• • •
NAYRA WAS WAITING for me on a corner close to the market, next to an idling truck much like the one that had carried Rachel away. We added our cloth sacks to the heap in the back and climbed among the crowds, squeezing against each other in the middle. Other refugees had been to the lake, had talked about eating grilled fish on its shores, but I had never gone. I had never wanted to leave my mother and she had never been persuaded to leave the city.
Nayra had been born in Carabuco, an ancient village near the shores of the lake. But we were not going to her family home now, she told me. “There is not much to see in the village except my family and our church, which is famous because of the cross. I want to take you somewhere else. Somewhere I also have family.” She had told me stories about the old wooden cross that had been buried or tossed in a lake but rose to the surface. There were many conflicting legends involving Spanish invaders and the Aymara and that cross, and I could never keep them straight.
It was a long and freezing drive to Lake Titicaca, bumping over uneven roads. I shivered despite my layers of clothing, and watched a woman across from us tear apart a roasted chicken in her lap, sucking each bone carefully before discarding it in a pile at her side.
Nayra went to sleep, her black head bent over her sack. She had told me only that we would disembark in Copacabana, but we would not be staying there.
I closed my eyes. The elephant clung to my chest like a fretful child.
When I opened my eyes again, the world stayed dark. It took me a minute to realize that night had fallen. The man next to me was snoring.
Nayra was sitting up, staring out at the sky, her breath puffs of mist in the air. “We’ll be there soon.”
The truck drove down the main street of a town and left us near the water, the driver getting out to toss our cloth bags down from the back. Behind us was a row of hotels and restaurants. Behind us was sound—music drifting from a restaurant, laughter, the hum of motors. Before us spread a vast darkness. Before us was silence, broken only by the lapping water at the shore.
“Wait here,” said Nayra and she hurried down to a small shack next to a dock. A man emerged, and they appeared to negotiate something.
She turned and waved me toward her. Uncertainly, I picked my way over the dirt and rocks to the dock. “I found us a boat.” She swept her arm toward something that looked like a canoe. It didn’t look very stable.
“Shouldn’t we wait until morning, when it is light?” I couldn’t imagine finding anything in the vast black of the lake before us.
“I know the lake.”
We climbed into the boat with a man who took up an oar. It was too dark to make out his features. He was a friend of a cousin of an aunt, Nayra explained. He nodded to me but did not speak as he dipped his paddle into the water.
It was a long way across that frigid expanse, the black water flat as ice. I was too cold to speak, too tired. I crouched in the damp bottom of the canoe, the fear of toppling over the side keeping me upright. Beside me squatted Nayra, expertly balanced on her sandals, her cloth bag between her knees.
As the lights of Copacabana faded and the darkness of earth was complete, I gazed with wonder above us. The stars, which I perceived in my numbness as a spray of glittering ice chips, were not only above us but all around, cascading toward the mountains on every side. I had never seen so many; I hadn’t known there were so many. How could my aunt Thekla have removed herself from a world like this? She would never see these stars. She would never see this lake. I was furious with her for rejecting our planet, for succeeding where the Nazis had failed. I might have cried then, if my tears had not frozen on the rims of my eyes before they could fall.
* * *
• • •
“WE CALL THIS ISLA DEL SOL,” Nayra said as our rower pulled close enough to the shore to allow us to leap to the grass and scramble up the steep slope. I could see nothing before me, but followed Nayra, occasionally reaching out to touch her top skirt to be sure of her presence. The cluster of houses appeared before me abruptly as we reached the top of a path, the starlight just bright enough to define their borders. Nayra knocked on the door of the third small hut. A dark shape answered the door and, after a whispered conversation with Nayra, admitted us. The room stank of animal and rancid oil. Her grandmother prodded us silently toward a corner of the floor, where we made a nest of the blankets we had with us. Grateful for the shelter, made slightly warmer than the night air by the bodies within it, I slept.
* * *
• • •
I WOKE STRIPED WITH SUN, which streamed from between the cracks in the thatched roof. Nayra had already risen and was outside; I could hear her murmuring to the woman we’d met last night. I stretched, my back slightly sore, unaccustomed to the ground. Yet I had slept deeply, dreamlessly. In the light, I could see that the hut had been built from bricks of mud and manure, like many I had seen outside La Paz. Our host’s sleeping mat had been rolled up and tucked in a corner. Other than that, furnishings were minimal. A chair, a small table, a chest for storage.
I rifled in my bag for the thermos of boiled water I had brought. It was nearly empty. Picking it up, I pushed open the front door. This morning, the Isla del Sol seemed aptly named. I could not remember having seen a sun this yellow, this clarifying. The waters of the lake, rippling in the breeze, reflected the sky, making islands of clouds. Across the lake there were flatter channels that almost looked like paths. A memory of ice-skating across an Austrian lake darted through my mind. Around us, the green hills were terraced for farming.
I stood outside the door, staring, until Nayra called to me from the firepit to the right of the hut. “The sun god was born here,” she said.
“I can see.” I walked toward her, blinking in the blaze of light.
“I will show you his footprints. This is my grandmother.” She indicated the older woman crouched next to her by the fire.
“Mucho gusto.” I was unsure if she spoke Spanish. She nodded and smiled, revealing nearly toothless gums, before turning back to watch the tiny fish she was roasting over the flames. We had come ashore near the village of Yumani, she explained. Her grandmother lived on the fringes of the settlement.
We set off just after breakfast, our bags tied around our shoulders cholita style. Nayra smiled as she watched me imitate the knot she tied at her collarbone. We would walk a circular route, first traveling down the spine of the island, she said, stopping to see the sacred sites. “There were people here long before the Inca,” she told me. “Our people.”
The narrow dirt path we followed wound through tiny settlements and past fields planted with amaranth and potatoes. Baby pigs tried out their trotters alongside the path and I squatted down to touch their skin. There were no roads. No cars. No exhaust fumes. No noise. I had the feeling I had traveled back to the time of the pre-Incan settlers. Along the edges of the island grew familiar white and yellow daisies, as well as exotic fluffy red-orange flowers that grew as tall as my shoulders.
The villages tapered off as we climbed up to the island’s backbone, walking a long, straight line toward what Nayra called the Sacred Rock, dwelling place of the sun. That same Sun, not an entirely benevolent deity, burned the skin of my cheeks as we walked, and I was glad I had brought a wide-brimmed hat. We walked mostly in silence, broken only by Nayra’s occasional explanations or a story. Despite her disdain for the Incas, many of her tales were Incan tales. They had left so many of these relics. As I looked out at the sea—I mean the lake, which felt so much like a sea because I could not see how far it stretched—I noticed that its colors shifted constantly. In the shallow coves, the slate-grey of the deeper waters turned aquamarine. I felt I could sit and watch it all day.
The Sacred Rock disappointed me. I had expected something spectacular, carved, interestingly shaped. But it was merely a weathered grey mass plopped at the end of the island like a discarded heap of sog
gy muesli. Nayra said it resembled a puma, but try as I might, I could not find anything in it resembling that wildcat. I rested my hand on its warm side, hoping a divine energy would infuse me with some kind of peace. But all that happened was that my hand became warm.
Nearby were the Sun’s footprints, odd oblongs carved into the stone. “The Huellas del Sol,” Nayra said. They were large, though not as large as you might imagine a god’s footprints to be. The strength of the Sun would surely burn holes in the earth far bigger than these two prints. Oh, how hard it is to instill belief—any belief at all—in the heart of someone who no longer believed in anything.
“And there is the table, where the Incas murdered their children.” She gestured at a stone table surrounded by little square stones. The arrangement looked so unexpectedly modern that I wondered how long the stones had actually been in those positions.
Nearby was Chincana, the ruined labyrinth. As we wandered through the roofless rooms, up and down the maze, Nayra took my hand, though she dropped it as soon as we passed a man walking down. “There isn’t much left,” she said apologetically, as if it had been she personally who had let it fall to ruin. “Everything was stolen.”
“Like what?”
“Gold and silver. Bowls, drinking cups. Everything. All we have left are doorways.”
There were many of those. If you stood at the top of the labyrinth looking down toward the lake, you could look through several doorways at once, all lined up. I realized suddenly how little I knew of this country. How much I wanted to know. This day, this island, would be a start.
From my vantage point, atop this small island in the vast lake, Europe felt impossible. War inconceivable. Everything but the elements fell away. There was only earth, sun, and water. People had always lived here, on this isolated piece of rock, since there were people at all. They grew things to eat. They fished. They played pipes and they danced. I tried to imagine this being enough, this life without books, cinema, or symphonies. The idea both tempted and terrified me, making my lungs constrict. What would I be like had I never experienced these things? Reading had ruined me for a life without books. Mahler ruined me for a life without orchestration. Yet, oddly, Vienna did not ruin me for a life in La Paz. It had only ruined my mother.
Stepping forward, I walked through a doorway.
“Did people live here, or was it only a place of worship?” I imagined roofs over these rooms, children hiding from each other.
“It is a mystery what was here.” Nayra didn’t mind mystery as much as I did, didn’t have the same desire to tie up every loose end of every story.
Around noon we stopped in the home of a woman who cooked for passersby, and sitting on the green verge of her lawn we ate salted potatoes and fried karachi. After lunch we walked slowly along the jagged coast, Nayra spilling stories in her wake. In the village of Ch’allapampa, Nayra told me, tiny gold and silver figures had washed up on shore, gifts from the city beneath the water. “People have taken them,” she said with a shrug. “The Incas, the Spanish.” We wandered as close to the water as we dared, but I saw no metallic glints beneath the surface.
* * *
• • •
WE COULD GO BACK to stay with her grandmother, Nayra said, or we could stay on the beach. I thought of the stars, of sleeping with them above me, and chose the beach of Challa, forgetting that the stars’ brightness would bring no heat. As soon as we stopped moving, the chill began to permeate my skin. It was even colder here than in La Paz, with the wind across the water whipping strands of hair in our faces.
Neither of us was very hungry, so we sat on the sand and nibbled on the packet of Lebkuchen I had brought from home. As the sun slid down, the surface of the water turned silvery, like snakeskin. From where we sat we could look across to the much smaller Isla de la Luna. How I would love to listen to Holst’s Planets sitting here, letting the music of Jupiter and Neptune wash over me with the sounds of the water. I wanted Nayra to hear it with me. But I didn’t have the words to explain my desire.
“Women used to live there.” Nayra gestured across the water. “Holy women.”
“Nuns?”
“Something like that. Virgins.”
Like me. Unlike the girls at school, I had never fallen prey to romantic crushes on boys. A few times I had given in to various boys who had pursued me, going to the cinema or out for tea. But their attempts to press their lips to mine aroused only a mild revulsion. It wasn’t boys I thought about when I was alone in the dark.
“Were they sent there by their families?”
Nayra shrugged. “Maybe they just had had enough of their men?” We smiled at each other, and something familiar twisted in me.
The dark descended fast. We each put on all of the clothing we had with us and unrolled our blankets. I could still feel the cold in my bones, in the heart of me. I could not remember what it felt like to be warm. Without thinking, I inched closer to Nayra, wanting to draw myself into her warmth. She had always been physically distant. Now here was her hair, her thick black hair, resting against my cheek, mixing its strands with mine. In the night, they were the same color. We had midnight hair. I could smell her smoky bread smell.
“Tell me a story,” I said, inching slightly away.
She laughed as she turned onto her back to see the sky. “For your book?”
“For our book.” I had dozens of stories by now, rewritten dozens of times.
“And you’ll read it to me once you put it down, to be sure you get it right?”
“I always read them to you.”
“But you’re always changing them.”
“That’s true.” I thought for a while. “Isn’t that what happens when they are passed down from your grandmother to your mother? The words can’t be the same.”
“Maybe.”
“I’ll change them again if you want.”
“We will see.”
“Entonces . . . ?”
She sighed. “Do you see that star, the brightest one there? That is the Grandfather Star I told you about, Achach Warawara. It’s the first one that appears and you are supposed to watch it with your grandmother or grandfather. Someone old. You have to find that one before you can look for all of the baby stars . . .”
I began to drift, and was nearly asleep when I heard her tone shift.
“Do you remember I said you had to watch the stars at a certain time of year? So that we know when to begin things?”
“I remember.”
“For weaving, too, we need the stars. To be sure our animals have the right color wool, we place weavings over the backs of llamas and alpacas. A black weaving for black babies. For white babies we do not cover the llamas, so starlight can get into them.”
I stared above us, trying to see colors in the stars.
“These patterns, I want to weave.”
The stars were starting to grow restless, quivering in their places. “Is there a way to weave a story?”
“Many weavings tell stories.”
“Like the one where the monkey sends the fox away to find fire from the stars and he burns his tail on the moon?”
“It’s possible.”
I tried to imagine these celestial tapestries. “I would like to see those stories in a weaving.”
When there was no reply, I turned my head to try to see her face but it was too dark. I heard her breath, quiet and regular.
Looking back at the stars, I thought about her stories, our stories, my stories, Anneliese’s stories. I thought about the poems I had written for Ana, Willi, my mother. The poem I wanted to write for my aunt Thekla. I wondered why some things came out in stories and some in poems or songs, and marveled how clear it often was which thoughts belonged in which kind of writing. My stories were all imagined. They were about worlds far from this one, animals, fantastic landscapes.
But the
poems, they told the truth.
* * *
• • •
I LAY ON MY BACK staring up at the shivering stars until the Sun god stepped out of the lake and into the sky.
Fifty-six
The day I began university, in February 1947, another Nazi died. I was spreading butter across a marraqueta for breakfast when Mathilde, panting from the stairs, knocked at the door of our apartment with the news. She and Fredi had also moved, but were just a dozen blocks away. It was always Mathilde—Mathilde with her journalist’s obsessive attention to both world and local events—bringing us news.
This Nazi was older, in his forties or fifties. He had been a guard at Auschwitz. It was his heart, Mathilde told us, accepting a cup of tea.
“His heart?” said my father. My mother studied the inside of her teacup.
“That’s what the doctor said.” A Bolivian doctor who either didn’t know who he was or didn’t care had examined him and passed on the information to our German doctor.
“Nazis have hearts?” My mother’s voice was flat.
“Scorpions have hearts. Cobras have hearts. Though I imagine theirs don’t do much more than push blood around the body. And in this case, that is what it failed to do.” Mathilde sipped her tea. “For which I am grateful.”
My father frowned as he stood up from the table. “I am not grateful for death in any form. Death is not something I can celebrate.” Leaving an unfinished marraqueta on his plate, he walked down the hall to his viola.
I stared at my mother, willing her to look at me. I hadn’t thought she would do it again, after Thekla’s death. But she kept her face turned to Mathilde.
I scraped back my chair, swept the crumbs from the table into my hand, and carried my plate to the sink. Thekla had not been grateful for the death of Nazis. Their crimes were not something that death could reverse. Couldn’t my mother see that?
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