Wunderland(112)

For a moment neither speaks. She feels his gaze like a ray of late-afternoon sun, its golden warmth just barely lessened by the melancholy promise of sunset.

He doesn’t deserve this, she thinks, with a stab of remorse so overwhelming she grips the sides of the chair. I should make up an excuse. I should leave now.

And in her mind, and in that moment, Ilse does precisely this: gets out of the creaky chair. Races out the door and home to her room. In her mind she types up a report saying she found no evidence whatsoever that Franz Bauer or anyone else at the house was involved in anti-Reich activities. And when questioned about this by Obergruppenführer Helldorff, she looks him straight back in his fish-pale eyes and confirms it.

Because, after all, it is still the truth.

But then her mind shifts to the basement of Prinz-Albrecht-Stra?e 8, the two agents circling her chair like preying panthers.

Looking back, Ilse will later try to pinpoint the moment she decided to remain in Franz’s chair, in Franz’s room, and she will come up empty. But this, nevertheless, is exactly what she does: she stays just where she is. She holds the course.

Sacrifices have to be made.

“Ah,” Franz is saying. Looking up again from his volume, he offers a wan grin. “Found it, I think.”

Clearing his throat theatrically, he reads: “Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little of his despair over his fate—he has little success in this—but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different (and more) things than do the others; after all, dead as he is in his own lifetime, he is the real survivor.”

He looks up, his eyebrows arched in dismay. “Holy hell, von Fischer.”

She laughs, a little self-consciously. “I don’t remember it being quite that bleak.”

“It is bleak, though, isn’t it? Even for bleak old Franz.”

“It is,” she agrees. “I’d forgotten that part about the ruins. Where was it from, in the end?”

He holds up a slim blue volume. “One of his diaries. A rare private edition that I was lucky enough to stumble upon in an old bookstore.”

The way he sets the slim volume back down on the bed is wary, as though it contained some potentially unstable chemical compound.

“Can I see?”

“Of course.” He indicates the foot of the bed with his chin and hands the booklet to her as she settles in there, still shaking his head. “I’m amazed that that’s what has stayed with you. There’s plenty of Kafka stuff that I can pull up from my head, but nothing that obscure.”

“I know.” She laughs again. “You once recited the last two pages of Metamorphosis for us from memory. Do you remember? We were playing Truth or Consequences.”

“Ja.” Now it’s his turn to smile self-consciously. “I’d forgotten that.”

“I used to love playing that game with the two of you.” Ilse leans back against the wall, twirling a strand of hair around the top of her finger as she reminisces. “Do you remember the time we convinced your parents to join in?”

He cringes. “I’ve tried to block that out.”

“Well, you were the one who asked them that awful question. What was it…”

“I asked my mother to share her most Freudian dream. I never thought she’d actually answer.”

“None of us did!” The scene comes back in a rush, as sweetly potent as a shot of honey liqueur: the five of them in the parlor. Franz and his parents drinking wine, Cole Porter on the phonograph, a roaring fire in the fireplace. Was it the same night that Doktor Bauer had tried to teach them the jerky steps to the Black Bottom, and Renate tripped and landed flat on her back? Ilse can’t remember. She just remembers the laughter, the flickering, sighing fireplace. And Franz’s dark eyes, dancing as they are dancing now.

“What did she say again?” she asks. “Something about trains and tunnels, right?”

“Worse.” He rubs his temple. “A ‘very big’ train that got stuck in a ‘very tight and damp’ tunnel. And she was riding it, afraid that it would explode.” He shakes his head again, covering his eyes with a thin hand in feigned humiliation. “I think she was three sheets to the wind.”

“And she kept going, and going,” Ilse chimes in. “And your father kept saying, ‘Lisbet. Lisbet? That’s enough.’?”

“And when she finally stopped talking,” he adds, “there was that shocked silence. And then Renate asked…”

Ilse recites it with him: “But Mutti, what does it mean?” She giggles. “We teased her with that for months, do you remember? Every time she said something clueless. But Mutti!”

They dissolve into helpless laughter together, Ilse clasping her arms over her belly as the scene plays over again in her head. The mirth feels like a feather blanket; light and airy and warming, and for the first time in months she feels nearly safe, almost happy. As she wipes her eyes with her sleeve she has to remind herself that this is an illusion; that it is precisely because she is neither happy nor safe that she has landed in here, in this room, on this bed. And that unless she accomplishes what she came for, neither fact will change.

“She might as well have been narrating my own conception,” Franz is saying, rubbing his face with his hand, as though laughing has unexpectedly fatigued his features. “It was mortifying. I remember worrying that you’d never come back.”