In Bolivia, the women made everything: clothing, butter, bread, furniture. You couldn’t buy furniture; you had to meet a carpenter and describe what you wanted. Or, in our case, you cut up your neighbors’ leftover packing crates and hammered them into tables and chairs. I had a new and profound respect for the people who knew how to make all of these things themselves.
My mother’s failures did not discourage her. What was a dust-dry bit of pastry compared with the ways the world had failed her? What was a lost tart compared with a lost country? A lost son? A lost voice? Cooking gave her something to push against. It was not that she derived true pleasure from the activity, but rather that she wanted to fight with something, something safe to battle.
If a dish turned out well, she recorded the recipe on a small scrap of paper and tucked it into a folder she kept underneath the silverware box. If it didn’t turn out well, my father and I ate it anyway.
Even when she got the dish exactly right, when the Schnitzel was delicate and flaky, something was still missing. My father and I looked at each other in mutual understanding as we chewed each endless mouthful and swallowed it down.
We would rather she were singing.
Thirty-seven
Soon after the Orazio refugees landed, my parents enrolled me in the newly opened Escuela Boliviana-Israelita. It was in the same building as the synagogue, up on the paseo del Prado. All the Jewish children were planning to go there. I was relieved at the prospect of returning to a daily routine, some semblance of a normal life. Not only did we now have a school of our own, but I no longer had to work as a child minder. My mother had begun to make money cooking and my father had dozens of students. We could afford our modest life.
I had not been to school in more than a year. Though I read every book I could find in German (and, increasingly, in childish Spanish), I had not encountered mathematics, science, or history since we arrived. I knew I was terribly behind.
Anxious to begin, I was ready that first day before my parents awoke: I had pulled on the faded, mended dress I had been wearing since we arrived and a pair of woolen stockings that were already too small. Even if we had had extra money, we couldn’t buy clothing. Here we had to buy cloth and sew the clothing ourselves, using patterns from the American catalogues circulating in our community—and sewing was not one of my mother’s talents. I had accumulated two additional dresses from Austrian girls who had outgrown them, but neither fit me well. I also had one handknitted Bolivian sweater we bought from Miguel’s mother. These items made up my entire wardrobe.
I splashed cold water on my face and cleaned my teeth before walking by myself to buy our breakfast rolls. The streets were mostly empty, save for the cholitas with their bread and fruit. “Buenos días!” I called gaily, grateful to be moving my body, grateful for the air around me. My heart beat too furiously for me to feel the cold. At last, school! I would be with other children all day. I would have new books to read. I felt the stones of the street through the holes in my shoes as I walked and didn’t mind. I pretended I was getting a foot massage. Back at home, I set the rolls on our table and leaned over the bed to touch my mother’s shoulder. “Mutti, school!”
“Wait, Orly wait, I have something for you.” She rose with uncharacteristic swiftness. “I meant to be up earlier.” Once she had pulled on her dress and washed her hands and face, she removed the lid from the cardboard box where she stored our clothes. Carefully, she lifted out a package wrapped in thin paper. “I made it.”
I took the package and set it on our table, peeling back the layers of tissue. My mother had made something?
It was a dress. I lifted it from its papers and shook it out before me. Made from a dark blue wool, it had puffed sleeves and a fitted waist, the skirt falling in pleats.
“Mathilde helped me. We made it a little big,” my mother said smiling. “So it would last.”
“Mutti.” I swallowed a lump in my throat. “When did you do this?”
“You’ve been spending an awful lot of time exploring and working, Schatzi. And I can’t cook all the time.”
Dropping the dress on my father’s sleeping form, I ran to hug her. “You’ll be late,” she said, pushing me away. “Put it on! And there are stockings too.”
Once my mother had buttoned up the dress and I had yanked on the stockings, I gazed down at myself. I looked grown-up. The dress was indeed long, hanging nearly to my ankles, some of the seams were slightly crooked, and the stockings kept sliding down my stomach, but there was not a single hole in anything. Not one single worn patch.
I spun around, watching the skirt flare out. “Mutti, you’re a magician.”
“That magic all came from Mathilde. Come, we’d better hurry.”
By the time we walked out the door, my father was sitting up at the kitchen table with his viola, sending me off with a song. Just like he used to do.
* * *
• • •
IN A SMALL CLASSROOM not so different from the one I had left behind in Vienna, children of all ages stood talking in small groups. I looked around for someone I knew and saw Rachel sitting quietly by herself. I waved to her and she nodded. There were many other familiar faces, children I had met at the SOPRO or the Austrian Club. Children I had seen at the market, clinging to the hands of German-speaking parents. Our community was getting larger every day. By the time the war began there were thousands of us, not only from Austria and Germany but from all across Europe. By the time it ended at least ten thousand of us had arrived—perhaps twice that number, even—swelling the population of this city of some three hundred thousand people.
A thin, brown-haired woman I hadn’t seen at first walked over to kiss my mother. “Guten tag, Julia. We will take good care of her.” She wore a limp, fading dress the same cornflower blue as her eyes. Two combs scraped her hair back severely from her brow. She did not smile, but her eyes were gentle.
I thought I was quite old enough to take care of myself, but I shook her hand, trying to look as serious and independent as possible.
My deskmate was a freckled girl named Sarah from Leopoldstadt. “How strange that we have come so far to meet,” she said in German. Perhaps we had once sat across a café from each other, or become dizzy on the same spin of the Riesenrad. Perhaps I had walked by her father’s tobacco shop. She had come from Vienna with her mother and little sister. “They took my father,” she said during that first conversation, as if to get it out of the way. “The night of the pogroms.” Once again I was aware of my good fortune. There were so many lost fathers. “My brother is missing,” I offered.
In Vienna, I had gone to school with the same children my entire life. I’d always had Anneliese. It felt strange to be in a classroom without her, with so many new people. While I knew many of the Austrian and German children, there were also children from Poland, Romania, and other eastern European countries.
Yet, in a way, we did know each other. I knew that, like us, my seventeen classmates had been cast out of their homes. Like us, they had been driven from their country. Like us, they had been afraid, cramped with cold, and stifled by heat on a ship. Like us, they had arrived here with nothing. Loss was assumed.
Perhaps that made us kinder to each other. No one teased the girls with worn and patched dresses, or the boys with too-short trousers. No one yelled Your mother is a Tratschtante—a gossipy blabbermouth—in the schoolyard, aware that too many mothers had met worse fates. I was not the only child missing a brother. We were reserved, careful not to cross each other’s borders.
But while our exile bound us, stark differences remained. Some had given up God entirely while others clung more tightly than ever to the idea of divine intervention. We spoke different dialects and advocated different politics.
“Niños,” Frau Pichler interrupted our nervous chatter. “Take out a sheet of paper, please.” I was surprised to hear her speak Spanish. She then repeated
the phrase in German.
“Think of two people or objects or ideas or places that have nothing in common,” she instructed. “Write them down.” I was confused. I had expected a speech, a welcome, an introduction to our curriculum. But Frau Pichler, I was to learn, wasn’t keen on small talk. After giving this instruction in Spanish and German, she sat down behind her small wooden desk.
I stared at my page. Two unconnected things. Every two things I thought of seemed connected. The Alps and the Andes. My old apartment and my new apartment. Willi and Anneliese. Coffee and tea. I began to feel I was connected to everything, between everything, the silk connecting strands of a spider’s web.
“Two more minutes.” I picked up my pencil. Two unconnected things! Mahler, I finally scribbled. Nayra.
“Bueno. Now, find a way to connect those two things and write that connection. What is between those things, what fills that space?”
It was a strange way to begin a class. I wasn’t used to my teachers encouraging improvisation. Our Viennese teachers had valued memorization and neat handwriting and strict structures like fables, sonnets, or villanelles, not vague, unspecified forms. But the assignment had the effect of instantly distracting us from our individual tragedies and plunging us into our work.
I didn’t know if I was any good at writing. I could not remember anything I had ever written in Austria, aside from my journals and the stories I created with Anneliese.
“She was a song of the earth,” I began. “The silence between notes of the melody.” For a moment I forgot whether I was writing about Nayra or Anneliese. Either. Both. My pen kept moving.
Sarah was still frowning over a line. “Are we writing in German?” she whispered, her breath yeasty like bread.
I looked down. I had started in Spanish. I glanced back at Sarah and shrugged. I was oddly free of the schoolwork anxiety that had plagued me in Vienna. There were worse things, I now knew, than getting an assignment wrong. Calm settled over me. I could write anything and life would still go on.
“That’s time,” said Frau Pichler. I looked up. I wanted more. Across the room, Rachel stared at an empty page.
When we read our pieces out loud, Frau Pichler smiled. “Do you see? You have started to write poems.”
I had once written songs in my journals, I remembered. Music made of words. That was how an earlier teacher had once described poetry. Music made of words. Yet I had no proper education in poetic rhythm and form. No one had ever asked me to write a poem.
“It’s often in the space between things we think are irreconcilably different that the most interesting connections are made. That space is where poems live.”
* * *
• • •
I WAS HAPPY AT SCHOOL, where I studied Bolivian history alongside grammar, writing, and mathematics. It confused me, however, that our Austrian geography teacher wanted us to study the rivers and cities of the Alps rather than those of the Andes. Of what possible use to me now was a detailed knowledge of European terrain? I wanted to learn more about where we actually lived.
Our music teacher taught us German folk songs, accompanying us on his accordion. These classes steeped me in an uncomfortable nostalgia, longing rubbing up against revulsion. I missed the Austrian seasons, the forests of the Wienerwald. I missed my white skates with the blue pom-poms attached to the laces and the little pairs of wooden skis Anneliese and I would lug up the same hill over and over again. Yet even the ice and snow, even the trees, were tainted now with all that had happened in that landscape.
While our instruction was alternately in German and Spanish, depending on the nationality of our teacher, we mostly spoke German in the schoolyard as we lined up in the morning, or between classes. Yet my heart was turning away from my native tongue. I did not want to share a language with those children I had seen at the German School, blindly saluting. I tired of the way my fellow refugees began their sentences with “Back home in Austria . . .” We were not in Austria. Austria had spat us out. What was the point in talking about it all the time? Home was here. Apart from my memories of Anneliese, I didn’t want to think about the past anymore; I wanted to live in the present. I wanted to live in Bolivia. I wanted to speak Spanish.
Thirty-eight
It started when I came in after recreo a couple weeks later, panting from our games in the schoolyard. I was hot and sticky, pulling my blouse away from my chest where it stuck to my skin. Normally I cooled down rapidly at altitude. But this day I didn’t cool down at all.
Sitting at my desk I felt the beads of sweat run through the hair at the back and sides of my scalp and trickle down my spine. My face and hands burned and turned red with a raised rash. My eyes blurred; the fours in my math book became ones and then eights.
Frau Pichler noticed the angry red crawling across my skin and sent me home. When my mother saw me at the door, her face paled. She put me to bed, pulled my covers up to my chin, and made me sip as much lukewarm tea as I could manage.
All I wanted to do was sleep. For nearly a week I didn’t get out of bed, except when my mother came to help me to the toilet. I didn’t eat. I didn’t want to drink, though my mother would trickle water through my teeth. What I know of this period is fuzzy around the edges.
A German doctor came to see me and gave me powders dissolved in a ceramic mug of water. European doctors could not legally practice medicine in Bolivia—the Bolivians did not want the competition—but many of them did anyway. We all went to them first, as our parents believed they provided superior care.
I did not get better.
The second week I was in bed, soaking through bedsheets already stiff with sweat, my mother grew desperate. We had heard of several refugees—the ones with agricultural visas who had been sent to work the land down below us—who had died of yellow fever, meningitis, or other kinds of fevers you could get in the tropics or semitropics. To travel to the lower altitudes, we were learning, was to risk an array of illnesses, often involving digestive problems, parasites, or amoebas. Things we had never encountered in Austria. In Bolivia, nature took over from the Nazis, though in a less organized fashion. I hadn’t been to the tropics yet, but La Paz had its own fierce bacteria, like those we had encountered in our first glasses of orange juice.
“I’ve been to the Witches’ Market with Miguel,” my mother breathlessly told my father one afternoon when she returned from the market. “Do you remember Orly told us that Miguel knows healers up on calle Linares? We went up there to talk to them and I found a medicine woman who has walked the Inca trail and who can cure anything.” Even in my feverish state, this made no sense. Why would this woman be walking through the Andes? How was that relevant?
Even more confusing was that this was my mother speaking. The fact that my mother would turn to Miguel and his healers for medical advice was the most worrying development thus far.
From my father I heard only murmurs of agreement. He had always left the care of sick children to my mother.
The healer came early the next morning. She was short like Nayra, but fat. A round little woman with long braids and smiling dark eyes. She stood over my bed, smiling down at me. There were gaps in her teeth and one of her upper front incisors was gold. I looked up at her. Speaking would have taken too much energy.
“Soy Wayra,” she said. “Soy Kallawaya.” The kallawayas, I had heard from Miguel and Nayra, were the roaming indigenous healers. The word comes from kolla-waya, which she says means “one who carries medicines on his shoulders.” Or in this case, hers.
Most of the Indians didn’t go to our doctors, but to medicine men. A few women worked as healers too. Women like Wayra. She put a dry hand on my forehead and murmured something in her bird language, which I later learned was a variant of Quechua. She touched my cheeks, my throat, looked in my eyes, and listened to my heartbeat in my wrists. “Abre,” she instructed. I opened my mouth. After peering into my throat for
several minutes she turned to my mother, gesturing for a piece of paper.
On the scrap of newspaper my father handed her, she scribbled in pencil: amor seco, manzanilla, verbena. More unfamiliar words. “Buy these plants,” she told my mother, holding out the paper. “Boil them in water for two hours. Strain out the large bits, and give her the water as tea, one cup every two hours.” When my mother just stared at her in bewilderment, the older woman shoved the paper into her hands.
“We need to get those things,” my father translated. I opened my eyes, which had drifted shut. I hadn’t realized my father knew enough Spanish to understand.
“Muchísimas gracias.” My mother—who at least knew that much Spanish—thanked Wayra with uncustomary enthusiasm and filled her hand with coins.
When I woke several hours later the house smelled of a bitter soup. My mother was waiting at my bedside, mug in hand. It occurred to me, even in my delirious state, that we had no way of knowing what these plants would do. Maybe they were poisons, given to Jews to exterminate them. Maybe they were tired of so many of us coming to their country. My mother must have been desperate, to put my life into the hands of a stranger.
But she had. And I had always trusted my mother with my safety. I drank the tea. Later that night my mother bathed my entire body with a chamomile infusion, using a pan and a small towel so that I would not have to move from bed.
Exile Music Page 19
