I nodded. “Of course.”
We stepped into the kitchen, large and light. My mother touched the wood countertops, the knobs of the oven, and she smiled. “This,” she said. “This will change everything.”
While I was excited about the prospect of space, I dreaded leaving Miguel’s house. No longer would I run into him and his siblings leaving our apartment or coming home. No longer would it be so easy for us to fall in step.
He took the news stoically.
“I guess I won’t see you then.” He stared off up the street in front of the house.
“Of course you’ll see me!” I couldn’t imagine life in La Paz without Miguel. He was part of the architecture of our existence. My foundation.
He smiled and shook his head. “It won’t be the same.”
He was right, of course. As soon as we moved into our new apartment, we became even busier, cleaning and organizing our new rooms, finding odd bits of furniture to fill them, and figuring out new routes to markets and friends. My mother began selling her food from a newly installed counter at the front of the Grubers’ Riesenrad Café. In my new room, my own room, I was relearning the pleasure of solitude. While I still met Miguel at the movies, I didn’t run into him several times a day in the street in front of our apartment. We attended different schools. I couldn’t race downstairs and knock on his door every time I had a question or news to share. He couldn’t race up the stairs to fetch me for a game. We had to make plans to see each other, with an ever-increasing gap between meetings.
* * *
• • •
DEAREST OF ANNELIESES, I wrote on one of my paper scraps. I have room for you now. You could run down to me, stay the night in my bed, sing me the lullabies of Katzenland. Writing to Anneliese was a bedtime ritual. The fact that I was not allowed to send these letters—my parents still believed it would endanger Anneliese to receive letters from a Jew—did not deter me. Someday I would be able to write to her, and I didn’t want to forget anything. I could not picture her face clearly anymore, yet she was still so sharp in my heart. Even sharper now that I no longer had Miguel as my daily distraction.
Next to my room in our new home on calle Colombia was the slightly larger room my mother painted a dark green with white trim. “I wish we had something of his to put in it,” she fretted, examining the bed she had made up with clean sheets and the simple set of drawers. It struck me as odd that the absent child should get the larger room, but I kept that thought to myself. I tried to think if I had anything left of Willi’s. I ran back to my room, where I rummaged through the few things on my shelves and found Fifteen Rabbits. It wasn’t my original copy, which I had left behind in Vienna, but one that had been passed around our community. It would do. I settled it on Willi’s pillow. “Be a magnet,” I instructed the dumb book. “Bring him here.”
The best room of our new apartment was the kitchen. It was big enough for a dining table as well as a real oven with gas burners. In the corner stood an icebox—the height of luxury!— and in the back was a pantry lined with shelves. My mother began to collect tins, mostly cookie tins from other Europeans or from Austrian-owned shops. She lined them up on our shelves, labeled them, and filled them with flours, grains, and cookies. Many of the tins were decorated with holiday scenes, featuring Christmas trees and ice-skating. They reminded me of the holiday markets of Vienna with their marvelous piles of ginger Lebkuchen, fir cones, and mulled cider. Funny that Christmas tins could evoke such nostalgia in the heart of a Jew. I wanted to be at those markets. I even longed for the cold, for the icy winds, the snow under my feet. I learned not to examine the tins too closely, to stay on the edges of that emotional abyss.
My mother was standing over her new stovetop one day, strands of hair creeping from the knot of curls on the top of her head to stick to her cheeks, when from my bedroom window I saw Rachel running down the street. I was not sure I had ever seen Rachel run before. Thin and pale—like so many of us—Rachel normally found walking any distance at all exhausting. I suppose she is finally getting used to the altitude, I thought. I heard her knock on the door and come in, without waiting for a response.
“Frau Zingel!” she called. “Frau Zingel! Orly!”
I was puzzled. Why would Rachel be calling my mother too? I ran to the top of the stairs, but my mother had gotten there first. She had been baking, and her hands were covered with flour. “Gruss Gott, Rachel!” she said, sounding pleased. “You’re just in time for some poppy-seed rolls. They’ll be out of the oven in three minutes.”
Rachel’s thin chest heaved with her efforts to catch her breath. “Telegram,” she finally said. “From France.”
My mother nearly ripped it out of Rachel’s hands. We stood staring at her as she tore it open and read the few brief lines. When she looked up at me, her eyes were bright with tears. I was alarmed for all of five seconds before she swept me into her arms and spun me around the kitchen. “He’s alive!” she cried. “Oh Orly, he’s alive!”
“Willi?” I said. “Willi’s alive? Oh Mutti, is he really alive?”
She waved the paper at me. “That’s what Violaine has just written. She has had a letter from him. He didn’t leave an address, but he said he was in France.”
“In France? But why?” I felt dizzy with relief and vertigo.
“I don’t know, I don’t know, but Orly, isn’t it marvelous? Alive and in France!” She suddenly remembered Rachel was still in the room. “And you, dear girl. You have made me happier than I have ever been. Ever since. Well. Thank you. Thank you for running.”
Rachel smiled shyly. “It was delivered to the SOPRO offices, and Eloise and I were up there this morning, so she said I should take it straight to you.”
I hugged my mother again and took the telegram from her hands. Willi alive. Here in my country. Address unknown. Letter to arrive soon. It was hard to believe it was true. For more than a year we had heard nothing, and now . . . ! I thought of the room my mother had prepared for him, and wondered if that was what had summoned him from the beyond.
“You’ll stay to dinner, Rachel? Where is my husband? Orly, where has your father gone off to? Tonight we are celebrating!” My mother’s hands moved in so many directions at once it looked as though she were dancing.
“Mutti?” Black smoke had started to trickle out of the oven.
“Oh, the rolls!” Grabbing an oven mitten she pulled open the oven door, to find a dozen blackened poppy-seed rolls burned to their pan. Her entire morning’s work. She pulled the tray from the oven and looked at it. “To hell with the rolls!” she exclaimed. And with the spatula she scraped them right out our window into the alley below.
* * *