I tore a strip from a pancake in this last heap and popped it in my mouth. Sour and sweet spread across my tongue along with the buttery taste of my childhood. “Mmmm. Mutti, they’re perfect. They taste like home.”
My mother took the piece I offered her, chewed, and frowned. “No,” she corrected me. “Not like home at all.”
* * *
• • •
AS WE WAITED in the garden of the Finca Elma in Miraflores for our guests, I helped some of the other women with the food, turning the potatoes on the grill, tucking handmade sausages into rolls, and pouring beer. We brewed pot after pot of coca tea. My mother set out our plates of pancakes at the end of the table.
The arrival of refugees was ordinarily a kind of holiday for us, for new people meant new friends added to our small colony, more lives saved from an ever more inhospitable Europe, and the hope of news. It was only later, when the refugees got their bearings and found confidants among us, that the darkest stories from home would emerge. Sometimes I wished I could erase these stories from my memory so that I would not lie awake at night imagining they had happened to Willi or my aunt Thekla. I needed to stay here, in the present, in the sun.
The arrival of the survivors of the Orazio was different. Their hopes had already been stripped from them and shredded beyond recognition. When they began to file into the garden, our usual bustle and chatter dipped and silenced. Compulsively, irrationally, and with a stubborn optimism, I searched the crowd of faces for my brother’s curly head, listened for his familiar voice calling “Erdnuss!” Pale women passed me, clutching the hands of small children as if they were all that bound them to this earth. Men of all shapes and sizes limped forward. Our mothers, an army of determined hostesses, moved toward them, thrusting forward their trays of food and mugs of foaming beer. Still unsteady on their feet, the new people took the food and drink but many just stood there holding it. The children were the first to begin, sitting on the ground with their plates and poking their potatoes with their forks. Chairs were brought forward and the newcomers sank gratefully into them. “Not too much beer your first week,” the mothers warned. “You’ll need time.”
My mother didn’t bother to warn people about the beer. She had other concerns. With each plate she handed over, she had a question. “Have you come across someone named Willi Zingel? Have you heard anything at all?”
No one had.
* * *
• • •
I LOOKED AROUND the garden. I had never seen so many of us in one place. Hundreds of refugees milled around me, talking and eating. A tall woman in a long, silk dress stood to read a poem of welcome, urging us all to forget the past and turn our thoughts toward the battles ahead. Some of the children I knew from the Austrian Club performed skits. My father’s quintet began to play. I carried a plate of food to a black-haired girl who looked about my age. She was standing alone. Her right leg was noticeably thinner than her left. She smiled and carefully folded her legs underneath her on the grass before accepting the plate. The grass in La Paz was never comfortable. It was stiff and pokey, sticking into you through your clothing. It wasn’t like Austrian grass, so pliant and soft it was easily subdued. I sat down beside her and told her my name.
“I’m Rachel,” she offered, in a voice so soft I had to lean toward her to hear it over the music. At the other end of the garden a group of children had begun to sing German hiking songs. She set the plate before her and seemed to admire its composition.
“How old are you?”
“Twelve.” My age. She didn’t look twelve. She was shorter than I was, small and narrow with sharp edges. When she finally looked up at me I saw her eyes were dark brown with starbursts of gold around her pupils.
“Which ones are your parents?” Adults trampled the grass around us but no one obviously belonged to Rachel.
She just shook her head, looking down to her plate.
“I’m sorry.” What was wrong with me? I knew better. It was just that there were so few appropriate questions to ask. I pinched the skin of my thighs until my nails broke through the skin. “Rachel, I’m so sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
She tried to smile at her plate. “My mother dropped me into a lifeboat. It had started to move down the ship’s side and it was the last one, and she just picked me up and she threw me over the railing. All that way. I nearly crushed a man.”
“She threw you?” I tried to imagine my mother having the strength to toss me over the edge of a ship. I pictured Rachel falling, her bird bones failing to fly.
Rachel nodded.
“Were you hurt?”
She nodded. “I fractured a leg. And the arm of the man who broke my fall. But we were lucky. Our boat didn’t sink. It almost capsized when we hit the water. The ocean got into it. Freezing ocean water. But we managed to steady it. Another boat got smashed against the side of the ship. There was nothing left of it at all.”
Our own voyage suddenly seemed miraculously uneventful. I couldn’t think of what to say. “Your mother must have been strong.”
She thought about this. She looked past me. Her eyes were glassy. “I think she was just desperate.”
“Was it that leg?” I gestured to the thinner one.
She nodded. “I just got the cast off, on the ship.”
“Do you have somewhere to stay?”
She looked around. “A lady has been looking after me. Eloise. She’s over there, with the hat.” I looked where she was pointing and saw a statuesque woman in a beribboned straw hat talking with the food servers. “She’s a friend of my mother’s. Was. She’s nice. I guess she’ll find us somewhere.”
“Were you coming here to join someone? Do you have family here?” Now that so many of us were in Bolivia, many of the arrivals were expected by someone. Not us. No one expected us. But we were expecting Willi. Any day now we were expecting Willi.
She shook her head. “It was just the only place that would take us.”
“Us too.” We smiled at each other, bound by our undesirability.
“Do you like it here? In La Paz?”
“I do.” I was surprised by how readily my answer came. “You get used to it. The altitude, the food, everything. Have you been ill?”
She shook her head. “I’m fine. Just. Well. Compared to everyone else, I guess.”
We ate in silence for a few minutes. “It gets better,” I said.
“It can hardly get worse.” She said it matter-of-factly, not like she was complaining.
“Yes. Though I hope the SS can’t find us here.” I thought of the children at the German School, wondered if their teachers were SS.