Wunderland(120)

As the train lurches from the station Ava wills it to fly; to go as fast as her own blood races in her veins. Renate Bauer. The woman who knows the truth about Ilse’s childhood past; who can answer the questions now swarming through Ava’s jolted mind. Renate Bauer! Here in the city! It seems impossible; incredible to her. It’s like discovering that the Blue Fairy is not only real but living on East 64th and Lexington.

As the car careens steamily through the city’s glimmering tunnels, Ava’s mind scrabbles for something to say, for some way to begin. Begin at the beginning, the White King had said. But where is that? You and my mother were like sisters for years, before you became a Jew and she a Fascist. But why should Renate Bauer want to hear something she already knows?

She tries again: Hello. I know my mother betrayed your family. But she’s dead now. And she’s also very sorry. But again, why would Renate Bauer care? Why wouldn’t she simply slam the door in Ava’s face, just as Sophie had done hours earlier? Given nearly everything that Ava knows now, the woman would have more than enough reason. For it wasn’t just that Ilse joined the BDM and the Nazi Party. It wasn’t just that she’d terrorized innocent Polish boys and destroyed Jewish property and physically attacked a man she’d once considered a friend. It wasn’t just that she’d betrayed Renate and Franz. Incredibly—or so it had seemed to Ava as she read—there was still more. And still more after that.

After Renate and Franz left, Ilse was posted in Lodz, where she’d not only continued writing her poisonous propaganda but physically aided in the appropriation of Polish farms and homes, moving Poles out and into a brutal roulette of ghettoization, mass execution, and deportation. In her letters, she’d claimed to have had doubts at the time; to have felt pity for the people she so efficiently ejected; to be sickened by colleagues who physically abused them. But she didn’t quit, or leave, or try secretly to help those who she herself noted were in desperate need of help. She told herself (she wrote) that her first loyalty was to her Party; that Party loyalty was what would save the nation. Sacrifices have to be made. She kept saying it until the Allies arrested her, convicting her of crimes against a civilian population and indoctrinating German youth into a Fascist ideology, and sentencing her to eighteen months of rigorous “reeducation.” It was only when Ilse was able to establish that she had a fatherless daughter who needed her that they commuted her sentence on “humanitarian” grounds.

In other words, Ava had been Ilse’s ticket to freedom.



* * *





At 34th Street the train judders to a halt, the conductor spewing an explanation that, between his Spanish accent and heavy static, is virtually incomprehensible. Ava finds herself groaning out loud while the West Indian nanny to her left hushes her wailing charge and a man in pinstripes snaps his Wall Street Journal in annoyance. The straphanger to her right curses stagnantly in Russian.

It seems they stay here, stalled, for hours, the agitation building within Ava like a hot inner balloon pressing against her lungs: Jesus. Come on. Then the lights go out and the panic descends, hotly crushing her in its suffocating fist. We’re all going to die. Ava closes her eyes, but for some reason the soothing images she usually summons to defuse such moments (a sunny beach, an open field) fail to materialize. Instead of ebbing, the terror surges; instead of breathing she gasps, already feeling plaster dust in her lungs.

“Ma’am? You all right?”

The lights flash back on. Opening her eyes, Ava sees an almost shockingly lovely woman in bright blue scrubs, her skin the color of shining onyx. She is sitting directly below where Ava is standing, though Ava has no recollection of having noticed her there a moment earlier. Nevertheless here she is now, gazing up, her eyes velvet-dark and wide with concern.

“Do you need to sit?” the woman asks. Her voice is melodious, flutelike. Embarrassed, Ava shakes her head.

“I’m fine,” she manages. “It’s just the heat.”

“Here. Sit.” Standing, the woman nods firmly at the space she’s opened up. “You need to rest. You don’t look good.”

Still struggling to breathe, Ava hesitates. Then she nods, sinking into the seat just as the train lurches back into motion. When she’s composed herself a little she looks up again to thank the woman properly. But her benefactor has vanished into the close-packed flesh of the crowd.



* * *





Reaching Lexington Avenue is like surfacing on another planet. Ava has always thought of the Upper East Side as the Lower East Side’s topsy-turvy opposite—shining town houses versus grimy tenements. Bowing doormen versus boozy derelicts. Purse-sized poodles versus homeless pit bulls. As she begins walking back downtown, however (66th Street, 65th), for the first time she finds herself thinking about their odd, invisible interdependence. For this is how New York has always functioned: immigrants from Delancey working their way up to Park Avenue; first the Germans, then the Irish and the Italians, then the Jews and now (gradually) the Indians, Chinese, Latinos. One swell following the next. Cycles of migrational chaos pounding the city’s asphalt shore, each wave making the trip smoother for the next…As Ava pulls out the envelope upon which she’d scrawled Renate’s address, she wonders how smooth Franz and Renate Bauer’s paths were after landing. Had they found safety and acceptance? New lovers? New pets? Had they ever seen their parents again?