Wunderland(126)

She stops again, her eyes shut against the memory. “They beat him to a pulp right there, in front of our house. In front of my parents. In front of the neighbors who came to their windows and doorways to watch. They kicked his stomach over and over, in their heavy leather boots, until blood came out of his mouth and his nose. They kicked his teeth.” She chokes slightly. “They kicked them so hard that broken parts of them were left on the sidewalk after they left. My mother…my mother collected them.”

“No.” Ava feels her hands fly to her mouth. “No. My mother wrote that she lied to them. About when you were leaving. About the meetings. She never told them anything. She was sure of it.”

“It doesn’t matter!” Renate’s voice rises sharply again. “Do you think that mattered to my brother? To my parents, who saw him all but dead on the street before being dragged into one of those cars?” Gripping the sides of the armchair, she forces a jagged breath. “Do you know what we called them? Those black Mercedes the Gestapo drove? We called them Leichenwagen. Hearses. Because if you ended up in one, you were almost certainly dead.”

Tot. The word seems to hang between them for a moment in the book-scented silence. Shivering, Ava hugs herself harder.

“My mother chased them,” Renate resumes. “In bare feet and her nightgown. She chased them halfway down our street. Screaming: Where are you taking him? When will he be back? For a few blocks, they drove just slowly enough to laugh at her from the windows. He’ll be back when he’s back, one of them shouted. That was all.”

Ava gazes at her water glass, the ice melted to slim sheer chips, the condensation beading along the outside crystal. She wants to drink, but she can’t seem to move.

“A day and a half later,” Renate is continuing, more quietly now, “I left for America. On my own. With my own luggage, a bag full of my own books.” She pauses, passes a thin hand across her forehead. “I tried so hard not to go. I argued and fought. I threatened to run away. But of course, in the end, I had no choice.” Wearily, she shakes her head. “I remember watching from the deck as the ship left the Hamburg harbor. My parents were wild with worry and grief, of course. But they smiled and waved as though I were off on a pleasure cruise. They kept it up for as long as they thought I could see them. When I couldn’t, I borrowed another passenger’s binoculars. My last image was of my mother collapsing into my father’s arms.”

The tears have stopped for the moment. Behind her glasses, her reddened eyes seem unfocused; as though she’s still gazing numbly at a fast-retreating shoreline, at the only two people left for her in the world. “I almost hurled myself over that rail. Even though I couldn’t swim then; I would have drowned. I just kept repeating to myself: They’ll come soon. They’ll come soon.”

“And did they?” It comes out in a shaky whisper.

Renate shakes her head. “Mama wrote me later that she’d received notice of my brother’s death. They told her he’d had a heart attack while in custody. That he’d been cremated ‘for sanitary purposes.’ And that she’d have to pay thirty Reichsmarks for postage and handling for his ashes.”

Ava thinks of Ilse’s ash-filled plastic urn. She swallows back against another wave of nausea.

“A year or so after I left,” Renate continues, “they were forced into a Judenhaus on Kurfürstendamm. Vati avoided deportation for a while because he was married to a non-Jew. But in 1942 he was sent to Auschwitz. He died there less than a year later.”

“And your mother?”

“Killed by the Russians at the end of the war.”

Raped and left in the snow, Ava thinks reflexively. For a moment she thinks she actually might vomit.

The older woman picks unseeingly at an invisible fray or thread on the handkerchief’s edge. Ava stares at her own hands; grimy, sticky with cookie crumbs. The right is smudged slightly from Ilse’s ink. Every fiber of her being seems to pulse with pain and shock. When she opens her mouth even her tongue feels broken.

“I’m truly so sorry,” she murmurs, again achingly aware of just how hollow the term is.

The old woman continues staring at her lap.

“She didn’t know either, then,” Ava continues. “My mother. When she came here. She didn’t know that he never made it out.”

Renate shakes her head. “When I told her she seemed quite shaken. She tried to ask more questions, but Adam wouldn’t let her. He took her arm. He walked her right out of the building.”

Ava nods slowly. So on the day of the blackout Ilse, having somehow found this address, arrived with her decades-old letters and her dreams of friendship resurrected, of crimes absolved. Perhaps even of romance rekindled. Instead, she was given the full crushing weight of her crime, one she’d bear for the rest of her life.

She pictures her mother after being ejected from Renate’s home, exiled back into the airless city. She sees her wandering dark streets blindly with her pocketbook of unread letters: Oedipus after his fall.

“It broke her too,” she says slowly. “Discovering that she’d not only betrayed you, but was responsible for my father’s death.”

Renate looks up sharply. “Your father?”

“Franz. Your brother.”

The old woman frowns. “Franz wasn’t your father.”