She tries the outer doorway to the vestibule, which is open. Inside it smells like floor wax and bleach. Spotting the building directory, Ava runs her finger down the list, her heart thudding so hard her vision vibrates. But not only is there no R. Bauer, none of the names listed look even remotely German. In fact, none—apart from a C. Benedict—even strike her as particularly Central European. There’s an L. Garcia in 1C, a J. Muhammed in 3B. Two Chans—K. and S.—in apartments 2B and 5A. The original name on 5B—I. Gruchowski—has been crossed out with black marker. W. Park is written in small black letters beneath it.
Transfixed, Ava watches herself press 5B firmly. A woman’s voice shrills from the speaker.
“Yeah?”
Static makes the voice sound an ocean away, and for a moment Ava’s English seems to disintegrate. She can’t think of a single phrase.
“Hello?” the woman repeats. “Who is it?”
Ava licks her lips. “Hello. I’m—I’m looking for Renate Bauer.”
“Who?” In the background, a child wails and is silenced by a rapid-fire comment in an Asian-sounding language.
“Bauer,” says Ava, articulating more clearly. “A German lady. I believe—I think that she used to live here.”
“Oh, I dunno,” the woman responds. “No, no. Not here.”
Ava bites her lip. “Have you heard of her before? Do you know where she might perhaps have moved?”
“No, no,” the woman repeats “Dunno. Not here.”
Ava sifts through her scrambled thoughts for something to keep the woman on the line. “Wait—then have you heard from a girl named Sophie today by any chance?” Something is cutting into the palm of her right hand. Looking down, she realizes that she still has the ’56 letter in her hand and is clenching it like an entrance ticket.
“No, no,” the woman says. “Zupah. You try Zupah. Okay. Bye-bye.”
“Zoo—what? Wait—please. Who should I try?”
But the speaker goes silent, and remains that way when Ava buzzes again, and then a third time. After the third ring she simply stands there, waiting; as though W. Park might return on her own or (even better) recall that she is not W. Park but R. Bauer after all.
This, of course, does not happen.
Carefully, Ava returns the letter to her purse and runs a trembling finger down the directory a second time. The closest thing to Bauer is G. Babayev. As she reaches the bottom this time, though, she spies a small-font listing that she hadn’t noticed before:
SUPERINTENDENT: APARTMENT 1A.
Zupah. She wants to hit herself. She settles for pressing 1A for just slightly longer than she’d pressed 5B.
A few seconds later a man’s voice answers: “Yeah?”
“Hello,” says Ava. “I’m hoping that you can help me. I’m—ah—I’m trying to find someone. Two people, actually. But only one whom I believe has lived in this building.”
“They all on the directory, miss.” The voice is deep, limned with the faintly melodic inflections of the Caribbean or the West Indies.
“No—I mean she used to live here. Many years ago. Her name was Renate Bauer.”
“Bowerrrrr,” the man repeats. It sounds for a moment as though he’s growling.
A pause follows. Ava feels herself holding her breath.
“Afraid it don’t ring a bell,” he says.
“Do you happen to know if a girl named Sophie tried to find her earlier today?”
“Not a clue.” His voice is harder now, impatient.
“Do you—do you think anyone in the building might remember? Someone who has perhaps been here for a long time?”
An incredulous laugh. “What the hell you think I am? A goddamn private investigator?”
The speaker goes dead.
Ava wanders back toward the street, her self-berating chant resuming. Stupid. Stupid. What did she think, she’d just waltz into a strange building and reunite with her mother’s long-lost best friend? In all likelihood, Renate Bauer isn’t even Renate Bauer anymore. She’s likely married and changed her name. Perhaps she is even dead.
Defeated, Ava begins slowly to make her way home—she will just have to wait for Sophie there. But when she passes the phone bank on the corner on Delancey and Essex she stops short again. Her first thought is to check messages, even though she’s only a few minutes from home. But after she’s tried two of the receivers (the first one is dead, the second coated in some sort of foul-smelling, greasy substance) and then called in to no voice mail, and then changed the answer message in case Sophie calls in (“Sophie, it’s Mom. I’m so sorry, sweetie. I’ll tell you everything you want to know. Please just call me”), an idea hits: an idea so improbable that it’s almost certainly delusional. Ava acts on it anyway: after waiting for the tone again, she punches in three digits: 4-1-1.
“City and state, please,” says the operator.
“New York, New York.” Ava licks her lips. “I’m looking for a Renate Bauer.”
“Can you spell the last name?”
“B-A-U-E-R. First name has an ‘e’ at the end.”
“One moment.”
As she waits for the results a new calm descends; as if her fate rests in this strange, polite woman’s hands. If she comes up with nothing, that is it. I will stop. I’ll apologize to Sophie and answer all her questions. We’ll put all of this nonsense behind us.
“I have two Renate Bauers,” the operator says.
Ava isn’t certain she’s heard the woman correctly. “Two?”
“Yes. One in Yonkers. The other’s on the Upper East Side. Do you want both?”
“Ah—yes. Yes. Both, please.”
Ava’s hands are shaking so much that she nearly drops the phone as she rummages in her bag for a pen, pushing past sunglasses, a capless ChapStick, two dirty-looking Wash’n Dri packets. For a heart-stopping moment she thinks she’ll have to memorize the numbers before digging up a broken stub of artist’s graphite. The only thing she has to write on are the envelopes: after hesitating, she pulls out the first one she finds and turns it over.
“Go ahead,” she says.
* * *
Ten minutes later she’s inside the graffiti-coated subway, which is packed for some reason (a concert? a game?) even though it’s a weekend. The crowd writhes and twitches like a single living organism: passengers inhabiting a rainbow of skin tones press into one another like lovers. The fan seems to be broken, leaving the heat as unrelieved as the stultifying damp of a terrarium.
As the train lurches from the station Ava wills it to fly; to go as fast as her own blood races in her veins. Renate Bauer. The woman who knows the truth about Ilse’s childhood past; who can answer the questions now swarming through Ava’s jolted mind. Renate Bauer! Here in the city! It seems impossible; incredible to her. It’s like discovering that the Blue Fairy is not only real but living on East 64th and Lexington.
As the car careens steamily through the city’s glimmering tunnels, Ava’s mind scrabbles for something to say, for some way to begin. Begin at the beginning, the White King had said. But where is that? You and my mother were like sisters for years, before you became a Jew and she a Fascist. But why should Renate Bauer want to hear something she already knows?
She tries again: Hello. I know my mother betrayed your family. But she’s dead now. And she’s also very sorry. But again, why would Renate Bauer care? Why wouldn’t she simply slam the door in Ava’s face, just as Sophie had done hours earlier? Given nearly everything that Ava knows now, the woman would have more than enough reason. For it wasn’t just that Ilse joined the BDM and the Nazi Party. It wasn’t just that she’d terrorized innocent Polish boys and destroyed Jewish property and physically attacked a man she’d once considered a friend. It wasn’t just that she’d betrayed Renate and Franz. Incredibly—or so it had seemed to Ava as she read—there was still mor
e. And still more after that.
After Renate and Franz left, Ilse was posted in Lodz, where she’d not only continued writing her poisonous propaganda but physically aided in the appropriation of Polish farms and homes, moving Poles out and into a brutal roulette of ghettoization, mass execution, and deportation. In her letters, she’d claimed to have had doubts at the time; to have felt pity for the people she so efficiently ejected; to be sickened by colleagues who physically abused them. But she didn’t quit, or leave, or try secretly to help those who she herself noted were in desperate need of help. She told herself (she wrote) that her first loyalty was to her Party; that Party loyalty was what would save the nation. Sacrifices have to be made. She kept saying it until the Allies arrested her, convicting her of crimes against a civilian population and indoctrinating German youth into a Fascist ideology, and sentencing her to eighteen months of rigorous “reeducation.” It was only when Ilse was able to establish that she had a fatherless daughter who needed her that they commuted her sentence on “humanitarian” grounds.
In other words, Ava had been Ilse’s ticket to freedom.
* * *
At 34th Street the train judders to a halt, the conductor spewing an explanation that, between his Spanish accent and heavy static, is virtually incomprehensible. Ava finds herself groaning out loud while the West Indian nanny to her left hushes her wailing charge and a man in pinstripes snaps his Wall Street Journal in annoyance. The straphanger to her right curses stagnantly in Russian.
It seems they stay here, stalled, for hours, the agitation building within Ava like a hot inner balloon pressing against her lungs: Jesus. Come on. Then the lights go out and the panic descends, hotly crushing her in its suffocating fist. We’re all going to die. Ava closes her eyes, but for some reason the soothing images she usually summons to defuse such moments (a sunny beach, an open field) fail to materialize. Instead of ebbing, the terror surges; instead of breathing she gasps, already feeling plaster dust in her lungs.
“Ma’am? You all right?”
The lights flash back on. Opening her eyes, Ava sees an almost shockingly lovely woman in bright blue scrubs, her skin the color of shining onyx. She is sitting directly below where Ava is standing, though Ava has no recollection of having noticed her there a moment earlier. Nevertheless here she is now, gazing up, her eyes velvet-dark and wide with concern.
“Do you need to sit?” the woman asks. Her voice is melodious, flutelike. Embarrassed, Ava shakes her head.
“I’m fine,” she manages. “It’s just the heat.”
“Here. Sit.” Standing, the woman nods firmly at the space she’s opened up. “You need to rest. You don’t look good.”
Still struggling to breathe, Ava hesitates. Then she nods, sinking into the seat just as the train lurches back into motion. When she’s composed herself a little she looks up again to thank the woman properly. But her benefactor has vanished into the close-packed flesh of the crowd.
* * *
Reaching Lexington Avenue is like surfacing on another planet. Ava has always thought of the Upper East Side as the Lower East Side’s topsy-turvy opposite—shining town houses versus grimy tenements. Bowing doormen versus boozy derelicts. Purse-sized poodles versus homeless pit bulls. As she begins walking back downtown, however (66th Street, 65th), for the first time she finds herself thinking about their odd, invisible interdependence. For this is how New York has always functioned: immigrants from Delancey working their way up to Park Avenue; first the Germans, then the Irish and the Italians, then the Jews and now (gradually) the Indians, Chinese, Latinos. One swell following the next. Cycles of migrational chaos pounding the city’s asphalt shore, each wave making the trip smoother for the next…As Ava pulls out the envelope upon which she’d scrawled Renate’s address, she wonders how smooth Franz and Renate Bauer’s paths were after landing. Had they found safety and acceptance? New lovers? New pets? Had they ever seen their parents again?
The address the operator had given her is on a somewhat quiet pocket of street; a sleek, modern complex with a white-gloved doorman standing behind a security desk. Stepping inside, Ava feels acutely aware of her disheveled appearance.
“Can I help you?” the doorman asks, his expression opaque.
She clears her throat. “I’m looking for Renate Bauer.”
“Is Dr. Bauer expecting you, Miss…?”
Doctor? Ava’s heart skips a beat. Had Renate followed in her mother’s footsteps? “Ava,” she says, not offering her last name, just in case. “And no. Or, not exactly. But I believe she’ll want to see me. I have something of hers that I am trying to deliver.”
“You can leave it here for her,” he says, pointing to a pile of other correspondences and packages.
“I’d rather not,” says Ava quickly. “It’s personal. Private.”
He looks her up and down, his lips tightening slightly. Then he nods. “Just a moment, then.”
Picking up his phone, he punches in a short number and waits. Then he shakes his head and sets the phone back down on the receiver. “The doctor doesn’t appear to be in right now.”
The letdown feels like a physical drop. Ava steadies herself, swallows.
“Can you tell me if a young girl named Sophie has stopped by in the last hour?”
“Not on my watch. I’ve been here since nine.”
“All right,” she manages. “I’ll guess I’ll just wait, then.”
And before he has a chance to say otherwise she has planted herself in a sumptuous leather armchair, beneath a chandelier that glimmers with a thousand rainbow-hued crystals shaped like tears.
She doesn’t know how long she sits there, bag clasped tightly in her lap, legs crossed against the air-conditioned chill. Only that at some point her exhaustion catches up with her, and then she is nodding off. And then she’s sitting on a train with Sophie. They’re in the dining car, and Ava is trying to pour them coffee. But somehow it keeps missing both their cups. “I am sorry,” she keeps saying. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what is wrong with me.”
“I don’t even know why you’re pouring it,” her daughter says, her voice sharply disdainful. “I don’t want any of that anyway. It’s disgusting.”
Ava glances down at the table to see that she’s been pouring not coffee, but dark red blood. It flows from the silver spout onto the white tablecloth, thick red stripes soaking into the fabric and dripping onto the floor.
“Oh my God,” she says, sickened. “Where is this from?”
“It’s from him.” Sophie points to one of the other tables, and Ava sees Ulrich Bergen slumped over the surface, blood pouring from a bullet wound in his head.
“Don’t you see,” Sophie shouts, leaping up. “You killed him. Just like you killed Oma. And you lied about it. You lie about everything. Everything!”
And then she’s turning and running off down the jolting aisle.
“Wait,” Ava tries to call. “Wait, sweetheart. Wait…”
“It’s too late.” The voice is chill, familiar: turning around, she sees Ilse, sitting where Sophie had just been, her eyes silvery and smug.
“It’s too late,” she says triumphantly. “You’ve missed your chance, just like you always do. You’ve missed it. Missed it…”
“Miss!”
Ava wakes with a start. Standing before her is the doorman, looking embarrassed. Behind him is an old woman with silvered hair and bright pink lipstick. She is wearing a green spring coat and a black beret, holding a bag from Shakespeare and Co.
“Yes,” says Ava, shaking her head groggily. “I’m so sorry.”
“You said you had something for Dr. Bauer?” He nods toward the woman.
“Yes. Oh, yes.” Stumbling to her feet, Ava clears her throat. “Dr. Bauer?” she asks.
“Yes.” The woman smiles, looking politely puzzled. The lines in her face are deep and i
ntricately intersecting, like the folds in a soft, often-folded map.
Ava finds herself laughing: with relief, with shock. With sheer joy. The woman looks alarmed.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “Do I know you?”
“No.” Ava takes a deep breath. “But I’m your niece.”
19.
Ava
1989
Upstairs, she sits on a miniaturized couch that is almost as overstuffed as the room’s riotous bookshelves. Covering three walls, Renate Bauer’s book collection looks like the setting for some antiquarian whodunit: weathered spines of varying hues, sizes, and degrees of wear packed and piled together so tightly that the effect is one of book-patterned wallpaper. Even the air smells bookish: like lavender and old paper, tinged by a faint hint of strong coffee.
“Do you want ice in your water?” calls Renate Bauer from her kitchen.
“Only if it’s no bother,” Ava calls back. And then: “I’m so sorry, really. I haven’t eaten or really drunk much today—I suppose I’m dehydrated. I’ve been running around trying to find my daughter, who ran out rather angry with me…” She trails off, realizing she must seem even more of a lunatic than she had downstairs, even before she (quite literally) fainted.
“So, ice?” Renate clarifies.
“Ja, yes,” says Ava, chagrined. “Thank you.”
The collapse had happened with shocking swiftness: one moment Ava was making the most stunning statement of her life, to a woman she’d only just met. The next, someone seemed to be turning down the world’s volume while white sparks looped and vanished before her eyes. She’d somehow landed back in the armchair, her head between her knees and her tote half-emptied on the lushly carpeted floor. And then the doorman was scooping it all up—keys, ChapStick, a few of the letters (my God the letters)—and Renate Bauer was bending over her, murmuring: “Oh, dear. Are you all right?” And to the doorman: “Let me take her upstairs until she gets her bearings.”
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