Wunderland(32)

“Can I eat it in my room, then? I want to go to bed early.”

A pause. Renate hears her father murmur something; hears her mother sigh. “Fine. We’ll send Maria up with a plate. But please come down before bedtime to say good night.”

“Fine,” Renate says, though she has no intention of complying. As Ilse frequently notes, Renate’s the worst liar on the planet. One look and they’ll know something is up.

Standing, she pushes Sigmund back onto four paws, then wipes his kisses from her forehead with her palm.

“Good day?”

She looks up to see Franz leaning against the wall, his arms crossed and his sleepy eyes wry.

“Good enough.”

“You don’t look it,” he says. “You look like you’ve been eating lemons.”

Worst liar on the planet. Once more she breaks into a brief, glum smile. “It’s been a very strange afternoon.”

“A good kind of strange?”

Shaking her head she stands, brushing the short dark hairs from her skirt. “Actually, can I speak with you for a moment?”

“Aren’t we speaking right now?”

He says it with one of his indulgent you’re such a child smiles, which normally would infuriate her. Today, however, she simply says: “It won’t take long,” and prays to Nobody in Particular that this is true.

After he’s shut the door she sits tentatively on his bed, with Sigi settling back into his usual spot at the foot. Renate finds herself relaxing a little bit, for the first time in what feels like hours. Franz’s room has always had that effect on her. In part it’s the smell: tobacco-tinged like her mother’s, but also aromatic in a way that has nothing to do with perfume or cologne. It’s a kind of boyish element, a faint whiff of musk to it. There is also a sourness, but it’s an almost pleasantly sweet sourness—like condensed milk left too long out of the icebox. It’s a smell that, for as long as she can remember, has made Renate feel safe. She watches in silence as he shuffles to the oaken secretary he works at, leaning his cane against the desk before falling into the cracked leather office chair he inherited from their mother’s clinic. Hoisting his bad leg up onto the desk he locks eyes with her, and Renate has a momentary image of the two of them, twelve years earlier.

It was a cold winter morning, and he was six and she was three, and she’d woken up early and gone to bounce on his bed as she often did since their parents had forbidden them both to wake them before eight. Franz had groaned and complained. But eventually he’d made room, putting his arm around Renate’s shoulders and pulling her close. Reading to her from the books he loved—Schwab’s Heroic Legends, the kings and monsters of Hauff. An old version of Alice’s Abenteuer im Wunderland that had once belonged to their mother. Even then he’d had that sweet scent, though not yet infiltrated by the oily, adult pungence of perspiration, brilliantine, and tobacco.

“So,” he says.

“So.” There doesn’t seem to be any graceful way to launch the subject, so she just plunges in: “Are we Jewish?”

“Ah.” He leans back slightly, tents his fingers before his nose. Behind him, Karl Marx stares down from his postered position above Franz’s desk, his hair wild and his expression inscrutable.

“Ah?” She’d expected the question to shock him—or, at very minimum, to make him laugh. That it doesn’t makes Renate’s stomach knot with dread. “Ah?” she repeats. “What is that supposed to mean?”

He holds up a finger: Wait.

Opening his top drawer, he takes out his cigarette tin. Renate’s chest feels suddenly tight—as though her breastbone is expanding. I should leave, she thinks. I should leave now. I should go…

But she finds she can barely breathe, much less move. Immobilized, she watches Franz place a Mona between his lips, holding it there slackly as he lights it the way Humphrey Bogart does in Big City Blues. The match’s flame casts her brother’s long dark lashes in relief against his cheeks. Ilse once said—only half in jest—that he has the loveliest eyes of any woman she’s ever known.

“How did it come up?” he asks at last.

She takes a shaky breath. “I applied to the BDM today.” And as he rolls his eyes: “It was my decision to make.”

“Unfortunately, it isn’t. The Hitlerjugend have strict standards about the sort of blood they want pumping in their young folks’ veins.”

Her heart plummets within her chest. “You can’t mean that what they told me is true.”

“That depends. What did they tell you?”

“They said that—that Vati is Jewish.” Renate’s voice is shaking, but she forges on. “That his parents were both Juden. And that that makes me a—” She pauses, trying to recall the term.

“A Mischling,” he says quietly. “At best. But in their eyes, we are probably no better than Juden. It’s like poison, you see. One drop spoils the entire cup of water.” He taps his cigarette over his own half-filled water glass.

Renate stares at him, then at the black specks as they swirl and whirl toward the bottom of the drinking vessel. And in that moment it seems the rest of the world has frozen: the walls, his books, the light fixture. Even Franz seems to take on a faint but impenetrable shine, as though he, too, might shatter if thrown or dropped. She pictures him, pictures everything tinkling to the ground in glistening shards. She feels as though she might vomit.