But not Willi’s.
Perhaps she was upstairs with the children when he stopped with the toys. Perhaps she was in the kitchen. The intersection of their paths is not recorded.
As the strange girl told these stories, I saw my brother in the shape of her brown eyes, the length of her lashes. I saw Willi in the curve of her jaw.
At last she fell silent, her face white with exhaustion.
We sat there, unmoving.
“Mamá?” Izzy came running down the stairs. “My beetle is on its back and it can’t turn over. It’s waving its legs like it wants to be crawling but I don’t know how to flip it!”
I stood, vertigo clouding my vision. “I’m coming, Iz.” I turned back to the girl. “You must be tired. You will stay with us, of course. I can make up the bed in the guest room.”
“My mother sent a letter.” She unbuckled her pack, rummaged around inside. “It is for you and your parents.”
I took the thin letter but tucked it in a pocket. I did not want to read it alone.
As I started upstairs with her pack, I turned back. “Your name,” I said. “I never asked your name.”
“Oh! I am sorry. My name is Julia.”
* * *
• • •
I WANTED TO RUN to see my parents, run to them with this news. We didn’t yet have a phone, there was no way to send a message. It would be better, I eventually decided, to take Julia to them in person. A phone call, a message, would create in them an unbearable anticipation. Better that Julia tell them herself. We would go the next day, once she was rested.
The next morning I was reading The Magic Flute to Isidora as she ate mango and chirimoya in our breakfast room when Julia came downstairs. We had put her to bed before dinner, before Miguel arrived home, and she had not emerged before we had gone to sleep ourselves—very late. Miguel had been wary, wanting to be sure that Julia was who she said she was before we told my parents, before we risked breaking their hearts again. “All you need to do is look at her,” I said. “She is Willi’s child.” For the millionth time I remembered with a pang that Miguel had never known Willi, had never even seen a photograph.
The letter still lay unopened on my nightstand. I told myself I wanted to wait for my parents before reading it. But I also wanted to delay reading the last letter we would ever receive about my brother. I wanted to savor the mere fact that it existed.
Isidora was anxious to see Julia again. She loved guests, always believing they had come especially to see her. This morning I had found her sitting outside Julia’s room, trying to see through the crack in the door.
Now here she was at last, dressed neatly in skirt and cardigan.
“Good morning!” I rose, offering her my place beside Isidora. “Did you sleep?” Julia was still pale, but her eyes were clear and alert.
She nodded, sliding obediently into the chair. “What time is it? I must have slept for ages!”
“Seven.” The sun was already blazing through the windows. “Are you hungry?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll make you tea.” While I boiled the water and poured it over coca leaves, Isidora showed her our book.
“I don’t speak Spanish,” Julia apologized.
“Te voy a enseñar. Mira.” I will teach you. Look. She lifted her plate. “Fruta.”
Julia laughed. “Fruta.”
I set the teapot and a cup on the table before her. “I could cut you up some fruit, too, if you’d like. And there’s marraqueta—bread rolls—that Isidora and I bought this morning.”
“All right. Thank you.”
She was visibly more relaxed, having relieved herself of the burden of her story. As she ate a few bites of fruit and drank her tea she allowed Isidora to teach her Spanish words, repeating after her.
By the time Miguel came downstairs, showered and dressed, they were fast friends. Isidora ran to him, and he scooped her up into his arms. “Buenos días, conejita,” he said, kissing her cheeks.
“Papá, I am teaching Julia Spanish.”
Julia stood up, looking uncertain.
“I’m sure she’s thrilled.” Miguel smiled at Julia. Ignoring her offered hand, he bent and kissed her cheeks. “Bienvenida, sobrinita.” Welcome, little niece.
“I am sorry to come without warning you. My mother thought it would be better if I explained in person.”
“That was wise of her. Besides, you don’t have a lot of competition for that guest room.” Miguel picked up a marraqueta and sat across from her. He never wanted anything but Nescafé and a roll in the morning.
“Thank you.” She sank back into her chair.
I stood, hovering over the table. “We think you should stay as long as you want. It will take you a few days to feel normal at this altitude anyway, and we’d like to show you more of the city.” I found myself unable to behave normally or appropriately, whatever that was, and instead babbled at her as if she were a tourist passing through. “At the weekend we could even take you outside of the city. Down to the jungle or up to the lake.”
Miguel rescued me. “But before any of this, Orly will take you to meet your grandparents.”
“Yes. Oh, Julia, I’m sorry I am all upside down. Forgive me.”
“Of course.” Julia explained that she had tried to find them first, but had been unable to discover their address. The publisher of my one slim volume of poetry had directed her to our house. It occurred to me that I owed some significant moments to book publishers.
“We’ll go see them once Izzy is off to school.” For the first time in my life here, I had something—someone—I knew would give my mother joy.
“Ven, hijita.” Miguel stood, brushing crumbs from his trousers. “Guardería.”
“She still needs to clean her teeth. Go, Izzy.”
“Only if Julia comes.” Isidora wrapped her arms around the girl’s neck.
“It’s okay, I don’t mind,” Julia said quickly. She followed Isidora up the stairs.
“Isidora seems to like her.” Miguel sat down on the stairs to tie his shoes.
“Isidora likes everyone.”
“True. How did we raise such an undiscriminating person?”
“Mira, Mamá, mira!” Isidora ran down the stairs, nearly knocking her father off the bottom step, clutching a hardbound book. “Look what Julia gave me!” I caught a flash of a rabbit on the cover before Isidora sat down in the middle of the hallway and began turning pages.
“I forgot I brought presents for her. For all of you. I’m sorry but some are in French. I wasn’t sure if you read French. There are a few others, in German and Spanish. I’ll get them.” She ran upstairs and returned with an armful of books she dumped on the table. I picked them up one at a time, examining the titles.
“You couldn’t have brought us anything better,” I said. “Books in German! We get so few.”
Isidora got up and pushed the book into my lap. “Read it to me?”
“Later, Izzy. You have to get to guardería.”
“But Mamá, it’s bunnies!”
I took the book from her chubby hands to see the cover more clearly. I had thought it looked familiar. Sure enough, it was an old friend: Felix Salten’s Fifteen Rabbits.
* * *
• • •
MY HEART WAS JUMPING in my rib cage as I walked with Julia up the steps to my parents’ new home. They were still in Sopocachi, but now in a small house of their own. The whole way there I wanted to keep my arm in Julia’s, to make sure she was real. To keep her from vanishing, this girl who returned to us pieces of our lives.
My mother came to the door in her apron. “Orly! Come in, come in. I’ve got something in the oven.” She reached a hand out to the girl beside me. “Mucho gusto,” she said. “I’m Julia.”
Julia looked at my mother, at the face subsiding
into creases, her grandmother’s bright eyes, and burst into tears. “Me too,” she sobbed. “I’m Julia too.”
My mother looked bewildered. “Come in, child. Come sit down. What is it?” She guided Julia into the front room and sat her down on a sofa. “Stay there. Let me fetch you something to drink.”
“Mutti, can you make her coca tea? She just arrived yesterday. Where’s Vati?”
“In his practice room.” My mother asked no questions, but disappeared into the kitchen.
“I’m sorry,” Julia said, her face in her hands. “I knew I was named for her, but seeing her . . .”
I touched the back of her head, stroked the dark hair. “Do you want me to tell her?”
She shook her head. “No, I should.”
I left Julia sitting there while I went to find my father. He was at work, making notes on a sheet of music, his viola at rest on his lap. There was a single bed in the corner of the room; he had taken to sleeping here, with his music. He looked up, impatient at the interruption.
“Orlita. I need to finish this.”
“Vati,” I said. “It’s important.” Something in my voice prevented further protest.
In the doorway of the living room he stopped, staring at Julia as if he recognized her from somewhere. His white hair stood up in tufts from his head and his shirt was creased, as if he had slept in it. My mother reappeared, setting the teapot and a small plate of strudel in front of Julia. “Jakob,” she said, “we have a guest.” She sat on the sofa and folded her hands in her lap, smiling like a child awaiting a puppet show. I nudged my father into the room, but he remained standing.
“Frau Zingel,” Julia began. “Herr Zingel. My mother lives near Chambéry.”
“My parents speak French,” I interrupted. “You can speak French.” My parents understood French better than English.
I watched their faces as Julia told her story, watched the polite expressions fall away, the shock replaced by sorrow, the sorrow replaced by the first glimmer of joy. Like mine, my mother’s hands trembled in her lap. “Willi loved someone,” she murmured, dismissing as unimportant the circumstances of that love.
My father’s face remained still, as he sank to the sofa beside my mother. “I knew when I saw you,” he finally said, looking up at Julia. None of them seemed to know how to proceed from here, what to do with this new knowledge.
Julia rose and knelt by my mother’s feet, picked up her thin hands. “I am named for you,” she said. “Willi named me. He managed to see me a few times before he was deported, but it was very dangerous for him, and for my mother.”
“You’re all grown up.” There was melancholy in my mother’s words. She had missed Julia’s childhood, her adolescence, her entire life.
“Would you like me to stay?” There was hope in Julia’s voice. “I can stay for a while.”
My mother gave a half nod, turning her face from us, swallowing hard. Unsteadily, she rose. “I’ll make lunch.”
* * *
• • •
AFTER LUNCH, we read the letter. Julia perched on a chair across from us as I squeezed between my parents on the sofa, flattening the pages on my lap. They were thin as onionskin and creased.
July 1963
Dear Julia, Jakob, and Orlanthe,
I write in the hope that you can somehow forgive me, although I don’t deserve it. I should have sent her to you long ago. It has been selfish of me to keep Julia all to myself, for all of these years. But to tell her while my husband was still alive would have destroyed them both. I didn’t want to ask her to keep secrets for me, to keep secrets from the man she believed to be her father.
Yet in doing what I have, I have withheld from you a member of your family, a granddaughter who belongs to you as much as she belongs to my parents. You have lost so much already, how could I keep from you perhaps the only relative you have left in Europe? And I have no answer for that.
Willi would have been—and was, for that first year—a different kind of father from my husband. More a playmate than a ruler. For him, becoming a parent was more than an honor, a sacred trust. It was a delight. It was seeing him with children that first drew me to him. He used to sit down with them on the ground and just with his imagination turn pebbles into mice or rabbits, pine cones into cars.
Had he lived, had the world not been as the world was, had France not been rotting from the inside out, the end of the war would have heralded the end of my marriage. Willi could have raised her with me, taken her for walks in the mountains behind our home, sung her to sleep.
But had I left home when it happened, in 1942, Julia may not have survived the war. Living with Willi, it would be impossible to conceal her parentage. You must know this. And so I appeal to your own parental love and ask you to forgive me for my cowardice.
There is more, but it is hard to put it all in a letter. I would like to meet you one day if you are willing.
I will let Julia say the rest.
Yours faithfully,
Arielle
I left Julia with my parents when I went to fetch Isidora from guardería. It was the hottest hour, when I would normally be inside if I didn’t have to pick up Isidora. The guardería was at the home of a young Bolivian woman named Estefania, a twenty-minute walk from our house. She had three children of her own and was pregnant with a fourth. When I rang the bell she came to the garden gate to kiss me. “She’s in the back, with the conejitos,” she said, waving her hand toward a wooden hutch where she kept two enormously fat rabbits. Isidora liked to feed them, poking sticks of celery and handfuls of parsley through the openings in their cage.
“Mira, Mamá,” she called when she saw me. “Look at them chew!”
“I see. Adorable. Vamos a casa?”
Reluctantly she turned away from the rabbits, catching sight of the book in my arms. “Where is Julia?” she demanded. “Why hasn’t she come to fetch me?”
I caught her hand and we walked toward Estefania to say good-bye. “She’s with your grandma and grandpa, Izzy. I’m going to explain to you about Julia as we walk home.”
At the gate we met my friend María Teresa, rushing to pick up her son, Gael. María Teresa had been my first friend in this rural part of town, and remained my closest. “I’ll be at the store in an hour,” she said, kissing me quickly. “I’m dashing to get Gael to my parents.”
A single mother, María Teresa relied on her parents for child care. She was the managerial and financial mastermind behind the bookstore I had finally saved enough money to open. It was a tiny storefront, but we had installed floor-to-ceiling shelves along the walls and a narrow bookcase dividing two aisles. On the wall behind the cash register hung a small woven tapestry in which a red fox gazed at the moon’s reflection in a dark lake, while a monkey swung overhead from a branch, an opening-day gift from Nayra.
Most of our books were in Spanish, but we also carried bookcases of German and French literature and a few slim volumes of Aymara and Quechua fables. If anyone wanted a book in English, which was rare, we would special-order it. At the back of the store there was just room enough for two smallish armchairs. Isidora had helped to paint the wooden sign bearing the name of the shop: La Esquina de Rachel. Rachel’s Corner.
We started up the hill, Isidora taking three steps for every one of mine. “So Julia,” I began, “is actually your cousin.”
* * *
• • •
JULIA STAYED, dividing her time between our house and my parents’. As her Spanish got better, she helped me out a bit in the shop, or with Isidora. When Miguel and I were both working, she helped my mother in the bakery. My mother didn’t have a mere storefront anymore, but a proper bakery on a corner in Sopocachi. “Julia has a much lighter touch with the cakes than you ever did,” my mother told me, delighted.
Julia’s arrival cheered my mother more than anythin
g had since we arrived. The sadness in her, the dark behind her eyes, would never leave her, but she carried it more easily. I felt guilty on the days Julia came to us, knowing that we were depriving my mother of her company. But Isidora was devoted to Julia, the first relative she had ever met on my side. I didn’t want to deprive her either.
Suddenly we were all studying languages. I took up my French with renewed passion, taking children’s books home from the store at night to read. At night, Isidora patiently corrected Julia’s pronunciation as she stumbled through children’s stories in Spanish. My mother instructed Julia in the finer points of altitude cooking in very rusty French. As for Isidora, she was demanding to learn not only French but English, because that is what she heard us speak most often with her cousin. Miguel spoke passable German, having endured many hours in the company of my family and other refugees, and had studied English at university. “And there I stop,” he said. “Otherwise there will be no room for meteors and black holes.”
“Black holes take up space?”
Miguel smiled. “How much time do you have to listen to the answer to that question?”
* * *
• • •
“WHY CAN’T JULIA read to me?” Isidora asked me one spring night in late September. “The books she gave me?”
For a few weeks she had forgotten about all her new books, swept up in the excitement of entertaining a guest.
“But Julia reads in French, mi corazón.”
“I know French now!” This was an exaggeration. But I had no desire to discourage her ambitions.
“If you really want then, Julia can read them to you. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.”
“In French?”
“If you like.”
“I like, I like, I like! In fact, I just happen to love French.” She sang the words. How did I manage to raise such a joyful daughter? How did such happiness emerge from a heritage of darkness? Ah, I thought. Miguel’s genes. He was a constitutionally happy person. He loved his work, he loved us, he wasn’t yearning for anything far away. Once I asked him where he would live if he could live anywhere on earth, and he looked at me with surprise. “Here,” he said. “Of course here.” Yet he and his family had also suffered. Where did they live, these cells that determined our resilience? I wondered. Which cells enable us to survive horror while others jump from their rooftops or cut open their bodies to let the life out?
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