“A wise choice, kleiner Hase.”
Tucking the viola back under his chin, my father lifted his bow and played me “Langsam, mit melancholischem Ausdruck.” Within the first six notes, I was in Vienna. I was in my own bed, soft sheets drawn to my chin, Lebkuchen tucked in my arms. I had forgotten how swiftly music could transport me.
His fingers were still clumsy on the strings—even I could see it—and his rhythm staggered, but he played it all the way through. Then he started again.
Scooting across the floor to lean against one of the crates, I closed my eyes. As the vibrations of his strings stirred the air around me, the small muscles along my spine spasmed and then unclenched. My stomach relaxed into roundness. My hands fell to my lap. Fear that had secreted itself in my body crept away. I let the sounds move over me like warm hands. When I heard my father play, I began to believe in our life here.
* * *
• • •
A SIREN STARTLED ME one morning while I was outside kicking a football with Miguel. At first I thought it must be a fire truck, but I’d never seen a fire truck in La Paz. A few seconds later, Mathilde came hurrying from the house, pulling on her jacket as she came down the steps. “That means news!” she called as she passed us.
I kicked the ball to Miguel and ran after her. “What does?”
“Orlita!” Miguel sounded cross.
“I’ll come back!”
“The siren, it’s from the newspaper.” Mathilde explained that whenever something important happened, the siren summoned people to the latest headlines scrawled on the blackboard in the windows of the newspaper office. “That way you don’t have to wait for the paper.” I remembered then Mathilde had been a journalist, one of the few women writing about politics in Berlin. I wondered if she wished she were still in Europe, covering the biggest story of our lives. But of course a Jew would not be allowed to interview anyone. Not now. She was here for a reason. Mathilde had become the story.
As we neared the street where the offices were, we saw other refugees hurrying in the same direction, their faces tight with fear. Had Hitler expanded his reach yet again? I felt an impulse to take Mathilde’s hand, but resisted it.
Breathless by the time we reached the small crowd gathering in front of the window, we threaded our way to the front. The message written on the chalkboard in the window was brief:
More than 900 refugees aboard SS St. Louis forced to return to Europe after denied entry by Cuba, the U.S., and Canada. Dozens threatened suicide.
I translated the Spanish for Mathilde. The language had made itself comfortable on my tongue. I was just young enough to absorb the whole of it, structure and vocabulary at once, without book study. Miguel and his many siblings were better than any book.
“Returned to Europe?” Mathilde repeated.
“Did you know anyone on it?”
Mathilde didn’t answer. She just stood there with her arms hanging limply at her sides. “There’s nowhere left,” she said. “There’s really nowhere left.”
Twenty-nine
While my mother was resolute in her decision to abandon singing, my father could not stop playing once he had begun again. Some days I felt it was an inconvenience for him to eat or to talk to us. He played as if, by drawing his bow across the strings enough times, he could erase history. As if he could lure his wife back to her voice and play his son home. As if he could erase everything but sound, and we could all live in that.
The following week he began to take on students. There was no La Paz Philharmonic. There was no opera house or ballet. If you wanted to make a living as a musician, you taught. Eager students are a reliable constant; music, it seems, is a universal craving.
At first he taught only the children of other refugee families, families that had been in La Paz long enough to start a business and save a little money. But unable to turn anyone away, he also taught recent arrivals for free. As word got around, a few of the Paceña families with money—the palest descendants of the Spanish invaders—asked if he would teach their children too. He began to earn a little, traveling from home to home or teaching from our bedroom. But it wasn’t enough. We needed pots and pans, shoes, spoons, a comfortable chair. I was tired of balancing on crates and boxes during meals. We wanted to save something for a real apartment, a proper kitchen table.
I wanted to go to school, but my parents said I would have to work until we had enough money to survive on our own. Besides, we hadn’t yet found a school. I wanted to go to the local Bolivian school with Miguel, but it was Catholic, and my parents said it wouldn’t teach me enough; they wanted me to have classes in German or English as well as in Spanish. This did not alleviate the despondency I felt when Miguel abandoned our early morning games to head to school. He had other friends there, friends who didn’t sound so stupid speaking Spanish.
The Grubers hired me to look after their toddlers some mornings. In the afternoons, I often tended to the children of other refugees. Thus I was able to contribute a few bolivianos each week to our coffers. I didn’t mind the work itself—there was something relaxing about being with smaller children, concerned with simple things like food and finding places to play—but I hated feeling I was falling behind in my studies.
My parents had never been especially good with money, their attention caught up in the perfection of sound rather than in the more pragmatic aspects of life. In Austria, their families had helped them when they ran into trouble. In particular, my Vienna grandfather had worried about our money. Here, we all had to.
Many Jewish entrepreneurs didn’t do badly in Bolivia. They were able to start import businesses, textile companies, or restaurants. But my parents didn’t have the right skills or minds. Nor had they any talent for self-promotion. Their talents had to sell themselves or go unused.
Once my father had enough students for us to pay for potatoes, onions, and the occasional pat of butter, he began meeting with three other refugee musicians in the evening to play Baroque music. Rarely had my father ever played the viola alone; he had always been a part of something larger. He was an arm severed from the body of the Vienna Philharmonic. He wanted to be grafted onto something else, anything else. He was, I realized only later, lonely, without even my mother’s voice to accompany him. All my life, my parents’ relationship had consisted of music. They sang phrases to each other, talked through their difficulties at work, hummed pieces of symphonies, sat down together by the piano. They inhabited the same world. Now, only my father lived in that world. My mother was still beside us, making us meals and reminding us to wash our faces, but there was no nightingale anywhere.
“Julia, why must you punish yourself? It was not music that did this. Not the sound of your voice. How can you let them take that too?” My father was confused, did not know how anyone lived in a world without music, least of all his wife. His wife who turned away from him, who did not answer.