Wunderland(37)

To New York, Ava thought.

And tipping the mug back, she finished off the last few mash-sweet drops.

“That’s the last time I’ll be able to bail you out, by the way,” Ulrich was saying. “Next time, you’ll have to call Bank Boy.”

“Fuck you,” she retorted; but she was smiling. When the Polizei had finally allowed her her one five-minute phone call, her trembling fingers had practically dialed Ulrich’s number of their own accord. After he signed the release papers, his first comment had been Ask me what I’m thinking about.

“You’re actually lucky you got out when you did.” He waved his mug at the Jurassic-era Zenith he’d inherited from his father back in Bremen. On Channel Three, the riots were still in high gear, policemen huddling behind a military tank as frenzied protesters hurled things at them: rocks, trash, and what looked like Molotov cocktails. Ava shuddered. Who are these people? she wondered. They didn’t look at all like the ones she’d marched with by the university. The latter had been boisterous, yes. But not belligerent. This crowd, by contrast, seemed to want only to inflict as much damage as it could. In fact, the scene looked less like a demonstration than wartime devastation. Smoke billowed from burning and overturned cars; the wounded limped and dragged themselves toward shelter. She searched for the cop who’d beaten and arrested her earlier, but they all looked the same on the screen: stern, grainy ghosts.

“True.” Reaching for the impromptu dinner he’d set out—a hunk of Emmenthaler, a loaf of bread, and some rock-hard smoked sausage—Ava sculpted off a piece of cheese before realizing that she had zero interest in eating. “At least this nonsense won’t be happening in the U.S.,” she added, setting it back on the plate.

“I wouldn’t count on that. You’ll be in Brooklyn.”

“Brooklyn’s not a war zone.”

“The world’s a war zone.”

She lifted an eyebrow. “Some places more than others.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He patted his shirt pocket for his cigarettes, tossing his pack of Crown Regals to her without her having to ask for them. I love you, she thought, the declaration sliding slyly into the jumbled slipstream of her consciousness before she had a chance to register and block it. Shaking her head, she reached for the cigarettes.

“Nothing,” she said, tapping the pack against the tabletop. It had been three months since his abrupt announcement that he was leaving Germany for Tel Aviv, but it still felt as surreal today as it had then. “I just don’t understand why you aren’t coming with me instead,” Ava added. “New York City is almost as Jewish as Palestine.”

“It’s Israel.” He picked up her cheese bit, tossing it high into the air and catching it victoriously in his mouth. “And New York’s not home.”

“And Palestine is?”

“Israel,” he corrected again, chewing methodically. “And yes. Or at least, it’s as close to a homeland as I’ve got.” He pushed his glasses up further on his nose. “Do you remember telling me—was it on the way back from that crazy trip to the Army Archives in Berlin—how New York suddenly just felt ‘right’ to you? Even though you’d never seen it?”

What she remembered of that bleakly silent ride back was the charred ache in her gut. The realization that nothing could be the same—not her sense of Ilse as a stern but essentially moral being. Not of Ava as a girl without a past and hence with no traceable link to the prior decade’s horrors. And not, in the end, her newfound romance with Ulrich, though (typically) Ava had never had to put this into words. She simply pulled away until he understood that it was over. And then carefully, delicately, like a damaged ship at high sea, they’d navigated back to the safe shore of their former friendship.

“Not really,” Ava said now, shaking herself out a smoke. “But anywhere away from Ilse felt right.”

“I’m fairly sure you said that too.” He picked up the sausage in his fist and bit off a chunk, not bothering with the knife. “The strange thing,” he said, thoughtful again as he chewed, “is that I’ve always liked your mother. She’s never been anything but civil to me.”

Ava tightened her lips. “It’s easy to appreciate civility if you’re not entitled to more.”

He quirked a brow. “Like what?”

“Like maternal devotion. Like love.” She’d meant for it to come out lightly, but the sudden intensity of her longing broke her voice slightly on the word love. Mortified, she dropped her gaze to the cigarette.

“She loves you, Ava,” he said, in precisely the warm, kind voice she did not want to hear at the moment.

She shrugged stiffly. “Do you have anything else to drink?”

“Just beer, I think.” He climbed to his feet, making his way to the Westinghouse in the little galley kitchen and returning a moment later with two freshly decapped Pilsners. “Enjoy it,” he said, sliding one her way. “You know American beer tastes like piss.”

She grimaced. “Does Palestine even have beer?”

“Israel. And frankly I don’t much care. If it’s all that bad I’ll stick with whiskey.”

He tipped his own bottle toward hers. “Cheers.”

“L’chaim,” she countered glumly. It struck her anew that they’d soon be half a world apart; Ava and this brilliant, sardonic, insufferable being who had almost singlehandedly made her life bearable for two decades, who could make her laugh with the slightest shift of an eyebrow. It was true that they sometimes went for a week or more without talking these days. But it was the idea of his proximity that she depended upon: the knowledge that no matter what, she could always summon his wry, dry voice by picking up the phone’s receiver. She had known this would change, of course; had known it the moment his emigration papers came through and her application to Pratt was accepted. But not until this moment had she fully felt the stark and gaping truth of it.