Which is true, she reminds herself. She has never been as good a liar as Ilse. But she knows instinctively that at this moment, it is her father’s life that very likely depends on what she says next and how she says it. She stares up at the drunken stormtrooper, hoping desperately that she looks as authoritative as Ilse. “My father was baptized at the First Lutheran Church on Friedrichstraße.”
She casts a quick glance at her mother, who has taken advantage of the interruption to yank herself away from the two men who were holding her. Lips set in a tight line, Lisbet Bauer makes a beeline for her husband and pulls him from his tormentor. Her father’s face is the color of chalk. They must have taken him from his bed straight to the street, as he is wearing nothing but the drawers and white cotton vest in which he sleeps at night. Renate’s throat tightens as she takes in the spattered blood. But while numerous, the spots at least don’t appear to be growing. She desperately hopes that this means that his wounds are superficial, unlike those of some of the men she’s seen on her way home.
“You’re the daughter?”
The boy speaking is the one who seems to be here with Ilse, given how close to her he is standing. He strikes her as almost unnervingly young, his face and torso still padded with childish fat, his dark eyes long-lashed like Franz’s.
She nods. “Yes.”
The boy looks at Ilse. “You know her too, Ida?”
Ida? Renate glances at Franz. He gives a faint nod.
“Absolutely,” says Ilse. “I’m telling you. I’ve known all of them for years.”
“I don’t think she knows her ankle from her Arschloch,” says the boy who is still holding Franz’s arms.
Another round of chuckles, but the sound is uneasy now. And the boy in the leather coat doesn’t even smile.
“It’s easy enough to clear up,” he says, and turns to Renate. “Go get his Kennkarte.”
Renate’s heart lurches. But before she can respond her mother is answering: “He’s had to apply for a new one. He dropped the old one in the water at Wannsee when we went boating there last month.”
She rattles off the mistruth with the same calm, commanding tone she uses to dispatch orderlies at the Jewish Hospital. Renate holds her breath as the boy turns to her father.
“This is true?”
Otto Bauer looks dazedly from his questioner to his wife. “Is what true?” he asks, slowly.
Oh God, Renate thinks. Not now. Please. Over the past months, as his work has dried up, his post and pension remain revoked, and even his beloved typewriter and bicycle have been confiscated (Jews are no longer allowed either), her father has been increasingly prone to periods of unresponsiveness. Her mother says it’s a symptom of his melancholia, that it will get better once life returns to normal. Renate knows better than to ask when that will be.
To Ilse, he looks as bewildered as a young child, the way her grandfather looked last year as he began to forget even the face and name of his own wife. “That your Kennkarte was lost in a lake,” she repeats loudly, encouragingly.
He looks at her and his eyes narrow, as though he’s trying to place a once-familiar face. Please don’t say my name, she prays.
He licks his lips, clears his throat. “Yes,” he says, in a weak, shaky voice. “In the lake.”
Ilse exhales silently in relief.
Max still looks uncertain. Stepping closer, he leans in and whispers to her. “You’re sure about this, aren’t you? You could end up in a camp if you’re wrong.”
Ilse’s mouth goes dry. She hadn’t thought about that part, any more than she’d thought about what she was doing when she ran into the group. But she makes herself nod. “I’m absolutely positive.” Her pulse racing, she turns back to Jock. “Why don’t you go find some real Jews to arrest. I hear there are plenty of them on this block.”
The stormtrooper scowls, his thick fingers twitching on the blade’s handle. For a moment Ilse fears he’s going to challenge her again. But he doesn’t, instead shoving his knife back into its holster and tucking it into his belt.
“All right,” he tells the group gruffly. “Let’s go.”
“Scheisse.” The boy holding Franz releases him, though not before giving him a small shove. Deprived of his cane, Renate’s brother staggers and falls before slowly climbing to his feet. As the thugs drift away, Renate’s mother gives a small sob; she flings her arms around her husband. “Are you all right? My God. Let me see.”
“It’s nothing,” Renate’s father mumbles.
“It’s not nothing. Come inside. If you need stitches we’ll need to call Doktor Strauss.” Pulling his arm over her shoulders and smearing her own blouse with blood in the process, Renate’s mother leads her husband slowly back into the house, though not before giving Ilse another look that feels so loaded she might as well have shot it out of a rifle.
A moment later she and her husband are slowly taking the steps together as Ilse stares at the ground.
“Well,” says Max. “That was interesting.”
She looks up again, startled: she’d almost forgotten he was still here. “It makes no sense to spend our energies on the wrong people,” she says, as diffidently as she can manage. “It just takes away from the mission.”
He shrugs. “Do you still need a ride home?”
The thought of a ride is intensely tempting; her legs are still trembling so much from exhaustion and relief that merely walking to the U-Bahn from here seems daunting. Still, she shakes her head. “I should stay here and make sure they don’t lodge a complaint. That would cause more unnecessary paperwork for everyone.” Though what she’s really thinking is that if he drives her to her house, he’ll know her address, and once he has that, it’s a quick step to finding out her real name. Of course, if he asks Kai about her at any point the ruse will be up just as quickly. For now, though, Ilse is too drained to think that possibility through.
“All right,” he says. He hovers awkwardly for a moment. “Is it all right if I call you tomorrow?”
“Call me?” She blinks up at him.
He clears his throat, flushing slightly. “Just in case you need more information. For your story.”
“Oh,” she says. “Right.” A bizarre urge to laugh sweeps her; she has to struggle to keep her face straight. “I’ll call you,” she manages. “We don’t have a phone at the moment.”
“I’ll give you my number.”
She nods, silently retrieving her notebook and pen and handing them over to him, waiting as he scrawls the digits. As he hands the book back he gives her the stiffly formal salute. “Heil Hitler.”
“Heil Hitler,” she responds.
As he walks briskly back to his bike she watches him go, uncomfortably aware of Franz’s and Renate’s eyes on her. There is nothing between us, she wants to tell them. But of course, that isn’t true. Not at all. The smashing and the burning, the bloodying and the brick-throwing: it’s all bigger than anything she’s experienced in her life, including the unpleasant hours spent in Hauptsturmführer Wainer’s flabby arms in Dam-Großer. And it will always be there between them, she realizes numbly. No matter what happens from here. Or what he thinks her name is.
For an instant she wishes she’d accepted the offer of a ride; it would be so much easier to simply roar off in a cloud of smoke. But she makes herself turn back toward her former friends.
“That was extraordinary.”
Standing next to Renate, Franz leans on his cane as he stares at her. There is a strange look on his face, as though he’s trying to read her face in the distance, or in rain.
Ilse looks away. “It was nothing,” she says, stiffly.
“Don’t be ridiculous. You just saved my father’s life. And very possibly put yourself in real danger.”
She shrugs, though at danger her heart skitters within her rib cage. She drops her gaze to her noteboo
k. “They’ll be back, you know.”
“I know.” He holds her gaze for a moment as the BMW’s engine starts up at the curb with a cough. “Thank you,” he says, simply.
Turning, he begins to limp toward the door.
Renate remains where she is. For a moment they just look at one another.
“Ida Fuchs,” she says, finally. “I didn’t think I’d hear from her again.”
“Me neither.” Despite herself, Ilse smiles. “Turns out she’s not all bad in the end.”
Renate smiles back—a weak curve of her full lips that makes Ilse’s throat constrict again.
“I feel like I need to thank you,” Renate continues. “But I can’t…I can’t think of the right words.”
“Don’t thank me. Just leave,” Ilse says tightly. “All of you. There’s no place for you here now.”
“We’re trying.” Renate’s voice catches slightly. “We’ve been on the waitlist for American visas for over two years. We’ve applied to five other countries as well. No one will take us.”
The hurt and helplessness on her face hit Ilse in the chest the way her brick had hit the baker they’d visited as friends. Ilse fiddles with the bag’s buckle, trying to keep her composure. “It was just this once,” she says, in a low voice. “I can’t do it again.” She hesitates miserably, before adding: “I have to go.”
Renate swallows. “Me too,” she says. But she remains rooted to the spot, and Ilse feels her chocolate eyes locked on her back as she turns in the direction of the U-Bahn.
Keep walking, she tells herself.
But after a few steps she stops and looks back. “I wrote you a letter,” she says.
Renate blinks. “When?”
“When I was in the East.”
“I didn’t get it,” says Renate slowly.
“I didn’t send it,” says Ilse.
“Why not?” The look on Renate’s face—confusion mixed with hope—actually almost hurts to see. Because we can’t be friends, Ilse thinks. Because I miss you too much. Because you are what’s wrong with everything.
“Leave,” she repeats.
And turning on her heel, she walks away.
15.
Ava
1946
“You know she’s dead,” said Maja. Her black eyes danced as she stood on tiptoe, holding the crumpled paper just out of Ava’s reach. “She was probably raped and killed by the Ivans. You know that, right?”
“Give it back,” said Ava, and leapt again, in futility. She didn’t know what rape meant, except that it was awful and hurt a lot, and that it had happened to some of the other girls at the orphanage. One of them, Katje, had only been five. After arriving at the Children’s Home of the Holy Mother Katje hadn’t made a sound for a whole week. But the first time she saw the orphanage’s Ami supervisors—Kapitän Ron and Leutnant Tommy—she screamed and screamed until she outright fainted.
“Well, do you?” Maja said now. “Answer me.”
“She wasn’t,” said Ava. Thinking: I will not cry.
“She was,” said Maja, and reaching out she gave Ava’s shoulder a shove. Behind her, Hanne Rossing and Anja Blum watched, their eyes shining.
“She was,” Maja repeated. “Probably by a hundred of them at once. Big, stinky, dirty Russians. They probably split her apart so she looked like a slab of meat. And then they left her naked and bleeding in the snow, to die.”
She shoved Ava again, hard enough this time to make her stagger. As Ava caught her balance her tongue caught in her teeth. The sick-sweet taste of blood triggered nausea and a hot rush of tears. She squeezed her eyes shut, but the droplets spilled out anyway, converging in stinging, salty tracks down her cheeks.
“Awww,” said Maja, delighted. “Is Babypisse bawling?” Babypisse was the nickname she’d given Ava the first day she’d arrived here, when she’d discovered Ava still sometimes wet the bed.
Behind her, Hanne and Anja screeched with laughter.
“Look at this thing,” Maja added. Ava opened her eyes to see Maja mockingly waving her drawing, back and forth. It was supposed to have been of a Banane, an item Ava had never seen in real life but had seen pictures of in books and magazines.
“It looks like a cock,” Maja declared. “A big yellow Ivan cock. Auf Wiedersehen, Ivan.”
And with a flourish, she tore the picture in half.
* * *
“She’s just jealous,” Ava’s friend Greta said later, as she brushed and parted Ava’s hair for Presentation.
“But why is she jealous?” Ava sniffled, then wiped her nose on her sleeve.
“Stand still,” Greta chastised, and yanked the brush down for emphasis. “She’s jealous because you have a mother and she doesn’t.” Dividing the left side into three parts, Greta started to braid, pausing to check her work from both sides in the mirror. They were in the washroom, where the older girl—Ava’s one self-proclaimed ally at Holy Mother—had just helped Ava splash her face with cold water.
“But no one knows where my mother is,” said Ava. A slab of meat. Naked and bleeding. She tried to black the words out of her mind the way she blacked out mistakes in her drawings.
“But not knowing is still so much better than knowing for sure that she’s dead.”
As she tied off the first braid and started on the other, a brief somberness clouded Greta’s Delft shepherdess features. Ava knew she was thinking about her own parents. After Greta’s father was called to the war, her mother had taken Greta and her younger brother to the East to escape the Berlin bombings. But then the war ended, and the Russians came, and all the Germans had to run away. Greta’s mother led them on the long, hard trip back to Düsseldorf, sometimes in crowded, smelly trains that stopped for hours and had no toilets or seats. Sometimes simply walking. It was while they were walking, Greta said, that the Russians had raped her mother and made her so sick that she finally died. Meanwhile, her father had been shot at the Russian front.
“You still have hope,” she said now, finishing the second braid with a gentle tug. “She doesn’t.”
“Someone might still adopt her.”
“No one will.”
“How do you know?”
“The same way I know your mother’s alive. I just do.”
Turning Ava to face her, the older girl surveyed the younger for a moment. Pulling out a tattered handkerchief from her skirt pocket, she licked a corner and rubbed a spot above Ava’s mouth, and Ava kept herself statue still. She knew it made more sense to try to look as unkempt as possible for Presentation, since she certainly didn’t want to be picked for adoption. But having Greta fuss over her—having anyone fuss over her—made Ava’s insides glow in a way that was nearly as nice as actually having a full stomach.
“There,” her friend said at last, tucking the handkerchief away. “You look beautiful.”
“No, I don’t.” Ava looked at herself quickly in the mirror, taking in her pale, pinched face, her sunken eyes, her arms and legs that looked like white toothpicks. “But you do. You always do.”
Greta laughed. “Now that’s a lie. Let’s go.”
It wasn’t a lie. But as Ava trailed after the older girl to the barracks she wished with all her heart that it was. The only reason she could think of that Greta was even still here was that she refused to be separated from her brother, who lived in the boys’ barracks on the other side of the chapel. And as of yet, no one had wanted to adopt two orphans instead of one.
But for someone as lovely as Greta, it was only a matter of time.
* * *
Back in the bunkroom, Ava felt Sister Agnes’s wooden ruler prod against her sternum. “Stand up straight, child,” the nun chided. “Don’t slouch!”
Ava pulled her shoulders back, trying to ignore the way Hanne was scowling at her from across the aisle, and the way that Maja, standing
next to her, was sticking her tongue out. But both were quickly obscured by the woman who had just come to a stop directly in front of Ava’s bed.
The woman looked Ava up and down, holding her chin in thought. “Humbert,” she called.
“Ja, Bärchen.” The stooped man chatting by the door with Kapitän Ron and Leutnant Tommy looked up.
“Doesn’t she remind you of Ina?”
Separating himself from the bored-looking Americans, the man made his way toward them. He walked haltingly, with a cane and a limp that made his body jerk back and then forward with each step, as though he were doing a funny kind of dance. Ava dropped her gaze to the floor, studying first the woman’s worn brown work shoes, then the nun’s low-heeled oxfords, and finally the man’s heavily scuffed brown-and-white wingtips as they drew up beside them.
“In what way?” he asked.
“Around the nose,” said the woman. “And the eyes too.”
“Hard to tell when she’s got them stuck on the ground.” The man gave a quiet laugh.
Go away, Ava thought.
“What’s your name, Süsse Maus?” the man asked.
She felt Sister Agnes’s ruler again, this time under her chin. “Look up, child. Tell them your name.”
Ava lifted her head. The couple standing before her were younger than her grandparents had been but probably older than her mother, though it was hard to know for sure. The woman had kind hazel eyes and black hair streaked with white, and she was gazing at Ava with a kind of dreamy wistfulness. The man was almost bald and had a huge silver-pink scar that ran from his left ear to the corner of his mouth. It pulled his top lip a little, making it look as though he was always smiling just the tiniest bit.
“Well?” said Sister Agnes. “What’s your name?”
Ava swallowed. “Ava.” She said it in the smallest voice she could manage while still technically not whispering.
“And how old are you, Ava?” the woman asked.
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