Exile Music

by Jennifer Steil

  I had many questions about this one. Where was the father? Why should a mother punish herself for her sons’ crimes? Or was the moral that a decent mother must sacrifice for her children, no matter how undeserving the children, no matter how great the sacrifice?

  It was a warning to sons, Nayra said. If they were lazy, it could kill their mother.

  There were many stories about mothers being cooked and eaten. Or being fed to the condors. Even Pachamama got thrown into a cooking pot in one of her stories. But there were also many stories of the lake where the sun and the moon and the stars were all born. Where humanity itself was born.

  Over time, we wove the threads of our stories together, so that it became harder to sort out which belonged to her and which belonged to me. The pages on which they were preserved, however, were mine. These lived in a stack beneath my bed. Someday, I thought, I could read them to Anneliese. Someday, I could read them to my own children. When stories were not shared, they withered and blew away. The world was so full of stories just blowing around.

  Forty-two

  APRIL 1940

  It was just a matter of time before my mother realized she could combine her two newest passions. She began by making special fertility bread with powdered maca root. Then a soup to cure fever. Coca cookies to help newcomers with the altitude—and with everything else. But our kitchen was too small and ill equipped for her to cook much of anything. Demand was constant. Refugees preferred to buy food from my mother, knowing that it would be cooked or baked to the standards of home. It would not make them ill.

  At the same time, I was longing for a room of my own. I was nearly thirteen. No longer did I need the safety of my parents’ bed. I needed a bed where I could think about things I didn’t want to share. Where I could be alone with Rachel. Where I could reread and reread The Scorpion. I still hadn’t worked up the courage to ask Rachel whether she had read it and how she felt about its contents. She had never brought up the books she left for me when I was sick, and I began to feel that the inclusion of that particular novel had been an accident.

  It wouldn’t be easy to find a new apartment, a place where my father could play music and teach his students, somewhere with plenty of space and unlikely to disturb neighbors. Yet we had just begun looking when we heard that another Austrian family wanted to rent out the top floor of their home on calle Colombia near Plaza Sucre, including a share of the small garden. It had three bedrooms, a separate kitchen, a parlor, and large bathtub.

  “Three bedrooms?” I asked my mother as we wandered the apartment. I noted that none of the windows looked out on Illimani.

  She turned to stare at me. “I have two children. Did you forget your brother?”

  My breath caught and my face went hot, because, in fact, I had. Not forgotten him, for he lived in the dull ache in my chest, but I had stopped factoring him into our Bolivian lives.

  “You don’t think he should have his own room?”

  “Of course I do but—” I stopped myself.

  “But what? You don’t think he’s coming?” My mother’s voice had gone hard.

  “I do. I do think he’s coming. I don’t know what I was going to say. I’m sorry, Mutti. I just wasn’t thinking.” I didn’t know how to express how much I longed for my brother, how much I needed him to be constant and laughing, things my mother no longer was. But I also wanted to tell her how hard it was to think of him, how fruitless it felt to touch that wound over and over. I could not climb into that pain and disappear completely.

  Her eyes narrowed. “He will need a room. Your father can use it for his lessons until Willi comes.”

  I nodded. “Of course.”

  We stepped into the kitchen, large and light. My mother touched the wood countertops, the knobs of the oven, and she smiled. “This,” she said. “This will change everything.”

  While I was excited about the prospect of space, I dreaded leaving Miguel’s house. No longer would I run into him and his siblings leaving our apartment or coming home. No longer would it be so easy for us to fall in step.

  He took the news stoically.

  “I guess I won’t see you then.” He stared off up the street in front of the house.

  “Of course you’ll see me!” I couldn’t imagine life in La Paz without Miguel. He was part of the architecture of our existence. My foundation.

  He smiled and shook his head. “It won’t be the same.”

  He was right, of course. As soon as we moved into our new apartment, we became even busier, cleaning and organizing our new rooms, finding odd bits of furniture to fill them, and figuring out new routes to markets and friends. My mother began selling her food from a newly installed counter at the front of the Grubers’ Riesenrad Café. In my new room, my own room, I was relearning the pleasure of solitude. While I still met Miguel at the movies, I didn’t run into him several times a day in the street in front of our apartment. We attended different schools. I couldn’t race downstairs and knock on his door every time I had a question or news to share. He couldn’t race up the stairs to fetch me for a game. We had to make plans to see each other, with an ever-increasing gap between meetings.

  * * *

  • • •

  DEAREST OF ANNELIESES, I wrote on one of my paper scraps. I have room for you now. You could run down to me, stay the night in my bed, sing me the lullabies of Katzenland. Writing to Anneliese was a bedtime ritual. The fact that I was not allowed to send these letters—my parents still believed it would endanger Anneliese to receive letters from a Jew—did not deter me. Someday I would be able to write to her, and I didn’t want to forget anything. I could not picture her face clearly anymore, yet she was still so sharp in my heart. Even sharper now that I no longer had Miguel as my daily distraction.

  Next to my room in our new home on calle Colombia was the slightly larger room my mother painted a dark green with white trim. “I wish we had something of his to put in it,” she fretted, examining the bed she had made up with clean sheets and the simple set of drawers. It struck me as odd that the absent child should get the larger room, but I kept that thought to myself. I tried to think if I had anything left of Willi’s. I ran back to my room, where I rummaged through the few things on my shelves and found Fifteen Rabbits. It wasn’t my original copy, which I had left behind in Vienna, but one that had been passed around our community. It would do. I settled it on Willi’s pillow. “Be a magnet,” I instructed the dumb book. “Bring him here.”

  The best room of our new apartment was the kitchen. It was big enough for a dining table as well as a real oven with gas burners. In the corner stood an icebox—the height of luxury!— and in the back was a pantry lined with shelves. My mother began to collect tins, mostly cookie tins from other Europeans or from Austrian-owned shops. She lined them up on our shelves, labeled them, and filled them with flours, grains, and cookies. Many of the tins were decorated with holiday scenes, featuring Christmas trees and ice-skating. They reminded me of the holiday markets of Vienna with their marvelous piles of ginger Lebkuchen, fir cones, and mulled cider. Funny that Christmas tins could evoke such nostalgia in the heart of a Jew. I wanted to be at those markets. I even longed for the cold, for the icy winds, the snow under my feet. I learned not to examine the tins too closely, to stay on the edges of that emotional abyss.

  My mother was standing over her new stovetop one day, strands of hair creeping from the knot of curls on the top of her head to stick to her cheeks, when from my bedroom window I saw Rachel running down the street. I was not sure I had ever seen Rachel run before. Thin and pale—like so many of us—Rachel normally found walking any distance at all exhausting. I suppose she is finally getting used to the altitude, I thought. I heard her knock on the door and come in, without waiting for a response.

  “Frau Zingel!” she called. “Frau Zingel! Orly!”

  I was puzzled. Why would Rachel be calling my mother too? I r
an to the top of the stairs, but my mother had gotten there first. She had been baking, and her hands were covered with flour. “Gruss Gott, Rachel!” she said, sounding pleased. “You’re just in time for some poppy-seed rolls. They’ll be out of the oven in three minutes.”

  Rachel’s thin chest heaved with her efforts to catch her breath. “Telegram,” she finally said. “From France.”

  My mother nearly ripped it out of Rachel’s hands. We stood staring at her as she tore it open and read the few brief lines. When she looked up at me, her eyes were bright with tears. I was alarmed for all of five seconds before she swept me into her arms and spun me around the kitchen. “He’s alive!” she cried. “Oh Orly, he’s alive!”

  “Willi?” I said. “Willi’s alive? Oh Mutti, is he really alive?”

  She waved the paper at me. “That’s what Violaine has just written. She has had a letter from him. He didn’t leave an address, but he said he was in France.”

  “In France? But why?” I felt dizzy with relief and vertigo.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know, but Orly, isn’t it marvelous? Alive and in France!” She suddenly remembered Rachel was still in the room. “And you, dear girl. You have made me happier than I have ever been. Ever since. Well. Thank you. Thank you for running.”

  Rachel smiled shyly. “It was delivered to the SOPRO offices, and Eloise and I were up there this morning, so she said I should take it straight to you.”

  I hugged my mother again and took the telegram from her hands. Willi alive. Here in my country. Address unknown. Letter to arrive soon. It was hard to believe it was true. For more than a year we had heard nothing, and now . . . ! I thought of the room my mother had prepared for him, and wondered if that was what had summoned him from the beyond.

  “You’ll stay to dinner, Rachel? Where is my husband? Orly, where has your father gone off to? Tonight we are celebrating!” My mother’s hands moved in so many directions at once it looked as though she were dancing.

  “Mutti?” Black smoke had started to trickle out of the oven.

  “Oh, the rolls!” Grabbing an oven mitten she pulled open the oven door, to find a dozen blackened poppy-seed rolls burned to their pan. Her entire morning’s work. She pulled the tray from the oven and looked at it. “To hell with the rolls!” she exclaimed. And with the spatula she scraped them right out our window into the alley below.

  * * *

  • • •

  I WAS GLAD for the excuse to run to Miguel’s. As soon as we’d finished dinner I walked Rachel home and then ran nearly the entire two kilometers to his house. Yet when Señora Torres answered the door, she told me that Miguel wasn’t there. He had gone to football practice. Disappointment fell through me like a stone. “You’re welcome to come in and say hello to the others.” She held open the door, and I could smell something frying in oil.

  “Gracias. But I had better get home before my parents start to worry. I just wanted to let him know something. We had some news today.” I shifted from foot to foot, the thrill of it still coursing through me.

  “From Europe?”

  I nodded. And while I wanted to tell Miguel myself I couldn’t stop. “My brother, he’s alive!”

  “Oh, Orlita, that’s fantastic news.” Señora Torres hugged me. “Your parents must be so relieved.”

  “I guess you can tell Miguel when he gets back.”

  “If you want to tell him yourself I won’t say anything. That’s just wonderful news. Maravilloso.”

  I considered this. Tomorrow was school for both of us, then I had homework with Rachel and theater rehearsal. I sighed. “You can tell him. I’ll try to come back this weekend though.”

  “I’ll let him know. I think he misses you.”

  I smiled and looked down at the scuffed doormat. “Yes, I miss him too.”

  * * *

  • • •

  AN AGONIZING MONTH passed before finally the letter arrived from Willi, sent months ago to Violaine, who forwarded it to us. My father was correct; it was a long journey for a letter. He brought it back one evening from the post office and we opened it together at the kitchen table. “You read it, Julia,” said my father, pushing the pages to her. My mother started to object, her hands shaking with emotion, but she could not keep herself from picking up those pages.

  Dearest Mutti, Vati, and Erdnuss,

  I hope this finds its way to you. I know you wish that it was I there before you rather than a few inadequate slips of paper full of words that don’t say enough, and I hope you know that is my wish as well. But there are things I find I must do here. There are ways here, I have discovered, of helping the others. I am being purposefully vague, but know that I am doing work I feel certain you would approve of, that I know you would want me to continue. There are children who are in our situation or worse. I will say that. As long as there is the smallest chance I could make a difference I must remain. Even one child could mean saving an entire family’s life. I am working in more than one country. I am trying to tell you all that I can without endangering our work or the children.

  I cannot tell you how glad it makes me that you are so far from here. Knowing that you are safe keeps my heart easy, frees me to focus on helping the others. Violaine has given me your letters, Mutti, and yours, Vati. Erdnuss, will you send along some stories? Something I could read to the children? I can hear your voice when you write me, you write just as you speak. I hope you are writing down all your bunny tales, or are you now too old for bunnies? I try to imagine you now, you must have grown a foot! I will have to find a way to come to you soon, so as to be around to help you fend off all of the young men sure to come courting. Please tell me they haven’t already? You are my little Erdnuss and mustn’t let them come near you until I can be there to make sure they are worthy.

  Mutti, I am glad that you are finding things to do, though I am sure it must feel awful not to be singing. Don’t be cross, but I find it hard to imagine you spending all day in the kitchen! How the war changes us. Vati, bravo for finding people to play with. Is a Bolivian symphony orchestra next? I am so longing to walk in that thin air with you and taste that coca tea that seems to have you all under a spell.

  I am well. I am healthy. And I am very sorry, Vati, but I don’t miss practicing the viola one bit.

  When it is time for me to come, I will write to let you know. I love every hair on your heads.

  Your Willi

  * * *

  • • •

  OUR WILLI. We still had a Willi. I felt a release of tension from muscles I didn’t know I had. As if longing for my brother had become part of my body. Miguel came with an armful of kantutas for my mother and we sat outside on the ground and drew stick figures on the pavement with chalk while I told him how Willi had made me puppets out of his old socks and musical instruments out of lentils and cardboard tubes.

  My father whistled waltzes as he put his hat on and headed out to give a lesson. For a few weeks, my mother was nearly my mother again. She hugged me often and for no reason. There was energy in her step. Her lips remembered how to curve upward. There were a few times I almost thought I heard an operatic sound coming from her throat. But I must have been mistaken.

  * * *

  • • •

  WE HAD ALMOST BEGUN to allow ourselves hope when France fell to the Germans. My mother was inconsolable. “What did he mean when he said he was in more than one country? Do you think he has gone back to Austria? He never even said if he had managed to get a visa for here!”

  “Maybe he is doing something in Switzerland? Moving people from the camp to France?” My father drummed his fingertips on the table.

  “But France is no longer safe.”

  “What children does he mean, Mutti? Jewish children? Why don’t they have parents?”

  None of us had answers. In a way, it had been better not to know anything abo
ut where he was than it was to know the certain danger he was facing.

  * * *

  • • •

  EVERY NIGHT WE IMAGINED the infinite things that Willi could be doing. Perhaps he was shepherding children to England. Or teaching them to swim in the Swiss rivers. Or crafting fake passports to get them to Shanghai. I fell asleep to visions of him playing follow-the-leader through the forests.

  Whatever it was, it was more important to Willi than finding his way to us. We pirouetted our minds away from this thought. Nothing further arrived from him after that one letter and we did not know if he was still in France or elsewhere. Paralyzed with fear, we listened on the radio to the account of the humiliation of the French in the forest of Compiègne, where the country had celebrated victory over the Germans less than two decades ago. Just like when the Nazis arrived in Austria, everything in France had gone so wrong so fast.

  “Willi would have seen it coming.” My father tried to reassure her. “He would have hidden somewhere.”

  “He wouldn’t! You know your son, Jakob. Has self-preservation ever been his first priority?” Despite her tears, my mother said this with a kind of pride.

  My father had no answer for that, and the two of them sat there in silence until the end of the broadcast. Then my mother got up and went to bed.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE BAD NEWS was relentless. Aunt Thekla wrote to say that she had returned to Graz to find their parents and two sisters had disappeared. The neighbors claimed not to know where they had gone. A Christian family had taken over their bakery. Thekla had been afraid to approach them, afraid where her questions might lead. My parents didn’t need Thekla to tell them that my mother’s family had probably been sent to one of the camps. The camps from which no one seemed to return.