“You always say that! You said that about why you work all the time! About why I can’t get new clothes! About why you can’t tell me about my father! I’m always going to be ‘too young.’ For anything!” I hate you, she almost added, but managed—barely—to hold it back. Still, Ilse’s eyes narrowed slightly. As though she’d heard it anyway.
“You’re not too young to learn one lesson,” she said coldly. “Very often, life will not be fair, and there will be nothing you will be able to do about it. Your best hope is to simply keep your nose clean and your mouth shut.”
“How clean is your nose?” Ava muttered.
If Ilse heard the challenge she opted to ignore it. “Speaking of keeping your mouth shut,” she said. “Frau Klepf’s note included one more fact. She wrote that you told the class that…” She hesitated. “That your father died in a camp.”
“A camp?”
Her mother’s jaw seemed to tighten. “A KZ,” she said.
Ava dropped her gaze to the table. “I didn’t know what else to say. Everyone else gave a job or the place their father died in. And I…I don’t even know what my father’s name was. All I know is that Oma and Opa told me he was a soldier somewhere. And that he was dead before I was born.”
For a moment, the only response was a distant-but-growing lowing: the grinding rise of a siren somewhere nearby. As it climbed in volume—a plaintive, raspy howl of pending catastrophe—the panic struck again; the sudden certainty that the walls and ceiling were not solid plaster and wood but were about to collapse on top of them like so much crumbling chalk. As the familiar sense of suffocation set in, Ava gripped her pencil with both hands, so hard her knuckles whitened beneath the skin. For a moment it actually felt as though her lungs couldn’t inflate; as though she might simply collapse herself right here, on the spot. Then the siren faded into the distance, and the terror moved on like the chilly shadow of a windblown cloud.
When Ava looked up she was expecting the familiar tight-lipped face look of disapproval. Instead she saw that Ilse had her blond head in her hands. Her shoulders shook. Ava realized with shock that she was crying.
“Mutti?” Standing, she softly touched her mother’s elbow.
For a moment, Ilse didn’t move. Then, shaking off her daughter’s hand she stood, wiping her eyes with her shirtcuffs. “Take your things upstairs, please,” she said, her voice strained. “I need to get started on dinner.”
“But…”
“Ava. Do I need to get the hairbrush?”
Ava felt her chin quiver. More upsetting than the familiar threat was the sense that a very rare window—one into her mother’s secret, true self—had just been cracked, and then quickly slammed shut. But Ava knew better than to try to pry it back open.
Blinking back tears, she began gathering her books and papers before making her way shakily to the door. Once there, though, she turned back again. “Mutti.”
Her mother was piling things onto the counter: an onion, a jar of tomatoes, a bag of meat.
“Just one question?”
“Nein.” Ilse set the onion on a cutting board. “We’ll discuss it when you are older.”
“Bitte. Can you just tell me—how did he really fall?”
Slowly, her mother turned around. “Was he really killed in battle, you mean?” Her silvery eyes were now rimmed in red—a contrast that was somehow unsettling.
Ava nodded.
Ilse hesitated again. Very slightly, she shook her head, and Ava’s heart gave a startled leap.
“Then he’s alive?” she said, breathlessly.
Her mother shut her eyes. “I will not have this discussion now,” she said, teeth gritted. “Go upstairs. This instant.”
“But…”
A sharp retort echoed abruptly through the room, making Ava jump in surprise. For a confused moment she somehow thought that her mother had been shot, before realizing Ilse had simply slammed shut the knife drawer.
“This instant!” It came out almost a howl.
Ava turned on her heel and ran to the front stairwell, the salty warmth blurring her vision so that she miscalculated where the step was and almost tripped. Trying to steady herself, she reached her hand out for the banister, barely missing the framed picture that perched beneath it: her and Ilse, shortly after her mother magically appeared at the Home of the Holy Mother. In the picture Ilse’s strong arms looped loosely around Ava’s skinny waist; her blond plaits tangled with Ava’s chestnut. Her smile was stiff; Ava’s face solemn, faintly confused. Reaching out, Ava ran a finger along the sculpted edge of the sterling silver frame.
Then, with equal deliberation, she swiped the whole picture off the table, sending it skittering the length of the polished oak before crashing onto the floor, the glass pane shattering into a dozen glinting, jagged pieces.
12.
Renate
1938
Renate races down Kronberger Straße, deploring Daphne du Maurier and buttoning her too-small coat against the chill.
It is the second time in four days that she’s completely missed her stop. On Friday, she’d caught the oversight almost immediately and got the driver to pull over, and so only had to run back a short way to school. Today, though, the number 8 made it halfway to Nikolassee before the conductor called out jovially over his shoulder. “Skipping class today, are we, Fräulein?” And even then, Renate was so immersed in Jack Favell’s evil plan to blackmail Max de Winter that she had to be called again before she caught on.
Cursing beneath her breath, she glances down at her wrist before remembering that she pawned her watch last week so she’d have money for Christmas presents. But given the spectral silence of the St. John church bells (which chime on the quarter hour) she calculates that it is at the earliest 8:03, and at the latest 8:18. Neither of which would matter if her first class weren’t English and her first teacher Herr Lawerenz.
A Great War veteran with a severe limp and a disposition so ferocious that he could shout down any Nazi instructor from Renate’s old school, Herr Lawerenz inspires raw terror in his overcrowded classrooms with a single bang of his walking stick. He has never been known to smile, though opinion is divided as to whether this sobriety reflects war trauma or the fact that he was simply born an Arschloch. He also seems to have taken more of a dislike to Renate than to his other students, though she can’t understand why. Her work in his class is strong; she contributes articulately to class discussions and always raises her hand before speaking. She even tries to make him smile, in part because after her last school experience she’s desperate to be liked by her teachers, but also for the simple challenge. Last Monday, for instance, when informed by him that her tardiness meant she’d missed his introduction to the English pluperfect, she pointed out that she’d been reading Gone with the Wind in the original English, and that it happened to be in the past tense. “So you see,” she’d said (in English), smiling in what she thought was a winning way, “I really haven’t missed anything at all.”
The class laughed. Herr Lawerenz did not. Instead, he slammed his cane on the parquet floor with such force that Renate half expected the wooden slats to shatter.
“Be late again,” he’d said ominously (and in German), “and you’ll find yourself facing suspension. And then we will see what you will miss.”
He then sent her straight to the headmistress’s office to contemplate her “arrogance.”
Happily, Doktor Goldschmidt, who is also the school’s founder, has both a sense of humor and a love of Margaret Mitchell. In fact, the Doktor admitted to just having finished Gone with the Wind herself, and she and Renate had a nice chat about America’s civil war and dark history of slavery before walking back to Herr Lawerenz’s class together, where the Doktor urged Herr Lawerenz to accept Renate’s sincerest apology.
Now flying through the wintry garden grounds behind the school (the bac
k entrance is less conspicuous and also tends to be unmonitored), Renate knows that the consequences might be far worse this time. If Herr Lawerenz does call for her suspension, what if even Doktor Goldschmidt is unable to change his mind? And if Renate is suspended, what if she then doesn’t have enough time to prepare for her university-qualifying Abitur exam? That, after all, was the whole point of coming here after leaving Bismarck last spring. Not only is the Jüdische Schule: Doktor Leonore Goldschmidt the only Jewish school in Berlin authorized to administer the exam, but it gives it in both English and German. At thirty-seven marks a month it is also expensive—she is only here because they gave her a scholarship. If she wastes this opportunity her parents will be furious.
She bursts through the double glass doors of the converted villa that, rumor has it, once housed Imperial family members and now houses some seven hundred banished Jewish students. Renate’s mouth is dry and sour-tasting; her heart feels as though it has a violent case of the hiccups. Struggling to catch her breath, she jogs past the closed classroom doors in the school’s East Wing, shrugging off her coat as she discards possible alibis: My mother needed help at the Jewish Hospital last night and we got home late. (No good: she’d need a note.) The tram broke down. (Too easy to disprove.) I left my Kennkarte at home and had to go back for it. That one is a little more plausible. The penalty for being caught without the mandatory identification card is stiff, even more so if it bears a glaring red J on its cover.
Reaching the classroom at last, Renate roots through her satchel for the document while listening for Herr Lawerenz’s gravel-filled voice. To her surprise, though, she doesn’t hear his voice at all. What she hears instead is the tense hum of fifty-odd students sounding very much unattended.
Which she discovers, as she opens the door, they are.
As always, the battered classroom is packed to bursting—not just with dozens of displaced Jewish youth, but with the jittery energy of a student body that has no idea what its near future might hold. Almost every family enrolled here is trying to emigrate or get its children onto a Kindertransport, though between the mountainous paperwork, extortionate departure fees, and endless waitlists for visas and ocean passage, the odds of escaping Germany are slight and getting slimmer. When it does happen, though, it happens quickly—students simply disappear, and are quickly replaced by others struggling against the same odds.
Today, though, Renate senses a darker element in the mood, which offsets her initial relief at not facing Herr Lawerenz. The atmosphere is not unlike that following the Anschluss last spring, when she came in to a hurricane of heated whispers about Viennese Jews scrubbing sidewalks with their own toothbrushes. Or after July’s Evian Conference, when nation after nation expressed sympathy for German Jews but kept their borders resolutely closed. (Jews for Sale, Der Stürmer gloated the following day. Who Wants Them? No One!)
“What’s happening?” she asks Bernhard Bhär, a pink-faced boy with red acne scars on his cheeks, whom the others have nicknamed Piglet. “Where is Herr Lawerenz?”
“Meeting,” he says. “They’re all in a meeting.”
“About what?”
He looks at her as though she’s asked him if the sky is blue. “You haven’t heard?”
When she shakes her head he rolls his eyes, his face assuming a by-now familiar expression that roughly translates as: Don’t you ever pay attention to anything?
“The pogroms,” he says.
“What pogroms? Where?”
“Everywhere. Here, even. Good God, Bauer. Did you wear a blindfold to school? Didn’t you see the Hitlerjugend out front?”
“I came in the back,” she falters, wondering instinctively whether she might have missed Rudi.
“They’ve been setting synagogues on fire,” he says.
“What?”
“I hear they’re destroying Jewish shops and beating the owners,” adds Kinge Lehmann, looking up from one of the five newspapers on his desk. Wire-thin and plagued by asthma, he reads the Nazi press obsessively.
“I’ve heard they’ve thrown people from windows,” chimes in Piglet’s best friend who is nicknamed Pooh, though his real name is Rolf Sumner.
“Which ‘they’?” asks Renate. “The SS?”
“Along with the Gestapo and the Hitlerjugend. But pretty much everyone who’s not a Jew themselves is falling in behind them.” Kinge shakes his head in amazement. “You really missed it all? You didn’t see any of this on your way here? The smoke? The crowds?”
“I…” Renate feels her face heat. The only thing she noticed was that the car seemed quieter and less crowded than usual. And, of course, that she’d entirely missed her stop. “But why?”
“The Dwarf’s got the papers saying it’s a ‘spontaneous uprising’ of the people to protest vom Rath’s murder. But no one is buying it. They’re saying the people in charge are Sturmtruppen wearing civilian clothes.”
“Wolves, sheep, et cetera,” Pooh adds darkly.
“And spontaneous my ass,” says Kinge. “They have government lists of every Jewish business and residence in the city. And it’s happening all over the country. I hear in Munich they’ve told all Jews to leave by sundown.”
“What, like the sheriff in a Karl May novel?” Renate asks, but no one laughs.
She sinks into her seat, struggling to process. Dwarf means Propaganda Minister Goebbels (one of the many pleasures of her new school is that one can speak ill of the Party without worrying about repercussions). Ernst vom Rath is the German diplomat shot the other morning in Paris by a Polish Jew barely older than she is. Renate hadn’t realized vom Rath had died, though. Chewing on one of her braids, she tries to remember more from the BBC broadcast the family had surreptitiously listened to. She wishes she hadn’t been reading Rebecca under the table.
Kinge, meanwhile, is quoting from the Völkischer Beobachter: “We shall no longer tolerate a situation where hundreds of thousands of Jews within our territory control entire streets of shops, throng places of public entertainment, and pocket the wealth of German leaseholders as ‘foreign’ landlords while their racial brothers incite war against Germany and shoot down German officials…” Usually he reads Party news in a whining and sycophantic voice. Now, though, he reads it straight. And he sounds worried. “That’s from last night,” he says, looking up. “They planned it all. My uncle’s wine shop in Munich was smashed to bits. Every bottle.”
“Same with my father’s friend in Leipzig,” says Piglet. “He has a shoe store there.” Looking apologetically at Renate, he adds: “They took shits in all of the shoes.”
Revolted, Renate covers her ears and turns away, searching the rest of the classroom for some sign that the boys are lying, or at least exaggerating; some sign that her life isn’t about to take another of the sickening jolts for the worse that have periodically marked the last three years. Please, she prays wordlessly, to No One in Particular. Please don’t let it happen again.
As if in answer, the door flies opens and Herr Lawerenz limps in, his cane pounding the floor with even more vehemence than usual, his gray hair sticking up on his head in two places, like tufted horns on a crochety fawn.
“Achtung!” he bellows.
As feared as he is, it normally takes the teacher at least two tries to get the jittery classroom to quiet down. Now, though, the silence is so sudden and so complete that Renate hears a bird chirp chidingly from a distant tree. Even the instructor seems momentarily taken aback: his rheumy eyes widen behind his spectacles. But he quickly recovers.
“All right, then,” he snaps. “Pack up your bags.”
Baffled, the students exchange glances.
“For the day?” asks Piglet finally.
“No, for a holiday,” the instructor growls. “Yes, for the day. You are all being sent home. Doktor Goldschmidt has determined that it’s not safe for the school to remain in session.”
As the buzz starts up again he slams his cane against the floor. “However.”
He waits as the room falls silent once more. “You must go out the back entrance, not the front. Do not all go at once. Avoid large groups. Find a partner, and go two-by-two. Two-by-two. Out the back. Do you understand?”
“Why can’t we go in groups?” asks Kinge.
“You’ll make for too obvious a target.”
“A target?” Renate repeats, incredulous.
The question is lost in the flurry of papers being hastily pushed back into satchels, of chairs being pushed back from the desks. Someone in the back shouts: “When is the Mann essay due?”
“When school resumes.”
“When will that be?” asks Renate, thinking again about her exam.
He just shrugs. “You’ll be notified.”
“How about the smaller children?” someone asks. “How are they getting home?”
“Some of their parents have already fetched them. If necessary, the Doktor is prepared to take the rest home with her driver. You just worry about yourselves.”
For a moment he glares at them each in turn. A little uncertainly, Renate raises her hand.
“Yes, Fräulein Bauer,” he says, looking pained.
Renate licks her lips, almost afraid to repeat the question. “What are we too easy a target for?”
Something in his expression shifts. And suddenly, he doesn’t look so much furious and vengeful as tired, and brittle, and even strangely fragile.
“Just get home,” he says. “Go straight home. No loitering. No stopping. No talking to strangers. No matter what. Am I understood?”
Renate nods. But her heart is pounding again. Not because she is terrified by her teacher but because it dawns on her that he—a veteran of the Kaiser’s war, held captive by the Russians, twice decorated for bravery, is terrified. He is clearly terrified for them all.
* * *
They ride the tram car like frozen players in a game of statues: two standing in the front, two in the back. Two seated on each bench on either side. Though they’d left the school in pairs they’d all ended up at the same stop within minutes. When the first tram came along they’d hesitated for just a moment before clambering on together in silence. Now they don’t speak with or even look at one another, or any of the other dozen-odd riders in the carriage. Renate can’t help thinking that anyone seeing them could deduce the truth at a glance: that they are students, out of school, on a regular school day. In other words, that they are in all likelihood Jewish. She is almost tempted to point it out: how silly they all must look, sitting stiff and pale in frightened silence. But as the tram squeals and hums toward Charlottenburg no one will even so much as catch her gaze.
Wunderland Page 25
