Wunderland

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  The group included two members of his still-secret “Schiller” study group (one Jewish, one Catholic), the Beidryzcki twins, a boy from the Betar Zionist movement Franz had recently become intrigued by, and two other Mischlinge whose parents knew Renate’s parents. Renate had agreed to join out of boredom at first: with the BDM now officially the only legal club at school, there was nothing else that she could join. Even then, she had braced herself to be as revolted by all things jüdisch as everyone around her seemed to be. To her surprise, though, in this instance too, her mother—who claims “engaging trauma often lessens its impact”—turned out to be right. The sessions not only helped her understand Judaism as a religion but leached away some of the toxic sting of being a Halbjude.

  Part of it was because, when one studied it through history books and religious tracts (rather than through government publications and Der Stürmer) Judaism bore no resemblance at all to the parasitic, lecherous, and sinister cult she’d been taught to despise. For one thing, the stories they read from the mysterious-sounding Torah were largely ones she’d always considered Christian fables. Only their order really differed, and the way they were read: while Christians were simply told what the stories were supposed to mean, Jews were actually encouraged to argue about their interpretation, just as generations upon generations of rabbis before them had enthusiastically done in writing in the Midrash.

  What was more, nothing in either the stories or the debates involved what she’d long been told was Judaism’s version of the Holy Trinity: material wealth, ritual sacrifice, and world domination. Instead, they were about things like peace and mutual respect, learning to love both one’s own people and the strangers among them.

  But the biggest surprise for her had been the music.

  Renate had first heard it on a warm night last September, wafting out of the enormous and stately Fasanenstraße Synagogue as she walked home. As it was mere blocks from her house, she had passed it by hundreds of times without giving it particular thought. This time, though, the sonorous organ tones that had washed into the darkening street had called out to her like the ancient, lonely cry of a siren. She listened to the end, and to the end of the next song. Then she found herself in a back pew, where she sat for the next half hour between a young woman with a sleeping baby and an older woman in a lacy black veil. The candles were lit, the rabbi reading from a list of the newly dead, his voice a soft-falling snow of gentle grief. And though she had no one physically to mourn, for the first time in months Renate had felt that it was not just permitted but somehow fitting to weep. And so she had.

  “It was actually rather beautiful,” she told Ilse the next day, as they perched together on the lip of the dried-up fountain in the upper school courtyard. “And to be honest, it didn’t feel very different from church.”

  By that point, Ilse and Renate hardly saw one another outside school hours. But in school, at least, Ilse was still there when it counted. When Rudi broke things off, Ilse wrote a mock story for her newsletter titled “Hitlerjugend’s Prettiest Boy Breaks with Sweetheart to Propose Marriage to Führer Himself.” When the headmaster decreed that all non-Aryans had to move to the back of all the classrooms, she had agitated on Renate’s behalf (“She’s half Aryan! Shouldn’t she at least get to sit somewhere in the middle?”). Upon losing that argument she continued to perch pointedly on Renate’s desk until the bell rang. She still met Renate in the courtyard before and after school, even though it meant other girls started avoiding her too.

  As gestures these all fell short of revolutionary. In fact, they weren’t even particularly risky. But they helped make the days a little easier for Renate to get through, as did the flash of silver Renate still spied on Ilse’s hand when she waved or gave the Führer’s salute.

  It wasn’t until after Christmas that things completely changed between them.

  * * *

  Ilse had spent most of the winter holiday on an HJ/BDM-sponsored ski trip, and when she returned, it was without the promised telephone call announcing the fact and with (it was rumored) a new sweetheart. And while no one knew for sure who this mystery boy was, the name Renate heard mentioned drove a steel spike through her soul.

  “Just ask her,” suggested Karolin, when Renate confided in her. “She’ll surely tell you, one way or the other.”

  But in that first week back at school Ilse was as maddeningly elusive as Rudi had been after Renate’s fall from racial grace. She’d arrive in class after Renate but before the teachers, disappearing in the opposite order afterward. She was pointedly absent from all their old meeting spots—the courtyard fountain, the windowside table in the library. The old hitching post outside the school’s main front entrance. When, in desperation, Renate finally cornered her on the route home one day, Ilse heard her out stiffly, looking intensely uncomfortable. Yes, she knew she’d said she’d telephone when they came back from Ischgl. And no, she hadn’t, because she’d been unusually busy. No, she didn’t know when she’d next come to Renate’s house; it seemed likely she’d be unusually busy indefinitely. And no, Rudi Gerhardt was nothing more than a friend to her. But she didn’t want to discuss it, she hadn’t the time, there was a Winter Relief drive effort she had to write about for the newsletter.

  As if to prove her point, she turned toward a passing Mädel and threw her arm up in the now-ubiquitous gesture: “Heil Hitler!”

  It was a gesture Renate had seen a thousand times in past months. For some reason, though, this time it felt different: not merely reflexive but irrevocable. As though with that single upward swing of her right arm Ilse was severing their connection, once and for all.

  It wasn’t until she was in bed that night, staring up at the stars they’d cut together, that Renate realized what had really set it apart.

  It was Ilse’s hand: it had been bare. Renate’s friendship ring had been nowhere in sight.

  * * *

  At home she kicks her boots off by the front door and is almost knocked over by Sigi’s leaping, stub-wagging welcome. On another day she might have pushed him off in annoyance. Now, though, she buries her face in his wiry pelt, as grateful for his unshakable canine love as she is pained by all it can’t replace. “You know what, Sig?” she whispers into his perked furry ear. “You may just be my new best girlfriend.”

  “Reni?” Her mother’s voice floats from the kitchen.

  “Guter Hund,” she murmurs, releasing the Schnauzer.

  “Welcome home.” Her mother has long since dispensed with her former greeting, How was school? the answers have become too depressing for both of them. “Can you come here for a minute?” she calls instead. “I need an opinion.”

  “About dinner?”

  “Yes.”

  Renate grimaces. They’ve had to let Maria go, as she’s well below the legal age limit for an Aryan woman working in a Jewish household. Renate’s mother tried to stress the situation’s silver lining, the “opportunity” to “learn something about cooking” in addition to the monthly savings of fifteen Reichsmarks, now doubly needed since Renate’s father has been forced from his university position. But the fruits of this educational endeavor have been decidedly mixed. Whether by deliberate inclination or simply because she’s too busy (with writing her own book, with taking on private clients in an effort to make up for Vati’s lost income, with writing foreign clinics in search of work for herself and foreign universities in search of work for her husband) nearly every meal Lisbet Bauer produces has something noticeably—sometimes nauseatingly—wrong with it. The soufflé attempted last Saturday was so marble-hard that even Sigi had wanted nothing to do with it. The potatoes in the Hasenpfeffer were so overboiled and mealy that the salad tasted more like a potato soup, while the cabbage for the Kohlroulade was so undercooked that Franz joked he’d lost a tooth trying to chew it.

  But worst of all was Sunday’s Sauerbraten. Finding herself out of both vinegar and cooking
wine, Renate’s mother had improvised with vodka—specifically, horseradish spirits that had been in their liquor cabinet since her husband’s service reunion two years earlier. It was like eating beef soaked in garlic and gasoline. Franz joked that he could blow up the police station he passed daily on Französische Straße by farting at it and striking a match—a comment that not only earned him no rebuke but actual laughter from both parents.

  Hovering in the doorway now, Renate inhales with some caution. But the air smells deceptively appetizing.

  “Komm rein, Liebling,” says her mother, sounding slightly distracted. A cigarette clamped between her lips, she is stirring her pot with almost aggressive force, as though trying to beat the meal into submission. “What do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “What I’m making. How does it smell?”

  Renate sniffs again. “It smells…good?”

  “I followed the recipe this time. Proper ingredients. Proper amounts. Who knew it would make such a difference?”

  “Who knew,” echoes Renate, though she can’t help wondering whether her mother’s psychotherapeutic approach is similarly scattered. “How was work?”

  “Getting worse.” Her mother’s lips tighten around her cigarette. “Now that Doktor Göring has forced out all the non-Aryans he’s turned to the publications.” The Psychotherapy Institute has recently been annexed by the Deutsches Institut für Psychologie, a government institute, and its new director is a cousin to Field Marshal Göring.

  “Everything but Freud vanished over the weekend,” her mother continues. “And even the Freud isn’t available, since they’re keeping it locked up in a cupboard for which only Göring has the key.”

  “Why keep it at all?”

  Her mother shrugs. “It’s a signed first edition. Perhaps they think it’s worth something. Or perhaps even our esteemed government has to accept Die Traumdeutung as the foundation of the field—even if they don’t want anyone to read it. Na, ja.”

  Setting her cigarette on a saucer, her mother extends her wooden spoon. Steam sloughs from it into the air; Renate takes a tentative taste. Meaty richness floods her mouth.

  “Eintopf?” she asks. The stew is Ilse’s favorite, one Renate has helped her and her downstairs kitchen staff prepare a dozen times. But there is, of course, no reason to note this now.

  “You win the prize,” says her mother. The slight smile that appears almost looks strange on her thin face; it’s been that long since Renate last saw one. For some reason, it evokes not a responsive smile of her own but a wave of grief strong enough that her body sways with it. She finds herself blinking back tears.

  “Reni,” says her mother, frowning. “What is it?”

  “I just…” Renate licks the last salty trace of stew from her lips, trying to think of how to phrase it. “I know that I…don’t have things as hard as other people. No one’s arrested me. Or chased me out of a classroom. No one’s told me to break up my family.”

  Her mother nods. Threatened with a beating by his former classmates, Franz and two of the other Jews in his class recently had to flee their lecture hall through a back window. Professor Bauer, meanwhile, has been brought in for “questioning” by the local Gestapo over rumors (false) of supposed Socialist connections. And Renate’s mother has been visited twice by the same agents and urged to “seriously consider” divorcing Vati. “For the sake of my future career,” she repeated in disbelief, over undercooked sausage and soggy spaetzle. “Next they’ll want me to do what that awful woman in the papers did: claim my children aren’t Mischlinge because their fathers were secret Aryan lovers from my past.”

  Renate is ashamed to remember how her thoughts buzzed at that. Not just the idea of her mother having a lover (and could she? She was certainly pretty enough, though to be honest Renate has no idea how she’d find the time) but the idea that by changing one small part of one’s story, one could erase the damning blood in one’s veins. She’d even allowed herself to imagine it: marching into the school office with the coveted Certificate of Blood Purity. Seeing Ilse by their fountain and having her pale face light up upon seeing Renate, instead of closing off as it always did now. And Rudi…Rudi. Oh, Rudi.

  It took her several moments more to process that the fantasy only worked if she cut her kind, gentle Vati entirely out of her life.

  “But…” her mother prompts.

  “But…” Renate swallows, hard. What she really wants to ask is that her mother make it better; make it go away. That she magically dismiss the pathetic paper and the Yid trap and the one-way ticket to Jerusalem as she has always dismissed everything else. To take Renate into her lap, murmuring shush-shush-shush, stroking her hair and brow and cheek. What she really wants is to curl up into a ball and have her mother surround her, a fleshly shield against the world.

  “Yes?” her mother repeats, her tone now slightly impatient.

  “I miss her,” Renate says quietly.

  For a moment there’s no sound beyond the bubbling of the pot’s contents. Then she hears her mother sigh, feels her strong and wiry arms press lightly against her back.

  “Klar. I miss her too.”

  Renate lays her head on her mother’s thin shoulder, noticing that the seam of her sweater has split apart there. Noticing, too, how little flesh her mother actually has these days. Lisbet Bauer has always been birdlike, delicate. But now her face is drawn and peaked, the flesh stretched so sharply over her cheeks that Renate all but sees the underlying bone.

  “I thought today that things might be changing back.”

  Her mother tucks a strand behind Renate’s ear. “And why was that?”

  “I…I left class. I walked out. And she came out to bring me back.”

  Her mother leans back to look at her. “You left class? Without permission?”

  Renate nods, flushing a little. “They were being hateful. All of them. Even the teacher.”

  Lisbet Bauer shakes her head. “Reni. We’ve talked about this. You simply must learn to…”

  “I know. Get through the day. But, Mama—that’s the thing. Today I didn’t think I could do it. I was pretty sure if I stayed there I’d do something awful. And so I left, and then Ilse came after me. And then…”

  Her mother leans against the stove, crossing her arms. “And then?”

  Renate squeezes her eyes shut, seeing it again: Sofi’s ticket, which she’d pulled out again in the hallway. Its cheery message (Please don’t bother returning!) cutting all the more cruelly because—as it slowly dawned on her now—there was actually nowhere she could go. She couldn’t go back into the classroom she’d just stormed out of. She certainly couldn’t waltz out the front door. She was as trapped as a Yid rat in a cage.

  She’d just been contemplating trying to sneak unnoticed into the library when she heard—first, footsteps, approaching rapidly behind her.

  And then the familiar voice: “Reni.”

  Renate looked over her shoulder, not daring to hope it was real. But it was; there she was. Ilse stood by a window, her blond hair lit by a shaft of afternoon sunlight.

  In a single instant, months of built-up misery and solitude dropped away. A jumble of joyous greetings vied for vocalization: I knew it and I’ve missed you and Why did you wait so long and I’ve so much, so much to tell you…though only two materialized: “You came.”

  The old Ilse would have laughed dismissively and said, Of course I came. I couldn’t just let you leave, you idiot!

  This Ilse, however, merely shrugged.

  “Herr Hartmann sent me. He said you’re to stop this nonsense and come back.”

  She spoke looking not directly at Renate but behind her, vaguely, coolly. And just like that, the bolt of joy that had caused Renate’s heart to jump became a leaden weight against her lungs. Of course, she thought. Of course Ilse was here not as Renate’s best
friend but as Herr Hartmann’s most trusted and favored pupil. His kleine Journalistin.

  “Are you coming?” Ilse prompted. “He says if you don’t come back he’ll have you dismissed.”

  “Why?”

  Ilse rolled her eyes. “Why do you think? You left the room without permission.”

  “Not that. Why did you leave?” Renate licked her lips. “Me. Why did you leave me?”

  The question seemed to catch Ilse off-guard. A look flashed across her face: a look of anguish and something more (guilt? uncertainty?). But then she tightened her lips and it was gone.

  “This isn’t the time to discuss that,” she said.

  “It is. It is exactly the time.” Renate wanted to clench Ilse’s shoulders, hard. To shake her until her enviably even teeth rattled. “If we don’t, I won’t go with you. And I’ll—I’ll scream. I’ll scream and say you attacked me.”

  Renate had no idea where the threat came from, and even less of an idea if she’d have been able to put it into action. Happily, though, she didn’t have to find out, because Ilse sighed and leaned against the wall. “I don’t know if I can make you understand. Especially given your Jewish blood and everything.”

  Ilse had her eyes shut, so she missed Renate’s flinch. Her pale face looked slightly pained, her lips pursed in thought. Finally she sighed.

  “Did I ever tell you,” she said, opening her eyes again, “about my ninth birthday?”

  Renate shook her head.

  “It was during the Inflation,” Ilse continued. “My mother had promised me a cake. But we didn’t have the money for ingredients. So she took an old cigar box of my father’s, covered it with clean paper, and then spread shortening over it as though it were frosting. We sat with that on the table throughout whatever dinner was. Then, after she’d lit the Geburtstagskranz, and she and Vati had sung to me and had me blow out the candles, she scraped the shortening back into a jar and threw the box out.”