Sacrifices have to be made.
“Ah,” Franz is saying. Looking up again from his volume, he offers a wan grin. “Found it, I think.”
Clearing his throat theatrically, he reads: “Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little of his despair over his fate—he has little success in this—but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different (and more) things than do the others; after all, dead as he is in his own lifetime, he is the real survivor.”
He looks up, his eyebrows arched in dismay. “Holy hell, von Fischer.”
She laughs, a little self-consciously. “I don’t remember it being quite that bleak.”
“It is bleak, though, isn’t it? Even for bleak old Franz.”
“It is,” she agrees. “I’d forgotten that part about the ruins. Where was it from, in the end?”
He holds up a slim blue volume. “One of his diaries. A rare private edition that I was lucky enough to stumble upon in an old bookstore.”
The way he sets the slim volume back down on the bed is wary, as though it contained some potentially unstable chemical compound.
“Can I see?”
“Of course.” He indicates the foot of the bed with his chin and hands the booklet to her as she settles in there, still shaking his head. “I’m amazed that that’s what has stayed with you. There’s plenty of Kafka stuff that I can pull up from my head, but nothing that obscure.”
“I know.” She laughs again. “You once recited the last two pages of Metamorphosis for us from memory. Do you remember? We were playing Truth or Consequences.”
“Ja.” Now it’s his turn to smile self-consciously. “I’d forgotten that.”
“I used to love playing that game with the two of you.” Ilse leans back against the wall, twirling a strand of hair around the top of her finger as she reminisces. “Do you remember the time we convinced your parents to join in?”
He cringes. “I’ve tried to block that out.”
“Well, you were the one who asked them that awful question. What was it…”
“I asked my mother to share her most Freudian dream. I never thought she’d actually answer.”
“None of us did!” The scene comes back in a rush, as sweetly potent as a shot of honey liqueur: the five of them in the parlor. Franz and his parents drinking wine, Cole Porter on the phonograph, a roaring fire in the fireplace. Was it the same night that Doktor Bauer had tried to teach them the jerky steps to the Black Bottom, and Renate tripped and landed flat on her back? Ilse can’t remember. She just remembers the laughter, the flickering, sighing fireplace. And Franz’s dark eyes, dancing as they are dancing now.
“What did she say again?” she asks. “Something about trains and tunnels, right?”
“Worse.” He rubs his temple. “A ‘very big’ train that got stuck in a ‘very tight and damp’ tunnel. And she was riding it, afraid that it would explode.” He shakes his head again, covering his eyes with a thin hand in feigned humiliation. “I think she was three sheets to the wind.”
“And she kept going, and going,” Ilse chimes in. “And your father kept saying, ‘Lisbet. Lisbet? That’s enough.’ ”
“And when she finally stopped talking,” he adds, “there was that shocked silence. And then Renate asked…”
Ilse recites it with him: “But Mutti, what does it mean?” She giggles. “We teased her with that for months, do you remember? Every time she said something clueless. But Mutti!”
They dissolve into helpless laughter together, Ilse clasping her arms over her belly as the scene plays over again in her head. The mirth feels like a feather blanket; light and airy and warming, and for the first time in months she feels nearly safe, almost happy. As she wipes her eyes with her sleeve she has to remind herself that this is an illusion; that it is precisely because she is neither happy nor safe that she has landed in here, in this room, on this bed. And that unless she accomplishes what she came for, neither fact will change.
“She might as well have been narrating my own conception,” Franz is saying, rubbing his face with his hand, as though laughing has unexpectedly fatigued his features. “It was mortifying. I remember worrying that you’d never come back.”
“Really?” She glances up, unexpectedly touched and thrilled that her presence was a cause for concern. “Why would you think that?”
“You always seemed so much more…proper than we were. I felt like we were constantly shocking you.”
“But I liked it,” she says, truthfully. “I loved being shocked. It made my life so much more interesting.” She hesitates, then adds, carefully: “I loved how brave you were, too. That you kept going to your secret Socialist meetings even after they became illegal.”
“Brave or stupid,” he says dryly. “I’m still trying to decide.”
“Are you still going, then?” She pretends to examine a split hair. When he doesn’t answer right away she looks up and sees that he is studying her again, his expression unreadable.
“I’m sorry,” she says quickly. “You don’t have to tell me.”
He runs a hand through his hair. “Reni said you’re leaving the BDM.”
She feigns a yawn. “It’s so time-consuming. And there’s more and more about it I don’t believe in. I’d prefer to put my efforts into other things.” (True and true. Hop, hop.)
“I don’t suppose it matters, then.” He shrugs. “Yes, I still go. Not that it accomplishes much. It’s always been mostly about talk.”
“Any revolutionary romance, at least?”
“At the meetings?” He snorts. “They’re all bluestockings. Bookish harpies, every last one.”
“What’s wrong with bluestockings? Your sister is one. So am I.”
“No, you aren’t.”
The quickness of the denial catches her off-guard a second time. “How do you know?”
He shrugs. “Various clues throughout the years, I suppose.”
“Such as?”
“For one thing, bluestockings don’t like swing.”
“I’m sure some do.”
“No.” He shakes his head somberly. “They like classical music only. Bach. Schubert.”
“Mozart?”
“Only the less dangerous works. And the candies, of course.”
She finds herself giggling again. Crossing her legs, she realizes how little opportunity there is in her life for laughter and banter. With Kai—to whose attentions she finally wearily succumbed once he made it clear her job security depended on it—Ilse rarely even cracks a smile. And when she does, it is never over something clever on his part. Usually it’s the opposite: that he behaves with such insufferable self-importance that Ilse has to stifle her derision.
“Also,” he’s continuing, “bluestockings don’t devour romance novels the way you and Reni did. They prefer dry, academic works that they can then use to bully any poor male unfortunate enough to start a conversation with them.”
“That sounds like experience speaking.”
“It is.” He rolls his eyes. “At the last meeting I was cornered by the lovely Karina Hafner and treated to a thirty-minute disquisition on Gramsci’s views on economic determinism.”
Karina Hafner, Ilse thinks, stowing the name away. “Is she pretty, at least?”
“Karina? Picture a face like a potato on top of a neck like a pencil.” He grimaces. “Add a voice like a squeaking clarinet.”
She can’t help laughing again. “You’re cruel.”
“I have taste.” He rolls his eyes, folds his arms behind his head. His physique has changed somewhat, she realizes; not only is he taller but his shoulders are broader, his arms more solid-looking, despite the obvious toll taken by his reduced Jewish rations.
“So no Duke Ellington. No Vicki Baum.
What else?”
“Well.” Reaching behind his stack of books, he retrieves a pack of Monas. “No smoking or drinking, obviously.” Shaking out a cigarette, he offers her the pack, and after a moment’s hesitation she takes it, aware of his eyes still trained on her face.
“And no postcards,” he adds.
“Postcards?” Ilse frowns, rolling the slim white stick between her thumb and fingertip.
“Yes. A bluestocking would never have her friend steal a lewd postcard and be brazen enough to bring it to school.” He puts the pack back on the bedstand, his dark eyes still trained on hers. “Though I suppose if they had to, they’d have chosen the same one you two did.”
The Book Lady. For a heartbeat she simply stares at him, Mona motionless in her hand. He flicks the lighter on and off, smiling his small, bemused smile.
Ilse forces a laugh. “How did you know?”
“How did I know it had been taken? Or how did I know where it went?”
“Both, I guess.”
Lighting his cigarette, he inhales, then exhales a stream of smoke. “You don’t think I’d let my little sister go through Gymnasium without having one or two people there to look out for her, do you?”
“But why did you never say anything?”
He shrugs. “You put it back, didn’t you? Or rather, that insufferable little stormtrooper my sister was seeing finally gave it back.”
Ilse blinked: so he knew about Rudi too. “Yes,” she says. “But surely…”
“Surely what?”
“Surely you thought it was…wrong. For us to have been looking at them.”
He is smiling again, just a little this time, the movement casting the faint stubble on his upper lip into darker relief. Ilse finds herself wondering what it would feel like: those full lips, that sparse stubble. Hauptsturmführer Wainer’s lips had felt wet and slack and slightly scratchy when he’d kissed her with them. Kai’s were thin and chapped and smooth, and he hardly ever has to shave. Thankfully, she hasn’t had to feel them since he left for the Soviet territories to work for some general Goebbels has set him up with. He’s written a few times, but she hasn’t written back yet. He’ll be back on leave soon enough.
“Or at least, no more wrong than it was for me to,” Franz is saying. “I suppose a part of me even liked the idea of it.”
With the second statement his voice drops just a little, in a way that makes it feel both more intimate and confessional. As he holds the lighter out toward her his expression is both lazy and speculative; a boy tossing a bread crumb into a sleepy pond to see whether a fish will break surface for it. She’s aware of the air somehow tightening between them, of her pulse beating butterfly-like, in her throat.
Very slowly she leans forward, until her face is a sigh’s distance from his, her cigarette millimeters from the flickering flame.
“The idea of what?” she asks.
He doesn’t blink. “Of you,” he says. “Of you. Looking at that.”
It’s barely a whisper, but Ilse feels the words on every inch of her skin. She feels them in the same way she feels his gaze somehow flowing inside her, warm and wide, daring and questioning. With other men at such moments all she has wanted is to escape, mentally if not physically; to contract her sense and her essence deeply into herself as a sea anemone retracts its vulnerable tendrils.
To her amazement, though, what she wants now is precisely the opposite. She doesn’t want to pull back. She wants to push past her own skin and his; to empty herself into him until there is nothing left to extend. It is what she has always wanted; a craving she only now understands has not lessened but ballooned in the years since she abandoned this house. Set loose by their banter, by the bubbling memories and drunken laughter, by the parted proximity of his soft full lips, it roars by every caution and every fail-safe mechanism she’d set up for herself, sweeping them away and out of sight even as it sweeps Ilse herself onto his lap.
And then her lips are on his, and her hands are in his hair, and the unlit cigarette is on the floor and forgotten.
* * *
Two hours later she is walking toward the U-Bahn, braids hastily repinned, skin tingling, thoughts in turmoil. The banned Kafka, slight as it is, feels like a ten-kilo weight in her satchel. But even heavier is the scrap of paper sandwiched within it, hastily ripped from Franz’s moleskin notebook.
Lying there with him, intermittently kissing and conversing, she’d found herself dreamily skip-hopping across her stream of untruths: I’m curious about your meetings. (True.) I think I’d maybe like to see one of them. Just to see if it’s something I might like to join. (Both true and untrue.)
He’d stared up at the ceiling, smoking the cigarette that she’d dropped, and it had taken him less than a minute to nod. All right. I’ll write down the information for you before you go.
It had seemed impossible that it might be just that easy. But as she’d rebuttoned, tucked, and adjusted, he had scribbled the address, time, and cross-street, tucked it into the Kafka volume, and handed it to her with one last, slow kiss.
There may be hope for you yet, von Fischer, he said, as she made her way into the hallway.
It was so easy that it almost broke her heart.
Now, walking quickly, she struggles to reconcile it all: the giddy exultation of his whispered confessions: You’re so beautiful, I’ve always wanted you. The tight-coiled power of the other confessions—the yes, I still go; the I’ll write down the information for you. The salty, sated joy of lying there with him, his palm cupped over her navel and his glorious hair veiling her face and neck. The stark terror of realizing, as she took him into her arms, that she was taking his life—both their lives—into her hands.
What would Kai say if he knew she’d slept with Franz Bauer? What if she were, right now, to telephone his unit, right this very minute, and say: I just made love to a Jew! Would he be more upset about the faithlessness or the Rassenschande? Would he scream at her the way she’d heard him scream the night they’d burned down the synagogue; tell her how soiled and impure she had made herself? The thought is strangely satisfying; the way it might feel to slap him in the face after he says one of the stupid things he is so often prone to saying: Why would you even want to go to university? Men don’t like women who think too much. Or: My money’s on you being a Gold Cross mother after we marry. You’ve a terrific build for breeding. As though she were a prize cow.
Maybe I will go to New York, Ilse thinks now. Maybe during Kai’s upcoming leave from Russia she’ll simply tell him it’s over. That she’s leaving. The thought is shocking yet intoxicating, like a shot of ice-cold vodka.
As she makes her way down the darkened stairwell of the Friedrichstraße U-Bahn station it’s as though her insides are shattering into sharp and embattled factions: what she feels versus what she knows. What she wants versus what she is. What she said versus what she really, truly meant. At one point the dissonance is so overwhelming that Ilse almost turns back up the subway stairs and down the street and to his room, to burrow back into the cocoon of his adoration, to feel his warm firm skin against hers. It’s only the knowledge that Renate and her mother will be back soon that pushes her through the ticket gate and into the waiting carriage.
I can make this work, she tells herself, pushing through the rush-hour crowd and taking hold of a strap by the far door. After all, von Helldorff hadn’t specified an exact deadline for her report. He may not even know Franz is leaving the country, let alone in two days’ time. So if Ilse simply times the delivery of her report properly, she can give the police chief what he wants while buying Franz just enough time to get out. In fact, maybe she can even hold off until after the meeting next week. She could say she was double-checking her intelligence. By throwing in a couple of days between the meeting and delivery she can ensure that the Gestapo doesn’t have a chance to act. And that way, she can give them oth
er names—not just potato-faced Karina Hafner, but all the others who show up Wednesday.
All the others, except for Franz. Who will be gone.
I can do it, she thinks again. But her pulse is pounding even harder, and Ilse forces slow and deliberate breaths to calm it while she stares at a bright advertisement poster directly before her.
The ad depicts a young couple in a shiny new KdF “Strength Through Joy” Wagon. Golden and chiseled, the man drives with a white-toothed grin. The woman—also beaming—is standing on the passenger side, her trim torso bursting through the fully opened sunroof. Her tanned arm is flung jubilantly into the air, against an impossibly blue sky. Behind them, white-capped mountains gleam next to rolling green fields, as though offering the best of all seasons in one landscape.
I can’t believe you are leaving so soon, she’d said.
Will you come visit? Franz murmured. Will you let me show you New York?
Careful. If I come I might stay.
I’d be fine with that, he’d said. Really. He smelled like smoke and coffee and something else that was slightly musky; the way his eyes looked as though they’d taste, if she could lick them. His skin tasted like something else, though; salt and something faintly acidic, mixed with the faintest trace of amber honey.
Staring at the poster now, she feels another warm wave of elation, quickly trailed by anxiety that seems to sour her stomach. I can do this, she repeats to herself, as the train stops at Berlin-Mahlsdorf and she jostles her way off. I can do this. I can do this. As she hurries down Frankfurter Allee it forms a chant: a silent mantra of desperate optimism. It’s like the “news” she writes, she tells herself: if she repeats it often enough it is bound to become true. And so she thinks it, and thinks it again. I can do this.
By the time she reaches her block she is murmuring it aloud, so caught up in the words—Ich schaffe das Ich schaffe das—she doesn’t notice the black sedan parked across the street from her doorway. Nor does she notice, at first, the strange silence as she unlocks the front door, or the fact that her mother looks pale and frightened when she greets her.
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