Sacrifices have to be made to secure the future of our nation.
And in the end, isn’t that what matters—Germany’s future? Working together in order to make it great? Isn’t that far and away more important than my naïvely girlish ideas of romance?
As I write this, I am realizing anew that it is for the same reason—Germany’s needs, and my commitment to meeting those needs—that I had to sever our friendship in the way that I did. For whatever our shared history, and whatever promises and plans we made, the facts remain irrevocable: First, that you are a Jew. Second, that your family also has unapologetic ties to Socialism: Not only was your mother’s father a former leader of the Socialist party, but your brother has attended Socialist meetings and even held them in your very home. In fact, as far as I know he is continuing to attend and hold them now.
So in the end, you are really an enemy of the nation on not just one, but on two counts. And that is precisely why I must not send this.
In fact, as I leaf through these pages now I can see that it really wasn’t even you to whom I was writing in the first place. Rather, I was writing a kind of ghost; the ghost of a friendship that has long since died. The ghost of who I thought you were, and who I truly am now.
Because the truth is, I long ago wrote you out of my life.
Ilse
Setting down her pencil, Ilse pauses for a moment, reading and rereading her last line.
Then, very carefully, she picks up the pages in one hand and her candle in the other. Carrying both over to the metal basin where she washed the dinner dishes last night (in penance for being late), she holds the candle to the corner edge of the missive until it catches. Then she drops the whole thing into the sink, watching dispassionately as it turns to ash before her eyes.
11.
Ava
1949
“She’s a housewife,” declared the boy two rows up from Ava’s seat in the back of the classroom. “And my father is an accountant.”
“Gut,” said Frau Klepf. “And do you know what an accountant does, Klaus?”
“He does sums with other people’s money.”
The teacher smiled, displaying yellowing teeth. “Something like that. You may sit. Next?”
A girl in the second-grade section leapt up, and Ava felt herself shrink in her seat. She’d been dreading the first day of Grundschule enough before walking in and discovering she’d have to “talk a little about her family” before the class. Now she found herself wishing she could simply sink below the earth so that when her turn came, the teacher would skip her.
“Abbi Schumer,” the second-grader piped, her looped braids swinging slightly. “I have a baby sister whose name is Marte. She cries all the time. My father owns a candy shop on Hochofenstraße. Mother’s a Hausfrau too, but she’d rather have a job.”
“Is that so.”
“Ja. She says she only doesn’t because Vati is a caveman.”
The classroom erupted with hushed giggles, and someone grunted gutturally—Ooga-Booga! Ava kept her eyes glued to her desk. Its wooden surface was worn and battered and—despite traces of frequent sandings—still tagged with symbols, phrases, and initials: mysterious messages for the future from pupils past. Tracing one with her forefinger (L.G.N. + G.F.R. = W.L.f. I.) she wondered whether, decoded, it might instruct her on what to say when her turn came. Experimentally, she gave it a try: My mother is a magazine editor. My father…
Nothing came: no self-forming thought finished the phrase in her head. No miraculous epiphany transmitted itself from the old wood into the whorled surface of her fingertip.
Before her to the left a girl in a crisp seersucker dress was standing. “Lotte Reinhardt,” she was saying. “My mum is a dressmaker.” (Of course she is, Ava thought, glancing glumly down at her own patched and worn frock.) “I have one brother. He’s a bother. He’s named Frederick, after my father.”
Frau Klepf smiled. “You may find him less bothersome now that you won’t be spending all your time together this year. And what does your father do?”
“He was a Generalleutnant.” Lotte paused. Then, lowering her voice: “He fell in Stalingrad.”
The teacher nodded. But she didn’t press for further details, or say my condolences as she had when first-rower Jeni Gruenbaum tearfully noted that her mother had recently died of stomach cancer. In fact, she hadn’t pressed for details on any of the fathers who were reportedly felled by the War. Fell, Ava noted, being the word they’d all used. As though they’d all just toppled over like wooden soldiers.
They were on the row right in front of Ava’s now; she felt her palms prickle with sweat. Eins, zwei, drei: six more desks to her turn.
Mein-Vater-mein-Vater-mein-Vater…Still nothing. She slumped a little deeper in her chair, intending to keep both her eyes and her head down until the very last possible moment. Barely a moment later, though, something high and tinny in the teacher’s tone made her look up again.
“A camp?” Frau Klepf was repeating. “You say she died in a camp?”
The gangly boy she was addressing—Ava had missed his name—was standing in a way that suggested he’d rather be doing anything else: his sharp shoulders hunched forward, his chin tucked into his chest. His fists clenched at the ends of his bony arms.
“Yes,” he said. “Auschwitz.” He shuffled his feet. “That’s a KZ,” he added, still speaking to the floor.
“I’m aware.” Frau Klepf sounded slightly breathless. “So your mother was an…was employed by this place?”
“Employed?” The boy blinked at her. “You mean like working there for money?”
Flushing slightly, the teacher nodded her head.
Placing a finger on the taped-up bridge of his glasses, the boy pushed them further up on his nose. “No,” he said shortly.
Frau Klepf waited a moment. When he said nothing more she cleared her throat. “Well, Ulrich,” she said. “I’m very sorry for your loss. You may sit.”
As the boy slumped back into his chair Ava studied the neatly shaven back of his head. It looked both soft and prickly, like a porcupine’s belly; if she were to draw it she’d do it with a series of short, dark lines and dots. She didn’t know what KZ stood for, but she knew it was one of those terms that—like the War, the Defeat, the Russians—only surfaced in very serious adult conversations.
“Who is next?” Frau Klepf asked brightly, even though it was obvious since they were going in order.
As the next two students went (Lena, Max, only children, Hausfrau, judge, baker, banker), Ava wiped her palms against the skirt of the let-out-both-ways dress and willed her jackhammer heart to be quiet. My father is…What on earth could she say? She couldn’t tell them the truth, that she didn’t know who her father was, beyond that he’d been a soldier and had died. She could maybe just say he’d fallen, as a dozen other students had. But then she’d have to say where he’d fallen, and she didn’t know, and she couldn’t trust herself to repeat any of the strange-sounding names (Stalingrad? Kursk? Voronezh?) correctly—much less convincingly. Particularly given how nervous she was, and that nervousness made her say things she didn’t really mean to say, like Yes, thank you when someone had just asked her name, or You as well when they’d asked how she was. It was almost as if she were missing some magic incantation or charm that made chatting so natural and easy for most people. She’d tried to tell her mother about this, but Ilse had dismissed it with an “Ach, there’s that colorful imagination of yours again.” As though Ava’s imagination were a gaudy and unwelcome guest.
As the girl next to her rattled off that her father was a dentist and her mother a dental hygienist, another thought struck: if Ava convinced herself she was invisible, she actually would be by the time her turn came. I am air, she told herself, squeezing her eyes shut. I am empty air in a chair. You can see right through me to the window.
<
br /> But as the dental duo’s daughter sat back, Frau Klepf was already launching into her query: “Und am Ende, we have…?”
Air, Ava thought.
But even as she thought it she could feel them: thirty-odd curious gazes brushing like hovering bees against her clearly-still-very-visible skin.
She opened her eyes.
“Ava,” she murmured.
The teacher frowned. “Ava what? And please stand.”
Reluctantly, she clambered to her feet. “Von Fischer.”
“I’m certainly very pleased to meet you, Ava,” said Frau Klepf, in the shiny voice grown-ups use when they really are saying I’m a grown-up and you’re certainly not. “Can you tell us a little bit about your family?”
Family, Ava thought. As usual, she had trouble connecting the term to herself. She and her mother were related, of course, and yet as a unit they somehow felt less “familial” than simply pragmatic: as though they’d been assigned slots in the same living space.
“My mother is, ah, a writer and editor,” Ava said, scuffing her right calf with the worn toe of her left shoe. “For Burda. That’s a women’s magazine.”
“Ah!” beamed the teacher. “I read Burda! And do you know what she writes about?”
“Women’s issues.” It came out more like a question.
“And could you tell us what, exactly, ‘women’s issues’ might be?”
And of course, Ava could have. She could have mentioned keeping house like a proper German housewife, and cooking wholesome meals on a tight budget. She could have told them about refurbishing one’s husband’s Wehrmacht jacket into a child’s winter overcoat, or repurposing old Hakenkreuz flags into cheerful holiday coasters. Or letting one’s daughter’s dresses out in both directions in order to make them last another year. She could have spoken about Ilse’s advice column, entitled Liebe Tante even though as far as Ava knew Ilse had no aunts and wasn’t one herself.
Instead, she said: “If you really read Burda you’d already know what they are.”
The hush that fell on the room was so cotton-thick that she all but felt it on the top of her head.
“That,” said Frau Klepf slowly, “is a very good example of how one ought not speak to one’s teacher. On any other day, in fact, I’d be forced to consider whether punishment might be in order.” She turned her gaze to the far classroom corner, and for the first time Ava noticed the branch there, casually propped in the crevice where the two gray walls met. Stripped and supple and thin as a whip. She had heard of children being switched by parents, though her own mother preferred the back of her paddle-shaped hairbrush, applied with expert aim and efficiency.
“Given, however,” the teacher continued, “that it is our very first day, I am prepared to make some exceptions. Ava, would you like to try that answer again? Politely, and with the respect due to an elder?”
A bead of sweat started a slow, tickling journey down the center of Ava’s spine. “She writes about housekeeping. And—and other things.”
“Thank you. And the rest of your family? Brothers? Sisters?”
Ava shook her head slowly, thinking bitte-nein-bitte-nein-bitte-nein. But inevitably, Frau Klepf did. “And your father?”
“He…” Ava swallowed. “He…”
“I’m sorry, Ava. I didn’t catch that.”
“He fell,” Ava mumbled, only slightly louder.
“He fell in battle?”
“He fell…he fell in a KZ.”
“A KZ?” Frau Klepf seemed caught off-guard by the statement. “Do you know where?”
Ava shook her head numbly. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about him at all. Except for that he fell.”
She stared at the sand-colored wooden floor as shocked giggling and rustling arose softly around her. It dawned on her that she actually hated her mother—really hated her—for keeping the truth locked away like this. As though by not telling Ava anything she was somehow protecting her, when in fact it was the opposite of protection.
When she looked up again, Frau Klepf was studying her with a look much like the one Ilse had worn when Ava showed her a dead pigeon on the street. “Very well.” She sighed. “You may sit.”
Ava sank into her chair, her limbs rubbery with relief. But as the teacher turned toward the blackboard, she was also aware, deep in her belly, of just the slightest sense of letdown. It was the same feeling she got when her mother listened to her without seeming to hear her, or looked at her without seeming to see her. At those times Ava felt as invisible as the magically cloaked prince in the Dancing Princesses story. At those times, she felt like a ghost in her own life.
* * *
In the afternoon they were given a half hour in the garden, which was less a garden than a big dirt square filled with cigarette butts and rubble. As the other children picked out rocks for goal markers and one another for teammates, Ava hung back, half hopeful, half intimidated. She had no real sports skills beyond skipping rope, and had had little chance to build any up, since after one dismally failed conscription into a neighborhood snowball fight she never played with other children on her block. But the possibility of being included was tempting enough that she lingered as the others organized themselves—at least, until one of the boys called out: “Hey you! Bastard smartmouth! Was your missing dad a baller?”
“Didn’t you hear her?” someone else hooted back. “She doesn’t know anything about him!”
Face burning, Ava scuttled in the opposite direction. She wasn’t sure where she was going until she all but tripped right onto it: a flat, large rock beneath a dead-looking oak tree.
Sinking down, she pulled from her pocket a pencil stub and her little sketchbook, then paged through to the picture she’d started the prior night. It showed a girl roughly her own age, roughly resembling herself (lean-limbed, sharp-chinned, straight dark hair in two braids). Except that while Ava was sitting cross-legged on a big flat piece of granite, the sketchpad girl was hurling herself into a well. Or, more specifically, poised on the rocky rim of the well, contemplating its moist and murky depths. It had taken hours to get the body position right, using as a model her only doll (chipped and bisque-headed, named for the nation stamped upon its back). The well was based on a soup bowl against which Ava had painstakingly propped “Japan” after stripping her down to her tiny knickers.
Now it was time for the face.
Ava chewed on her pencil tip, which tasted woody and salty and strangely comforting as always. What kind of expression would a girl wear if her own mother had ordered her to jump into a deep, dark well, and possibly drown?
Shutting her eyes, she tried to summon it: the moment, the feeling. The fear. A mineral tang of shale and cement; a green algae hint. For the barest of moments, the footballers’ shrieks and calls faded, and along with them the morning’s sticky anxiety, the hot shame of her exposure as a “smartmouth” and a bastard within less than three hours of the starting bell. Instead she was almost there: in the half world that might actually exist between dingy Bremen and glimmering Grimm. The air around her quivering the way water shivers and glistens before parting before her…
“Are you asleep?”
Startling, Ava popped her eyes open to see Ulrich Something-or-Other, the boy whose mother really had died in a KZ. Ulrich stood directly in front of her, a battered paperback beneath his arm and somber curiosity on his face.
“Of course not,” she said, quickly covering her notebook. Go away.
Instead he drew closer, pushing his glasses up again in that same anxious, jerky fashion that Ava suddenly identified as intensely annoying. “What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
“Drawing.” He said it almost gently, as though introducing her to the concept. “The question is, what are you drawing?”
She glowered down at his f
eet. His boots were worn straight through at the toe: she could make out a striped sock. On closer examination, the sock also had a hole in it, revealing a single, dirt-mooned toenail.
“A girl,” she said, begrudgingly.
“What sort of a girl?”
“A girl jumping into a well.” Like you should.
“Why would she want to do that?”
She glared up again, preparing herself for ridicule. But behind the fraying wad of tape and the scratched spectacle lenses his eyes weren’t mocking. They were mahogany-dark with greenish-gold flecks in them. They were curious.
“She dropped her spindle in it,” she said cautiously. “Her mother makes her go back to get it. And when she does, she finds the world down there is much better than the one up here.”
He rocked back and forth on his feet. “Well, that’s splendid,” he said thoughtfully. “I’d sure like to find a better world underground.”
Ava scrutinized his face again, but it still appeared guileless. He was even nodding slowly to himself now, as though the idea of a wondrous land inside a well made such perfect sense he was wondering why he hadn’t thought of it himself.
“So what kind of place is it, down there?” he asked, taking a seat next to her.
“A beautiful meadow with butterflies. Talking bread and apple trees. A lady who showers her with gold.”
“All underwater?”
She hadn’t thought about this. “No. I think the meadow and everything is under the water—the next level down. But not actually inside the water.”
Wunderland Page 23
