“That’s good. So she wasn’t soaking wet. That would make things pretty uncomfortable.” Cocking his head, he added: “Show it to me?”
“No!”
“Why not?”
Why not was that while Ulrich Something-or-Other had seemed decent enough to this point, there was still plenty of time for him to find something to laugh at her for. And there was little Ava hated more than being laughed at. By anyone.
Glancing at him sidelong, however, she had to admit that he didn’t look as though he was going to laugh. In fact, with his sad eyes and his long serious face, he looked like he rarely laughed at all.
She rearranged her knees into a crisscross position like his and set the sketchpad in between them. Ulrich studied it for a few moments, saying nothing. Then he looked up at her grimly.
“It’s good.” He sounded as though he were delivering a fatal prognosis.
Ava glanced at the picture. Since her grandparents’ deaths, no one had complimented—seriously, thoughtfully complimented—any of her drawings. The nuns at the Children’s Home of the Holy Mother had been too busy to offer more than an occasional “that’s nice.” So unfamiliar was this sort of praise that for a moment she wasn’t sure how to answer, though she knew gratitude was in order.
But when she opened her mouth, what came out instead was a question: “What’s a KZ?”
“Didn’t you say your dad died in one?”
“Yes, but my mother won’t tell me anything.”
He nodded, as though personally familiar with this conundrum. “It’s like a jail, only worse.” Picking a stick up from the rock’s surface, he studied it intently.
“Did people do bad things to be put inside them?”
“No,” he said shortly. “That’s part of why it’s worse.”
“How else is it worse?”
“My father won’t tell me.” He began stripping the twig of its silver skin. “He says he’ll explain when I’m older.”
“That’s what my mother says to me,” Ava exclaimed, abruptly giddy at this shared injustice. “We’ll discuss it when you’re older. You’re too young to understand.” Picking up a pebble, she threw it after his twig. “Like I’m a baby.”
“They think being grown-ups gives them the right to talk that way,” he said darkly. “But I’ve heard him cry sometimes. Like he’s a baby.”
“Really?” Ava had never seen Ilse cry. Not even once.
Ulrich nodded. “He thinks I don’t hear it. But I do.” Picking up another pebble, he tossed it so it landed between his twig and the little stone Ava had thrown. “So you really don’t know who your father is?”
“No.” For some reason it wasn’t hard to say this to him.
“But you know he’s dead?”
“I don’t even know that.”
He held her gaze a long moment, his gold-flecked eyes thoughtful. For a moment Ava had the strange sense that he was looking not into her pupils but through; right into the confusion and hurt and mortification that had made her blurt out the word KZ. He knows, she thought, with a cold empty certainty she felt in her stomach. He knows that I was lying.
If he did, however, her new friend opted not to say so. What he said, at last, was: “That’s better.”
“What is?”
“Not knowing whether he’s alive.”
“Better than what?”
“Than knowing he’s dead.”
She had heard this before. “What if he’s alive, and a truly terrible person?”
Ulrich brightened. “Like a bank thief?”
“Or a murderer.”
“Maybe he’s an evil genius,” said Ulrich, warming to the topic. “Like Lex Luthor.”
Ava frowned at him. “Who’s Lex Luthor?”
“He’s Superman’s archenemy, obviously.”
“Superman? What’s that?”
He gawked at her. “You don’t know Superman? The American superhero?”
“I’m not American, am I?” Miffed, she tossed a pebble after his stick. “So how do you know about him?”
He shrugged. “An Ami soldier my dad treated gave me a stack of Action Comics before he went back home. They’re in English, but I still understand most of it.”
From the direction of the little schoolhouse came the silvered tinkling of Frau Klepf’s triangle. Somewhat to her surprise, Ava realized she was disappointed to hear it. She wanted, she realized, to keep on talking to this odd but strangely familiar-feeling boy.
“He’s the strongest man in the world,” Ulrich continued, pulling himself to his feet as Ava repocketed her sketchbook. “Though he’s not really a man, because he’s from the planet Krypton. He can lift trains off the ground. And fly.”
“That’s impressive.” Ava stood as well, brushing the dust and dirt from the backs of her bare legs. “Are his wings like bird wings or butterflies’?”
“He’s not a fairy.” Ulrich Bergen looked indignant. “He doesn’t need wings.”
“Then how does he fly?”
“He just does.” They’d fallen into step together the same way they’d fallen into their conversation: with perfect ease and comfort. As though they walked this precise path together every single day. “The comic books explain it,” he went on. “I’ll bring a few in tomorrow if you promise not to touch them. They’re pretty old. But they’re still really good.”
Tomorrow. The word and its unspoken promise were unexpectedly thrilling. What he was saying, she realized, was that they would talk again tomorrow. That it was a plan. What he was saying was that he liked being with her.
“I promise,” she said, beaming.
* * *
Back in the classroom Frau Klepf stood before her desk, a wax paper bag in her hands and a stack of thin paper pamphlets before her. “In a few moments,” she told them, “I will hand out the history textbooks that have been approved for our use for the time being. But before that, I’ve a very special surprise for you all. Abbi’s father has given everyone a special first-day-of-school treat: a whole Mozartkugel!”
Abbi Schumer preened as the room filled with an impressed hum, and Ava wondered what it would be like to be her. Not only to have a father, but a father with the world’s best job (a candy shop!) and the desire to secure his daughter’s social well-being.
“Please note,” said Frau Klepf, lifting her voice again to be heard over the excited whispers, “that I will normally not be permitting eating during classtime. But given Herr Schumer’s extraordinary generosity, I am willing to make an exception just this once. Yes, Ernst?”
“Aren’t textbooks still books? Those don’t look like books.” The pudgy boy in the front row pointed a pudgy finger.
“Ja,” said the teacher. “They are what we have instead of books for the time being. The occu—” She broke off, seemingly to correct herself. “The government is still working on new textbooks for everyone. In the interim they’ve given us these to start with.”
“Why do we need new textbooks? What was wrong with the old ones?”
“I’m afraid that as I’m not in the government myself I can’t answer that,” Frau Klepf said, tightening her lips. “Now. Who still wants a sweet?”
A forest of childish arms shot up across the room; the teacher began making her way through them. Before she’d finished the first row Ava’s mouth was watering, for Ilse relegated candy into the same category she did new toys and shoes and the pretty tin paint sets Ava constantly coveted: all things we don’t need requiring money we don’t have. So beyond the occasional festival candy apple and twice-yearly birthday cakes (about which Ilse was improbably insistent), the only sweetness Ava could regularly count on was the jam on her morning toast. As a result, she craved sweets now almost as much as she had in her orphanage days: an obsessive, gut-level yearning exceeded only by her craving to know the tr
uth about her father. Now she could almost taste the buttery richness of the almond paste in sweet alliance with hazelnut cream, bonded together by their shiny cap of dark chocolate.
When she finally had the foil-wrapped treat in her palm she tried her best to savor it. Peeling the glimmering wrapping away slowly, she folded it with exquisite care and saved it to inhale wistfully later. She nibbled first one side of the bonbon, then the other, shutting her eyes after each taste so as to better savor every rich and glorious note. Around her the classroom fell into a contented lull broken only by the cheerful crinklings of wrappers unwrapping and occasional, breathy sighs of contentment.
Then a newly familiar voice broke the silence. “I thought you said we each get one.”
Ava opened her eyes to see Ulrich from the courtyard frowning down at his desk, on top of which lay not one untouched Mozartkugel, but two. Standing over him was Frau Klepf.
“I did,” the teacher said, smiling uncomfortably. Somewhat counterintuitively (at least to Ava), she looked like a child caught at the candy jar. “But as it turns out we had an extra piece. I thought that perhaps you might like to have it.”
Ulrich stared up at her with open suspicion. “Why?”
“Why?” Frau Klepf smiled harder. “Why, don’t you like candy?”
“Klar. But so does everyone else,” he pointed out. “But no one else got two. Everyone else only got one.”
“Well, Ulrich. You see…” Frau Klepf cleared her throat again. Her smile was starting to look like a grimace. “You see,” she restarted, “sometimes when something is left over, rather than waste it, it is better to…to give it to someone deserving.”
“But how do you know I’m deserving?” Pushing his glasses back up his nose, the gangly boy leaned back in his wooden chair. “It’s only the first day of school. You don’t know anything about me.”
Her mouth still tingling with almond-paste transcendence, Ava found herself gawking at her new friend. It wasn’t just that he’d landed this confectionery windfall, or that (incredibly!) he didn’t seem to want it. It was that she’d never seen someone her age address a grown-up in quite that way: as though he were every bit as adult as she was. It was easily the most subversive thing she’d ever witnessed—and that included when someone at her old orphanage pinned a note to the backside of one of the plumper nuns reading First Prize: Fattest Pig.
“Well.” The teacher coughed. “You mentioned that you’ve lost a parent.”
“Lots of people did. Lotte, for instant. And Ava.”
“I understand that.” Was it Ava’s imagination, or had the teacher’s tone taken on a slightly pleading note? “The war was very hard on all our families. But in some cases…”
“I don’t want it,” he interrupted flatly.
A handful of gasps sounded audibly. Frau Klepf looked as though she’d been slapped.
“You don’t…you don’t want it?”
“No. Give it to someone else, please.” Picking the bonbon up, Ulrich held it out at her stiffly.
Staring down at him, Frau Klepf’s pinched face took on a rosy flush not unlike that on the candy’s mini-Mozart portrait, while Ulrich simply stared right back. Ava bit her lip. She could practically feel the mounting tension displacing the close, quiet air in the room.
At last, the teacher sighed. “Bring it home for later,” she said tartly, and turned away. “For everyone else: please have your wrapper ready when I come around with the bin.”
“I won’t want it later either.” Ulrich glared at the teacher’s receding back. But if she heard him, Frau Klepf didn’t give any sign.
Ava waited until she was well past the first row of desks. Then, leaning over, she tugged on Ulrich’s shirt. “If you don’t want it,” she whispered, “can I have it?”
He looked back at her with lifted eyebrows, and for a moment Ava worried that perhaps she appeared greedy, and that this would sever the thin thread of their new bond.
But Ulrich merely shrugged. “Sure,” he said. And turning around, he picked up not one but both of the candies, depositing them directly on her desk.
“Really?”
“I don’t really like marzipan,” he said. He gazed solemnly at her from behind his scratched lenses. “Or Mozart,” he added.
She wasn’t sure if he meant it as a joke, but she found herself giggling anyway. It almost seemed too much: she’d not only acquired a friend who liked her drawing, and wanted to talk again tomorrow. But she had two more whole candies to herself….
“Fräulein von Fischer!”
Starting, Ava lifted her gaze to see Frau Klepf glaring at her from the blackboard.
“Did you take those from Ulrich’s desk?”
Ava licked her lips. “He—Ulrich said that I could have them.”
Setting the bin she was holding down, the teacher strode back down the aisle. “I thought I’d made myself clear. Those were for Ulrich, and Ulrich alone.”
“Yes, but…”
“But what?”
The teacher stood directly over her now, her fists propped on her slight hips. She smelled of old sweat and stale perfume and something deeper and slightly fishy.
“He doesn’t want them,” Ava said. “You heard him say it yourself.”
“Are you implying that there’s something amiss with my hearing?”
“It’s true,” Ulrich chimed in. “I really don’t…”
“Not. Another. Word.” Frau Klepf’s face had gone from rosy with rage to as white as the chalk stubs she had just lined up neatly on her blackboard. “Give the candy back to Ulrich. And apologize.”
Ava looked down at the two bonbons. It felt as though she had been told to give away the two sweetest pieces of her very soul. Just do it, she told herself. Just say you’re sorry.
But her entire body, from her fingers to her lips, felt as fixed and frozen as Herr Andersen’s Ice Maiden’s.
“Well then!” hissed the teacher. “I’ll do it myself!” Scooping the candy up, she flung it at Ulrich’s desk so hard that one of the pieces bounced off again and skittered to the wall. Ava followed its trajectory. Then she looked at Ulrich, rendered speechless by the gesture’s violence.
He stared back, his expression unreadable. Then, very slowly, he crossed his eyes behind his glasses.
As if on cue, they were suddenly laughing again together: Ulrich hooting and heaving and wheezing, Ava tittering and snorting and hiccuping, while the teacher and classroom looked on in utter amazement.
* * *
At five o’clock Ava sat at the kitchen table, her new magazine-style history textbook before her, along with more properly booklike math and English textbooks. On top of the older texts was her sketch of the Well Girl, upon which she was putting finishing touches. When she heard the sound of the key in the lock, however, she shut the sketchbook and opened her math textbook instead, staring unseeingly at rows of antlike multiplication tables as her mother’s keys landed with a metallic clatter on the front hall dresser.
There followed a moment of weighted silence. Ava knew her mother was reading the note that Frau Klepf had dashed off für deine Mutter, which Ava in turn had considered ripping up, reading, or rewriting before finally, despairingly, setting it on the front hall bureau.
After a small eternity, her mother finally called. “Ava?”
“In here,” Ava called back, fighting the urge to slide under the table.
She heard Ilse’s hard-soled oxfords marching smartly down the hall. Then her mother was in the doorway, the note lifted in one hand. “Is this true?”
“I don’t know what it says,” said Ava, truthfully.
“Don’t be smart. It says you stole candy from a—from another student. And then refused to apologize for it. And also that you were rude to the teacher in front of the classroom.”
“He gave me the cand
y,” Ava said. She realized her voice was trembling.
“Then why does she write here that you stole it?”
“I don’t know.” Ava stared at her shoes. “She told the whole class that. But I can prove I didn’t.” Reaching into her jumper pocket, she pulled out the last remaining Mozartkugel. “See? He gave them both back to me after school. I saved this one for you.”
Lips pressed tightly, Ilse took the candy between two fingers. She studied it with a look that implied she suspected it might explode in her hand. “You swear to me you didn’t steal it.”
“Yes.” Ava lifted her chin slightly. “He’s my friend.” The word felt almost as sweet as the chocolate on her tongue.
“Your friend?” Ilse looked bemused. “How long have you known him?”
“We just met today.” Ava felt her ears heat. “But we talked all throughout recess. He told me about Superman.”
For a long moment Ilse said nothing. Her face seemed to set slightly, the way clay sets itself as it hardens. Finally, she sighed. “I’m afraid that the teacher is right. You will have to apologize to your new friend tomorrow.”
“But that’s not fair!” Ava felt her face heating again. “And it’s not even important to Ulrich! He said…”
Her mother cut her off. “It’s clearly important to the teacher. And you want to make sure you start the year off right.”
“By lying? You always say lying is wrong!”
Ilse just shook her head. “We’ll find a way to say it together. But I will check with Frau Klepf to make sure you’ve complied. And I want no more stories about you talking back in class. Do you hear me?”
“You don’t believe me,” Ava said hotly. “My own mother.”
“This has nothing to do with me. To be fully honest—it has nothing to do with you, either.”
“How can you say that?” Ava cried. “She called me a thief! And now you’re making me lie about it!”
Ilse tightened her lips. “You’re too young now to understand. I’ll explain it when you are older.”
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