The people on the streets stared openly at us as we passed. Many of the women were dressed similarly to the woman who had sold us the juice. Some men wore dark hats and suits, while others were draped in colorful blankets. I wondered what we looked like to them, if they found our clothing strange or wondered why we were here in their country or if they knew.
* * *
• • •
WE TURNED DOWN a street called Ingavi, where Chani pointed out the recently opened Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folklore. “They have some beautiful textiles and some wild carnival masks. If you want to learn a bit about the country.” Most of us didn’t even look up from the pavement, too exhausted to contemplate tourism. A few minutes later, Chani stopped in front of a dingy metal door that apparently led to the offices of the SOPRO, where volunteers waited to break our fall into this new life.
While my parents talked with volunteers about our paperwork, I lingered in the doorway of the dim, cramped office. “Little girl.” A white-haired lady beckoned me over to her desk. “I have something for you.” From a drawer she pulled out a cloth doll with a hard plastic head. It wore a yellow dress with a blue apron—an Austrian dirndl—and had blue eyes that opened and shut.
I did not want the doll. I had never wanted dolls. But it would have been rude to say so. “Danke,” I said, and took it in my arms.
* * *
• • •
THAT NIGHT WE BECAME ILL, taking turns in the bathroom down the hall from the room we were sharing. Our hosts, another Jewish family from Austria, shook their heads in recognition. You have Bolivia belly, they said. It happens to all of us. You will get used to it.
Hanna Gruber, who was a little older than my mother, brewed us pots of a strange, grassy tea and made us drink it. “It will help,” she promised.
“With what, precisely?” My mother looked skeptically into her cup.
“With everything.”
She was right. The band of pain around my head loosened and my stomach settled. My exhaustion was not quite so complete.
“The Indians here chew it, you’ll see. They chew it all day long. Anything wrong with you, they say chew coca. It’s their entire apotheke.”
The Grubers shared their three-room home, their food, and their rudimentary bathroom with us and their twin toddler girls. They were also hosting a newly arrived young couple, who slept on the floor of the kitchen after we had all gone to bed. The Grubers were strangers and yet not, compared with the world beyond the walls of their home. They too spoke German with Viennese accents. They too had endured the long journey from sea level to the sky. They too ate strudel and challah, though it wasn’t anything like it was at home. The first time I saw a flat, misshapen loaf of challah in Bolivia I nearly wept to see something so familiar. My parents asked about how to find an apartment of our own, but I wasn’t sure I wanted a home separate from the other refugees. I liked sharing a bed with my parents, tucked securely between them where I could listen to the sighing of the wind outside and not feel lonesome. In Vienna, they had always sent me back to my bed after reassuring me that my nightmares were nothing but flimsy shadows of my fears. But here in Bolivia, they never sent me away. There were nights my mother’s arms closed so tightly around me in sleep I had to pry them apart so I could breathe.
We were lucky. Hundreds of other refugees who couldn’t be squeezed into private apartments had to sleep in SOPRO-leased houses that held as many as fifty beds. Chani from the SOPRO offices had told us that she didn’t think La Paz could hold many more of us. More than four thousand European Jews had already arrived, and the local people were complaining of food shortages. Mauricio Hochschild, a rich Jewish man who owned more than a third of the mines in Bolivia, was working on a project to save more of us by starting a colony in the jungle, she said. Jews with agricultural visas would be sent there, once they found land. I was grateful for our regular visas. I didn’t want to travel anymore.
Our third morning, when Frau Gruber returned from her errands with a sack of crusty white rolls, I discovered one link between La Paz and Vienna. These marraquetas that the Bolivian women sold on the streets in the morning were not so different from our Viennese rolls. I broke one apart and inhaled the yeasty warmth rising from the soft interior. The white fluffy insides melted on my tongue. After a few days, I could not remember the taste of Stefi’s rolls.
Like us, the Bolivians liked to dip their rolls into a hot beverage. Though both the definition of “hot” and the definition of “breakfast beverage” were different here. Because of the high altitude, water boiled at a lower temperature, making it nearly impossible to brew either strong coffee or strong tea. I found this confusing; surely boiling temperature was boiling temperature? But then one morning I accidentally poured boiling water over my left hand and was surprised to discover that my skin did not even blister in protest.
Bolivian coffee, according to my mother, was an unacceptable substitute for the coffee of Vienna. While farmers here grew coffee, there were no cafetières, no espresso makers, no evidence at all that the Bolivians made coffee in a recognizable way. Rather, they made their morning cups by mixing a syrupy black coffee concentrate with hot water. Because the concentrate was usually cold, the coffee was never more than tepid. Aggravating my mother further, there was no fresh milk or cream. Powdered milk came in a tin and was called Klim (only years later, as I learned a bit of English, would I figure out that this was “milk” spelled backward). Before too long, I rarely remembered that milk had ever come in a glass bottle with cream on top.
* * *
• • •
IN THE EVENINGS, when my mother kissed me and tucked the coarse woolen blanket more tightly around me before going back to talk with the adults, I still asked her for a song. Every night, I asked her for a song. And every night, she touched my cheek with her cold fingers and shook her head. I thought perhaps it was the presence of the other children in the room, the crowd of adults gathered in the kitchen next door. That perhaps she was shy to sing in front of strangers. But that wasn’t it, she finally told me one night to make my questions stop. “Singers require two things: air and joy. Here I have not enough of either.”
“But you sang on the boat,” I protested. “You sang when we left. There was no joy then.”
My mother’s fingers dug into the muscles along my spine, releasing them all the way down. “There was air. There was relief. We had escaped. I still had hope,” she finally said. “And a great need to communicate something to the world I was leaving. I had to say good-bye.”
“Don’t you still?” I rolled over and looked up at her. “Don’t you still need to communicate?”
I wanted to ask, “Don’t you still have hope?” but I was too afraid of her answer. Of course it was hard, of course we were still breathless, but we would adjust in time, wouldn’t we? Everyone said we would adjust.