Nayra didn’t ask what my parents did for work or what I did at school. Maybe she didn’t consider those things important.
She had been surprised that I didn’t have brothers or sisters living with us, so I explained that my brother was missing. This didn’t seem remarkable to her, that someone should be missing. I wondered how often people went missing up by the lake, what forces might take them away. The cold water, perhaps.
When she got up from the table, Nayra saw the doll sitting in the corner of the room. “Yours?”
“It was a gift.” I picked up the doll and handed it to Nayra. She turned it over in her hands. Its dirndl was growing stiff and dusty.
“From your country?” She turned the doll backward to make her eyes close. “Ojos de lago.” Lake eyes.
“Nayra, this is for you.” My mother held out a small cake. Nayra set the doll back on the floor. “It’s a recipe from Austria. For your family.” Nayra looked at the cake in her hands. “It’s not usually so flat,” my mother added ruefully. “Es la altura.”
“It’s good,” I reassured her. “It’s Gugelhupf. With almond and fruits.”
Nayra smiled. While I had wanted Nayra to know my parents, had wanted to share our food and show her our room, I realized now that I preferred it when we were alone. I liked it better when Nayra was allowed to be quiet, or tell the stories she wanted to tell, when she didn’t have to answer questions or entertain anyone.
* * *
• • •
THE NEXT TIME I saw Nayra, she handed me a tiny alpaca sweater, a rainbow of colors knitted together. “To help your doll dress for Bolivia,” she said. “She will be cold.”
Forty-one
Under the water of our lake, all the way under, there is a city,” Nayra began in the mix of Spanish, Aymara, and gestures we used to communicate. Her voice was so quiet that it always sounded as if she were telling me a secret. We were sitting on the dusty street in early April, leaning against the wall of a building near the market, sipping tin cups of api morado, a warm drink made from purple corn and cinnamon.
“Like Atlantis!” I had discovered the story of Atlantis in one of Willi’s books, though I embroidered it considerably. “In Atlantis, everyone played music. Writing poetry was as common as writing shopping lists and artists painted every wall before money was introduced. At first people scoffed at the gold coins brought by a visitor. But a few, entranced by their glittering novelty, traded their prized artworks for them. The greed for coins grew until it was all anyone thought about. They stopped writing poetry and only wrote shopping lists. Apollo, or whatever god of music reigned then, sent a wall of water to submerge the city forever.”
Nayra’s face glowed in recognition.
“Yes, similar. Only our whole city was made of gold. But it too was sunk when people became greedy. If you travel underwater in the lake you can hear the music of the quena still playing.” I had heard the quena, the Andean pipe that made a shrill, lonesome sound. The kind of sound a drowned musician would make.
“Who is playing it?” I imagined Andean mermaids and wondered if they braided their hair and wore little black bowler hats.
She smiled. “No one knows. The spirits trapped there?”
As Nayra continued the story of the city under the lake, I noticed something odd. When she referred to something that had happened in the past, she gestured in front of her. When she spoke of the future, she gestured toward her back.
“Say, ‘When I was a little girl, I swam in the lake.’” I interrupted her, and she looked up at me, confused.
“Say the sentence, I mean. In Aymara.”
Still looking puzzled she said, “When I was a little girl, I swam in the lake.” Her right hand stretched toward the horizon. “But I didn’t! I don’t know how to swim.”
“I know. But when you talk about being a little girl you move your hands in front of you. Like your childhood is in front of you.”
“But it is.”
“No, your childhood is in the past. And the past is behind us.”
She laughed. “The past is right in front of us, where we can see it. It’s the future we can’t see.”
“But that’s backward.”
“It can’t be any other way.”
I was frustrated. Were we not walking away from our childhood with every step?
Yet later that night, as I lay in bed mulling this over, I had to concede that it was only the past I could see. I could see the scar on Anneliese’s lip, Stefi sewing a tiny dress for my bunny Lebkuchen, the men in brown trampling my city. I could see the braided rug by the door of our Vienna flat and the imposing silhouette of the Proteus. I could see Miguel running up the aisle of the Cine Teatro Tesla. But I could not see tomorrow. I could not see who would win the war or when Willi would come home or where I would live when I grew up or what my children would look like. It made a kind of sense to refer to the future as belonging to the blind spot at our backs. Hadn’t Orpheus been reaching for his future when he turned back toward Eurydice?
It startled me that the way I had always thought of the world could be wrong. Yet at the same time, it filled me with a breathless sense of freedom and possibility. Closing my eyes, I imagined with all of my might that my brother Willi was standing just behind me.
* * *
• • •
WHEN I TOLD NAYRA our stories of Friedenglückhasenland, she didn’t mock me or raise a skeptical eyebrow. Telling stories about rabbits did not strike her as odd. Like my stories, hers were focused on animals, but Bolivian animals, such as turtles, foxes, vizcachas, snakes, condors, vicuñas, and jaguars. It was a puma, Nayra told me, that she wore pinned to her hat. The puma was a symbol of prosperity, among other things. Nayra could not write, but she allowed me to transcribe her stories, to create a record.
Nayra was nothing like Anneliese, except for her love of stories. Anneliese was a wild talker, expressive and turbulent. Nayra was still and quiet. Yet when it came to stories, a channel of fire seemed to rise inside both girls. I had no trouble writing the connection between them.
* * *
• • •
WITH OUR STORIES, Nayra and I created a common ground.
“Tell me the one about the fox and the monkey,” I begged, another afternoon at the market. Nayra’s mother had let Nayra take a break to sit with me when I stopped by after school. Monkeys were still exotic to me. I knew there were monkeys in Bolivia, but they didn’t live in La Paz. I dreamed of traveling to the jungle, where the monkeys would come down from the trees and ride on my shoulders.