Wunderland

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  Renate blinked. “Threw it out? Just like that?”

  Ilse nodded. “She said it had just been there to make things look ‘festive.’ When I asked if there wasn’t anything sweet at all—at least a biscuit or some fruit—she paddled me and sent me to my room. She said I was ungrateful; that I didn’t understand how hard it was for them to even get bread on the table.” She hesitated. “It was, I think, the worst day of my life.”

  “You never told me.” Renate felt her throat tighten in sympathy. “Ilsi. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not telling you because I need pity,” Ilse said curtly. “I’m trying to make you understand. I don’t ever want to experience anything like that moment again. I don’t ever want my children to experience it.”

  “But why do you think I can’t understand that?”

  Ilse rolled her eyes the way she always did when Renate was being (as she’d put it) as dense as cement. “I don’t think you understand what it’s going to take to change things. The kinds of sacrifices that will have to be made. Anything that gets in the way of what we are trying to do has to go. It has to be eliminated. Even if…even if it’s you.”

  “But how am I ‘getting in the way’?” Renate asked, truly baffled. “I want a stronger Germany too. I know I can’t join the BDM, but…”

  “But that’s just it, don’t you see?” Ilse’s cheeks were flushed, her voice hard in the way it hardened when she was trying to hide the fact that she was close to tears. “You can’t join because you’re not part of the new Germany. You can’t be. I know that’s not your fault, but it’s the truth. We can’t just pretend that it’s not.”

  Renate stared at her, stunned. Not part of the new Germany? She knew other people believed this. But she’d never expected to hear it from Ilse. Not Ilse, who until last year showed every poem she ever wrote to Renate before anyone else. Not Ilse, with whom Renate had worked her way through Kant and Heine and Schiller and had just started Goethe when their friendship started to crumble. Not Ilse, who’d once predicted that Renate would be the first female German minister of culture.

  It was as if someone had placed a tourniquet around her esophagus. Panic descended, not because she couldn’t breathe but because she somehow sensed that this was her last chance to do it: to say something. To change things back, if she could only find the right, magical words. Try as she might, though, Renate couldn’t even come up with one.

  “Oh, and just so you know,” Ilse was saying. “I told them not to give you one.”

  “One what?”

  “One of the tickets. I told them to leave you alone.” Message delivered, Ilse turns back toward the classroom.

  “Wait,” Renate said. “One more thing. Then I’ll go.”

  Looking annoyed, Ilse waited.

  “That—that signature.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one on the back. From—it said Rudi.” Renate licked her lips nervously. “Was it really from him?”

  Ilse had gazed at her former best friend for a moment, and once more Renate—in the past so adept at interpreting her expressions—found herself unable to translate this one.

  She did, however, recognize the tone of voice with which Ilse delivered this answer as well: “No.”

  It was the tone she usually used when she was lying.

  * * *

  “And that was it?” her mother asks now, absently straightening Renate’s collar. “You went back into class together?”

  Renate nods. “Herr Hartmann said he was going to report me to the headmaster. But then Ilse told him that she’d had to use the lavatory ‘for women’s problems,’ and that that was why we took so long. So in the end he just made me stay after class and sand and wash all the desks.” She doesn’t tell her mother how the harsh soap and cold water caused her fingers to prune, or how the sandpaper blistered the pads of her fingers. Or the way Herr Hartmann made her stand straight without moving an inch while he pressed against her to “inspect” her work.

  Instead, she says: “I know I shouldn’t complain. But it’s—it’s so hard, Mama. And I’m lonely.”

  “I know.” Sighing, her mother runs a tired hand through her hair. The emerald in her silver ring glints in the light. It’s one of several heirloom pieces her mother’s mother left her; this one a set comprising a finely wrought brooch, a set of earrings, the ring, and a stunning necklace. For as long as Renate can remember, these items have been kept in her mother’s stocking drawer, in an enameled jewelry box inlaid with opalescent mother-of-pearl. Someday they’ll be Renate’s, though for now she has to settle for holding them only when her mother takes them out for a polishing. Or stealing glimpses of them when her mother isn’t home at all.

  “But for the moment,” her mother is continuing, “there’s nowhere else you can be. At least, not unless we leave Germany altogether.”

  “Are we seriously considering moving to another country?” Even saying it feels blasphemous, as though they were considering setting fire to their own home.

  “I’m seriously considering everything.” Lisbet Bauer sighs. “It’s your father who is still resistant. He keeps saying all this will blow over, that it always has in the past. Though I think that’s only part of the reason. He won’t ever say so, but I think he’s worried that he’s not employable anywhere outside Germany.”

  “How can that be? He is—was—the most popular instructor in his department!”

  “Yes. But he also doesn’t speak another language. At least, not well enough to teach in it. And”—seeing Renate open her mouth to argue—“ancient Latin doesn’t count.”

  “But he’s brilliant. Surely he could learn…”

  “Not quickly enough to qualify for a job in America. Or Shanghai. Or even Trinidad. And he’d need that in order to get a visa.”

  Biting her lip, Renate digests this. “Well, what do you think? Do you think it will blow over?”

  Her mother purses her lips, tucking one of Renate’s curls behind her ear. “I think,” she says, “that it’s better to be safe than sorry. But for now let’s just get you to your Abitur without losing your sanity.”

  Turning back to her pot, she adds: “Go tell your father that dinner will be in half an hour.”

  8.

  Ava

  1956

  “Ready for trouble?”

  Ulrich revved his engine roguishly, and despite her jangling nerves Ava couldn’t help laughing. The car was his father’s sedate ʼ38 Opel Olympia. Its color was an unobtrusive mint green.

  “You look ready to rob a nursing home.”

  “I thought you liked men with big motors.”

  “Only when they’re balanced on two wheels, you idiot.”

  Ava slid into the passenger side and pulled the heavy door shut, leaning over to plant a kiss on his cheek that landed on his mouth as he turned toward her. She closed her eyes, registering the echo of Earl Grey tea and tobacco on his tongue, the stubbly scratch of his upper lip against hers before gently pulling away again. Kicking off her flats, she settled her skirt over her knees, drawing a small stack of bills from her jacket pocket. “Here.”

  He lifted a brow. “What’s this?”

  “For gas. Or bribes, if we need them.”

  If he took the bribes suggestion as a joke, he gave no sign. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Ilse’s purse. Where else?” She reached for the Benson and Hedges on the dashboard.

  He was thumbing through the bills. “Won’t she notice? There’s close to twenty marks here.”

  “I doubt it. I’ve been taking it bit by bit.”

  “Impressive. Just call us Bonnie and Clyde.” He tucked the money into his jacket pocket, then absently tightened his collar. He’d dressed for the occasion, Ava noted, wearing her favorite blue striped tie that reminded her of stick candy tucked into one of his father�
�s woolen V-necked jumpers. “Speaking of which…how’d our other criminal endeavor turn out?”

  Rummaging in her purse, Ava tossed him the trifold license she’d spent most of the last night altering to make him appear old enough to drive unsupervised. “I was worried that my ink wasn’t a match. But it looks more convincing now that it’s dried.” Shaking out a B&H, she pressed the dashboard lighter button with her bare foot. “What’s up with the radio?”

  “Should be working again. Just came back from the shop.”

  Still running the engine, Ulrich flipped the falsified document over to inspect its back. Ava fiddled with the radio’s chrome knobs, skipping over alpenhorn-heavy folk music and a German quartet crooning over Hawaiian ukuleles. “For God’s sake,” she grumbled. “Why can’t anyone play decent music in this town?”

  Folding the fake license closed again, he gave a low whistle. “My girlfriend is a bloody genius.”

  “You think the border guards will buy it?” she asked, settling on an old-school swing number on the radio.

  “If they don’t they’re either blind or stupid. My money’s on the latter.”

  “God. I hope you’re right.” As Ulrich eased smoothly into morning traffic she rolled down the window and withdrew the dashboard lighter, pressing its heated tip to the end of her cigarette, studying him beneath her lashes. He’d been driving with his father for only a month now, but he was as naturally competent behind the wheel as he was everywhere else. In fact, with the possible exception of Ilse he was the most competent person Ava had ever known—and certainly the most trustworthy. At some point he’d also become surprisingly handsome, albeit in a gangly Jimmy Stewart kind of way. I’m lucky, she thought. He’s so much better for me than the others.

  It would have been a hard point to argue with herself. Before Ulrich, her two forays into romance had been with pompadoured, fast-talking boys whose sole purpose seemed to have been to get into her capris. One stopped calling when Ava declined; the other when she complied. Both abandonments—for that was how she’d felt, abandoned—had left her distraught and mortified for weeks.

  Turning her head, she blew smoke at a gaggle of pubescent schoolgirls. It was barely seven in the morning, but the Bremen sidewalk was already bustling with ambling students, hurried dog walkers, and harried-looking commuters. Ava found herself searching warily for her mother’s neat blond head, even though Ilse worked on the other side of town.

  And yet, she thought, wouldn’t it be just like Ilse to do that. To have discovered today’s plan and found a way to ruin it, in the same way she ruined everything else in Ava’s life. A few months earlier, for instance: Ava’s Gymnasium drawing teacher told Ava her work was strong enough for a summer course at the University of the Arts, and offered to introduce her to the life study instructor there. It would have cost almost nothing financially, and interfered with nothing academically. Still, Ilse had put her foot down. “I don’t want you staring at naked women in a room filled with boys,” she’d said. “And you waste enough time on that drawing nonsense already.” Similarly, last year when she’d gotten wind (probably by listening in on the downstairs phone line) that after six years of close friendship Ava and Ulrich had become something more, Ilse had immediately tried to put a stop to that development as well, appearing unannounced at the flat Ulrich shared with his widower father to inform a groggy Doktor Bergen that their children had crossed a “dangerous line,” one that required firm parental intervention. She’d stated her intention to “monitor Ava and Ulrich closely” whenever they were at the von Fischer household. “I’d request you do the same whenever Ava is here,” she’d added.

  Happily, Ulrich’s father—a night surgeon at Hospital St. Joseph-Stift—had as little time for chaperoning as he did for anything else in his precious daylight hours. After relating the tale to Ulrich, he’d merely told him to “watch his step” with Ava—less because he agreed with Frau von Fischer than because he didn’t want any further dealings with the woman. “Frankly,” he’d confided, “she terrifies me.”

  * * *

  On Radio Bremen the big band number gave way to a newscast about France withdrawing from the Suez.

  “Why aren’t we just driving to Paris again?” Ava asked, twisting the dial further. “I could enroll in the Beaux Arts. You could work at Paris Match.”

  “For starters, Magellan, it’s in the entirely opposite direction.” Ulrich checked his rearview mirror. “Also, I have exams tomorrow.”

  “So do I.”

  “Well, some of us actually want our graduation certificates. And it’s bad enough that you have me skipping school in the first place.”

  “I have you skipping?” She switched the radio off in disgust. “This was your idea, remember?”

  “My idea was that you go there.”

  “Which I couldn’t do, unless you drove me. And you got your license a year early out of it.”

  “From a counterfeiter and a hussy. I love you, but you’re a terrible influence. Here.” Reaching under his seat, he retrieved a worn road atlas and tossed it into her lap. “See if you can steer us straight. Don’t forget that north is up.”

  Ich liebe dich. She felt, as she had in past weeks, a strange sense of disorientation over the declaration, as though he’d unintentionally called her by the wrong name.

  Shaking the feeling off, Ava flipped through the Michelin until she found the route to the capital. For a moment she just stared at the inkblot-shaped space: Berlin. Embattled city of her birth. Hazily recalled hometown of her happiest years. And, she now knew, the starting point of a story she’d been seeking practically every day since she’d been weepingly removed from that city by Berlin’s wartime Child Welfare services. Not her own sad-sack tale of abandonment and reluctant reunification with a mother uninterested in mothering. Nor was it Ilse’s story; her mother kept that narrative locked inside her nearly as tightly as she’d have liked to keep Ava locked into their little yellow row house. This was another story, belonging to another parent: the nameless, unmentioned third in Ava’s incomplete family triad.

  Only he wasn’t nameless any longer.

  Her finger still on the former capital, Ava silently recited to herself the three words that had felt like a magical incantation when she first read them:

  Nikolaus Gunther Hellewege.

  And then, experimentally: Mein Vater.

  * * *

  The day’s extraordinary expedition had its roots in what had started as a quite ordinary afternoon three months earlier. Sitting (unchaperoned) together atop Ulrich’s rumpled bed, Ava and Ulrich had been doing what they now did nearly every day after school: French kissing, smoking English cigarettes, and listening to American music. Ulrich had also been filling out an application for his automobile learner’s permit, and Ava had his birth certificate in her lap, along with a photograph that had slipped out of the file he’d kept it in. Holding the latter to the light, she’d tilted her head appreciatively. “She looked like an angel.”

  Ulrich’s mother had been a lithe redhead with dark green eyes, though in the black-and-white photo she looked like a brown-eyed brunette. Either way, she’d been ethereally lovely in that way only women who have been dancers can be. “Seraphina Sara Bergen,” Ava read dreamily off the certificate. “Even her name sounds angelic.”

  “It was meant to sound Jewish,” he’d said, flipping over the form. “Her original middle name was Ingrid.”

  “Why’d she change it?”

  “It was the law.” His eyes were still on the application form. “All Jews had to have a Jewish-sounding middle name.”

  Ava frowned, trying to recall whether this bizarre detail had been covered in any of their patchy history lessons. Information on both world wars—but particularly the second one—was usually dispersed cryptically and vaguely: a terse chapter on Hitler’s seemingly self-propelled ascent to power. A chalkboard
list titled “Enemies of the Reich” that included Communists, Jews, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Far more traumatizing was the day her class was led to the school’s downstairs auditorium, where with neither introduction nor explanation they were shown Alain Resnais’s brutally blunt concentration camp documentary, Night and Fog. After the last searing images—walking corpses, cloth made from human hair, shower-room walls scored by scrabbling fingernails—had faded, the stunned students were let out early to be bludgeoned by the wintry afternoon brightness. After vomiting in the school courtyard Ava had looked for Ulrich—only to discover that he and the school’s one other student of Jewish descent had quietly been given the whole afternoon off.

  “So Jews had to choose new names?” she asked.

  “There was no choice,” he said, copying down the Opel’s year, color, and make. “Men got ‘Israel.’ Women got ‘Sara.’ ”

  “Israel?” Ava grimaced. “The women got the better end of that deal, didn’t they.”

  At that he did look up, briefly. Then he looked down again.

  “Not really,” he said.

  Immediately she recognized her mistake. She knew his mother’s story: how her marriage to his Catholic father staved off the cattle cars and the camps until the very last months of the war, when the dreaded “Notice of Deportation” was delivered to the Judenhaus they’d been forced into. How Doktor Bergen had pleaded with her to go into hiding at the home of one of his patients, and how she’d initially seemed to agree—only to slip out of her hiding spot on the appointed morning of her summons with her designated single suitcase. I can’t bear the thought, she had written, that an attempt to save myself might result in repercussions for you or—worse—for our child. Better to go quietly and alone than risk the lives of those I love.

  She’d been gassed almost immediately upon reaching Auschwitz.