Wunderland(114)
He is smiling again, just a little this time, the movement casting the faint stubble on his upper lip into darker relief. Ilse finds herself wondering what it would feel like: those full lips, that sparse stubble. Hauptsturmführer Wainer’s lips had felt wet and slack and slightly scratchy when he’d kissed her with them. Kai’s were thin and chapped and smooth, and he hardly ever has to shave. Thankfully, she hasn’t had to feel them since he left for the Soviet territories to work for some general Goebbels has set him up with. He’s written a few times, but she hasn’t written back yet. He’ll be back on leave soon enough.
“Or at least, no more wrong than it was for me to,” Franz is saying. “I suppose a part of me even liked the idea of it.”
With the second statement his voice drops just a little, in a way that makes it feel both more intimate and confessional. As he holds the lighter out toward her his expression is both lazy and speculative; a boy tossing a bread crumb into a sleepy pond to see whether a fish will break surface for it. She’s aware of the air somehow tightening between them, of her pulse beating butterfly-like, in her throat.
Very slowly she leans forward, until her face is a sigh’s distance from his, her cigarette millimeters from the flickering flame.
“The idea of what?” she asks.
He doesn’t blink. “Of you,” he says. “Of you. Looking at that.”
It’s barely a whisper, but Ilse feels the words on every inch of her skin. She feels them in the same way she feels his gaze somehow flowing inside her, warm and wide, daring and questioning. With other men at such moments all she has wanted is to escape, mentally if not physically; to contract her sense and her essence deeply into herself as a sea anemone retracts its vulnerable tendrils.
To her amazement, though, what she wants now is precisely the opposite. She doesn’t want to pull back. She wants to push past her own skin and his; to empty herself into him until there is nothing left to extend. It is what she has always wanted; a craving she only now understands has not lessened but ballooned in the years since she abandoned this house. Set loose by their banter, by the bubbling memories and drunken laughter, by the parted proximity of his soft full lips, it roars by every caution and every fail-safe mechanism she’d set up for herself, sweeping them away and out of sight even as it sweeps Ilse herself onto his lap.
And then her lips are on his, and her hands are in his hair, and the unlit cigarette is on the floor and forgotten.
* * *
Two hours later she is walking toward the U-Bahn, braids hastily repinned, skin tingling, thoughts in turmoil. The banned Kafka, slight as it is, feels like a ten-kilo weight in her satchel. But even heavier is the scrap of paper sandwiched within it, hastily ripped from Franz’s moleskin notebook.
Lying there with him, intermittently kissing and conversing, she’d found herself dreamily skip-hopping across her stream of untruths: I’m curious about your meetings. (True.) I think I’d maybe like to see one of them. Just to see if it’s something I might like to join. (Both true and untrue.)
He’d stared up at the ceiling, smoking the cigarette that she’d dropped, and it had taken him less than a minute to nod. All right. I’ll write down the information for you before you go.
It had seemed impossible that it might be just that easy. But as she’d rebuttoned, tucked, and adjusted, he had scribbled the address, time, and cross-street, tucked it into the Kafka volume, and handed it to her with one last, slow kiss.
There may be hope for you yet, von Fischer, he said, as she made her way into the hallway.
It was so easy that it almost broke her heart.
Now, walking quickly, she struggles to reconcile it all: the giddy exultation of his whispered confessions: You’re so beautiful, I’ve always wanted you. The tight-coiled power of the other confessions—the yes, I still go; the I’ll write down the information for you. The salty, sated joy of lying there with him, his palm cupped over her navel and his glorious hair veiling her face and neck. The stark terror of realizing, as she took him into her arms, that she was taking his life—both their lives—into her hands.
What would Kai say if he knew she’d slept with Franz Bauer? What if she were, right now, to telephone his unit, right this very minute, and say: I just made love to a Jew! Would he be more upset about the faithlessness or the Rassenschande? Would he scream at her the way she’d heard him scream the night they’d burned down the synagogue; tell her how soiled and impure she had made herself? The thought is strangely satisfying; the way it might feel to slap him in the face after he says one of the stupid things he is so often prone to saying: Why would you even want to go to university? Men don’t like women who think too much. Or: My money’s on you being a Gold Cross mother after we marry. You’ve a terrific build for breeding. As though she were a prize cow.
Maybe I will go to New York, Ilse thinks now. Maybe during Kai’s upcoming leave from Russia she’ll simply tell him it’s over. That she’s leaving. The thought is shocking yet intoxicating, like a shot of ice-cold vodka.
As she makes her way down the darkened stairwell of the Friedrichstra?e U-Bahn station it’s as though her insides are shattering into sharp and embattled factions: what she feels versus what she knows. What she wants versus what she is. What she said versus what she really, truly meant. At one point the dissonance is so overwhelming that Ilse almost turns back up the subway stairs and down the street and to his room, to burrow back into the cocoon of his adoration, to feel his warm firm skin against hers. It’s only the knowledge that Renate and her mother will be back soon that pushes her through the ticket gate and into the waiting carriage.