Wunderland(22)
Or that every time Rudi takes her friend’s soft pale hand in his own he might as well be hammering a small nail into Ilse’s spleen.
“Well, anyway. It’s just a film,” her mother is saying. “It’s not as though the Führer is going to be looking back at you from the screen.”
“It’s not just a film,” Ilse says. “And everyone else will be seeing me!”
“I rather suspect they won’t be quite as interested in your appearance as you seem to presume they will be,” her mother retorts.
It is such a typical put-down, with such typical, casual cruelty that Ilse actually has to stifle a scream.
“You don’t understand,” she says instead, as coldly as she can manage. “You don’t understand anything at all.”
Fuming, she spins around toward the door. But as her mother begins powdering her nose, Ilse turns back again. “Don’t you think you’re wearing too much makeup? You know the Führer disapproves of face painting.” She looks pointedly at her mother’s feet, clad in black T-strap pumps. “And high heels.”
And without waiting for a response, she stomps morosely back to her room.
With barely half an hour to make it to the Ufa-Palast am Zoo, she rummages first through her sock drawer, then her underwear drawer, still seething in silence. Not only does her mother seem to know nothing about her life, but she quite frankly doesn’t seem to care. The fact that Ilse managed to become a M?delgruppenführerin after only a year in the BDM barely elicited a reaction, even though in her performance review, the head of Ilse’s leadership training unit described her as one of the hardest-working and resourceful girls I have had the pleasure of meeting. But all Ilse’s mother said when presented with the news was: “That’s wonderful, dear. But they don’t actually pay you at that level, do they?”
She’d been similarly unenthused when Ilse brought home her very first piece of published writing in the BDM monthly, Das Deutsche M?del. The German Girl. A short poem titled “Why We Work,” it was about the role of German youth in carrying their country back to greatness. The day it came out in the February edition was among the happiest of Ilse’s life: something her best friend, at least, easily understood.
“You did it!” Renate had shrieked. “My best friend’s a published author!” Humming a snatch of “You’re the Cream in My Coffee,” she’d tried to pick Ilse up and twirl her around the way John Boles does Shirley Temple in The Littlest Rebel. Of course she failed, since Ilse is the significantly heavier of the two and Renate is such a weakling. But her exuberant pride and the steady stream of impressed compliments Ilse received as everyone got their issue of the magazine made Ilse realize that she truly has found it: not just the thing she wants to do with her life, but the thing she truly believes she was meant for.
Because yes, she wants to write. Not just for herself, or Renate, or her instructors at school, but for the nation. For the movement. For the cause. She wants to write knowing that what she’s writing will be read far and wide; that her voice and her own thoughts and ideas will shape voices, thoughts, and ideas across the Fatherland, perhaps even someday the world. Seeing her name in print that first time had felt like seeing it writ in lightning across the sky: electrifying, staggering. Even more so when she realized what it meant: that with BDM membership approaching two million, those neatly typeset words might well pass before four million eyes, or even more.
Four million eyes. All pondering her words:
The door that leads to the future is found in our young hearts
The fruit that sustains the nation ripens in our sinless souls
Our mission is holy, our will pure and true
Our destiny: eternal victory, endless glory!
All of which only made her mother’s nonplussed response—“It’s really quite short, isn’t it!”—sting all the more.
Slamming shut her underwear drawer, Ilse rifles through her jewelry box a second time: the old yellow lanyard is there, but not the new red-and-white one. It occurs to her that her mother might have simply taken the stupid thing out of spite. After all, she and Ilse’s father have only just joined the Party, even though Ilse urged them to do it over a year ago. Sure enough, almost the moment they did their lives took an immediate turn for the better. Ilse’s father, for instance, was given the bank promotion he’d been denied for two years straight. “You were right, Mousebear,” he’d crowed to Ilse that night, pouring her her very first half glass of real Sekt. “It’s something I should have done from the start!” Ilse knew how that had irked her mother: not just that Vati was letting her drink wine like a grown-up, but laying credit for the family’s fortune at Ilse’s (sensibly shod) feet.
* * *
Removing Renate’s friendship ring (accessories are frowned upon in the BDM), she drops it in the box and shuts the lid, then glances again at her bedside clock. Lanyard or no, she’ll have to leave in ten minutes or else she’ll be late to meet her troop at the theater. The idea of showing up in her yellow lanyard is disproportionately infuriating. Not wearing one at all actually seems worse in some ways. Not just because this is the first BDM event where she’s actually responsible for overseeing thirteen younger girls, but because they are going there to see Triumph of the Will, which from everything Ilse has heard is almost like partaking in last year’s legendary rally in real life. Showing up in anything less than her full BDM attire seems not just lacking but actually immoral.