Wunderland(106)

“The Wizard of Oz. Have you seen it?”

“I can’t see it.”

“Oh.” Ilse flushes slightly. “Is the ban really that strict? I mean, do they actually check your Kennkarte and everything?”

“It doesn’t exactly seem worth finding out, does it?” says Renate, more sharply than she intends to. “Not when they’ll arrest me for sitting on the wrong bench.”

“I suppose not.” Coloring slightly, Ilse fiddles with the doll’s padded foot. “Well, anyway. The Technicolor thing was impressive. I thought the film itself was overrated. But you know me. I always like book versions more.” Stroking Alice’s woolly hair, she adds, consolingly: “I heard Gone with the Wind is coming out in color. And you’ll be able to see that before anyone here.”

“That’s true,” says Renate dubiously. She hadn’t thought of this. Given everything, it seems small compensation.

“I’m sure there are lots of perks to moving to America. I wish I could.” Ilse’s smile turns wistful. “Maybe I’ll come live with you in New York. Do you remember how we planned all those trips together?”

Renate nods, though the memory feels celluloid and oddly inauthentic, like a film montage filled with fake champagne bubbles.

“Why aren’t your parents going along?” Ilse continues.

Going along. The phrase is so breezily divorced from the tortuous reality of emigration that Renate almost snorts, though she checks herself. It amazes her, how little non-Jews comprehend about what life has become like for her. When a former schoolmate she met on the street recently asked her whether the eight o’clock curfew was “restricting” her social life very much, Renate had been tempted to laugh in his face. The truth was that given how little Jews are allowed to do in the first place now, it barely makes a difference what time they aren’t allowed to do it.

“It’s too expensive, for one thing,” she says. “And Vati will never pass the exams.”

“The physical?”

“There’s a written one now too. They’re apparently looking for excuses to shut people out.” In fact, the new exam was added just as Renate and Franz submitted their novella-length stacks of forms and papers to the U.S. consulate on Pariser Platz.

“That’s ridiculous! Was it hard?”

“Absurdly. Do you know how tall the Bunker Hill Monument is, in feet?”

“So much for welcoming the huddled masses.” Ilse shakes her head. “But you passed?”

“We both did.” She doesn’t mention that here again Elisabeth Bauer had come through, somehow obtaining a list of the written test’s more esoteric questions that might otherwise have torpedoed her children’s chances. Or that, waiting in her slip and panties for the consulate physical, Renate had suddenly found herself having trouble breathing, half-expecting as she did a red-lipped Führerin to appear and ban her from emigrating.

“Ugh.” Ilse shakes her head sympathetically. “How is Franz, by the way? Is he here?”

Renate shakes her head.

“Schiller discussion group?” asks Ilse, making quotation-mark gestures with both forefingers. “Is that still going on these days?”

Renate opts not to answer. “He’s at Alberti’s with some friends,” she says. “They’ve supposedly got some new discs in from New York.”

“Jazz?”

“What else.” Renate rolls her eyes. Officially, at least, the fremdl?ndische “alien” music form is prohibited by the Ministry of Propaganda. For those in the know, however, the latest hits by Glenn Miller and Louis Armstrong can be clandestinely appreciated in the locked basement of the little music shop on Rankestra?e. So it is there that her brother can often be found.

Ilse’s face falls, and for a moment Renate worries whether she should have shared even this hardly incriminating information. Then again, she remembers, Ilse always did act a little oddly when it came to Franz.

“So tell me more about it,” she says, changing the subject. “What made you change your mind? And what are you thinking about doing about it?”

“I suppose it’s been building for a while.” Ilse smoothes Alice’s blue dress. “But last year was really when my thinking changed direction. I was supposed to cover the Kristallnacht story. But so much of what I saw sickened me. It was…it was just wrong. No matter what you think about Jewish influence in Germany, it didn’t—doesn’t—justify that.” She frowns, picking a nonexistent speck from the doll’s shoulder. “I couldn’t get it out of my head. The image of your father. What those…buffoons were doing to him. What they’d already done. And then I had to write it up for Der Angriff as though it were this spontaneous and heroic revolution. Germany’s storming of the Bastille!” She pauses, blinking rapidly. “I’ve always wanted to be a newswoman. But what we are writing isn’t news. It’s lies.”

“Did you ever get in trouble for the other lies?” Renate hugs her knees to her chest. “The ones you told for us?”

“No.” Ilse twirls the doll’s hair around her index finger. “Believe it or not, those thugs were actually more stupid than they looked. And more drunk.” She pauses, staring down at the worn paisley duvet cover, biting her lower lip. She really does look sick: drawn and pale, the purple shadows beneath her eyes deepening their oceanic grayness.