The doll the lady in the SOPRO offices had given me sat in the corner, watching me. Even in the dark I felt the gaze of her false, unblinking eyes.
Once my parents were breathing evenly, I slid carefully out of their arms and walked to the window. It got cold quickly once the sun fell behind the mountains, and the glass was icy under my fingers. Our room looked out on a small patch of grass and a cluster of redbrick buildings and squat adobe huts. It was too dark to see even the silhouettes of the mountains now, but in every direction but down I could see the stars. In vain, I searched for the familiar constellations Willi taught me—Hydra, Hercules, my favorites, Ursa Major and Minor—but could find no recognizable patterns. Perhaps we were not merely in a different country, but on a new planet, in a new universe.
Twenty-seven
That first morning in our own rooms, I woke shivering with cold. Sunlight burned through the naked windows, waking me, while beside me my parents slept on, as if unwilling to open their eyes to our new Bolivian lives. I pressed an ear against my mother’s back, listening to the air inflate her lungs, wishing I could feel her ribs vibrating with melody, the way they used to. She was so quiet.
At last, unable to go back to sleep, I climbed again from our nest of coats.
“There’s fruit on the table,” my mother murmured before turning over.
There wasn’t fruit on the table. There wasn’t even a table. The table she imagined was home, in Vienna, where a china bowl always overflowed with plums, cherries, and apples. In a corner of our floor was only tea, instant coffee, a can of powdered milk, and a flat loaf of bread Mathilde had made. But I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t get hungry here like I did in Austria, with that ravenous empty feeling. My stomach felt constantly full, though often with air. In these mountains, we inflated like balloons.
I walked past Mathilde and Fredi’s door, padded down the stairs, and stepped outside, shielding my eyes. In front of the house I saw a small boy with shaggy dark hair squatting in the rutted, empty street, tossing pebbles into the dust.
He looked up at me and grinned. “¿Eres una de los blanquitos que viven arriba, no?” I stared at him uncomprehendingly. While I had learned a few words and phrases of Spanish in my first couple of weeks, I still struggled to understand. He had a flat nose and a scar on his lower lip. His short-sleeved white shirt was carelessly buttoned, so that it hung unevenly over his dark trousers. “¿Cómo te llamas?” When I remained silent, he said. “¿No hablas español?” I shook my head. He sighed and tossed another pebble, striking a larger rock in front of him. “Mira,” he commanded.
Not recognizing the word but knowing the tone all too well, I walked over and squatted in the dirt beside him. He dropped a dusty stone into my palm and pointed at the rocks laid out in front of us. It wasn’t long before I caught on to the rules, and we played his nameless rock game until my mother finally woke and called me in for breakfast.
The boy stood to watch me disappear inside, looking disappointed. He was shorter than I was, with sturdy little legs and a wide torso. When I turned back to wave at him he brightened and grinned. “¡Chau kantutita!”
Kantutita, I echoed as I climbed the stairs to our rooms. What a pretty word.
* * *
• • •
THE BOY’S NAME, I soon learned, was Miguel, and I was grateful he was willing to play with me, given that he had no shortage of playmates. In the three rooms downstairs, he lived with five siblings. His two older brothers, thirteen and fifteen, were in a different school from Miguel and not often around. His little sisters were two, three, and seven. Miguel was ten, nearly my age.
Our second morning, I sat on the front step waiting until Miguel emerged. When he and his younger sisters tumbled through their door, arguing about something I could not understand, I sprang to my feet. “¿Marraqueta?” My father had given me a coin to buy us breakfast. I wasn’t sure how much it was worth or what it would buy.
Miguel looked at me. “¿Tienes hambre?” He turned to go back into his home, as if to get me some of his own food.
“No!” I extended my arm, showing him the coin. “I want to buy them.” My words were German but the coin spoke for me.
“Ah. Momentito.” He turned to his sisters, ordering them back into the house before waving an arm down the road. We walked in silence two blocks to the right and one to the left before I saw a woman sitting outside a small shop in front of a massive sack of rolls. Behind her, the mountains again. Everywhere the mountains.
“Miguel? How many?” I held the coin out. He took it from my palm and gave it to the woman.
“Siete, por favor.”
Siete por favor, I whispered to myself.
The woman dug large, calloused hands into her bag and handed me seven rolls without speaking. Not having brought a basket of my own, I folded up the hem of my skirt to carry them.
“Gracias,” said Miguel.
“Gracias,” I echoed.
Walking back I was bursting with questions I could not voice. How much money was that coin worth? How did people here make money? Where was the school? Where could we find fruit? My ignorance made me ashamed.
“Miguel?” I pulled a roll from my bag and offered it to him. “Marraqueta? Marraqueta, gracias.”
When he wasn’t at school, Miguel flew from his door whenever I returned from a walk with my mother or father and invited me to play with him and his siblings. I didn’t understand their words or games at first, but Miguel was patient with me, using chalk to scribble on bits of pavement, exaggerating his pronunciation until I said a word correctly. When I got something right he would brighten and say, “Bien hecho, kantuta!”
He and his sisters—Ema, Nina, and Celia—absorbed me into their games, asking no difficult questions. They never asked if I was a Jew. It was the first time in forever that someone treated me as an ordinary child.
“Salta!” Miguel would cry, leaping from the front step. “Corre!” he called as he sprinted down the road and back. “Para!” He jerked to a halt in front of me.
Their games were not so different from ours. They kicked balls. They raced toy cars they had fashioned out of empty Klim cans. They played something like hopscotch called thunka, which involved drawing squares on the streets with chalk and labeling them for the days of the week. On one foot, we hopped from Monday to Sunday, before kicking the stone out of the squares. We borrowed a neighbor’s wheelbarrow to push each other around. Things I already knew how to do. Wheelbarrow in Spanish is carretilla and I loved the Spanish r’s, the way they skipped across my tongue. I loved the soft yuh of the double ll’s. I especially loved the eñe, that exceptional letter.
My parents’ tongues rebelled against the Spanish r’s, their less flexible brains struggling to adapt. My mother often refused to speak anything other than German. It wasn’t long before I took over our negotiations at the shops, learning the words for flour, potato, rice, and the invaluable sentence: “That’s too expensive. We can’t pay that much.”