playing little wooden flutes. I saw women in flouncy skirts laughing as they strolled in pairs down wide avenues. I saw the grand government buildings clustered around Plaza Murillo. Above all, I saw the mountains. Every time we turned down a new street, I was delighted anew to see the mountains at the end of it. To be confronted with the majesty of snow-tipped Illimani and her companions as part of our everyday errands tinted our days with magic.
It frustrated me that my mother couldn’t see the same things. That her eyes absorbed only dirt and disappointment. How could she fail to note that every place we saw looked better than the few filthy feet of floor space we had had in Leopoldstadt? I didn’t care what our apartment looked like, as long as it was ours alone. As long as it meant we were safe.
Some refugees lived in boardinghouses, some in one-room apartments. In one of the buildings we considered, there were twelve families per floor, each with just one room. A single toilet served them all. My mother walked back down the stairs without speaking. “Vati?” I began tentatively, as we walked to the next building. “How long will the loan last for?”
“Until I can find work, I hope. We have a little extra your mother’s friend Violaine sent us from Paris.”
“Can Violaine send money to Willi where he is?”
“She has, sweetheart. At least to where we last knew he was. But she hasn’t heard anything from him.” He squeezed my fingers gently. “Maybe he’s just on a ship.”
My breathing relaxed. I was grateful that my mother had traveled, that she had friends in other countries—countries that allowed money to be sent to Jews.
Two weeks later, we found two rooms in a white stucco house on calle Genaro Gamarra in the neighborhood of Miraflores, a twenty-minute walk downhill from the central Plaza Murillo. Our apartment was adjacent to that of a German couple, Mathilde and Fredi, who were friends of the Grubers. We split the top floor, sharing a toilet and bath. Chani, who told us about this place, said the landlady had recently lost her husband and needed the extra income from boarders.
She and her children lived on the ground floor. The landlady, a diminutive, hazel-eyed woman we were introduced to as Señora Torres, met us and Chani by the front door. “Bienvenidos!” She smiled, kissing my mother’s cheek and offering my father her hand. As she continued speaking, my mother and father and I looked at each other in confusion. Chani stepped forward to translate.
“I see you don’t have luggage. I’ll bring you some towels and a cooking pot.”
“Ah! Danke,” said my father.
Señora Torres let us in to our rooms, gave us the keys, and apologized via Chani that she had
to get back downstairs to fix dinner for her family.
As soon as they heard us in the hallway, Mathilde and Fredi emerged from their room. They were about the same age as my parents, and had arrived a few months before. Mathilde, fair and frail, wasn’t much bigger than I was. “We brought you a few things,” she said smiling. In one hand was a pitcher of water and in the other, a vase of roses. The sight of them brought tears to my mother’s eyes. It had been a very long time since anyone had given her flowers.
“Danke,” she whispered. I pushed open the door of our apartment and they all followed me in. The wood floors, painted a dull brown, were flaking and dusty. Olive green paint crumbled from the walls. Dust coated the sills of the two windows. Even the air looked dirty in the morning light. Mathilde set the water and roses on the floor and looked around. “We’ll have to find you some mattresses.” She spoke in German. “How are you doing with the altitude?” This is still the first question we ask new arrivals; only the altitude remains unaltered by time. Mathilde’s wide blue eyes were gentle and kind. “Have you been ill?”
“Not since the first few days. I suppose one adjusts?” My mother glanced around her for something to clean with. Her whole body hummed with disorientation.
Mathilde shrugged. “Everyone is different. Some people never adjust and they have to move to Cochabamba or Coroico. But some don’t even feel it.”
“I don’t feel it,” I piped up, eager to prove my sturdiness.
“Good,” said my mother, fixing her eyes on the dirty floors and windows as if they were a personal affront. “You can help clean.”
“Oh, I’ll help too! Everything gets so dirty between tenants. It’s the dust, it’s so dry here and everything comes in the windows. I’ll get some rags.” Mathilde ran into her apartment and returned with a handful of torn cloths and a bucket of soapy water. “Here’s a start.”
Exile Music Page 13
