Wunderland

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  But it was already too late: Ava couldn’t have changed directions if she’d tried.

  “All I understand is that it’s always been about you,” she said, her voice heating. “Your convenience. Your rules. Your private plans and…and secret stories that you never think to let me in on.”

  Ilse gave her a hard look. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about the fact that even here in New York, and even after all this time, you still can’t be honest with me!”

  The words seemed to finally puncture Ilse’s weary remove: “Nonsense,” she said indignantly. “I’ve practically been here from morning to night since arriving! I’ve taken the baby out and put her to sleep. I’ve rubbed my hands raw cleaning out your dirty firetrap of an apartment.”

  The abrupt shift into attack mode caught Ava’s breath in her throat. “That’s not what I’m talking about!” she said. “I’m talking about honesty. You weren’t just wandering around last night—any more than you were wandering around for a whole damn year after the war ended.” And oh, the sheer, electric relief of simply letting the words fly—of aiming them right at Ilse’s rigid face. How many times had she played out this confrontation in her head? It felt so exhilarating that for an instant she was almost thankful. “You think a couple of air conditioners and a quick bathtub scrub makes up for it all?” she added. Her voice was rising now; for once she let it. She didn’t care.

  “What do you mean, ‘all’?”

  “All the secrets! All the lies!”

  Did Ava imagine it, or had Ilse flinched at the word Lügen? If she had, she recovered quickly. “At least I had a real job,” she shot back. “At least I raised you in a proper home. Not some tenement in an urban war zone.”

  “But you know what else I did here?” Ava’s pulse was beating in her throat; her voice shook as though disrupted by its rhythm. “I made a real, honest-to-God family. It may just be the two of us, but at least there are no boundaries between us. Not of the sort you always kept up between me and you.”

  She held her breath, waiting for Ilse to deny this. But her mother merely tightened her lips. When it became clear that she had nothing to add, Ava allowed herself another slow exhale. There it was again: the icy certainty that if she pressed even a little, her mother would respond not by opening up but rather by shutting herself off completely—and very likely forever.

  “Mutti,” Ava said, softening her tone again. “Bitte. I just need to know the truth. You always said that someday you’d answer my questions. For God’s sake. I’m almost thirty-seven. Don’t you think it’s finally time?”

  Ilse’s eyes were fixed on her, as steely and unrelenting as the Atlantic in late afternoon. Ava watched as she plucked the Parliament from her lips and wordlessly stubbed it out in the ashtray.

  “I was going to tell you,” she said. “I was going to tell you everything. It was actually why I came.”

  It was so precisely what Ava had longed to hear for so long that for a moment she felt as though her heart stopped. Don’t fall for it, she told it.

  “Und?” she asked, quietly.

  “I can’t.” Ilse shook her head. “It’s—it’s too late now.”

  Despite Ava’s own self-warning it still felt like a blow to the solar plexus. For a moment she couldn’t meet her mother’s eyes. When she did, she realized to her horror that her own were dangerously close to tears.

  “Is—is this some sort of perverse game for you? Some sort of silly story you are just making up as you go along?”

  Ilse shook her head. “It’s not a game. And it’s not a story.”

  “How can you say that, when my entire life you’ve refused to tell me anything meaningful?”

  “What do you mean, ‘meaningful’?”

  “I mean like where I came from! I mean like where you were during the war, and all those months after it ended before you finally came for me!” Ava was crying now, openly. She no longer cared.

  “Everything I did, I did so that you’d have a good life.” Ilse spoke rapidly, her voice low and level. “An education. Clothes. Food.”

  “But not your trust! Can’t you see that I never had that?” Ava dashed at her damp eyes with her wrist. “And without that, it was as good as never having you at all. I need that to change, Mutti. I need to know.”

  “Know what?”

  Ava clenched her teeth again in frustration. “Everything! I need you to sit here with me—right here, right now—and answer every single question I ask you with full honesty.”

  For a long moment Ilse said nothing. She simply stared at the table, her face white and her eyes closed. When at last she opened them again there was a dullness to them that Ava had never seen before, as though some light deep behind them had flickered out.

  “Das kann ich nicht,” she said, quietly.

  I can’t.

  It came back to her then, the old, haunting image: a bone-bright day. Her mother walking away. She swallowed, fully aware of the weight of what she was about to say. Wishing desperately for a way not to say it. But it had been in her for too long, holding her back like a rusted anchor in the tempestuous current of her current existence.

  “Then,” she said softly, “I can’t have you in my life.”

  Ilse remained still—so still, in fact, that for a moment Ava wasn’t certain if she’d been heard. Then she nodded, albeit so subtly that it might as easily have been a shifting shadow.

  “If that is what you need,” she said.

  Ava squeezed her eyes shut. Suddenly, she was feeling it all over: the juddering sift and tumble of the world collapsing on her. The blacking out of all light, all air. All life. For a moment she even thought she heard the whining buzz of the bombers, taking aim at the cornerstones of her life.

  But then she heard something else: a sleepy, singsong tune floating gossamer-light from the bedroom.

  “Oma,” Sophie was singing. “Oma-oma-oma-oma.”

  When she opened her eyes Ilse was staring at her, her gaze quiet, bereaved. She lifted her pale brows in question.

  “All right,” Ava said numbly. “Go ahead.”

  It wasn’t until after Ilse had pushed heavily to her feet that Ava realized why it had been so hard to shape the words: they had felt strangely like good-bye.

  4.

  Ilse

  1935

  It is five thirty-five, and Ilse can’t find the new lanyard that should be the crowning touch to her uniform.

  “Are you sure you didn’t put it in with the washing?” her mother asks, carefully combing through her golden finger-wave with two fingers. She’s wearing a black silk dress that Ilse hasn’t seen before, and she has to admit it’s very striking: the sweetheart neckline and dropped shoulders make her mother’s pale skin glow like moonstone next to a darkened lake. The little diamond drop earrings are also new, an anniversary gift from Ilse’s father last month.

  “Did you ask Katinka?” her mother adds. Katinka is the new housekeeper.

  “I didn’t. But I’m sure. It was on my bureau in my room. I always leave it there,” Ilse gripes. “So I won’t lose it.”

  “Well, the way you keep your room it’s no wonder you can’t find anything in it.” Her mother crooks an eyebrow at her in the mirror; Ilse’s chronic sloppiness is a point of ongoing contention. “Anyway, don’t you have more than one?”

  “My other one isn’t the right color now that I’ve been made a Group Leader.”

  “Well, I really don’t know what to tell you.” Zella von Fischer spritzes her décolleté with Vol de Nuit. “You can either wear the old one or go without one altogether.”

  “But I can’t go without it!” Ilse cries. “Especially not tonight! Everyone is going to be in full uniform!”

  “Renate won’t.”

  “Renate isn’t going. It’s a
Hitlerjugend outing and her parents still won’t let her join.” In fact, Renate has at long last capitulated on the BDM front and now plans to join despite her parents’ opposition, though in the end it wasn’t Ilse’s urgings but those of Rudi Gerhardt that got her to change her mind. Ilse can’t help but feel slighted that after years of dedicated lobbying on her part, it took a boy who (as far as Ilse’s concerned) barely knows Renate at all to change her mind on the subject. But she takes solace in the fact that once Renate does join, at least she and Ilse will be able to spend more time together. As of late, nearly all of Renate’s free time seems to be shaped around Rudi’s availability: taking walks, seeing movies, studying together in cafés and Herr Steinberg’s library. And while Ilse is ostensibly invited on these activities, the few times she’s joined have been distinctly uncomfortable—like trying to fit three people onto a two-person love seat. It doesn’t help that Renate treats everything out of Rudi’s mouth like the most fascinating story ever told. Even though it’s usually another silly Mein Kampf quotation.

  Or that every time Rudi takes her friend’s soft pale hand in his own he might as well be hammering a small nail into Ilse’s spleen.

  “Well, anyway. It’s just a film,” her mother is saying. “It’s not as though the Führer is going to be looking back at you from the screen.”

  “It’s not just a film,” Ilse says. “And everyone else will be seeing me!”

  “I rather suspect they won’t be quite as interested in your appearance as you seem to presume they will be,” her mother retorts.

  It is such a typical put-down, with such typical, casual cruelty that Ilse actually has to stifle a scream.

  “You don’t understand,” she says instead, as coldly as she can manage. “You don’t understand anything at all.”

  Fuming, she spins around toward the door. But as her mother begins powdering her nose, Ilse turns back again. “Don’t you think you’re wearing too much makeup? You know the Führer disapproves of face painting.” She looks pointedly at her mother’s feet, clad in black T-strap pumps. “And high heels.”

  And without waiting for a response, she stomps morosely back to her room.

  With barely half an hour to make it to the Ufa-Palast am Zoo, she rummages first through her sock drawer, then her underwear drawer, still seething in silence. Not only does her mother seem to know nothing about her life, but she quite frankly doesn’t seem to care. The fact that Ilse managed to become a Mädelgruppenführerin after only a year in the BDM barely elicited a reaction, even though in her performance review, the head of Ilse’s leadership training unit described her as one of the hardest-working and resourceful girls I have had the pleasure of meeting. But all Ilse’s mother said when presented with the news was: “That’s wonderful, dear. But they don’t actually pay you at that level, do they?”

  She’d been similarly unenthused when Ilse brought home her very first piece of published writing in the BDM monthly, Das Deutsche Mädel. The German Girl. A short poem titled “Why We Work,” it was about the role of German youth in carrying their country back to greatness. The day it came out in the February edition was among the happiest of Ilse’s life: something her best friend, at least, easily understood.

  “You did it!” Renate had shrieked. “My best friend’s a published author!” Humming a snatch of “You’re the Cream in My Coffee,” she’d tried to pick Ilse up and twirl her around the way John Boles does Shirley Temple in The Littlest Rebel. Of course she failed, since Ilse is the significantly heavier of the two and Renate is such a weakling. But her exuberant pride and the steady stream of impressed compliments Ilse received as everyone got their issue of the magazine made Ilse realize that she truly has found it: not just the thing she wants to do with her life, but the thing she truly believes she was meant for.

  Because yes, she wants to write. Not just for herself, or Renate, or her instructors at school, but for the nation. For the movement. For the cause. She wants to write knowing that what she’s writing will be read far and wide; that her voice and her own thoughts and ideas will shape voices, thoughts, and ideas across the Fatherland, perhaps even someday the world. Seeing her name in print that first time had felt like seeing it writ in lightning across the sky: electrifying, staggering. Even more so when she realized what it meant: that with BDM membership approaching two million, those neatly typeset words might well pass before four million eyes, or even more.

  Four million eyes. All pondering her words:

  The door that leads to the future is found in our young hearts

  The fruit that sustains the nation ripens in our sinless souls

  Our mission is holy, our will pure and true

  Our destiny: eternal victory, endless glory!

  All of which only made her mother’s nonplussed response—“It’s really quite short, isn’t it!”—sting all the more.

  Slamming shut her underwear drawer, Ilse rifles through her jewelry box a second time: the old yellow lanyard is there, but not the new red-and-white one. It occurs to her that her mother might have simply taken the stupid thing out of spite. After all, she and Ilse’s father have only just joined the Party, even though Ilse urged them to do it over a year ago. Sure enough, almost the moment they did their lives took an immediate turn for the better. Ilse’s father, for instance, was given the bank promotion he’d been denied for two years straight. “You were right, Mousebear,” he’d crowed to Ilse that night, pouring her her very first half glass of real Sekt. “It’s something I should have done from the start!” Ilse knew how that had irked her mother: not just that Vati was letting her drink wine like a grown-up, but laying credit for the family’s fortune at Ilse’s (sensibly shod) feet.

  * * *

  Removing Renate’s friendship ring (accessories are frowned upon in the BDM), she drops it in the box and shuts the lid, then glances again at her bedside clock. Lanyard or no, she’ll have to leave in ten minutes or else she’ll be late to meet her troop at the theater. The idea of showing up in her yellow lanyard is disproportionately infuriating. Not wearing one at all actually seems worse in some ways. Not just because this is the first BDM event where she’s actually responsible for overseeing thirteen younger girls, but because they are going there to see Triumph of the Will, which from everything Ilse has heard is almost like partaking in last year’s legendary rally in real life. Showing up in anything less than her full BDM attire seems not just lacking but actually immoral.

  “It’s amazing,” her friend Marta had rhapsodized last week, after seeing the film with her parents. “It’s hard to explain. But it captures exactly what we are doing. What the movement is all about.” Without an ounce of self-consciousness, she admitted that she’d spent the last half hour of the movie in tears. “Though I don’t imagine you will cry, Steel Girl,” she’d added. Stahlmädchen is the nickname the other Mädchen gave Ilse last summer on a group hike in the German Alps: after turning an ankle, she’d marched on for eight kilometers, not even relinquishing the troop flag she’d been assigned to carry. She laughs gamely at the moniker, but like that stupid story about the U-Bahn burglar Renate claims she “fought off,” Ilse is never quite sure it is meant as a compliment.

  Now she gazes gloomily at her reflection: the black beret pulled sportily over one ear. The white blouse she’d had Katinka iron, looking plain and barren without the colorful cord that runs from collar to breast pocket. Sighing, she pulls on her jacket and buttons it all the way up; she will simply have to keep it on throughout the two-hour documentary. Hopefully it won’t be too hot in the theater.

  She’s just about to head out the door when it opens abruptly to reveal her mother, holding the missing lanyard out between two red-tipped fingers.

  “Katinka did have it,” she says in triumph. “You left it in your pocket yesterday.”

  Ilse all but snatches the accessory back, her annoyance that her mother was right briefly outweigh
ing her relief that the cord has finally been located. “Can you please at least knock before just barging in?” she says feebly.

  “You’re welcome, Liebling,” her mother says. And with a tight smile, she turns away.

  * * *

  An hour later Ilse sits with eleven of her charges, the other two having been kept home by the latest bout of influenza. After significant scolding, cajoling, and threatening (and four last-minute washroom trips), Ilse has finally gotten everyone in their velvet-covered chairs, a task made all the harder by the edgy excitement that fills the room like a palpable force. Even though the movie hasn’t yet started, it already feels like a momentous occasion. The theater has been accessorized with Hakenkreuz banners and flags. The speakers—which usually pipe out cheerily bland Volksmusik—tonight emit brass-heavy Party tunes like “Kampflied der Nationalsozialisten” and “Sieg Heil Viktoria.” Ilse casts a quick glance around the room for Rudi and is quietly relieved not to find him.

  Then the lights dim, and the curtains sweep open, and a respectful hush rolls over the rows like a soft heavy wave. As the familiar chords of the Horst Wessel song sound, the first title cards roll: “On the 5th of September, 1934, 20 years after the outbreak of the World War, 16 years after the beginning of Germany’s suffering, 19 months after the beginning of the German rebirth, Adolf Hitler flew again to Nuremberg to review his faithful followers.”

  And then suddenly, amazingly, they are in the clouds, soaring like angels above a field of shining white. As it becomes clear that they are on the Führer’s plane with him, the wonder is both immediate and palpable—most of them have never been on a plane. And as the clouds part to reveal old Nuremburg’s fairy-tale-perfect skyline, its gingerbread gables swathed in Imperial and Nazi flags, it’s as if every volume switch but the film’s has been turned off completely.