Wunderland(105)

“So why didn’t you?” Renate meant her tone to be casual. But even she can hear the hurt in her voice.

“It never seemed the right time. No. That’s not true.” Ilse clears her throat. “The truth is, I was afraid.”

Renate almost wants to laugh. “You were afraid of visiting us but not of lying to protect us?”

The other girl smiles ruefully. “I know. It makes no sense.”

“But you came.”

Ilse nods. “I heard you’re finally leaving. I realized I might never get another chance.”

Renate thinks of Ilse’s command on Kristallnacht: Leave. She frowns. “Who told you?” She hadn’t thought their social circles intersected anywhere any longer.

“I ran into Maria at the Concordia.”

The names land like a double blow: the first the Bauers’ beloved housekeeper, forced by the race laws to quit. The second Renate’s favorite cinema and ice-cream counter before Jews were banned from the movies.

“And I brought you this,” Ilse goes on. “I thought of you when I first read it.”

She pulls a slim, dark volume from her satchel and extends it. Renate takes it and runs a forefinger over the gold-embossed title—Meine Wunder.

“Isn’t she on the banned list now?” she asks, pointing to the name: Else Lasker-Schüler.

Ilse arches her brows. “So what?”

So are you trying to get us arrested?

It’s the first response that comes into Renate’s mind. She quickly discards it. Because despite herself, despite everything, a tender sprig of hope is vining its way through her anger, her shock.

“So is your mother friends with a book importer now as well?” she asks instead.

Ilse tips her head back and laughs. It is the first genuine-sounding sound she’s uttered since Renate opened the door: loud and clear and almost startling in its heartiness. It is also so intuitively familiar—like hearing Sigi’s distinctive, raspy bark after resigning herself to never hearing it again—that at least for the moment it breaks through some of Renate’s icy reservation, and she finds herself laughing along. For a blissful moment it’s as if they’ve traveled back in time together.

“I found it in Zürich,” Ilse says at last, after the giggles have ceded way to a new, slightly warmer level of discomfort. “I took a M?delschaft group on a ski trip there. It’s not hard to smuggle things in if you’ve got the right uniform and stamps on your passport.”

“So you’re still with the BDM?”

“For the time being.” Ilse tugs on a braid. “It’s easier to know what to fight against if you’re working on the inside.”

“Fight?”

Ilse parts her lips, then presses them together again, throwing a quick glance toward the kitchen. The chink and splash of dishwashing drifts toward them, underscored by the rare sound of Elisabeth Bauer humming under her breath: the melody to “Stardust.”

“Can we go to your room?” Ilse asks quietly. “Not because I don’t trust your mother. It’s just…” She drops her gaze. “I’m still working through all this. I need you to help.”

“My room’s a mess,” Renate says, shrugging to disguise the sudden leap her pulse takes at the words I need you.

“Fantastic.” Stripping off her coat and boots every bit as naturally as she’d done when they both were still German, Ilse tosses the former onto the coatrack by the door and the latter next to Renate’s battered black-and-white saddle shoes.

People don’t change, Renate reminds herself, as she turns toward the staircase. But it’s hard to ignore the rush of happiness she feels as, glancing downstairs, she sees the new-looking woolen swing coat covering her own threadbare trench.

Upstairs her father is asleep in his bedroom armchair, a dog-eared copy of The Last Days of Pompeii lying unopened in his lap. Tiptoeing in, Renate covers him with the Persian throw from the bed, then tiptoes out again with a finger to her lips. Ilse on her heels, she makes her way silently through the now-carpetless hallway.

“How is he?” Ilse asks, once they’re inside Renate’s room with the door shut.

“Not well.” Renate props her pillow against the wall and leans back, while Ilse settles at the bed’s opposite end—right above (she can’t help noting) the Shabbat candle shoebox. Seeing her there feels surreal, like a visitation by a ghost. Renate suppresses an urge to reach her hand out, to make sure it doesn’t go right through.

“He’s taken everything very hard,” she continues. “Especially since the Jewish Affairs Office turned down his appeal for pension resumption. Mama calls it ‘acute depression.’ She says he’ll be better once all of this is over.”

“I’m sure that’s true.” Ilse leans back against the wall as well, pulling Ragdoll Alice into her lap in a movement so natural and reflexive it’s as though the past four Ilse-less years have been a dream. “Can he teach in New York?”

“He’s not going to New York. Neither of them are. Did Maria say they were?”

“We didn’t talk much,” says Ilse quickly. “The film was about to start.”

Renate can’t resist asking, a little wistfully: “Which film?”