Wunderland(2)

KONTAKTIERE UNS NICHT (HALT) DU BIST JETZT TOT (HALT)

DO NOT CONTACT (STOP) FOR US YOU ARE DEAD (STOP)



No, it wasn’t so much Ilse’s physical remnants that had launched her into this vertiginous shock. It was the words she had left behind: detailed, careful accounts sealed into over a dozen envelopes. I also include some letters that your mother asked be forwarded to you, the lawyer had written, almost in a casual aside. Could he have known all that they encompassed: the crushing truths and bereft confessions? Though to be sure, some of these had merely confirmed Ava’s own long-held suspicions. I actually began writing you, one divulged, from an old jail in Heidelberg, where the Americans had hoped to de-Nazify me.

Entnazifizieren! She’d blinked at that unfamiliar and faintly absurd verb (as though moral rot could be extracted like a burst appendix!). But her shiver had been less one of surprise than vindication. Everyone joined, Ilse would say, shrugging, but Ava had always sensed a darker story shadowing this particular deflection.

Tossing the lawyer’s note aside, Ava once more takes in her epistolary inheritance. Yellowing with age and of various thicknesses, the letters lie strewn over the coverlet. None of them seemingly sent; all of them addressed to the same woman:


Renate Bauer

163 Eldridge St

New York, New York 10002

USA



It’s the first time Ava has encountered this name: Renate Bauer. But that Ilse wrote the woman obsessively is clear: the letters are all in her old-fashioned, slightly Gothic hand. And the return address is quite definitively the Schwachhausen row house that Ava still dreams of in startling detail: the lemon yellow her mother had painted Ava’s bedroom wall as a child. The green chipped mug in which they’d kept their two toothbrushes. The dark circular stain on the wooden desk in Ilse’s bedroom, the legacy of some slopped coffee, wine, or water.

Reaching for the nearest one—dated August 1976—Ava smooths the two thin sheets against the wrinkled linen of her pajama pants, catching a whiff of must and mothballs, a whispered vanilla hint. Like the others, this one is written in the informal “Du” form, with capitals omitted as her mother would have done for a close friend:


My dearest Reni!

Last night I had a dream. It began the day that we first met in middle school; when you—late as always—rushed into me on your way into our classroom and dropped the books you were carrying. Strange, how so much from more recent years has become vague for me. And yet I still recall small details of our first encounter with such clarity: the golden brown of your eyes. The red bow in your hair. The worn book I handed back to you, with the comment that for some reason I’d only read the sequel, but had loved it.

Then, somehow, it was later—much, much later, and I was walking down Unter den Linden, by the newsstands and the U-Bahn station, on the route we always took coming back to your house after school. I had the book, and I knew that returning it (not to you but to Franz for some reason) was of utmost, nearly crushing importance. The street was clean and gray and so crowded I could barely breathe. But it was also completely silent. I was aware of feeling very alone, and very worried that I wouldn’t accomplish my task.

Then I saw you only a few meters ahead, hurrying in the opposite direction. You were wearing your green coat and your little black hat, and Franz had on one of those tweed newsboys he used to favor. I felt such enormous joy and relief! I tried to catch up to you but the crowd kept pushing, pushing against me, pushing me back. I tried to call out to you, but though you seemed close enough you didn’t hear me. The two of you just kept walking. And eventually, you both disappeared.

I woke up in tears, but also strangely resigned. I don’t know much about dreams—certainly not as much as your mother did (I still remember talking with her for hours about what ours were, what they meant). But it seemed to me that this one was perhaps a sign that it was finally time to realize the truth: that while I continually fantasize about reaching out to you and Franz, perhaps even coming to New York and hand-delivering my letters to you, the truth is that for the moment at least I lack the courage to even drop them into the post. I should therefore probably just stop writing them altogether. Indeed, if I were a less obstinate person I likely would have stopped a long time ago.

But we both know how I hold on to things.

Reni. If there were just one thing in all these writings I could communicate to you, it would be this: that if I could go back and change everything, I would. Everything. I would even change the fact of my own existence, my own birth, if it meant that I could undo what was done—to you, and to your family. That I can’t is a fact that pains me every single day.

In the end, perhaps that is my true prison.

Ilse



Ava shuts her eyes. For a moment the old panic threatens: the suffocating certainty that the ceiling and walls are about to collapse, choking out all air and light. To counter the attack, she summons the comforting image suggested by her last therapist: the golden Montauk shoreline, captured breezily in midsummer.

But what comes instead is another beachside memory entirely.

In it Ava is perhaps six, on a rare mother-daughter outing to Gro?er Wannsee shortly after their postwar reunion. The sand is wet and grainy, the day bone-bright and raw in the way very early spring days can be. At some point Ava sees Ilse striding away from her briskly, her braid-wrapped head a shrinking spot of brightness in the chill morning light. The sight pries open a black, panicked hole in Ava’s center: Come back, she wails. Don’t leave me. Leaping to her bare feet, she charges after the retreating figure—only to feel a pair of strong arms sweep her up from behind. For a moment she writhes and kicks before recognizing the still-unfamiliar form, the sturdy torso and round breasts pressed into her small back.