Eventually I felt his arm around my ribs grow heavy, his breathing turn to snores. “Thank you,” I whispered. “Gracias.”
Sleep refused to come. Our blankets were too heavy, too hot. I pushed myself into a sitting position and walked to my dresser. I was wearing wool socks. I always wore wool socks to bed here. Miguel had laughed the first time I had undressed for him but refused to take off my socks. “Gringa chic,” he said. “So alluring.” Crouching, I pulled open the bottom drawer, took out the sealed tin I kept there, and carried it down the hall and up the stairs to the small attic room where we stored our suitcases. By the time a sliver of pink appeared on the horizon, I was packed.
* * *
• • •
WE TOOK THE TRAIN to Tupiza and a bus from there. Anneliese slumped against me, ill nearly the entire journey, while I stared out the window imagining our car tumbling to the cliffs below the road. It was a relief to arrive in the green of Tarija, in its thick sweet air, its red earth. After a few faltering steps, Anneliese found her footing and wanted to walk to the hotel. It wasn’t far from the train station, but I was surprised at the speed of her recovery.
“It was just the altitude, I think. I feel marvelously better already!” She swung her arms as she walked. “I can feel the oxygen whooshing around inside of me.”
I looked at her face, transformed for a moment into a younger Anneliese I recognized. For a few moments, I felt uncontaminated joy. I reached for her hand.
“I’m sorry. I should have brought you here sooner. Most people do adjust though, eventually.”
“I guess you didn’t have a choice.”
“Some of us did go down to the jungle. There was a colony, a farming colony of Jews.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not.”
“Farming Jews?”
“Don’t you remember what I wrote about Rachel?”
“The orphan girl who got sent to the jungle?”
“Yes. My friend.”
“Who died?”
I nodded.
I told her the rest of the story, about Mauricio Hochschild, the crop failures, and disease. I didn’t tell her everything about Rachel.
Anneliese was silent. “That poor girl.”
I nodded. Rachel’s death was one more reason prayer felt futile. I didn’t understand why my father had continued to go to synagogue. If there was a god, he or she was guilty of such gross negligence I hardly knew where to start, how to voice my bottomless fury and grief. These mountains were all the synagogue I needed. Even if I believed in God, why would I go inside to worship when all of creation was outside? These rocks, this red earth, this pale blue sky. Whoever made these, whatever force of nature, inspires in me greater faith than man-made buildings or worlds ever did.
“Are there many of you here?” Anneliese asked. “How many are left?”
“Not so many. Me, my parents. There can’t be more than a hundred others.” There had been so many thousands of us in 1939. And in 1946, when the survivors were washed up here by the war.
* * *
• • •
IT HADN’T OCCURRED to me that we would need to call ahead to make a reservation, but by the time we arrived at our chosen hotel, the one Miguel had recommended, almost all the rooms were full. “I have one room left near the pool,” the young clerk told us. “But it has only one bed.”
Anneliese and I looked at each other.
“It’s fine,” said Anneliese quietly. I repeated this in Spanish to the hotel clerk, who looked unsurprised. Entire Bolivian families often shared a bed.
The room felt enormous and empty. Anneliese walked over to the window and drew the curtain aside. “It’s so strange,” she said.
I came to stand next to her. She smelled like lavender, like her French shampoo. She had washed her hair that morning in my bath. Outside in the wild gardens, a bright green bird paused atop a palm tree.
Anneliese turned to me abruptly. “Can we go for a walk?”
“Of course!” It was the first thing I did anywhere I visited. It calmed me after the anxiety of travel. So great was the diversity of Bolivia’s lands, I was discovering with Miguel, that we could find ourselves in an entirely different landscape and climate in a matter of hours. Walking oriented us.
After getting lost in the streets near the hotel, we finally found ourselves on a dirt road heading outside of town. If we continued on it for forty minutes or so, and took a right, it would cross a river, the hotel clerk had told us. A path on the other side would take us back.
Anneliese wasn’t the only one who perked up closer to sea level. While I had never experienced altitude sickness and felt myself to be as adapted as any native, I could not deny that a few days at lower altitude gave me superhuman powers. I could drink more than one glass of wine, I could run twice as far, I could go an entire night without sleep.
For a while, we walked without talking along the rutted road. Despite our silence, it wasn’t a quiet walk. Birds squawked, winds rustled the leaves, bits of music leaked out of the few houses we passed.
“Oh!” Anneliese cried suddenly, stopping. “Are those vineyards?”
I followed her gaze. “We’re in Tarija. It’s the wine region.”
“There’s a wine region? Here?”
“For at least a few hundred years or so. France didn’t invent wine, you know.”
“I know, it was Bacchus, in Greece.” She grinned at me.
“Do you see that?” I pointed to the trees growing across the fields. “Those are muscat grapes. They plant the vines around the molle trees, and the resin protects the vines from fungus.”
Anneliese stopped and gazed out at the green fields. “I wonder if France has molle trees?”
I shrugged.
“No, I guess not.” She turned back to the road. “We wouldn’t want all wines to taste the same anyway.”
* * *
• • •
THAT NIGHT WE ATE a simple meal of local cheeses and hams in a small café near the hotel. “It’s not terrible.” Anneliese swirled the red wine in her glass. “Ça se boit.”
I poured myself a second glass. “I don’t think I’ve ever had anything but Bolivian wine. There’s some here from Argentina and Chile, but it’s more expensive and Miguel won’t buy it.”
“Patriotism over palate.”
“Something like that. Though there is very good Bolivian wine.”
When we got back to the hotel I rummaged around in my bag until I found the tin. “I’ve been saving these to show you.”
Anneliese sat on the edge of the bed, holding the tin in both hands. I stood before her, too anxious to sit. “Most of the stories are Nayra’s, some are mine, and some we mixed together. The poems are all mine.”
She ran her fingers around the rim of the tin, dug her fingernails underneath the edge. “Wait. I have something for you too—if you want. They’re just stories. For the next book.”
“Of course I want!”
She set my tin down to rifle through her bag and pulled out a packet of handwritten pages tied with string.
That evening, she read every poem, every story, taking breaks only for a drink of water or to use the bathroom. Even Miguel had never read all of these stories and poems. Reading things unrelated to science made him restless.
She cried as she read.
I sprawled on the floor with her packet. The stories were good. These were not childish tales of a magical land, but stories of Frenchwomen working in the Resistance, of trapeze artists falling into rivers, and of a charismatic ceramicist who seduces a young Austrian girl. But while I appreciated their artistry, reading them made me feel far from her. They reminded me of the length of the years we were apart, the discrepancies in experience. It’s not that her life had been easier; that would be too simple. It is just that it was
a life, a full life, that I knew nothing about.
I finished before her and paced the carpet of the room, pausing to stare out into the dark night. But the glass was reflective, and all that stared back was my own shadow and Anneliese’s.
Late that first night, our pages scattered around us, Anneliese lay back on the bed, her face contorting as tears streamed down her temples. I watched the tears roll into her ears and worried that something would happen to her hearing. “Ana?”
She just lay there and sobbed. I knelt on the cover beside her. “Ana? Why are you crying?”
“Why aren’t you? Why isn’t everyone, all the time?”
“I don’t know.” Surely if anyone has a right to cry all of the time, it’s us Jews. But is that what we survived for?
“I missed so many stories. I had to write them all down on my own and it isn’t the same. I should have had you. We should have had each other.”
I nodded, but she didn’t see me because she kept staring at the ceiling.
“There is just so much that is terrible. So much. In Vienna I saw a man throw a little girl off a roof, Orly. I can’t stop seeing her, with her little blue dress and little plaits. Someone had plaited her hair that morning, someone had combed it out and plaited it and put ribbons on the ends and made her look neat and pretty. And someone else just threw her out.” Those last words choked her. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I swore I wasn’t going to tell you.”
A wave of nausea and heat flooded my abdomen. For so many years, these were the images I had been avoiding. I sat beside her on the bed and picked up one of her now-warm hands, holding it between mine.
“Knowing that we are capable of all of that, how do we go on?”
I didn’t have any answers. Weren’t these the questions I had been asking my mother ever since we left Austria? Maybe even before? I don’t know how we go on. But we do. Some of us, anyway, go on.
“I don’t think you are capable of that, Ana. Of cruelty. You never were. You could have been, so easily you could have been, but you weren’t.”
Her breath slowed. “No.” She rolled on to her side to look at me. “No, I don’t think I am.”
“You could have been like your parents. Or like Heinrich Müller. I still don’t know why you weren’t.”
She was quiet. “Because I loved you?”
“There must be more to it than that. I think you would have been kind to anyone Jewish even if it weren’t for me.”
“It’s impossible to know who I would be if not for you. I didn’t exist before you.”
I lay down facing her, my knees curled to touch hers, and looked at the eyes I had known since birth. Listened to the way our breaths fell into rhythm.
“All those wasted years, Orly. Think what we could have done with them if we were not all murdering each other.”
“We haven’t been murdering anyone.”
Anneliese smiled, tiny lights coming on in her eyes. “You did the opposite. You created a person.”
I smiled. “I did. With a little help.”
“Isn’t it scary? Sending some part of you out into this world?”
“Yes. It’s terrifying. All the time. Is that why you never had a child?”
“I couldn’t bear the thought of watching anyone else suffer. And the way the world was going, has been going, suffering seemed inevitable.”
“Suffering has always been inevitable.”
“Yes.” She closed her eyes. “I don’t know what I am doing with my life.”
I touched her cheek to make her open her eyes. “Alleviating my suffering.” And I kissed her.
* * *
• • •
A NEW VERSION of me emerged that night, a version that might have sprung to life decades earlier. What we did was neither better nor worse than what I shared with Miguel. It was a thing apart. He was gentler, more careful than Anneliese, more afraid of hurting me. Making love to Anneliese did new and shattering things to my body, things that left me sobbing and inside out. Things that left our sheets soaked and tangled, so that we had to get the towels from the bathroom and spread them all over the bed.
The thought of hurting Miguel was unbearable to me. But so was the thought of leaving this part of me, secret for so long, forever unexplored. It wasn’t fair that she had come so late. It wasn’t fair to Miguel that she had come at all. Yet here she was. And there were things I had to know about myself. And about us.
“I wasn’t sure,” she told me in the dark of early morning. “I wasn’t sure this was part of what we were to each other.”
“It always has been, Ana, always, even when I didn’t understand.” I told her about The Scorpion, about falling in love with Rachel. That after Rachel died I had caged those emotions, the secret responses to girls that brought both the pain of loss and the fear of discovery. I had never heard anyone here talk about falling in love with someone of the same sex unless it was to condemn it as an unforgivable sin. Admitting a passion for women would put me in almost as much danger as being Jewish had in Vienna.
Then there had been Miguel. Guilt flashed through me. Anneliese had an earlier claim, but I had promised him the future.
“Come back with me. Come to France.” Her arms tightened around me. They felt strong, as though she had been pushing a plow in France rather than plucking at typewriter keys. Maybe she had been pushing a plow. She had probably done a lot of things I didn’t know about.
I let myself imagine it. Getting on a plane with her, going to her French village, moving into her little house. Sleeping next to her skin. Waking up next to her skin. Telling stories with her. Lying in lavender-scented sheets while she went out to buy bread for our breakfast. For a moment, I glimpsed the life I might have had. That I could still perhaps have, if I were willing to give up everything.
“Ana, don’t ask me, don’t ask me now.” I buried my face in her neck, her celery-smelling neck. How could it be that her neck still smelled the same?
* * *
• • •
AT NIGHT WHILE SHE SLEPT I tried to find ways to make the pieces of my life fit together. Even from the start I knew it was futile. Life without Isidora was not possible. For me, there was no life without Isidora. Nor could there be life without Miguel. I had grown into his contours, the contours of his country.
“Stay here,” I pleaded, desperately, stupidly, and without hope. My city made Anneliese sick. My city contained my family.
“Leave here,” she replied, her breath hot on my ear.
* * *
• • •
WE HAD BEEN there three days when I asked her if she lived alone in France. It was late morning, the sun long up, and we still lay in bed. Anneliese rolled onto her back.
“I live with someone.”
“A woman?”
“A woman.”
I considered this. “She knows where you are?”
“In a way. She knows you are a childhood friend who was lost.”
A childhood friend. I felt myself disappearing into insignificance.
“Is that acceptable there? To live with a woman?”
Anneliese laughed. “As long as no one looks in our windows at night.”
That tore at me, the image of Anneliese with another woman.
“The villagers think we’re spinster roommates, I suppose. Or relatives. I don’t know what they think. We keep to ourselves. I would have written to you about it, but I think you know how dangerous it is to admit something like this. Even with you, I couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t turn away. That’s why I haven’t told you.”
“What is her name?”
“Henriette. She is a ceramicist and runs a gallery. I write their publicity materials.”
I imagined their life, their idyllic life in this French village. Their nights together, their days spent working companionably at thin
gs they loved.
“So what would you do if I said I would come with you? Or didn’t you mean it? What would become of poor Henriette?”
Anneliese turned to look at me. “But you won’t come back with me, will you?”
“But what if I did?”
“You know what would happen if you did, my Iphis.” She ran her fingertips along my side, from my ribs down toward my hips, then lower.
“Shall I turn myself into a man for you?”
“Please,” she said. “Please don’t.”
“Would we live together?”
“Why are you tormenting me?”
“I just want to know. I want to be able to picture the life I am missing.”
She sighed. “If you came back with me, we would find another village. Maybe even a city. Villages are full of curious people. I would write books and you would write your poems and play your charango. We would drink wine at night and then we would do this. . . .” She bit the skin on the inside of my thigh.
I caught my breath. “And Henriette?” I managed.
Anneliese rolled her head so she could see my face. “I would write her a letter. A kind letter. Saying that you had a prior claim. That I was sorry. Henriette would find someone else. There are many women in France.”
Her mouth moved down my skin until it replaced her fingers. And we could say no more.
* * *
• • •
WHEN I WOKE the next morning she was already up, sitting in the chair by the window. “Ana?” I stretched out an arm.
She turned to look at me, her black hair glossy in the sunlight, her eyes serious. “Why did you never leave here? There must have been a time you could have.”
I pulled my knees to my chest under the blanket. “Where should I have gone?”
“Not back to Austria, that wasn’t what I was suggesting.”
“So where?”
“Anywhere. The U.S., Israel. Somewhere, maybe, not so backward, more advanced . . .”
Exile Music Page 38
