* * *
• • •
SO JULIA READ one of her books aloud in French, sitting on the edge of Isidora’s bed, while I stretched out on the floor beside them in the dark, my head resting on a stuffed rabbit. When Julia finished a book, Isidora pretended to read to her in German from Anneliese’s book, one of her favorites. Though she turned the pages, she knew all the stories by heart.
When I closed my eyes and let the girls drift away, I could hear Anneliese’s voice in our parlor on Seegasse, see us on the carpet with our rabbits.
“All of the treasures of the country—”
“Like its recipes for strudel and photographs of sunrises and the smell of cloves—”
“Are kept in wooden chests—”
“With magical locks—”
“Around each treasure chest is a silvery light. To unlock it, you need to move your head into the light and pick up the pen attached to the chest.”
“Yes! And then holding that pen, you trace the password on the trunk of the chest. Mint leaf apfelsaft.”
* * *
• • •
“HOW LONG do you usually let her read for?”
So far had I drifted it took me a minute to hear Julia’s question. How long had Isidora been reading? It could have been minutes, it could have been hours.
“Oh!” I rolled to my side and sat up, the room settling into place around me. “Ten minutes? Fifteen? It depends.”
“We’ll stop there then, ma puce. We can continue tomorrow.” Julia took the book from her and set it on the bedside table.
“Mamá!”
“You can read more tomorrow.”
“That’s so far away!” She frowned at me, then turned to Julia. “What does ‘puce’ mean?”
Julia laughed. “It means flea. I called you my little flea.”
Isidora looked cross again. “Do I make you itch? In what way am I like a flea? I am not so little!”
“In France, fleas are considered a sacred bug. We call only our most adored people fleas.” She winked at me.
“Really?” Isidora looked skeptical for a moment before deciding to take Julia’s statement at face value. “Then I suppose I do not mind being called a flea.” She pulled Julia down to embrace her, knocking the book to the floor.
Sixty-four
OCTOBER 1963
It was just before midnight on the eve of día de Todos Santos, the Bolivian day of the dead at the start of November, when the diaphanous veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead is at its most porous, allowing spirits to drift between realms.
I was in the guest room over the kitchen, Isidora curled by my side. We had stayed so late baking tantawawas with my mother that we were too tired for the journey home. Todos Santos was one of my mother’s biggest days of the year, when people flocked to her shop for the provisions they needed to prepare sumptuous feasts for their dead relatives. As I had done since my adolescence, I helped to knead the tantawawas, pushing the little painted clay faces into the dough figures. This year, Isidora had worked alongside me, tenderly tucking each tantawawa into its bed of papers, filling twenty-seven tins for my mother to sell.
A noise startled me from an uneasy sleep. Perhaps it was the clatter of the padlock to the counter, or the rattle of the tin itself. Perhaps my father, whose knees had recently become unreliable, had stumbled on the stairs.
I sat up on the edge of the bed, my body tensed, as if it already knew. I glanced down at Isidora, touched her sleep-warmed hand, her stubby brown plaits, but she did not stir. She was untroubled by the nightmares that still plagued the rest of us. When she closed her eyes, she did not see armies of spiders or piles of doll-size clothes.
Without stopping to search for my slippers in the dark, I crept to the top of the stairs. There: a rustle of paper, a drawer sliding open. I smiled, exhaled. He was at it again, raiding my mother’s wares like a little boy. Slowly, I stepped down.
In the kitchen, a bulb buzzed in the overhead light—the electricity in Sopocachi was working, for once— and the clay tiles were icy on my bare feet. Shivering in my nightgown, I saw my father bent over the sink, a forkful of Palatschinken halfway to his mouth. Beside him on the counter was a rusting cookie tin, one of the dozens my mother used to store the food she sold in her bakery and in the markets of La Paz. The padlock that had fastened the tin lay open beside it, a slim bit of metal still inserted, the lid thrown back on its hinges. I stepped closer, alarm quickening my pulse. Despite the opened lid, the shape of the tin was clear: a Christmas tree.
“Vati, no!”
Jerking upright, my father dropped the fork into the sink and turned to face me. “Orlita! My heart. Are you trying to kill me?” He pulled his robe more tightly across his thin chest. “I’m sorry I disturbed you. I didn’t hear you come down. Go back to bed now.”
I grabbed his arm. “You don’t understand. How much did you eat?”
“Not so much! What’s the fuss? A bite of pancake more or less?”
“Mutti!” I wanted to run upstairs to get her but I didn’t want to leave my father alone. “Mutti, get down here!”
My father looked bewildered. “Orlita, I’m sorry. Why do you want to wake your mother? Get me in trouble?”
“It’s not you in trouble, Vati, not in the way you think—”
My mother appeared then, motionless on the bottom step, nightgown drifting around her like a ghost. She stared at me, her silvery curls snaking straight out from her head. I hadn’t heard her footsteps.
“He ate some, Mutti. The German food. Why is it there? Why is it in this house? I’ll go for a doctor. What have you done?”
Her eyes conducted a rapid calculus of terror as she absorbed the tin and the missing chunk of pancake. “How much did he eat?”
“Just a corner. A bite or two. Julia, please, someone explain to me—”
My mother was already reaching for the earthen jars of herbs she kept above the sink, her personal pharmacy. “Light the stove. And get me the horsetail and milk thistle from the pantry. Where is my palo de aceite?” She opened a jar and sifted green leaves into her mortar.
“Shouldn’t I get a doctor?” I needed to do something. I needed to save my father. I fetched her the herbs she had asked for.
“A doctor won’t know how to undo this. I know the antidote.”
“Have you ever used it?”
“Of course not.”
“Mutti!” A tide of fury rose in me. But I could not risk distracting my mother now.
“Julia!” My father still stood in the middle of the kitchen in his dark-blue dressing gown. “Stop, please. Stop. What are you doing?”
“I’m saving us,” my mother said, pounding the herbs into dust. “I am saving you.”
My question for her was different from my father’s. My question was: Who have you become?
* * *
• • •
AS SOON AS my mother had finished mixing up the antidote Wayra had apparently taught her decades ago—just in case—she placed the mug of dark foaming liquid on the table. “Sit, Jakob. Drink this.”
My father sat down, but refused to pick up the mug.
“Vati, please drink.” I sat down next to him and nudged the mug closer to his hand.
“Jakob, there’s no time to waste.” My mother hovered over him as though he were a recalcitrant toddler refusing his milk.
He looked calmly up at her. “Then you had better start talking.”
“Stubborn fool! I’m talking. I’m talking now. Where to start. Wayra. No, Thekla. Do you remember the guard, the one who Thekla knew . . .” As soon as she began, my father picked up the mug and began to take slow, careful sips.
The story she told was similar to the one she had told me more than fifteen years ago in a different kitchen. She spoke quickly, as if to get it
all out in one breath.
My father kept his eyes on hers as he tilted up the mug. She paused after the second death and my father stopped drinking. “Orly knew? You made my daughter complicit?”
“She guessed. She made me promise to stop. She said if I didn’t she would tell you.”
For so many years she kept her word to me. I had heard of no suspicious deaths, had not had any bits of food knocked out of my hands or those of my daughter. I had watched her carefully. I would never have forgiven her had she put my daughter at risk. But now—hadn’t she? Isidora was a curious, intelligent child. It would not be long until she was finding her way around locks.
My father looked at me. “She should have told me anyway.”
“Why? What would you have done, turn Mutti in to the Bolivian police?” The last thing I wanted to do was defend my mother or myself, yet I could not see a clear benefit to reporting my mother’s crime.
“So I could maybe not end up poisoned by my own wife.”
“Don’t blame Orly. She made me promise to stop. I kept that promise for so long, even when I knew Barbie was in the country. He was living far away anyway, it wasn’t a possibility. It was only after I saw him in La Paz that I couldn’t be idle anymore. Jakob, how could I sit there and watch a movie in front of the man who ordered the murder of our son?”
My father tipped up his mug until it was empty and then he stood. “You didn’t have to watch a movie with him. That isn’t what this is about.” His hands curled in fists by his sides, shock turning to rage.
“No. You’re right. But no one else is coming for him. Jakob, can’t you understand? He is leading a happy life.”
“So these pancakes, these Palatschinken I have always loved, that have always been my favorite thing you make, these are what you choose for him? My pancakes? Mine?”
My mother’s voice faltered. “They—they weren’t the first thing I chose. The first thing I made was a strudel. But he gave it to one of his food tasters, one of his bodyguards.”
“Who is no longer with us.”
“Who is no longer with us,” my mother conceded.
“Then you decided to try the pancakes.” His voice fell flat, inflectionless.
“No, then it was Schnitzel. They always love the Schnitzel.”
My father cleared his throat. “And who tasted the Schnitzel for him?”
“Another guard.”
“I see. And no one was suspicious about the Austrian woman serving food to these guards?”
“They weren’t in La Paz that often. And it’s slow-acting poison. It can take days. They would have eaten several more meals by the time it took effect, and they were never sure which to blame. Plus, foreigners are always getting sick here.”
“So no one was punished for those deaths.”
“I don’t think so. I didn’t hear anything. And then I thought, pancakes . . . well, they’ve always tempted you. . . .” Her voice trailed off. “He is going to be the last one, I promise. Just him.”
My father seized her shoulders. “No,” he said. “You cannot.”
“Jakob, what about Willi! What about those children!”
“You want to become like him? Damn you, Julia!” He pushed her away, causing her to stumble backward. He was shouting. I watched them, frozen. I had never heard him swear at my mother. “I married you because there was beauty in you, there was music and life. What have you done with that woman? What have you done with her?” He began to weep. “I learned how to live without your voice. But I can’t live with who you are now. I have had enough of murderers.”
He turned and walked upstairs, a hand on his stomach.
* * *
• • •
THE SUN ROSE, even on this day, at the exact time it always rose.
It was still cold in the kitchen. My mother and I sat for some time without speaking, having nothing more to say as we waited to see if my father would be joining the other souls adrift today, crossing the wrong direction.
“When will we know?” I finally asked.
She turned glassy eyes to me. “If he hasn’t started getting ill by tomorrow, he’ll be fine.”
“Tomorrow?”
“I said it was slow.”
She got up and carried the mugs to the sink and stood there a moment, as if wondering what to do next. “I suppose I’ll go upstairs.”
“Isidora will be up soon.” Miraculously, the shouting had not woken her. She had not heard the story of her grandmother’s crimes.
“I could make her breakfast.” There was hope, there was pleading in her voice.
“No,” I said firmly. “I’ll do that.”
* * *
• • •
ALONE IN THE KITCHEN I scraped the sodden herbs into the trash and washed the dishes three times. I threw out the pancakes and scoured the tin. I worked quickly, wanting to get rid of all of it before my daughter came downstairs. I rang Miguel quickly to say we’d spend an extra day with my parents, and to ask if he could look after Julia, whom we’d left behind because she had a cold. “I’ll explain once I’m home.”
Weary and panicked, I started up the stairs. Isidora was still sleeping, sprawled diagonally across the entire bed. Thankful for her oblivion, I tiptoed to my parents’ bedroom. My father was asleep. My mother had curved her body around his on their bed, careful not to touch him, knowing what would happen should he wake, but near enough she could probably feel the warmth emanating from his skin. Suspecting, perhaps, that she would never again be allowed so close.
Unaware, he slept on. I stepped over the threshold.
As I stood over them, I had a vision of myself at seven or so, standing over their bed in Vienna, their lace curtains fluttering in a spring breeze. While they rarely let me stay in bed with them if I woke in the middle of the night, often they would let me sneak in in the morning. If I crept in quietly enough, sometimes they wouldn’t even wake. But one morning, this morning that came back to me, I had found them like this: my mother curled around my father, but their arms and legs intertwined so closely that their intimacy seemed inviolable. Sometime in the night they had thrown off the pile of sheets and blankets that lay twisted at the foot of the bed, as if they wanted nothing between them. I stood for a moment, watching them, before turning to go back to my own bed, feeling my solitude more acutely than ever.
Now, I felt the same resistance to disturbing them. My mother hadn’t stirred when I came in. I wondered if she were asleep. How could she sleep? But then, she had been sleeping for years.
Sixty-five
Isidora and I returned home as soon as we were reassured that my father would live. On the second day after the pancakes, he was feeling so vigorous that he packed a suitcase and left to spend the night at Gregor’s apartment. A damp grey mist was sifting down through my rib cage.
Isidora was upstairs with her rabbits when Julia came down from her room to make tea. She wore a purple cotton sundress that somehow made her look even younger.
“Julia.” I stopped in the doorway of the kitchen, where she was filling the kettle.
“Sí?”
“Come sit down with me when you’re done?”
She came to perch beside me on the living room sofa, cupping the mug between her palms. It wasn’t any easier in the retelling, not any of it. Julia cried like Isidora often did, only quietly, with less abandon. She cried as if she were accustomed to crying in secret.
“My grandfather—he’s really okay?” Julia looked up at me, pink mottling her cheeks. She finally set down her mug and pressed her hands together between her knees.
“He seems to be. He went to stay with a friend for a while.”
“He looked fine?”
“He looked fine. I don’t think his stomach was in very good shape but he’s alive. Alive and furious.”
“I only just found t
hem.”
“I know.”
“It’s so weird that Barbie ended up here. I mean, where we are. The family of someone he ordered killed.”
“Not that weird. He murdered thousands of people, Julia. There are families of people he murdered in almost any country you could mention. He’s always going to be passing families of his victims on the street. Though not all of them will recognize him.”
She turned her head to look at me, a lock of dark hair falling across her eyes. “Do you think she’ll try again?”
“For Barbie? I don’t think so. She knows we’re watching. And it’s now unmistakably clear she might have killed any of us.” Even as I said this, I knew I would never again feel easy about sending Isidora to stay with her grandparents.
“Not just Barbie, but in general . . . ?”
“She promised my father she would stop. Though there seems to be no shortage of Nazis, here or anywhere in South America. The temptation is always there.”
“But he still left. My grandfather.”
“Yes. But maybe he’ll change his mind.” I shifted on the sofa to face her. “Am I wrong?”
Julia was quiet for a moment. “Isn’t there a part of you that wishes she had succeeded?”
I didn’t need time to think about that one. “Of course. He doesn’t deserve to live. But I don’t want my mother to be the one to do it. I don’t want it to be on her soul.”
“Do you believe in souls?”
“I don’t know. But it would make her more like them. And it wouldn’t bring Willi back, or the children.”
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