Julia nodded.
“Do you think my grandmother is a little bit like them?”
My own tears came then, the knife of the question slicing me open. I thought of my mother at Les Huguenots, talking to me of the dangers of war, of religion. I heard her voice singing to Elektra, begging for peace. I remembered the way she curled around me on Pogrom Night, blocking my ears with her song.
And I thought of her now.
“I can’t— That equation. It’s not—”
Julia look chagrined. “I’m sorry.”
I took her hand between mine. “The problem is older and greater than these men. A poison has been spreading through Europe for centuries. Someone else might have done what Hitler or Barbie did. It’s dangerous to believe that it’s just about these men. Their ability to manipulate ancient hatreds is not unique.”
Julia leaned into me, resting her forehead on my shoulder. “I don’t want my grandmother to hurt anyone,” she said in a small voice.
“All right.” I rested my hand on her back. “We won’t let her hurt anyone.”
* * *
• • •
BARBIE LIVED LONG ENOUGH to be extradited to France in 1983. Justice had finally arrived, if only after Barbie had had the luxury of a long and happy life.
Six months after my mother nearly killed him, my father moved back home. Maybe it was too late for him to start again. Maybe he had forgiven her. He did not immediately move back into their bedroom, but slept in his office.
“Vati, I’m glad.” What I didn’t say was, I’m glad someone will be watching her.
A few weeks later he and I sat in the living room together, mostly quiet, watching my mother and Julia through the kitchen doorway as they moved back and forth across the tiles.
“She promised me all that is over.”
“And you believe she means it this time?”
My father’s long, thin fingers traced patterns on the surface of the coffee table. “I can’t bring myself to give up hope. When I thought I had, I realized there was nothing else holding me up. Just the hope that she would be herself again.”
“Even now?”
“Even now.”
“You don’t think maybe you should do the cooking?”
He laughed. “No. That’s how lazy I am. Not even fear of poisoning will drive me to the kitchen.”
“Vati—”
“I know. I’m a foolish old man, Orlita.”
“Not foolish. Illogically tenacious, perhaps.” I smiled at him. “What are they making in the kitchen?”
“Pancakes.”
I leapt to my feet, but he laughed. “I’m joking. They’re making cinnamon rolls. I think the first batch is out of the oven if you feel like stealing a few for us.”
“You’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
I picked up our teacups from the table and started for the kitchen. In the doorway, I paused. My mother was rolling strips of spiced dough into pinwheels, which Julia took from her hands and settled onto metal trays. As I stepped closer to them I heard something strange. A foreign yet not unfamiliar sound that disinterred something inside me. I couldn’t believe it. My mother was humming.
Sixty-six
FEBRUARY 1966
I was stepping into a bath when I heard the knock at the door. It wasn’t even 7:00 A.M. No one in our neighborhood paid a social call at that hour. Pulling my dressing gown from its hook and wrapping it around me I ran to look out the front window. Below me I saw only the top of a dark head, a small, vaguely female form. Perhaps she was a beggar. Or maybe there was an emergency. An antigovernment manifestación. Flooding. A sick friend. My parents. Worried something had happened to my mother or father, I ran down the stairs. Passing Isidora’s room, I checked to make sure she was still there, snoring gently under her covers.
I remember everything about the moment that I opened the door. The sun blazing red on the cliffs above us, the deep blue of the sky, the slim crescent of moon still visible. I remember the metallic, post-rain smell of the air. The breeze cold against my right foot, the only part of me I had dipped into the bath. I can still feel the pull of the hairpins stuck into the top of my head, the bareness of my neck.
And I remember the girl, the woman, before me.
Her black hair was streaked with white and cut chin length and deep lines scored her forehead. At the left corner of her lip, a smile quivered. Her brown eyes were bigger, her face narrower, her skin unnaturally pale, almost blue. Otherwise she was the same. Short, slim, eyes stormy with some subterranean feeling.
We stood there, staring at each other across the threshold, saying nothing.
Saying everything.
I had opened the door into another life.
As I stood there, trembling in my dressing gown, she linked her thumbs and raised them over her head, her fingers fanned out on either side, like wings. My arms rose to mirror her.
Then she vomited onto my bare feet.
* * *
• • •
BECAUSE I WASN’T SURE that she could or should walk up the stairs herself, I scooped her up in my arms. She wasn’t heavy. I could feel her ribs pressing against my right forearm, her heart staggering. A reek of perspiration, bile, and staleness rose from her dress.
At the top of the stairs I set her on her feet, keeping one arm around her shoulders. “Ana,” I said—as if she were any other guest, as if years and wars and cruelty and ships and mountains had not come between us—“you need to rest. There’s a bath ready, I was just getting in.”
She nodded. “I smell, don’t I? I’m so sorry, Orly. That wasn’t how I pictured our reunion.”
“It’s hard to predict how altitude will affect you.” I felt impatient with the altitude, for distracting us from the infinite things we had to say to each other.
“I’ve been vomiting all the way here. I could have waited until I was better, I suppose, but I couldn’t wait. I couldn’t. I’ve already waited too long. It took so long! I didn’t want to tell you I was coming just in case I didn’t make it. I have been disappointing you for so many years.” She looked at me as she unbuttoned her dress and shrugged it to the floor. Automatically, I picked it up, averting my eyes. My hands, I noticed, were still trembling.
“I’ll wash your dress.”
“I brought another one.” Ana lifted one thin leg over the edge of the tub and sank down, the pink tips of her breasts floating up in the water. “I left my case somewhere near your front door. I might throw up again.” Her brow creased, deepening the lines.
“Here.” I dragged over the rubbish bin and set it next to the tub. “I don’t think you had breasts the last time I saw you.”
“Are you getting in?”
I smiled, remembering the times she had climbed in with me over Stefi’s protestations that there was not room enough for two children in the bath. Poor Stefi. We had knocked over jars of my mother’s creams and flooded the bathroom floor.
“Not if you’re going to vomit on me again.”
“Yes, I suppose you had better not. Would you push that bin a bit closer?”
As she hung over the edge of the bath, I slipped out to clean the hallway and to fetch her case. The front door still stood wide open, the case waiting expectantly on the top step. It was small, but heavy. I carried it upstairs to Julia’s room and set it down. I should change the sheets.
“Orly?”
I hurried back to the bath. Anneliese was shivering on the mat. “May I have a towel?” I had used mine to clean my feet and the front step, so I handed her Miguel’s. Once she was dressed in an old nightgown, I made her coca tea and then made up her bed as she sat on the floor and watched, warming her hands on the mug.
“Will I feel like this forever?”
“Most people adjust.”
“I feel like I mi
ght die. Will I die?”
“I don’t think so. Not unless you try to run a marathon.”
“Mamá?” Isidora stood in the doorway, wearing the bunny costume we had bought her for Carnival. She still liked to sleep in it. She stared at Anneliese sitting on the floor next to a bucket, and looked back up at me. “Do I have another cousin?”
* * *
• • •
IT WAS HARD to let Anneliese sleep. It wasn’t only the never-ending questions pushing their way to the forefront of my brain, or the fact that Isidora wanted to play with her. I just wanted to listen to her voice, to make her laugh, to touch her hand.
She didn’t want to sleep. I could tell by the way she clung to my hand, explaining herself in German to my daughter. But at last she fell back against the pillow. “It’s getting the better of me,” she said.
I closed the door to her room and shooed Isidora downstairs. It was a Saturday and Miguel had left in the dark for the observatory. My head and heart reeling, I grounded myself in the mundane task of preparing breakfast for Isidora. All of the best things happen before breakfast, I thought. I had always loved mornings, the clean slate of them, the infinite promise. After lunch I was sometimes overtaken by a heaviness, a loss of hope. I have given up fighting this; there will always be darkness in me. How could it not remain in all of us? Only playing my charango with a group of other musicians, Isidora’s return from guardería, or Miguel’s arrival home from work could lift me back up.
* * *
• • •
ANNELIESE CAME DOWNSTAIRS for lunch, but couldn’t manage more than a couple of spoonfuls of peanut soup. She sat at the table shivering in one of my alpaca sweaters, while Isidora asked her riddles. What gets wetter the more that it dries? she asked Anneliese in German. What weighs more, a kilo of feathers or a kilo of bricks?
“Sweetheart, let Anneliese rest.”
“She’s been resting all morning!” Isidora crossed her skinny arms across her chest.
“She’s had a long journey and isn’t feeling very well.” I stirred my soup, not feeling hungry myself.
“Like Julia? Does she come from where Julia came from?”
“No.” I was still thinking of Anneliese as Viennese, as Austrian. But then it occurred to me that she had been in France now for a very long time. “Maybe, in a way. Ana, are you still in France? You haven’t gone back to Vienna?” I was talking to Anneliese. I was talking to Anneliese.
“Vienna? You think I could still live in Vienna?” She almost spat the words. “No. France has been terrible enough, but Vienna, never. I could never.” She pulled the sweater more tightly around her.
“I didn’t know.” I shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know anything.”
“No. Thank God. There is very little I would want you to know about those years.”
“We’ve heard things. Many of us came here after.”
“Did they?”
“Yes. My aunt Thekla.”
“I remember Thekla!” She sat up straighter. “With Klara and Felix?”
I shook my head, glancing over at Isidora. I had tried to spare her too many of these stories.
“Not anymore. Not any of them.”
“But you said Thekla came here . . .”
“Yes.” I tipped my head toward my daughter. “But it was too much for her.”
“What was too much, Mamá?”
“I’m sorry,” said Anneliese. “This can wait.”
“What can wait?” Isidora hated not knowing everything. “What can wait!”
“Nothing, lovie. Just talking. Anneliese and I have not talked in a very long time.”
Anneliese smiled. “I think it may take us twenty-four years of talking to even begin.”
“At least.”
“I was hoping I would never have to speak German again,” she said, in German. “I’ve wanted to change my name forever. But I knew that if I did you could never find me.”
“If I had seen the book I would have known,” I said. “Even if your surname had changed. If I had read the story about carrotmobiles.”
“There was such a small chance you would. I wanted to be as findable as I could.”
We sat smiling at each other while Isidora scraped up bits of carrot from the bottom of her bowl. I felt awkward, words clotting in my throat. Too many words. “Tell us about your village?”
“It’s in the South of France. Near Nîmes. A very small village, on a river. Quiet. Lots of artists. We even have circus performers. A tightrope walker. A trapeze artist.”
Isidora perked up. “Julia is from France!”
Anneliese looked questioningly at me. “Julia?”
“Willi’s daughter. She is here now, she stays with us sometimes.”
“Right! Willi’s daughter! My brain isn’t working. She is still here?”
“Yes.” I was unable to stop smiling. “You will love her. And I promise I will tell you all.”
* * *
• • •
ANNELIESE DID NOT GET BETTER. She tried coming downstairs to the table for dinner later that day, to meet Miguel, but only sipped at her water. Miguel was welcoming and kind; while I got her back to bed he went out to buy the sorochi pills that helped some people with the altitude. “I’m so glad, Orly,” he said. “It’s like one of the stories you’ve told me coming true. Like I know her before she talks.” Julia stayed with my parents so that Anneliese could have the guest room. They hadn’t even met yet. There would be time. I hoped that there would be time.
* * *
• • •
ONCE MIGUEL LEFT for work the next morning and I dropped Isidora at nursery, I got into bed with Ana, lying beside her as we had several lifetimes ago, pressing her cold hands between my palms. It felt so easy. We talked all morning, until she slipped back to sleep. Lying beside her, watching her eyelids quiver with dreams, I marveled that she was still Anneliese. That it could still be so simple to talk with her, almost like having a conversation with a part of myself, a part that had been missing and returned.
At night, after I had tucked Isidora in bed with Anneliese’s book, which she wanted to read again now that she had met the author (“a real live writer!”), I returned to her, lying fully clothed on top of the covers beside her while she tried to sketch the missing years.
As I knew from her letters, in 1943 Anneliese had run away. Now, she filled in many details. “I couldn’t stand it anymore,” she said. “Living with them. Pretending I didn’t hate them more than I have ever hated anyone. Not doing anything. Not doing anything to the people who had taken you away. How could I just stay there and do nothing? With the Nazis everywhere, taking everyone, everything? How could anyone?” She shook her head, as if to shake the very thought out. “You should have seen what Heinrich Müller became. You thought he was bad as a child!”
She refrained from telling me too many details of the years in Vienna that followed my departure. “You have enough memories to haunt you. You will already have read, already heard, more than anyone should have to.”
The Resistance networks were growing stronger in 1943, especially among various Catholic groups. It was an Austrian priest from one of these groups who had helped her to travel to Switzerland and put her in touch with people from the Christlicher Friedensdienst, the Christian Peace Service, who took her in. She lived with religious women there, working with them to help Jewish refugee children find homes. There were labor camps for Jewish refugees, she told me. She had visited one, looking for Willi. “I didn’t see him.” She crinkled her forehead, remembering. “I looked for him. I wanted to see him, Orly. I wanted him to tell me where you were. But I didn’t know where he had gone, or you, or anyone. No one knew where you were.”
“No. I should have told you. I don’t know why I didn’t tell you. My mother had said not to, but I should have trusted you.”
“You were wise, Orly. I might have been different. Or I might have been made to talk.”
“They wouldn’t have come after us to Bolivia.”
“Maybe not.”
“Then again, there are Nazis here.”
“They came for you? Here?” She looked confused.
“For themselves. Escaping. Justice doesn’t ever seem to reach South America.”
Anneliese closed her eyes. “The Nazi diaspora,” she said. “Just what the world needs.” And she was asleep again.
* * *
• • •
AFTER THE THIRD DAY, Miguel suggested I take Anneliese to Tarija. We were lying in bed reading, our bedside lamps still burning. “You could stay with my aunt there, or even in a hotel. It won’t be expensive. It’s lower, she won’t be as sick.”
This had occurred to me, but seemed too much to ask of my husband. I should have known better than to underestimate him, his generosity.
“I can do some of my work from home after I pick Isidora up from guardería.”
“You don’t cook.” Most Bolivian men did not cook. You were lucky if you could find yourself a husband who could make his own coffee. They stayed with their parents until they married, and even after marriage they went home every Sunday. This had caused us a great amount of conflict in the early years of our marriage. Though I loved Miguel’s family, once in a while I wanted a Sunday to myself.
“I’ll buy salteñas! I can slice fruit and buy marraquetas. We’ll cope.” He closed The Feynman Lectures on Physics and turned toward me. “You need to go, Orlita. Aside from the altitude sickness. You can’t talk properly here. Take a few days away from us and all of our distractions.”
I shut my own book, a collection of French poetry. “Miguelito.” My throat closed and I could not say any more.
He reached for me. “There is so much I can’t understand,” he said. “So much I will never understand.”
Exile Music Page 37
