But most shocking of all is the sight of Herr Schloss himself.
It’s been over three years since Ilse saw the baker, and he no longer looks as though he’d fill out the red robes and bishop’s hat he used to sport at Weihnachten in years past. In fact, it’s hard to imagine him even laughing at all. His formerly round, pink face is now pale and pinched-looking, and he has an angry welt on his left cheek. His apron has been marked with a lopsided Star of David, in what looks like the same yellow paint used to scrawl Jude across the shop’s door.
As his bright blue eyes meet hers and widen in recognition, she feels a spike of panic: No, she thinks. Nonono.
But he is already calling her name. “Ilse!”
His voice is different too. No longer hearty and deep, it’s the voice of a thinner, weaker man.
Pretending not to have heard, she searches wildly for Kai and spots him a few meters away, dousing a pile of towels and potholders with petrol and the fierce overfocus of the exceptionally inebriated.
The baker calls to her again. “Ilse!” he calls again. “Ilse von Fischer!”
Ilse shrinks into the crowd, still pretending not to have heard. Kai, however, clearly has: swinging around, he glares from Herr Schloss to Ilse and back again. Then, setting his can down with the same overstated care, he walks unsteadily over.
“Who are you talking to, Jew?” he says.
Though not especially loud, his voice cuts through the shouting and laughter. A queasy quiet descends as, as if on cue, two heavyset men step out from the group. Each one takes one of the baker’s quaking arms.
Herr Schloss stares at him blankly.
“I asked you a question,” says Kai more loudly. “Do you know this girl?” He points to Ilse.
When the baker doesn’t answer, one of the men shakes him hard enough that he briefly loses his footing. Regaining it, he blinks.
“I do,” he says quickly. “I do.” Looking back to Ilse, he adds: “Tell them, Ilse. Tell them you know me. Tell them I’m a good man.”
As the crowd turns its bleary gaze on her, Ilse is rooted to her spot.
“You know this Yid?” asks Kai, his voice now even quieter.
Ilse shakes her head. “No.”
“Of course she does,” says Herr Schloss, his voice rising in desperation. “She’s been one of my best customers. Go on, Ilse!” he pleads. “You can tell them!”
For a moment, no one seems to breathe. Ilse keeps her gaze on the ground, on a raspberry turnover whose glistening innards splay on the street with obscene sticky sweetness. She feels rather than sees Kai approaching from the corner of her eye. He is walking slowly, as though taking a casual stroll. But when he puts his arm around her shoulders this time, there is nothing joking or affectionate about it. And when he presses his lips to her ear, there is nothing even faintly seductive in his voice.
“Is the Jew telling the truth?”
Pulse racing, she shakes her head again. “No,” she repeats. “I—I don’t know him.”
“But of course you do!” exclaims the baker. He actually laughs, an obsequious smile spreading on his bruised face. “You even came during the boycott! Don’t you remember?”
Kai’s grip tightens. “Really,” he says. His voice is tight and low. To Ilse, almost beneath his breath, he says: “Look at me.”
Trembling slightly, Ilse meets his gaze. He is staring at her with a kind of gloating intensity. Pulling her close, he murmurs directly into her ear: “Did you break the boycott for a Jew?”
His breath smells toxic: beer and bile and molded cheese. Swallowing back a surge of nausea, she pulls away. “Of course not.”
“Prove it.” He lifts his hand, and it takes a moment for Ilse to realize that he is signaling Max, who is still holding his motorcycle up on the other side of the street. Nodding, the latter turns and begins rolling the bike toward them, the crowd parting to create a silent path. When Max reaches Kai, the editor reaches into the sidecar and selects a large red brick, which he hands to Ilse.
“Prove it,” he says again.
Behind them, the mob begins to shift and mutter restlessly. Boycott, she hears. Jew lover. Bitch. The rough red block in her hand feels far heavier than it looks; her arm and shoulder ache with its weight.
“Well?” says Kai. He is sounding impatient now. “There’s a good spot. Right there.” He is pointing at the one glass expanse that hasn’t yet been shattered: the door.
“Ilse, bitte,” the baker stammers.
Ilse looks at him. His eyes are wide. His small pink mouth is pursed and trembling. “Please,” he repeats. “You were always such a nice girl.”
Nice girl, she thinks, numbly.
And suddenly, she is filled with a searing rage. At Kai, for putting her in this position as casually as he puts his hands on her body. At Max, for bringing her here, and for locking his dark eyes on her as though her next move will determine her fate.
But most of all, at Herr Schloss. For in the end this is all his fault. He was the one stupid enough to hold on to his business, rather than selling it and remaining safe. He was the one bringing up the boycott, getting her into trouble with her superiors, when all she’d ever tried to do was be kind to him, to help him.
Traitor, she thinks. Coward. Liar.
Greedy kike.
And then the brick is in flight, with all the velocity and accuracy of an arrow released from a bowstring. Ilse stares in amazement as it speeds through the air, heading not for the glass but the man: Herr Schloss himself. She watches, mouth agape, as the baker tries to duck and the men holding him hold him firm. The missile hits its target, striking the terrified Jew in the chest, just above the six-pointed star. And though she has never in her life done anything remotely this violent, never been aware of even harboring such an urge, the sight of his startled face and the sound of his pained cry spark a crystalline jolt of exhilaration that makes her want to do it again.
The crowd feels it too. It lunges forward, piling onto the tradesman, pounding and kicking, until he lies as motionless on the ground as the hat merchant. Shouting and cheering, the mob surges past him and into the shop through the window, toppling the cash register, tearing down oven racks and shelves, throwing the goods out onto the street. Sacks of flour land and split in clouds of dusty mist. Raw eggs crack, bleeding sunny yellow yolks onto the street. Two baking sheets come flying through the empty window, nearly hitting Ilse in the head. But by now she doesn’t care; it’s as though with that one action a spell has been cast: she’s invincible. Invisible. Omnipotent. She could leap into one of the surrounding fires and emerge not just unscathed, but reborn.
Electrified, she takes the other brick from Max, marveling that it hardly feels heavy at all now.
“I thought your name was Ida,” he shouts, as he picks up another for himself.
“It is,” she shouts back. “The filthy Jew was lying.”
* * *
An hour later, Max curses the traffic for moving at a snail’s pace as drivers and riders gawk at the ominous vista. Still, despite its coating of dust and rubble, the sidecar is significantly more comfortable than the back of the bike had been, and Ilse is almost tempted to close her eyes. It would be easy to simply fall asleep like that. But just as she’s found a comfortable, slumped position Max is stopping again.
“Hallo,” he shouts. “Looks like the fun’s still going on over here.”
Lifting her head, Ilse sees with a start that they are idling on Renate’s street. As she follows his gaze to the now-familiar sight of half-drunk men and boys jeering and shouting Jude and Yid and Kike, Max cuts the engine. And it’s then that Ilse hears a woman’s voice as well, high and shrill: Let go of him! You animal! You swine!
As Max swings his leg over the seat, she watches him groggily before clambering out of the sidecar and trailing after him toward the activity.
At first she can’t make out what it’s about. Then the group parts, and she sees the object of their derision: a tall, gray-haired man with a beard wearing only his underthings. One of the men has his dagger out; he appears to be lunging fencing-style, pricking his victim each time just enough to make him cringe. Two others hold a shrieking, struggling woman back from the cruel tableau. “Cowards!” the woman screams. “Swine!”
The voice makes the hairs on the nape of Ilse’s neck stand up. A split second later her eyes make the same, devastating connection:
The man in the bloody shirt and drawers is Renate’s father.
The woman is her mother.
This time, Ilse doesn’t give herself time to think about what she’s doing. She simply breaks into a run.
14.
Renate and Ilse
1938
“Stop. Stop it!”
Ilse hurls herself at the group, pushing past a surprised Max and the taunting semicircle that has formed around Renate’s father and his torturer. For the second time in two hours she is surprising herself: just as her arm and fist made the decision to hurl the brick at Herr Schloss, her legs are carrying her toward the Bauers’ familiar front door as her brain struggles to catch up.
“Let him go!” she shouts, knocking head-on into one of the men and in the process knocking him into the much younger boy beside him.
“What the hell,” says the man.
The boy staggers and nearly falls, cursing before hauling himself back up and pointing an unsteady finger in Ilse’s direction. “Who’sh that,” he slurs.
Ilse ignores him, coming to a panting stop as she reaches the circle’s center.
It’s not just the blood, though that is shocking enough: Otto Bauer’s white cotton shirt and shorts are soaked with it. A thick, paintlike streak drips down one arm; there is even blood smeared in his tangled hair.
But since Ilse last saw him, Renate’s father has transformed into a man she no longer recognizes. His once-dark and rich hair is now thin and almost white. His lank form seems to have shrunk several sizes, not just in girth but in height. His face, which had exuded intelligence and perpetual bemusement, now looks heavily lined and confused, as well as startlingly vulnerable without his habitual horn-rimmed spectacles. At the sound of Ilse’s voice he, like everyone else in the small group, has turned his blue eyes upon her. But they reflect no recognition; only a vague puzzlement. His wife stands a couple of meters away, struggling in the grip of two large, leering men. Coatless despite the cold, she is wearing only a thin blouse, one of the sleeves of which has been ripped from her shoulder. She, too, has changed: always bird-thin, she is now almost skeletal, her pale skin stretched so tautly over her exposed shoulder blade that it appears the bone might tear through at any moment. Slightly behind her is Franz, disheveled and pale and being held by another, much younger thug in Hitlerjugend attire. Behind him, the front door to the Bauers’ home has been left open, displaying a front hall in complete disarray: the rug is rumpled and thoroughly muddied, the banister broken. The grandfather clock Ilse has always loved has been smashed and turned on its side. She wonders vaguely where Sigi is.
She tears her gaze away from the destruction, only to meet Franz’s one good eye. The look in it is unreadable. But the gaze itself still lands like a punch to her gut.
Taking a deep breath, Ilse squares off with his father’s attacker. He is easily twice her weight, with the burly frame of a day laborer and biceps that she likely couldn’t fit both hands around. As he registers her presence his eyes—wide-set and beer-bleary—seem to have trouble focusing correctly. She wonders how long he’s been drinking.
“You don’t want to do this,” she tells him.
“Who the hell are you?” He holds the dagger high and slightly behind him, as though preparing to attack her next. Its tip is crimson with the professor’s drying blood. Ilse forces herself to look away from it as she tries to catch her breath.
“I asked you a question, bitch,” he repeats, spraying spit as he speaks. “What’s your name?”
“Ida,” she says, trying to keep her voice from shaking. “Ida Fuchs. You need to leave this family alone.”
He throws his head back and laughs contemptuously, the sound like that of a bull lowing. The jeer is quickly picked up by his cohorts. “Ooooh,” one of them mocks. “Are you going to fight her next, Jock?”
“She looks like she’d like a fight,” says another insinuatingly. “I’ll fight her if you don’t.”
“I’m the regional district leader of the Bund Deutscher Mädel.” Ilse tries to state it as authoritatively as she can, though her blood is roaring so loudly in her ears that she can barely hear herself speaking. She forces herself to maintain his gaze as she reaches into her satchel and pulls out her Untergau Führerin badge. She flashes its distinctive yellow crest at him, hoping her hand isn’t visibly shaking and praying that in his alcohol-fueled haze he won’t grasp more than the capital letters U and F.
He shrugs. “Na und?”
“This man isn’t Jewish. No one in the family is. You’re about to make a very big mistake.”
As she slides the badge back she sees Elisabeth Bauer staring at her, her brown gaze hard and angry but also blazing with comprehension. “It’s true,” she says, in the I mean business voice that Ilse still remembers so well. “What she’s saying is true. My husband isn’t Jewish. Neither am I.”
“I know you’re not, you kike-fucking bitch,” says the one they’d called Jock.
The men holding her shake her violently in emphasis, so that her head seems to snap on the thin white stalk of her neck.
Ilse fights back a flinch. “You are only getting yourselves into a lot of very bad trouble. This man has powerful connections to the Party.”
“Then why was his name given to us by Party headquarters?” asks Jock. Pulling a crumpled ball of paper from his pocket, he smooths it awkwardly against his thigh and squints at it, holding it up to the light. “Otto Bauer,” he reads, with exaggerated care. “Number 265. Wife is Gentile.” He looks at Renate’s mother, spits contemptuously.
“Some of those lists have the wrong names and addresses on them. It happened several times last night.”
The lies hang there like desperate darts thrown into the chill fall air, Ilse holding her breath, praying that they’ll land.
“The Party doesn’t make mistakes,” says Jock, staunchly.
“I’m sure it wasn’t a Party leader. They have secretaries, you know,” she retorts, in a tone she hopes is both confident and contemptuous.
“Ida? What in God’s name are you talking about?”
Turning, she sees Max staring at her, his dark eyes wide.
“These people aren’t Jews.”
“Not that. What are you saying about the lists?”
Swallowing, she tries to keep her expression matter-of-fact. “You didn’t hear? Kai told me at the Windhund earlier. He had to call in with his list before we went out because we were told some of the addresses on it were off.” She pauses before improvising: “It’s why we were so late.”
His dark eyes dart from her to the brutish Jock to Jock’s blood-spattered victim. “He didn’t tell me that.”
“Well, it’s true. And these oafs are going to find themselves in a cell if they don’t listen.”
Turning back to Jock, she pulls herself up to her full height. “What is your full name and rank, anyway?” Always ask questions with authority. It’s one of the interview tactics she learned last month at the National Leadership School in Potsdam, where she and other rising BDM regional leaders were sent as part of their training. Of course, the interviews they’d been prepared for were with adolescent girls, as part of the screening process for new BDM recruits. But the strategy seems to work just as well on drunken Sturmtruppen.
“Schumacher,” Jock say
s, frowning confusedly. “SS-Mann Jock Schumacher.”
A quick beat of relief: he’s the lowest rank possible without technically still being only a candidate. “Put your dagger away, Jock,” she says. “This man served the Kaiser. He has two Iron Crosses.”
“A kike who served is still a kike,” says Jock, though his tone is now more petulant than threatening.
“He’s not any more of a kike than you or I are.”
He hesitates, and Ilse can all but see him struggling to weigh the wisdom of contesting her.
“It’s true! Please. Listen to her. It’s true.”
The voice—frightened, female, and familiar enough that even now Ilse’s pulse leaps in recognition—breaks in from just behind them. Turning, she sees Renate pushing toward them, white-faced and breathing heavily. She is wearing the familiar green woolen coat she had at fourteen, her pale wrists extending nakedly from the cuffs.
Like the rest of her family she is much thinner than when Ilse last talked to her. But in that instant she strikes Ilse as beautiful in an almost otherworldly way: her cheeks flushed pink, her dark eyes wide with fear. The wave of joy at seeing her is so powerful that it is almost disorienting; Ilse actually has to shut her eyes for a moment to suppress it.
* * *
“It’s true.” Renate’s voice sounds thin and childish to her own ears. She has to fight to keep the shock out of it: shock at the sight of her besieged family and home. Shock at that one moment when she thought Ilse was leading the attack. The almost equally shocking moment when she realized that in fact, Ilse was stepping in to try to protect them.
And yet she finds herself falling into line beside Ilse and the young man who stands beside her as though nothing at all has changed between them. “We’re Germans,” she says again. “None of us are Jews.”
Wunderland Page 28