Wunderland(122)

“So, ice?” Renate clarifies.

“Ja, yes,” says Ava, chagrined. “Thank you.”

The collapse had happened with shocking swiftness: one moment Ava was making the most stunning statement of her life, to a woman she’d only just met. The next, someone seemed to be turning down the world’s volume while white sparks looped and vanished before her eyes. She’d somehow landed back in the armchair, her head between her knees and her tote half-emptied on the lushly carpeted floor. And then the doorman was scooping it all up—keys, ChapStick, a few of the letters (my God the letters)—and Renate Bauer was bending over her, murmuring: “Oh, dear. Are you all right?” And to the doorman: “Let me take her upstairs until she gets her bearings.”

Ava hadn’t been able to make out the man’s answer through the suddenly roaring silence. But she’d heard Renate Bauer’s response: “Well, we can’t very well send her on her way like this.” And then, dryly: “Don’t worry, Eugene. I’ll call you if things get too desperate.”

And so it was that Ava found herself shepherded into a wood-paneled elevator that smelled of lemon wax and Windex and whatever old-lady perfume (powdery and sweet) Renate Bauer happened to be wearing. The doctor had set Ava on the tastefully padded stool, patted her on the shoulder, and then thoughtfully watched the old-fashioned floor dial work its way from one to seven, seeming far less unsettled by the announcement Ava had just made than Ava still was herself.

Could it really be that easy? Ava had thought, as the polished box made its creaky trip up the building. Is she really going to simply let me in?

It wasn’t just the cheerful reception that surprised her. As Ava had surreptitiously studied her mother’s childhood confidante in the mirror, she saw little to match the image she’d formed in her head: that of a young girl with a gentle, bookish demeanor and a kindness Ilse described in one of her letters as unmatched by any I have known since.

Just on the cusp of seventy, Dr. Renate Bauer remains a striking woman, with high cheekbones, a pointed chin, and a small, well-shaped nose that sits perfectly symmetrically over her pink-painted lips. But it was the eyes that had struck Ava the most. Dark and wide behind their oversized plastic frames, Renate Bauer’s eyes were at once solicitous and fiercely determined. They were thoughtful, and deep, and tinged with the life-weariness of one who has lived through trauma and remains trapped in its outer orbit.

They were also the eyes of a woman used to getting her own way. Not because she’s been coddled, but because she’s learned how to fight.

“I really don’t want to cause trouble,” Ava calls again now.

“No trouble for family!” Renate calls back. In the other room something rattles; something clinks.

Family, Ava thinks. It’s like she’s back in a dream.

Trying to ground herself, she surveys the small room. Like Renate herself, it exudes a bookish and slightly shabby elegance that seems untouched by the passage of decades. On the wall directly across from her hangs a framed document in Hebrew—a Jewish marriage contract, Ava guesses, remembering the small scroll-box she’d seen outside the door. On the walnut coffee table in front of her, a heavily annotated copy of Pearl Buck’s Peony lies half open atop a fading copy of the New York Review of Books. A yellow legal pad lies next to it, covered with notes written in English (filling loss with literature, Ava reads; and beneath it all extremist forms converge in the end). Protruding from beneath the pad is a plain-looking green book, the cover of which is mostly obscured, though part of an illustration—a little black-and-white foot—seems familiar. When Ava gently slides it out she immediately sees why: the foot is part of Tenniel’s iconic image of Alice, key in hand, pulling back the curtain to the door to Wonderland. Above the image is the book’s title: Alice’s Evidence: The Absurd Across Language and Culture.

The author is Renate Sophia Bauer, PhD.

Ah, Ava thinks. That kind of doctor.

From the kitchen comes the crash of shattering glass. “Oh, damn it,” Renate calls out. “I’m sorry. One more minute…”

Despite herself, Ava smiles. Her mother had written frequently and fondly of Renate’s clumsiness. Apparently her grace hasn’t improved with age.

“Really, there’s no hurry,” she calls. She flips to the dedication and feels her heart leap in her chest:

For Franz.

Glancing furtively toward the kitchen, Ava pages forward to the introduction.


I first met Alice, she reads, when I myself was a little girl, growing up in prewar Berlin. My brother, Franz, had an old copy of the original Antonie Zimmerman translation dating from 1869, and if I asked him very nicely, he would sometimes read to me from it. Like so many children all over the world, we were both charmed by Carroll’s fantastical tale: the cheeky Cheshire Cat (or as I first met it, the “Grinse-Katze”). The hookah-smoking caterpillar. The way Alice’s very form could stretch and shrink with a bite of mushroom or cake. Visiting them soon became an almost weekly ritual; first as siblings and then, as I learned to read, alone. Over the years, I came almost to feel as though Alice were not a character but a friend. She was someone I could talk to, first as an imaginative child and then as a young Jewish woman whose world had quite suddenly been turned upside down in Nazi-era Berlin. I laughed at Alice’s nonsense and was cheered by her resilience; I also took heart in her resolute pursuit of her goals, even in the face of the most unexpected changes to her landscape, her companions, and her own body. Throughout it all, though, it never even occurred to me that the pages I grew to know by heart contained anything other than Carroll’s own imaginings.