Wunderland

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  It was as though the air had been sucked from Ava’s lungs, from the sandpit, from the whole coldly bright day. “My mother?” she repeated, the words thick and foreign-feeling on her tongue.

  “Yes!” Greta clambered to her feet, yanking Ava up with her, not bothering to wipe the sand from her bare legs. “Come on! Don’t you want to see her?” Leaping from the sand pit with the lightness of a blonde, bony rabbit, Greta started racing back toward the chapel. Ava remained behind for a moment, simply staring after her. Her tongue felt frozen inside her sand-dry mouth, her feet rooted to the sand pit’s shifting floor.

  Brushing her hands together, Theresia clambered to her feet. “Aren’t you going to follow her?” she lisped, through her few remaining teeth. “Don’t you want to see your mama?”

  Mama, Ava thought.

  And then she, too, was running—skipping, stumbling, racing—as if for her very life.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, she was sitting in the same oaken chair, in the same dark office in which six months earlier she’d been told by Mutter Oberin her mother was dead. And miraculously, sitting directly across from her in the other big oaken chair, was Ava’s mother, looking very much alive.

  Ilse had pale white skin and perfect posture. She had eyes the color of storm clouds and braids the color of cornsilk that wrapped around her head like Greta’s, only thicker and cleaner-looking. She wore clothes that had no holes or patches, and that fell smoothly over her frame in a way that suggested there was actually flesh and fat underneath. She felt familiar in the way that Ingrid Bergman was familiar: a face Ava couldn’t quite place but knew that somehow she knew. And even if her mother’s first reaction upon seeing Ava had not been the whirling embrace of Ava’s dreams—even if, instead, she had almost seemed to flinch, and instead of saying ich liebe dich she’d said nothing at all—she was still the most beautiful woman Ava had ever seen.

  Now she was studying Ava with a kind of troubled intensity that left Ava unsure where to direct her own gaze. “She’s grown up so,” she said, sounding almost frightened for some reason. “She looks…”

  “Yes?” Peering over the tops of her glasses, Mutter Oberin waited to hear how Ava looked.

  But Ilse just shook her head, seemingly unable to finish the sentence. Running a hand over one of her braids, she asked instead: “Are they all so thin?”

  “This winter took a particularly hard toll on us,” said Mutter Oberin, a little stiffly. “We’ve managed to scrape by somehow, and now that the weather is nicer we’ll be able to supplement with our own vegetables and things like nettles and dandelions, when they come up.” She nodded, looking the younger woman over. “The Americans seem to have treated you well enough.”

  Ilse flushed, which made her even prettier. “I suppose so.”

  An uncomfortable pause followed. Then Mutter Oberin cleared her throat. “Ava,” she said. “I know it’s likely a big shock. But isn’t it wonderful? Don’t you have anything to say to your mother?”

  Ava blinked, her gaze still fixed on the vision, half afraid that if she spoke it would vanish.

  “Hallo,” she said finally, almost whispering.

  “Ja, hello.” The woman stared back. Her jaw—square and strong and almost like a man’s—tightened slightly.

  “That’s it?” said the head nun, laughing in her dry, coughlike way. “Ava. Show her your drawing.” And to Ava’s mother: “She worked on it for weeks.”

  Ava looked down at the image, which she had in fact worked on for weeks, back in the days before she’d decided Ilse was dead. Titled Meine Familie, it showed herself and Ilse and a dog she hoped they might one day maybe have. Ava and the dog were both dark-haired and smiling; Ilse was golden-haired and smiling, and above them all was a smiling golden sun. It was Greta who’d remembered the image and fetched it out from under Ava’s bunk.

  Now, hopeful and shy, Ava held it out and watched as Ilse took it in her stocky, strong fingers. For a long moment her mother stared down at the slightly wrinkled picture, her face utterly stripped of emotion. Then she nodded and gave Ava the picture back.

  “It’s very nice,” she said. “I like the cat.”

  “It’s a dog,” Ava corrected, but her mother had already turned back to the Mutter Oberin. “I assume that there will be some paperwork?”

  “Of course.” The Mother Superior nodded, appearing slightly flustered. “I’ll need a few things from you as well. Your Exoneration Certificate, to begin with. And a work permit if you have one.”

  “The one with the yellow hair is you,” Ava said, holding the image up again for Ilse to see.

  But her mother was digging in a battered-looking purse. “I’m sorry,” she said, seeming not to have heard. “Do you have a pen? Of all the days to not have one with me…”

  Their voices softened and merged as Ava stared back down at her drawing, the wide sickle smiles, the bull’s-eye eyes and stick fingers. It was horrible, she realized all of a sudden; like something Theresia would draw. Or a baby.

  She should never have shown it to anyone.

  Very quietly, she began to rip it in half.

  16.

  Renate

  1939

  Item number: 16

  Quantity: 2

  Item description: hand towels

  Year purchased: 1933

  Renate pauses, pencil pressed to her lips. Will two be enough for the five-day journey to New York? Should she risk taking more and strike something else from her list? Or will there be enough space and dry air on the ship to accommodate an emergency hand washing if need be (Item number: 9. Quantity: 1. Description: Box of Persil laundry soap. Year Purchased: 1939.)?

  Sighing, she sticks with two and moves on to the next line. 17, she writes. The next item on her notebook list is monthly menstrual protection. But as her eyes drift to today’s date—Friday, November 10th, 1939—she finds herself hesitating, pen tip hovering.

  “Perhaps,” she says, “if I just say they’re pewter instead of silver?”

  “What?” Her mother looks up from the health summary she is copying out for their records across the kitchen table.

  “My candlesticks. What if I say they’re pewter. How are they really to know?”

  “Are you seriously still thinking about that?”

  Lisbet Bauer stares at her daughter in disbelief. Renate stares right back, a faint flush creeping its way up her neck. “It’s not as if you and Vati are going to use them,” she adds.

  The “them” in question is a pair of Shabbat candlesticks Renate acquired back in February, on her way home from the weekly hairdressing course she and Karolin Beidryzcki are taking at the Jüdisches Gemeindehaus. (Neither girl particularly wants to go into hairdressing, but prospective emigrants are encouraged to acquire a trade, and hairdressing seemed the most glamorous option—at least initially.) Hurrying down a darkening Oranienburger Straße, she’d passed a prim-looking old woman sitting next to a handful of items she was apparently trying to sell. It’s an increasingly common sight these days: Jews who, having secured transport and visas out of Germany, find themselves unexpectedly having to unload items they discover they can’t take with them, often at the last minute.

  Renate usually walks past these spontaneous street sales quickly. Not just because she herself has no resources to make a purchase, but because the quiet undertones of self-conscious desperation only underscore her own growing despondency. On this day, however, she had paused, unexpectedly captivated by one of the woman’s wares.

  Thanks to a handful of “Judea study sessions” with Franz and a few surreptitious synagogue visits on her own, she had a vague understanding of what Shabbat candles were for, though she’d never considered performing the old-new ritual herself. And yet standing there that chilly day, her fingertips stained red with henna and her back aching from an hour bent ov
er a rusty wash basin, the candlesticks had seemed unaccountably comforting. Tarnished, still spotted with waxen drippings from decades of Shabbats past, they struck her as symbols of flickering hope in the waxing darkness of her life. Picking one up, Renate had found herself stroking it as though it were some Aladdin-like talisman.

  “Jakubowski und Jarra,” the seller said.

  “What?” On closer inspection, the woman’s age seemed more elusive than Renate had first assumed; her fine-boned face so deeply creased by fatigue and worry that she might have been anywhere between forty and seventy.

  “The maker,” she said. “Jakubowski and Jarra of Warsaw. Very famous.” Renate could tell from the fluid way she pronounced the names (the J’s softened into Y’s and the B’s into V’s, the same way they did for Karolin’s mother) that her native language was Polish.

  “My mother’s,” the woman added curtly. “A wedding gift.”

  “They’re very pretty,” Renate said. It came out almost an apology, though as she turned the silvery objects over in her hands she understood that she fully meant the compliment. Adorned at base and stem with unfurling leaves and whimsical flourishes, the Polish pieces were nothing in style like the sleek Parisian Art Deco pair her own mother had recently and reluctantly sold. These were unapologetically ornate, like something a Jewish Louis the Fifteenth might have set upon his rococo table. Even the nozzles looked like regal flowers in full bloom, awaiting their holy waxen stamens.

  “I thought they’d let us bring them,” the woman was continuing. “You see, they’re only plated in silver, not solid. At first our emigration officer said yes. Then yesterday, he said no. I think they make the rules up by the hour.” She sighed heavily. “I couldn’t stand the thought of them ending up with some bandit official or pawnbroker. I wanted—” She hesitated, peering into Renate’s face.

  “I want to keep them with Jews,” she said.

  For a moment Renate just stared at her, sitting there in the singed shadow of the Neue Synagogue that was itself still shuttered in the wake of what the papers were now calling Kristallnacht (such a patent misnomer, Renate still thinks, as though that ghastly event had been nothing more than a festival of dainty glass baubles). How does she know? The question shaped itself in her head, not with defensiveness or resentment but a vague sense of relief, even wonder. She thought back to another old woman; the one she’d helped after being thrown from a tram. The one to whom she’d said: Ich bin Jude.

  “How much?” she asked. And then, breathlessly, without waiting for an answer: “I can give you ten Reichsmarks.” Technically, the money was for materials for her hairdressing class; she was supposed to have handed it to her instructor last week. But even as she recognized this, Renate’s grip on the silvery sticks was tightening, her mind working furiously to come up with a way to borrow Karolin’s kit, or even steal the instructor’s rusty spare set of scissors.

  “Ten?” The woman laughed dryly. “At that rate I might as well throw them in the gutter.”

  She reached for the candlesticks, shaking her head, and Renate’s throat tightened with something almost like panic. “Wait,” she said.

  Plunging her right hand into the pocket of her ever-more-ragged green coat, she pulled out the crisp banknote. Then she reached back into her pocket, fingers fumbling against the worn wool until she found the slim, hard circle she’d been seeking.

  She’d carried Ilse’s friendship ring like this for the past four years, rationalizing the practice with various little stories she told herself about it: that when she had time she would push it into Ilse’s mail slot, or bring it to a jeweler to sell, or donate it to the Jewish Winter Relief Fund. For four years, however, she’d done none of these. The ring had remained snugly nestled in the right pocket of her only coat, retrieved only occasionally for a moment or so before being plunged back into its place of nubby rest.

  “Here,” she said now.

  The woman picked the ring up with two fingers, studying it through slightly narrowed eyes. Then she looked up.

  “Silver?”

  Renate nodded, though in fact she had no idea; she’d have declared it platinum if it had meant the candlesticks could be hers.

  The woman hesitated once more, her eyes still searching Renate’s face. Then she shrugged. “Ach, well,” she said. “Day’s almost over.” Wrapping the bill around the ring, she’d tucked both in her own pocket and held the candlesticks back out to Renate. “Better these end up with someone who will use them for their intended purpose. That’s worth something in and of itself.”

  And since then, Renate has done just that. Despite not understanding the Hebrew prayers Karolin hastily taught her, or why she covers her eyes after setting the waxen wicks aflame, or why she mustn’t blow out the candles before they burn to the base; despite, too, the fact that Franz dismisses the practice as “Judaic voodoo” and her mother shakes her head in unspecified disapproval, Renate lights the two candles every Friday in her room, murmurs blessings and sing-says A-mein. Afterward, she leaves them to burn down on her windowsill, weekly beacons to a transformation she feels in her bones but still doesn’t fully understand.

  * * *

  “Renate,” her mother repeats now. “Are you seriously still proposing not just smuggling a precious metal—which, incidentally, you were supposed to have turned over to the Reich’s Treasury Division in March—out of the country—but actually lying, in writing, about it?”

  “Of course not,” Renate snaps, although of course this is exactly what she is proposing. “I just…don’t want them to go to waste.”

  “Your whole emigration could go to waste if you try to take them with you,” her mother retorts tartly. “You could very well find yourself arrested.”

  “That’s fine.” Renate finishes off the next row (17, Sanitary napkins, 12) with an irritated flourish. “I don’t want to go in the first place.”

  “Enough.” Her mother rakes a pale hand through her now mostly gray hair. Her voice is tired and sharp. “I don’t want to hear any more about not wanting to go. Not after all the work I’ve done.”

  Renate opens her mouth. Then she shuts it again, since this, too, is not really a point she can argue.

  Over the past year Elisabeth Bauer has registered with the Jewish emigration aid agencies in Germany and the Jewish immigration aid agency in New York. She has filled out endless questionnaires for the governments of both nations. She has haunted five different government offices in her quest to get the new, J-stamped passports now required of Jews, batted from one unresponsive, rude bureaucrat to the next in what seemed to be the Reich’s idea of an inside joke. She has paid for exorbitant departure fees and overpriced ocean liner tickets, obtained sponsorship affidavits from a former colleague in Chicago and her brother-in-law in New York, found a way around the German prohibitions against wiring funds abroad to deposit the currency required of prospective immigrants by the U.S. government in two separate New York bank accounts. She has queued up for, harassed, and cajoled staff members at the American consulate general until the Bauers’ numbers came up on the visa waitlist, three years after they’d been applied for but two years sooner than they otherwise might have. After hearing that even mildly “unfit” immigration applicants faced visa rejection, she enlisted the family doctor to concoct a sprained-ankle diagnosis for Franz’s leg, and paid a discreet “sweetener” to the consulate doctor to ensure that her son passed the American examination.

  She has procured affidavits of good conduct from the Charlottenburg police office, and from four other “responsible and disinterested” parties in America and Germany. She’s collected school certificates to confirm Renate’s passing of her Abitur last year and Franz’s completion of three years of university. She’s obtained proof of passage to the Western Hemisphere, included certified copies of Bauer family tax records and two copies each of the two children’s birth certificates. Most
recently, she brought home the petition Renate is currently working on for the office of Berlin’s chief financial president, itemizing every object Renate plans to take with her when she boards the SS Columbus in two weeks. It must be submitted to, checked by, and approved by a Reich official against the actual items in her trunks and carry-on luggage, after which she’ll face another tax on the estimated value of those items and the pitifully small cash amount Jews are permitted when they leave.

  All in all, it’s been a heroic performance on a two-front bureaucratic battlefield that these days defeats almost everyone. Rita Oelburg’s family, for instance, was approved for U.S. visas and secured boat passage, but had no money left for the exorbitant Reich “escape tax.” Kinge Lehmann’s father, a former banker, could cover the escape tax and visas but couldn’t secure passage before the visas expired. Bernhard Bähr was rejected because he’d had acne radiation treatments and the U.S. consulate physician labeled him a cancer risk. And the affidavit supplied by Karolin Beidryzcki’s New York sponsors—pledging all their assets as bond in the event Karolin was unable to support herself—was deemed inadequate by U.S. authorities, forcing her to start the whole application process again.

  “It’s as though they’re trying to find reasons not to let us in,” she’d complained, as she and Renate mixed peroxide, honey, and baking soda into a paste that their instructor guaranteed would lighten even the most “Jewish” of dark-haired heads. Renate hadn’t had the heart to tell her that according to Franz, at least, this was precisely what “they” were trying to do. And when she and Franz had finally secured transportation, visas, and exit documents, she’d almost wanted to hide that fact as well. For despite everyone’s congratulatory envy, despite the soul-crushing and steadily growing list of life restrictions in Berlin, when she thought about their departure date—November 25, 1939—all she felt was a chill sense of emptiness.