Wunderland(21)

“Is—is this some sort of perverse game for you? Some sort of silly story you are just making up as you go along?”

Ilse shook her head. “It’s not a game. And it’s not a story.”

“How can you say that, when my entire life you’ve refused to tell me anything meaningful?”

“What do you mean, ‘meaningful’?”

“I mean like where I came from! I mean like where you were during the war, and all those months after it ended before you finally came for me!” Ava was crying now, openly. She no longer cared.

“Everything I did, I did so that you’d have a good life.” Ilse spoke rapidly, her voice low and level. “An education. Clothes. Food.”

“But not your trust! Can’t you see that I never had that?” Ava dashed at her damp eyes with her wrist. “And without that, it was as good as never having you at all. I need that to change, Mutti. I need to know.”

“Know what?”

Ava clenched her teeth again in frustration. “Everything! I need you to sit here with me—right here, right now—and answer every single question I ask you with full honesty.”

For a long moment Ilse said nothing. She simply stared at the table, her face white and her eyes closed. When at last she opened them again there was a dullness to them that Ava had never seen before, as though some light deep behind them had flickered out.

“Das kann ich nicht,” she said, quietly.

I can’t.

It came back to her then, the old, haunting image: a bone-bright day. Her mother walking away. She swallowed, fully aware of the weight of what she was about to say. Wishing desperately for a way not to say it. But it had been in her for too long, holding her back like a rusted anchor in the tempestuous current of her current existence.

“Then,” she said softly, “I can’t have you in my life.”

Ilse remained still—so still, in fact, that for a moment Ava wasn’t certain if she’d been heard. Then she nodded, albeit so subtly that it might as easily have been a shifting shadow.

“If that is what you need,” she said.

Ava squeezed her eyes shut. Suddenly, she was feeling it all over: the juddering sift and tumble of the world collapsing on her. The blacking out of all light, all air. All life. For a moment she even thought she heard the whining buzz of the bombers, taking aim at the cornerstones of her life.

But then she heard something else: a sleepy, singsong tune floating gossamer-light from the bedroom.

“Oma,” Sophie was singing. “Oma-oma-oma-oma.”

When she opened her eyes Ilse was staring at her, her gaze quiet, bereaved. She lifted her pale brows in question.

“All right,” Ava said numbly. “Go ahead.”

It wasn’t until after Ilse had pushed heavily to her feet that Ava realized why it had been so hard to shape the words: they had felt strangely like good-bye.





4.


    Ilse


1935

It is five thirty-five, and Ilse can’t find the new lanyard that should be the crowning touch to her uniform.

“Are you sure you didn’t put it in with the washing?” her mother asks, carefully combing through her golden finger-wave with two fingers. She’s wearing a black silk dress that Ilse hasn’t seen before, and she has to admit it’s very striking: the sweetheart neckline and dropped shoulders make her mother’s pale skin glow like moonstone next to a darkened lake. The little diamond drop earrings are also new, an anniversary gift from Ilse’s father last month.

“Did you ask Katinka?” her mother adds. Katinka is the new housekeeper.

“I didn’t. But I’m sure. It was on my bureau in my room. I always leave it there,” Ilse gripes. “So I won’t lose it.”

“Well, the way you keep your room it’s no wonder you can’t find anything in it.” Her mother crooks an eyebrow at her in the mirror; Ilse’s chronic sloppiness is a point of ongoing contention. “Anyway, don’t you have more than one?”

“My other one isn’t the right color now that I’ve been made a Group Leader.”

“Well, I really don’t know what to tell you.” Zella von Fischer spritzes her décolleté with Vol de Nuit. “You can either wear the old one or go without one altogether.”

“But I can’t go without it!” Ilse cries. “Especially not tonight! Everyone is going to be in full uniform!”

“Renate won’t.”

“Renate isn’t going. It’s a Hitlerjugend outing and her parents still won’t let her join.” In fact, Renate has at long last capitulated on the BDM front and now plans to join despite her parents’ opposition, though in the end it wasn’t Ilse’s urgings but those of Rudi Gerhardt that got her to change her mind. Ilse can’t help but feel slighted that after years of dedicated lobbying on her part, it took a boy who (as far as Ilse’s concerned) barely knows Renate at all to change her mind on the subject. But she takes solace in the fact that once Renate does join, at least she and Ilse will be able to spend more time together. As of late, nearly all of Renate’s free time seems to be shaped around Rudi’s availability: taking walks, seeing movies, studying together in cafés and Herr Steinberg’s library. And while Ilse is ostensibly invited on these activities, the few times she’s joined have been distinctly uncomfortable—like trying to fit three people onto a two-person love seat. It doesn’t help that Renate treats everything out of Rudi’s mouth like the most fascinating story ever told. Even though it’s usually another silly Mein Kampf quotation.