Exile Music Read online

  The three of us wiped the walls, windows, and floorboards of our new rooms until they shone, although there wasn’t much we could immediately do about the paint. Once I had finished the second window, I stood staring out at the mountains the dust had obscured, at snowy Illimani, sharp against the clear blue sky. Our Vienna apartment had been a place of luxury in comparison, but it didn’t have a view like this.

  The men wandered across the hall to Fredi and Mathilde’s rooms, discussing the probability of war. Fredi and Mathilde, my father told me later, had recently arrived from Berlin, where they had both worked as journalists. Like us, they had left most of their families behind. They were just beginning to learn Spanish and to look for work.

  Listening to my mother and Mathilde talk in German, with the murmur of the men’s voices in the background, I could almost pretend that we were still at home. If I closed my eyes. And if I didn’t notice the missing tenor.

  That first night, the three of us made a nest from our coats and went to sleep on the floor. Mathilde and Fredi had given us one of their blankets to use until we could get one of our own. I wriggled in between my parents, still wanting them to stand guard between me and the world. We had kept our clothing on against the cold and my father’s jacket was scratchy against my cheek. Despite my exhaustion, I found it difficult to sleep. I wanted my old bed. My Stefi. My Lebkuchen. My brother. I wanted to wake up in the morning and have hot chocolate and bread. I wanted to run upstairs after breakfast to fetch Anneliese for school. I even wanted school itself, a normal rhythm to my days.

  The doll the lady in the SOPRO offices had given me sat in the corner, watching me. Even in the dark I felt the gaze of her false, unblinking eyes.

  Once my parents were breathing evenly, I slid carefully out of their arms and walked to the window. It got cold quickly once the sun fell behind the mountains, and the glass was icy under my fingers. Our room looked out on a small patch of grass and a cluster of redbrick buildings and squat adobe huts. It was too dark to see even the silhouettes of the mountains now, but in every direction but down I could see the stars. In vain, I searched for the familiar constellations Willi taught me—Hydra, Hercules, my favorites, Ursa Major and Minor—but could find no recognizable patterns. Perhaps we were not merely in a different country, but on a new planet, in a new universe.

  Twenty-seven

  That first morning in our own rooms, I woke shivering with cold. Sunlight burned through the naked windows, waking me, while beside me my parents slept on, as if unwilling to open their eyes to our new Bolivian lives. I pressed an ear against my mother’s back, listening to the air inflate her lungs, wishing I could feel her ribs vibrating with melody, the way they used to. She was so quiet.

  At last, unable to go back to sleep, I climbed again from our nest of coats.

  “There’s fruit on the table,” my mother murmured before turning over.

  There wasn’t fruit on the table. There wasn’t even a table. The table she imagined was home, in Vienna, where a china bowl always overflowed with plums, cherries, and apples. In a corner of our floor was only tea, instant coffee, a can of powdered milk, and a flat loaf of bread Mathilde had made. But I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t get hungry here like I did in Austria, with that ravenous empty feeling. My stomach felt constantly full, though often with air. In these mountains, we inflated like balloons.

  I walked past Mathilde and Fredi’s door, padded down the stairs, and stepped outside, shielding my eyes. In front of the house I saw a small boy with shaggy dark hair squatting in the rutted, empty street, tossing pebbles into the dust.

  He looked up at me and grinned. “¿Eres una de los blanquitos que viven arriba, no?” I stared at him uncomprehendingly. While I had learned a few words and phrases of Spanish in my first couple of weeks, I still struggled to understand. He had a flat nose and a scar on his lower lip. His short-sleeved white shirt was carelessly buttoned, so that it hung unevenly over his dark trousers. “¿Cómo te llamas?” When I remained silent, he said. “¿No hablas español?” I shook my head. He sighed and tossed another pebble, striking a larger rock in front of him. “Mira,” he commanded.

  Not recognizing the word but knowing the tone all too well, I walked over and squatted in the dirt beside him. He dropped a dusty stone into my palm and pointed at the rocks laid out in front of us. It wasn’t long before I caught on to the rules, and we played his nameless rock game until my mother finally woke and called me in for breakfast.

  The boy stood to watch me disappear inside, looking disappointed. He was shorter than I was, with sturdy little legs and a wide torso. When I turned back to wave at him he brightened and grinned. “¡Chau kantutita!”

  Kantutita, I echoed as I climbed the stairs to our rooms. What a pretty word.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE BOY’S NAME, I soon learned, was Miguel, and I was grateful he was willing to play with me, given that he had no shortage of playmates. In the three rooms downstairs, he lived with five siblings. His two older brothers, thirteen and fifteen, were in a different school from Miguel and not often around. His little sisters were two, three, and seven. Miguel was ten, nearly my age.

  Our second morning, I sat on the front step waiting until Miguel emerged. When he and his younger sisters tumbled through their door, arguing about something I could not understand, I sprang to my feet. “¿Marraqueta?” My father had given me a coin to buy us breakfast. I wasn’t sure how much it was worth or what it would buy.

  Miguel looked at me. “¿Tienes hambre?” He turned to go back into his home, as if to get me some of his own food.

  “No!” I extended my arm, showing him the coin. “I want to buy them.” My words were German but the coin spoke for me.

  “Ah. Momentito.” He turned to his sisters, ordering them back into the house before waving an arm down the road. We walked in silence two blocks to the right and one to the left before I saw a woman sitting outside a small shop in front of a massive sack of rolls. Behind her, the mountains again. Everywhere the mountains.

  “Miguel? How many?” I held the coin out. He took it from my palm and gave it to the woman.

  “Siete, por favor.”

  Siete por favor, I whispered to myself.

  The woman dug large, calloused hands into her bag and handed me seven rolls without speaking. Not having brought a basket of my own, I folded up the hem of my skirt to carry them.

  “Gracias,” said Miguel.

  “Gracias,” I echoed.

  Walking back I was bursting with questions I could not voice. How much money was that coin worth? How did people here make money? Where was the school? Where could we find fruit? My ignorance made me ashamed.

  “Miguel?” I pulled a roll from my bag and offered it to him. “Marraqueta? Marraqueta, gracias.”

  When he wasn’t at school, Miguel flew from his door whenever I returned from a walk with my mother or father and invited me to play with him and his siblings. I didn’t understand their words or games at first, but Miguel was patient with me, using chalk to scribble on bits of pavement, exaggerating his pronunciation until I said a word correctly. When I got something right he would brighten and say, “Bien hecho, kantuta!”

  He and his sisters—Ema, Nina, and Celia—absorbed me into their games, asking no difficult questions. They never asked if I was a Jew. It was the first time in forever that someone treated me as an ordinary child.

  “Salta!” Miguel would cry, leaping from the front step. “Corre!” he called as he sprinted down the road and back. “Para!” He jerked to a halt in front of me.

  Their games were not so different from ours. They kicked balls. They raced toy cars they had fashioned out of empty Klim cans. They played something like hopscotch called thunka, which involved drawing squares on the streets with chalk and labeling them for the days of the week. On one foot, we hopped from Monday to Sunday, before kicking
the stone out of the squares. We borrowed a neighbor’s wheelbarrow to push each other around. Things I already knew how to do. Wheelbarrow in Spanish is carretilla and I loved the Spanish r’s, the way they skipped across my tongue. I loved the soft yuh of the double ll’s. I especially loved the eñe, that exceptional letter.

  My parents’ tongues rebelled against the Spanish r’s, their less flexible brains struggling to adapt. My mother often refused to speak anything other than German. It wasn’t long before I took over our negotiations at the shops, learning the words for flour, potato, rice, and the invaluable sentence: “That’s too expensive. We can’t pay that much.”

  When I finally knew enough to grasp the essence of Miguel’s questions, and he asked me why we came to Bolivia, I didn’t know where to start. Sitting in the dust in front of our house, I sent a rock skittering across the road.

  “Nowhere else would take us.”

  “But why did you have to leave where you are from?” He squatted in front of me, offering me another stone. We were playing thunka.

  “We’re Jewish.” I tossed the rock on Tuesday.

  Miguel frowned. “What is Jewish?”

  “It’s our religion.” One hop, two.

  “¿Entonces . . . ?” And so?

  “So . . . most people don’t like Jews over there.” I handed him the rock. He turned it over in his hands.

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. I had no answer. “Isn’t there anyone here people don’t like?”

  Miguel looked thoughtful. “I guess some people don’t like Indians very much,” he finally said.

  “Indians?” Keeping one foot off the ground, I remembered the things people had said on the ship about Indians. That they were dirty and strange, maybe violent.

  “You know, like the Aymara, the people from the highlands. From the lake. Or the Quechua. My father was Aymara, but he moved to Coroico to grow fruit and coca.” Intrigued by the idea of highlands, I overlooked his use of the past tense when describing his father. There were people living higher than La Paz? Not possible.

  “Why don’t people like the Indians?”

  He threw the rock and imitated my shrug. “Because we Indians were here first?”

  * * *

  • • •

  AT THE END of our second week in his house, Miguel took my mother and me to the market. Mathilde offered to take us, but I wanted to go with someone who would be able to explain things.

  “Miguel will know what things should cost,” I reasoned.

  “How will he tell us?” My mother wasn’t yet sure of Miguel. “I understand Mathilde.”

  “I understand him, Mutti. At least some of the time. He’s nice.” When the skin of her forehead did not relax, I continued. “Mutti. Would you want a French person to guide you around Austria?”

  * * *

  • • •

  AS MIGUEL AND I walked together, chattering and waving our hands, my mother followed silently behind. I wished she could be like she always had been with Anneliese: inviting, interested. Why couldn’t she at least try? I wanted her to be nice to my friend. I wanted her to try some Spanish words. For years she had been singing in Italian, French, and German. Spanish should have been easy.

  We passed little stores with battered signs reading TIENDA ANA MARÍA or TIENDA MARISABEL. Like every store was named after someone’s aunt. At the side of the street I saw a pile of something that looked remarkably like human excrement. “Is that—?”

  Miguel shrugged.

  I glanced back at my mother, hoping she would not see, that her views of Bolivia would not be made still darker. Yet I couldn’t suppress my own revulsion. It was hard to believe I would ever adjust to the fecal stink of the open sewers that ran along some of the streets. Paving stones glistened with urine and gobs of greenish spit. Every time we took a walk we returned covered with dust. I shared my mother’s horror at the lidless bin next to the toilet for discarded toilet paper. All that stained, festering paper sitting around in the open air. In Austria, bodily functions had been a private matter. But here, we were continually confronted with our animal reality.

  A quarter of an hour after we set out, the Mercado Camacho opened before us. Row after row of woven blankets spread on the ground displayed vegetables, fruit, coca leaves, and maize as well as many things I didn’t recognize. Selling these things were the people Miguel called Indians, who were mostly Aymara like his father. They included the cholitas, those many-skirted women with the long braids and bowler hats. Busily they stacked their earth-crusted potatoes and cucumbers for our inspection, babies strapped to their backs with brightly colored cloth Miguel called aguayo. The babies stared at me over their mothers’ shoulders with round, brown eyes.

  They had come from the semitropical Yungas Valley or from the plains around Lake Titicaca to sell their produce in La Paz. Their men wore thick woolen ponchos and hats with flaps that came down over their ears. In their hands they carried pouches of green coca leaves. Their calloused feet were nearly bare in sandals that appeared to be fashioned from automobile tires.

  I stopped in front of a display of mangoes and other fruits, amazed to discover so many unfamiliar shapes. There were lumpy green fruits that Miguel called chirimoyas, little round guavas with pink flesh inside, like the ones I had seen in the port of La Guaira, Venezuela, where our ship had stopped on our way here, and gourd-shaped papayas. “Mutti, look!” I reached for a pearlike yellow fruit.

  “Membrillo,” Miguel told us. I shook my head. Not a word I recognized. “And here, maracuyás. Good, but sour.” He pursed his lips so I would understand the word.

  The vegetables were less exciting; carrots, peppers, tomatoes, and garlic were all familiar. I stopped again, however, when I saw the rough green skins of what I now know are avocados, looking to Miguel for explanation.

  “Palta,” he said. He spoke to the woman selling them and she cut one open for me to see. The inside was creamy and green. With her knife, the woman sliced a bit of the flesh for me to taste.

  The buttery smoothness on my tongue was a revelation. After that initial encounter, I bought them every time we could afford them. My favorite lunch was an avocado with a spoon to scoop out its insides. I felt I could never again live anywhere that did not grow avocados.

  “If we ever have a garden, I want to grow an avocado tree!”

  Miguel laughed. “You think these grow in La Paz?” Almost all the palta, all of the fruit, came to La Paz from the hot, wet lowlands, he explained. Mostly from around Coroico, a village in Los Yungas. They came to La Paz on trucks, or on the backs of men. I wondered if I would ever see these distant jungles, mythical sources of water and oxygen.

  My mother shopped cautiously, purchasing only fruit with peels that she scrubbed with vigor and rinsed with boiled water in the hope that any contamination would not seep inside. Allowing Miguel to negotiate her purchases, she carefully selected plátanos, which looked like bananas but were starchy and bland; tamarindos, which came in brown pods; tuna (cactus fruit with prickly skin); and mangoes, fruits that were either a luxury or unheard of in Vienna.

  As we wandered through the market, we passed men sitting at street corners, playing music on sets of wooden pipes. The women, it seemed, did most of the selling.

  I couldn’t stop staring at their faces, so flat and alien. They stared back at me. What did I look like to them? I wondered. Was my pale face frightening or just strange? Was my orange hair ugly to them? Did they find the lack of color in our clothing a sign of dullness? I wanted to know.

  Behind a table spread with potatoes was a girl with skin darker than Miguel’s and black plaits hanging to her waist. Her eyes too were darker than Miguel’s, so black I couldn’t find the border of her pupils. She wore a fringed shawl of turquoise cloth around her shoulders. My mother ran her hands over the potatoes as if they were valuable gems. While we had always thought
of potatoes as white, here they were yellow and blue and orange. I couldn’t take my eyes off the girl.

  “Soy Orly,” I said, offering her my hand. She stared at me, arms by her sides. “¿Cómo te llamas?”

  She looked uneasily at the older woman beside her. Her mother? “No mucho español,” she finally said.

  “Yo tampoco.” Me neither. I smiled. “Estoy aprendiendo. ¿Qué idioma hablas?” I was mystified as to why this clearly Bolivian person did not speak Spanish. I still hadn’t learned the history of this country, that Spanish was not its native tongue but that of its brutal conquerors. I looked around for Miguel, but he and my mother had walked on ahead.

  The girl was silent.

  Pressing both hands to my chest I tried again. “Soy Orly.” She smiled shyly, and pressing her hands to her own chest, she answered, “Soy Nayra.”

  “Mucho gusto.” I reached out to touch her hand, but she jerked back, fear in her eyes.

  “Orly!” My mother called, realizing I hadn’t followed her and Miguel to the poultry.

  “Lo siento,” I said, tilting my head to convey my apology. “Tengo que ir. Mi madre. Me voy! Hasta luego!” Across the market I flew until my mother caught my hand in hers, anchoring me to her side.

  “Miguel, what language do the potato ladies speak?”

  He laughed. I must have said it wrong. “Aymara.”

  “Do you know it?”

  “Of course. From my father.”

  “Can you teach me?” I augmented my halting Spanish with gestures.

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. I wanted to explain more, but I just didn’t have all the words yet.

  We examined the chickens. A city girl, I was unaccustomed to watching animals be slaughtered. For me, meat had always come in bloody packages from the butcher. But at the Camacho Market, the food was still alive. Chickens and ducks fluffed their wings in cages, and fish swam in tanks. When Miguel bought a chicken for his family, a cholita sliced off its head right in front of us.