Yet questions were all I had left. When I asked her if Willi would find us, if I would see Anneliese again, if we would ever return home, my mother only laced her fingers through mine and turned her face to the window.
I fell silent, rubbing the bit of Lebkuchen’s dirty fluff between my fingers until it disintegrated.
* * *
• • •
WHEN I TRAVEL from one city to another, I can’t help but see connections between the two places. For me, Vienna and Genoa are irrevocably linked, not only by my presence in both cities in 1939, but by the scent of coffee and butter drifting from the doors of cafés, by the glazed Falstaffs in bakery windows, and by thick, warm chocolate. I saw faces on the streets in both places I was sure I recognized. The church bells rang in the same key.
Other than those things conjured by my own circumstances, the cities are utterly different. Genoans moved to a softer, more arrhythmic beat. In April, the sun had already gained the heat of spring. People looked at me, at my face, and smiled. Some of the older women paused to pat my cheek. Perhaps they did not know that I was Jewish. In Genoa, I was freer than I had been in years. I could taste things with every part of my body, my tongue, my fingers, my ears—the wind off the harbor, the clouds, the voices of the grocers calling to their customers.
I could almost convince myself we were on holiday as I wandered through the pretty streets listening to the strains of opera drifting out of the open door of a café. I could almost convince myself we were on holiday—if I never looked at the faces of my parents.
We had to wait three days for our ship, the Proteus. But there were Jews in Genoa, Jews willing to feed us noodles in strange green sauces and put us to sleep in their attics.
Walking at last to the harbor, I took my parents’ hands, remembering how they used to swing me between them when I was small. Ein, zwei, drei! And up I would sail, my feet reaching for the sky. I wished I were small again. I wished their arms were strong enough to hold me up.
When we emerged from the warren of little streets into open air and were confronted with the harbor, with the water itself, I ran forward, searching the horizon. But nothing was there. Just a flat, misty grey that stretched on forever, interrupted by the silhouettes of hundreds and thousands of boats of every conceivable shape and size. It was impossible to get a sense of the size of the ocean itself. I looked along the edge of the city, listening to the water flop against the concrete, searching for the sandy beaches I had read so much about, but they did not exist. The harbor was cluttered with buildings, noisy, and populated mostly by shouting men. The line of palm trees along the shore awed me with their exotic height, their feather-duster tops.
When I looked back up at the city behind us, I saw that it was surrounded by the greenest of mountains, a series of gentle peaks that held all of the city and port in their embrace. The appearance of those mountains lifted me as my parents arms once had, gave me hope for a peaceful life.
White-haired men sat out on the decks of small boats, their bare feet dangling over the water. I wondered where all of the boats were going, where they had all come from. It comforted me to know that we were not the only people on the move. That there were families taking to the sea even when they didn’t have to go.
Beyond the seawalls, ocean stretched in every direction, rippling eternally outward. I had thought the sea would be blue or green or even teal, but it was a dull slate-grey. As if even it were weary. “Why can’t you see what’s on the other side from here?” I asked my parents. “Why can’t we see Bolivia?”
“It’s not on the coast, Orly. Also, it’s a very big sea,” my father answered, gazing out at the horizon. “A very, very big sea.”
I followed his gaze. “Will Willi find us there, Vati?”
He glanced at my mother and back to me. “I hope he will.”
“If not,” my mother said, “we will return for him.”
My father fell silent and the three of us stood there for a long moment, faces to the wind.
Now, we walked all the way down to the Stazione Marittima, across from the beautiful Miramare Hotel. Long before we reached the ship, we could see it looming over the harbor, shrinking every other vessel in its vicinity. Its bulk dwarfed even the hills around us, its profile rising above them. It looked too big for the port, too big to be anywhere except in the middle of the ocean. The name Proteus was scrawled across its side. My father said he thought Proteus was the name of a sea god who could change shape at will. “Like the sea itself.” I thought that was a good omen. That the god of the sea would be looking after us, keeping us safe. Conveniently, I forgot how temperamental the gods could be.
As we stood below the Proteus waiting to board, I felt a tightness in my lungs. It was cold by the water and the winds whipped my braids across my face. This monstrously oversized boat was going to take us away, to a place that was nothing more to me than an unanswered question. I watched my mother check her coat pockets for our tickets three times as we stood waiting to board, watched my father fold his arms around his viola case as though it were an infant needing to be soothed. I touched the packet of letters I had been writing to Anneliese on scraps of discarded newspaper and carton since we left home, tucked deep into my pocket.
* * *
• • •
LIKE ALICE IN WONDERLAND, I grew smaller and smaller. I felt myself dwindling to a speck, a bit of dirt being brushed off the sleeves of Europe. As if the sound of my mother’s voice, my father’s viola, had not made it more beautiful. As if we were the ones who had brought fear and hatred to the Continent.
“Orlanthe?” My mother looked back abruptly, as if she had lost track of me. “Come, Liebchen.” I caught her arm, pressing it tightly against me as we stepped forward.
* * *
• • •
I HAD NEVER been on a ship. I had hardly traveled anywhere except to Graz and the Austrian countryside. Standing on the deck of the Proteus felt like a metaphor for everything. For the rocking of my world, the sway of solidity under me, the sickening churn of my insides. I probably didn’t know the word “metaphor” back then, but I knew the feeling. “We are going to be safe,” I reminded myself. “This ship will take us somewhere we will be safe.”
My parents had told me that going on the ship would be an adventure. That’s what my mother always told me anytime I faced something unpleasant or difficult. “Think of it as an adventure,” she would say on trips to the dentist or on an exhaustingly long walk.
I didn’t particularly feel the need for adventure. I had had no dearth of adventure. Yet I was still young, still resilient, and I still believed in the power of my parents to save me.
* * *
• • •
WE DIDN’T HAVE any possessions to store in our dormitory room, and so the three of us stood leaning against the rails, looking back on land. With a roar, the engines shuddered to life beneath our feet and the whistle blew low and long. The few who had lingered on board to bid farewell to loved ones hurried tearfully back down the gangplank, clutching their hats to their heads against the wind. As we moved off our moorings into the water, I half expected to see battalions of brown-shirted men rushing to the seafront to stop us. Or to hear the crack of gunfire. But all I saw were a few handkerchiefs in the waving crowds, the jumble of pastel buildings, and a light mist covering our wake.
My fingers on the metal bars grew cold in the wind. My mother’s arms encircled me from behind, her long, thin fingers next to mine on the railings. A crush of passengers filled the deck around us, but I felt protected in my mother’s embrace. I felt her inhalation, her chest pressing against my back even through our worn wool coats, too warm for an Italian April. Then her voice at my ear, softly at first, her breath stirring my hair so it tickled. Like a lullaby. Leb’ wohl mein Leben. Farewell my life. My Austria, my Europe, my land. Mein Sohn. Somewhere behind us was my brother. I knew she was thinking
of Willi. She sang as though she were putting our old life to sleep until a distant day when it would be safe for it to awaken. Her voice grew stronger as we moved around the seawalls and oceanward, but the rumble of the ship was so loud I don’t think anyone but me could hear her. Her voice soared upward and outward, alone in the air, and I could feel her heart go with it.
Twenty-five
Several lifetimes passed before we landed in Arica, Chile. Friendships were formed on board and lost in new ports. Books were devoured and traded away. I practiced my breaststroke when the pool wasn’t too full. We borrowed a Spanish textbook to teach ourselves a few words. The waiters, evidently not intimidated by our numbers, told us they pitied the country that would take us in.
As we neared Chile, I stayed on the top deck, eager for the first glimpse of land. I wanted to absorb and touch all the things I had seen only in glimpses from various ports: palm trees, exotic fruits, Indians. On the ship we heard many rumors about Bolivia. “It’s the most backward country on earth,” my shipboard friend Volkmar’s German mother told mine. “It’s almost entirely Indians.” Venezuela was much more advanced, she said. Every country in South America was advanced compared with Bolivia.
“Perhaps we won’t have to be there for long.” My mother had looked worried, although no more so than she usually did these days.
I missed Volkmar, who had been a near-constant companion between Italy and La Guaira, Venezuela, where he and his mother had disembarked. Together we had collected books other passengers had already read, sprawled on the deck to turn their pages, and goaded each other to climb up a ladder on the outside of the ship to sneak into the cinema in First Class. Without him I was restless and bored. It had turned hot and the air clung to me.
A whole month we had been at sea. In my old life, a month flitted by. But the past month seemed as long as my previous eleven years. I had met hundreds of other refugees, eaten strange Italian food, and shared a bathroom with twelve women. I had washed out my underwear in the sink at least thirty times and cut my hair in frustration over the knots. It seemed impossible to me that I had ever skipped gaily to school with Anneliese, worried about a history test, or had a bathtub of my own. That Viennese girl had become a stranger. But what had replaced her? I would find out, I supposed, when we arrived in Bolivia.
We were waiting on deck when rocky bluffs emerged from the sea before us. The sky turned all to light. As we drew closer, I trembled with the anticipation of putting a foot down on a stable surface. I could already see a link between this world and the one we had departed a month ago: palm trees. I assumed that meant there would be plenty in Bolivia. Before us stretched an infinity of sand. At last, I was to step onto the beaches I had imagined, even if this wasn’t yet Bolivia. The ship seethed with activity as the sailors prepared for arrival and we squinted into the relentless sun. I wondered if it would ever be winter here. If we would be able to both swim and ski, as we had done in Austria.
A moment later we were standing on the earth of a new continent.
Once ashore, we waited in clusters to be told where to go, feeling awkward and hot in our dresses, hats, and shoes in the middle of the beach. My mouth was dry, my lips cracked and sore. All around us men joked with each other in Spanish, laughing and hauling luggage. I looked longingly at the sea, wanting to throw myself fully dressed into the waves. To be clean again, of all of it. Sweat seeped through my dirty dress and torn stockings and made me itch.
At last a woman came to lead us to a nearby army barracks, where we were to sleep in a large hall lined with beds. An organization called La Sociedad de Protección a los Inmigrantes Israelitas, La Paz (SOPRO), funded by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, had arranged for us and nearly a hundred other refugees to stay there until our train the next day. Feeling indulgent, my parents allowed me to strip off my stockings and run barefoot in the sand. I waded into the water, delirious with its caress, taking another step farther every time my parents looked away. I reached down to touch it with my hands, licking my fingers to taste the salt.
The village was small, with a church and clusters of low houses with curiously flat roofs. A woman at the barracks served us all bowls of soup and small bread rolls.
We had just one night in Arica before boarding the train for La Paz. “Don’t eat too much on the way up,” the army commander who ran the barracks told us. “It will be better for you if there is nothing in your stomach when you arrive.”
* * *
• • •
IT TOOK MORE than two days for the locomotive to heave its way up the Andes with its load of refugees and Bolivians, all of us sharing wooden benches that bruised the bones of my bottom. At times, the train hardly seemed to be moving, inching its way up the arid slopes. The cliffs on either side were massive, steep, and bare. Many of our fellow passengers were various shades of brown. They smiled at me and said things in Spanish or another language I wish I understood. I could not remember ever having been on a train with so many smiling people. Nothing that the Nazis did with their mouths counted as a smile.
The train ground on, up and still farther up, until I wondered if we might actually pass through a cloud. I shivered in my winter coat. There was no heat on the train and it kept getting colder. I huddled close to my mother. The refugees around us began to get ill, some visibly and audibly, others quietly leaning their heads between their knees. None of us felt much like talking. I wasn’t sick, but I felt very tired. I curled into my mother’s lap and slept for much of the last day.
* * *
• • •
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, pressing my nose flat into the dusty window of the train, I found myself—at last!—face-to-face with the Andes. I had expected them to be green, not this dark red and grey. I had expected the grass and wildflowers of the Alps. In an entirely new way, it struck me how very far we were from everything we knew. Far from the city. Far from the Alps. Far from Austria’s scattered gentian and arnica, far from its chamois and stags. Far from the Vienna Woods, from the coffees, the canals, and the gardens. Far from Aunt Thekla and Anneliese. Far from Stefi, from the house where my mother and I were born. Far from a countryside and language we recognized. Far from the pavements scrawled with graffiti. Far from the Nazis. Far, most of all, from my brother.
We were nowhere I knew at all.
My breath became shallow and fast. When my parents spoke of Bolivia I had imagined something lush. I imagined wild horses and monkeys and alligators and llamas and parrots, as if these creatures could all coexist in the same place. Bolivia is home to all of these animals, but not all of them lived in the Altiplano—one of the highest plateaus in the world.
Still we were moving, up across a tabletop plain. It looked for an instant as if the train would plunge right off the edge of earth, into a vast emptiness and then—
La Paz. It appeared below us, a city of redbrick buildings and tin-roofed mud houses trickling down the sides of a bowl in the middle of the mountains. I stared and stared, my eyes going gritty and dry. These buildings were not grand or beautiful. This was not a city. Who had told us it was a city? This was a village. A large village in the middle of a valley on the moon.
There were no palm trees. There were hardly any trees at all. La Paz was not lush. It was dry and high and far from anything alive. As we had neared the plateau above the city, my nose began to bleed, the blood dripping through my fingers to stain my last dress. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said to my mother, bending over so the blood fell to the floor of the train.
My father, who had turned the bluish white of skimmed milk, silently passed me his handkerchief.
“Don’t be sorry,” my mother said. “None of this is your fault. None of this is any of our faults.”
As I watched the cluster of brick and mud that made up the city grow closer and closer, my mother vomited into her hat.
I could barely hear anything above the rattl
e and roar of the train. Again the ground was moving under my feet. Again I swayed above it. I wanted the earth to be still. I wanted something firm underneath me. I wanted an anchor.
Once we had rolled slowly to a stop, all three of us stumbled as we rose from our seats and started toward the doors. We had arrived somewhere after all. A few metal steps and then—
My feet touched the top of the world.
* * *
• • •
THIS COULD NOT be the same sky. This could not be the same earth.
My eyes burned. Never had I seen a sun so stark or felt such force. The sun back home had been a weak and benign presence that had to be coaxed out of the clouds. It touched us gently, stroked our hair, warmed our fingers. But the sun of La Paz was all naked aggression; I worried it would blind me. How could the sky be so bright when the air was so cold?
It took a moment for our eyes to take in the landscape—the city and the vast bowl that cradled it. There were jagged cliffs, deep canyons, and mountains in every direction. I could spend all day staring around and not absorb it all. What an odd place to build a city, in mountains so high, in air hardly thick enough to sustain life. It sprawled down the rough sides of a valley, as if a local deity had tripped on its way to more fertile ground and had spilled a bit of metropolis over the edge. I gazed across the crater of the city and up the range of naked peaks on the other side, to the snow-covered slopes of the most beautiful peak of all.
“What’s its name?” I asked, pointing to it.
My mother shook her head, but a small, dark man who had been sitting across from us on the train followed the direction of my finger. “Illimani,” he said. “Se llama Illimani.”
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