Wunderland(3)

Dummes M?dchen, murmurs Ilse, who has been behind her the whole time. What on earth is the matter with you now?

The recollection carries the heft and hurt of a physical blow. What pulls her from it is a sudden pounding on the door, violent enough to rattle the ancient air conditioner in its frame.

“Mom!” Sophie shouts, with that spontaneous and implacable outrage peculiar to teenage girls. “I totally forgot I promised to bring Erica back her Lou Reed sweatshirt. Did you wash it? You said you were going to wash it.”

Sophie? Why was she back? And how had she gotten in without Ava hearing her?

After a moment of blank paralysis she leaps to her knees and begins scrabbling the letters together. “Just a moment,” she calls, thinking: Scheisse, Scheisse, Sophie. Her daughter fully believes that Ilse has been dead now for over a decade. What am I going to tell her?

“Mom! Do you have it?” The doorknob chatters in its fixture. “Oh my God—why is this locked?”

“Hold on! Just hold on a minute!” A desperate look around the unkempt bedroom: the sweatshirt’s nowhere in sight.

Shoving the urn inside the box, Ava showers it with a handful of peanuts and sweeps the letters into an untidy pile beside it. Then she makes her way to the door, her knees as weak as a New York City Marathon runner’s, her heart beating like a living creature in her mouth.

“Mom! Jesus!” (Bang-bang-bang.) “Erica’s waiting! What the hell is going on in there?”

“Nothing,” says Ava shakily.

And with a deep breath, she reaches for the doorknob.





2.


    Renate


1933

A rush of despair washes over Renate, so potent it’s almost liberating. She’ll just have to own up to it, she decides. Her life will be over now. Over before anything real even happens in it: before she visits Paris or sees Elisabeth Schumann sing at the Vienna Opera. Before she experiences being tipsy or moodily smoking a cigarette that sketches languid ghostly images in the air. Before she experiences her first kiss—on her lips, or anywhere else.

It’s a little past two, and the low-ceilinged school library is suffused with milky late-afternoon light. Her eyes are fixed on the wooden floor, on the black-and-white picture postcard that just flew from her opened notebook. She has no idea how it managed to get into the notebook, since she distinctly recalls putting it in a different section of her school satchel. But it now lies directly in the pacing path of the library proctor, Herr Steinberg. Herr Steinberg, who when not haranguing his meek-mouthed assistant (young Frau Bernhardt, who always looks as though she’s about to cry) likes to stride between the long oaken library tables like the Kaiser inspecting his troops. Herr Steinberg, who has already sent two notes home to Renate’s parents for “inappropriate comportment”: the first for whispering with Ilse, the second for sneaking snacks.

Herr Steinberg, who—as Renate watches, as immobile as Galatea before Pygmalion’s life-giving kiss—is about to step right on the Book Lady’s placid face. Though actually, given the card’s size, not just her face. On her face, and her breasts, and her belly, and her…in short, on every part of her completely unclothed physiognomy.

Sieh nicht nach unten! Renate prays in silence to an unspecified Almighty (though nominally Lutheran, she considers herself agnostic). Sieh nicht nach unten! Sieh nicht nach unten! Please, please don’t look down….

And for a moment it seems as though her wordless prayer has been answered. For after landing his polished oxford squarely atop the damning image, the reedy proctor takes two more steps. Renate has just begun considering a possible exhale when, quite abruptly, he comes to a halt.

Very slowly, he turns back a half rotation. Renate watches with her lungs gripped in some inner iron vise as he takes two very long, very quick steps back. Kneeling on his knobby knee, he picks the cardboard square up and swivels his face toward her like an owl.

“Was,” he says, “ist das.”

Renate’s brain works furiously. This will be far, far worse than the last curt note to her father. It could result in a telephone call, and suspension, or even (her mouth goes dry) full expulsion. Surely Schuldirektor Heintz has ejected students for less. She tries to picture her family receiving this news—her Doktor mother and Professor father, who both earned nothing but top marks in their many, many years of combined study. Her brother, Franz, who soared through both Mittelschule and Gymnasium like an academic meteor, with nothing sent home but breathless praise and commendation.

“I’m waiting,” says the librarian, tapping his foot. “I expect someone to take responsibility for this. Otherwise—” He clears his throat again. “Otherwise the punishment will have to be far more severe.”

Punishment, Renate thinks, the word lodging in her brain with the grainy stubbornness of a half-swallowed pill. Is there a punishment beyond expulsion—beyond, of course, the humiliation of having everyone in the school think she’s some sort of a sex addict?

Beside her, her best friend, Ilse, chooses the moment to elbow Renate in the ribs.

“Autsch,” Renate hisses. “Stop.”

And with that one, suppressed protest, that faintest hint of a sway, the librarian is over them like Death over two maidens.

“Fr?ulein Bauer!” he cries. “I hear you speaking up. Is that because you wish to explain this to me?”