Wunderland(111)

“Something about warding off life’s despair with one hand, but writing about it with the other.”

“Doesn’t sound like one of his novels.” Pulling several volumes of the Brockhaus down, he limps to where she is sitting and sets the encyclopedias down with a thud.

“Would it really be in that?” When Franz likes an author, she knows, he becomes obsessive about collecting their works. Given how much he loves Kafka it seems odd to her that he’d seek the quote in a secondhand source.

“You never know what’s in good old Brockhaus.” Eyes twinkling, he pushes one toward her. “Take a look.”

Ilse hesitates. She remembers this expression. It’s the one he wears when he’s pulling off a prank: pie-sheeting Renate’s bed on a sleepover night. Replacing sugar with salt for afternoon tea. When Renate got her first two brassieres Franz hung one from the second-floor flagpole as she and Ilse approached the house after school. Ilse vividly remembers Renate’s face upon spotting it: the way it went almost as white as the lace-trimmed cotton on public display.

“Go on,” he says mildly. “It won’t bite.”

Holding her breath, she lifts the battered cover of the volume closest to her—and gasps. The tome’s pages have been almost completely carved out, creating a large, hollow box. Nestled inside like bookish Matryoshka dolls are three slim volumes: The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and Amerika. Delighted, she lifts them out.

“Is the whole series hiding contraband?” she asks, looking back at the bookshelf.

“Just every other volume,” he says. “That way if some dunderhead of an officer is sharp enough to take one down, the odds are that he’ll open up a real book. Though I’ve enlisted a few other genres in the resistance.” Turning back to the bookshelf, he points to a 1927 world atlas, the combined Iliad and Odyssey, and Volumes I and II of Musil’s ponderous The Man without Qualities.

“You took a knife to Homer?” Ilse asks, covering her mouth in mock horror.

“We’ve got four editions. It’s not as if Otto is going to miss one,” he retorts dryly. Picking up the Brockhaus Glied through Henare edition, he drops onto his bed with it. “Especially not these days.”

“Is he here?”

“In a sense. Locked in his room and his head.”

His expression doesn’t change, but there’s a bleakness in his voice that makes Ilse want to reach for his hand.

“Renate told me about his condition,” she says instead. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. You’re the first one yet who’s really tried to help us.”

Ilse finds she can’t look at him. “Surely there’ve been others.”

“At first.” He’s pulling another volume from the hollowed-out encyclopedia. Setting the gutted shell beside him he begins flipping through its pages. “At first everyone was horrified. No one believed it was happening. No one believed it would last.” He recites it in a mocking drone, running a fingertip down a margin. “But that’s the strange thing about hell. The longer you’re stuck in it, the less those who’ve been spared seem to notice.” He flips a page. “Do you remember my university friend Diederich Schuchard? Tall fellow, blond? Long skinny nose? He used to come here to copy my Weimar Law notes every week.”

“Was he the one with that insufferably affected Viennese accent?”

“Ha.” A quick, approving look. “You’ve still got a memory like a trap.”

She blushes again, absurdly pleased by the compliment.

He continues, finger still planted on the page. “About two years ago he, like almost everyone, had stopped coming round. Which is fine. No, really. It’s dangerous to be seen with Jews, and I understand that. You just happen to be braver than most.”

She picks at a cuticle, feeling loathsome.

“Anyway,” he resumes. “I bumped into him outside a music shop. My mind is on something else, because it’s always on something else nowadays. But I stop, just reflexively. Just for a quick fancy-meeting-here kind of exchange. ‘Why, hello, Schuchard,’ I said. ‘It’s been ages.’?”

He looks up at her. “Do you know what he did?”

She waits, holding her breath.

“He spit on me,” Franz says. “Landed right on my shoulder.”

He lifts his finger to indicate the spot on his worn-looking navy jumper. “And it wasn’t a very delicate sort of spit, if you get my meaning. I think he was coming down with a head cold.”

The way he recounts it—a bitter-tart blend of humor and resignation, as though the main point is not woe is me but see this foolish, marvelous world we inhabit together—nevertheless makes Ilse’s throat tighten.

“Odd,” she says, trying to keep her voice steady. “He never struck me as an ideologue. I actually considered him more of a Marxist. Like you.”

He just shrugs again. “He was. At first. And when Hitler landed as Chancellor he was as disgusted as any of us.” He drops his gaze back to the book, turning a page. “But now that the current’s swung the other way he just wants to ride it along. Who gives a damn if people like us drown.”

“I do,” she says, with an indignation that surprises her.

“I know.” There is no trace of laughter in his voice now.