Wunderland

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

Instead she took a sip of water. “No. All we did was drive.”

  Ilse’s pale brows lifted slightly. “Drive where? Drive how?”

  “In Doktor Bergen’s car. To Berlin.”

  “Doktor Bergen drove you to Berlin?”

  “Not Doktor Bergen. Ulrich. Ulrich drove us.”

  “Ulrich?” Ilse’s face tightened further. “But he isn’t old enough to drive unaccompanied. He doesn’t have his Führerschein.”

  “He does now.” Ava shrugged, watching as comprehension dawned on her mother’s chiseled face. It was closely shadowed by disbelief.

  “And Doktor Bergen,” she said tightly. “He knew of this expedition?”

  Ava dropped her gaze to her mug. The water in it, slightly brown from the rust in the pipes, shivered slightly in response to some unseen vibration. It reminded her of the scene from Godzilla, King of the Monsters! when the giant lizard is closing in, still unseen.

  “So let me repeat what you are saying.” Each of her mother’s words was barbed with fury now. “You forged my signature to skip Gymnasium for the third time in the last two months. You let a boy you aren’t supposed to be seeing unchaperoned, and who can’t legally drive, drive you out of the country, with falsified documents, in a car he’d stolen from his father. And you drove to Berlin—Berlin!—and back. In one day.” She gave a short laugh of disbelief. “My God, Ava. You’ve become a criminal! Right before my eyes!”

  Ava jerked her head up. “I’m the criminal?” She felt it again now: the queasy stab of foreboding as she’d taken down the name of her father’s division in the East. The raw shock when she looked it up in the little downstairs library. “If I am,” she said bitterly, “it’s your own fault, isn’t it. You’re the one who gave me a criminal for a father.”

  “Was?” Ilse blinked at her.

  “My father,” Ava repeated. “I know what he did. I found out about it today. That’s why I went to Berlin.”

  For a moment her mother simply stared at her.

  “Your father was a soldier,” she said at last. “And you know nothing about him.”

  “I know more than enough now.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  Ava pulled her purse into her lap. Unsnapping the clasp, she withdrew the birth certificate and held it out.

  Her mother took it warily, her pale eyes not moving from Ava’s face until she had it in her hands. When she looked up, her jaw was tight. “Where did you get this?”

  Ava allowed herself a small smile. “You ordered it for me.”

  “I…” Her mother took a sharp breath as this sank in as well. “My God,” she said. “What has happened to you?”

  “What happened to me?” Ava’s voice was shaking now. She didn’t care. “What happened is that you wouldn’t tell me about my father. I decided to find out for myself.”

  Her mother was shaking her head slowly. “I told you I’d tell you when it was time. It isn’t time yet. You’re not ready. You’re not…” She hesitated, bit her lip. “It was complicated.”

  “There’s nothing complicated about murder.”

  “Murder?” Her mother’s eyes widened, then narrowed. “What on earth are you talking about? It wasn’t murder.”

  “What do you call it, then?”

  Ilse hesitated. Ava recrossed her arms over her chest and waited. She could almost see her mother’s mind working furiously through the pale windows of her silvery eyes, could see the mental calculus behind Ilse’s next response. What have I told her. How much does she know. How much can I get away with not saying.

  At last, sighing, she crossed the blue-checked linoleum floor and pulled the chair opposite Ava’s out for herself. “You must understand,” she said, slowly lowering herself into it, “that things were…different in those days. At the time, we—he—simply thought of it as journalism. We didn’t think of it as propaganda.”

  “Is that what you thought he did?” Even to her own ears, Ava’s laugh sounded shrill, slightly mad. “Propaganda?”

  “It is what he did.” Ilse looked affronted. “I know. We worked together. It’s why…” Seeming to catch herself, she stopped and shook her head. “He was a journalist.”

  Ava started to laugh again, then stopped as it dawned on her that her mother was speaking in earnest.

  “Do you really not know what he did in the East?” she asked quietly. “In Russia?”

  “All I knew was that he was working for a general.” Ilse didn’t break her gaze; she didn’t even blink. “I forget the name. Someone quite high up. I think Kai made his appointments, took letters. That sort of thing. When I asked for more details he told me it was all classified.”

  “It’s not classified anymore.” Heart pounding again, Ava reached into her purse and pulled out her sketchbook.

  “What—” Ilse started.

  “Notes,” Ava interrupted. “From the army notification archives. That’s where Ulrich and I went today. Would you like to hear them?”

  Ilse looked dazed. “You went…”

  But Ava was already flipping past her sketches to the shakily inscribed page where she’d jotted down phrases and dates. Not waiting for an answer, she started reading:

  “Prior to his 1944 death at the hands of his Soviet captors, SS-Scharführer Hellewege was personal secretary and aide to SS-Obergruppenführer-General Max von Schenckendorff, commander of rear guard operations on the Eastern Front.”

  Ilse nodded faintly. “That was it. Von Schenkendorff.”

  Ava ignored her. “Von Schenkendorff is perhaps best known for an infamous three-day field conference on partisan counteroperations in the Russian city of Mogilev, held in 1942. Conference participants were bused to the nearby settlement of Knyazhichi for hands-on antipartisan training. However, upon finding that the town did not harbor partisans, Hellewege screened the existent population and compiled a list of the town’s fifty-one Jews.”

  At the word Juden Ava glanced up briefly. Her mother’s face was ashen, her hands clenched before her on the table. She had gone very still.

  “Of those,” Ava continued, “thirty-one—composed of men, women, and children—were summarily…” She shut her eyes, overcome again by what she was about to read. It was the first time she’d said it aloud.

  “Thirty-one—” she repeated, “composed of men, women, and children—were summarily executed in the town square.”

  As she finished, the words—furiously dashed off in what now seemed another lifetime—swam before her. She felt it return: that strangely weightless sensation of floating in murky, filthy water, pushed by a current over which she had no control: He did this, she thought. The man from whose seed I came into being. The man whose blood is in my blood. In her mind’s eye she was once more watching Ulrich read the page, his jaw tightening. His brown eyes hesitating for just the briefest, the most heart-sickening of moments before lifting to meet hers again.

  When she opened her eyes, her mother hadn’t moved. Not a single muscle on her fine-boned face twitched. It was impossible to tell whether she was shocked or frightened or embarrassed. It was impossible to tell if she’d heard Ava at all.

  Ava shut the sketchbook with a snap that sounded like a gunshot against the linoleum-limned silence.

  “So that,” she said, “was his classified work. Finding innocent men, women, and children for his special forces to murder.” She laughed huskily. “A real hero, my father.”

  Ilse didn’t answer at first. When she finally spoke she seemed to be addressing not Ava but her own strong hands. They were clutched together so tightly that the knuckles looked bluish.

  “He told me he was just going to be taking dictation and writing more propaganda.”

  “And you expect me to believe that.”

  “It’s the truth.” When Ilse lifted her gaze, her eyes were unflinching.
“I swear it. I had no idea at all.”

  “How is that possible?” Ava set the notebook down with a thud. “You went to see him.”

  “Never.” Ilse shook her head. “He posted to Lodz first, that October. I never saw him again.”

  Ava stared at her. “October,” she said. “He went in October?”

  “October 1939.” Ilse nodded. “Two weeks after the Polish victory. I remember it clearly.”

  “But I was born the next August,” Ava said slowly. “You must have seen him at least once after he left, and you would have known what he was doing.”

  Ilse’s face was so white and still that she looked less like Ilse than a marble sculpture of herself. “I won’t discuss this any longer,” she said.

  She stared back at her daughter with eyes the color of a river in winter. Ava stared back. And then it dawned on her, another sickening truth: that despite everything that had happened today—the endless drive, the horrific file, the harsh, dark shadow now cast between Ava and her best friend in the world—nothing with her mother had altered in the slightest.

  The realization loosed within her a shock wave of sheer rage. She wanted to leap up, to scream out: Tell me! Just tell me you went back there, to the Front. You went back and helped him kill innocent people! But it suddenly felt as though her throat, mouth, and lips were coated in the same plaster dust that had filled them when they’d dragged her from the wreckage of her grandparents’ house. And just as it had hit her that day, it hit her again now: the fact that everything had changed in that world, but nothing in this one. That no notebook, no grainy image, no certificate forged or genuine, would be strong enough to pry open Ilse’s locked chest of secrets. That when confronted with the proof of her lies and half truths, her mother would simply continue cleaving to the same, icy wall of silence she’d erected the first day of their joyless reunion.

  Slumping forward, Ava covered her face with her hands, struggling to catch a full breath. She felt terrified and abandoned and shockingly alone. Yet when she heard Ilse stand up, a childish part of her leapt up too, in hope: She’s going to take my hand, and say she is sorry. She’s going to tell me everything, at last.

  But when she looked up she saw that Ilse wasn’t coming around the table to her. She wasn’t even looking in Ava’s direction. Instead, she was slowly making her way toward the kitchen door.

  “Where…where are you going?”

  Hand on doorknob, Ilse turned to face her. “It’s late,” she said. “I am going to bed, and I suggest you do the same. You are going to school tomorrow if I have to walk you myself. And you are staying there. Am I understood?”

  Ava licked her lips. No, she thought. No, not at all.

  But what she said, in a voice that felt thick and gravelly and strange to her, was “You are.”

  “Gut,” said Ilse. “Turn out the light when you go to bed.”

  And with that, she was gone.

  9.

  Renate

  1937

  Ilse walks quickly, her eyes locked on the huffing train, valise swinging from her hand like a carpet-toned pendulum. It is raining. A half step behind her Renate half skips and half jogs, struggling as always to keep pace.

  “What time does it leave?” she asks, breathless.

  “Fourteen hours sharp,” her friend replies. “But I want to make sure we get seats together.”

  “Wait—you mean I’m coming with you?” Renate’s heart leaps: she’d thought she was here merely to see Ilse off on her journey. But she hasn’t packed anything she would need for an eight-month posting to the Eastern border. In fact, she hadn’t even applied for one. Only BDM members are eligible.

  Ilse just rolls her eyes. “Of course you are, Dummkopf. You don’t think I’d just leave you here, do you?”

  “But I don’t have my suitcase.”

  “So?” Ilse shrugs. “We’ll share.”

  “And I don’t have a ticket.”

  “I have one for you, silly.” Grinning, Ilse holds it up in her right hand. The ticket is white with elaborate, embossed Gothic lettering that is as bright as the friendship ring on her best friend’s finger. Seeing it fills Renate with a sudden sense of liquid lightness. She didn’t mean it, she thinks jubilantly. She didn’t mean any of it. She wants to throw her arms around the other girl: to cry and laugh in relief.

  But Ilse has already resumed walking. “Hurry,” she calls over her shoulder, as the train looses a long, sharp whistle. “They won’t wait for us. Look—they’ve already started closing the door.”

  “Yes, I’m coming.” Renate tries to run to catch up, but something is wrong with her shoes; the soles are slipping and scuffling against the wet asphalt as though seeking traction on ice. It’s like Alice running with the Red Queen in Wonderland: no matter how fast her legs move she remains in the same place.

  Meanwhile Ilse has already reached the train. “You have to hurry,” she shouts over her shoulder. “Run! Do you hear me, Reni? Run!”

  I do, Renate tries to shout. Of course I do. Wait. But when she parts her lips nothing emerges but a dry croak. Helpless, she flings her arms out as Ilse pounds on the carriage’s closed door (bang-bang-bang), still shouting her name: “Reni. Reni!”

  Bang.

  “Reni? Are you up?”

  Renate opens her eyes, her panicked heart pounding in the dream’s dreadful wake. Her bedside light is still on, and the book she fell asleep reading sometime after two a.m. (The Rains Came, about floods and love in colonial India) lies half open next to her pillow. She pulls herself up in the bed slowly as the bedroom door bangs and rattles, her brother’s annoyed voice sounding over the racket: “Hey, slug! Are you even awake?”

  “I’m awake,” she mumbles, reaching for her bedside water glass.

  “Lisbet says you’ve a half hour to make your school trip.”

  The water tastes like dust. Renate drinks it anyway while simultaneously rolling her eyes. She finds Franz’s new habit of addressing their parents by name both pretentious and profoundly annoying.

  “I’m up,” she lies, and throws the book at the floor to simulate the effect of her feet landing there. The door emits one final, aggrieved rattle before the sound gives way to her brother’s heavy, uneven footsteps on their way back down the stairs. “She says she’s up,” she hears him call, his tone deliberately dubious.

  Stretching painfully, Renate turns off the lamp and slowly slides from the rumpled bed. Making her way to the window, she stares out at the sleepy avenue, undisturbed but for a half-empty double-decker bus and a horse-drawn Milchwagen topped by clattering cans. Her heart rate has slowed, but there’s a chill emptiness in her gut in the wake of the dream’s cruel bait-and-switch: the dangled glimpse of that desperately longed-for reconciliation. The waking truth of its ever-clearer impossibility. Textbook anxiety dream, her mother would call it (and she would know, having written two textbooks on dreams). But why now? Renate hasn’t dreamt of Ilse—who actually is off on a yearlong Land Service assignment—in well over a month. And it’s certainly not as if Ilse has written her; not even a postcard, much less the long, newsy sort of letter she used to write when she went on holiday. Then again, as recently as this summer her former friend was still appearing in Renate’s dreams nearly nightly. The possibility that that nocturnal haunting might be about to reassert itself is enough to spark a dull shudder.

  Shaking it off, Renate resolves to turn her thoughts to pleasanter topics—and for once, there is actually something pleasant to contemplate. For at exactly eight thirty today, her class will depart for the Berlin-Charlottenburg station and ride the U-Bahn together to Museum Island. There they will wander the Nordic Antiquities collection at the Neues, making sketches and jotting down thoughts and notes. Renate has always loved museum trips: The marvel of craftsmanship that’s endured for centuries. The way that age can be a ghostly presence in itse
lf. This year, however, she has literally been counting down to the field trip. She’s not entirely certain she could survive the regular routine for another day.

  Things at Bismarck Gymnasium have been bad now for months. But they got dramatically worse in late December, when Karolin Beidryzcki—the school’s last remaining full Jew—was finally and summarily expelled. As with all the Juden expulsions it happened with ruthless speed: one minute her old friend was surveying a trigonometry midterm. The next, she was piling her desk’s contents into a battered cardboard box, her eyes damp behind her perpetually broken glasses.

  Looking back on it now, Renate knows that she shouldn’t have been surprised. Karolin had been the last full Jew in their class, the others having departed either for Jewish schools or for other, more Jewish-friendly countries. Rumor had it that the only reason Karolin had kept her place for so long was that her father had paid the headmaster for the privilege. Though to be truthful, Renate couldn’t understand why she’d even wanted to stay: from what she saw, the girl’s life had become a gauntlet of daily torment. Not only had Karolin’s teachers persisted in giving her poor and failing grades, but she’d been pushed, mocked, and even spit upon in the hallways; excluded from field trips, clubs, and films; and made to change into her gym uniform separately from the other girls. She’d told Renate that she could bear it all only because she knew that she’d soon be following her brother Martin to America—she was just waiting for her visa to be approved. But apparently Schuldirektor Heintz decided that she needed to wait elsewhere. Or else Herr Beidryzcki had finally run out of funds.

  For her own part, Renate has managed school survival as a Mischling by keeping scrupulously to herself. She returns greetings when they are offered but initiates none of her own. All other verbal exchanges are kept short, and purely functional.

  Most of all, though, she reads.

  Reading, she’s discovered, gives her an excuse to avoid eye contact, and avoiding eye contact goes a long way in avoiding the sorts of unpleasant encounters that last year sometimes left her in tears. Like Sophia Sitz’s hateful one-way Palestine ticket. Or the time a few months later, when Trude Baumgarten waved her over in the library—only to ask her whether it was true her father killed “white” babies and drank their blood. Or the time a friend of Rudi’s called Renate’s mother a “Jew-loving whore”—right in front of Rudi himself, and Rudi not only said nothing but actually laughed. In such cases, Renate has learned, reading also gives her an excuse to not respond; she can simply pretend she hasn’t heard them.