Wunderland(34)
“Reni?” says her father, looking sleepy and surprised. “Where on earth are you going?”
“Go away!” she shrieks, ignoring the startled gazes of an old woman and her companion, the giggles of two passing, pigtailed schoolgirls, both in crisp BDM uniforms. “Just leave me alone!”
And then, turning her back on him, she runs. She runs hard and fast, for the first time in her life feeling as fleet as a fully German Deutsches M?del would feel, even though each step is still a pounding drumbeat of that word. That inconceivable hideous word:
Jude
Jude
Jude.
6.
Ava
1968
Ho! Ho! Ho-Chi-Minh! Ho! Ho! Ho-Chi-Minh!
The name thundered through the Berlin air, an angry incantation above a bobbing sea of protest posters and placards: here a beret-clad Che Guevara, dashing as a movie star. There a President Johnson embellished with a Hitlerian mustache and underscored by a scrawled USA in which the S was replaced by a swastika. Scattered throughout the marchers Ava also spied several images of the North Vietnamese Chairman himself, looking wise and somewhat bemused by the proceedings. So far, though, she hadn’t seen a banner anything like the one she and her current lover, Fiete, carried stretched out between them.
Peering up at it, a K?the Kollwitz–style take on the AP photo that had shocked the world in February, Ava felt a flush of weary pride not unlike what she felt during her art class exhibitions. Ava had spent the night working and reworking it, while Fiete—a rising Neo-Dadaist who looked like Paul Newman’s pudgy brother—emptied a bottle of iced vodka and offered useless suggestions: Aren’t they shorter than that over there? Should his eyes look so big? Hey, is that even the right kind of gun?
Ava hadn’t had the answer to any of those questions. All she knew was that from the moment she’d seen it in Der Spiegel the image had sparked the same sickened fascination she usually felt over grainy images of Auschwitz prisoners and Einsatzgruppen massacres, though she knew the story behind the AP shot was more complex: Bay Lop, the Viet Cong captured at the moment of his shockingly casual execution, had himself summarily executed women and children just hours earlier. Still, the stark brutality of it continued to mesmerize her: the executioner’s oddly relaxed stance. The doomed prisoner’s grimace, a sullen mix of resignation and loathing even as his brains were being blown from his head. Ava had originally planned to integrate a Pollock-style spattering of bright blood into her banner reproduction. But when she’d applied the tone to the bedsheet, she’d quickly discovered why Kollwitz stuck with her famously monochrome pallet: the splashed color detracted from the picture’s gravity, like lurid sound bubbles (Pow! Wham! Crack!) in an American comic book.
And so at three a.m. she’d started over, rousing Fiete from the mattress he’d passed out on in order to strip it of its remaining sheet. Somehow, between the two packs of Larks she’d smoked and the black sea of coffee she’d imbibed, the image was complete—if still slightly damp—by the time they were due to leave for Berlin’s Technical University.
Pulling her end of the banner tighter now, Ava noted a crick forming in her neck even though they’d been marching for less than twenty minutes. Then she flinched as something soft and wet blew into her eye and popped there, a fleeting, burning kiss.
Ducking her head awkwardly to try to rub the spot with her shoulder, Ava traced the attack to her left, where two girls were waving bubble wands while bobbing along on the shoulders of their marching male friends. The one bobbing nearest—a pale blonde in a plaid jumper—mouthed an apology as Ava caught her gaze. Then she apparently lost her balance, swaying forward and back atop her human transport, shrieking giddily with laughter.
Despite the burn in her eye Ava found herself laughing too, less from the sight than from a sudden crest of glee. The opening moments of a protest were like this, she’d learned. It was not unlike buckling into a Trabant just before it took its first tilting spin: a vertiginous cocktail of exhilaration and terror made all the more intoxicating by Ilse’s full-on disapproval of carnival rides. “I’ve lived through too much,” her mother had once said, “to pay good money to risk life and limb.” Though of course, when pressed on “too much” she would never elaborate.
Unsurprisingly, Ilse considered street protests an even more dangerous waste of time: “Hooliganism, pure and simple,” she called it. And for all of Ava’s genuine outrage over the state of things—former Nazis running the government; the U.S. war machine burning through Southeast Asia; Soviet jackboots grinding Prague’s springtime hope to bloody dust—she sometimes wondered how much of a role her mother’s disapproval played in driving her into the movement’s riotous swell. Though in fact Ava’s first sojourn into student dissent had been prompted not by Ilse but by a conceptualist “happening” she’d gone to see with Ulrich in Berlin. The show consisted of a heavyset artist sawing open a female mannequin, yanking out her cottony innards, replacing them with toy soldiers, all while screaming “TELL ME A FAIRY TALE!” And despite Ulrich’s deadpan asides (“I’ll bet he’s fun in bed”), the performer’s howls had connected somehow with Ava’s own inner, widening well of despair over the life she found herself living: fitting her art and sporadic love life around a grueling waitressing schedule, living with Ilse to save up for graduate school in New York.