Wunderland(128)

Has Franz ever told you that I’d come to see him just a day or two before you left? I told him I’d come to see you, but I knew you wouldn’t be home. So when he answered the door I got him to invite me inside with some excuse I can’t remember, other than that it was something I was genuinely curious about.

But the truth was that I’d been sent there by the Gestapo.

I want to be clear that I did not do this willingly. I knew full well it was monstrous, and I loathed myself for it. But the Gestapo had pressured me in such a way that I could not refuse—or at least, that is how I saw it at the time. They sent me to determine whether Franz was still involved in his Socialist meetings, and to gather intelligence about when and where those meetings occurred, and the names of the other people who attended them. I did get some of this information, and my plan was originally to hold off delivering it until you were both out of the country. But they were waiting for me at our house the very night I returned from yours. I’d had no forewarning of the visit, and they obviously felt no need to share the reasoning behind it. But I must be as good a liar as you always said I was, because while they questioned me for hours, trying to trip me up, to trick me, to startle me with shouts and sudden stomps, I managed to stick to my story: that the next meeting was the following week, and that Franz would be in attendance and had agreed to bring me. I gave them the location, the time. When the time came, I reasoned, and he wasn’t there, I’d simply say that I hadn’t known he was leaving. That he’d lied.

Luckily, though, they never did follow up about it—perhaps because my Lodz posting came through less than a day later, and less than a week later I was out of the country. Or maybe they had too many other Socialists to process after the raid. Or perhaps (and this is what I’d like to think) the whole thing was just a test, set up to prove or disprove my loyalty. Either way, looking back, it remains in many ways both the best and the worst day of my life. The best, because it enabled me to spend one last moment not just with Franz, but with so many fond memories of and feelings for your home and your family. And worst because I came close to death at the hands of the Gestapo only hours later.

Did Franz ever tell you what happened between us that afternoon? For some reason I think he did not. I think that, like me, perhaps he’s locked it away as something at once impossibly perfect and perfectly impossible. For my part, I have never told anyone. Not even Ava—or perhaps, especially not Ava. Not because I’m ashamed of her or her lineage, but because the story behind it is at once too personal and too painful. You see, for all your protestations that I was the brave one, I really am at heart a coward in the end.

But I am hoping that someday I’ll be brave enough to tell her about it all: about Franz and you; about the good times we had as children and the harder times as young adults. Perhaps I’ll even be brave enough to find you both. And if so, who knows what might follow?…

Ah. The hip-twitching American has been switched off; I just looked at the clock and saw the time. As usual I’ve gone on and on in a letter that most likely will never be read by anyone else. But also as usual, it leaves me with just a little less of that leaden, lonely feeling inside. As does the knowledge that even if you and Franz aren’t yet aware of it, Ava and I do still have family.


Humbly yours,

Ilsi



Setting the letter in her lap, Ava closes her eyes for a moment. The truth, she repeats in silence, as she had earlier in her room, is that Franz is my father.

And: The truth is that my mother killed him.

For an instant there’s again that disorienting sense of falling in place; the sort of motionless plummet one feels in dreamt tumbles which end with waking, shocked and gasping, in bed. Ava covers her face with her hands. When she looks up again, it’s to find Renate Bauer staring at her. It’s not the gaze she’d worn while sharing her heart-stopping story, when her eyes seemed trained not on Ava but on some invisible screen between them, upon which played out the cataclysm she was relating.

No, now she is actually looking at Ava; bluntly studying her through her glasses. Assessing each feature, each long dark eyelash while her mind works furiously to confirm or deny. Ava finds herself holding her breath; as though she were standing before a diminutive judge whose verdict will determine her very fate.

After concluding her survey, however, Renate Bauer doesn’t immediately speak. She stands up. As Ava watches, twisting her hands in her lap, the old woman paces from the bookshelf to the window, her white hair illumined by pinkish, early-evening light. She seems agitated, almost angry. But for several sets of rapid strides—back and forth, back and forth—she neither looks at her newfound niece nor says a word.

“What is it?” Ava finally asks, aware of how tentative and nervous her voice sounds.

Stopping midway between door and bookshelf, Renate Bauer looks at her fiercely.

“It’s your mother,” she finally says, her tone caustic. “Even dead, she’s turning everything to chaos.”

Ava blinks.

“All these years,” the old woman continues. “All this time, all I’ve had to do is hate her. And that was easy enough, after all. After all she did to me. To us.” She flings an arm out, indicating Ava. “But now here you are, with her letters and your stories and you—your goddamn eyes. Your eyes that are just like Franz’s.”

“They are?” asks Ava, feeling them widen.