Wunderland(124)

“She—she came here?” For a moment the room seems to shift, ever so slightly, as though readjusting its position.

“Ja.” The older woman’s voice is shaking with outrage now. “We made it very clear she wasn’t welcome.”

“When?” Ava manages; but even before the question is out she realizes that she already knows the answer: Of course. That awful night of the blackout.

It rushes back; Ilse’s wan face when Ava found her at the police precinct. Her inexplicable attachment to her purse: Don’t tell me what I have in it. Ava glances quickly back down at her own tattered bag, the crumpled paper just visible in jumbled disarray.

“It doesn’t matter when,” Renate Bauer is saying curtly. “There is nothing more to discuss.” With three tight strides of her vein-etched, stockinged legs she is at the door. Flinging it open, she steps aside. “Please go. I don’t want to have to call the doorman.”

“But you still don’t understand—” Ava begins to say, but the other woman cuts her off.

“I’m under no obligation to understand anything for you,” Renate says sharply. “Even if you are her daughter. Especially if you are her daughter.” She indicates the hallway with her chin. “Du musst gehen.”

“Frau Bauer,” Ava pleads.

“Doctor Bauer,” Renate snaps.

“Doctor Bauer,” Ava repeats, dutifully, desperately. “Please, listen to me. Just for a minute.” She takes a deep breath. “I’m not really here about my mother. I’m here about something she wrote you. In this letter.” With shaking hands, she slips the page from its envelope. “Can I just…”

“How many times must I say it? I don’t care about her damn letters!” There’s a wildness now to the old woman’s voice, an unsteadiness that seems fully positioned to escalate into a scream. “I’d just as soon read Mein Kampf. It amounts to the same bloody thing.”

“But if you didn’t read them, then you don’t know about Franz and my mother….”

“She killed him!” This does come out close to a scream. For a moment the older woman seems as startled by its ferocity as is Ava.

“For God’s sake,” she adds, shakily. “What more is there to know?”

Beneath her cardigan, her narrow chest heaves. Ava blinks at her, speechless. “Wh-what?” she finally manages.

“She killed him.” Renate takes a hoarse breath. “Ilse von Fischer murdered my brother.”

“No,” Ava says slowly, shaking her head. “No. That’s not right. You both got out. You came to America together.”

“Nein.” The rebuttal is guttural, unchallengeable. “Franz was taken by the Gestapo in 1939. A day before he was to leave Germany.”

“Taken?” Ava repeats blankly.

“Arrested.” Renate shuts her eyes for a moment, her lips pressed together tightly, as though struggling to keep the words in. “He never came back.”

It hits Ava like a force field, with such jolting abruptness that she actually feels herself rock in her seat. Never came back. She presses a hand to her forehead, as though she might somehow physically impose calm on the careening thoughts just behind the bone.

“She didn’t know,” she finally whispers. “My mother didn’t know.”

“Not at first.” The old woman’s voice is more level now, but still biting. “No. She showed up here all smiles and tears. With her letters. And her need. Her need to talk to me. Her need to explain. Her need to apologize to me and my brother. She said she’d gotten our address from Barnard.” She shakes her head contemptuously. “She was always good in that way, able to put things together.”

“She never missed a beat.” It comes out barely a whisper.

“Adam didn’t even want to let her in,” the old woman continues, as though Ava hadn’t spoken. “But I thought: Why not, after all these years. What harm could it really do.” She gives a rueful laugh. “She used to make fun of me for that. How gullible I was. People don’t really change, in the end. Do they. My mother—she was a psychoanalyst—used to tell me that. They may defy expectations. But they don’t change.”

She is leaning against the door now, her eyes distant behind her glasses. “But of course, I thought there still was a chance. I brought her upstairs, all smiles and welcome. Come to my arms, my beamish boy!”

Ava blinks. “Boy?”

“Nothing.” The thin lips twist bitterly. “Just my own gullibility. I gave her iced tea and a bit of lemon shortbread.” She is staring not at Ava, but at the table between them. “When she first apologized, I thought it was simply over never having said good-bye to us. You see, she’d come to see me before I left. She brought me a book. And she’d promised to come back, but she never did.” She shakes her head. “When she told me she’d really been spying on us, at first I didn’t understand. I thought she was making some sort of horrid joke. But then she was crying, and saying how ashamed she was of her behavior, and how she wanted to apologize to Franz in person as well. And I finally put it together: the Gestapo took my brother away because she’d given him away to them. It was her fault.”

She takes a sharp, shaking breath in. “I told her Franz was dead. That they’d come for him because of her.” She locks eyes with Ava, unblinking. “I told her that she was a murderer.”