Wunderland(100)

“Of course.” The Mother Superior nodded, appearing slightly flustered. “I’ll need a few things from you as well. Your Exoneration Certificate, to begin with. And a work permit if you have one.”

“The one with the yellow hair is you,” Ava said, holding the image up again for Ilse to see.

But her mother was digging in a battered-looking purse. “I’m sorry,” she said, seeming not to have heard. “Do you have a pen? Of all the days to not have one with me…”

Their voices softened and merged as Ava stared back down at her drawing, the wide sickle smiles, the bull’s-eye eyes and stick fingers. It was horrible, she realized all of a sudden; like something Theresia would draw. Or a baby.

She should never have shown it to anyone.

Very quietly, she began to rip it in half.





16.


    Renate


1939

Item number: 16

Quantity: 2

Item description: hand towels

Year purchased: 1933



Renate pauses, pencil pressed to her lips. Will two be enough for the five-day journey to New York? Should she risk taking more and strike something else from her list? Or will there be enough space and dry air on the ship to accommodate an emergency hand washing if need be (Item number: 9. Quantity: 1. Description: Box of Persil laundry soap. Year Purchased: 1939.)?

Sighing, she sticks with two and moves on to the next line. 17, she writes. The next item on her notebook list is monthly menstrual protection. But as her eyes drift to today’s date—Friday, November 10th, 1939—she finds herself hesitating, pen tip hovering.

“Perhaps,” she says, “if I just say they’re pewter instead of silver?”

“What?” Her mother looks up from the health summary she is copying out for their records across the kitchen table.

“My candlesticks. What if I say they’re pewter. How are they really to know?”

“Are you seriously still thinking about that?”

Lisbet Bauer stares at her daughter in disbelief. Renate stares right back, a faint flush creeping its way up her neck. “It’s not as if you and Vati are going to use them,” she adds.

The “them” in question is a pair of Shabbat candlesticks Renate acquired back in February, on her way home from the weekly hairdressing course she and Karolin Beidryzcki are taking at the Jüdisches Gemeindehaus. (Neither girl particularly wants to go into hairdressing, but prospective emigrants are encouraged to acquire a trade, and hairdressing seemed the most glamorous option—at least initially.) Hurrying down a darkening Oranienburger Stra?e, she’d passed a prim-looking old woman sitting next to a handful of items she was apparently trying to sell. It’s an increasingly common sight these days: Jews who, having secured transport and visas out of Germany, find themselves unexpectedly having to unload items they discover they can’t take with them, often at the last minute.

Renate usually walks past these spontaneous street sales quickly. Not just because she herself has no resources to make a purchase, but because the quiet undertones of self-conscious desperation only underscore her own growing despondency. On this day, however, she had paused, unexpectedly captivated by one of the woman’s wares.

Thanks to a handful of “Judea study sessions” with Franz and a few surreptitious synagogue visits on her own, she had a vague understanding of what Shabbat candles were for, though she’d never considered performing the old-new ritual herself. And yet standing there that chilly day, her fingertips stained red with henna and her back aching from an hour bent over a rusty wash basin, the candlesticks had seemed unaccountably comforting. Tarnished, still spotted with waxen drippings from decades of Shabbats past, they struck her as symbols of flickering hope in the waxing darkness of her life. Picking one up, Renate had found herself stroking it as though it were some Aladdin-like talisman.

“Jakubowski und Jarra,” the seller said.

“What?” On closer inspection, the woman’s age seemed more elusive than Renate had first assumed; her fine-boned face so deeply creased by fatigue and worry that she might have been anywhere between forty and seventy.

“The maker,” she said. “Jakubowski and Jarra of Warsaw. Very famous.” Renate could tell from the fluid way she pronounced the names (the J’s softened into Y’s and the B’s into V’s, the same way they did for Karolin’s mother) that her native language was Polish.

“My mother’s,” the woman added curtly. “A wedding gift.”

“They’re very pretty,” Renate said. It came out almost an apology, though as she turned the silvery objects over in her hands she understood that she fully meant the compliment. Adorned at base and stem with unfurling leaves and whimsical flourishes, the Polish pieces were nothing in style like the sleek Parisian Art Deco pair her own mother had recently and reluctantly sold. These were unapologetically ornate, like something a Jewish Louis the Fifteenth might have set upon his rococo table. Even the nozzles looked like regal flowers in full bloom, awaiting their holy waxen stamens.

“I thought they’d let us bring them,” the woman was continuing. “You see, they’re only plated in silver, not solid. At first our emigration officer said yes. Then yesterday, he said no. I think they make the rules up by the hour.” She sighed heavily. “I couldn’t stand the thought of them ending up with some bandit official or pawnbroker. I wanted—” She hesitated, peering into Renate’s face.