Yet I, too, was enraged that these men were sharing our streets, our ordinary lives. When I thought too long about this my blood boiled so hot it seared my skin. I had to seal away that part of me in order to go on with my schoolwork, play my charango, or write a verse. Like I sealed away memories of Willi. Like I sealed off everything I felt for Rachel and Anneliese.
Perhaps that is what the Nazis did, sealed off in a locked part of their brain what they had done, how generations would suffer because of it. I could not even begin to imagine living with the memories that must cling to them. If Thekla couldn’t live with what she had done, how could they?
“Mutti, I need to go. I’ll be late.” I grabbed my notebooks from the table and pulled the strap of my cloth bag over my head. She rose from her seat to kiss me good-bye. “Be good,” she said. “Be careful.”
* * *
• • •
WHEN I RETURNED from the lake trip with Nayra, I had informed my parents that I would begin university the following term, and begin it here. Only Bolivians, I tried to explain to my parents, could teach me what I wanted to know.
I registered at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, a fifteen-minute walk from our apartment, though the secretary who registered me warned that I would be one of the only women. I felt hungry for books and conversation, as though I had been fasting and abruptly regained my appetite. I wanted to keep moving forward as quickly as possible, to keep ahead of the pain. Away from thoughts of the empty places in me, in our family.
* * *
• • •
I WAS GRATEFUL for the walk to school. It warmed my fingers and toes, sent my blood dashing around delivering oxygen. As I moved, the sediment stirred up inside me settled down into compartments I could close. I would talk with my mother later. I would ask her to stop. Two deaths were enough on anyone’s conscience. How many more had she planned? Did she have a list?
This was not what I wanted to be pondering on my first day of university.
* * *
• • •
IT WAS NOT A BEAUTIFUL CAMPUS, but then there were very few buildings in La Paz that strived for beauty. I glanced up at Illimani, that reliable friend, before climbing the stairs to the blocky orange building. “Wish me luck.”
In the halls, groups of young men jostled me as they passed, talking and laughing, papers in hand as they searched for the correct classrooms. I stopped to pull my own registration sheet from my purse. Room 407. Introduction to South American Literature. After that I had English, which I hoped would allow me to read more broadly. Joining the throngs on the stairs, I started up. What staircase was Anneliese ascending now? I wondered. Was she also starting university? What would she be studying? I had received nothing but silence in reply to my note. It was possible that she had died. It was possible that she had moved, forgetting her promise to me. I had no way to know.
I was enrolled in the Humanities Department, in the hope of studying poetry. There was no music conservatory then, so I continued to study charango with Vico and music itself with my father when he had time. I enjoyed our frequent café concerts. But I also looked forward to studying the literature of this country, of this continent, literature my parents had never introduced to me.
No one else from our school had come here. They had gone abroad to study, or their families had left Bolivia after the war, or they had gotten married and begun families of their own. Some had taken jobs in the textile factories. Few refugees saw the point of enrolling in a Bolivian university, even if their Spanish was good enough.
The degree was not the point. The point was to dive into here. At the top of the stairs, I walked down the echoing hallway until I found my classroom, and pushed open the door.
* * *
• • •
EVERY DAY AFTER that I told myself I would talk to my mother. Every day I put it off, telling myself she was done now.
Perhaps a part of me did not want her to stop.
A month into my studies, I was humming as I turned my key in the lock and stepped into the kitchen. It smelled yeasty and warm, like baking. “Hola!” I called, dropping my book bag by the door. “Home from the knowledge mines!” My mother wasn’t in the kitchen, but the kerosene was on and a small pot was simmering. In a dish on the table sat a small round of dough. I picked up the bowl to sniff it.
“Put that down!” My mother’s voice startled me so much I nearly dropped the bowl. She hurried from the bedroom, ripping the bowl from my arms. “Why are you here? I thought you were going out to the movies after classes?”
I stared at her, at her bloodshot eyes, her flour-speckled curls. “I was. But I decided to come home. I have an essay to write. And I wanted to tell you—” My mother’s face was pink and damp. “Mutti, what’s going on? Are you all right?”
“Orly, you didn’t eat anything, did you? Not even a taste?” She held tightly on to the bowl, as if I might try to take it back.
“Of course not.” I looked at the pestle and mortar on the table. At the opened jars of unfamiliar herbs. Dizzy, I saw Knochenmus with the Schnitzel. I saw an elderly man accepting an apple strudel from my mother’s hands. My mother’s hands.
“Mutti.” My knees were trembling so badly I had to sit down. I wanted something solid underneath me. At that moment, thoughts of my schoolwork evaporated in the steam of that kitchen.
“Mutti. I think you need to tell me.” My hands gripped the seat of the chair.
My mother studied my face for a moment. Wondering, I thought, if there was any use in lying. “Are you sure?”
I nodded, eyes stinging. “You could have poisoned me. Just now. You owe me at least the truth.”
“Once I tell you it can’t be taken back. You will always know.”
I lifted my chin. “You really think I don’t already?”
With a deep breath, she sank into the chair across from me. “Well, I think we can skip the why.”
* * *
• • •
SHE TOLD ME all of it then. The idea that had crystallized with the appearance of Knochenmus. The dark secrets Wayra had taught her. The slow-acting poisons in near-tasteless herbs. The careful pacing of deaths, no more than every few months—or even longer.
No one else was doing anything about him, were they? No one else was doing anything about any of them.
“Usually I cook everything fresh in the morning. I’m nervous about having any of the German food in the house overnight. That’s what I always call it to myself: German food.
“I have a metal box with a lock. My cookie tin. Do you remember this cookie tin?” She picked it up from the table between us and turned it over in her hands. Shaped like a Christmas tree and painted with baubles. “You were with me when we bought it up in El Alto at the market. Once I began making the German food, I closed it with a padlock. To avoid any accidents. Only I had the key.”
I found my voice. “I thought you did that to keep Vati out of the pancakes.”
“I do do it to keep him out of the pancakes. As you know. There are many locked tins. But only this one ever has the German food.” She paused, picked a bit of dough out from under a fingernail with shaking hands. When she looked up, her eyes were dark.
“Orly, I had to do something. It’s changed everything for me, having a purpose. Taking action. I’m so tired of being hunted. All those men who went to war against the Nazis, they got to do something. They didn’t just run away.”
“Mutti—”
“No, let me finish or I’ll never be able to say it all. This is my war, Orly. I’m fighting it a little later than the rest of the world, but it is my war.”
She paused. “Don’t think I haven’t thought this through. I am not killing mere murderers. I am killing the men whose career of torture and genocide cast a vast shadow over my own small deeds.” My mother’s voice had so rarely had this unwavering certainty. She was not given to len
gthy speeches. She was not given much to conversation at all. Not since I was ten.
“Tell me these men should not pay. Tell me the world is not a better place. Tell me whatever you like but it will not change the decisions I made.”
She leaned back in her chair, like a lawyer who has finished presenting a case.
My mind scrambled for a foothold on her logic.
She leaned forward again. “I was careful, Liebling. I kept no records. Nothing on paper. But I marked on the wall with a pencil—just as I recorded your height as a child—the dates and initials, faint in the grey paint of the doorway to the pantry, where it was easy to explain away.”
She smiled, maybe thinking of that distant doorway.
Then. “It is lucky also that Germans will go to any lengths for a taste of home.”
* * *
• • •
FOR A LONG WHILE we were silent. My mother leaned across the table and took my cold hands into hers. “Please don’t hate me, Orlita. I cannot bring myself to believe you have a heart hard enough to hate me, even now. Your heart was always so elastic, so strong. Your heart that was formed here, that was made for this place. It is stronger than mine.”
Nothing about me felt strong. Even the tiles beneath my chair tilted under me, like they could slide me off into air. I could no longer refuse to make a moral decision.
I tried to find words for what was coursing through me. My mother, whose voice had brought thousands of people to the edge of their seats, a murderer several times over. Searching for a persuasive argument, I stumbled upon an image. My mother, on her knees beside Elektra. I pressed her hands. “Mutti, remember Chrysothemis?”
“What?” It took her a minute to follow me so many years back.
“Can’t you remember? How you explained her to me?”
“Chrysothemis.” She said it softly, as if it were a foreign word.
“She was the only one to live, in the end. She was the only one to stay sane.”
My mother looked at me, her face twisting unrecognizably. “I am envious of your common sense, but I hate your cowardice.”
“That’s Elektra. That’s not who you were, who you are. You always said it was a story about the meaninglessness of vengeance.”
She was still, head bowed, but only for a moment. “They killed us for nothing. I have reason to exterminate them.”
Exterminate. That word they used for us. That word decided me.
I could have said: Why not simply report him and bring him to justice? But I knew the answer to that one. Report him to whom? We could not assume the Bolivians would care. Nor could we trust the international community. Those same countries that stood by clutching their borders closed around themselves, letting us die? Justice was slow when it came at all. And my mother had never been a particularly patient person.
So this was not the argument I made. There was one argument, and only one, that had a chance of working.
“Mutti. You must promise me to stop. Stop now and I will never breathe a word. I will take this to the grave.” I took a breath. “Promise me, or I will tell my father.”
Fifth Movement
OLD FRIENDS
Fifty-seven
One afternoon at the movies, I caught sight of a familiar, stout figure with a bent nose and a scar on his lower lip. He was frowning into his palm, counting change onto the glass counter of the snack stand.
“Miguel!” I abandoned my two university friends to thread my way through the crowd toward him. Only after he had picked up his paper bag of puffed corn and turned toward the sound of his name did I realize that he wasn’t alone. My step faltered. But of course he wasn’t alone! I chided myself. No one went to the movies alone here. With him was a girl whose long hair hung loose about her waist, which I thought very daring and beautiful. Miguel’s face opened when he saw me. He waved, spilling puffed corn out of his other hand. “Kantutita!” When he smiled, it sent a sharp-edged memory through me of my first days on this soil. His smile was the first life preserver thrown to me.
When we found our way to each other in the crowd, he introduced the woman. “Carla is in my department at university.” Another female student! We were a distinct minority. She smiled and nodded, her hands too full of puffed corn to take mine.
“Mucho gusto.”
“Your hair is different. Darker,” he observed. “Like burned pumpkin.”
“I feel like a burned pumpkin sometimes.” When my skin had too much sun, I did indeed resemble a roasted vegetable. “Where are you at university?”
“San Andrés.”
“I’m there, too!” This was hardly surprising, given the dearth of universities in La Paz. I had considered universities in Sucre or Cochabamba, but I worried about leaving my mother for so long. Love and guilt had tethered me to La Paz.
I hadn’t even known Miguel was at university; I had hardly seen him since my eighteenth birthday. Our lives had diverged as we became involved with work and friends who lived closer, who were a natural part of our distinct communities. Seeing his face now, I thought how rarely I was this happy to see someone. He had just started classes, he said, studying physics and mathematics.
The lights flickered and the crowds surged past us. “We had better get to our seats,” Miguel said, touching Carla’s shoulder.
“Could we meet some afternoon?” I asked, suddenly unwilling to let him go, not caring if Carla found me forward or inappropriate. “Could we have coffee?”
“Why not?” He shrugged, as if it didn’t really matter to him one way or another. I tried not to look hurt. “Come find me. I’m still living in the same place.”
As he and Carla were pushed forward into the theater, I scanned the crowd for my friends. They had already gone in, but had saved a seat between them. “Where were you?”
“I found someone.” I squeezed myself into the chair. “An old friend.”
* * *
• • •
A FEW WEEKS LATER, Miguel and I found ourselves seated in front of tiny glasses of singani in the cavelike bar on calle Jaén where I had spent my eighteenth birthday. It was fitting, I thought, to be meeting my oldest friend in the oldest street in the city. I loved calle Jaén. It was prettier here than down where we lived, where new buildings seemed perpetually under construction. The ceiling of the bar arced low over our heads, its walls now painted with murals of angels and devils, of deadly sins. They were always changing.
“It’s the foundation of life itself,” he was saying about his studies in mathematics and physics. “The forces that propel us and explain the planets.” At the word “propel” his exuberance got the better of him and he pushed one of the glasses too hard and fast across the table—an impromptu lesson in friction—spilling its sticky contents. I wasn’t even sure he noticed. His face was incandescent as he spoke of his studies, of numbers and stars.
“Explain the planets,” I echoed, dabbing at the spill with my napkin. “Sounds like a job for poets.”
I hadn’t imagined Miguel as a scholar of the skies. I hadn’t imagined him as a scholar at all, I realized to my shame, though I never doubted his intelligence. Hadn’t he taught me everything I knew about this country? He had worked in textiles all through secondary school, spending long hours in the factory to earn his university fees.
“Are you suggesting you could do it better?” He grinned at me and I flushed.
“I wouldn’t say I’m a poet. Not yet, anyway. I’m not even sure I want to be one.” It seemed a too-lofty claim. But I couldn’t imagine a life without writing them, just as I couldn’t imagine a life without music, without plucking tunes from the thin air. Poems, it occurred to me, could easily become songs.
“And there is the inconvenient fact that you have never lived on another planet.”
I laughed. I had forgotten how easy it was with him. “Which makes it rather hard for
me to describe one.”
He took a sip from one of the four glasses between us and made a face. “I’m not sure this one is my favorite.” He passed me the glass of greenish liquid. The bar made its own singani, as well as absinthe and coca liqueur.
“I thought you liked coca.”
“Not sweet like that. Just in tea or to chew.”
I sipped it and made a similar face. “Home distilled or not home distilled, this is horrible. Like something my mother gives me for a cough.” I set it down and took a sip of the clear singani. I had always liked singani, the smooth grape liquor with only a hint of sweetness. It was better straight than in the chuflays—singani with ginger ale—many of the bars and hotels offered. “This is nice.”
“Entonces, how is your family? Your mother still cooking for her shop?” My body tightened. But no, of course he couldn’t know.
I nodded. “I think she’d crumble without it.”
“Good. I always loved that apple thing she made, with the flat pastry.”
“Strudel.”
“Strudel.” He laughed at the way the word emerged from his mouth, twisted toward Spanish. He finished the singani. “I’ll get another. Your dad is still playing in the new orchestra, no?”
“Almost all the time, though he plays with Vico and Daniel too. And me! And he still takes students. The orchestra doesn’t earn anyone any money.” I sipped at the absinthe, rolled its anise around my tongue. “He’s just happy to be playing with other musicians again.” My father could have taken on more students, could have started a school, could have done so much more had he considered financial gain a goal. But he preferred to reserve as many hours of the day as possible for playing music with his friends, for rehearsing with me and Vico, or just listening as I plucked my charango.
“Does he want to go back to Austria? I assume that is possible now?”
Exile Music Page 31
