The tallest one of the three, whose clothes looked a little cleaner, moved closer to the counter. “Buenos días, niña,” he answered. “We’re looking for señora Weisz. Is she here?”
“What is this about?”
“Actually, we’d like to tell the señora ourselves if you don’t mind.”
“If this is about David Weisz, I’m his daughter.”
“Is your mama here?”
“She’s sleeping. She was up half the night when Papa didn’t come home. I’d rather not wake her.”
The man’s shoulders slumped slightly. “Well then, niñita, let me write a name down for you.” Sara handed him a piece of paper and a pencil, and after smoothing the paper on the counter’s wooden surface next to the old cash register, the man began to write. “This is the lawyer who has agreed to defend your father in court,” he explained. “His case will be heard the day after tomorrow. Your mama should go to this man’s office, at the address I’m writing here, later this afternoon if possible. Please give this paper to your mama when she gets up.”
For about a month Papa stayed in jail while the lawyer fought to get him out. There were stories in the newspaper and pictures of Papa being brought in handcuffs before the judge, looking thinner and thinner every day. Mama tried to get in to see him and take him some food, but the police refused. Sara did not go back to school, and at night the only way her mama could sleep was if Sara made her some chamomile tea and then rubbed her back for hours.
When she thought back to those days, what Sara remembered most was the fragrance of chamomile and how it combined with the smell of newsprint on her hands from reading the latest about her father. Only after workers and peasants held a large demonstration in the central plaza calling for Papa’s release did the judge finally hear his case. The following day, as she was adding chamomile flowers to the boiling water for tea, Sara looked up to see her father standing in the doorway. He was so thin that his clothes hung on his body, and there were deep circles under his eyes. As she stepped forward into his open arms, the sweet chamomile wafted up and mixed with the sour jail smell coming off Papa’s clothes. It was so much stronger than before, because he had been in jail for so long without washing. Never again would Sara be able to smell chamomile tea without feeling sick.
Yet if it hadn’t been for Papa’s jailhouse adventure, Sara had to admit, Antonia Painemal, the young Mapuche girl, would never have come to live with them. Tonia, as they called her, was not from the community fighting the German farmer. Her mother, who was, had followed Mapuche custom and gone to live in her husband’s community. It was Tonia’s grandparents, old friends and comrades of David Weisz, who had asked him to take Tonia in.
Although they were the same age, Tonia was a full head taller and much stronger than Sara. At first it was hard to communicate because Tonia didn’t speak good Spanish, and the Weisz family could not speak the Mapuche language. When Sara mentioned this to Tonia years later, and said they had been like immigrants trying to communicate with each other, Tonia corrected her. “I was the only one there who wasn’t an immigrant,” she said.
Sara wasn’t sure she liked Tonia at first. The house was small, so she ended up having to share her bedroom with her. And she didn’t even know how to use a knife and fork properly. Then, a few days after Tonia came to live with them, Sara found her coming into the shop from the garden in the back.
“What were you doing?” she asked, using her hands to try and mimic her question. Tonia looked puzzled for a moment, then made the motion of lifting her skirt and squatting down.
“Pee,” she said.
“Where?” Sara asked.
Instead of answering, Tonia took her hand and led her into the back garden, to a corner under the orange tree. She pointed to a wet spot, and laughed softly. “There,” she said.
In the unexpected intimacy of that moment, for the first time Sara saw things from Tonia’s point of view. She knew the Mapuche were poor; her papa had told her that. But now she realized they must not have bathrooms. Torn from her family, stuck in a strange place, Tonia had never used a toilet before.
Sara brought Tonia back into the house and opened the door to the bathroom that was next to the kitchen. She walked in, made the motion of lifting her skirt and pulling down her underwear, and sat on the toilet seat. After making the motions of using toilet paper, she stood up, mimicked lifting up her underwear and smoothing down her skirt, and flushed. “There,” she said. “Bathroom.”
From then on they could talk about anything. As Tonia learned more Spanish and Sara a few words in the Mapuche language, they gradually stopped having to act things out. They understood each other so well that, as time went by and they grew older, sometimes they did not have to use words in either language.
When Sara finally returned to the German school, Tonia stayed at the tailor shop and helped out with the sweeping and cooking. At the end of her first week, when every day she came back to the shop to find her friend working, Sara decided to ask her papa about it. After changing out of her uniform, she went into his sewing room and stood near his pedal machine. He was concentrating so hard that at first he didn’t notice her.
“Papa,” she said softly. Startled, he looked up at her over his half-moon glasses. His red hair was standing on end.
“Oh. Sarita. I didn’t hear you come in.”
Sara moved closer, putting her hand on his shoulder. She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, at the edge of where his beard began. “Papa,” she said, “I was wondering. Why doesn’t Tonia go to school?”
Papa took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Well, Sarita,” he began, “you must know that Tonia can’t go to your school. They don’t accept Mapuches there.”
“I know, Papa, they hardly accept me because I’m Jewish. But there’s lots of other schools in Temuco.”
“You’re right, sweetness. But Tonia never went to school before, and I don’t think her parents want her to.”
“Why not?”
“Well, it’s hard to explain, and I don’t understand it completely myself. You remember when we talked, before I went to help the community with the land invasion, about what had happened to the Mapuche? They’re a proud people, Sarita, and they still remember when they were independent. Tonia’s grandparents, their generation … well, they grew up before the Chileans conquered them. They have a different way of explaining the world, and they taught this to their children and their children’s children. Especially to the girls, because when they grow up they teach the next generation. The Mapuche don’t want their children learning foreign things.”
“But Papa, she’s living here now. That’s foreign.”
“You’re right, Sarita. And to be honest, I’m teaching her things.”
“Like what?”
“Sewing. How to use my machine. But I’m also teaching her to read.”
“That’s good, Papa. She should know how to read. But now I’m even more confused than before.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, if her parents don’t want her to learn foreign things, why didn’t they just keep her at home? Why did they send her to Temuco?”
“A very good question, Sarita. I’m not really sure, but I think it was because she got very sick.” He then turned back to his machine, signaling to Sara that the conversation was over.
As time passed, the reason behind Tonia’s presence in their house remained a mystery. Sara tried to bring it up once or twice, but Tonia would always change the subject. And then there were the dreams. Some nights Tonia churned up the sheets and moaned, talking in gibberish, screaming or roaring once in a while and waking Sara up over and over. The mornings after were the hardest, and during the day at school Sara could barely keep her head up off her desk.
One night, Tonia seemed in great pain. She was not thrashing or screaming, just moaning and crying quietly. Sara went over to her and placed a hand on her shoulder. “Tonia,” she whispered. “Are you all right? Please wake up.”
Tonia’s dark brown eyes fluttered open. “Sara,” she breathed. Sara took her hand.
“Are you all right?” she asked, smoothing the other girl’s sweat-drenched hair back from her forehead. “You don’t seem to have a fever.”
Tonia closed her eyes and let out a sigh. “I’m not ill,” she said. “At least not that you can cure.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a Mapuche thing. Sometimes, when a person has the gift, or the mark, a spirit comes to live inside her head.”
“How come? What does that mean?”
“Ay, Sarita, the mark … it never goes away. My mama tried everything, but nothing worked. That’s why she sent me here, to get away from Kuku, but she still comes to me in dreams.”
“Who, your mama?”
“No, Kuku, my grandmother. She was a great machi and it’s her spirit. Mama said that Kuku died of grief after the Chileans took away our land. Now Kuku comes to me at night and scolds me for running away.”
“What’s a machi?”
“It’s someone who can hear the spirit world. My mama said Kuku wanted to give me her spirit and make me a machi, but it was too hard. An old man in our community with grizzly hair is a machi and offered to teach me, but he charged a lot of money my parents didn’t have.”
“So that’s why they sent you here?”
“Yes. But Kuku found me.”
“So what do we do now?”
“Please don’t tell anyone, Sara. I don’t want to go home.”
“But are you going to be all right?”
“As long as I don’t get sick, I’ll be all right. Sometimes, when the machi spirit gets really angry, it makes you sick. For now, though, it’s all right. Just don’t tell anyone, okay?”
The secret made them closer, because now they shared something no one else knew. They were like sisters, Tonia said, under the skin. The sister neither of them had.
When the war heated up in Europe, many Germans in Temuco went public with their support for Hitler. From one day to the next, the girls at school began to laugh at Sara, insult her, push her into walls. “Jew,” they whispered under their breath, and then crinkled up their noses as if she smelled bad. One day she tried fighting back, but the teacher sent her to the headmistress, saying it was her fault. The old, fat principal, the ruddy web of capillaries on her nose and cheeks clashing with the sky-blue color of her eyes, shook her three chins in disgust.
“Our school is built on tolerance,” she said in her heavy German accent, “but even reasonable people have limits. I know about your parents, their Jewish Communist ways; but you can’t bring that in here. You will not talk back to the other girls, insulting their beliefs. You will do your work quietly and respectfully. Remember that you are in this school exclusively thanks to our generosity and good will.”
That was the same day she’d taken her special doll to school in her bookbag. At the end of the day, when she put on her coat, her doll’s newly bald head peeked out from the top of her bag and she could see the star of David carved into her scalp. “Jew,” they spat at her. Somewhere deep inside she felt something break.
After she got home and closed the door to her room, she could not come back out. Her mama and papa knocked. What happened, they asked. Are you sick? But she couldn’t answer them. Her mama finally opened the door and came in.
“What happened, m’hijita?” she asked, placing her hand on Sara’s back. But Sara could only lie there, on her stomach. Although she felt the tears wetting the pillow, she wasn’t sobbing. She felt paralyzed. She couldn’t say or do a thing. She could see the pieces of herself laid out on the bed, in the wrong order. She couldn’t put them back together.
After waiting for an answer, and gently rubbing a hand back and forth across her shoulders, Mama finally left the room, closing the door gently. Sara could hear Mama and Papa whispering on the other side, then their footsteps retreating. After the door opened again and Tonia came in, Sara realized that they had gone to ask her for help.
Only Tonia understood. Sara didn’t say anything to her, not a word. But when Tonia put her hands on Sara, she knew. When she rubbed softly at the knot under her shoulder blades, then moved her large hands up to massage her scalp, could Tonia feel the Star of David that was carved there? Every night, after Mama and Papa went to bed, Tonia ran her large hands from Sara’s head, along her shoulders and down her spine, kneading out the pieces of her sorrow and putting her back together. Then she was able to sleep. She didn’t know how many days had passed when she finally opened the door. In a few weeks she was even able to go back to school.
When she came home that first day, Tonia was at the counter of the tailor shop.
“Everything go all right?” she asked.
Sara nodded. “But it’s so strange,” she said. “It’s like everyone else belongs to a different country, and I’m a foreigner there. When they look at me the expression on their faces makes me feel like the old prejudice about Jews is true, and I must have horns growing out of my head.”
“I know what you mean,” Tonia said. “I feel like that all the time when I leave the shop. People look at me in the street like I don’t belong.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“In my case it’s because I’m Mapuche. I do look different, and besides, my mama keeps sending me these clothes to wear that make it even more obvious.” Tonia laughed, looking down at her colorful apron, her hand reaching up to check the kerchief she wore over her long braids.
“And in my case,” Sara said, “it’s because I’m Jewish.”
“Do you look different, too?”
“Well, I’m shorter and darker than the other girls. Although, looking at my papa, it’s clear that not all Jews are short and dark.”
“But the other girls at the school won’t think about that.”
“Why not?”
“When people see you’re different, they don’t think about you in the same way. They don’t care.”
After that it was easier for Sara to get up in the morning and face the German girls at school. She knew her sister would be waiting for her at home. Tonia’s love was the amulet she needed to protect herself. Together they were safe on an island in the middle of a dangerous sea.
The year they turned fifteen, Tonia got sick. At first her dreams got longer and more frequent, but pretty soon she began running a fever and refusing to eat. Mama tried the home remedies she remembered from Odessa, chicken soup, plus various concoctions with raw eggs that turned Sara’s stomach. Even her papa’s old friend Dr. González, who had delivered her, came by to help. But nothing, not even cold baths, brought the fever down. And there was nothing they could do for the chills, the dreams, the crackling of her bones.
“There’s nothing else, compadre,” Sara overheard Dr. González whisper to her father outside the door one day. “I think it’s time you took her home.” When her papa hired a truck for the journey back to Tonia’s community, Sara sat for a long while next to the bed, holding her hand.
“I’m sorry, lamien,” she said, using the Mapuche word for sister. “I broke my promise.”
Tonia looked at her with fever-shimmering eyes. “Oh no you didn’t,” she croaked. “I said only if I didn’t get sick, remember? Kuku just got too angry.”
Papa came in and wrapped Tonia up in a large blanket. Sara watched through the blur of her tears as he picked her up in his arms like a small puppy. She’d been ill so long in their house that she was nothing but skin and bones.
A gash opened up in Sara’s life then, a before-and-after that would not heal. She refused to go back to school. Without Tonia’s comforting presence, her mind sometimes traveled to a parallel world where angry spirits shrunk loved ones to a third of their original size. In this world, Jews got their heads shaved and stars of David carved into their scalps. Being a Jew meant that the pieces of your being got separated from one another, sent to different locations as soap, lamp shades, or gold fillings taken fr
om your teeth. Being a Jew meant that your family was killed for no reason except that they were Jews. Her mama and papa’s migration through Istanbul, their foggy story of love and survival, lost any vestige of romance in the world unfolding before her. Her mama, huddled in the Istanbul fog, was nothing more than her family’s only survivor from the Odessa pogrom. Her papa, no longer a dashing, pipe-smoking suitor who swept her mama off her feet, was a scared working-class kid alone in the world. This harsh world had always been there, Sara realized, and it spared no one.
1948
When Samuel first came into the tailor shop, a shy, plump, slightly greasy young man, Sara took pity on his desire for her. He smelled of the yeast he used in his bake shop. After putting the offending item of clothing on the counter between them, he would take a thick roll of bills out of the right pocket of his pants and, not able to look her in the face while he talked, whisper what he needed: a button replaced, a seam repaired. Then he threw the money down on the counter and ran out of the store. Sometimes she ran after him, in his yeasty wake, just to return the extra money he left among the folds of his clothes. But he was long gone, surprisingly swift for such a pudgy creature.
It took him a long time to gather up his courage to ask her out, and even then he stammered so hard she could barely understand him. It took him so long to get the words out, it was as if the weekend went by while she was waiting. He couldn’t look her in the face but stood staring down at his hands, the left one still clutching the shirt he’d brought in that day, the wad of bills glistening with sweat in his right fist. She put her hand over his fist and waited for him to look up. The minutes dragged by. Finally his gaze came up slowly, fear vibrating in the green irises of his eyes. She waited just a second for their eyes to lock. “I’m free on Sunday right after lunch,” she said. “I love to walk in the park and eat peanuts.”
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