Wunderland

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  “I was beaten up by fucking Nazis.”

  “They weren’t Nazis,” he said quietly.

  Ava felt herself flush. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just…it was hell.” And it had been. The seats in the police van had been crowded and unpadded; every jostle and bump had hurt Ava’s beaten body. Ten minutes into the ride, the woman crammed in next to her had leaned forward and vomited on Ava’s boots. And that was before even reaching the Tiergarten’s Precinct E, where her repeated requests for water, paracetamol, and a phone call had been ignored for hours. As awful as it had been, though, she knew she—of all people—had no business flinging around that particular term. Especially not with him.

  “Verzeihung,” she said again, swirling her whiskey in its mug. He was right; she was drinking too much again. And making the same foolish romantic mistakes. And getting herself needlessly into trouble and injury. And speaking thoughtlessly to the man she cared most for in the world.

  She’d start over in New York. She’d start everything over in New York.

  To New York, Ava thought.

  And tipping the mug back, she finished off the last few mash-sweet drops.

  “That’s the last time I’ll be able to bail you out, by the way,” Ulrich was saying. “Next time, you’ll have to call Bank Boy.”

  “Fuck you,” she retorted; but she was smiling. When the Polizei had finally allowed her her one five-minute phone call, her trembling fingers had practically dialed Ulrich’s number of their own accord. After he signed the release papers, his first comment had been Ask me what I’m thinking about.

  “You’re actually lucky you got out when you did.” He waved his mug at the Jurassic-era Zenith he’d inherited from his father back in Bremen. On Channel Three, the riots were still in high gear, policemen huddling behind a military tank as frenzied protesters hurled things at them: rocks, trash, and what looked like Molotov cocktails. Ava shuddered. Who are these people? she wondered. They didn’t look at all like the ones she’d marched with by the university. The latter had been boisterous, yes. But not belligerent. This crowd, by contrast, seemed to want only to inflict as much damage as it could. In fact, the scene looked less like a demonstration than wartime devastation. Smoke billowed from burning and overturned cars; the wounded limped and dragged themselves toward shelter. She searched for the cop who’d beaten and arrested her earlier, but they all looked the same on the screen: stern, grainy ghosts.

  “True.” Reaching for the impromptu dinner he’d set out—a hunk of Emmenthaler, a loaf of bread, and some rock-hard smoked sausage—Ava sculpted off a piece of cheese before realizing that she had zero interest in eating. “At least this nonsense won’t be happening in the U.S.,” she added, setting it back on the plate.

  “I wouldn’t count on that. You’ll be in Brooklyn.”

  “Brooklyn’s not a war zone.”

  “The world’s a war zone.”

  She lifted an eyebrow. “Some places more than others.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” He patted his shirt pocket for his cigarettes, tossing his pack of Crown Regals to her without her having to ask for them. I love you, she thought, the declaration sliding slyly into the jumbled slipstream of her consciousness before she had a chance to register and block it. Shaking her head, she reached for the cigarettes.

  “Nothing,” she said, tapping the pack against the tabletop. It had been three months since his abrupt announcement that he was leaving Germany for Tel Aviv, but it still felt as surreal today as it had then. “I just don’t understand why you aren’t coming with me instead,” Ava added. “New York City is almost as Jewish as Palestine.”

  “It’s Israel.” He picked up her cheese bit, tossing it high into the air and catching it victoriously in his mouth. “And New York’s not home.”

  “And Palestine is?”

  “Israel,” he corrected again, chewing methodically. “And yes. Or at least, it’s as close to a homeland as I’ve got.” He pushed his glasses up further on his nose. “Do you remember telling me—was it on the way back from that crazy trip to the Army Archives in Berlin—how New York suddenly just felt ‘right’ to you? Even though you’d never seen it?”

  What she remembered of that bleakly silent ride back was the charred ache in her gut. The realization that nothing could be the same—not her sense of Ilse as a stern but essentially moral being. Not of Ava as a girl without a past and hence with no traceable link to the prior decade’s horrors. And not, in the end, her newfound romance with Ulrich, though (typically) Ava had never had to put this into words. She simply pulled away until he understood that it was over. And then carefully, delicately, like a damaged ship at high sea, they’d navigated back to the safe shore of their former friendship.

  “Not really,” Ava said now, shaking herself out a smoke. “But anywhere away from Ilse felt right.”

  “I’m fairly sure you said that too.” He picked up the sausage in his fist and bit off a chunk, not bothering with the knife. “The strange thing,” he said, thoughtful again as he chewed, “is that I’ve always liked your mother. She’s never been anything but civil to me.”

  Ava tightened her lips. “It’s easy to appreciate civility if you’re not entitled to more.”

  He quirked a brow. “Like what?”

  “Like maternal devotion. Like love.” She’d meant for it to come out lightly, but the sudden intensity of her longing broke her voice slightly on the word love. Mortified, she dropped her gaze to the cigarette.

  “She loves you, Ava,” he said, in precisely the warm, kind voice she did not want to hear at the moment.

  She shrugged stiffly. “Do you have anything else to drink?”

  “Just beer, I think.” He climbed to his feet, making his way to the Westinghouse in the little galley kitchen and returning a moment later with two freshly decapped Pilsners. “Enjoy it,” he said, sliding one her way. “You know American beer tastes like piss.”

  She grimaced. “Does Palestine even have beer?”

  “Israel. And frankly I don’t much care. If it’s all that bad I’ll stick with whiskey.”

  He tipped his own bottle toward hers. “Cheers.”

  “L’chaim,” she countered glumly. It struck her anew that they’d soon be half a world apart; Ava and this brilliant, sardonic, insufferable being who had almost singlehandedly made her life bearable for two decades, who could make her laugh with the slightest shift of an eyebrow. It was true that they sometimes went for a week or more without talking these days. But it was the idea of his proximity that she depended upon: the knowledge that no matter what, she could always summon his wry, dry voice by picking up the phone’s receiver. She had known this would change, of course; had known it the moment his emigration papers came through and her application to Pratt was accepted. But not until this moment had she fully felt the stark and gaping truth of it.

  How did we let this happen, she thought miserably.

  Cigarette between her lips, she leaned forward as he produced a lighter and wordlessly flipped its cap. As he lit her cigarette she studied his hand; the long strong fingers, the dark curling hairs. She felt a strange pang that she had never tried to draw them.

  “Do you know,” she said, exhaling and leaning back, “that she hasn’t even congratulated me on getting into the program?”

  He shook out a cigarette for himself. “I’m sure she’s just upset that you’re leaving her.”

  “Doubtful.” Ava snorted, tasting the smoke’s tartness in the back of her throat. “She’ll throw a party. Even more so now that I’ve been arrested. She already thinks I’m a criminal.”

  “Why do you have to tell her about today?”

  Ava shrugged. “I suppose I don’t. But she’ll find out somehow anyways. She always manages to find out about my fuckups.”

  “This wasn’t a fuckup,” he said, exhaling. �
��This was you standing up for what is right.” He smiled. “At least until the Nazi knocked you down.”

  She gave him the finger. “Either way, it’s another reason for her to hate me.” On the television, a handful of protesters hurled themselves at a parked Volkswagen van and began rocking it from side to side.

  “She doesn’t hate you. She’s in pain. She’s losing her child.”

  “She never wanted her child,” Ava said bitterly.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do. Every time she looks at me I feel it. It’s as if it takes all her strength not to run away from me, screaming. Not that I blame her, given what we know about my father.” Ava toyed with her cigarette. “Do you know,” she said, “that one of my clearest, earliest memories of her is of her leaving me. I was on a beach—Wannsee, I think. She’d been behind me. But then all of a sudden she was walking away. Just…going.”

  He cocked his head. “What age was this?”

  “I can’t remember. After the orphanage.”

  “But she picked you up from the orphanage, didn’t she?”

  “I know that. But I barely remember anything from that day. It doesn’t make much sense.” As Ava shut her eyes, for some reason she saw not the lakeside beach but Bay Lop’s tooth-gnashing grimace. The simultaneous dawning of hatred and despair, even as life abruptly left his wire-thin frame. Where was he now? Ava wondered. Had they buried him? Burned his blood-spattered corpse? Her own body felt bloodless, as bleak and empty as starless space.

  “Would you stay?” Ulrich asked.

  “Was?” Startled, she looked up.

  “What if she asked you not to go? To stay with her here in Germany?”

  Ava contemplated this a moment: the novel thought of Ilse saying I love you, Ava. Please don’t leave. Or even more improbably: Let’s talk. In many ways, it was all she’d ever wanted from her mother. And yet at this moment the idea sparked not happiness but a swell of airless anxiety, the same sort that sometimes precursed her panic attacks.

  “Not a chance,” she said. “And you? Would anything make you stay now?”

  He smiled. “Not all the blond tail on the planet.”

  “Pig.” Ava flecked beer foam at him, though she was laughing again despite herself. In the years since their breakup it had become a running joke: his penchant for buxom milkmaid-types, as well as Ava’s for dissolute artist types. There was truth in both depictions, though Ava had sometimes thought they evoked them to keep their own relationship safely in its platonic realm. After all, Ava—with her dark hair, slight figure, and mournful brown eyes—couldn’t have looked less like a milkmaid. And Ulrich—sensible, sober Ulrich—had neither a creative nor a dissolute bone in his body.

  “Anyway,” she said. “There have to be blondes in Palestine.”

  “The bottle variety,” he said disdainfully. “It won’t be like here, in the Aryan paradise that is the Fatherland.”

  “I’d hope not much there is.”

  “Agreed,” he agreed. “Ditto with New York.”

  “That’s why I’m going,” she said.

  On Channel Three North the protesters finally toppled the VW van onto its side. As it lay there, a wounded whale, they crouched behind it as a shield, continuing to lob bottles and stones at the police squads.

  “They’ll make you fight,” said Ava, watching one officer race past the screen, gloved hand clamped against the riot helmet on his head.

  “Fighting was part of the draw for me.” He toyed with his lighter. “At least there we get to be fighters. Not victims.”

  “You’re not a victim here, are you?”

  “Of course I am.” He flicked his lighter, and she watched his flame materialize, then disappear again: poof. “The minute people hear Jew they see you differently. They wonder who you lost, how you survived—whether you lied or bribed or sold someone out to do it. They wonder why the hell you’re still here, in a country that gassed your mother and would probably have gassed you as well, if things had ended differently.” Sliding the lighter into his jacket pocket, he pushed his spectacles further up the bridge of his nose in that gesture that by now was so familiar, and so intensely dear all of a sudden, that Ava felt another pang.

  “I wish I were coming with you,” she said impulsively.

  “As in making Aliyah? Is there something you haven’t been telling me?”

  She shrugged. “I just know how much I’ll miss you.”

  She knew how foolish it sounded. Yet at that moment it was almost panic-inducing, the idea of an Ulrich-free world. She was suddenly uncertain if she could even survive it.

  “I’ll miss you,” she repeated softly. Thinking, once more: I love you.

  He held her gaze for a long moment. And though at this point she knew his gold-flecked eyes better than she knew her own, she saw something new and unexpected in them: a statement. A question. She caught her breath, instinctively summoning the nervous giggle, the offhand joke, the invisible gate she always slammed between them at these instances. For once, though, nothing came. She was aware only of his nearness; the scent of his English soap and aftershave. The faint spice on his breath left from the bite of sausage. That, and her pulse pounding in her throat.

  It was he who looked away first, but only to stub out his cigarette and set his spectacles with careful deliberation on the table.

  “What…” she managed.

  But he was already pushing the table out of the way, and pulling his body over hers, and cupping her face in the warm, strong hands she’d never drawn. Ava found herself not pulling away but pushing forward, pushing back. Obeying an impulse long buried all these years, not just from him but from herself, she wrapped her arms around his neck; twined her scraped, still-bleeding legs around his hips. As she started unbuttoning her blouse, though, it was he who paused.

  “You’re sure,” he said, “that this is all right?”

  For what felt like the first time in her life with him, she didn’t have a flip answer. What she had were questions—hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, each one as cool and sharp as it was strangely weightless, swirling through her stunned mind like downy snowflakes: why and why now and what is happening and what has changed. But most of all: what does this mean?

  But beneath the soft beat of their descent the answer lay already: that this wasn’t romance restarting, but friendship ending.

  That what they were saying was good-bye.

  For a moment her ears rang faintly: the old panic threatening to overtake her. Pushing it aside, she clung to him even more tightly, squeezing her suddenly wet eyes shut, burying her damp face in his prickly neck.

  “It is,” she whispered. “It’s everything.”

  7.

  Renate

  1936

  “Take it. It’s for you.” Sophia Sitz holds the envelope out, her eyes as hard and sharp as broken shards of blue glass.

  “What is it?” Renate asks warily.

  Sofi shrugs. “I meant to give it to you last week. I forgot.”

  Which isn’t an answer, but Renate extends her hand anyway, trying to look nonplussed even as her pulse skips a beat. Last week Sofi handed out invitations to her sixteenth birthday party. It’s to be held in the ballroom of the fancy Hotel am Steinplatz, with a buffet table and a band and dancing. The whole class is buzzing about it. Renate had told herself she didn’t care that she hadn’t been included, but the thrill coursing through her now says otherwise.

  Sliding the card into her skirt pocket, she darts a quick glance toward the front of the classroom, where Ilse sits scribbling furiously in a notebook.

  “Na, aren’t you going to open it?” Sofi is still waiting, her arms crossed over her chest.

  Renate wavers, wondering whether she can extract the envelope’s contents without her face giving away her relief and gratitude. She hears the s
ingsong tenor of their geography teacher in the hallway, cheerily greeting some other staff member or instructor. (Heil Hitler!)

  “I’ll open it later,” she says, relieved. “Class is starting.”

  As she sinks into her wooden chair she senses rather than sees Karolin Beidryzcki’s hazel gaze. “What was it?”

  Is it Renate’s imagination, or is there a hint of jealousy in her voice? Feigning nonchalance, she pulls out her notebook. “I don’t know.”

  “You were probably smart not to open it then.” Karolin pulls out her own book and a pencil, then holds up the latter and frowns. “Ach.”

  “What?”

  “Broken. Have you got an extra?”

  Renate darts a quick glance at the metal sharpener screwed to the wall up front. A year earlier, Karolin might have risked a trip to it. These days, though, both she and Renate know better than to leave their seats unless summoned. The less attention they draw to themselves the better.

  “I’ll look.” Renate rummages in her bag again. “And what do you mean, ‘smart’? Do you know what it is?”

  “I might. A few others got them last week.” Her friend’s freckled face is sober.

  Poor girl, thinks Renate. Of course, she wouldn’t have been invited. None of the full Jews were. “I’m sure it won’t be much fun, anyways,” she lies consolingly.

  Karolin frowns. She looks as though she’s about to say something more. But before she can answer, the room fills with thunks and screeches of chairs being hurriedly pushed back and girls springing from their seats. As Herr Hartmann strides through the doorway, pointer in hand, Renate reluctantly pulls herself to her own feet. Striding to the lectern, the teacher yanks down the retracting map they’d been studying yesterday: Karte des Deutschen Volks—und Kulturbodens, the title reads, over a darkly shaded area that includes large swathes of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary.

  For a moment he studies it, rocking back on his heels. Then, swiveling around to face them all, he lifts his arm. “Heil Hitler!”

  “Heil Hitler!” the class chimes, thirty-two girlish arms flung high. Renate and Karolin remain standing but don’t salute. This is not from choice, but because “the German salute is for Germans only,” as they and the school’s other remaining non-Aryans were told at a terse meeting in the headmaster’s office last term. By that point it had come as a relief; the daily inner battle between her longing to fit in and the last, defiant shreds of her self-respect had become almost as exhausting as pretending nothing had changed.