Exile Music

by Jennifer Steil

My mother, who for years—since our arrival—had allowed me to wander the streets alone or with my friends, suddenly didn’t want to let me out of the house. I was eighteen, practically an adult. Despite the relative spaciousness of our three-bedroom apartment, the thought of being cooped up there, away from my friends, was untenable. Besides, I had to work.

  “I’ll go out with Miguel,” I offered. I hadn’t actually seen Miguel in months. Sarah told me she had seen him with a girlfriend. This gave me a curious feeling in my stomach, even though I had never wanted to touch him the way I touched Rachel, had never considered kissing his scarred lip. Had I seen Miguel recently, I would not have wanted to tell him about the men who had followed us here; he might be tempted to fight them. I wanted Austrian troubles to stay across the sea, far from Miguel, far from all that had saved me.

  “Miguel doesn’t understand.”

  “He does as much as anyone here does! Do you think he would let them hurt me?” Despite the widening space between us, I trusted in his friendship.

  “These are Nazis, Liebchen. Did you forget?”

  “You think I would forget? You really think I would forget?”

  I loved my mother, but we had basic philosophical differences. I needed to connect with people, to weave myself into a cobweb of friends and in that way strengthen my own perch. I needed people. My mother was so solitary it worried me. “I have my customers,” she said. “I have your father.”

  “And he has his viola,” I was tempted to add.

  When it came to the Nazis, however, I temporarily relented and agreed to avoid walking alone when I left the apartment. The situation surely couldn’t last. Surely the Nazis wouldn’t stay here long. Surely there were people looking for them, people who would come take them away to justice. Surely the world would not allow them to remain free.

  I began writing letters to Bolivian presidents. We had three that year: Gualberto Villarroel, Néstor Guillén, and Tomás Monje Gutierréz. The first two were not really presidents, but chairmen of a provisional government. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I received no replies.

  After work, I spent more time with my mother in the kitchen, although she brushed me aside at first. “You’ve got work of your own, Orly. Apply to universities. Practice your charango.”

  My father had initially suggested I consider going abroad to study, if not to the United States, then to Argentina or Chile. “The universities here aren’t worth anything,” my mother agreed. “What good would such a degree do you?” I refrained from pointing out that we didn’t have the money to travel to a foreign university, let alone tuition fees. I refrained from asking her what good her Austrian music degree was doing her. I refrained from pointing out that if I planned to stay in Bolivia, a Bolivian degree would not be completely irrelevant.

  Fifty-four

  At breakfast one morning my mother was oddly cheerful. When I came into the kitchen I was surprised to find her awake before me, sitting at the table sifting through pages of her handwritten recipes. “Guten Morgen!” She smiled at me and pushed over a plate of rolls still warm from the oven. “Do you have plans this morning?”

  I lowered myself onto a chair and rubbed my eyes. “You’re up early. Just practicing, I think. Though I’m working in the afternoon.” I liked working at Arbres Morts, talking with customers about books, reading bits of poems. Writing bits of poems.

  “Is there any chance you could go ask Miguel how to get ahold of Wayra? I seem to have lost track of her.”

  There was something too casual in my mother’s speech. We hadn’t seen Wayra in years, not since she had finished my mother’s unofficial tutorial in Bolivian herbal medicine.

  “Mutti, that was a long time ago. I’m sure Miguel doesn’t know. And doesn’t Wayra travel?” I picked up one of the rolls and tore it open.

  “We have to start somewhere. Can you go?”

  I took a bite of soft dough and looked at her with suspicion. “Are you sick?”

  She shook her head.

  “Is Vati sick?”

  “No one is sick. But it’s important. It’s just in case.”

  “You can’t explain to me why?”

  My mother sighed, a whisper of impatience. “I can’t explain to you why.”

  Whatever it was, it seemed to have renewed my mother’s sense of purpose. For weeks after seeing Knochenmus she had been possessed by a wild fury, kneading dough so hard it flattened and refused to rise.

  I got up from the table. “I’ll go now, but don’t get your hopes up.”

  “Tell him to tell her I’ll pay,” my mother called after me. “I’ll pay whatever she wants.”

  * * *

  • • •

  IT SEEMED POINTLESS to go to Miguel when there was so little chance he would have any information, but I stopped at his house. He wasn’t home, and his mother said he wasn’t expected until late. I was relieved; I would have felt awkward asking him for a favor when it had been so long since we’d spoken. Alone, I walked the familiar route up calle Sagárnaga to calle Linares. My mother had apparently forgotten her own precaution. In this more populated part of town the stores opened earlier. I began in the first shop Miguel had shown me, asking if anyone knew Wayra’s whereabouts. Many of the women in the shops recognized me now, as I sometimes came on errands for my mother, looking for a specific herb or powder. None of them knew where Wayra was, but promised to ask around. I returned to the stores each morning until the following Thursday when one of the shop owners told me Wayra would arrive in La Paz that weekend. I left our new address, as we hadn’t seen her since the move.

  Saturday morning my father and I took Thekla with us to the market. When we returned, my mother and Wayra were stirring things on the stove. Thekla headed straight to her room to rest. Shrugging to each other, my father and I retreated to our respective rooms, our respective instruments, relieved that my mother had something to do.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE FOLLOWING WEDNESDAY I helped my mother carry things to her store and arrange the food on her shelves and cases. Once she opened the shop, I sat on a crate behind the counter with a book. I often spent weekend mornings like this, watching over my mother while exploring the world from my stool.

  “Here you are, sir.” Something in my mother’s voice made me look up. My mother’s customer was fair-haired and tall. “Danke schön,” he said, taking the plate with one hand and offering my mother a crumpled note with the other.

  Shock took hold of my tongue and kept it still. I watched him walk across the street to the park and squat down to eat. My mind reeled. My mother said, My mother said, My mother said, never never never talk. Not to them.

  “Mutti.” I watched my mother place a cloth back over the plate of Schnitzel and tuck it under the counter. “Why did you give food to him?”

  My mother—my furious, exacting mother—seemed uncharacteristically unconcerned. “He was hungry. He had money. It’s hard to be sure after all. What should I say when they ask?”

  “But . . .” I didn’t know where to start. Or end. Or what to say in the middle. My mother would never—but did I know my mother after all? “Mutti, you know . . .”

  “I know.”

  “You would take money from him?” The earth and sky had somehow switched places and I found I had never understood the world at all.

  My mother turned her opaque eyes to me. I used to know how to read them. “I took it last time. Is it better that he have it?”

  I stared across the market at the man, filling his Aryan mouth with my mother’s Schnitzel. My mother’s, my mother’s food. Into the mouths of monsters.

  “You’re feeding an evil, a fiend! Thekla . . .”

  “This fiend probably won’t bite the hand that feeds him. Trust me, Orly, I know what I’m doing. I am protecting us.” My mother smiling, relaxed. Something was off.

  “I
f Thekla finds out you—”

  “She won’t. And you won’t tell her. Why don’t you go home and get something to eat? You must be hungry.”

  Distracted, I shook my head. I didn’t want to leave my mother alone. “I’ll just eat something here.” I pulled the small tray out from under the table and lifted the cloth. It smelled good. I pinched a bit of the meat between my fingers.

  “Stop that!” Before my hands had fully closed on the Schnitzel, my mother had knocked it from my fingers. But she didn’t look angry. She looked scared.

  “Mutti?” I wiped the grease from the food on my skirt. “I’m sorry?”

  My mother next to me, squatting, serious. “I’m sorry, too, sweetheart. I didn’t mean to shout at you. But that plate is reserved for our customers. I’ll fix you something else.”

  Silent, I nodded. My stomach hurt.

  “There’s another pan of it in the basket behind you. I’ll make you something from that. It’s fresher.”

  I examined her face. Her eyes were clear and steady. “I think maybe I’ll go home.”

  My mother touched my forehead. “Are you all right? You haven’t eaten anything all day, have you?”

  “No.” I stared at my mother. She stared back at me.

  My mother had fed that man something bad, I was sure of it. Some kind of poison that Wayra had taught her how to brew. Puzzle pieces slid into place. I needed space to think. “I’ll see you at home.”

  Numb, I hardly felt my feet on the stones. There had been more of that Schnitzel she fed Knochenmus. I wiped my fingers repeatedly on my skirt. She would have told me if I needed to wash my hands, wouldn’t she? I would wash them anyway. My thoughts erupted. Who else was she planning to feed? If too many died at once, wouldn’t people guess? Would my mother be arrested? But surely she had planned carefully. My mother was meticulous. Her food would not be the only thing Knochenmus ate today.

  I shook my head to clear it. No one had died. Not yet. And what if Knochenmus did keel over? Would anyone mourn? It was hard to resist the euphoria, the feeling of triumph and justice served that swept through me at the thought of my aunt’s torturer brought down. That man who had been able to look into the newly minted eyes of an infant and see something deserving of extermination. My steps grew faster as I thought of it. Who else was coming after them? I didn’t see the Americans or the Europeans arresting Nazis in South America. Justice had very short arms.

  But not my mother. My mother, unlike the rest of the world, was doing something.

  A week later, we found out that Knochenmus was dead. We heard about it from Mathilde, when we saw her at the Austrian Club over the weekend. Thekla was not, of course, the only one who had recognized him.

  Everyone assumed it was something Bolivian that killed him. It could have been dysentery or a heart problem caused by the altitude. The possibilities were nearly endless. Death was not so uncommon. Only if there were clear evidence of homicide would a death be investigated. And in the case of Knochenmus, there was no such evidence.

  The confirmation of Knochenmus’s death shook me. I had known, I had expected it, and yet now new fears took hold. My mother was a murderer. I did not want her to have anything in common with those men. Yet now she did. Though I had longed for Knochenmus’s death, I hadn’t anticipated the anxiety I suddenly felt for my mother’s soul. “Soul” is the wrong word for someone as secular as I am, and yet I can find no other word for the part of her I wanted to preserve. And—this was all occurring to me in a landslide—mine as well. My father, I was sure, did not know. Thekla did not know. I didn’t think anyone knew but me. If I did not tell anyone, I was complicit.

  If my mother had thought Knochenmus’s death would bring some relief to my aunt, she was mistaken. Thekla had not even smiled when we told her, just listened in silence and left the kitchen.

  I followed her to her room and stood in the doorway. “Aren’t you glad, Auntie?”

  She turned from the window. Her eyes looked vacant, as if the person behind them had wandered off, leaving her body behind. “Glad?”

  “That he’s gone.”

  She considered me for a moment, partially returning to the space behind her eyes. “What good does his death do now?”

  I was mute. She sighed and dismissed me, turning back to the window.

  My feet still stood on her floor. I could not pick them up. “But at least now he cannot harm anyone else,” I said.

  She did not move. She did not register my words with a gesture or sigh. I was speaking to the air.

  Fifty-five

  Some people can live with the memories and some cannot. Three days after Knochenmus died, my aunt Thekla used my father’s straight razor to pry open the doors to death that lived in her veins.

  My mother found her. She was in the bath. Apparently she was worried that her wrists would not be enough; she sliced open the skin along both ankles, and the soft flesh of her inner thighs. My aunt Thekla was taking no chances. She wanted never to remember again.

  Yet she had failed to consider the memories she would leave with us. For me, the memory of running in search of my mother, whom I heard screaming somewhere in the apartment. The memory of following the sound to the bathroom, to the tub full of sloshing scarlet, the color of the Easter egg dye Anneliese used to make from beetroot. My mother shaking with rage and grief, pulling Thekla’s arms from the water to press the violated skin with her palms.

  “Get a doctor,” she ordered without turning around.

  The doctor, as was usual in Bolivia, arrived too late.

  * * *

  • • •

  A FEW WEEKS after Thekla left us, I woke in the dark. An elephant, or something its size, had settled on my heart. An animal that had nothing to do with Bolivia or the altitude. I felt it physically, its weight, the crushing of my lungs. If I stayed in bed, surely I would suffocate. On my feet, the feeling remained. Perhaps movement would shake this elephant, dislodge it from my chest. The worse I felt, the more I needed to move. As quickly and quietly as I could, I pulled on wool socks, a long skirt, a sweater. Searched for my hat. Collected all of the pages of our stories.

  Outside, the sun arrived suddenly and brightly, like a surprise party on the horizon. Like stupid optimism. Always sun, every morning. It still amazed me. No matter how much rain we had during the day, a few hours later it was as though nothing damp had ever happened to this city. Its earth was resilient, resistant to dark forces, lighting up again and again.

  I walked without thinking, always uphill. But in my heart, I knew where I was going.

  Nayra was still unraveling potatoes from sacks of bright cloth, spreading them before her on the stones. She looked up and smiled, but her hands didn’t stop. I squatted next to her, reaching into the sack to help. I had done this before, so she let me. Nayra didn’t ask me about work or my other friends or my parents. It relaxed me, to be free of these bits of etiquette. There are so few people who allow you to be quiet.

  Only after the first sack was empty did we stop and crouch against a stone wall to sip some tea. “Do you remember my aunt Thekla?” I began.

  Nayra did not interrupt me. She asked nothing. Although her Spanish was no longer hesitant, she remained a quiet person. When her tea was gone, she untied the mouth of the second sack of potatoes. Her hands continued to move, sorting potatoes by color and size, nestling them together in pyramids on her mat. When she was finished, when I was finished, she sat back on her heels and looked up at me. “Would you like to come back to the lake with me tonight?”

  At the end of the market day I returned home to fetch a change of clothing and tell my parents where I was going. My mother was lying on her bed fully dressed, with the lights off. “Mutti?” I reached for the lamp by her bedside. “Are you all right?”

  She rolled onto her side to look at me, her hairpins coming loose so that her auburn curls fell in lops
ided clumps from her head. Her hair had grown darker in recent months, its glossiness worn away. Silently, she took in the bag in my hand and my air of impatience. “Where are you going?”

  I almost changed my mind when I saw my mother’s white face, her shock that I would leave her. Never had I traveled outside of La Paz alone, spent a night away. I understood her fear. But Thekla—my old aunt Thekla, the one in Austria—would not have wanted her death to turn me into a prisoner. I cannot imagine she would have wanted that.

  I couldn’t follow my mother any further into the dark. “Vati is here. He is just in the next room.” My father, I thought, might not even notice I was gone. He chose his viola over my mother more often now, slipping out of bed to practice while my mother wept into her pillow. I understood. I too felt myself straining against the confines of her bottomless grief. We were still alive.

  “But those trucks, Orly, they are not safe.” She sat up, her eyes wide.

  “It’s all right. Nayra knows the driver.” I rarely lied to my parents, but sometimes my mother seemed bewildered to discover I was not one of her limbs. That I moved autonomously. It never occurred to her that I was older now than she was when she married. When she had Willi. “Mutti, I’ll be back day after tomorrow.”

  She sighed, an uncommon concession, perhaps at last abandoning the idea that she could protect those she loved. “Take some water. There’s some on the stove. And some of the cookies.” The night Thekla died, after the doctor had gone and the bathroom was clean and the stained bathmat crushed down into the garbage, my mother had baked five dozen ginger cookies. My father and I had not even been surprised.

  When she finished speaking, she lay back down on her bed and turned her face to the wall, returning to the unreachable country where she lived.

  If I didn’t leave quickly, I wouldn’t leave at all.

  * * *