Wunderland

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  “Are you insane?” She gapes at him. “It changes everything. My God. Everything.” Nausea forces a path up her throat; she presses her handkerchief against her lips. Other moments are rushing to mind now, ones she’d barely noticed because she’d assumed they didn’t apply to her. The new government quotas on the number of Jews in German schools. The bizarre and (she’d thought) silly prohibition on using the names David or Samuel to spell out words on the telephone (Dora and Siegfried are to replace them). Rudi expounding on a scientific study he’d read into what he described as “that unique Jewish smell”: “It’s a bit sulfurous,” he’d told her. “Like rotten eggs. Though these days, they’re more adept at covering it up—it’s why Jew women like that fancy French perfume.” Franz noting at the dinner table last week how a sign had appeared on the Friedrich Wilhelm Student House, announcing that Jewish students and staff were no longer allowed to write or publish in German. What are they supposed to write in, then? Renate had asked.

  Hebrew, he had said, and laughed as though it were the world’s funniest joke.

  “I thought about telling you myself last month,” he’s continuing now. “But it was going to come out anyway, sooner rather than later. Especially if all this talk about limiting the number of Jews in schools is true.”

  She frowns. “But if we’re only half Jewish…”

  “To be honest, I’m not sure how much that will matter.” He smiles dryly. “Their logic can be somewhat hard to follow.”

  The room is suddenly too small, too stuffy—that familiar Franz-scent no longer comforting but suffocating, like being trapped in a closet filled with rotting candy. For a moment Renate almost thinks she does detect a hint of sulfur. The thought is enough to make her want to retch.

  “I have to go,” she says, and she is somehow already on her feet, the kerchief floating gently to the floor.

  He lifts a brow. “Go where?”

  “Out. Air.” Not trusting herself to say more, she picks up her bag and slings its leather strap over her shoulder.

  “Wait,” he’s saying. “Sit a moment. I know it’s hard to…”

  Renate just shakes her head, making her stumbling way to the door, ignoring the peripheral glimpse of him struggling to shift his leg, to get up; ignoring the heavy thump of Sigmund dropping down from the bed and making his tail-wiggling way after her. Slamming the door in his furry face she rushes down the stairs, past the murmuring parlor, to the white-painted front door that—could it really be just moments earlier?—she’d painstakingly and quietly entered. Jamming her feet into her boots, she flings the door open and hurls herself down the stoop, her untied bootlaces flapping, her heart pounding out a rhythm to which her mind supplies cruel lyrics: JudenJudenJuden. She trips on her laces and is leaning down to tie them when the front door flies open behind her.

  “Reni?” says her father, looking sleepy and surprised. “Where on earth are you going?”

  “Go away!” she shrieks, ignoring the startled gazes of an old woman and her companion, the giggles of two passing, pigtailed schoolgirls, both in crisp BDM uniforms. “Just leave me alone!”

  And then, turning her back on him, she runs. She runs hard and fast, for the first time in her life feeling as fleet as a fully German Deutsches Mädel would feel, even though each step is still a pounding drumbeat of that word. That inconceivable hideous word:

  Jude

  Jude

  Jude.

  6.

  Ava

  1968

  Ho! Ho! Ho-Chi-Minh! Ho! Ho! Ho-Chi-Minh!

  The name thundered through the Berlin air, an angry incantation above a bobbing sea of protest posters and placards: here a beret-clad Che Guevara, dashing as a movie star. There a President Johnson embellished with a Hitlerian mustache and underscored by a scrawled USA in which the S was replaced by a swastika. Scattered throughout the marchers Ava also spied several images of the North Vietnamese Chairman himself, looking wise and somewhat bemused by the proceedings. So far, though, she hadn’t seen a banner anything like the one she and her current lover, Fiete, carried stretched out between them.

  Peering up at it, a Käthe Kollwitz–style take on the AP photo that had shocked the world in February, Ava felt a flush of weary pride not unlike what she felt during her art class exhibitions. Ava had spent the night working and reworking it, while Fiete—a rising Neo-Dadaist who looked like Paul Newman’s pudgy brother—emptied a bottle of iced vodka and offered useless suggestions: Aren’t they shorter than that over there? Should his eyes look so big? Hey, is that even the right kind of gun?

  Ava hadn’t had the answer to any of those questions. All she knew was that from the moment she’d seen it in Der Spiegel the image had sparked the same sickened fascination she usually felt over grainy images of Auschwitz prisoners and Einsatzgruppen massacres, though she knew the story behind the AP shot was more complex: Bay Lop, the Viet Cong captured at the moment of his shockingly casual execution, had himself summarily executed women and children just hours earlier. Still, the stark brutality of it continued to mesmerize her: the executioner’s oddly relaxed stance. The doomed prisoner’s grimace, a sullen mix of resignation and loathing even as his brains were being blown from his head. Ava had originally planned to integrate a Pollock-style spattering of bright blood into her banner reproduction. But when she’d applied the tone to the bedsheet, she’d quickly discovered why Kollwitz stuck with her famously monochrome pallet: the splashed color detracted from the picture’s gravity, like lurid sound bubbles (Pow! Wham! Crack!) in an American comic book.

  And so at three a.m. she’d started over, rousing Fiete from the mattress he’d passed out on in order to strip it of its remaining sheet. Somehow, between the two packs of Larks she’d smoked and the black sea of coffee she’d imbibed, the image was complete—if still slightly damp—by the time they were due to leave for Berlin’s Technical University.

  Pulling her end of the banner tighter now, Ava noted a crick forming in her neck even though they’d been marching for less than twenty minutes. Then she flinched as something soft and wet blew into her eye and popped there, a fleeting, burning kiss.

  Ducking her head awkwardly to try to rub the spot with her shoulder, Ava traced the attack to her left, where two girls were waving bubble wands while bobbing along on the shoulders of their marching male friends. The one bobbing nearest—a pale blonde in a plaid jumper—mouthed an apology as Ava caught her gaze. Then she apparently lost her balance, swaying forward and back atop her human transport, shrieking giddily with laughter.

  Despite the burn in her eye Ava found herself laughing too, less from the sight than from a sudden crest of glee. The opening moments of a protest were like this, she’d learned. It was not unlike buckling into a Trabant just before it took its first tilting spin: a vertiginous cocktail of exhilaration and terror made all the more intoxicating by Ilse’s full-on disapproval of carnival rides. “I’ve lived through too much,” her mother had once said, “to pay good money to risk life and limb.” Though of course, when pressed on “too much” she would never elaborate.

  Unsurprisingly, Ilse considered street protests an even more dangerous waste of time: “Hooliganism, pure and simple,” she called it. And for all of Ava’s genuine outrage over the state of things—former Nazis running the government; the U.S. war machine burning through Southeast Asia; Soviet jackboots grinding Prague’s springtime hope to bloody dust—she sometimes wondered how much of a role her mother’s disapproval played in driving her into the movement’s riotous swell. Though in fact Ava’s first sojourn into student dissent had been prompted not by Ilse but by a conceptualist “happening” she’d gone to see with Ulrich in Berlin. The show consisted of a heavyset artist sawing open a female mannequin, yanking out her cottony innards, replacing them with toy soldiers, all while screaming “TELL ME A FAIRY TALE!” And despite Ulrich’s deadpan asides (“I’ll bet he’s fun in b
ed”), the performer’s howls had connected somehow with Ava’s own inner, widening well of despair over the life she found herself living: fitting her art and sporadic love life around a grueling waitressing schedule, living with Ilse to save up for graduate school in New York.

  So when the Fräulein Saigon artist urged his audience to attend the next day’s demonstration at the Deutsche Opera she’d found herself leaping at the chance, even as Ulrich dismissed it as “more self-congratulatory exhibitionism.” And from the first jostling half step she’d found the experience exhilarating. Not just the camaraderie she felt within the crowd’s collective fury, but the thrill of shouting—no, of screaming, until her cheeks ached and her throat was raw—at her mother’s generation-wide wall of silence and complicity as the world erupted in napalm, flame, and corruption.

  “Careful, baby! You’re walking too fast!”

  Snapping back to the protest at hand, Ava registered Fiete huffing and red-faced a few steps behind her, his banner pole dangling at a precarious angle. Slowing down slightly, Ava let him catch up while briefly fantasizing about doing just the opposite: swiping the plywood pole from his grasp and putting as much distance between herself and him as she could, given the crowd’s density.

  She’d met him two weeks earlier outside a Deutsche Bank near Ulrich’s flat, sporting pinstripes and a sandwich-board-style sign: Ask Me What I’m Thinking About. Passersby who complied were offered an improvised pornographic fable on the spot, one that supposedly illustrated “how advanced capitalism fucks us all.” “He’s a fool and a fraud,” Ulrich warned Ava at the time. But Ava was intrigued enough by Fiete’s “bankporn” story in her honor (one involving ice cubes, Spanish fly, and handcuffs) to leave him her number, only to discover that for all his street-side bravado the man was pathologically insecure in the bedroom. It was a disconnect that Ulrich had found riotously funny: “Told you he was a fake,” he’d hooted. “Trust you to bag a performance artist with performance anxiety.”

  “You weren’t always so smooth in the sack yourself,” she’d shot back, in an uncharacteristic reference to their own short-lived affair in their teens.

  “I was seventeen,” he retorted. “And the least of my problems was getting it up.”

  * * *

  As Fiete pulled even, Ava threw another quick glance at Bay Lop’s clenched face. It seemed to shiver in some unseen breeze, and Ava found herself shivering too, unexpectedly brushed by apprehension. Shaking the feeling off, she threw her head back and added her own smoke-sore shout to the crowd’s: “Ho! Ho! Ho-Chi-Minh!” It felt both furious and playful; a primal nursery rhyme howled in breathless time with a thousand marching footsteps. But as they entered the plaza the mood suddenly shifted. The crowd’s pace quickened into a jog. And as the chant swelled into a full-fledged roar—Ho! Ho! Ho-Chi-Minh! Ho! Ho! Ho-Chi-Minh! HO! HO! HO-CHI-MINH!—it was quickly underscored by the sound of sirens in the nearing distance and the rhythmic chop of a helicopter that had materialized above the campus buildings.

  And then all of it—the chanting, the marching, the bracing, energizing outrage—was stopping, so suddenly that she nearly ran into the line in front of them.

  Confused, Ava stepped back and peered around her banner pole.

  “It’s the bulls,” Fiete shouted.

  Following his gaze, she made out a dark block of Polizei at the demonstration’s front lines. They were decked out in full riot gear.

  “But why are they stopping us?” Shifting her grip again, she lifted onto the tiptoes of her white patent boots. As the chopper bobbed and whined above like an uneasy hornet, she watched as the two sides faced off: cops on one side, students on the other. “Don’t we have permits?”

  The attack came in lieu of an answer, though looking back Ava wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the exact moment of its launch. All she’d recall was that one moment the Polizei were in their tight battalions, as stiff and stone-faced as so many tin soldiers. And then they were laying into the demonstration’s front lines with a strangely mechanical-seeming fury that left Ava both stunned and sickened.

  “What’s happening?” she cried, to no one in particular, but no one around her seemed to have the answer. And already the neat, forceful rows were unraveling into a panicked scramble to safety. She looked back at Fiete again, uncertain whether to move forward or back before registering that it was too late to do either: the Polizei had already reached them. At the same moment she saw one of the bubble-blowers tumble from her friend’s shoulders, inadvertently falling on top of a policeman who then proceeded to smash her head with his club. Ava gasped as the girl attempted to stagger back to her feet, the blood running in bright, spiked rivulets down the side of her face. As another Polizei pushed past her she extended an arm, mouthing something that might have been help or stop or doctor. Ava turned reflexively to try to offer aid, but the girl had already disappeared from view entirely, replaced by a writhing scrum of dissidence and enforcement.

  A moment later the banner shaft jumped in her hands like a fishing pole with a strong bite. Looking over, she saw that her partner had dropped his end and was racing off toward the Tiergarten.

  “Where are you going?” she shouted after him.

  “I’m splitting,” he shouted back, his blue eyes blank with panic. “You know I can’t afford another arrest.”

  And without waiting for her response he sprinted into the crowd, Ava staring after him in mixed disbelief and disgust. Bastard, she thought. Why was Ulrich always right about these things?

  A sudden sprinkle of cold water jolted her back to the moment. Turning, she saw the police had brought in Wasserkanone: black, boxy tanks topped with gunlike hoses were advancing on the crowd, forcing back water-battered bodies. A few meters behind her a white van had pulled up; the Polizei were already herding protesters inside.

  Dropping to her knees, she scrabbled for the plywood handle Fiete had dropped, awkwardly lofting the painted sheet back up on her own: she’d worked too hard on the image to simply leave it in the street. A pole on each shoulder, she began gingerly moving toward the beckoning green of the Tiergarten: If she could make it to the park she could follow its outer rim south until she reached the Berlin Zoologischer Garten station.

  She’d barely made it three steps, however, before a hand clamped down on her shoulder. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Staggering, Ava turned to see a bull in his tall black hat and long black coat.

  “To the park.”

  He snorted. “Why? Planning a picnic?” He looked to Ava to be in his forties; roughly Ilse’s age, or perhaps older. His jaw had the blunt squareness of her mother’s garden hoe.

  “I just want to go home,” said Ava truthfully.

  Ava watched the man’s gaze trace its way to the ruined painting that now sagged between them. As he studied the latter she found herself searching his face, an artist’s greedy, reflexive need for even a faint indication that her work might have moved its viewer. But he just held out his gloved hands.

  “Hand it over,” he said.

  “What?” Blinking, Ava took a step back. “I made this. It’s mine.”

  “It belongs to the city now,” he said. “Hand it over.”

  As he reached brusquely for one of the poles, Ava tried to sidestep. But her foot slipped on something slick and soapy that had spilled on the ground. As she fought for her balance the banner poles swung wildly, the left one striking the Polizei on the side of his helmeted head.

  “Oh,” she gasped, horrified. “I’m—”

  Before she could apologize he was lunging straight at her, his truncheon whipped from its leather holster. Then somehow she was on the ground, her arms covering her head while blows rained down on her ribs and bare thighs. The pain was searing, breathtaking; it numbed with the force of electric shock. A burst exploded in her knee, and for one fleeting, red-veiled moment she thought sh
e’d felt the bone snap in half. Then there were hard hands beneath her armpits, dragging her away from where the banner lay crumpled on the street, now stained with smears of her own blood.

  “Stupid cow,” the bull was shouting. “I warned you!” They’d reached the van now. Pushing her face-first against it, he patted her down before spinning her to face him again. His blunt face was beet red.

  “What do you have to say now, you commie bitch,” he said.

  Ava registered that she was shaking: huge, harsh spasms. It wasn’t until she tried to speak that she realized she wasn’t crying but laughing: juddering, gasping peals that felt like another attack on her bruised ribs. But they elicited such a comically baffled look from the cop that she found herself laughing harder despite the pain.

  “Tell me a fairy tale,” she gasped.

  * * *

  Four hours later she was curled up on Ulrich’s couch, an ice pack on her knee and a mug of whiskey in her hand.

  “How’s it looking?” he asked.

  “Empty,” she said, extending the mug.

  “I meant your knee, you lush.”

  Grimacing, she set the cup down and peeled the pack from the scraped, swollen flesh, eyeing it dispassionately before shrugging. “Still disgusting. But the swelling’s gone down.” She grinned grimly. “I should be back in my miniskirts in a week or two.”

  “I’m sure Bank Boy will be thrilled to hear it. Oh, wait—he’s probably in France by now.”

  “Ass.” Ava groaned. “Don’t rub it in.”

  Smirking, Ulrich picked up the bottle of Jack Daniel’s he’d set between them on the coffee table. He poured them both another finger-full. Ava downed half of hers in a single gulp.

  “Careful, sailor,” he chided.

  “What?”

  “You’re putting those away quickly.”