Wunderland

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  “How would he know it’s you?”

  “Who else would it be? My mother?”

  “Maybe it was Raina.” Ilse pokes Renate in the shoulder. “It sounds like something she’d do.”

  “Raina wouldn’t just steal the postcard. She’d re-create it.” Renate eyes Ilse sidelong. “But with a manatee instead of a man.”

  “Oh, horrid.” Ilse pretends to retch. “Raina Bachmeier” is the name of the evil alternate personality Renate invented for herself after the girls saw Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde together at the Concordia. Ilse’s is “Ida Fuchs.” They have an ongoing competition regarding whose conscience-free alter ego is more theoretically depraved: in past weeks Raina Bachmeier has burned down the Bismarck School, robbed a jewelry store, and borne Herr Steinberg’s love child, while Ida Fuchs has stolen all the city street signs, hijacked the number 8 tram to Paris, and eaten a Dachshund puppy for lunch.

  “I’ll just have to ask Rudi for it whenever I see him next.” Renate sighs. “It will be unbearably embarrassing. He probably thinks I’m the worst sort of girl on earth.”

  “If he thought that, he wouldn’t have come galloping to your aid,” says Ilse tartly. “Rescuing the beautiful damsel.”

  “Beautiful?” Renate snorts. If she’s registered the way that people—boys in particular—have begun looking at her differently over the past months, it’s in the same vague way that she’s registered the changes in her own body. The lengthening of her pale, slim legs; the subtle broadening of her hips and narrowing of her waist. The way her former boyish tangle of brown curls has almost magically relaxed into a rich waterfall of waves down her back. And while she hears the soft whistles and comments—Hallo, meine Schöne! Du bist schlau!—she has a hard time connecting them to herself. Much less responding.

  “He would have done it for you, too,” she tells Ilse, uncomfortably aware that this isn’t true. It’s not that she doesn’t find Ilse beautiful, in a golden, Amazonian sort of way. But she recognizes that there is something staunch and unyielding, something almost ungirlish about her friend that keeps boys at bay. It was that same steely instinct that had led Ilse to hurl herself at the schoolbag-snatcher that day on the U-Bahn—in a move that was not accidental in the least, though of course Renate would never say as much. Indeed, Ilse had responded to the mugger’s tug with a fury as raw as it was instantaneous; as though she’d been waiting her whole life for precisely this opportunity to inflict outrage and injury on an opponent. Even remembering it—and the look on the startled thief’s face as he fled—is enough to catch Renate’s breath in her throat.

  “No, he wouldn’t have,” Ilse is saying now. “None of the boys would.” She stares up moodily at the stars they’ve painstakingly cut out and arranged on both their bedroom ceilings, in constellations of their own design (“so we’ll go to sleep under the same sky,” Renate said). Then she sighs.

  “The irony,” Renate says, changing the subject, “is you didn’t even get a good look at the thing. Even after all that.”

  Ilse smirks. “I saw enough of it when Herr Steinberg was waving it around like a flyswatter. It looked to me like he was French-kissing her.” She sticks out her tongue.

  “Oh, Ilsi—disgusting!” Renate covers her head with a pillow.

  Undaunted, Ilse crawls over on all fours. She pulls the pillow from her friend’s face. “Maybe,” she whispers, “Franz has done that to a girl. Maybe it was even him in the picture—you said you can’t see the man’s face, right? What color was his hair?” She laughs triumphantly. “You see, that’s where he could have gotten them. Straight from the source.”

  There’s an added glow to her cheeks, a thrilled tremor to her voice. But if Renate notices this she doesn’t comment on it.

  “You’re awful!” is all she says. Grabbing the pillow back, she swings it directly at Ilse’s hairline, though being Renate (weak and clumsy), she misses. Laughing, Ilse grabs it back. Then they are rolling together on the floor, laughing and panting and somehow fitting perfectly, like always, like interlocking parts in a two-piece puzzle.

  3.

  Ava

  1977

  The 747 looked like a huge land-bound whale, beshimmered by midsummer heat. As it taxied toward the jet bridge, the old Bob Hope line started circling in her head: I just flew in from the West Coast, and boy, are my arms tired! When Ava first heard the joke she’d been new to America, and duly mystified: why would someone’s arms hurt from sitting in an airplane?

  Now, however, it was her own arms that were aching. She’d been holding Sophie up to the window to watch landing jets and trundling baggage carts for what felt like forever, though she had just intended for it to be a few moments. Like so much else with her daughter these days, though, the exercise escalated into a battle of wills: once lifted, the toddler refused to be lowered.

  “Baby,” Ava tried again, reresting Sophie against her hip. Despite the overconditioned air, perspiration dripped down her spine and soaked the waistline of her Wranglers. “Look,” she said. “You can still see it from here. And if I hold you here we can dance!” She bounced a little on the balls of her feet, singing under her breath in German (since she didn’t know any American baby songs): “Alle Vögel sind schön da, alle Vögel, alle…”

  “Nooooo­ooooo­!” shrieked her daughter. “Uppuh! Uppuh!” A chubby palm planted itself on Ava’s cheek, hard enough that Ava’s neck twinged in pain. She suppressed the impulse to just drop the child on the floor.

  “Mummy’s arms aren’t so strong,” she said instead, shuffling Sophie’s damp weight to her other hip and noting the ammonial whiff of an overdue diaper change. “I need to rest them so that you and I can give Oma a big, big hug when she comes out—right through that door. See? That’s where she’ll be.”

  She pointed to the arrivals gate, where an air hostess was finally taking up position. Sophie directed a suspicious gaze at the woman, who—God bless her—obliged them with a white-gloved finger-flutter. Sophie generally distrusted strangers. But something about the stewardess—possibly the jaunty little red hat—had sparked the infant’s interest. She lifted a chubby fist in a gesture closer to the Black Power salute than a wave, but the scowl on her face softened into something closer to a smile than her mother had been able to elicit from her for hours.

  Sighing, Ava turned her attention to passengers disembarking, most of whom looked overdressed for the city’s Sahara-like heat wave. Searching their wan faces, it struck her that she didn’t altogether know what she was looking for. After all, she hadn’t seen her mother for nearly a decade. What if Ilse had changed, had gained or lost twenty kilos? Dyed her hair black, or blue? What if she wasn’t even on board?

  This last possibility sparked a nervous quiver that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. Ava had complained frequently to friends, lovers, and therapists about the fact that since her move to the States in 1968, Ilse had not once made the trip to visit. She hadn’t come for Ava’s art school graduation, nor for her first Bowery art exhibition, nor when the death of her best friend and former lover sent Ava spiraling into a monthlong depression, one that had concerned her then-roommate Livi enough to actually call Ilse about it herself (“I don’t believe I’d be any help,” her mother had reportedly responded). Ilse hadn’t even come after Sophie was born, though she claimed to have both made reservations and secured time off at the magazine. As usual, though, something had interfered. In this case it was the sudden onset of the flu: “I certainly wouldn’t want to get you or the baby sick,” her mother said when she called with the news. “It’s hard enough to care for a healthy newborn.”

  Not that you’d know, Ava had wanted to retort. But of course she did not.

  So when Ilse called again shortly after Sophie’s first birthday to announce she’d paid for not only a Lufthansa ticket but a hotel room in Greenwich Village, Ava’s reaction had been decidedly mixed. Naturally, there was s
kepticism. But there was also a stubborn stirring of anticipation: a curling tendril of hope that maybe, at long last, Ilse was ready to be the loving, supportive, and (most important) open mother Ava had always wanted her to be.

  Released from the stewardess’s spell, Sophie resumed chanting: “Up-up-up-up-up!” She began to twist and buck.

  “Wait, wait,” hushed Ava. “A minute more. We are still looking for Oma. If she doesn’t come I’ll lift…” But before she’d finished the sentence there, in fact, was Ilse, wearing a plaid dress and matching cardigan and looking as though she’d just strolled off the Bremen underground.

  “Mama!” Ava called.

  As Ilse snapped her braid-wrapped head back toward them, Ava grasped Sophie’s soft wrist to make her wave. The baby, whose strength was truly astonishing, arm-wrestled the gesture into a sticky slap to Ava’s left cheek, just as Ilse’s and Ava’s eyes met. It struck Ava that her mother seemed both confused and just the faintest bit pained, a look that evoked a startlingly clear memory of the day three decades earlier when Ilse had appeared unannounced at the Bremen orphanage where Ava spent the war’s end. And for just an instant, Ava felt the same queasy emotional mix she had felt locking eyes with her mother for what had felt to her like the very first time: incandescent joy at Ilse’s long-awaited return. Heart-stabbing fear she’d walk right back out the door.

  Instead, Ilse picked up her carry-on and strode over to where Ava and Sophie stood, walking her familiar shoulders-back soldierly walk. “Da bist du!” she said, as though she were the one who’d been waiting. “My God, I thought they’d never let us off.”

  As she spoke she was looking not at Ava but at Sophie, who stared back with a look of round-eyed consternation that Ava fully understood: seeing them up close for the first time, the likeness between her mother and her daughter was not just confirmed but almost confounding. Not only were their eyes mirror images of one another in shape and in color, but their noses and chins matched as well. Even their expressions—sternly fascinated, slightly wary—looked as though they’d come off the same assembly line, albeit five decades apart.

  “Isn’t she lovely!” Ilse was saying, with a warmth so genuine it caught Ava off-guard. “Will she come to me?”

  Setting her bag down again, she held out her arms.

  “She’s a little shy around…” Ava started. Then she stopped. Not just because she’d been about to say strangers, but because Sophie was actually lunging toward her grandmother, chubby arms outstretched. As though she’d been waiting for just this moment for the entirety of her short life.

  * * *

  “She isn’t walking yet?” her mother asked, as their taxi jerked onto the steaming expressway.

  Ava wiped her brow with the bottom of her T-shirt. “The doctor says girls often start later. Especially if they don’t crawl first.”

  “She doesn’t crawl?” Ilse sounded aghast, as though Ava had just revealed to her that her granddaughter didn’t breathe.

  “I didn’t either, remember?”

  “It was a long time ago,” her mother said vaguely.

  Ava studied her sidelong. Though she hadn’t noticed it as much in the airport, Ilse had changed over the last decade. Her body seemed stockier, her posture slightly more stooped. She still had the smooth pale skin of a Bavarian milkmaid, but close up the lines above her eyebrows and bracketing her lips appeared more deeply etched. Her hair had changed too, ceding some of its gold to silver. Overall, the effect wasn’t so much aging as softening.

  Indeed, her mother’s behavior seemed softer too; she laughed and babbled with her infant granddaughter with an unguarded silliness Ava had no recollection of having ever experienced herself. Then again (she reflected) her own grandparents had seemed entirely different beings with her than the staid, stern duo Ilse had curtly depicted on the few occasions she’d deigned to discuss them. For Ava, the years with her Oma and Opa had been the happiest and safest period of her childhood. Even thinking about them now brought a lump of loss to her throat.

  She buried her nose in Sophie’s soft, sweat-damp hair. “Aren’t we happy Oma is here?” she murmured.

  “NO,” said Sophie, and kicked her hard little heels into Ava’s thighs.

  “Don’t hurt Mommy,” Ava chided, stilling the rogue ankles with one hand.

  “Don’t you ever speak German to her?” Ilse pressed a handkerchief to her forehead.

  “I don’t want to confuse her,” Ava lied. The truth was that she wanted as little connection to her old homeland as possible. She often didn’t even tell people she was German.

  “Haven’t you read that early years are the best time to learn languages?” Ilse asked.

  “I don’t have much time to read anything,” said Ava wearily. “This one takes up a lot of energy.”

  “You took energy,” Ilse pointed out. “But I somehow managed to both work and read.”

  You had help, Ava wanted to respond, though she did not.

  “Well,” she said instead, carefully diplomatic. “Maybe you can give me a few tips. God knows I could use them.”

  It was precisely the sort of opening that the Ilse Ava remembered would have used as a springboard for further disparagement. I can see that, she would have said. Or, You’ll need more than a few.

  Now, though, she just smiled and touched one of the baby’s white-blond curls.

  “You seem to be doing well enough,” she said.

  In Ilse-Sprache, it was the highest of praise.

  * * *

  “What do you call your neighborhood again?” Ilse asked a half hour later, her gaze fixed on a wall caked with band posters, escort offerings, and graffiti: a peace sign scrawled over a swastika; the spray-painted suggestion to Kill a Yuppie; another to Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo.

  “The East Village.”

  “Didn’t you live in another Village before?”

  “That was Greenwich. With Livi. But then Mark and I found the rent-controlled place here, and it seemed too good a deal to pass up. It’s only $150 a month.”

  “Mark being the father.”

  Der Vater. It sounded so clinical and clean; so completely at odds with the gleefully self-destructive man with whom Ava had so fleetingly shared a life. Their affair had been a white dwarf in the chaotic universe of her love life: blindingly bright, impossibly dense, heartbreakingly brief; unmatched in intensity before or since. He’d fled when she got pregnant, a mere three months after he’d convinced her to move in with him. All he’d left was a battered Martin guitar, a check for six months’ rent, and a hastily scrawled note: Sorry babe.

  “He is Sophie’s father, yes,” Ava told Ilse, glancing back down at her daughter, who now felt like a limp rag doll in her lap, having plummeted precariously into sleep as only small children can.

  “He’s American?”

  “Yes.” Ava sighed; she was fairly sure she’d covered at least that much in her letters.

  “And is he still in New York?”

  Actually, the last Ava had heard Mark was in LA, sharing an apartment (and possibly a bed) with the transvestite drummer of a glitter band called the Bobbie Cocks.

  “We’ve lost touch,” she said tightly.

  Her mother studied her face, her gaze opaque. “You don’t seem very bothered by it.”

  “By what?”

  “The fact that Sophie won’t know her father.”

  Ava actually gaped at her.

  For as long as she could remember, the topic of her own paternity had been both implicitly and explicitly off-limits. As a child, she’d known only that her father had been a German soldier who had died on the Eastern Front. As a teen she’d tried to learn about him on her own, forging her mother’s signature to order a copy of her birth certificate and then researching the name on it at Berlin’s Wehrmacht Archives. Her findings, however, had merely confirmed
Ava’s darkest fears about the man, while pushing Ilse further into her sullen secrecy.

  “Who knows,” she said now, carefully. “Maybe he’ll come back into the picture someday.”

  Wiping her forehead again, Ilse began rolling down her window, covering her mouth and nose as the city’s signature stench of moldering garbage, melting street tar, and slow-baking dog excretion wafted in. “This was really the only place you could find to live?” she asked, her voice faintly ducklike behind her palm. “I can see why my travel agent warned me not to stay here.”

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” said Ava defensively. “If I had money, I’d look into buying in this neighborhood.”

  “A job might help, no?”

  “I have a job, Mama. A few, actually. There’s the book proposal I’m working on with a well-known children’s author. My agent says Scribner’s interested. There’s the play group I run on Mondays and Wednesdays; that pays something. And I still tutor high school German on weekend afternoons while Livi or Jakob watches Sophie.”

  “Unglaublich,” her mother murmured. Unbelievable.

  Ava stiffened before realizing the comment wasn’t meant for her. They’d stopped at an intersection, and Ilse was looking out the window, her gaze locked on a crumbling tenement that looked as though it hadn’t been inhabited in several decades. Stripped-down car frames intersected in the rubble below at odd angles, like skeletal remains from some primordial urban derby.

  “How can they just leave it like that?” Ilse said, as the cab resumed its jerky journey. “It looks like Berlin after the war.”

  Ava looked at her quickly again. Her mother’s whereabouts at the war’s end and the first year in its wake were another thing Ilse refused to discuss. Ava was half tempted to press the point now: Is that where you were then? In Berlin? But she knew from experience that pushing Ilse on topics she didn’t want to be pushed on only led to Ilse pushing away.