After near-silent dinners, my father would come to life when one of the other musicians knocked on our door. “Julia, do you know,” he said excitedly as he rose to let them in, “I am falling in love with music all over again. I can experiment now. I do not have to play the same repertoire year after year. I am free!”
My mother stacked plates and carried them to the washing basin. “Free? Yes, you are free—from the Philharmonic, from our parents, from your son. Me, I could live without such freedoms.”
“Julia—”
But then Gregor was in the house, changing everything. “Frau Zingel! Guten Abend! So kind of you to tolerate us once more.” He swiveled on his heels. “Jakob, an honor, as always.”
I liked Gregor, a violinist, the best. He was the happiest, dancing as he played, his body bouncing forward and backward, rocking left to right, sometimes rising up on his toes as his eyebrows shot toward his hairline at a particularly emotional juncture. He came from Salzburg and was only twenty. Like my father, he took in students, but he also worked in a textile factory during the week. There were three textile factories in Bolivia, where workers spun cotton or wool into thread, dyed it, and wove it into cloth. Gregor was a dyer, and his hands were always stained with color. I liked to watch his sunset-streaked fingers dance across his strings.
The two of them were eventually joined by a Czech cellist and a German violinist, both Jews. One evening, Miguel and I were drawing with chalk in the street when they began playing, the notes cascading from our windows. Miguel stopped, squatting back on his heels. “Is that your parents?”
“My father. And his friends. My mother is a singer but she doesn’t sing anymore.”
He listened for a few minutes more, rapt. “This is what he did when you were in Austria?”
“It’s what he does everywhere. What he has always done.”
Miguel looked at me, the smooth skin of his forehead crinkling. “And they threw him out?”
Thirty
Our social life in La Paz was far more casual than it had been in Vienna. None of us had telephones at first, so we had to venture out to find each other at home or meet up in Plaza Murillo, in the heart of the city. In the mornings, I liked to climb the mile or so up to the plaza with my mother and Mathilde, even though they always needed to stop and rest a dozen times along the way. In those early days we traveled regularly to the SOPRO offices on calle Junin, near the plaza, mostly to connect with each other, but also to pick up emergency cash, trade books, or offer to help a newer refugee with paperwork or a meal. When one of us had a few coins, we rode the Tranvías de La Paz electric trams all the way downhill to the pastoral neighborhood of Obrajes and back. The red streetcars had the nicest seats, but mostly we rode the yellow and green cars because they were cheaper. There wasn’t much to Obrajes back then; it was countryside. But the descent was thrilling. I couldn’t stop myself from the delicious torment of imagining a failure of brakes that would send us all sailing into the blue.
My mother sat with Mathilde or Hanna on the benches (we were allowed to sit on benches again!) across from the grand Presidential Palace and the Cathedral of La Paz, watching the trams disgorge passengers and the salteña vendors ply their juicy pastries while they exchanged news from home. More of us arrived every month, in varying states of shock, confusion, and grief. I chased the pigeons with newly arrived refugee children, careening around the statue of independence fighter Pedro Domingo Murillo and irritating the old women who were scattering corn for them. While I joined in games with the other children, I didn’t make a friend like Anneliese. No one was exactly my age; no one could draw a map of Friedenglückhasenland; no one stroked my arms with tender fingers. I had only ever had one best friend. Besides, now I had Miguel, whose happy company usually felt like enough.
Once we were settled, it was our turn to host the new families. Like us, they arrived pale, nauseated, and panting for air. We were the experts now, thrusting cups of coca tea into their hands and instructing them to drink. We told the newcomers how long to boil the water and where to find the best textiles. We guided them up the uneven, twisting streets to the markets, to the textile factories, and to the paseo del Prado, a wide, grassy area of avenida 16 de julio, where you could watch couples parade in their fanciest clothes on Sunday afternoons. We took them to the refugee-owned Brückner & Krill, which sold European-style sausages, pastries, and other food they recognized. My mother liked to stop in there, more for the pleasure of running into other refugees and speaking German than to actually buy anything. Mathilde had told us there was a Viennese restaurant somewhere nearby, though we didn’t yet have enough money to go.
Most of us grasped for the familiar, cooking Austrian and German food and speaking German. Many never became comfortable with Spanish. Many never considered Bolivia a permanent home, but merely a place to wait out the coming war.
Not everyone adapted. Some stayed ill, some never learned to sleep. But there were limited alternatives. While not all of Bolivia is close to the sky—there are jungles in the lowlands, cities close to sea level—these too had their hazards. As we would learn.
Some families moved to Cochabamba, a sunny little city closer to sea level, where they opened small hotels and bakeries. But most of the work was in La Paz. Most of our community was in La Paz. Travel was difficult, making it hard to move between cities.
Eventually, we formed clubs—the Maccabi Sports Club, the Austrian Club, and others—where we had meals, arranged concerts, and played tennis. The Austrian Club was often where we heard news—who had come down with amoebic dysentery, who had died in childbirth, and who had heard from relatives in Vienna. Our mothers exchanged dress patterns and suggestions for coping with altitude or food-borne illnesses.
On our first Sunday at the Austrian Club I was amazed to suddenly see so many of us, so many German speakers, so many Jews, in one place. It was as if we had abruptly been transported back home. The full name of the club was Federación de Austríacos Libres en Bolivia—Federation of Free Austrians in Bolivia. There, I almost felt like a free Austrian. We ran around playing games we had played in Vienna while our parents heaped their plates with potato salad and Schnitzel, talking not only about home and the coming war, but about books and films. I couldn’t remember the last time I had heard adults talk about anything other than how to stay alive.
* * *
• • •
MY FATHER SUGGESTED I join the troupe of actors at the club. “You’ll learn some Austrian plays. Maybe make a few friends.” He was sitting on the end of my mattress on the floor, his knees poking up nearly as high as his head.
“I have Miguel.” The other refugee children were not as interesting. Why did I need Austrian friends? No one but Miguel could tell me the names of the fruits and flowers. No refugee kid could tell me that the cholitas’ hats were called borsalinos or that a grain called quinoa was one of the few crops that thrived at altitude. I didn’t understand why so few of the other refugees made Bolivian friends. How else could we learn how to live?