Overture
When I think of Austria, I remember what a child remembers—details as vivid as the bright shards of a dream. The coffee-warmed air of the kitchen. The rough fabric of my father’s suits against my cheek. The chalk dust of my classroom tickling my nose. The ice-crusted snow in the Jesuitenwiese meadow that cut my eyebrow open when I fell off the toboggan halfway down the slope. My Anneliese. My parents’ voices in the kitchen as I hovered still and silent by the door, secretly listening. It was important then, to listen.
I remember the tang of my mother’s apricot jam spread over a thick layer of butter on crusty bread. The fungal stink of my older brother’s dirty sports clothing on the bathroom floor. The earthy scent of the square olive-oil soap that was always slipping into the sink.
I remember a plum tree in our small communal courtyard that dropped its sour-sweet fruit onto our terrace. They were a dark, dusty purple, more oval than the green ones we would eat in Bolivia. In Vienna, Anneliese’s mother collected the dropped fruits and used them to make tortes.
I remember my mother’s voice in our parlor, starting off low and gathering the energy to soar. I remember the scent of rosin on horsehair, the vibrations of my father’s viola, how I could feel the notes on my skin even after he stopped playing and I was in bed, listening only to the silence.
I remember the inky smell of my schoolbooks as I cracked their spines. The sound of Frau Fessler’s ruler smashing into my desk when she caught me with a book on my lap during math class. The way the fruit gummies from Weiss’s got stuck in my back teeth so I had to pick them out with my fingernails. I remember the damp heat of Anneliese’s hand as she folded it with mine for the last time.
I remember our neighbors’ long coats decorated with flocks of badges saying only Ja. The swastikas on every armband and flag, pinned to every lapel, painted on our sidewalks. They even fell from the sky, flurries of paper spiders dropping onto our heads. I remember the newspapers my parents hid from me under sofa cushions.
I remember lying awake, twisting the satiny border of my blanket in my fingers, until my mother came and curled around me. I remember her breath on my neck, the ice of her fingers on my spine, stroking my skin until I drifted into dreams.
The bland quotidian details, the textures of ordinary days, seared themselves most permanently.
Except for Anneliese. Anneliese, who was neither bland nor ordinary. Anneliese, who was more a part of me than not. Our mothers had birthed us in the same building a week apart and from then on there were no divisions between us. The three syllables of her name were my first song.
* * *
• • •
I REMEMBER FRIEDENGLÜCKHASENLAND.
We imagined the place into existence long before the Anschluss, when we were small and preliterate, as we lay sprawled on our stomachs on the floor of her kitchen, scribbling with our pencils on the back of brown paper from the grocer’s.
“Where do you think we lived before this?” She looked up at me with large dark eyes.
“We have always been here, Ana. We’ve never been anywhere but here.” Our families had lived in the same apartments in the same small building owned by my grandfather since we were born. I thought for a moment. “I guess before here we were in our mothers’ bellies?”
“No, I mean before we lived in our mothers’ bellies.”
“Nowhere,” I said. “The belly is where we start.”
Anneliese shook her head, the ends of her long hair dancing across the paper. “How could we not have existed? We must have been somewhere.” She traced the outline of her lips with the rubber end of her pencil as she gazed up at the ceiling. At the left corner of her mouth, a faint scar curved upward so that even at rest her lips suggested a smile. “I know where I was,” she said definitively. “I was in Friedenglückhasenland.”
Friedenglückhasenland. Peace, Happiness, and Rabbits, all stuck together in a single word to make a place.
I stared at her. I was pretty sure that I hadn’t existed before I emerged from my mother in some bloody and uncomfortable way she described in only the vaguest of terms. But I wanted to have always been with Anneliese. I wanted to have come from the same place, to belong to the same land. “Was I there?” I looked at the rabbit lying next to me. “Was Lebkuchen?”
She looked at me, her eyes drifting to a world only she could see. “Don’t you remember? We lived in a palace with Mutti Hase. The mother of all bunnies. She was the queen. She still is. She’s about a million years old. No—a billion. She is the wisest person in the world. She knows the names of all of the dinosaurs and has lived on all of the planets. She can talk to trees and turn herself invisible. She has two other children, Alezia and Nicholas. Do you remember them?”
I closed my eyes. “I remember Alezia’s red hair.” She began to take shape in my mind, tall and thin. “They were both dancers. Russian dancers.”
“Until Nicholas starting drinking too much wine. He could have been so famous but he started putting wine on everything. He even put wine sauce on his vegetables.” Anneliese glanced toward the bottles clustered near her family’s waste bin. Her father’s bottles. “He couldn’t balance on his toes anymore.”
“But not Alezia,” I added quickly, anxious to save one of them.
“Not Alezia.”
“There was a Vati Hase, too, wasn’t there?”
“Yes. Only he died. But not of old age.”
My belly tightened as I thought of all the ways I was discovering that daddies could die. “He died of silliness,” I offered.
“Yes. He decided to be a soldier but didn’t kill anyone, so they killed him.”
“It was silly of him to become a soldier.” My brother Willi wanted to be a soldier, and the prospect of his absence was gnawing away at me like a hungry rat.
“Your daddy was a soldier.”
“I know, that’s what I just said.”
“No, your real daddy. Your Vienna daddy.”
“I know.” Like most Austrian men his age, my father had served in the Great War. He’d even received a medal, the Kriegserinnerungsmedaille with crossed swords on the back, reserved for frontline troops or the wounded.
“Aren’t you proud of him?”
I shrugged. My father never talked about the war. “I guess. I’d just rather there were no soldiers. None at all.” My father made sense only as a creator of music, not as a uniformed killer.
Anneliese bent her neck so our foreheads touched. I could feel the warmth of her breath against my lips, her eyes so close they blurred together. “There are no soldiers in Friedenglückhasenland,” she whispered. “No one can get in. The country is surrounded by stone walls and when invaders try to get in the wind just blows their hands off the doorknob.”