Wunderland(10)

Ilse waves a hand at the scattered shoes, pages, and books around them. “All this. This endless cycle. School, studies, sleep. Broken up only by the occasional silly birthday party. It all feels—I don’t know. Weightless, somehow. Like I’m not changing anything.”

Renate frowns. “What is it you want to change?”

“I don’t know. Something. Oh. And guess what.” She lowers her voice. “Erika says last summer they went camping with the Hitler Youth and she snuck out of her tent and went swimming with Rudi and three others.” She lowers her voice further. “In their underthings.”

Something sour stirs in Renate’s stomach. She tells herself that it’s not just because Erika went swimming—nearly naked!—with Rudi, but that she got to go camping at all. Renate’s own parents wouldn’t in a million years take her overnight in the woods. For one thing, her mother can’t stand nature walks (“boring, pointless”). She also can’t cook to save her life—and that’s in the kitchen; never mind on a campfire. There is also Franz’s limp, left by childhood polio. He already has to walk with a cane, even on flat surfaces. As for Renate’s father: he claims to have spent enough time in tents along the Russian Front to last him for the next several lifetimes.

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Would you join if I did?”

“You know how my parents are.”

“You wouldn’t have to tell them!”

“Don’t I need their approval?”

“You know what your father’s signature looks like, don’t you?”

“Seriously?” Renate gapes at her. “And what about all the records? I can’t get those by myself.”

“I’ve heard they’ll order them from the Census Department for you if you need. You just need to give them enough notice.”

Stretching, Renate cracks her neck: first one side, then the other. She is trying to imagine herself following Ilse’s suggestion: Lying. Forging Vati’s signature. Making up excuses twice weekly and on Saturdays as to why she needs to be out. The thought alone makes her queasy. Her most rebellious act so far has been sticking her tongue out at the back of her mother’s head five years ago, really just to see whether she could. Apparently she could not: Renate, Lisbet Bauer snapped. Your tongue belongs in your mouth. She hadn’t even bothered to turn around.

She decides to deflect. “The real question is how I get that stupid postcard back. Franz will kill me if he finds out I took it.”

“How would he know it’s you?”

“Who else would it be? My mother?”

“Maybe it was Raina.” Ilse pokes Renate in the shoulder. “It sounds like something she’d do.”

“Raina wouldn’t just steal the postcard. She’d re-create it.” Renate eyes Ilse sidelong. “But with a manatee instead of a man.”

“Oh, horrid.” Ilse pretends to retch. “Raina Bachmeier” is the name of the evil alternate personality Renate invented for herself after the girls saw Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde together at the Concordia. Ilse’s is “Ida Fuchs.” They have an ongoing competition regarding whose conscience-free alter ego is more theoretically depraved: in past weeks Raina Bachmeier has burned down the Bismarck School, robbed a jewelry store, and borne Herr Steinberg’s love child, while Ida Fuchs has stolen all the city street signs, hijacked the number 8 tram to Paris, and eaten a Dachshund puppy for lunch.

“I’ll just have to ask Rudi for it whenever I see him next.” Renate sighs. “It will be unbearably embarrassing. He probably thinks I’m the worst sort of girl on earth.”

“If he thought that, he wouldn’t have come galloping to your aid,” says Ilse tartly. “Rescuing the beautiful damsel.”

“Beautiful?” Renate snorts. If she’s registered the way that people—boys in particular—have begun looking at her differently over the past months, it’s in the same vague way that she’s registered the changes in her own body. The lengthening of her pale, slim legs; the subtle broadening of her hips and narrowing of her waist. The way her former boyish tangle of brown curls has almost magically relaxed into a rich waterfall of waves down her back. And while she hears the soft whistles and comments—Hallo, meine Sch?ne! Du bist schlau!—she has a hard time connecting them to herself. Much less responding.

“He would have done it for you, too,” she tells Ilse, uncomfortably aware that this isn’t true. It’s not that she doesn’t find Ilse beautiful, in a golden, Amazonian sort of way. But she recognizes that there is something staunch and unyielding, something almost ungirlish about her friend that keeps boys at bay. It was that same steely instinct that had led Ilse to hurl herself at the schoolbag-snatcher that day on the U-Bahn—in a move that was not accidental in the least, though of course Renate would never say as much. Indeed, Ilse had responded to the mugger’s tug with a fury as raw as it was instantaneous; as though she’d been waiting her whole life for precisely this opportunity to inflict outrage and injury on an opponent. Even remembering it—and the look on the startled thief’s face as he fled—is enough to catch Renate’s breath in her throat.

“No, he wouldn’t have,” Ilse is saying now. “None of the boys would.” She stares up moodily at the stars they’ve painstakingly cut out and arranged on both their bedroom ceilings, in constellations of their own design (“so we’ll go to sleep under the same sky,” Renate said). Then she sighs.