We would rather she were singing.
Thirty-seven
Soon after the Orazio refugees landed, my parents enrolled me in the newly opened Escuela Boliviana-Israelita. It was in the same building as the synagogue, up on the paseo del Prado. All the Jewish children were planning to go there. I was relieved at the prospect of returning to a daily routine, some semblance of a normal life. Not only did we now have a school of our own, but I no longer had to work as a child minder. My mother had begun to make money cooking and my father had dozens of students. We could afford our modest life.
I had not been to school in more than a year. Though I read every book I could find in German (and, increasingly, in childish Spanish), I had not encountered mathematics, science, or history since we arrived. I knew I was terribly behind.
Anxious to begin, I was ready that first day before my parents awoke: I had pulled on the faded, mended dress I had been wearing since we arrived and a pair of woolen stockings that were already too small. Even if we had had extra money, we couldn’t buy clothing. Here we had to buy cloth and sew the clothing ourselves, using patterns from the American catalogues circulating in our community—and sewing was not one of my mother’s talents. I had accumulated two additional dresses from Austrian girls who had outgrown them, but neither fit me well. I also had one handknitted Bolivian sweater we bought from Miguel’s mother. These items made up my entire wardrobe.
I splashed cold water on my face and cleaned my teeth before walking by myself to buy our breakfast rolls. The streets were mostly empty, save for the cholitas with their bread and fruit. “Buenos días!” I called gaily, grateful to be moving my body, grateful for the air around me. My heart beat too furiously for me to feel the cold. At last, school! I would be with other children all day. I would have new books to read. I felt the stones of the street through the holes in my shoes as I walked and didn’t mind. I pretended I was getting a foot massage. Back at home, I set the rolls on our table and leaned over the bed to touch my mother’s shoulder. “Mutti, school!”
“Wait, Orly wait, I have something for you.” She rose with uncharacteristic swiftness. “I meant to be up earlier.” Once she had pulled on her dress and washed her hands and face, she removed the lid from the cardboard box where she stored our clothes. Carefully, she lifted out a package wrapped in thin paper. “I made it.”
I took the package and set it on our table, peeling back the layers of tissue. My mother had made something?
It was a dress. I lifted it from its papers and shook it out before me. Made from a dark blue wool, it had puffed sleeves and a fitted waist, the skirt falling in pleats.
“Mathilde helped me. We made it a little big,” my mother said smiling. “So it would last.”
“Mutti.” I swallowed a lump in my throat. “When did you do this?”
“You’ve been spending an awful lot of time exploring and working, Schatzi. And I can’t cook all the time.”
Dropping the dress on my father’s sleeping form, I ran to hug her. “You’ll be late,” she said, pushing me away. “Put it on! And there are stockings too.”
Once my mother had buttoned up the dress and I had yanked on the stockings, I gazed down at myself. I looked grown-up. The dress was indeed long, hanging nearly to my ankles, some of the seams were slightly crooked, and the stockings kept sliding down my stomach, but there was not a single hole in anything. Not one single worn patch.
I spun around, watching the skirt flare out. “Mutti, you’re a magician.”
“That magic all came from Mathilde. Come, we’d better hurry.”
By the time we walked out the door, my father was sitting up at the kitchen table with his viola, sending me off with a song. Just like he used to do.
* * *
• • •
IN A SMALL CLASSROOM not so different from the one I had left behind in Vienna, children of all ages stood talking in small groups. I looked around for someone I knew and saw Rachel sitting quietly by herself. I waved to her and she nodded. There were many other familiar faces, children I had met at the SOPRO or the Austrian Club. Children I had seen at the market, clinging to the hands of German-speaking parents. Our community was getting larger every day. By the time the war began there were thousands of us, not only from Austria and Germany but from all across Europe. By the time it ended at least ten thousand of us had arrived—perhaps twice that number, even—swelling the population of this city of some three hundred thousand people.
A thin, brown-haired woman I hadn’t seen at first walked over to kiss my mother. “Guten tag, Julia. We will take good care of her.” She wore a limp, fading dress the same cornflower blue as her eyes. Two combs scraped her hair back severely from her brow. She did not smile, but her eyes were gentle.
I thought I was quite old enough to take care of myself, but I shook her hand, trying to look as serious and independent as possible.
My deskmate was a freckled girl named Sarah from Leopoldstadt. “How strange that we have come so far to meet,” she said in German. Perhaps we had once sat across a café from each other, or become dizzy on the same spin of the Riesenrad. Perhaps I had walked by her father’s tobacco shop. She had come from Vienna with her mother and little sister. “They took my father,” she said during that first conversation, as if to get it out of the way. “The night of the pogroms.” Once again I was aware of my good fortune. There were so many lost fathers. “My brother is missing,” I offered.
In Vienna, I had gone to school with the same children my entire life. I’d always had Anneliese. It felt strange to be in a classroom without her, with so many new people. While I knew many of the Austrian and German children, there were also children from Poland, Romania, and other eastern European countries.
Yet, in a way, we did know each other. I knew that, like us, my seventeen classmates had been cast out of their homes. Like us, they had been driven from their country. Like us, they had been afraid, cramped with cold, and stifled by heat on a ship. Like us, they had arrived here with nothing. Loss was assumed.
Perhaps that made us kinder to each other. No one teased the girls with worn and patched dresses, or the boys with too-short trousers. No one yelled Your mother is a Tratschtante—a gossipy blabbermouth—in the schoolyard, aware that too many mothers had met worse fates. I was not the only child missing a brother. We were reserved, careful not to cross each other’s borders.
But while our exile bound us, stark differences remained. Some had given up God entirely while others clung more tightly than ever to the idea of divine intervention. We spoke different dialects and advocated different politics.
“Niños,” Frau Pichler interrupted our nervous chatter. “Take out a sheet of paper, please.” I was surprised to hear her speak Spanish. She then repeated the phrase in German.