Wunderland

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  Over the last year, therefore, she’s made a point of reaching her desk early enough to be reading (or pretending to) when other students arrive. She also reads in the school courtyard, in darkened corners of the library, and on the toilet when she goes to the WC. She even reads on the walk to and from school on some days, stepping slowly and very carefully.

  She reads anything and everything, barring the books that have been banned. Lately she’s even found herself doubling or even trebling up, as though one fictional storyline alone is no longer enough to distract herself from the troubling narrative of her own life. Before The Rains Came she reread every Pearl Buck book in the Charlottenburg library, followed by Baring’s Daphne Adeane at the same time she was reading Shakespeare’s Henry the Eighth. She read The Wind in the Willows for a third time and then read it again, between readings of Rilke and Heine and Tennyson. She read Winnie the Pooh twice as well, the first time to herself, the second aloud to her father, who clearly needed a laugh. In addition to Through the Looking-Glass she has read the new translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and took Franz up on his challenge to memorize The Hunting of the Snark, Carroll’s Jabberwocky-inspiring nonsense poem, in English. Initially she did this only to prove she could. But she came to find the poem strangely soothing in its absurdity, and now often recites it to herself when she feels bored or upset—which, despite all of her reading—is increasingly often.

  For a brief period, she had dared to hope that in the wake of Karolin’s ouster she might be able to let her guard down; that stripped of its final target, the vicious anti-Juden spotlight that had shone so hotly on her friend would dim a little, or perhaps a lot. Or maybe just shut off altogether. Instead, its loathsome focus simply shifted to the school’s remaining Halbjuden, its new targets for mockery and scapegoating. Already this month, Renate’s books have been knocked from her arms or off her desk four times. Notes that read Dirty Jewess and Half-blood Abomination have been slipped into her bookbag and coat pocket. The Racial Hygiene instructor makes her and the other Mischlinge wipe down their seats after his class, “to minimize the reach of Jewish contagion.” Last Monday, he even called Renate up to the blackboard so he could measure her face with his caliper, cheerfully inviting the class to call out Juden or Deutsch as he went over her features. “The nose,” he’d noted, “is arguably Aryan in its overall size, though the sharp angle suggests some Hebrew influence. On the other hand, look here! These lips are all Jew.”

  As her classmates snickered and scribbled, it had taken all Renate’s willpower (and six verses of Snark) to remain something resembling impassive. But when the instructor asked for a show of hands on her “dominant” half and Jude won overwhelmingly, she barely managed to excuse herself and run to the lavatory before bursting into hot tears yet again.

  But today will be different, she thinks, as she rummages for a clean pair of socks. For one thing, there are strict rules regarding field-trip deportment: no whispering, giggling, or other “disrespectful” behavior is permitted, which effectively strips her classmates of their main source of weaponry. Moreover, the only book she will have to carry is her little blue-covered sketchbook. After toting around two novels at a time in addition to all her regular textbooks, the prospect seems hugely liberating.

  She even finds herself humming as she goes through her morning routine; splashing her face and armpits, braiding her newly brushed hair. And she actually has an appetite for breakfast, finishing off her poached egg and wiping up the leftover yolk with her toast. After kissing her father on his cheek, she hugs her mother by the sink and wishes her a pleasant day.

  “Not likely,” Lisbet Bauer retorts dryly. Still barred from her clinic for remaining married to her husband, she’s been volunteering instead at the Jewish Hospital in Spandau, which has been inundated by mental breakdowns and suicide attempts.

  But even this bleak response does little to dampen Renate’s mood. As she steps out onto Unter den Linden, for once bookless beneath the lemon-white sun, the street strikes her as almost surreally detailed and lovely. And when the first butterfly of the season flutters its golden-winged way before her eyes, it erases the last bit of leaden sadness left over from her dream.

  When she reaches her classroom, though, almost immediately she senses that something is off.

  For one thing, even though she’s here even earlier than usual (ten to eight, according to the delicate wristwatch that her grandmother gave her for her sixteenth birthday last year) the rest of the class is already there. Coats are off, bags are down, hands are clasped expectantly on their desks. It’s a sight unsettling enough that for a moment she wonders whether she’d written down the departure time incorrectly.

  Moreover, although it’s not a BDM meeting day, every girl in the room is in uniform. To get to her desk, she has to navigate row upon row of blue serge skirts and crisp white shirts, to swim a bobbing sea of jauntily angled black berets.

  As she sets her bag down, the class teacher, Herr Bachmann, unfolds his long-limbed form from behind his desk. “Ah, Fräulein Bauer,” he says. “A word, if you don’t mind.”

  He is speaking in a normal voice. But against the sudden silence that falls he might as well have shouted at her from across the room.

  Sweat prickling her palms, Renate shrugs off her coat and makes her way toward the front of the room, spine-tinglingly aware of the twenty-two sets of eyes that are locked on each hesitant step.

  When she reaches the blackboard, Herr Bachmann clears his throat uncomfortably and runs a spidery hand through his ginger hair. He has narrow brown eyes and a face that has always reminded Renate of an otter.

  “Good news,” he announces. “You are getting the day off!”

  “Off?”

  (Behind her a hissing whisper: Jude! Or is she imagining it?)

  “Yes. Today.”

  “From what?”

  (There it is again: Juuuuuude!)

  Herr Bachmann chuckles, the sound mirthless and forced. “From everything. School. Schoolwork.” He clears his throat again. “And of course, today’s expedition to the Neues.”

  The mention of the museum lands like a leaden shot put in her gut. “But…why?”

  Behind her someone half suppresses a snort so that it comes out sounding like a flattened sneeze. Like a stone dropped in a pond, it sets free a wider ripple of titters. Renate feels her ears turning red.

  “I’m allowed to go,” she says, pulling herself fully upright. “By the museum, I mean. It’s only full Jews that aren’t permitted there.” She tries to say it as assertively and as calmly as she can, the way her mother responded when their local Geheime Staatspolizei agent came by last month to again “discuss” her marriage to Vati (“We married in 1916,” Lisbet Bauer had informed him crisply. “The race laws don’t apply in our case.”).

  But Herr Bachmann just shakes his head. “This isn’t actually about the museum.” He rubs his thin hands together. “I’m afraid that there has been a—a request.”

  “A request,” Renate repeats mechanically.

  “Yes.” He nods. “To keep this particular outing exclusively German.”

  “Who…”

  But he cuts her off quickly. “It is more than one, in fact. In fact…” He lowers his voice slightly, almost pleadingly. “It was almost unanimous. And given that we are, in fact, exploring Germany’s Nordic roots, and that you are in fact neither German nor Nordic, the headmaster has decided to honor it.”

  For a moment she is back in the dream: running breathlessly, yet unable to move. A Snark verse floats like a baleful soap bubble through her mind:

  “Be a man!” said the Bellman

  in wrath, as he heard

  The Butcher beginning to sob.

  “Should we meet with a Jubjub

  that desperate bird

  We shall need all our strength for the job!”
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  When she’d first learned the poem, the word Jubjub alone had been enough to set her giggling. Now, though, it feels faraway and fractured. She shuts her eyes, ordering herself not to cry. When she opens them again Herr Bachmann is gazing at her with what looks like real concern.

  “Actually,” he is saying, “this way you’ll have more time to write your essay on how Marxism led to Germany’s defeat in the Great War and shaped the Treaty of Versailles.” He winks. “Silver linings.”

  In happier days he’d been one of her favorite teachers. He’d even lent her history books about ancient China and Egypt at one point, when she’d told him she wanted to write about foreign countries, like Pearl Buck. Last year, though, he wouldn’t even sign her autograph book at year’s end. “It might get us both in trouble,” he’d said, sadly.

  “Are you all right?” The teacher is still gazing at her with that uncomfortable not-quite smile. “You seem pale.”

  He is throwing her a lifeline. Renate scrabbles for it blindly. “Yes,” she whispers. “I mean, no. I do feel ill, all of a sudden. I should probably go home.”

  Cheeks burning, she turns and begins what feels like the longest walk she has ever taken in her life; past Sophia Sitz and Trude Baumgarten and all the other uniformed girls who look on in undisguised triumph.

  * * *

  The trip home is almost as interminable. Without a book before her she feels defenseless, shiveringly vulnerable to the gazes of strangers who she is sure must be wondering why a schoolgirl is on the streets at half past nine. Too anxious to ride the tram back, she walks instead, quickly, keeping her gaze glued to the ground, ignoring the budding trees on Unter den Linden and Potsdamer Platz and the bright display window at the Schloss-Konditorei, with its official Star of David sign in the window oddly juxtaposed against the lamb-shaped Osterkuchen and Easter bread. She pauses before it, staring not at the sweets but at the familiar six-pointed symbol, remembering the long-ago day when she and Ilse had put the stars up on her bedroom ceiling. Or more accurately, Ilse had put them up for Renate, since they both knew Renate would almost certainly fall to her demise if she tried to stand on the chair they’d precariously balanced atop her homework desk in the center of the room.

  Did you know, she remembers Ilse saying, cellotape in one hand and paper cutout in the other, that a lot of the stars we see at night are actually dead already?

  How? Renate had asked. If they’re dead, how can we still be seeing them?

  Something about how long the light takes to get here. They die, but the light they send out takes such a long time to reach Earth that it only reaches us after the dying. Squinting at the ceiling, Ilse pressed one paper star above her head, then looked back at Renate (who was holding the constellation chart) for approval. Renate nodded.

  So if they’re dead, what we’re seeing, Renate said, is like a ghost? The ghost of a star?

  Ja. Ilse had nodded. A beautiful, shining ghost star.

  Gazing at Herr Schloss’s six-pointed star of shame, it strikes Renate now that he—that all of them—are not unlike those dead stars Ilse had spoken of. They go about their lives, reading and baking and hoping, sending out the impression of still being fully living, engaged human beings. The truth, though, is that they are simply sending out ghostly light into space, obscuring the fact of their own erasure.

  The observation hits with a chilly bleakness that feels like the touch of death itself. Spinning away from the window, Renate races past the Fasanenstraße Synagogue, still fighting back tears, until she finally reaches her building and all but sprints up the front steps in relief.

  Inside, she kicks her boots off and leaves her bookbag beside them, pausing only for a muttered inquiry:

  “Hallo?”

  As expected, there is no response: at ten o’clock in the morning the only Bauer at home is Sigi, who greets her with a sleepy tail wag from beneath the dining room table. She makes her way through the foyer, pausing at the bottom of the stairs to listen again, just to be sure.

  Up until last week her father would have been home, at least, doing whatever it was that he did in his office all day. Now, though, he works at the Jüdische Gemeinde on Kantstraße helping aspiring emigrants navigate the baffling process of leaving the country: Filling in emigration and visa applications. Working out departure taxes and bank fees. Itemizing and assessing hundreds of pages’ worth of household belongings down to the last spare trouser button. He calls the work “demoralizing,” but Lisbet Bauer insists he do it. She has confided in Renate that without a structured schedule and daily interaction with others, she fears her husband will fall into full-blown depression.

  Still battling tears as she half slides, half walks in her bobby socks, Renate makes her way into the sun-filled sitting room. There she rummages around in a cubby in the antique oak secretary until she finds the half pack of Monas that she filched from her mother’s purse last week.

  Dragging the desk chair to the wall, she sets the ashtray on the sill and cracks the window, deftly pulling one of the cigarettes out with her lips, a trick picked up by watching Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express two years ago, though the smoking itself is a new habit, taken up more from boredom than anything else. She initially found it vile but has since come to appreciate the nicotine’s softening effect on her nerves. Not to mention the much-needed sense of glamour and sophistication it seems to add to her gloomy existence. Her parents, she knows, would certainly not appreciate these things—yet another double standard, since they let Franz smoke at sixteen. But since neither of them will be home for several hours at least, Renate doesn’t bother herself with what they’d think.

  Silver linings, she thinks, tipping her head back and exhaling a low and misty-white groan.

  Staring up at the paneled ceiling, she tries to push past the despair, to fully absorb what just happened and what it means. Certainly it’s a bad sign, if she’s now seen as so loathsome that her classmates won’t even let her come on a class outing with them. And yet why? What has changed? She’s no more or less Jewish now than she had been when her ancestry first came out. Or is it possible that Franz was right; that the Jewish “blood” everyone seems obsessed with doesn’t remain constant but rather spreads, like black ink in her veins, eventually tainting the entirety?

  Experimentally, Renate holds a thumb over her wrist’s pulse point, as though she might be able to detect the answer in her own muted bloodbeat. But of course, it feels the same as it always has felt, merrily pumping her cells on their endless anatomical loops.

  Perhaps, she muses, the best thing after all would be to go to a fully Jewish school, like Karolin has. She’s heard mixed things about them: that they are terribly overcrowded, but emotionally much freer and more open. That the instructors are overworked and exhausted and—as the law limits Jewish teachers to just five students—mostly Aryan, but not pointedly abusive as they are in German schools, where they must take pains to demonstrate their Reich loyalty. That the student body changes daily as various students leave the country, their spots filled by other students liberated from their former schools, by force or by choice. That there are no Hakenkreuz flags or daily pledges to serve the Führer, and no Hitler portraits glaring down in pale disgust. “It’s so much easier to write now,” Karolin reported when Renate ran into her on the street a few weeks ago. “I can’t describe it. It’s as though the pens there are lighter, somehow. Or magic.”

  Clearly, she still hadn’t found anyone to fix her glasses (all but impossible since Jewish eye doctors have been stripped of licenses and Aryans declared off-limits to Jews). But despite that, despite everything, she had actually seemed almost happy. And this, in turn, had sparked an unexpected surge of jealousy on Renate’s part.

  Now Renate wonders: would it be worth it? Or is she better off clinging to her spot at Bismarck—no matter how awful—in the hopes of finishing her Abitur there and having a chance at un
iversity? At least, presuming universities still admit Mischlinge at that point? Sighing, she shuts her eyes. It’s like trying to chart a course through life-threatening waves in a toxic ocean, with neither a compass nor a map.

  Dispiritedly, she picks up the paper Franz left on the desktop, rifling through its cheap, gray-toned sheets. It’s Der Mischling Berliner, the mixed-race biweekly he started bringing home last month from somewhere. Still smoking, Renate skims a story about half Jews enlisting in Hitler’s army and an advice column on reading the Nuremberg Race Laws correctly before paging to the classifieds on the back page. Franz likes to read them aloud in a nasal, news-announcer voice: Tall and kind 2nd Degree of 32 years seeks like young lady with marriage interests. Blond/blue-eyed preferable, not essential. Pleasantly plump 1st Degree lady—35 but young at heart!—seeks 1st Degree Gentleman age 30–50 for companionship and possible commitment. But it’s a struggle to keep her eyes on the page. Renate’s head throbs, and she keeps seeing Herr Bachmann’s careful face; keeps hearing his voice, low and tight with discomfort: Almost unanimous. Neither German nor Nordic. And behind it, that ever-flowing, malicious-whispering river: Jude. Halbjude. Mischling. Jude…

  She tosses the paper onto the floor and balances her cigarette on the edge of the ashtray. She needs better reading material, she decides. In particular, the plight of Lady Edwina Esketh and her forbidden love for a Brahmin doctor in colonial Ranchipur. Hauling herself up, she sets up the stairs in her stockinged feet to fetch The Rains Came from beneath her unmade bed.