I hadn’t even imagined that chocolate came from a plant. Where did I think it came from, Weiss’s candy shop? I envied Rachel that wild Bolivian chocolate, that sweet taste of home.
* * *
• • •
IN HER LAST LETTER, in 1943, Rachel wrote that many of her fellow colonists were ill. Strange fevers, rashes, and uncontrollable diarrhea were common. Later, we would learn the names of some of these diseases: leishmaniasis, hepatitis A, malaria, Chagas disease, typhoid, and cholera. Few of them had cures, even when properly diagnosed. There is a doctor in residence at the colony, Rachel wrote, but his Austrian education has not prepared him for the diseases of the tropics. She was afraid to drink the water, afraid to eat the fruit.
It was a combination of fever and self-starvation that killed her in the end, Eloise wrote to us. She had slowly stopped eating, and her weakened state had made her more vulnerable to illness. “We tried very hard to save her,” Eloise wrote. “But we did not know how.”
Forty-six
The first song I ever wrote for my charango was for Rachel. In my helpless grief I practiced for hours every day, to prevent myself from being washed away. Like Orpheus, I played to survive, though without nearly as much skill. Rachel would want words, not just the simple series of chords I had learned. Music was never enough for her. I picked up my pencil. Vico could help me to arrange the chords, but the words I wrote alone.
I still reflexively started by thinking of two seemingly unconnected things, and then imagining a connection. At the top of a page I wrote Rachel. Across from it I wrote Jungle. By then I had learned other ways to write poems, but this particular exercise never failed to be useful in the generative stage. Yet today, the magic was failing me. I sat in my room on my bed, staring at the empty page. I decided to try something different. I wrote: Dropped. Broken. Lost. Small. Alive. Book hungry. Isis. Delicious. Scorpion. Cocoa. Bitten. Dreams. Lost. Lost. Lost.
I wondered what Rachel was like before she had climbed up the gangway of the Orazio. Perhaps she had once been plump and rosy, with a weakness for marzipan and caramels. Perhaps she clutched her mother as I had clutched mine walking up into the Proteus. Perhaps she had made dozens of friends on the ship, organizing games and races on deck. Perhaps she had made a friend like Volkmar, who shared books with her.
I started again. “If there is something after this,” I wrote. “I hope you have something to read.”
* * *
• • •
AS I COPIED my final draft into a notebook, the rhythms of the words summoned a melody. I wasn’t sure if I had invented this melody or if it was an echo of something I had once heard. There was no way to check. I had studied music theory as a child, but so much of it had faded. I wasn’t sure how to move the melody Vico and I had woven onto the page. “Vati!” I called.
My father had possibly been waiting for this moment his entire life. The moment he could share this part of his knowledge, this part of his soul. Sitting down next to me, he drew the five-line staff, using a wooden ruler to keep the lines straight. “Now,” he said, looking up at me expectantly. “Sing a few bars of it.”
* * *
• • •
WE HELD RACHEL’S MEMORIAL in the synagogue. Everyone came, even our schoolmates who had never spoken to her. Eloise couldn’t get back to La Paz, but she sent a letter that my father read aloud. It spoke about the girl she had loved as a daughter, the girl who had seemed to mend the broken bones of her leg by sheer force of will. Her heart, she continued, was not as easy to mend. “At least now, that broken heart is easy.” I was less sure about this. I saw no reason to believe that life beyond the grave would be any more charitable than this one.
My father had spent several weeks arranging Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder for the twelve musicians he had been able to corral. When I got up in the night to use the bathroom, I often found him at the kitchen table, absently nibbling on my mother’s pancakes meant for the café as he marked up a score.
Although Mahler originally scored these songs for voice and orchestra, my father knew better than to try to convince my mother to sing. He rewrote the part of the voice for a viola. He even managed to find a bass clarinet, an oboe, and a bassoon, although he was still short several of the brass instruments. I would hazard a guess that this was not one of the better interpretations of these particular Lieder.
“Jakob, those Lieder are twenty-five minutes long.” My mother didn’t think the length appropriate for the service.
My father looked up from the score he was annotating. “I couldn’t find anything to cut, Julia. I couldn’t bring myself to take away the right to grief in full. You can’t rush through grief.”
My mother could not argue with that.
I never liked those songs. The music was eerie enough, sounding as though it came from somewhere far beyond the grave, but the lyrics were untenable. The father waiting for his family to come through the door, his glance falling not on his wife but on the empty space where his daughter’s face should be:
when you bright with joy,
would enter, too,
as you used to, my little daughter
Fourth Movement
AFTER THE WAR
Forty-seven
When Germany surrendered and the end to war in Europe was announced on May 8, 1945, I was confused. La Paz, La Paz! our neighbors shouted in the streets. La Paz! For a moment, I mistook the words as a celebration of our city.
When Mathilde ran up our stairs with the news, my father was out rehearsing and my mother was at the Riesenrad. I leapt up from my books to hug her. “Maybe he’ll come now,” she said. “Now it will be easier. I’ll go find your mother. Meet us in half an hour at the club?”
When the bells began to ring, I ran outside. I was surprised there were not bigger crowds on the streets. There didn’t seem to be any marching bands playing victory songs or unfettered dances of joy and relief. The faces of the women in the market were stoic, immovable as they counted out change and handed over earth-dusted peppers. As if it were any ordinary day. I wished for Rachel. I wished for Anneliese. Someone who would understand.
I ran over to Miguel’s house and he and his three sisters all ran out to hug me. They at least knew what this meant for us. “I thought everyone in the city would be celebrating,” I said to Miguel as we stood in his doorway looking into the street. “Isn’t the end of the war kind of major news?”
“It’s far away for us.”
“Still.”
“And I think people are afraid.”
“Afraid? Of peace?”
“Of Villarroel. He represses everything that moves.”
“Represses?”
“Like, accidentally pushes off a cliff.”
“Oh.”
Villarroel was the latest military leader to take over the country. Some people said he’d been rooting for the Nazis.
“So I think people don’t want to do anything to draw attention to themselves.”
Celebrating the end of violence didn’t seem particularly controversial to me, but there was much I still did not understand.
* * *
• • •
WHEN I FINALLY got to the Austrian Club, the atmosphere was considerably more festive. Ecstatic arms waved Austrian and Bolivian flags. There was music. There was dancing. So many colors and sounds flooded through me as I stood in the throngs of sweating, happy Europeans, holding the hands of my dazed-looking parents—though at seventeen I was too old now to need this comfort—that I was dizzy. Peace! our friends and neighbors cried. Church bells were still ringing. I could smell meat roasting in the club kitchen, feel the music throb against my ears. On every side of me were perspiring bodies, whirling skirts.
Shoved and jostled by revelers, I felt no ease of tension in my body. My mind had registered the news as good, as wonderful, as the end of the slaughter
in Vienna, in all of Europe, yet how could we celebrate when we didn’t know if Willi remained? My grandparents? My aunts and uncles and cousins? My Anneliese? Yes, the Germans were defeated. Yes, Hitler was dead. But then, so were we.
My father was smiling. He dropped my hand to shake hands with everyone we passed. My father was happy. My mother’s lips curved slightly upward at the corners, but only slightly. I squeezed her fingers even tighter. “Will we hear from Willi now?”
She didn’t answer, but her fingers returned my pressure.
Of course I was glad the war was over. Of course the news had lightened my heart. But should we not all be sitting shiva for the millions of us who were gone? I glared at a man who stumbled against me, reeking of singani. At the same time, I wanted to drink something that would numb me, that would remove me from all of this sorrow, all of this joy and noise. I had tasted that liquor and knew its obliterating fire.
“Mutti,” I said, suddenly a child again. “Mutti, take me home.”
Leaving my father behind, we found our way to the door, we put our feet one in front of the other until we were at the house where we lived. I walked straight up the stairs, down the hallway, and into Willi’s green room. Pulling back the covers from his bed—those pristine covers that had never been lifted—I crawled beneath them and pulled my knees to my chest. I heard my mother inhale, heard the start of a word, and then nothing. Nothing until she bent to remove her shoes, and climbed in beside me.
* * *
• • •
THE SURGE OF DETAILS from Europe threatened to drown us. We knew of the camps, of course—we knew before anyone, or before anyone would acknowledge them. But the details. The individuals. The photos of the liberated skeletons. The names. The relentlessness of the names.
* * *
• • •
BY AUGUST 15, 1945, our relief at the end of violence in Europe was paralyzed by the news of the bombs. TERMINÓ LA GUERRA EN EL MUNDO, EL JAPÓN SE RINDIÓ INCONDICIONALMENTE blazed the day’s headline.
Now all of the wars were over. But something else had begun, something new and terrifying. “Julia,” my father said as we listened to a frenzy of North American celebration on our radio while my mother roasted a chicken. “Julia.” He shook the newspaper in her direction. “They say that to be under that bomb was like being shot into the heart of the sun.”
My mother turned off the oven and came to stand behind my father, resting her hands on his shoulders. He twisted to look up at her.
“Julia, every time a new weapon is invented it ends up being used on us. Someday it will be used on us.” He didn’t sound at all like my father. It was my mother’s job to worry.
When the worst photos finally emerged in the newspapers we passed around, they made us mute. The cloud they called a mushroom, the skulls left behind. The living body of a child, eyes brimming with terror, gazing up from the ruined ground. Just one of the many thousands. They said there had been no other way to end it. I was not convinced. We needed to murder children to stop the murder of children? None of it made any sense. None of it ever will.
* * *
• • •
THE NEWS INSISTED on arriving. My grandparents, both pairs, had vanished. With them, my grandmother’s political salons, the haze of cigarette smoke in her parlor, the books scattered around her rooms. The gaze commanding obedience. That intimidating shelf of curls. With my grandfather went his research on the formation of eyeballs. The eye charts he held before us as we sat in his wide, soft chair. My cousins were gone. Klara would no longer conjure fugues on the piano keys, Felix would never tell me another riddle. With my Graz grandparents, whose faces I struggled to recall, went the bakery, their recipes for Palatschinken and strudel, the smell of cinnamon in the morning. I had hardly known my Graz aunts, slighter versions of their mother. My little Graz cousins.
My aunts and uncles, all gone but one. Thekla wrote to us from her hospital bed in Poland about the rest of our family, her letters scattered and nearly unrecognizable. “Thekla’s alive,” my mother had cried with joy when she recognized her sister’s handwriting on the envelope. Before she had read its devastating contents.
* * *
• • •
THEN CAME THAT FINAL NAME.
We had gone to the post office as we did daily—always the three of us now, together—hoping to hear the date of Thekla’s arrival. Having no one left to go to, she was coming to us.
Yet there was nothing from Thekla. Instead, there was a slim envelope bearing a French postmark and addressed in an unfamiliar hand. We knew Violaine had been searching for Willi in France for months, questioning the police, importuning the Red Cross, visiting other charitable organizations that may have heard something. But the letter was not from Violaine.
Without speaking, we carried the letter outside with us, sank down onto the steps of the post office. Between me and my father, my mother smoothed it on her lap, stared at it for a moment, then picked it up and tore it open.
“It’s in French,” she said, still staring at it. “I don’t know if I—” Her shaking hand rattled the paper. My parents had both learned French in school, but it had been a long time since they had spoken—or sung—a word of it. My father and I peered over her shoulders.
Nous regrettons de vous informer de la mort de Willi Zingel. . . .
It was not difficult French. My parents understood. Even I understood. Yet the three of us sat staring at it as if we could resist the knowledge it contained. It was from the police, who we knew had been wrong before. Who had never been on our side.
“How do they know?” I said finally. “How do they know that it is him?” It could not have been him. It could not. My father made a strangled, guttural sound. He believed it.
My mother’s calm was almost more terrifying than tears would have been. “They say it took them more than a year to figure out whom to notify. His death was recorded alongside the deaths of the children—the children of Izieu.” Her voice shook.
The children of Izieu. I had heard the story. By then we had all heard the story, from our friends, from our neighbors, from letters and telegrams. Not, by and large, from the radio or newspapers. There were forty-four children, accompanied by seven adults. We knew these statistics by heart. Together they had lived in a beautiful house in a small village in a remote part of France, where their parents had hidden them. Some had been orphaned when their parents were deported. Some had parents with no other means of keeping them safe. They were all between the ages of four and seventeen when the Lyon Gestapo sent them to Auschwitz to die.
“Willi was in Izieu?” I couldn’t put the pieces together.
“They think he may have been working with OSE.” Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, we knew, worked to help deprived Jewish children. During the war the OSE worked across Europe, saving more than five thousand refugee children from certain death. I remembered Willi had mentioned children in his letter.
In a swift motion my mother tore the pages in two and crushed them in her fists, dropped the pieces to the step and stomped on them with both feet. “Verdammt, die Franzosen in die Hölle! Verdammt, verdammt! Mein Sohn . . .” Damn, the French can go to hell! Damn it, damn it! My son . . .
My father and I stood, tempests of grief raging in our chests. We closed ourselves around her, arms overlapping, cheeks against her neck.
“Let’s go home,” my father finally said.
“There is no home,” my mother cried. “There will never be a home again.”
They began their halting progress down the stairs, entwined so it was hard to see which one of them supported the other. I bent to retrieve the scraps of paper, dusted them off, and folded them into my damp palm. I needed to know everything.
But this, it became clear, was impossible. The OSE had no answers for us when we wrote. They didn’t have any record of a Willi Zingel. They didn’t know where or
how his death had been recorded. The police did not reply at all. We had no way to know why Willi never got on a ship to South America. Why he was in France. What he was doing in Izieu.
It took so long to find out where Willi had been, what he had been doing. Longer than we ever could have imagined.
Forty-eight
Will we go back?” It was the end of October 1945. My mother and I stood pinching the edges of dumplings in the kitchen. She was fighting her way through pain with a rolling pin, flour, and butter. I tried to keep mine at a bearable distance with pencil and charango, escaping more and more into words and music.
A choking heat seized my throat as I asked. I could not imagine waking up without these mountains around me. I could not imagine surviving a flat landscape, pressed in that nowhere land between sky and earth.
The end of the war had triggered a flurry of planning. Now we were allegedly free; we could move to Argentina, Brazil, or Chile—cleaner places with oxygen and more reliable electricity—or move onward to the newly accommodating United States or to Palestine. We could return to what was left of Austria.
This sudden change in our status, these new openings in our horizons, had been causing me great anxiety. It seemed ungrateful, somehow, to abandon the country that had saved us. To seek an easier life. Was it really any easier to start over, again? I couldn’t bear the thought of replanting myself in yet another landscape. Acclimating myself to different air, a new language.
And while I longed to go back for Anneliese I could not imagine returning to a Vienna without my brother, without my grandparents. I dreamed of sledding down Jesuitenwiese after the winter’s first snow. Skating along the Alte Donau. Opera. Music. If we returned to Austria now I could start university there. And yet. Those things were very far away for me now. They were like dreams. Only now, I dreamed in Spanish.
Exile Music Page 26