As we neared Chile, I stayed on the top deck, eager for the first glimpse of land. I wanted to absorb and touch all the things I had seen only in glimpses from various ports: palm trees, exotic fruits, Indians. On the ship we heard many rumors about Bolivia. “It’s the most backward country on earth,” my shipboard friend Volkmar’s German mother told mine. “It’s almost entirely Indians.” Venezuela was much more advanced, she said. Every country in South America was advanced compared with Bolivia.
“Perhaps we won’t have to be there for long.” My mother had looked worried, although no more so than she usually did these days.
I missed Volkmar, who had been a near-constant companion between Italy and La Guaira, Venezuela, where he and his mother had disembarked. Together we had collected books other passengers had already read, sprawled on the deck to turn their pages, and goaded each other to climb up a ladder on the outside of the ship to sneak into the cinema in First Class. Without him I was restless and bored. It had turned hot and the air clung to me.
A whole month we had been at sea. In my old life, a month flitted by. But the past month seemed as long as my previous eleven years. I had met hundreds of other refugees, eaten strange Italian food, and shared a bathroom with twelve women. I had washed out my underwear in the sink at least thirty times and cut my hair in frustration over the knots. It seemed impossible to me that I had ever skipped gaily to school with Anneliese, worried about a history test, or had a bathtub of my own. That Viennese girl had become a stranger. But what had replaced her? I would find out, I supposed, when we arrived in Bolivia.
We were waiting on deck when rocky bluffs emerged from the sea before us. The sky turned all to light. As we drew closer, I trembled with the anticipation of putting a foot down on a stable surface. I could already see a link between this world and the one we had departed a month ago: palm trees. I assumed that meant there would be plenty in Bolivia. Before us stretched an infinity of sand. At last, I was to step onto the beaches I had imagined, even if this wasn’t yet Bolivia. The ship seethed with activity as the sailors prepared for arrival and we squinted into the relentless sun. I wondered if it would ever be winter here. If we would be able to both swim and ski, as we had done in Austria.
A moment later we were standing on the earth of a new continent.
Once ashore, we waited in clusters to be told where to go, feeling awkward and hot in our dresses, hats, and shoes in the middle of the beach. My mouth was dry, my lips cracked and sore. All around us men joked with each other in Spanish, laughing and hauling luggage. I looked longingly at the sea, wanting to throw myself fully dressed into the waves. To be clean again, of all of it. Sweat seeped through my dirty dress and torn stockings and made me itch.
At last a woman came to lead us to a nearby army barracks, where we were to sleep in a large hall lined with beds. An organization called La Sociedad de Protección a los Inmigrantes Israelitas, La Paz (SOPRO), funded by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, had arranged for us and nearly a hundred other refugees to stay there until our train the next day. Feeling indulgent, my parents allowed me to strip off my stockings and run barefoot in the sand. I waded into the water, delirious with its caress, taking another step farther every time my parents looked away. I reached down to touch it with my hands, licking my fingers to taste the salt.
The village was small, with a church and clusters of low houses with curiously flat roofs. A woman at the barracks served us all bowls of soup and small bread rolls.
We had just one night in Arica before boarding the train for La Paz. “Don’t eat too much on the way up,” the army commander who ran the barracks told us. “It will be better for you if there is nothing in your stomach when you arrive.”
* * *
• • •
IT TOOK MORE than two days for the locomotive to heave its way up the Andes with its load of refugees and Bolivians, all of us sharing wooden benches that bruised the bones of my bottom. At times, the train hardly seemed to be moving, inching its way up the arid slopes. The cliffs on either side were massive, steep, and bare. Many of our fellow passengers were various shades of brown. They smiled at me and said things in Spanish or another language I wish I understood. I could not remember ever having been on a train with so many smiling people. Nothing that the Nazis did with their mouths counted as a smile.
The train ground on, up and still farther up, until I wondered if we might actually pass through a cloud. I shivered in my winter coat. There was no heat on the train and it kept getting colder. I huddled close to my mother. The refugees around us began to get ill, some visibly and audibly, others quietly leaning their heads between their knees. None of us felt much like talking. I wasn’t sick, but I felt very tired. I curled into my mother’s lap and slept for much of the last day.
* * *
• • •
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, pressing my nose flat into the dusty window of the train, I found myself—at last!—face-to-face with the Andes. I had expected them to be green, not this dark red and grey. I had expected the grass and wildflowers of the Alps. In an entirely new way, it struck me how very far we were from everything we knew. Far from the city. Far from the Alps. Far from Austria’s scattered gentian and arnica, far from its chamois and stags. Far from the Vienna Woods, from the coffees, the canals, and the gardens. Far from Aunt Thekla and Anneliese. Far from Stefi, from the house where my mother and I were born. Far from a countryside and language we recognized. Far from the pavements scrawled with graffiti. Far from the Nazis. Far, most of all, from my brother.
We were nowhere I knew at all.
My breath became shallow and fast. When my parents spoke of Bolivia I had imagined something lush. I imagined wild horses and monkeys and alligators and llamas and parrots, as if these creatures could all coexist in the same place. Bolivia is home to all of these animals, but not all of them lived in the Altiplano—one of the highest plateaus in the world.
Still we were moving, up across a tabletop plain. It looked for an instant as if the train would plunge right off the edge of earth, into a vast emptiness and then—
La Paz. It appeared below us, a city of redbrick buildings and tin-roofed mud houses trickling down the sides of a bowl in the middle of the mountains. I stared and stared, my eyes going gritty and dry. These buildings were not grand or beautiful. This was not a city. Who had told us it was a city? This was a village. A large village in the middle of a valley on the moon.
There were no palm trees. There were hardly any trees at all. La Paz was not lush. It was dry and high and far from anything alive. As we had neared the plateau above the city, my nose began to bleed, the blood dripping through my fingers to stain my last dress. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said to my mother, bending over so the blood fell to the floor of the train.
My father, who had turned the bluish white of skimmed milk, silently passed me his handkerchief.