Wunderland(108)

Ilse laughs. “I do. The boiled Leberk?se episode still haunts me.” Faced with liver cheese that had been left out overnight, Renate’s mother had had the bright idea of heating it in a pan of water, “just to soften it up.” After leaving it on the stove for too long (she always forgets to set her timer) she’d ended up with a tasteless pink sludge that she salvaged by serving as “stew.”

“I’d forgotten that one.” Renate grimaces as they start down the stairs. “It’s only gotten worse since rationing started. Though luckily, she works late a lot at the Jewish Hospital, so I have an excuse to take over.”

Reaching the bottom of the stairs her friend pulls on her coat and shoes and ties her scarf. She turns to face Renate with another smile. “Can I come back?”

“Of course,” says Renate, trying to toss off the response as casually as the question. “I’m out for a class on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. But otherwise”—she shrugs—“I’m generally here.”

“What class?”

“Hairdressing. At the Jewish Community Center. They want us all to learn an ‘internationally viable’ trade.”

“So the next time I need a permanent I come to you?”

“I didn’t say I was good at it.”

They laugh together again, and once more, for just a moment it is almost like the old days. Then Ilse frowns. “Now I know what I was missing. Where’s Sig?”

Renate swallows, hard. “He—he died.”

The wound is still too raw for her to go into more detail; she tightens her lips and shakes her head.

“Oh, Reni,” says Ilse softly. “I’m so sorry.” She hesitates for a moment, her face stricken.

Then, wordlessly, she enfolds Renate in a hug.

Caught off-guard again, Renate lifts her arms and squeezes back, until the warm, familiar scent of her friend threatens to undo her composure for good.

Laughing self-consciously, she pulls back. Ilse laughs as well, though her eyes are suspiciously damp again.

“I’m sorry, too, for just showing up like this,” she says, dashing at them with the back of her hand.

“It’s all right,” says Renate. “It broke up the afternoon.”

“So I’ll come back soon. Before you leave?”

Renate nods. “I’ll look forward to it.”

It comes out automatically: more politeness than assertion. But as she leans against the door frame she decides she does mean it. That despite the pain and the betrayal, despite the months of solitude, there is a part of her that is cautiously, sheepishly thrilled as she watches Ilse stride briskly away down Bismarckstra?e, the early-evening light glinting silver in her gold hair. A verse from one of the poems she read upstairs comes back to her:


We are framed by stars

And take flight from the world

I believe we are angels.





17.


    Ilse


1939

She sits windowside at Die Arabische Tasse with her notebook before her, though in reality she’s engaged in surveillance. The coffee shop—a former favorite of hers and Renate’s—is positioned on Bismarckstra?e and Leibnizstra?e, within convenient viewing distance of the Bauers’ arched doorway. Nursing her Milchkaffee, Ilse divides her attention between the familiar black door and her latest article: Jews and Ritual Sacrifice: A History.

Thanks to an introduction from Kai before his posting to the East, she’s been taking on more Propaganda Ministry writing for various pamphlets and newsletters. There have also been two more Der Stürmer pieces written under her male pseudonym of Isador Frank: “Jew Alert! Ten Ways to Spot a Sex Predator,” and “The Secret, Bloody Truth about Passover.” Kai calls these “investigative pieces,” though all Ilse really does is interview sources he assigns her, using questions he writes for her, then more or less transcribes their answers to be published. “It isn’t bad journalism,” her editor had said last week when she questioned him about this system. “It’s just an alternative way of presenting the facts.”

“But some of these ‘facts’ are laughable!” Ilse had been typing up quotes from a Talmudic ‘expert,’ a jaundiced-looking man with a monocle that kept dropping into his lap, who had punctuated his claims with hand movements so bizarre that Ilse at first suspected some sort of palsy. It was only later that she realized that he was trying to imitate the distinctive hand gestures of some Ostjuden, Eastern European Jews.

“Does anyone believe that matzo is made with blood from Gentile infants?” she asked now. “If that were true, wouldn’t it at least be red? Or pink?”

The editor just waved dismissively. “If you write it often enough it becomes its own version of the truth.”

“But surely there’s enough real evidence of the Jewish problem that we don’t have to fall back on such nonsense?”

“Of course there is,” he’d retorted. “But which makes for the better story: Jews murdering babies or Jews cheating the banking system? And in the end, don’t they amount to the same thing?”

She’d had to think about that one. But under certain circumstances, Ilse decided now, they very likely could.

Chewing on her pen tip, she reworks her second paragraph, periodically glancing back at the Bauers’ flat. In a secret companion volume to the Jewish Talmud can be found the command to “slaughter foreigners…(No sign of Renate, though if her class is at three then she should be leaving now) who are the same as beasts.” Jews are ordered to do this in a “lawfully valid manner.” According to Talmudic experts, this “manner” (She had said Thursdays, hadn’t she? Or had Ilse misremembered?) is the very same manner in which Jewish butchers so cruelly slaughter and bleed animals, which is why throughout the ages the bloodless corpses of Christians, especially Christian children (Ilse checks her watch again: it is now two twenty, and the U-Bahn trip takes well over forty minutes), have been discovered in areas where Jews live, usually on or approaching the Jewish holidays of Passover and Purim…