A few blocks from the market, Miguel took my hand. “Come. I have something to show you.” With my silent mother struggling to keep up with us, we picked our way through the crowded streets to a woman sitting against a brick building, bunches of flowers arranged in clay vases in front of her on the ground. There were white roses, flame-colored begonias, and bunches of flowers I had never seen. After greeting the woman, Miguel reached his hand to a single bloom, a tubular flower that flared out at the end like a Spanish skirt. “Mira.” Stroking the underside, he showed me how its color turned from yellow to orange to red. “Like your hair.” He lifted one of my braids and held it close to the flower. “It’s our national flower. It’s called kantuta.”
* * *
• • •
ON THE WAY HOME we stopped in one of the many small Bolivian shops that sold powdered milk, matches, and other odds and ends. “I want to buy a peli,” Miguel explained. He showed me the slender bits of film containing frames from movies that you could see if you held them up to the sun. He and his friends collected them. “I love the cinema.”
I touched the fragile scrap Miguel gave me, held it up to the sky. “I see a boy in a funny hat. And—is that an elephant?”
“That’s from Elephant Boy. Have you seen it?”
I shook my head. “I’ve seen The Tale of the Fox,” I offered. Willi had taken me and Anneliese one Saturday afternoon, had made us laugh imitating the animals.
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s German. It had animation.”
Interest flickered in his eyes. “I’ve only ever seen one animated film. I saw Snow White. Do you know it?”
“Everyone knows it!”
“Not everyone here.” A defensiveness had crept into his voice.
“My brother took me to see that one too.” I said it to change the subject, to keep Miguel from being mad at me.
“You have a brother?”
“Didn’t I tell you?”
He shook his head. Shame spread through me like hot poison. I could not have forgotten my brother. I could never forget my brother. I glanced at my mother, who was speaking quietly with Mathilde, whom she’d met in the shop. I was thankful she could not understand us. “My brother, Willi. He’s still in Europe, in Switzerland. He’s coming here.”
“When? Why didn’t he come with you?”
I shook my head and looked up the street. “Soon. He’s coming soon.”
Twenty-eight
When will grandma and grandpa come?” I asked my mother one bright afternoon as we stood on the steps of the post office. “And Aunt Thekla? When will Klara and Felix be here?” My mother was studying a thin page of cramped writing with a hand over her eyes to protect them from the sun. The family members we had left behind were still trying to find a way out. Visas had dried up and the few letters we received were steeped in panic. My mother wrote to Bolivian officials, to Austrian officials, to distant relatives in other countries. She received no replies.
Today’s letter was from my Viennese grandmother, who had been moved with my grandfather into yet another communal apartment.
“Felix is still missing. Thekla won’t leave without him.” My mother shook her head over the letter, her hand crushing the edge of the paper before handing it to my father. “There’s going to be war. There’s going to be war and then how will they get out?”
My father frowned over the paper. “I should have gotten them the agricultural visas. What a fool I am.”
“You’re not a fool, Vati.”
“We are all fools, Orlita. Letting them walk right in.” He slipped the letter into his pocket and stared grimly out at the mountains.
I fell silent. I thought about my aunts and uncles and my grandparents. I thought about Willi. “Is Klara still there? And Aunt Klothilde?”
My mother took my hand. “Everyone’s alive, we think. But I doubt their situation is going to get better.”
“And if there’s war?”
“If there’s war,” said my father, “we’ll know even less.”
* * *
• • •
OVER THE FIRST FEW WEEKS of our new life in La Paz, we pieced together a home from three straw mattresses, donated dishes, borrowed books, and a table and chairs crafted from packing crates. As soon as these set pieces were in place, my father sat down on a crate after dinner one night and took out his viola for the first time. He hadn’t opened the case since we arrived, although he had often played with other musicians on the ship. Now, he ran his fingers over the instrument like he was relearning its surfaces. He tightened his bow and drew it across the D string. We both winced. But half an hour later, as I lay on the floor reading at his feet, a stroke of his arm drew forth the flight of notes that began Fantasia Cromatica.
My heart leapt after those notes, following them like butterflies up a path it knew well. It didn’t matter that his fingers were stiff and weak, that they faltered at that speed. Listening to him play reminded me of times when I didn’t know I was thirsty until I started drinking and then the whole glass went down. Home had been with us all along; it lived in the air shimmering around my father’s strings.
“Well. There it is.” He lifted his eyes from the viola and smiled a real smile, the first I could remember seeing since the Philharmonic expelled him. “So. What shall I play for you?”
I closed the book of fairy tales on my lap that I had borrowed from the Grubers. “Schumann’s Märchenbilder! The fairy tale songs.”
“Nothing simpler? I don’t want to start panting and faint in the middle of it.”
“You just did Fantasia Cromatica!” I sighed. “All right. A waltz, then: Strauss.” I glanced over at my mother lying on a mattress, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. She did not stir.
My father pulled the viola from his chin and rested it on his knee. “No waltzes,” he said. “I think I am finished with waltzes.”
“Well, don’t ask me then,” I said irritably, turning back to my book. “Play whatever you like.” I couldn’t see the harm in playing a waltz. Hadn’t we already given up enough of Austria? We had to give up Strauss now too?
A mild amusement tugged at my father’s mouth. “Which Märchenbilder piece, then? I suppose you want ‘Lebhaft’?”
“Lebhaft”—lively or spirited—was my favorite of the four. But I thought about how fast my father’s fingers would have to move on the strings and how he had struggled with the Fantasia. “No, I’m in the mood for ‘Langsam, mit melancholischem Ausdruck’ tonight.” This piece, “Slowly with a melancholy expression,” was one he had played me in the evenings before bed, its gentle rhythms drawing me irresistibly into dreams. It seemed to describe the undercurrent of our life in La Paz, the way my mother drifted up and down its streets. Slowly, with melancholy expression.