Twenty-four hours later I was out of bed. Two days later I was walking. And by the third day I had no fever.
When my mother made me stay home a few additional days as insurance against relapse, I discovered a pile of books Rachel had brought for me while I was sick. She was always collecting books other refugees discarded or left at the SOPRO offices for trading. My mother had stacked them next to my mattress. On the top was Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel, which I had already read. Beneath it were Rosa Mayreder’s A Survey of the Woman Problem, Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, and a book I had never heard of called The Scorpion, by Anna Weirauch. I turned over Werfel’s book in my hands, smiling as I remembered that he was one of the many men bewitched by Alma Schindler, star of my aunt Thekla’s bedtime stories. But I wasn’t sure that reading about the massacre of Armenians would hasten my recovery. I picked up The Scorpion.
The sun had sunk below the mountains and my parents were asleep by the time I turned the final page and lay back on my mattress in a kind of trance. So it was possible. It was right there in the pages. There were girls who felt about other girls the way I felt about Anneliese. There were women who lived together, who were everything to each other. Women who—and I flushed in the dark to think of it—lay in each other’s arms. Whose bodies “seized each other as wild beasts seize and shake the bars of their cages.” Those words!
The book also, however, made it clear that this path was not free of trouble or adversity. On the contrary, it was a path strewn with suicides and drugs and other strange occurrences I didn’t fully understand. Must love always face such punishment? I thought about Heinrich, about the names he had called me and Anneliese. Then I remembered Odiane, the mysterious tuxedoed woman I had met at the opera. She was like some of the women in this book. There are all kinds of girls, my mother had said.
I wanted to shake her awake and ask her a thousand questions, but something held me back. Just because my mother understood that there were women like this in the world did not mean she would want me to be one of them. I don’t know how I knew this, how this message had been transmitted, but it was there, lurking in the underside of my psyche like a caution sign.
All night I lay awake, restless in my skin and unable to be still. Not until I saw the first light of morning did it occur to me to wonder if Rachel had read this book before she brought it to me.
* * *
• • •
AFTER MY MIRACULOUS RECOVERY, Wayra was often in our house. In order to talk with her, my mother finally began to learn Spanish, although Quechua would have been more useful. While she continued to cook for the café, my mother became fascinated with herbal medicine and the plants of Bolivia, especially after Wayra said she knew almost one thousand species of medicinal plants. I almost think she would have tried to become a kallawaya had Wayra not told her that no white woman could become one. No outsider. No one whose ancestors had not passed on to her generations of knowledge and experiences. My mother said she just wanted the chance to study, to learn what Wayra knew about plants.
I watched them talking together and thought, it wasn’t only me Wayra had saved.
Sometimes the two of them would send me to the market to ask for a certain plant that grew in the lowlands. Sometimes I knew why they wanted it, sometimes I didn’t. The women in the shops of the Mercado de las Brujas wouldn’t always have what my mother wanted, but often knew where to find it and would return with it the following week. My mother wanted to learn cures for everything: coughs, colds, rashes, aches, fingernail infections, and sore throats. Wayra was always obliging, though her instruction wasn’t free. My mother paid her for each remedy, over my father’s protests that we could not afford to cure anything else.
My mother just looked at him in that immovable way she now had. “We cannot afford not to.”
When I was back at school, I spread a clean piece of paper on my desk as I waited for the lesson to start. My Austrian mother, I wrote at the top. My Bolivian mother. Slowly, I began to write the connection.
Thirty-nine
Miguel didn’t like Rachel. Her Spanish was terrible, he said, and she didn’t like games or sports.
“I guess you might not be fun if your parents were dead,” I said. “I guess your Spanish might not be good if you weren’t Bolivian.” I was dismayed at Miguel’s lack of enthusiasm for Rachel, especially given that she was one of my only friends who didn’t tease me for spending time with him. I had always been tolerant of his school friends, even when they told me I couldn’t play football with them because I was a girl. “Besides, you didn’t seem to mind so much that my Spanish was terrible when you met me.”
We were sitting on the steps outside the San Francisco church, watching the pigeons and eating puffed corn that Miguel called pasankallas. I didn’t quite understand the appeal of this popular snack food, which tasted rubbery and stale. I was happy to let the pigeons have it.
“My father is dead.” Miguel opened a sticky palm to drop the remaining puffs back into the bag. This immediately derailed my anger. It rarely occurred to me—though it should have—that Bolivians had their own tragedies.
In fact, Miguel had been telling me this in a dozen subtle ways for a very long time. I wondered why I hadn’t questioned him about his father before. Perhaps it was the same reason he avoided asking me more about Willi. We were both afraid of touching a place of pain.
I was ashamed I had bragged so much about my own father. “What happened?”
“He had a farm in Los Yungas. He wanted to grow more things than he could grow by the lake. I was born there. Everyone but Ema was born there. My father is why I am so dark.” It was true Miguel was darker than other Bolivians in our neighborhood, though not as dark as Nayra. His mother was paler than all her children and hazel-eyed, of Spanish descent. “He grew chirimoyas and guava, sometimes palta.” Palta, that glorious green orb that had transformed my opinion of vegetables. “It was a good farm. Sometimes my father took the fruit to La Paz himself, on the new road. One day when he was driving back . . . Entonces, we call it Camino de la Muerte for this reason.”
“I thought it was called that because so many people died making the road?” I had heard about the Camino de la Muerte. Paraguayan prisoners had carved the skinny shelf of a road into the sides of steep mountains about five years ago, during the Chaco War. Lots of prisoners died in the process, but exactly how many depended on whom you asked.
“They were the first to die, true. But the road has continued to earn its name.”
I nodded, hoping he would go on.
“It was the only way to travel from Los Yungas to La Paz. Or to go the other way.”
To get to the road, you had to first climb from the city another three thousand feet to La Cumbre before plunging down toward Coroico. The dirt road skirted the edge of the lush green mountains, arriving at last in the forests of Los Yungas. Looking away from the road for even a millisecond meant near-certain death for the driver and everyone else in the car, which would tumble through the thickening air to be buried in tangled vines. Hundreds of people had already died on this road, but the devastation represented by this statistic was not clear to me until I knew Miguel’s father was among them.
“Did someone crash into him?” Parts of the road were only ten feet wide, Miguel had told me. If two vehicles approached one of these stretches at the same time, one of them would have to back down. And if staying on it going forward was difficult, staying on it going backward along the edge of a cliff required a feat of vehicular acrobatics.
He shrugged. “We don’t know. Maybe he fell asleep? It was late. He had been working at the farm all day. It took them months to find his truck.”
I shuddered at the image of Miguel’s father’s truck tumbling down through the air. If he had been asleep, I hoped he had not woken up before he hit the ground.
“When?”
He shrugged. “
Three years ago? We moved in with my grandfather in La Paz after that.” Miguel looked anxious to change the subject. “And last year we moved here. My point is that this doesn’t keep me from being fun.”
I nodded, to show him I understood. But he clarified anyway. “It’s not me who’s dead.”
* * *
• • •
THINGS HAD BEGUN to change between Miguel and me after Rachel came and I started classes. I now had a world without him. Rachel came over after school to do homework with me, leaving little time for thunka. Most of my classmates weren’t comfortable with Spanish and I was reluctant to share Miguel with them. Few of my schoolmates had Bolivian friends, and no one even considered trying to make friends with the Indians. “They’re too different,” they said. Or, “I hear they don’t wash their hands.” When they saw me talking with Nayra in the market, they stared. Maybe they had already been forced into more contact with difference than they could handle. They hadn’t asked to come here. They hadn’t asked to be removed from the comfortable vernacular of their home. Refusing to adapt was one way to exert control over their lives.
I bristled at their prejudices, though perhaps I might have shared them had I not had the good fortune to live in Miguel’s house. Had I not known him and his sisters. I wondered if we had come all this way, escaping a whole continent of people who saw no place for us in their vision of a single race, only to close ranks and turn on those who looked different from us. I did not want to remain an outsider, as we all so clearly were, forever. I wanted to belong here.
Most of my classmates assumed this was not a permanent move. Someday, when the Nazis were gone, the more forgiving planned to move back to Austria or Germany. The rest would find somewhere more hospitable, the United States, Canada, or the more developed countries of South America. Countries where it was easier to breathe. Sarah told me her mother couldn’t wait to get back to Austria, “where there was culture.” Here in Bolivia, Sarah said with a disdainful lift of her chin, there were no literary salons, symphony orchestras, operas, or theater. “It’s just fiestas. All they have are fiestas. All these people do is dance in the street, chew coca, or drink.” Although I knew she was parroting her mother’s words—not so different from the words of my own mother—I couldn’t help hating her for them.
Rachel was an exception. Rachel’s only verb tense was present. She could never return to the life she had had in Austria. I never heard her say anything unkind. She didn’t talk much at all.
* * *
• • •
MY CLASSMATES WERE more accepting of Miguel than of Nayra, simply because he was paler—pale enough to be allowed to walk through Plaza Murillo, to go to school, and to accompany me to the movies. The Bolivians, I observed, sorted themselves by color and did not like to mix with people whose skin tone didn’t match theirs. Maybe we did the same thing; I couldn’t remember spending time in Vienna with people who didn’t look like us.
While I didn’t have as much time to spend with Miguel, we still went to the matinees at the Tesla most weekends, to see the westerns that were Miguel’s favorite. Afterward, we would go to the store near our house where you could buy pelis. They didn’t cost much; they were something that we could buy without further impoverishing our families. We held them to the light and competed to see who could be first to identify the film it came from. Union Pacific. Drums Along the Mohawk. Destry Rides Again. I never got the westerns right—all those men on horseback looked the same to me. We traded them and made up games to play. Miguel would stick a peli in his science textbook, and then his siblings and I would slip ours in, trying to get it between the same pages. If we succeeded in inserting our peli in the same place as his, we got to take his peli. If we slipped ours into an empty page, we lost it to him.
Miguel had more pelis than anyone.
* * *
• • •
ONE EVENING Miguel took me to see Rebecca. We had seen it before, and I had been mesmerized by the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers. The rigidity of her profile and the cruelty of her calculations reminded me of our Austrian neighbors when they became Germans.
Hitchcock had changed the ending. Rebecca dies in an accident rather than at the hands of her husband as she did in the book, which I had read on the ship. It interested me that even without actually killing anyone, Maxim de Winter remained menacing. His need to control and belittle the women in his life, his way of suffocating them, was as effective as bloodshed. As deserving—I thought—of punishment.
“Now I know what I don’t want in a husband,” I joked to Miguel after our first viewing. But he hadn’t found Maxim evil. “It was Rebecca who caused it all,” he insisted. “She was the wicked one.” We argued about it for the entire afternoon, and agreed to see it again to bolster our respective cases.
That evening, the screen was already crackling to life as we slipped into our seats. Every film at the Cine Teatro Tesla began with a newsreel, one more way we kept up with the atrocities going on across the ocean. We were a noisy audience, greeting every mention of the Allies with cheers, every mention of the Nazis with derogatory whistles. It felt good to cheer, it felt optimistic. As if we were actually urging the Allies on to victory.
Tonight, the newsreel announced Germany’s invasion of Denmark. I tried to think of what countries might be left for Willi. I hoped he was still in Switzerland. Why wouldn’t he come? Could anything but Nazis keep him from us? Miguel and I whistled furiously, and I was comforted by the whistles of others around us. But then, from a seat not too far back, came a familiar cry. “Heil Hitler!”
My skin went hot. Fear pinned me to the seat.
Miguel was instantly on his feet, searching the crowd in back of us. “Heil Hitler!” came the voice again. By then I had risen to my feet as well. The teenage boy who had uttered the hateful words leered at me. “Go home, Jews!”
He had said it in German, but Miguel had understood. He started up the aisle toward the Nazi boy and his friends, but a group of Jewish boys beat him there. The one in front swung a fist at the Nazi. I stared. A Jew beating up a Nazi.
It was difficult to keep track after that. The audience was in uproar, watching the boys attack each other, cheering on both sides. Miguel joined in with enthusiasm, an act that won him newfound respect in our community. Despite the terror I felt hearing that Fascist echo of Austria, I was suffused with a giddy euphoria watching Jews defend themselves. I hoped there were not more Nazis waiting in the wings, rolling up in tanks outside the theater. But maybe here, we had a fighting chance.
Forty
On weekends, I woke early and went alone to the market to see Nayra, though she was often too busy to talk. The Aymara were at least as reluctant to befriend foreigners as the foreigners were to befriend them. It took me weeks of persistent effort to get Nayra to look at me, weeks longer to get her to speak more than a few syllables. Aymara people are shy, Miguel reminded me. They won’t want to be friends with you. When I pointed out that he was friends with me, he said, “Just half of me.” And laughed.
It was difficult for me to understand why the majority of Bolivians—people native to the country like the Aymara and Quechua—would not have the same rights that the paler Spanish descendants had. The Indians were not even considered full citizens, Miguel told me. Despite my own experience with insensible divisions, this explicit segregation bewildered me.
So I met Nayra standing before dirty pyramids of yucca, potatoes, and cañahua.
There were different rules for the Indians. If they had Indian names, like Mamani or Quispe, they were simply not admitted to school. If the girls wore the traditional clothes of the cholas, they were not admitted to school. Once I asked Nayra to come to the movies with us and she said she was not allowed. “Your mother?” I asked. But she shook her head. “Bolivia does not allow us.” And I thought, Just as Austria did not allow me. The connections were everywhere.
The Aymara, Qu
echua, and other native populations were not allowed in the front seats of the tram. Indian children were expected to work, not to study and learn to read. When you were walking on a sidewalk and an Indian was coming the other way, the Indian was expected to step down. I could not do this, could not force an Indian to yield to me. I was always stepping down no matter who was coming toward me and I cringed when I saw my fellow Jews allow this humiliation to occur. Had we forgotten how it felt?
Some Indians worked as maids for the richer Bolivians or the Europeans. Everyone wanted to work for the Europeans, Nayra told me. They paid better and did not whip their servants. “People whip their servants?” The thought of anyone laying a hand on Nayra fueled my outrage. An image of Anneliese’s scars flashed through my mind. But Nayra just looked at me impatiently, as if I were an idiot younger sister. How could I understand so little of the world?
The richer white Bolivians all had servants, usually Indian girls. None of the Austrians did in those first few years. Still, hiring a maid cost almost nothing, sometimes just room and board. That’s why so many immigrant families eventually hired empleadas. Once my father was teaching and my mother was consistently selling Austrian pastries, we had enough to pay the pittance that maids demanded. But my mother wanted no strangers in our home. She had had enough of strangers in her home.
* * *
• • •
ONE AFTERNOON, I took Rachel to the market to meet Nayra. She wouldn’t make fun of an Aymara girl. She never made fun of anyone. In that way, she reminded me of Anneliese. She gave a grave little curtsy when I introduced her to Nayra, who looked bewildered by the gesture. I don’t think she was accustomed to foreigners being interested in her at all other than as a means to her vegetables. I also had the feeling that perhaps she was not as interested in me and Rachel as we were in her.
Exile Music Page 20
