Wunderland(27)
From the neck down, at least, the M?delschaftsführerin is in strict compliance with Bundestracht uniform regulations. Her white short-sleeved blouse is embellished with the black-and-white district insignia; her black kerchief neatly secured by a leather lanyard. Her navy skirt is knee-length and modest, her shoes sensible lace-up pumps. Each item of clothing is meticulously creased and ironed and polished, spotless enough to have been purchased that very morning. “You’re here to register?”
“Yes,” says Renate.
“She is,” Ilse clarifies. “I’m here to get an identification card for Das Deutsche M?del.”
“That would be in room 210 upstairs.” The woman indicates the stairwell with her chin, then turns to face Renate. “Your name?”
“Renate Bauer. I’m fifteen,” Renate offers, though no one has asked her age yet.
The woman frowns and jots something in her notebook. “You have your identity papers?”
“Of course.” Renate’s fingers tremble slightly as she fishes into her bag again. She knows she has them. She always has them, because it’s the law to always have them. Lately, though, she’s been strangely terrified of inadvertently breaking the law. She has had dreams where she finds herself in a white-walled room that she knows is a cell. And last Saturday, when her mother took her to Wertheim to buy new gloves, she spent the entire hour convinced the sales lady thought she’d stolen something.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” her mother said, when Renate confided her concern. “It’s a classic response to the dilemma of adolescence. You’re being robbed of your childhood. Your innocence is being threatened. It’s only natural that your thoughts would turn to theft and guilt.”
To her relief, Renate spies the green corner of her Ausweiskarte poking out from beneath her history textbook. “Thank you,” says the woman as Renate hands it to her. “You have an appointment, correct? Good. We’ll start with the physical examination.” The Führerin indicates the stairwell with her chin. “Up the stairs, first room on the right-hand side. Dr. Braun’s office. He has someone else in with him right now, but you may wait on the bench outside until she’s done.”
“Thank you,” says Renate, and forces what she hopes is a confident smile (they’re not recruiting nervous wrecks!) before following Ilse up the stairs. On the top landing she pauses, patting her hair and pinching her cheeks to make them pink.
“You’re not going dancing with Rudi,” Ilse tells her, rolling her eyes.
“I just want to look healthy.” Glancing at her reflection in another glass-covered image of their dashing leader inspecting a Bund Deutscher M?del unit, Renate suppresses a sigh. She doesn’t look healthy. She looks peaked and tired. Not at all like the wholesome, smiling girls in the photograph (or like Ilse, who might have sprung directly from it). Uniformly blond, white-toothed, and smiling, the BDM maidens salute their Chancellor from several meters away, lithe arms outstretched like the pale fronds of an anemone. The Führer smiles back at them but keeps his own arms clasped behind his back. The effect is an odd mix of approachability and remove.
To her right, Ilse has settled onto the bench and is pulling out her homework. Renate settles in next to her, but she’s too nervous to study. She takes in the literary offerings on the table by her elbow: a newly minted copy of Mein Kampf on a stand, behind a neatly fanned selection of Wille und Macht, Das Deutsche M?del, and Die M?delschaft, the BDM newsletter. There are also two editions of the HJ yearbook, Jungen-eure Welt.
Eschewing the Chancellor’s tract (she’s heard almost all of it from Rudi anyway), Renate leafs through last year’s yearbook. It seems to be composed largely of maps of Germany and its borders, odes to the Sturmtruppen martyr Horst Wessel, and assorted images of other sincere-faced, stiff-armed youth, though toward the back she discovers a busy graph comparing Germany’s current birth rate to the (much higher) rates of Poland and Russia. Beneath it appears yet another smiling blond girl, this one holding a cherubic-looking baby boy. “M?del!” reads the caption. “It is your Sacred Duty to propagate, and be the Future Mothers of the Fatherland!”
Propagate, thinks Renate, blinking. She thinks of her and Rudi’s outing last week to the Volkspark Friedrichshain. They’d been lying together, postpicnic, off one of the less-traveled pathways, half obscured by flower banks and well-manicured shrubs. She’d found herself beneath Rudi on the blanket, his mouth moving on her neck in a way that sent almost unbearably lovely shivers through her; his hips pressing against hers and between them both, the thing she can’t name aloud feeling hard and warm and urgent between them. And while the idea of it had long frightened her (for what to do if he wanted to bare it for her; or—even less thinkably—for her to touch it?), the reality felt entirely, dreamily different. As though her skin—so taut and tingling beneath his featherlight touch—somehow expected and even wanted this odd, firm pressure; wanted to meet and surround it and become part of it. And so even as she was pushing his chest away with her palms, her hips—despite Renate’s best intentions—had wanted to rise to meet his of their own accord. Not trusting herself, she had finally rolled away, flushed and giggling, and lied about her mother wanting her home early.
At the Babylon last week there had been the same bodily mutiny: her torso squirming and writhing as Rudi licked and nibbled at her earlobe, his fingers creeping beneath her skirt’s hemline and over her bloomers before settling directly over the very spot where she most felt that strange new ache to be touched. It had all seemed to happen with breathless speed. And yet in retrospect, what had frightened her wasn’t even that they’d gotten that far so quickly. It was that it had been so hard to keep herself from going further. In fact, if the midfilm newsreel hadn’t come on showing the Führer celebrating his forty-sixth birthday, Renate honestly has no idea what might have happened.