Exile Music

by Jennifer Steil

  These were good questions, and I struggled to answer them, using as many of Ovid’s own words as I could remember. By the time I had created something Rachel found acceptable, I had written seven drafts. Talking about the play gave us a way to speak to each other about what concerned us, though we studiously avoided allowing our arms or fingers to brush against each other.

  Our group loved it, immediately launching into arguments over who would play the roles. While I initially proposed Rachel for Ianthe, our collective wisely outvoted me, assigning her the relatively minor yet critical role of the goddess Isis. Sarah secured the role of Ianthe to my Iphis. I believed myself to be an adequate rather than brilliant actor, but the group had elected me, perhaps as a reward for my work on the script.

  It was a relief when Sarah pressed her lips to mine and I felt nothing. No twisting inside, no electrical currents. It wasn’t that I loved girls, after all. It was that I loved Anneliese. (And perhaps Rachel? These thoughts were still parenthetical, although now that I was thirteen they were more persistent than ever.)

  Our initial rehearsals were not inspiring. Rachel struggled to move with confidence and to speak audibly, leading our director Lotte to suggest that she might be better off as a stagehand. I agreed to meet with Rachel before the next rehearsal, to see if I could help.

  “Rachelita. You are a goddess.” I squeezed both of her hands in mine, as if I could press divinity through her skin. We stood in the emptiness of the Austrian Club dining room, which still retained the odors of frying lamb and garlic. A cook clattered pots in the kitchen behind us. “Goddesses have no human emotions such as humility or shyness. They don’t have worries. They are never embarrassed. They never question themselves. Forget that you are Rachel and all that that involves.”

  She nodded miserably. “I’ll try.”

  “No, don’t try.” Her relentless melancholy began to irritate me. “Just be her.”

  Rachel’s shoulders slumped even further. I had a sudden inspiration. “You are not Rachel the Jewish refugee who is mourning her parents and a lost home. This is your chance to not be that. Just for a little while. If you can do that, well, I’ll give you all of my books.”

  Her spine straightened. Her sharp chin lifted. “All of them?” Rachel spent every penny Eloise gave her at Osmaru, the German library that rented out used books for a small fee, or at La América, the only bookstore that stocked a few German books.

  “Every one.” I had only a dozen or so, but books were a precious commodity. “Except Fifteen Rabbits. But my father just found me an almost-new copy of Metamorphoses.”

  * * *

  • • •

  IT WAS A MATINEE PERFORMANCE, as there was a ball scheduled for the evening. While we changed into our costumes in the washroom and painted our lips and cheeks with our mothers’ lipsticks, decorators, prop people, and waiters raced about the dining room setting tables in the back and hanging things on the walls. Two of the oldest girls, Ruth and Emmi, hung the sheet that was to be our curtain, separating us from the lines of chairs where our parents would sit. Lotte, our director, paced around the room chewing the ends of her dark braids. So preoccupied was I with going over my lines in my head that I didn’t pay much attention to what else was going on in the club.

  Rachel sat quietly as lights were darkened and the murmur of voices grew louder on the other side of the curtain. I put a hand on her shoulder. “Hals und Beinbruch.” Break a leg. Slowly, she turned her head to look at me, and then stood to face me. For the first time, I noticed she was slightly taller than me. “Mortal,” she said regally, gently. “You dare to touch me?”

  I smiled at her in the dark. Maybe I didn’t need to worry.

  Metamorphoses was an appropriate prize for Rachel’s performance. When she first appeared to Telethusa in a dream, she seemed to have grown several feet. Her arms lifted with authority. Her voice, while thin at moments, was assured. When she promised to protect Iphis—me—from all harm, I believed her.

  I got through my own part without any serious mistakes, although in one scene I tripped over my long robe as I ran to the Temple of Isis, falling at the feet of the goddess more dramatically than planned. Even that didn’t throw Rachel, who had smiled benevolently and added, “Rise, mortal” before her line.

  When it was all over, when we had taken our bows and dropped the sheet that served as our curtain, Rachel turned to me, her cheeks flushed. “You were right,” she said, taking my hands. “I never want to be Rachel again.”

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN WE EMERGED from the washroom in our everyday dresses, Rachel ran to Eloise while I searched the room for my parents. Something felt odd. It took me a few seconds to figure out what the difference was. Everyone was dressed identically. Those trousers. Those skirts. The men were wearing lederhosen. The women were wearing dirndls. I experienced a jolt of dislocation, a memory of my shredded apron. My voice, I am an Austrian. The voice of that leering man, No, you’re a Jew.

  As I stood there spinning into the past, my mother appeared before me, her eyes unnaturally bright. Was I dreaming? My mother, in a dirndl? My father beside her, in a Styrian hat?

  “We borrowed them,” my father said somewhat apologetically. “It’s a Dirndl & Lederhosen ball after all.”

  I stared at them. I had never told them what happened to mine. “Where did they all come from?”

  “Some people got out earlier, they were able to take things. Mathilde and Fredi had a few. Some people sewed their own. Not me, mind you!” My father bent to pull up a sagging wool sock. The lederhosen were loose on his skinny legs.

  “We have one for you. We thought it might be a nice surprise.” My mother reached into the basket she was carrying.

  “No, thanks.” I was already backing away.

  “Are you sure?” My mother held out a folded green dress, a red apron tied around it. “It would be so pretty on you.”

  “I’m sure. I—”

  “Oh, I’m sorry we didn’t even say! You were a wonderful Iphis, Orly. You always loved that story.” My mother looked critically at my faded dress. “Are you sure you don’t want to go change?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve got to go find Rachel. I promised her I— I just have to go. I’ll see you at home.” I turned and fled to the entrance hall. The other girls were busy with their families or still in the dining room packing up pieces of our sets.

  By then it had settled into place in my head. The words I couldn’t say to my parents. It wasn’t only what had happened to me in Vienna; I was no longer sure I wanted to be an Austrian.

  I didn’t wait for Rachel or anyone else, but started down the road toward our home. I couldn’t stay in the Austrian Club a minute longer. Before I reached the first corner, I heard footsteps hurrying behind me. “Orly, wait.”

  I paused, but didn’t turn around. I was afraid to speak.

  “Where are you going?” She stopped beside me. “Aren’t you staying for the ball?”

  I shook my head and resumed my pace.

  “Are you angry with me? Was I terrible?”

  “Oh, Rachel! Of course not!” I turned to her. “You were absolutely literally divine. I swear it. It’s just, the dirndls . . .”

  “Oh.” She didn’t seem to require further explanation.

  “Not to do with you at all.”

  “No.”

  I glanced at her. “You don’t want to stay for the ball either?”

  “My family’s all city people. Were all city people.”

  We walked the rest of the way home in silence.

  At our building, Rachel followed me inside and up the stairs to my room. She hadn’t asked if she could come home with me. Maybe she knew she didn’t have to. We sat on the edge of my mattress.

  When I turned to look at her, dread and desire competing in my pulse, a passage from The Scorpio
n came unbidden to my lips. “It was a longing without name or object. It was a longing for distant lands, a longing for affection.” Rachel leaned her head slowly toward mine until our foreheads touched. Her quiet voice joined my own as I continued, “It was a longing for glittering fame, for heroic deeds, and a longing, too, for grandmother’s quiet garden, for the meadow over which the bees hummed.”

  Her breath was soft on my cheek. I listened as it quickened.

  “I guess you’ve read it more than once too.”

  She smiled, a pale ghost in the dark. “I guess I have.”

  She leaned closer.

  * * *

  • • •

  RACHEL’S THEATRICAL DEBUT at the Austrian Club, it turned out, was also her farewell performance. Her guardian Eloise would soon be moving to the jungles, to an agricultural colony at the other end of the Camino de la Muerte. Eloise had married a man who—like most recent arrivals—had come over on an agricultural visa, so they had no choice. She was excited about moving to the jungle, Rachel said. Eloise had always struggled with the altitude and was looking forward to thicker air.

  “But I’ve heard of lots of people who came on agricultural visas who are still in La Paz,” I protested, panic closing in on my ribs. We were sitting in my mother’s kitchen, raiding a tin of her crescent-shaped Kipferl pastries, our schoolbooks spread out on the table. “They only took the visas because there was no other way. Viennese people don’t know how to farm.” No one could get regular visas anymore. It was only because Mr. Hochschild had said the Jewish refugees would work the land that they let in any more of us at all.

  “I know. But Wenzel is worried they won’t let him stay if he doesn’t go. He wants to follow the rules. And Eloise wants to go.” She took a sip of her coffee.

  “What will you be growing?”

  I meant to say: Stay here with me.

  Rachel shrugged miserably. “Pineapple, I think. Coffee. Mandarins.”

  “You’ll be able to eat all the fruit you want!”

  I meant to say: I can’t lose anyone else.

  I had become stupid with sorrow.

  Fruit didn’t impress her anyway. Rachel had never been terribly interested in food. “I don’t want to move again.”

  While I understood this too well, I hoped she had at least one more reason to wish to remain.

  A semitropical plantation sounded romantic in theory. There would be monkeys down in the lowlands. A profusion of palms. Lush forests. I didn’t mention to Rachel the other things I had heard about Los Yungas from Miguel: the dangers of the road, the clouds of mosquitoes, the suffocating humidity, the venomous snakes threading themselves through the forests. It wouldn’t have changed anything. It’s possible that she had heard stories of these and other dangers from the foreign engineers and adventurers who had passed through La Paz after working in the area clearing roads or shipping goods down the Coroico or Mapiri rivers, but I didn’t ask.

  “Does Wenzel know anything about farming?”

  “He was a lawyer.”

  “So how—”

  “There’s some kind of society that is supposed to give us equipment and seeds.”

  “And someone to show you how to plant them?”

  “I guess. I don’t know.” She wiped her lips with a cloth napkin, leaving traces of confectioners’ sugar.

  I pushed the pastry tin toward her. “You better have a few more.”

  Rachel looked at me pleadingly, as if there were something I could do to stop this.

  “What if there are no books? What if I have nothing to read?”

  “You can take all your books, can’t you?” I was glad I had given her my small collection. “Will you have time to read? Will you have to be picking bananas or something? Do you have to work too or just Eloise and Wenzel?”

  Her small, sharp face crinkled with anxiety. “I don’t know how to grow anything. I never even had a plant!”

  I couldn’t bear to think of her so unhappy and so far from us. Yet I was powerless to keep her. “You’re lucky,” I said unconvincingly. “It will be warm. And they say there are avocados.”

  “But where will I go to school? I don’t even know if there are schools there.”

  “Maybe it won’t be forever?”

  “I hope not. There won’t be any cinemas. Or libraries.”

  “But there are hardly any libraries here either.”

  Books didn’t seem to be as important to the Bolivians we knew as they were to us.

  “Will you write? Will letters get there?” I asked.

  She shrugged.

  “I’ll ask Miguel. He must know people who go down there.”

  She reached across our schoolbooks to wrap her fingers around my forearms. “Don’t let me go, Orly. Don’t let them take me.”

  But I have never been able to save the people I loved.

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN I ASKED my parents if Rachel could stay behind with us, my father set down his viola to look at me.

  “Eloise is her guardian. We just can’t save everyone.”

  “We never save anyone! For once, can’t we do something? Can’t I be allowed to keep just one person?”

  “Orly—”

  “It’s not fair, Vati! It’s not fair!” I had never raised my voice to my parents before. My mother’s shoulders stiffened over the sink, but she didn’t turn around. Shadows flickered in my father’s eyes.

  “Which part of our journey together, my daughter, has given you the idea that life is fair?”

  * * *

  • • •

  ONCE AGAIN, there was little time for good-byes. The Sociedad Colonizadora de Bolivia La Paz, which worked with Mr. Hochschild to resettle refugees in the hope of proving they were not a burden to the country, announced that Rachel, Eloise, and Wenzel would be joining other Jewish families in an agricultural colony called Buena Tierra—Good Land—the following week.

  On the day they left, we joined the crowds gathered to see them off. Parents already standing in the back of the truck pulled their small children up over the sides and settled them on large sacks of goods, flour or sugar bound for Los Yungas. About a dozen families crowded into the back of the vehicle. Eloise stood aboard next to Wenzel, shielding her eyes from the sun with a hand, making sure Rachel was following.

  Rachel shook off Wenzel’s proffered arm and leapt onto the side of the truck bed, dragging a small case after her. I wondered if she had packed any clothes or only books. She turned her face toward the crowd, her eyes finding mine.

  “¡Vamonos!” The driver slammed his door and started the engine.

  Pushing past the families in front of me, I climbed onto the side of the back tire near where Rachel stood, gripping the cold metal with my fingers.

  “Come back. Please say you’ll come back.”

  “Orly.” She reached for me with the arm not gripping the side of the truck, cupped the sweating nape of my neck.

  “Everywhere life had angles and edges, points and sharp corners.” My voice trembled but I continued. “Wherever one groped among the rosy, shimmering clouds that so beautifully enveloped them, one was struck and hurt. One had to be a cobblestone or a diamond not to be shattered by their hardness.” I stood on my toes to lean into her, to press my cheek against hers, cold and dry.

  “I don’t remember that one.”

  “Remember that one. Remember that one, Rachel, when you fall through those shimmering clouds. Be a cobblestone.” As if someone so soft could be made so hard.

  The truck started to move, belching a black cloud of exhaust.

  I leapt to the ground and raced after it as it pulled away.

  “Why not a diamond?” she cried back to me. “Why not a diamond?”

  * * *

  • • •

  WE WERE NEV
ER SUITED for the tropics. Lacking the natural immunities of the Bolivians, European refugees in Los Yungas contracted tropical diseases as unfamiliar to them as plowing a field. The Andes, the jungles of Coroico, the salt flats of Uyuni, they made it plain to us that we were fools to think we had any power over the world around us. We did not dominate nature here in Bolivia; we were bent by its will.

  It was nature whose pests infected the Jewish colony in Los Yungas with malaria. Nature whose caiman eyed us warily. Nature who sent its bacterial emissaries into our blood.

  In such a landscape, Rachel didn’t stand a chance.

  * * *

  • • •

  HER FIRST LETTER—carried by hand by one of the farmers traveling to La Paz to sell produce and dropped at the offices of the SOPRO—strained for optimism. “I’ve never seen so much green, so many plants. And you were right about the monkeys! Though they are noisy in the night and stole the first letter I started to you. Everything is noisy in the night.” It was a brief letter, probably written after a long day of work. “Also, the mosquitoes are ferocious. And the other bugs that bite. There are so many bugs that bite! If you saw me, you would think I had the measles. I itch all night long. Some people don’t get bitten as much, but I guess I am delicious.”

  I knew she was.

  When I opened her second letter, several large, dark grains fell out. “Look, cocoa!” she wrote. “We are planning to grow it here but it already grows in the wild. Did you know that chocolate was wild? One of the women from here, she showed me how to roast the wild beans over the fire and peel the skins off. Then we put them through a grinder until they were paste, which we mixed with sugar and canned milk to make cocoa. It doesn’t change my feelings about being here, but I never had better chocolate in Vienna.”