Wunderland

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  “We’d been packing. We’d been up to nearly midnight together, going over all the paperwork. The forms. Approvals. The lists. There were so many lists.” She shakes her head. “We’d been arguing about something. Something stupid. I think he’d run out of room for a book he wanted to bring, and wanted me to put it in my hand baggage. At that point, my books were my only friends, and I already was leaving so many of my favorite ones behind. I told him no. I accused him of thinking his books were more important because he was a boy and I was a girl.” Reaching into her skirt pocket, she pulls out a handkerchief, her thin hand with its hot-pink manicure trembling. The spots on the backs of them are the color of light coffee. But as Ava studies her face, for the first time she thinks she glimpses the young girl described in her mother’s letters: hopeful, thoughtful. Almost unbearably vulnerable.

  “That was nonsense, of course,” Renate continues. “Franz was remarkably progressive for the times. He could be condescending, but I always knew that was over our age difference, not my gender.” Her eyes are distant and dark, gazing not at Ava but vaguely over her left shoulder, toward her wall of books. “But you see, I was just so tired. We both were. You can’t imagine what things had been like for us at that point. We’d been eating poorly, sleeping poorly. I was so worried about my parents. I hadn’t wanted to leave them, but my mother insisted that they would follow us.” She pauses to lift her glasses, pressing the white cloth against first one eye, then the other.

  “I was always the hot-tempered one,” she continues. “Franz was generally so calm. When I picked fights he’d find a way to make me laugh—and that would be that. But that night he snapped. For the first time I could remember ever since we were both small, he actually shouted back at me. He told me I was spoiled, a child. That I thought the world revolved around me. That I was in for a rude awakening in America. I told him—” She breaks off, swallows. “I told him it would be less rude if I didn’t have to go with him. I told him I wished he were staying in Germany.” She shuts her eyes. “It was the last thing I ever said to him.”

  When she looks back up at Ava her eyes are welling again.

  “I’m sorry,” Ava whispers again, sickened by how useless a response it is, how completely vacuous.

  “They came for him the next morning,” the old woman continues, again as if Ava hasn’t spoken. “Just before sunrise. That’s when they usually came for people.” Tears are rolling down her withered cheeks now, but she makes no effort to try to dry them. “There was a horrible pounding on the front door, and when my mother opened it they pushed past her and went straight upstairs to his room. They seemed to know exactly where it was.” With thin, pale fingers she wrings the handkerchief in her lap, then smooths it out again over her knee. Dampness traces her jawline, her chin; drops plop unnoticed on her gray skirt, darkening the fabric. “They dragged him out without even giving him a chance to change out of his bedclothes. Or to get the cane he needed to walk. He had had polio, you see….” She chokes slightly, swallows. “They dragged him down the stairs backward. When my father tried to stop them, one of the agents hit him in the face with his pistol so hard his nose broke. My mother tried to block the door, but they shoved her to the ground. Outside—I don’t know why, he must have said something—they started beating him…”

  She stops again, her eyes shut against the memory. “They beat him to a pulp right there, in front of our house. In front of my parents. In front of the neighbors who came to their windows and doorways to watch. They kicked his stomach over and over, in their heavy leather boots, until blood came out of his mouth and his nose. They kicked his teeth.” She chokes slightly. “They kicked them so hard that broken parts of them were left on the sidewalk after they left. My mother…my mother collected them.”

  “No.” Ava feels her hands fly to her mouth. “No. My mother wrote that she lied to them. About when you were leaving. About the meetings. She never told them anything. She was sure of it.”

  “It doesn’t matter!” Renate’s voice rises sharply again. “Do you think that mattered to my brother? To my parents, who saw him all but dead on the street before being dragged into one of those cars?” Gripping the sides of the armchair, she forces a jagged breath. “Do you know what we called them? Those black Mercedes the Gestapo drove? We called them Leichenwagen. Hearses. Because if you ended up in one, you were almost certainly dead.”

  Tot. The word seems to hang between them for a moment in the book-scented silence. Shivering, Ava hugs herself harder.

  “My mother chased them,” Renate resumes. “In bare feet and her nightgown. She chased them halfway down our street. Screaming: Where are you taking him? When will he be back? For a few blocks, they drove just slowly enough to laugh at her from the windows. He’ll be back when he’s back, one of them shouted. That was all.”

  Ava gazes at her water glass, the ice melted to slim sheer chips, the condensation beading along the outside crystal. She wants to drink, but she can’t seem to move.

  “A day and a half later,” Renate is continuing, more quietly now, “I left for America. On my own. With my own luggage, a bag full of my own books.” She pauses, passes a thin hand across her forehead. “I tried so hard not to go. I argued and fought. I threatened to run away. But of course, in the end, I had no choice.” Wearily, she shakes her head. “I remember watching from the deck as the ship left the Hamburg harbor. My parents were wild with worry and grief, of course. But they smiled and waved as though I were off on a pleasure cruise. They kept it up for as long as they thought I could see them. When I couldn’t, I borrowed another passenger’s binoculars. My last image was of my mother collapsing into my father’s arms.”

  The tears have stopped for the moment. Behind her glasses, her reddened eyes seem unfocused; as though she’s still gazing numbly at a fast-retreating shoreline, at the only two people left for her in the world. “I almost hurled myself over that rail. Even though I couldn’t swim then; I would have drowned. I just kept repeating to myself: They’ll come soon. They’ll come soon.”

  “And did they?” It comes out in a shaky whisper.

  Renate shakes her head. “Mama wrote me later that she’d received notice of my brother’s death. They told her he’d had a heart attack while in custody. That he’d been cremated ‘for sanitary purposes.’ And that she’d have to pay thirty Reichsmarks for postage and handling for his ashes.”

  Ava thinks of Ilse’s ash-filled plastic urn. She swallows back against another wave of nausea.

  “A year or so after I left,” Renate continues, “they were forced into a Judenhaus on Kurfürstendamm. Vati avoided deportation for a while because he was married to a non-Jew. But in 1942 he was sent to Auschwitz. He died there less than a year later.”

  “And your mother?”

  “Killed by the Russians at the end of the war.”

  Raped and left in the snow, Ava thinks reflexively. For a moment she thinks she actually might vomit.

  The older woman picks unseeingly at an invisible fray or thread on the handkerchief’s edge. Ava stares at her own hands; grimy, sticky with cookie crumbs. The right is smudged slightly from Ilse’s ink. Every fiber of her being seems to pulse with pain and shock. When she opens her mouth even her tongue feels broken.

  “I’m truly so sorry,” she murmurs, again achingly aware of just how hollow the term is.

  The old woman continues staring at her lap.

  “She didn’t know either, then,” Ava continues. “My mother. When she came here. She didn’t know that he never made it out.”

  Renate shakes her head. “When I told her she seemed quite shaken. She tried to ask more questions, but Adam wouldn’t let her. He took her arm. He walked her right out of the building.”

  Ava nods slowly. So on the day of the blackout Ilse, having somehow found this address, arrived with her decades-old letters and her dreams of friendship resurrected, of crimes a
bsolved. Perhaps even of romance rekindled. Instead, she was given the full crushing weight of her crime, one she’d bear for the rest of her life.

  She pictures her mother after being ejected from Renate’s home, exiled back into the airless city. She sees her wandering dark streets blindly with her pocketbook of unread letters: Oedipus after his fall.

  “It broke her too,” she says slowly. “Discovering that she’d not only betrayed you, but was responsible for my father’s death.”

  Renate looks up sharply. “Your father?”

  “Franz. Your brother.”

  The old woman frowns. “Franz wasn’t your father.”

  “Yes. Yes, he was.”

  The older woman shakes her head. “It’s not possible. He would never…that would never have happened.”

  Ava starts to respond. Then, thinking the better of it, she reaches back into her bag.

  “This,” she says gently, “was written by my mother in June 1956. May I?”

  When the old woman doesn’t answer, Ava pulls the folded note from the envelope. Clearing her throat, she begins reading aloud.

  Dear Reni:

  It is a quiet Sunday evening here in Bremen, and I am at my kitchen table with a glass of sherry and my pen. Ava is in her room, loudly playing a record by that oddly popular American who gyrates his hips like a bellydancer. She is also crying into her pillow. The pillow and the music are intended for me: she doesn’t want me to know what has happened. But I can guess. And while I’m sure a good mother would rush upstairs to offer sympathy and advice, there are several things that are keeping me from doing so.

  You see, I suspect her heart is broken, and I suspect it has been broken by a Jewish boy whom she has known for years now. I tried to keep the attachment from forming, as it seemed inevitable to me that it couldn’t last. Not because of his race—you of all people know that I’m certainly no anti-Semite. But because like you I understand, in a way she can’t yet, that the barriers to happiness are always far too high when people come from such very different worlds. To be honest, I’m only glad that it happened sooner rather than later.

  I would very much like to be able to say all this to Ava; even more so now that I’ve had some more sherry (!). But as I can’t, I write you, as I have taken to writing you periodically over the past decade, just as I always did when we were girls.

  Odd, the habits one keeps.

  You and I spent a good deal of time considering romance, I remember. All those hours pondering potentially “dirty” bits of All Quiet on the Western Front and Anna Karenina. All the juicy details you’d share about your moviehouse dates with Rudi Gerhardt. The long walks we’d take; talking and talking, stopping at Schloss-Konditorei for our daily Mohnkuchen. To be honest, in all the years since, I have never had another friendship that was quite that close, quite that effortless.

  It makes me sad, sometimes, to think of how naïve we both were then. How we had no way of seeing the events that would roll over us both and change our lives. Though again, I suppose it’s also more evidence for my theory: for as breathlessly as you loved Rudi for all those months, it could only have caused more heartbreak eventually. That is clear.

  There is news on Rudi, by the way: He’s still in prison, awaiting trial for some Aktion-related event in Russia or Hungary. I’m not sure when the date has been set for, but it will likely be quite some time yet. The backlog on these things is quite significant.

  Pausing, Ava peers over the page, at Renate’s face. But the old woman is staring at her books, her expression unreadable.

  I wish I could send you a picture of Ava. Apart from an unfortunate haircut at the moment—I truly fail to understand the current fashions!—she’s grown into a lovely young woman, though she seems to have absolutely no awareness of her own beauty. She’s not unlike you in that way, I think. I always felt as though for you, your looks were like a complex gadget you’d been given and never quite deduced how to operate. And in fact, she looks not unlike you: dark hair, large dark eyes, lovely glowing skin. She’s every bit as passionate about art as you were about books; when she begins to sketch or paint it’s as though time ceases to exist. Sometimes she falls asleep with her sketchbook under her cheek. Ever the restless sleeper myself these days, I’ll tiptoe in at three or four, cover her up and turn out her light.

  At this point, I should add (and I’ve just had some more sherry to steel myself) that the likeness between her and you is almost certainly more than coincidental. Because the truth is that you are related.

  The truth is that Franz is her father.

  (There, I have finally written it.)

  Ava pauses again, staring at the phrase—Franz ist ihr Vater—which had triggered such joyous shock earlier on in the day.

  Swallowing again, she reads on.

  I know you’d find this almost as shocking as I did, when I was finally faced with the truth. For months—years, really—I’d told myself that Ava’s father was the editor I went with while working at the BDM publications office, even though beneath it all I’m sure that this wasn’t even vaguely likely. Kai and I were still involved, yes. But he’d been away in the East for weeks when Ava was conceived. Still, it was Kai I wrote with the news of the pregnancy, and Kai’s name that I put on Ava’s birth certificate and ration forms. Had he survived the war, I suppose that it would also have been Kai whom I ended up marrying, adding yet one more lie to the pile I’d built my life on.

  But Kai died in the East, well before the end of the war. And the moment I picked Ava up at the orphanage I simply knew: the likeness I’d managed to overlook when she was a baby had become incontestable. It actually left me speechless at first.

  I have no doubt that you’d be speechless too, were you to read these words. And yet I think you always suspected my feelings for your brother, even if I tried to hide them from you. Nor did I ever think that they’d be more than that: feelings. Certainly not after the race laws forced me away from your family. But fate has a way of playing pranks on us sometimes, and this was a particularly dark one.

  Has Franz ever told you that I’d come to see him just a day or two before you left? I told him I’d come to see you, but I knew you wouldn’t be home. So when he answered the door I got him to invite me inside with some excuse I can’t remember, other than that it was something I was genuinely curious about.

  But the truth was that I’d been sent there by the Gestapo.

  I want to be clear that I did not do this willingly. I knew full well it was monstrous, and I loathed myself for it. But the Gestapo had pressured me in such a way that I could not refuse—or at least, that is how I saw it at the time. They sent me to determine whether Franz was still involved in his Socialist meetings, and to gather intelligence about when and where those meetings occurred, and the names of the other people who attended them. I did get some of this information, and my plan was originally to hold off delivering it until you were both out of the country. But they were waiting for me at our house the very night I returned from yours. I’d had no forewarning of the visit, and they obviously felt no need to share the reasoning behind it. But I must be as good a liar as you always said I was, because while they questioned me for hours, trying to trip me up, to trick me, to startle me with shouts and sudden stomps, I managed to stick to my story: that the next meeting was the following week, and that Franz would be in attendance and had agreed to bring me. I gave them the location, the time. When the time came, I reasoned, and he wasn’t there, I’d simply say that I hadn’t known he was leaving. That he’d lied.

  Luckily, though, they never did follow up about it—perhaps because my Lodz posting came through less than a day later, and less than a week later I was out of the country. Or maybe they had too many other Socialists to process after the raid. Or perhaps (and this is what I’d like to think) the whole thing was just a test, set up to prove or disprove my loyalty
. Either way, looking back, it remains in many ways both the best and the worst day of my life. The best, because it enabled me to spend one last moment not just with Franz, but with so many fond memories of and feelings for your home and your family. And worst because I came close to death at the hands of the Gestapo only hours later.

  Did Franz ever tell you what happened between us that afternoon? For some reason I think he did not. I think that, like me, perhaps he’s locked it away as something at once impossibly perfect and perfectly impossible. For my part, I have never told anyone. Not even Ava—or perhaps, especially not Ava. Not because I’m ashamed of her or her lineage, but because the story behind it is at once too personal and too painful. You see, for all your protestations that I was the brave one, I really am at heart a coward in the end.

  But I am hoping that someday I’ll be brave enough to tell her about it all: about Franz and you; about the good times we had as children and the harder times as young adults. Perhaps I’ll even be brave enough to find you both. And if so, who knows what might follow?…

  Ah. The hip-twitching American has been switched off; I just looked at the clock and saw the time. As usual I’ve gone on and on in a letter that most likely will never be read by anyone else. But also as usual, it leaves me with just a little less of that leaden, lonely feeling inside. As does the knowledge that even if you and Franz aren’t yet aware of it, Ava and I do still have family.

  Humbly yours,

  Ilsi

  Setting the letter in her lap, Ava closes her eyes for a moment. The truth, she repeats in silence, as she had earlier in her room, is that Franz is my father.

  And: The truth is that my mother killed him.

  For an instant there’s again that disorienting sense of falling in place; the sort of motionless plummet one feels in dreamt tumbles which end with waking, shocked and gasping, in bed. Ava covers her face with her hands. When she looks up again, it’s to find Renate Bauer staring at her. It’s not the gaze she’d worn while sharing her heart-stopping story, when her eyes seemed trained not on Ava but on some invisible screen between them, upon which played out the cataclysm she was relating.