Wunderland(115)

I can make this work, she tells herself, pushing through the rush-hour crowd and taking hold of a strap by the far door. After all, von Helldorff hadn’t specified an exact deadline for her report. He may not even know Franz is leaving the country, let alone in two days’ time. So if Ilse simply times the delivery of her report properly, she can give the police chief what he wants while buying Franz just enough time to get out. In fact, maybe she can even hold off until after the meeting next week. She could say she was double-checking her intelligence. By throwing in a couple of days between the meeting and delivery she can ensure that the Gestapo doesn’t have a chance to act. And that way, she can give them other names—not just potato-faced Karina Hafner, but all the others who show up Wednesday.

All the others, except for Franz. Who will be gone.

I can do it, she thinks again. But her pulse is pounding even harder, and Ilse forces slow and deliberate breaths to calm it while she stares at a bright advertisement poster directly before her.

The ad depicts a young couple in a shiny new KdF “Strength Through Joy” Wagon. Golden and chiseled, the man drives with a white-toothed grin. The woman—also beaming—is standing on the passenger side, her trim torso bursting through the fully opened sunroof. Her tanned arm is flung jubilantly into the air, against an impossibly blue sky. Behind them, white-capped mountains gleam next to rolling green fields, as though offering the best of all seasons in one landscape.

I can’t believe you are leaving so soon, she’d said.

Will you come visit? Franz murmured. Will you let me show you New York?

Careful. If I come I might stay.

I’d be fine with that, he’d said. Really. He smelled like smoke and coffee and something else that was slightly musky; the way his eyes looked as though they’d taste, if she could lick them. His skin tasted like something else, though; salt and something faintly acidic, mixed with the faintest trace of amber honey.

Staring at the poster now, she feels another warm wave of elation, quickly trailed by anxiety that seems to sour her stomach. I can do this, she repeats to herself, as the train stops at Berlin-Mahlsdorf and she jostles her way off. I can do this. I can do this. As she hurries down Frankfurter Allee it forms a chant: a silent mantra of desperate optimism. It’s like the “news” she writes, she tells herself: if she repeats it often enough it is bound to become true. And so she thinks it, and thinks it again. I can do this.

By the time she reaches her block she is murmuring it aloud, so caught up in the words—Ich schaffe das Ich schaffe das—she doesn’t notice the black sedan parked across the street from her doorway. Nor does she notice, at first, the strange silence as she unlocks the front door, or the fact that her mother looks pale and frightened when she greets her.

“There are two men here to see you,” she says tightly.





18.


    Ava


1989

Heart thudding in her ears, Ava twists the bedroom doorknob. Her intention at first is to just crack the door a little, but the button lock has barely popped before the door flies open with enough force that she has to leap back to avoid getting hit.

Her daughter stands in the threshold, arms crossed over her chest, her smooth face pink with annoyance. “My God,” she huffs, pushing past Ava into the bedroom. “What took you so long?”

Ava licks her lips again. “I’m sorry. I was a little distracted.”

“Distracted? Or deaf? I have to be back at the park in five minutes!”

“Which park?” asks Ava reflexively. “Not Tompkins, I hope?” Over her vocal objections, Sophie and her friends have taken to congregating in Tompkins Square Park, currently home to half the city’s homeless population.

“We’re just hanging around outside it.” Striding into the master bathroom, Sophie stares down at Ava’s overflowing laundry bin for a moment before picking it up with a sigh. “I thought you said you were doing laundry today.”

“Before dinner,” says Ava, distractedly wondering if she can clear the box and letters from the bed before her daughter turns back around. But before the thought is even complete Sophie has the bin in her arms and is making her way back into the bedroom with it.

“So Erica’s sweatshirt’s still dirty then,” she is saying.

“It’s just a sweatshirt,” Ava reminds her mildly.

“Yes, but it’s not mine, and I promised her I’d take good care of it.”

Reaching the bed, her daughter drops the basket at its foot and begins rifling through its rumpled contents. Ava watches warily, until it strikes her that Sophie’s less likely to notice the letters if Ava herself isn’t staring at them obsessively. Turning back to her drafting table, she takes a swig of cold coffee while feigning interest in her abandoned Mutter Trudi illustration. In reality, though, she is seeing not the wiry-haired old witch but Ilse’s blue eyes, narrowed against the sun. Dummes M?dchen. What on earth is the matter with you now?

Everything, Ava thinks wearily. She still feels utterly disoriented—as though the past hour’s revelations have severed her connection to her life the way an axe might cut through a ship’s anchor, setting it adrift.

It’s not just the sheer selfishness of Ilse’s actions that has left her stunned: the empty justifications, the self-imposed blindness, the continual, cynical prioritization of personal gain over principle. Nor is it even that Ilse made these confessions not to Ava, her own daughter, but to a woman she hadn’t seen for four decades; a woman she’d betrayed in the most callous of ways. It’s also the voice of these pages; the fact that the person they reveal is a complete stranger to her own daughter. Affectionate and confessional, nostalgic and reflective, anguished and surprisingly, sharply humorous, she is someone who has been almost completely absent for Ava’s entire life.