Ava hadn’t been able to make out the man’s answer through the suddenly roaring silence. But she’d heard Renate Bauer’s response: “Well, we can’t very well send her on her way like this.” And then, dryly: “Don’t worry, Eugene. I’ll call you if things get too desperate.”
And so it was that Ava found herself shepherded into a wood-paneled elevator that smelled of lemon wax and Windex and whatever old-lady perfume (powdery and sweet) Renate Bauer happened to be wearing. The doctor had set Ava on the tastefully padded stool, patted her on the shoulder, and then thoughtfully watched the old-fashioned floor dial work its way from one to seven, seeming far less unsettled by the announcement Ava had just made than Ava still was herself.
Could it really be that easy? Ava had thought, as the polished box made its creaky trip up the building. Is she really going to simply let me in?
It wasn’t just the cheerful reception that surprised her. As Ava had surreptitiously studied her mother’s childhood confidante in the mirror, she saw little to match the image she’d formed in her head: that of a young girl with a gentle, bookish demeanor and a kindness Ilse described in one of her letters as unmatched by any I have known since.
Just on the cusp of seventy, Dr. Renate Bauer remains a striking woman, with high cheekbones, a pointed chin, and a small, well-shaped nose that sits perfectly symmetrically over her pink-painted lips. But it was the eyes that had struck Ava the most. Dark and wide behind their oversized plastic frames, Renate Bauer’s eyes were at once solicitous and fiercely determined. They were thoughtful, and deep, and tinged with the life-weariness of one who has lived through trauma and remains trapped in its outer orbit.
They were also the eyes of a woman used to getting her own way. Not because she’s been coddled, but because she’s learned how to fight.
“I really don’t want to cause trouble,” Ava calls again now.
“No trouble for family!” Renate calls back. In the other room something rattles; something clinks.
Family, Ava thinks. It’s like she’s back in a dream.
Trying to ground herself, she surveys the small room. Like Renate herself, it exudes a bookish and slightly shabby elegance that seems untouched by the passage of decades. On the wall directly across from her hangs a framed document in Hebrew—a Jewish marriage contract, Ava guesses, remembering the small scroll-box she’d seen outside the door. On the walnut coffee table in front of her, a heavily annotated copy of Pearl Buck’s Peony lies half open atop a fading copy of the New York Review of Books. A yellow legal pad lies next to it, covered with notes written in English (filling loss with literature, Ava reads; and beneath it all extremist forms converge in the end). Protruding from beneath the pad is a plain-looking green book, the cover of which is mostly obscured, though part of an illustration—a little black-and-white foot—seems familiar. When Ava gently slides it out she immediately sees why: the foot is part of Tenniel’s iconic image of Alice, key in hand, pulling back the curtain to the door to Wonderland. Above the image is the book’s title: Alice’s Evidence: The Absurd Across Language and Culture.
The author is Renate Sophia Bauer, PhD.
Ah, Ava thinks. That kind of doctor.
From the kitchen comes the crash of shattering glass. “Oh, damn it,” Renate calls out. “I’m sorry. One more minute…”
Despite herself, Ava smiles. Her mother had written frequently and fondly of Renate’s clumsiness. Apparently her grace hasn’t improved with age.
“Really, there’s no hurry,” she calls. She flips to the dedication and feels her heart leap in her chest:
For Franz.
Glancing furtively toward the kitchen, Ava pages forward to the introduction.
I first met Alice, she reads, when I myself was a little girl, growing up in prewar Berlin. My brother, Franz, had an old copy of the original Antonie Zimmerman translation dating from 1869, and if I asked him very nicely, he would sometimes read to me from it. Like so many children all over the world, we were both charmed by Carroll’s fantastical tale: the cheeky Cheshire Cat (or as I first met it, the “Grinse-Katze”). The hookah-smoking caterpillar. The way Alice’s very form could stretch and shrink with a bite of mushroom or cake. Visiting them soon became an almost weekly ritual; first as siblings and then, as I learned to read, alone. Over the years, I came almost to feel as though Alice were not a character but a friend. She was someone I could talk to, first as an imaginative child and then as a young Jewish woman whose world had quite suddenly been turned upside down in Nazi-era Berlin. I laughed at Alice’s nonsense and was cheered by her resilience; I also took heart in her resolute pursuit of her goals, even in the face of the most unexpected changes to her landscape, her companions, and her own body. Throughout it all, though, it never even occurred to me that the pages I grew to know by heart contained anything other than Carroll’s own imaginings.
And yet the first time I sat down to read Alice in English—mere months after arriving in the wondrous new land of America—it felt like a different work altogether. For the first time, I realized how these gloriously absurd English phrases had been crammed into ill-fitting German idioms: Carroll’s “little bat” who is “like a tea-tray in the sky” is twisted into a “little parrot” whose “feathers are so green.” The fantastically funny Lobster Quadrille had been cruelly sedated into a far less hilarious “dance of aquatic beings.” And the delightful play of “whitings” and shoe polish had been left out altogether.
But what was most stunning for me was my own response to Carroll’s words, a kind of amazement that surpassed even what I’d felt as a child. In part, this was because Carroll’s Alice seemed so much more wondrously bewitched by his strange world, in a way that Zimmerman’s Alice somehow did not. I came to realize that this was because Zimmerman altered or removed most of the comments that reflect the little girl’s ongoing astonishment: “how very strange” becomes a demurely appreciative “how wonderful.” And “curiouser and curiouser,” that old favorite, is not to be found at all.
The effect is that Alice, like any Little Red Riding Hood being chased by a talking wolf, or a Dancing Princess attending nightly balls beneath her bedroom, merely accepts the unexpected without apparent note or comment….
“Here we are.”
As her hostess bustles back into the room, Ava quickly re-covers the little volume with the paper, just in time for Renate to briskly set down a plate of Fig Newtons and a glass of ice water before her. “Eat a biscuit, please,” the older woman instructs, with all the authority of a certified medical doctor. “It will help get your blood sugar back up.”
“Thank you,” says Ava, dutifully picking up one of the soft, jam-filled squares.
“You’re still quite pale, you know,” the older woman observes. “Does this happen to you often? Fainting?”
Embarrassed, Ava shakes her head. “Not for years.” The last time she recalls truly fainting was at Holy Mother, and then it was probably from hunger. Children had always been fainting from hunger there. It was just how things were.
“I just…this day has been difficult,” she says. “On so many levels.” She tries to laugh; it comes out more like a hiccup. “It started with my mother’s ashes being delivered to me in a box.”
“You mean Resl?” The older woman’s whitened brows jerk toward her hairline. “You can’t mean Resl, surely. I just saw her at Freda Goldblum’s shiva. She seemed fine.”
Ava hesitates, cookie halfway to her mouth. Resl? She thinks. Freda? Shiva? Like the deity?
“Actually,” Renate Bauer goes on, “I’m ashamed to ask this, but whose daughter are you? I thought I knew all of Adam’s relatives. Granted, there are quite a few of you.” She smiles ruefully, a gentle tilt to her lips that somehow conveys as much sadness as mirth. “And of course my memory isn’t quite what it was.”
“Adam?” Ava repeats blankly.
“My husban
d, dear.” Her voice is patient; as though Ava might have hit her head, or is perhaps just a little bit slow. “Adam Cooperman. Though I suppose I should start saying late husband.”
She pauses, seeming to briefly fall into herself before briskly returning to the moment. “But that’s neither here nor there, is it. The question is, how are you related to Adam?”
Renate Bauer places one mottled hand atop the other in her lap, waiting. She doesn’t know, Ava realizes, stunned. She doesn’t know who I am.
The air feels dense and pressing; as though she’s entrapped in a solid glass cube. She sets the biscuit down on the plate slowly, deliberately.
“I’m not Adam’s niece,” she says carefully.
“But you said…” Renate frowns, her expression gently baffled. Then she shakes her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t think I understand.”
Ava takes a deep breath. “My name,” she says, switching to German, “my full name, is Ava Fischer. Von Fischer, originally. My mother was Ilse von Fischer.”
At the utterance of von Fischer the old woman’s demeanor changes. Nothing about her actually moves. But there is a sudden sense of her pulling inward; a sense of a subtle tightening.
“I’m sorry if this is a surprise,” Ava continues, tightening her clasp on her bag. “But you see, she passed away only a few weeks ago. Today I received her ashes. But also these…”
But before she even finishes the sentence, Renate Bauer, with surprising agility, is already back on her feet.
“You have to leave,” she says. She says it in English, her voice suddenly high and shrill. “I’m sorry you aren’t feeling well. But you must leave.”
Ava swallows. “Please,” she says. “I know—I know my mother hurt you. She hurt me as well.”
“I’m sorry,” Renate repeats crisply. “But that isn’t my problem.”
“But you see, she wrote you. She wrote you for years. I brought them all here. All her letters…” She starts rummaging in her bag.
“I don’t care about the blasted letters,” Renate Bauer interrupts. “I didn’t want them when she brought them here, and I certainly don’t now.”
“She—she came here?” For a moment the room seems to shift, ever so slightly, as though readjusting its position.
“Ja.” The older woman’s voice is shaking with outrage now. “We made it very clear she wasn’t welcome.”
“When?” Ava manages; but even before the question is out she realizes that she already knows the answer: Of course. That awful night of the blackout.
It rushes back; Ilse’s wan face when Ava found her at the police precinct. Her inexplicable attachment to her purse: Don’t tell me what I have in it. Ava glances quickly back down at her own tattered bag, the crumpled paper just visible in jumbled disarray.
“It doesn’t matter when,” Renate Bauer is saying curtly. “There is nothing more to discuss.” With three tight strides of her vein-etched, stockinged legs she is at the door. Flinging it open, she steps aside. “Please go. I don’t want to have to call the doorman.”
“But you still don’t understand—” Ava begins to say, but the other woman cuts her off.
“I’m under no obligation to understand anything for you,” Renate says sharply. “Even if you are her daughter. Especially if you are her daughter.” She indicates the hallway with her chin. “Du musst gehen.”
“Frau Bauer,” Ava pleads.
“Doctor Bauer,” Renate snaps.
“Doctor Bauer,” Ava repeats, dutifully, desperately. “Please, listen to me. Just for a minute.” She takes a deep breath. “I’m not really here about my mother. I’m here about something she wrote you. In this letter.” With shaking hands, she slips the page from its envelope. “Can I just…”
“How many times must I say it? I don’t care about her damn letters!” There’s a wildness now to the old woman’s voice, an unsteadiness that seems fully positioned to escalate into a scream. “I’d just as soon read Mein Kampf. It amounts to the same bloody thing.”
“But if you didn’t read them, then you don’t know about Franz and my mother….”
“She killed him!” This does come out close to a scream. For a moment the older woman seems as startled by its ferocity as is Ava.
“For God’s sake,” she adds, shakily. “What more is there to know?”
Beneath her cardigan, her narrow chest heaves. Ava blinks at her, speechless. “Wh-what?” she finally manages.
“She killed him.” Renate takes a hoarse breath. “Ilse von Fischer murdered my brother.”
“No,” Ava says slowly, shaking her head. “No. That’s not right. You both got out. You came to America together.”
“Nein.” The rebuttal is guttural, unchallengeable. “Franz was taken by the Gestapo in 1939. A day before he was to leave Germany.”
“Taken?” Ava repeats blankly.
“Arrested.” Renate shuts her eyes for a moment, her lips pressed together tightly, as though struggling to keep the words in. “He never came back.”
It hits Ava like a force field, with such jolting abruptness that she actually feels herself rock in her seat. Never came back. She presses a hand to her forehead, as though she might somehow physically impose calm on the careening thoughts just behind the bone.
“She didn’t know,” she finally whispers. “My mother didn’t know.”
“Not at first.” The old woman’s voice is more level now, but still biting. “No. She showed up here all smiles and tears. With her letters. And her need. Her need to talk to me. Her need to explain. Her need to apologize to me and my brother. She said she’d gotten our address from Barnard.” She shakes her head contemptuously. “She was always good in that way, able to put things together.”
“She never missed a beat.” It comes out barely a whisper.
“Adam didn’t even want to let her in,” the old woman continues, as though Ava hadn’t spoken. “But I thought: Why not, after all these years. What harm could it really do.” She gives a rueful laugh. “She used to make fun of me for that. How gullible I was. People don’t really change, in the end. Do they. My mother—she was a psychoanalyst—used to tell me that. They may defy expectations. But they don’t change.”
She is leaning against the door now, her eyes distant behind her glasses. “But of course, I thought there still was a chance. I brought her upstairs, all smiles and welcome. Come to my arms, my beamish boy!”
Ava blinks. “Boy?”
“Nothing.” The thin lips twist bitterly. “Just my own gullibility. I gave her iced tea and a bit of lemon shortbread.” She is staring not at Ava, but at the table between them. “When she first apologized, I thought it was simply over never having said good-bye to us. You see, she’d come to see me before I left. She brought me a book. And she’d promised to come back, but she never did.” She shakes her head. “When she told me she’d really been spying on us, at first I didn’t understand. I thought she was making some sort of horrid joke. But then she was crying, and saying how ashamed she was of her behavior, and how she wanted to apologize to Franz in person as well. And I finally put it together: the Gestapo took my brother away because she’d given him away to them. It was her fault.”
She takes a sharp, shaking breath in. “I told her Franz was dead. That they’d come for him because of her.” She locks eyes with Ava, unblinking. “I told her that she was a murderer.”
Trembling, Ava drops her gaze to her hands. She can see it so clearly: her mother likely sitting right where she is sitting now, after years of convincing herself that she hadn’t done that much harm. That there was a chance, still, for redemption. She sees Renate Bauer’s expression transition from cautious to shocked, and then horrified. Feels her mother’s heart tighten and plummet within the black well of her chest. Just as her own is doing now.
“And then what happened?” she whispers.
Renate shakes her head again. “I don’t remember it all very clearly. I was so upset. I know I shouted. I think I might have become faint myself. That was when Adam told her she had to leave.”
Ava shuts her eyes, and her mother’s face that night comes back: the utter desolation and weariness. I think I should not have come. A wave of nausea descends, along with a profound sadness. So in two days, her mother had been ejected from the lives of the three people she truly cared for in the world—after learning she’d effectively killed the only man she’d ever loved.
It takes tremendous effort to force her eyes open, and even more effort to force them to meet Renate’s. “She didn’t want to spy on you,” she says. “The Gestapo made her. As punishment for having helped your father on Kristallnacht.”
The older woman just looks at her blankly.
“It’s in the letters,” Ava continues, her heart thudding again in her ears. “The Gestapo made her betray you. She thought she’d stalled them—that she hadn’t given them enough information to act on. She thought she’d bought you both time to leave the country.”
Renate just continues staring, so utterly nonresponsive that Ava wonders whether she’s actually even heard her. Then the other woman squeezes her eyes shut again. For a moment she seems not the hard-willed persona Ava had observed in the lift, but someone much older and frailer. When she reopens her eyes Ava sees that they are damp. But still, Renate Bauer says nothing. Wordlessly, she shuts the door. Wordlessly she leans against it, her face the color of talc.
Then, slowly, she makes her way back to where Ava is still sitting on the sofa. When she reaches the armchair she lowers herself into it, still very slowly, as though not fully sure of its solidity.
“I know it probably doesn’t change anything,” Ava says, in a small voice.
Renate just shakes her head. After what feels like an interminable silence she starts to speak again; dully, heavily. In German.
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