Wunderland(13)

In Ilse-Sprache, it was the highest of praise.



* * *





“What do you call your neighborhood again?” Ilse asked a half hour later, her gaze fixed on a wall caked with band posters, escort offerings, and graffiti: a peace sign scrawled over a swastika; the spray-painted suggestion to Kill a Yuppie; another to Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo.

“The East Village.”

“Didn’t you live in another Village before?”

“That was Greenwich. With Livi. But then Mark and I found the rent-controlled place here, and it seemed too good a deal to pass up. It’s only $150 a month.”

“Mark being the father.”

Der Vater. It sounded so clinical and clean; so completely at odds with the gleefully self-destructive man with whom Ava had so fleetingly shared a life. Their affair had been a white dwarf in the chaotic universe of her love life: blindingly bright, impossibly dense, heartbreakingly brief; unmatched in intensity before or since. He’d fled when she got pregnant, a mere three months after he’d convinced her to move in with him. All he’d left was a battered Martin guitar, a check for six months’ rent, and a hastily scrawled note: Sorry babe.

“He is Sophie’s father, yes,” Ava told Ilse, glancing back down at her daughter, who now felt like a limp rag doll in her lap, having plummeted precariously into sleep as only small children can.

“He’s American?”

“Yes.” Ava sighed; she was fairly sure she’d covered at least that much in her letters.

“And is he still in New York?”

Actually, the last Ava had heard Mark was in LA, sharing an apartment (and possibly a bed) with the transvestite drummer of a glitter band called the Bobbie Cocks.

“We’ve lost touch,” she said tightly.

Her mother studied her face, her gaze opaque. “You don’t seem very bothered by it.”

“By what?”

“The fact that Sophie won’t know her father.”

Ava actually gaped at her.

For as long as she could remember, the topic of her own paternity had been both implicitly and explicitly off-limits. As a child, she’d known only that her father had been a German soldier who had died on the Eastern Front. As a teen she’d tried to learn about him on her own, forging her mother’s signature to order a copy of her birth certificate and then researching the name on it at Berlin’s Wehrmacht Archives. Her findings, however, had merely confirmed Ava’s darkest fears about the man, while pushing Ilse further into her sullen secrecy.

“Who knows,” she said now, carefully. “Maybe he’ll come back into the picture someday.”

Wiping her forehead again, Ilse began rolling down her window, covering her mouth and nose as the city’s signature stench of moldering garbage, melting street tar, and slow-baking dog excretion wafted in. “This was really the only place you could find to live?” she asked, her voice faintly ducklike behind her palm. “I can see why my travel agent warned me not to stay here.”

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” said Ava defensively. “If I had money, I’d look into buying in this neighborhood.”

“A job might help, no?”

“I have a job, Mama. A few, actually. There’s the book proposal I’m working on with a well-known children’s author. My agent says Scribner’s interested. There’s the play group I run on Mondays and Wednesdays; that pays something. And I still tutor high school German on weekend afternoons while Livi or Jakob watches Sophie.”

“Unglaublich,” her mother murmured. Unbelievable.

Ava stiffened before realizing the comment wasn’t meant for her. They’d stopped at an intersection, and Ilse was looking out the window, her gaze locked on a crumbling tenement that looked as though it hadn’t been inhabited in several decades. Stripped-down car frames intersected in the rubble below at odd angles, like skeletal remains from some primordial urban derby.

“How can they just leave it like that?” Ilse said, as the cab resumed its jerky journey. “It looks like Berlin after the war.”

Ava looked at her quickly again. Her mother’s whereabouts at the war’s end and the first year in its wake were another thing Ilse refused to discuss. Ava was half tempted to press the point now: Is that where you were then? In Berlin? But she knew from experience that pushing Ilse on topics she didn’t want to be pushed on only led to Ilse pushing away.

So she simply shrugged. “Germany recovered well enough.”

“It seems the Amis put more effort into Germany,” said Ilse tartly.

For a moment they fell back into hot, sticky silence. Then her mother seemed to brighten again. “I ran into Doktor Bergen last week.”

Ava felt her stomach contract hollowly. “Oh?”

“Ja.” Her mother nodded. “Ulrich’s widow came to Bremen last month. With the children.”

That’s nice. Or, How did she seem? Or, How old are the children now? These were the things people normally said in such cases. But the wound of Ulrich’s death felt as fresh as it had when Ava first received the telegram over a year earlier: Ulrich confirmed killed Golan Heights sniper funeral Tel Aviv June 28.

Ava shifted her gaze out the window, struggling desperately to think of a way to change the subject. Before she had, however, she felt a hand on her shoulder.