Exile Music

by Jennifer Steil

  “No. I looked in your house.” House. Our two bare rooms.

  “Then at the market I suppose. What is it?” Something must have happened. Could a telegram have arrived? News of Willi?

  “A ship burned.” The adults had given up trying to protect us from the relentless news of the war.

  My second foot hovered above the earth. “What ship?”

  “Orlita!” Miguel tossed his pebble at my foot. “Kantuta!”

  “The Orazio.”

  The Orazio. We had been waiting for the Orazio. Every time one of the families in our community expected someone on one of the ships, we all waited. Every family member was our family member. Every lost friend or relative was our lost friend or relative. Despite our vast social, cultural, and educational differences, our refugee status bound us. We passed around every bit of good news—a daughter found alive in Shanghai, a father who made it to the Dominican Republic—as we shared our favorite novels, with generosity and passion.

  I tried to remember who was expected on that ship. The Hirsches? The Rosenthals? The names scattered like dry leaves before my pursuit; I could not catch them.

  “All of the ship burned?”

  “It sank.”

  “¿Vas a jugar o simplemente estar allí como un flamenco?” Are you going to play or just stay there like a flamingo? Miguel and the others were growing impatient. Lowering my foot, I stepped out of the squares, away from their game. “Sorry, Miguel.”

  * * *

  • • •

  AS MATHILDE AND I walked up the slope to the market I thought about who might have been lost. Could Willi have been on that ship? But he would have let us know to expect him. Mathilde didn’t try to speak to me; she seemed far away, in her own mind.

  The market wasn’t crowded and it didn’t take long to find my mother. She was standing in front of Nayra’s vegetable stall, transfixed by a pile of blue potatoes. Since our first visit to the market, we had been loyal to Nayra and her potatoes. Often, I stayed behind to talk with her once my mother had moved on, though she was shy and reluctant to speak. Aymara people are private, Miguel said. They don’t trust white people. And why should they?

  “Hola Nayra, qué tal?” She nodded, a faint smile hovering on her lips. I touched my mother’s sleeve. “Mutti?”

  She turned toward me, her eyes still on the potatoes. “Do you think they are blue inside?” At the market, my mother spoke to everyone with her hands, preferring gestures to Spanish. When I went with her, everything went much faster.

  “I don’t know. Mutti, Mathilde says that the O—”

  “What would they say back in Vienna if we made blue latkes for Chanukah?”

  “They look good, Mutti, but—”

  “Julia.” Mathilde found her voice. “The Orazio.”

  My mother’s body rippled as if she’d felt an electric shock. Her eyes focused on Mathilde’s face for the first time. “What happened?”

  “It caught fire. There are still 104 missing.”

  “And who—?”

  “The Neufelds. Their son and daughter. And the Kahns were expecting her sister. I can’t remember who else.”

  “Not Willi?” Now I knew why Mathilde had been so anxious to find my mother.

  My mother shook her head. “He would have told us.” She turned to Nayra.

  “Fünf,” my mother said, holding up all the fingers of her right hand. Nayra nodded, plucked a handful of dirt-crusted potatoes from the stack, and placed them gently in my mother’s basket.

  “Un boliviano.” My mother held out a handful of money so that Nayra could pluck the correct coin from her palm.

  Clutching her basket to her chest like an infant, she turned toward Mathilde and they began walking toward home. With a small wave to Nayra, I followed.

  * * *

  • • •

  MY MOTHER AND I were making pancakes. I beat together eggs and flour in a pewter bowl while my mother mixed up pitchers of Klim. I was quiet. Listening. I hadn’t thought it possible for my mother to make Palatschinken without humming. She always hummed or even sang when we cooked together in Vienna. Now she moved around our small room with a silent, grim determination, slicing the apples as if they had insulted her personally.

  She hadn’t wanted to make the pancakes; it was my idea. I thought it would be a nice thing to make for the passengers of the Orazio—those who were left—when they finally arrived. After their injuries were treated in French and Italian hospitals, the survivors had been collected in Genoa once again and put onboard the Augustus. We expected them later today.

  For weeks we’d been planning the welcome party, funded by the Maccabi Sports Club and the Jewish Community Organization. Mathilde had come to our rooms to ask what we could contribute. She would be helping to make the Schnitzel.

  “I’d be happy to play,” my father said. “If you think that would be appropriate?”

  “Would you? Your quintet?”

  “I’ll ask.”

  “Julia?”

  My mother gazed out the window as if she hadn’t heard the question.

  I tried to think of the most special thing that we could do, something we knew how to do together, and I remembered that once, in a faraway land, we had made pancakes.

  “Mutti.” I touched her sleeve. “Could we make Palatschinken for the survivors?”

  My mother smiled faintly. “Here? It would be difficult.” My mother had shown little interest in cooking beyond what was necessary.

  “They’re pancakes, how can they be difficult? Besides, the other women are making difficult things. Austrian things. I’ll help. Please, Mutti?”

  In the end she couldn’t refuse to exert herself for a group of people whose suffering was greater than our own. Frau Gruber loaned us her widest frying pan and we rose early on the day of the party to start frying stacks and stacks of paper-thin pancakes over our kerosene burner.

  Next to my mother, I sprinkled cinnamon and sugar over the apples, stirred them over the flames, and spooned the puree into each pancake. In some of the pancakes we tucked a savory filling of salty Bolivian cheese and spinach (the Bolivian spinach had a bitter aftertaste, but it wasn’t bad if you mixed it with something else), and in the last batch we rolled a thick jam we made from tumbos and maracuyas.

  I tore a strip from a pancake in this last heap and popped it in my mouth. Sour and sweet spread across my tongue along with the buttery taste of my childhood. “Mmmm. Mutti, they’re perfect. They taste like home.”

  My mother took the piece I offered her, chewed, and frowned. “No,” she corrected me. “Not like home at all.”

  * * *

  • • •

  AS WE WAITED in the garden of the Finca Elma in Miraflores for our guests, I helped some of the other women with the food, turning the potatoes on the grill, tucking handmade sausages into rolls, and pouring beer. We brewed pot after pot of coca tea. My mother set out our plates of pancakes at the end of the table.

  The arrival of refugees was ordinarily a kind of holiday for us, for new people meant new friends added to our small colony, more lives saved from an ever more inhospitable Europe, and the hope of news. It was only later, when the refugees got their bearings and found confidants among us, that the darkest stories from home would emerge. Sometimes I wished I could erase these stories from my memory so that I would not lie awake at night imagining they had happened to Willi or my aunt Thekla. I needed to stay here, in the present, in the sun.

  The arrival of the survivors of the Orazio was different. Their hopes had already been stripped from them and shredded beyond recognition. When they began to file into the garden, our usual bustle and chatter dipped and silenced. Compulsively, irrationally, and with a stubborn optimism, I searched the crowd of faces for my brother’s curly head, listened for his familiar voice calling “Erdnuss!” Pale women passed
me, clutching the hands of small children as if they were all that bound them to this earth. Men of all shapes and sizes limped forward. Our mothers, an army of determined hostesses, moved toward them, thrusting forward their trays of food and mugs of foaming beer. Still unsteady on their feet, the new people took the food and drink but many just stood there holding it. The children were the first to begin, sitting on the ground with their plates and poking their potatoes with their forks. Chairs were brought forward and the newcomers sank gratefully into them. “Not too much beer your first week,” the mothers warned. “You’ll need time.”

  My mother didn’t bother to warn people about the beer. She had other concerns. With each plate she handed over, she had a question. “Have you come across someone named Willi Zingel? Have you heard anything at all?”

  No one had.

  * * *

  • • •

  I LOOKED AROUND the garden. I had never seen so many of us in one place. Hundreds of refugees milled around me, talking and eating. A tall woman in a long, silk dress stood to read a poem of welcome, urging us all to forget the past and turn our thoughts toward the battles ahead. Some of the children I knew from the Austrian Club performed skits. My father’s quintet began to play. I carried a plate of food to a black-haired girl who looked about my age. She was standing alone. Her right leg was noticeably thinner than her left. She smiled and carefully folded her legs underneath her on the grass before accepting the plate. The grass in La Paz was never comfortable. It was stiff and pokey, sticking into you through your clothing. It wasn’t like Austrian grass, so pliant and soft it was easily subdued. I sat down beside her and told her my name.

  “I’m Rachel,” she offered, in a voice so soft I had to lean toward her to hear it over the music. At the other end of the garden a group of children had begun to sing German hiking songs. She set the plate before her and seemed to admire its composition.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twelve.” My age. She didn’t look twelve. She was shorter than I was, small and narrow with sharp edges. When she finally looked up at me I saw her eyes were dark brown with starbursts of gold around her pupils.

  “Which ones are your parents?” Adults trampled the grass around us but no one obviously belonged to Rachel.

  She just shook her head, looking down to her plate.

  “I’m sorry.” What was wrong with me? I knew better. It was just that there were so few appropriate questions to ask. I pinched the skin of my thighs until my nails broke through the skin. “Rachel, I’m so sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

  She tried to smile at her plate. “My mother dropped me into a lifeboat. It had started to move down the ship’s side and it was the last one, and she just picked me up and she threw me over the railing. All that way. I nearly crushed a man.”

  “She threw you?” I tried to imagine my mother having the strength to toss me over the edge of a ship. I pictured Rachel falling, her bird bones failing to fly.

  Rachel nodded.

  “Were you hurt?”

  She nodded. “I fractured a leg. And the arm of the man who broke my fall. But we were lucky. Our boat didn’t sink. It almost capsized when we hit the water. The ocean got into it. Freezing ocean water. But we managed to steady it. Another boat got smashed against the side of the ship. There was nothing left of it at all.”

  Our own voyage suddenly seemed miraculously uneventful. I couldn’t think of what to say. “Your mother must have been strong.”

  She thought about this. She looked past me. Her eyes were glassy. “I think she was just desperate.”

  “Was it that leg?” I gestured to the thinner one.

  She nodded. “I just got the cast off, on the ship.”

  “Do you have somewhere to stay?”

  She looked around. “A lady has been looking after me. Eloise. She’s over there, with the hat.” I looked where she was pointing and saw a statuesque woman in a beribboned straw hat talking with the food servers. “She’s a friend of my mother’s. Was. She’s nice. I guess she’ll find us somewhere.”

  “Were you coming here to join someone? Do you have family here?” Now that so many of us were in Bolivia, many of the arrivals were expected by someone. Not us. No one expected us. But we were expecting Willi. Any day now we were expecting Willi.

  She shook her head. “It was just the only place that would take us.”

  “Us too.” We smiled at each other, bound by our undesirability.

  “Do you like it here? In La Paz?”

  “I do.” I was surprised by how readily my answer came. “You get used to it. The altitude, the food, everything. Have you been ill?”

  She shook her head. “I’m fine. Just. Well. Compared to everyone else, I guess.”

  We ate in silence for a few minutes. “It gets better,” I said.

  “It can hardly get worse.” She said it matter-of-factly, not like she was complaining.

  “Yes. Though I hope the SS can’t find us here.” I thought of the children at the German School, wondered if their teachers were SS.

  She startled, dropping her fork. “Let’s hope not. Then there would be no point to anything.”

  * * *

  • • •

  TOWARD THE END of the afternoon I went to fetch Rachel some of the Palatschinken and found my mother talking with Frau Gruber. “Julia, why did you never tell me you can make Palatschinken? This is better than anything you could get at Café Sperl.”

  My mother glanced at the empty plates. “Anyone can make Palatschinken, Hanna.”

  “Not like this. Listen, Julia, you know I just opened a café? It’s very small, just somewhere we can go for drinkable coffee and a bite of something sweet. But I haven’t much on the menu yet and I’d love it if you would make some of these for me. If you have time?”

  My mother smiled, almost a real smile. “Time? Yes, time is one thing I have left.”

  Thirty-five

  Two days after the welcoming party, I stood in Miguel’s doorway, waiting for his mother to fetch him from the back room. On the hallway table was a stack of newspapers. Idly, I turned the top one toward me. It took me a minute to understand what it meant, but then it was unmistakable. On the front page of the paper was a drawing of two Jews—identifiable by their exaggerated noses—in fancy suits and hats, dragging a Bolivian to a cross.

  I was still staring at it when Miguel appeared.

  “Kantuta?”

  “Is this what you think of us?” I turned the paper toward him.

  Miguel glanced down at the cartoon. He was quiet for a moment. “Some people.”

  “You?”

  “Not me. Not my family.”

  “But people you know. This is what they think?”

  “I don’t know what everyone thinks, Orly.”

  “What do they say about us?”

  Miguel shifted from foot to foot, frowning.

  “Look, I believe it’s not what you think. I just need to know.”

  “They think there are too many of you, taking all of our jobs. That the government should stop you coming.”

  “Did my father take someone’s job?”

  “No . . .”

  “Did my mother?”

  “I don’t think that Orly, I promise.”

  “But if other people do . . . You don’t understand. This is how it starts.”

  Miguel stared miserably at the floor.

  “Is that why your friend Hector doesn’t come play anymore if I’m here?”

  “Hector’s probably busy.”

  I nodded, biting my lip.

  Miguel flipped the paper over and looked up at me. “Orlita? Can’t we forget about it? Whoever did that, they don’t know you. They don’t know your parents. And it’s true that people don’t have jobs. They’re just worried, that’s all.”

  “Most
of us don’t have jobs either.”

  “But it’s not your country.”

  For a moment I forgot how to inhale. I stared at the floor, willing myself not to cry. I wanted to protest—where else did we have?—but it was true. “I guess nowhere is.”

  I looked up at Miguel. He wasn’t my enemy. I didn’t want to be mad at him. “Okay. Can we play something outside?”

  When I returned to our apartment a few hours later, sweaty and panting, my father was home. He sat on a crate humming to himself as he made notes on a sheet of music. At the table, my mother kneaded dough in a bowl.

  “Vati?” I began.

  “Favorite daughter?” He smiled at me.

  I smiled back. “Nothing.”

  Thirty-six

  Now that my mother had something to keep her busy, I worried less about leaving her to play with Miguel or to look after Lotte and Bettina, the Grubers’ girls. Her Palatschinken were very popular with the customers of Frau Gruber’s Riesenrad Café, who had long been deprived of anything so reminiscent of home. When she became bored with making pancakes, she experimented with other things, although other things, it turned out, were not so easy.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, pulling gluey noodles from the pot on the kerosene burner. “It’s always too hard or too soft.” Meat took hours longer than it should have, and came out tough and chewy. Most of her breads were so dry they crumbled when she tried to slice them, or they inflated like balloons and collapsed in on themselves.

  “It’s the altitude,” Frau Gruber told her. “Things cook differently.” Everything needed longer in the oven and more liquid than a recipe demanded.

  There were other challenges. A lack of refrigeration meant we had to shop for perishables every day. We had only the two kerosene burners and the small oven, all of which had to be pumped full of air to turn the liquid into a burnable gas.

  My mother took the difficulty of producing edible food in her rudimentary La Paz kitchen as a challenge. Using the money Frau Gruber gave her to buy ingredients, she began baking even more impossible things, like Mohnstriezel, Austrian rolls filled with sweet poppy-seed paste. She had never even tried to make them in Vienna. Each morning for a week, my mother fiddled with the recipe, adding lemon or butter when she could find it, making them larger and softer until they could be sold at the café. The irregular availability of butter frustrated her. Twice a week (in good weather and barring accident), a train from Argentina delivered meat, butter, and other staples. But shortages were not uncommon.