We stood there for a while, admiring it. “I want to weave the stars,” Nayra continued. “There are women who can weave designs that show the Great Road in the sky and the Grandfather Star.”
“You can weave the stars?”
“You must first see them from a special place, a pukara, at a special time, then you can learn to weave them. We do this in October, sowing time. The time that the earth and the sky are talking the most.”
“Does the sky look different then?”
“It’s the best time to see the Goat-kids, and the Eyes of the Llama. Haven’t you ever watched the stars move?”
I tried to remember the skies over Vienna. “You mean shooting stars?”
She didn’t answer. “When the mountains breathe out the stars. The stars tell us the best time to do things. When it is time to mate the llamas, or to plant seeds. There must also be a full moon.” She sighed, weary of my questions. “There is too much for me to explain.”
“Bueno.” It was becoming clear to me that I knew astonishingly little about the world. “Maybe someday you can tell me more.”
“Maybe someday. Today I have to go back to work.”
* * *
• • •
I WALKED HOME with tiny llamas trotting around my brain. I couldn’t believe such a magical festival existed. It was exactly the kind of thing that would exist in Friedenglückhasenland. I loved to imagine the Black Llama in the sky and a Grandfather Star. It all seemed dreamed up, as if Nayra had created a world as enchanting and mysterious as Friedenglückhasenland.
New stories were rising in me.
* * *
• • •
AT HOME THAT NIGHT, I tried to write down these new stories, but my German was starting to sound stiff and unnatural. We still spoke German at home, and within our community, but I was beginning to prefer the softer sounds of Spanish. Were it not for my need to maintain a sturdy bridge to my parents, who never quite became themselves in their new tongue, I might have given up the corset of German entirely.
It occurred to me that Spanish could give me the freedom to write whatever I wanted. Neither of my parents could read Spanish well. They didn’t help me with my homework. And while they understood enough Spanish now to do the shopping and greet acquaintances, they didn’t bother learning to write it. To whom would they write in Spanish? All of their letters went to Austria.
I began to scratch out my thoughts in a journal. It was a relief, to put everything there, on the pages. Thinking I should start from the beginning, I began with Anneliese. I began with our imagined world and its sensible laws, its generous inhabitants. For weeks I wrote our stories, every scrap of them I could remember—in Spanish. Anneliese’s face came back to me, its sternness when I once accidentally referred to our land of bunnies as imaginary. “There is no point in even talking about it with you if you don’t really believe,” she said.
So I did.
* * *
• • •
I WANDERED THE STREETS of the Alasitas markets in January 1941 every chance I could, after school and on the weekends, alone or with Rachel, Miguel, or Nayra, admiring the tiny things. For Rachel I bought little colored books. Rachel was easy.
My own desire was most difficult. One day I stopped again at a table covered with stacks of miniature documents. The stout woman behind the table sat impassively as I thumbed through the piles of marriage certificates, birth certificates, and diplomas. “Do you have a certificate for being alive?” I asked her. “For surviving the war?”
She shook her head. As I turned to go, she said, “We have visas! Visas for Argentina, Brazil, visas for the U.S. . . .”
I turned back. “Visas for Bolivia?”
She looked confused. “You have no visa for Bolivia?”
“No—I mean, yes, I do. But for my brother.”
She shook her head. “No one here needs a visa for Bolivia.”
“He’s not here.” I realized I sounded absurd. I didn’t know how to explain.
She just shook her head.
“No, gracias.” What good were visas to anywhere else? Willi would never find us if we moved again. All I wanted was for him to be here.
* * *
• • •
MIGUEL CAME WITH ME one day after school. “Why don’t you buy a health certificate for Willi? If he’s healthy then he is alive, no?”
I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of this. I had seen the health certificates without registering their import. Using a few of the coins I earned from occasional child minding after school, I bought Willi a tiny health certificate. Squatting on the ground near the table, I took a pencil from my schoolbag and filled out the certificate with his name. The lines for the yatiri’s blessing, the ch’alla, were long, but we waited. We watched as he waved smoke over the certificate, sprinkled it with bright orange flower petals.
With the health certificate tucked into my schoolbooks, I wound my way back through the tables until I found a woman selling tiny looms. Most of the objects were inexpensive, less than a boliviano. I bought one for Nayra, along with several balls of colored wool. Miguel trailed behind me, stopping to examine university certificates and wheelbarrows that came with tiny bags of cement. “Most people want building materials.”
“Do you?” This did not seem a very romantic desire, but I supposed it was quite practical. If you had building materials you could make a home.
“We have a house. I would like some land, I think.”
I wanted to get him something that might express what he was to me. I didn’t want to give him the obvious things everyone bought for each other, the little brown suitcases of money, the parcels of miniature tools. At a woodworker’s stall I fingered tiny carvings of llamas, people, the sun, and the moon. The sun was painted yellow and orange, with lightning-jagged rays of wood sticking out in all directions, reminding me of Miguel’s tousled hair first thing in the morning when I found him outside. When he was distracted, I paid with a coin and slipped it into my pocket.
* * *
• • •
I BROUGHT THE HEALTH CERTIFICATE home to show my parents. “It might work better if we have an Ekeko.” When I explained about the god and the offerings, my father agreed to go back to the market with me. “Maybe they have little Stradivariuses.” The workmanship of the tiny objects entranced my father, who turned them over in his hands in wonder. He liked the pocket-size newspapers, with their satirical stories, the best.
“Nayra says they ask for good health and vegetables, and they almost always have good health and vegetables.” I wanted to believe in something. Anything at all. After we had wandered among the tables for an hour, my father went back to a stall near the entrance and bought an Ekeko who fit into my hand. His grinning mouth was open, awaiting the offering of tobacco, and he wore a belt of tiny bolivianos.
“Danke, Vati!”
“Don’t get your hopes up,” he said. “It’s just a doll.” I was indignant. I was too old for dolls.
“The Bolivians say he’s a god.”
“It seems odd that we should have to pay for a god.” But he smiled at me.
On the way back I collected whole coca leaves from the streets where the careless had dropped them—they weren’t difficult to find. All of the builders and laborers we passed in the streets carried small bags of the leaves, which they chewed as they worked. I stood Ekeko on my windowsill, slipped Willi’s health certificate underneath him, and spread seven coca leaves at his feet. Seven seemed like a magical number.
When I brought the little loom and yarn to Nayra, she flushed and tucked it hurriedly away under her table without thanking me. But I think she was pleased.
I couldn’t find the right time to give the little sun to Miguel. I worried it was the wrong thing. He had plenty of sun, after all. Why should I want to give him more? I hadn’t thought of that at
the market, I had thought only that it resembled Miguel, or what he was to me. Maybe I should wait to give it to him on another holiday, when it could mean something different.
* * *
• • •
A WEEK LATER I visited Rachel where she lived with Eloise, though she usually preferred to come to our place. She and Eloise shared a room in a house with several other families. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of where she lived; our circumstances were not so different. I think she simply liked to be around a family—and my mother’s baking.
In a corner of the room, alongside Rachel’s mattress, I spotted a cluster of tiny furniture behind her stacks of books. Some of it I recognized from the Alasitas market. “Oh, there’s the little lamp you bought! Can I look at these?”
She nodded. “Don’t move anything, okay?”
I knelt on her mattress to better see the miniatures. They had been carefully arranged. Along the wall was a little wooden bed covered by a scrap of blanket and a blueberry-size pillow. Next to it on the floor a hand-carved dog sat on a red-and-orange braided rug. There was a rocking chair, a bookcase, and a little doll. “It’s my room in Vienna,” she said softly.
“It’s so beautiful.” I stroked the little dog.
“I don’t think I believe in Ekeko but it seemed worth trying. Everything bad that has ever happened to me happened after I left that room.”
Forty-four
One afternoon as I sat on my bed plucking the strings of my charango, my father knocked at my door. My mother never knocked. She didn’t acknowledge borders between us. “Sí, Vati?” He stepped into the room, squinting against the light pouring in from the window behind me. In the glare I could see every small line of his face and the increasing gaps between the strands of his white hair. His forehead and cheeks had grown speckled with brown spots, the skin papery and dry. The climate was not kind to our faces.
Although my father was busy with students, I saw him more in La Paz than I had in Vienna. Recently, however, he had begun performing more often with other musicians. They played on a show on the local refugee radio station and talked constantly about starting an orchestra. They played together whenever and wherever they could. No one had enough space at home, so they often practiced in our school after we went home, or in a room at the Austrian Club. He had been returning to the apartment late, when I was asleep. I tried to stay awake until he came home, to tell him about something that had happened at school, or to read him a new poem. But I could rarely keep my eyes open past 9:00 P.M.
He sat beside me on the bed, his weight tilting the mattress, forcing me to shift to keep from toppling into him. “May I try it?”
“But you don’t know how to play. It’s not tuned like a viola, or a guitar.”
“I know.” The charango looked tiny in his arms, a toy. He ran a hand along its gleaming curves before plucking each string in turn, tightening or loosening them until they rang true. “Better,” he said. His fingers were long and thin, nimble viola-player’s hands. He strummed a thumb across the strings, releasing a shimmering arc of sound. I leaned against the wall as he began to pick out a melody. The instrument sounded entirely different in his hands. Alive.
“How did you learn that?”
“My students are also teachers.” He looked up from the instrument. “One student has taught me just a little charango in return for teaching him viola. But it will never be my instrument. I just wanted a sense of it, a sense of his teaching. I asked him if he would give you the lessons instead.”
I didn’t expect that. “Do you mean it?”
“I wasn’t sure if you’d rather keep wrestling with it on your own or—”
“No!” It was clear to me I wouldn’t get far on my own. “I didn’t ask because I didn’t think we could afford it.”
“We can if I pay with my teaching.” He rested his fingers on the strings. “My fingernails are too short to do this properly. Yours are probably better.”
I took the instrument back, cradling it against my rib cage. My fingernails were not much longer, brittle and jagged. My father pressed my fingers on the strings. “C major,” he showed me. I strummed a chord with my right hand. He moved my left fingers once again, resettling them on the strings. “D major. And that’s about all I know. Someone else will have to teach you its particularities. Someone who knows this instrument from birth.” He smiled at me, the familiar lines crinkling at his eyes. I couldn’t remember the last time my father had smiled like that.
“Orly, there are sounds here I have never heard before. I have Bolivian students who can’t read music but whose fingers are nimbler than mine, who play songs of their own like virtuosos. I don’t know how to explain it, but the notes feel more connected to the world, to life. They are not something reserved for concert halls.”
This was a long speech for my father, who had no particular affinity for words.
“I’m glad, Vati.” I plucked a few strings.
“Your charango, it makes me happy. This sound, these sounds, will connect you to so many things.”
Did this mean my father felt connected to this place?
“Maybe we should make Mutti learn something? The quena?”
His smile faded. “I don’t think we can make your Mutti do anything.”
The following Monday afternoon a man knocked at the door. He wore his long black hair tied back in a ponytail and carried a small black case. “Soy Vico,” he explained. “¿Te gustaría aprender a tocar el charango?”
Forty-five
APRIL 1941
One day as Rachel and I sprawled across my mattress, our schoolbooks spread before us, she arched her back in discomfort. “Ouch, what’s this?” Reaching behind her, she pulled The Scorpion out from under my pillow. I had kept it there for the better part of a year, rereading certain passages in the privacy of night. Their bodies seized each other as wild beasts seize and shake the bars of their cages.
Afraid to breathe, I watched her face closely. “You gave that to me.” I said it softly, as if trying to coax a kitten out from under a chair. “I always wondered if you had read it.”
Patches of pink flamed in her cheeks, answering for her. She bent her head over the book so that curtains of dark hair closed off her face.
“I meant to ask you before. And wondered what you thought because—”
She looked up at me, a glimmer of something—her hope, or mine reflected?—in her eyes. “Because what?”
I thought about how to put it. “Because I hadn’t known other girls felt that way.”
Rachel was silent then, but her face did not tighten with disapproval.
“There was a girlfriend of mine in Vienna, but we were so young that I don’t know. . . .” I had never told anyone about Anneliese. Not in this way.
I wasn’t sure Rachel heard. Her eyes had gone far away. “My aunt was that way.”
I looked at her in surprise.
“She’s the one who gave me the book. Not this copy, but the first one that I lost when we left. I think to try to explain to me. She lived with someone, a woman named Harriet.”
“Like Odiane and Ilse!”
“Who?”
“Friends of my mother’s in Austria.” There was so much I wanted to ask. “Were your aunt and Harriet happy? How long were they together?”
“Forever. At least since I was born. I don’t know where she is now. We haven’t heard from her.”
Rachel looked at me. We both sat up cross-legged now, arms dangling over knees, our fingertips almost touching, the book between us.
“The women in the book are always so unhappy.” They drank too much, they longed for death, they tortured themselves over their love affairs.
Rachel nodded. “But it doesn’t have to be that way.”
* * *
• • •
NOT LONG AFTER that afternoon, it was my tur
n to suggest a play for our refugee theater group to perform. I thought about the plays I knew, the stories I knew. I thought about Elektra and Schnitzler’s Professor Bernhardi and the farces of Nestroy, but none of them inspired me.
“What about Ovid’s Iphis and Ianthe?” I asked the group on impulse. I was thinking of Anneliese, of my mother saying we reminded her of those two. It was painful to think of doing it without her, but forgetting would have hurt more.
“Is it written as a play?” My classmate Sarah was one of the best actresses among us. A dozen of us were sitting at a table in the Austrian Club just after a Sunday lunch. I folded and refolded a red cloth napkin.
“We could write it.” It wasn’t a difficult story, after all.
“Why don’t you write it, Orly, and then we’ll see?” It was Sarah’s suggestion—she who watched me scribble poems in the margins of my schoolwork every day—but not even the older girls found a reason to disagree. I began work at home that evening.
* * *
• • •
RACHEL WAS THE FIRST to read my draft. Not a natural performer, she had been reluctant to join the group. Yet stubbornly, I wanted to involve her in one of my worlds, draw her out of her isolation and into our community. Out of her perpetual sorrow and into the joy of artifice and impersonation. “It’s not you onstage,” I told her. “It’s someone not like you at all.”
She wasn’t shy at all when it came to criticism. She went through my first draft of Iphis and Ianthe with a heavy hand, crossing out lines of speech and scribbling notes in the margin. Wouldn’t Ianthe notice if she suddenly had a beard at their wedding? she wrote. Why doesn’t Ianthe sound as smart as Iphis when she talks? Doesn’t Iphis feel worried that she is in love with a girl?
Exile Music Page 24
