My mother conceded to pour the wine into our small ceramic mugs. Nothing in our Bolivian home has ever been made of crystal. Nothing has ever been made of glass. Our bowls were crafted from heavy Bolivian clay and didn’t break when you dropped them. Our cups too were ceramic or tin. When a visitor arrived with a pretty set of wine glasses, we gave them away. The sound of glass shattering was forever tied to the night we knew our lives in Vienna could never be put back together.
What my mother contributed was almost as precious to me as the candle flames with which my father tied us to our past: a loaf of braided bread, an extraordinary culinary feat at nearly four thousand meters above the sea. And so with candles and bread, we maintained a bridge to our past.
* * *
• • •
EVERY MORNING AFTER making coca tea, my mother wrote letters. She wrote to her parents, to her sisters, to everyone we knew in Austria. She wrote often to her friend Violaine in Paris, hoping she would have heard something from Willi. Nearly every other day she walked all the way to the post office, to ask if there was any poste restante for Zingel.
“Why hasn’t he written?” she asked my father on a Friday evening when he returned from the synagogue. We were chopping carrots on our one, all-purpose table. “Switzerland has a good postal service.”
“Maybe he isn’t in Switzerland?” My father sat down and snapped open his viola case.
My mother’s face stilled. “Are you trying to kill me, Jakob? What do you mean, not in Switzerland?” Her knife hovered over the carrots.
He looked up, the viola balanced on his knee. “Nothing, Julia, nothing. Just that he could have gotten a visa. He could be on a ship. Don’t panic for nothing was all I meant.”
“But he would have written to us before he left,” she insisted. “He would have written.”
“Maybe he has,” said my father, lifting the instrument to his chin. “Maybe he did. It’s a long journey for a letter.” He drew his bow across the strings.
Scooping up my carrot slices and dumping them into the pan on the kerosene stove, I tried to imagine what Willi was doing, what was keeping him from us. I could see him leading the children in the Swiss refugee camp in a game of hide-and-seek. I could see him secretly printing anti-Fascist pamphlets for airplanes to set loose over Germany. I could even see him ending up on a ship to Shanghai instead of Bolivia. But I never let myself imagine him dead. Willi was not a dead kind of person.
* * *
• • •
I WORRIED ABOUT my mother, about her inability to muster enthusiasm for any aspect of our life. I tried to think of what things made my mother happy in Vienna. She had loved the sound of the piano, singing me songs about monkeys and cactuses, and rehearsing a role. None of those things were useful to me now.
If only she could smile at me. If only she could sing. One evening she disappeared into the bathroom in the hallway for an unusually long time. “Go check on your mother, would you?” my father asked from the corner, where he sat turning the pegs to adjust the strings of his viola. “Mathilde and Fredi might need the bathroom. Make sure she hasn’t drowned in there.”
We bathed irregularly in the shared hallway bath, as we had to heat pan after pan of water on the small kerosene stove in order to fill it. Also, the water was often turned off in the evening, or at random times for no discernible reason. I had never appreciated water more than I did once I knew we could lose it at any moment. The things we learned to appreciate in Bolivia—oxygen, water, heat—were things that had hardly crossed our minds in Vienna. My mother kept large pans of boiled water on the floor next to the stove so that we could drink it and use it for cooking when the water to the house was shut off.
I knocked on the door. We were a modest family, afraid of catching each other naked, which made living in such close quarters particularly mortifying. “Mutti?” I called. When there was no answer I reluctantly turned the knob.
My mother lay on her back in the bath, her bare skin dotted with patches of soap bubbles. Staring up at the ceiling, she apparently hadn’t noticed the ebbing of the water. She turned her head to me when I stepped into the room. The tiles of the floor were cold on the soles of my feet. “It all ran out,” she said tonelessly. “All of the water ran away.” Her skin was shriveled and grey, as if the color of her lips and cheeks had drained away with the water.
“I can see.” I backed out of the room and ran down the hall. “Vati! Can you come?” My father stood, laid his viola gently in the case beside him, and walked to the bathroom without questioning me.
I heard my father’s voice, soft and coaxing, as he got my mother out of the bath, dried her off, and wrapped her in a dressing gown before leading her back to our rooms. “You’re going to scare Orly,” I heard him say. I found it odd that he used the future tense, as if she had never scared me before.
They walked by as if they didn’t see me standing there, and sat on the edge of the mattress in the next room. My father pulled back the sheet and tucked my mother underneath it. He sat there next to her, silently stroking her hair, until her eyes finally closed.
In Vienna, music had propelled my mother through the day, through her own practice, her rehearsals, her performances, and her cooking. She was a warm, living radio, projecting melody as she moved. It was difficult to get her to sit down with us; she was always keeping time with some internal rhythm. Even when she was cross with us she would chastise us with a song. “Orlanthe Charlooootte!” she’d trill. “Have you finished all your maaaath?” or “Whose wet skaaaaates are these in the hallway, beloved son of mine?”
But in Bolivia, our house felt silent, despite the flights of my father’s viola. My mother not only resisted adding her voice to his melody, but now left the room when he took out the instrument, as if his playing was painful for her. As if it were possible for her to avoid it, to remain in our two rooms without her ears filling with its sound.
When I came to bed that night, she was curled in a tight ball, facing away from the window. Often when she slept beside me I would shift to curl around her, but tonight something in the rigidity of her back kept me at bay. I rolled over toward the window, through which I could see the stars beginning to appear. Nowhere on earth had as many stars as Bolivia. Nowhere on earth was so close to them.
Thirty-two
One morning I walked all the way to the German School. Miguel was at the nearby Catholic school during the afternoons and I was bored and impatient to return to my own studies. My mind was restless. I kept track of the months of classes I had missed in Vienna, the months I was already behind. I wondered what Anneliese had learned since I left. I wondered if I would ever be able to study in my own language again. My fingers itched to write things, to put words to paper. My stack of letters to Anneliese grew daily.
But that isn’t why I went to look at the German School. I went because I had to see for myself if the rumors were true. The children I met in the Plaza Murillo, while our mothers exchanged news from home, had told me that it was a Nazi school. This should not have shocked me—naturally a German School would be run by the current German government, meaning Hitler—yet it did. How could the Nazis be here, so far from Germany, so far from Austria? Why had Bolivia let them in? A fear I thought I had left behind took hold of me. Were there Nazis in La Paz?
I had never seen the German School, nor had I met any children who went there. Refugee families knew to stay away. There was no Jewish school for kids our age yet, though there were plans to open one. Some families sent their children to Bolivian schools. The youngest ones could attend a day school the Joint Distribution Committee funded in Miraflores and many of the older children worked. I asked Miguel about the German School but he didn’t know anything. It was the only question I ever asked him that he couldn’t answer.
It was early, before breakfast. I left before my mother was up, stopping to buy a marraqueta to eat on the way. No one had t
old me I couldn’t go out alone. The bread ladies were always up earlier than anyone, waiting at the corners of the streets with their sacks of hot rolls.
I wished Miguel were with me. “What if they are Nazis, and they come after me?” I said as we sat on our stairs sharing a marraqueta.
“Wait until later and I’ll come with you.”
“It will be closed by then.”
He shrugged. “You’re a pretty fast runner.”
He was the only person I had told. He couldn’t miss classes, so he couldn’t accompany me. But he asked around for the address of the school and drew me a map. The school was uphill from us in Sopocachi, and though La Paz was relatively small, it was a farther and steeper walk than I had anticipated. I took several wrong turns and kept stopping to ask the way. My skin flamed with heat. My legs began to ache and my feet hurt in my old shoes. When I finally reached the street Miguel had circled, I saw mothers with children hurrying ahead of me toward a gated brick building. Feeling suddenly shy, I hung back so they wouldn’t see me. The gates were not yet closed and locked, and mothers were still kissing the blond heads of their children and ushering them inside.
I waited until the street was quiet, then sneaked to the gate.
When I peered through the black bars, I saw the German children lined up in rows, arms rigid by their sides. A moment later, the Nazi flag slithered up the flagpole across the schoolyard. I saw the children’s arms rise in unison, heard the Heil of their salutes, and the first few bars of “Deutschland über alles.” For a moment disbelief froze me in place. Here? Here?
I turned and I ran.
My legs had new life as I sprinted downhill—thank God it was downhill—through the city. I didn’t want to allow myself to think about what I had seen until I was safe in our rooms, but my mind raced. I thought we had left those flags and salutes behind when we boarded the boat in Italy. I slipped on a pile of rotting garbage and nearly fell. We had traveled so far! How could they possibly be here? I ran faster. I imagined what those children would do to me on the playground. I imagined who their parents were. Would they try to take control of Bolivia? They were taking everywhere else. We heard it on Fredi and Mathilde’s radio. Hitler had taken Czechoslovakia. What was to stop him from taking over a small city named Peace?
When I finally reached the sanctuary of our rooms, I crept into my parents’ bed. Pressing myself against my mother’s back, I sobbed with fear. “Mutti, please. Please, sing.” She made no reply but I felt her body tense against me. “Mutti. I need you to sing to me. I need you.” When she remained silent I whispered to her what I had seen.
Still, she didn’t say a word. I wanted to shake her, to dig my fingernails into her shoulders until she turned back into my mother.
Yet watching her press her lips together, it occurred to me that perhaps she never would.
* * *
• • •
THAT WAS THE FIRST DAY I felt real fear in Bolivia.
The second was the day President Germán Busch died. It was August 23, 1939, the middle of Bolivian winter. The son of a German immigrant and a power-hungry authoritarian eager for German approval, Busch had nevertheless been our savior. Mauricio Hochschild, the German Jewish mining entrepreneur who had been working in Bolivia and elsewhere in South America for decades, building an empire from the extraction of tin, had convinced Busch that Jewish immigrants from Europe would help the country’s economy. Now that Busch was gone, who would take his place, and would we still be wanted? While I was only eleven, I was acutely sensitive to talk of political change. Had we all worried a bit earlier in Vienna, had we all seen the danger Hitler posed to Austria, perhaps things might have turned out differently. Transfers of power did not fill me with optimism.
Busch can’t have been optimistic either; he shot himself.
That’s the official story anyway; Miguel told me with great confidence that Busch’s death was a political execution. Beyond that, however, he could provide no details.
Bolivia was not politically stable. The leadership of the country, Fredi and Mathilde said, was more likely to be determined by a military coup than an election. Now another president was gone and a new military appointee was taking over. What if the country descended into chaos? Who would seize control? What if we were exiled once again? And where would we go? These worries chased each other in my head as I changed the diapers of the Grubers’ twins, as I cut up pieces of apple for them to eat.
Miguel claimed that Busch’s death was not a disaster. “We get new rulers all the time,” he said. “It’s not unusual. It doesn’t mean anything.”
But nothing he said could convince me.
Thirty-three
On September 3, 1939, the newspaper sirens went crazy, waking me just as the sun was turning the snows of Illimani pink. I sat up and reached for my undershirt, my fingers stiff and cold as I struggled with the buttons of my dress and boots. My parents had not moved. I was amazed that they could sleep through the noise, this sign of changes afoot in the world. Europe had already been awake for hours, I thought. So much could already have happened there today.
I ran nearly all the way to the Plaza Murillo, meeting several of our refugee neighbors on the way. War, they said to each other, it must be war. The world could not keep letting Hitler carry on unchecked forever. Could it?
Panting from the climb, I finally had the blackboard in my sights.
Britain declares War! A crowd had already formed around the message, was already abuzz with talk.
At last, I thought. At last, at last! Perhaps even in time to save my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my brother. I swelled with hope. But then I remembered that all of those people I loved were now in countries under attack. Enemy countries. Not only were they vulnerable to the Nazis, British and French soldiers were now headed their way. How would they be able to tell that my family was prey and not predator?
As I stood there, my mind darting in several directions at once, I thought of the Dudeks and Zajacs, Polish families who had been so disappointed with life in La Paz that they had returned to Poland a month ago. My parents didn’t spend time with the Polish refugees; they didn’t speak the same language, clung to different cultures. But we met them in the SOPRO offices or on the streets. We knew who they were. What would happen to the Dudeks and Zajacs now?
I turned toward Illimani, comforted by its constancy above the city as I ran home, nearly colliding with Mathilde and Fredi on the way. “War!” I cried.
They looked grim. They were old enough to remember the last war. Silently, they clasped hands and turned to walk slowly down the slope of the city.
* * *
• • •
THAT MORNING, as we did every Sunday, we listened to the news in German broadcast from London on Mathilde and Fredi’s radio. I thought of our Zenith radio at home in Vienna and wondered who was listening to it today. Aunt Thekla was no longer on the radio, so how was she surviving? It had been two months since my mother had heard from her. As Fredi fiddled with the knobs on the small wooden box, my body tensed in my chair. Perhaps we would hear something about Vienna, something that would tell us the fate of our relatives. For a moment, I longed for Lebkuchen. Then the radio crackled to life.
“It is the evil things that we shall be fighting against.” Neville Chamberlain’s pinched and nearly indecipherable voice picked its way through the static. “Brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution—and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.”
I did not understand the English words, but the broadcast translated the text of the speech. I had so many questions. Did this mean that Britain would be bombing Austria? Germany? Could they do this without hurting the Jews left there? Could bombs recognize Nazis? My parents could not answer these questions. There was so much my parents did not know. I wondered why Poland had been the breaking point, and not Czechoslvakia. Or Austria.
* * *
• • •
I WAS RELIEVED when Bolivia joined the Allies a few years later and expelled many Germans, including the head of the German School.
But it did not expel them all.
Thirty-four
When I first heard about the Orazio I was standing on one foot in front of our apartment building, playing thunka with Miguel, Ema, and Nina. It was January, the peak of the Bolivian summer, which meant rain could interrupt our game at any moment. Rain and mothers. While I loved to stand outside in the torrents to feel the water on my scalp, my eyelids—I didn’t remember rain falling so fast in Vienna—my mother was convinced that wet clothing was almost as dangerous as drinking orange juice on the street.
“Orly?” Mathilde appeared in the door of our building.
“There’s no rain yet!” I worried Mathilde had been sent to fetch me inside. “And I’m only on Wednesday!” Wobbling on my right foot, I tossed the rock into the Thursday square.
“It’s not about the rain. Orly, stop for a moment?”
I looked up at her, not letting my foot touch the ground. Miguel sighed. He didn’t like interruptions to our games. Ema and Nina, figuring it might be awhile before they got a turn, sat down on the ground to play a hand game that looked like pattycake.
“Where’s your mother?” Mathilde’s face looked funny, crumpled.
I shrugged. “Cooking?” I was still balancing, seeing how long I could last. If I put my other foot down I would lose.
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