Wunderland(127)

“Yes. Yes, he was.”

The older woman shakes her head. “It’s not possible. He would never…that would never have happened.”

Ava starts to respond. Then, thinking the better of it, she reaches back into her bag.

“This,” she says gently, “was written by my mother in June 1956. May I?”

When the old woman doesn’t answer, Ava pulls the folded note from the envelope. Clearing her throat, she begins reading aloud.


Dear Reni:

It is a quiet Sunday evening here in Bremen, and I am at my kitchen table with a glass of sherry and my pen. Ava is in her room, loudly playing a record by that oddly popular American who gyrates his hips like a bellydancer. She is also crying into her pillow. The pillow and the music are intended for me: she doesn’t want me to know what has happened. But I can guess. And while I’m sure a good mother would rush upstairs to offer sympathy and advice, there are several things that are keeping me from doing so.

You see, I suspect her heart is broken, and I suspect it has been broken by a Jewish boy whom she has known for years now. I tried to keep the attachment from forming, as it seemed inevitable to me that it couldn’t last. Not because of his race—you of all people know that I’m certainly no anti-Semite. But because like you I understand, in a way she can’t yet, that the barriers to happiness are always far too high when people come from such very different worlds. To be honest, I’m only glad that it happened sooner rather than later.

I would very much like to be able to say all this to Ava; even more so now that I’ve had some more sherry (!). But as I can’t, I write you, as I have taken to writing you periodically over the past decade, just as I always did when we were girls.

Odd, the habits one keeps.

You and I spent a good deal of time considering romance, I remember. All those hours pondering potentially “dirty” bits of All Quiet on the Western Front and Anna Karenina. All the juicy details you’d share about your moviehouse dates with Rudi Gerhardt. The long walks we’d take; talking and talking, stopping at Schloss-Konditorei for our daily Mohnkuchen. To be honest, in all the years since, I have never had another friendship that was quite that close, quite that effortless.

It makes me sad, sometimes, to think of how na?ve we both were then. How we had no way of seeing the events that would roll over us both and change our lives. Though again, I suppose it’s also more evidence for my theory: for as breathlessly as you loved Rudi for all those months, it could only have caused more heartbreak eventually. That is clear.

There is news on Rudi, by the way: He’s still in prison, awaiting trial for some Aktion-related event in Russia or Hungary. I’m not sure when the date has been set for, but it will likely be quite some time yet. The backlog on these things is quite significant.



Pausing, Ava peers over the page, at Renate’s face. But the old woman is staring at her books, her expression unreadable.


I wish I could send you a picture of Ava. Apart from an unfortunate haircut at the moment—I truly fail to understand the current fashions!—she’s grown into a lovely young woman, though she seems to have absolutely no awareness of her own beauty. She’s not unlike you in that way, I think. I always felt as though for you, your looks were like a complex gadget you’d been given and never quite deduced how to operate. And in fact, she looks not unlike you: dark hair, large dark eyes, lovely glowing skin. She’s every bit as passionate about art as you were about books; when she begins to sketch or paint it’s as though time ceases to exist. Sometimes she falls asleep with her sketchbook under her cheek. Ever the restless sleeper myself these days, I’ll tiptoe in at three or four, cover her up and turn out her light.

At this point, I should add (and I’ve just had some more sherry to steel myself) that the likeness between her and you is almost certainly more than coincidental. Because the truth is that you are related.

The truth is that Franz is her father.

(There, I have finally written it.)



Ava pauses again, staring at the phrase—Franz ist ihr Vater—which had triggered such joyous shock earlier on in the day.

Swallowing again, she reads on.


I know you’d find this almost as shocking as I did, when I was finally faced with the truth. For months—years, really—I’d told myself that Ava’s father was the editor I went with while working at the BDM publications office, even though beneath it all I’m sure that this wasn’t even vaguely likely. Kai and I were still involved, yes. But he’d been away in the East for weeks when Ava was conceived. Still, it was Kai I wrote with the news of the pregnancy, and Kai’s name that I put on Ava’s birth certificate and ration forms. Had he survived the war, I suppose that it would also have been Kai whom I ended up marrying, adding yet one more lie to the pile I’d built my life on.

But Kai died in the East, well before the end of the war. And the moment I picked Ava up at the orphanage I simply knew: the likeness I’d managed to overlook when she was a baby had become incontestable. It actually left me speechless at first.

I have no doubt that you’d be speechless too, were you to read these words. And yet I think you always suspected my feelings for your brother, even if I tried to hide them from you. Nor did I ever think that they’d be more than that: feelings. Certainly not after the race laws forced me away from your family. But fate has a way of playing pranks on us sometimes, and this was a particularly dark one.