Wunderland(101)

“I want to keep them with Jews,” she said.

For a moment Renate just stared at her, sitting there in the singed shadow of the Neue Synagogue that was itself still shuttered in the wake of what the papers were now calling Kristallnacht (such a patent misnomer, Renate still thinks, as though that ghastly event had been nothing more than a festival of dainty glass baubles). How does she know? The question shaped itself in her head, not with defensiveness or resentment but a vague sense of relief, even wonder. She thought back to another old woman; the one she’d helped after being thrown from a tram. The one to whom she’d said: Ich bin Jude.

“How much?” she asked. And then, breathlessly, without waiting for an answer: “I can give you ten Reichsmarks.” Technically, the money was for materials for her hairdressing class; she was supposed to have handed it to her instructor last week. But even as she recognized this, Renate’s grip on the silvery sticks was tightening, her mind working furiously to come up with a way to borrow Karolin’s kit, or even steal the instructor’s rusty spare set of scissors.

“Ten?” The woman laughed dryly. “At that rate I might as well throw them in the gutter.”

She reached for the candlesticks, shaking her head, and Renate’s throat tightened with something almost like panic. “Wait,” she said.

Plunging her right hand into the pocket of her ever-more-ragged green coat, she pulled out the crisp banknote. Then she reached back into her pocket, fingers fumbling against the worn wool until she found the slim, hard circle she’d been seeking.

She’d carried Ilse’s friendship ring like this for the past four years, rationalizing the practice with various little stories she told herself about it: that when she had time she would push it into Ilse’s mail slot, or bring it to a jeweler to sell, or donate it to the Jewish Winter Relief Fund. For four years, however, she’d done none of these. The ring had remained snugly nestled in the right pocket of her only coat, retrieved only occasionally for a moment or so before being plunged back into its place of nubby rest.

“Here,” she said now.

The woman picked the ring up with two fingers, studying it through slightly narrowed eyes. Then she looked up.

“Silver?”

Renate nodded, though in fact she had no idea; she’d have declared it platinum if it had meant the candlesticks could be hers.

The woman hesitated once more, her eyes still searching Renate’s face. Then she shrugged. “Ach, well,” she said. “Day’s almost over.” Wrapping the bill around the ring, she’d tucked both in her own pocket and held the candlesticks back out to Renate. “Better these end up with someone who will use them for their intended purpose. That’s worth something in and of itself.”

And since then, Renate has done just that. Despite not understanding the Hebrew prayers Karolin hastily taught her, or why she covers her eyes after setting the waxen wicks aflame, or why she mustn’t blow out the candles before they burn to the base; despite, too, the fact that Franz dismisses the practice as “Judaic voodoo” and her mother shakes her head in unspecified disapproval, Renate lights the two candles every Friday in her room, murmurs blessings and sing-says A-mein. Afterward, she leaves them to burn down on her windowsill, weekly beacons to a transformation she feels in her bones but still doesn’t fully understand.



* * *





“Renate,” her mother repeats now. “Are you seriously still proposing not just smuggling a precious metal—which, incidentally, you were supposed to have turned over to the Reich’s Treasury Division in March—out of the country—but actually lying, in writing, about it?”

“Of course not,” Renate snaps, although of course this is exactly what she is proposing. “I just…don’t want them to go to waste.”

“Your whole emigration could go to waste if you try to take them with you,” her mother retorts tartly. “You could very well find yourself arrested.”

“That’s fine.” Renate finishes off the next row (17, Sanitary napkins, 12) with an irritated flourish. “I don’t want to go in the first place.”

“Enough.” Her mother rakes a pale hand through her now mostly gray hair. Her voice is tired and sharp. “I don’t want to hear any more about not wanting to go. Not after all the work I’ve done.”

Renate opens her mouth. Then she shuts it again, since this, too, is not really a point she can argue.

Over the past year Elisabeth Bauer has registered with the Jewish emigration aid agencies in Germany and the Jewish immigration aid agency in New York. She has filled out endless questionnaires for the governments of both nations. She has haunted five different government offices in her quest to get the new, J-stamped passports now required of Jews, batted from one unresponsive, rude bureaucrat to the next in what seemed to be the Reich’s idea of an inside joke. She has paid for exorbitant departure fees and overpriced ocean liner tickets, obtained sponsorship affidavits from a former colleague in Chicago and her brother-in-law in New York, found a way around the German prohibitions against wiring funds abroad to deposit the currency required of prospective immigrants by the U.S. government in two separate New York bank accounts. She has queued up for, harassed, and cajoled staff members at the American consulate general until the Bauers’ numbers came up on the visa waitlist, three years after they’d been applied for but two years sooner than they otherwise might have. After hearing that even mildly “unfit” immigration applicants faced visa rejection, she enlisted the family doctor to concoct a sprained-ankle diagnosis for Franz’s leg, and paid a discreet “sweetener” to the consulate doctor to ensure that her son passed the American examination.