Wunderland(38)

How did we let this happen, she thought miserably.

Cigarette between her lips, she leaned forward as he produced a lighter and wordlessly flipped its cap. As he lit her cigarette she studied his hand; the long strong fingers, the dark curling hairs. She felt a strange pang that she had never tried to draw them.

“Do you know,” she said, exhaling and leaning back, “that she hasn’t even congratulated me on getting into the program?”

He shook out a cigarette for himself. “I’m sure she’s just upset that you’re leaving her.”

“Doubtful.” Ava snorted, tasting the smoke’s tartness in the back of her throat. “She’ll throw a party. Even more so now that I’ve been arrested. She already thinks I’m a criminal.”

“Why do you have to tell her about today?”

Ava shrugged. “I suppose I don’t. But she’ll find out somehow anyways. She always manages to find out about my fuckups.”

“This wasn’t a fuckup,” he said, exhaling. “This was you standing up for what is right.” He smiled. “At least until the Nazi knocked you down.”

She gave him the finger. “Either way, it’s another reason for her to hate me.” On the television, a handful of protesters hurled themselves at a parked Volkswagen van and began rocking it from side to side.

“She doesn’t hate you. She’s in pain. She’s losing her child.”

“She never wanted her child,” Ava said bitterly.

“How do you know?”

“I just do. Every time she looks at me I feel it. It’s as if it takes all her strength not to run away from me, screaming. Not that I blame her, given what we know about my father.” Ava toyed with her cigarette. “Do you know,” she said, “that one of my clearest, earliest memories of her is of her leaving me. I was on a beach—Wannsee, I think. She’d been behind me. But then all of a sudden she was walking away. Just…going.”

He cocked his head. “What age was this?”

“I can’t remember. After the orphanage.”

“But she picked you up from the orphanage, didn’t she?”

“I know that. But I barely remember anything from that day. It doesn’t make much sense.” As Ava shut her eyes, for some reason she saw not the lakeside beach but Bay Lop’s tooth-gnashing grimace. The simultaneous dawning of hatred and despair, even as life abruptly left his wire-thin frame. Where was he now? Ava wondered. Had they buried him? Burned his blood-spattered corpse? Her own body felt bloodless, as bleak and empty as starless space.

“Would you stay?” Ulrich asked.

“Was?” Startled, she looked up.

“What if she asked you not to go? To stay with her here in Germany?”

Ava contemplated this a moment: the novel thought of Ilse saying I love you, Ava. Please don’t leave. Or even more improbably: Let’s talk. In many ways, it was all she’d ever wanted from her mother. And yet at this moment the idea sparked not happiness but a swell of airless anxiety, the same sort that sometimes precursed her panic attacks.

“Not a chance,” she said. “And you? Would anything make you stay now?”

He smiled. “Not all the blond tail on the planet.”

“Pig.” Ava flecked beer foam at him, though she was laughing again despite herself. In the years since their breakup it had become a running joke: his penchant for buxom milkmaid-types, as well as Ava’s for dissolute artist types. There was truth in both depictions, though Ava had sometimes thought they evoked them to keep their own relationship safely in its platonic realm. After all, Ava—with her dark hair, slight figure, and mournful brown eyes—couldn’t have looked less like a milkmaid. And Ulrich—sensible, sober Ulrich—had neither a creative nor a dissolute bone in his body.

“Anyway,” she said. “There have to be blondes in Palestine.”

“The bottle variety,” he said disdainfully. “It won’t be like here, in the Aryan paradise that is the Fatherland.”

“I’d hope not much there is.”

“Agreed,” he agreed. “Ditto with New York.”

“That’s why I’m going,” she said.

On Channel Three North the protesters finally toppled the VW van onto its side. As it lay there, a wounded whale, they crouched behind it as a shield, continuing to lob bottles and stones at the police squads.

“They’ll make you fight,” said Ava, watching one officer race past the screen, gloved hand clamped against the riot helmet on his head.

“Fighting was part of the draw for me.” He toyed with his lighter. “At least there we get to be fighters. Not victims.”

“You’re not a victim here, are you?”

“Of course I am.” He flicked his lighter, and she watched his flame materialize, then disappear again: poof. “The minute people hear Jew they see you differently. They wonder who you lost, how you survived—whether you lied or bribed or sold someone out to do it. They wonder why the hell you’re still here, in a country that gassed your mother and would probably have gassed you as well, if things had ended differently.” Sliding the lighter into his jacket pocket, he pushed his spectacles further up the bridge of his nose in that gesture that by now was so familiar, and so intensely dear all of a sudden, that Ava felt another pang.