Wunderland(40)

For a moment he studies it, rocking back on his heels. Then, swiveling around to face them all, he lifts his arm. “Heil Hitler!”

“Heil Hitler!” the class chimes, thirty-two girlish arms flung high. Renate and Karolin remain standing but don’t salute. This is not from choice, but because “the German salute is for Germans only,” as they and the school’s other remaining non-Aryans were told at a terse meeting in the headmaster’s office last term. By that point it had come as a relief; the daily inner battle between her longing to fit in and the last, defiant shreds of her self-respect had become almost as exhausting as pretending nothing had changed.

“And how is everyone today?” The teacher is beaming. “Scrubbed and fresh-faced and ready to work?”

Scattered titters. Barely into his twenties, Herr Hartmann just joined the teaching staff this year, replacing dour and darkly dressed Frau Cohen. Most girls welcomed the change: with his thick slicked-back hair and trimmed mustache he evokes Clark Gable wearing a red armband. A year earlier, Renate might have fancied him too. Now, though, his handsome face sparks little more than a sour spike of anxiety.

Picking up her pencil, she casts another glance up at Ilse, who is seated in her customary spot in the front row. As usual, she is scribbling away, probably finishing last night’s assigned essay on the postwar redrawing of German borders. Between her BDM activities and her writing duties at Das Deutsche M?del, Renate guesses that she’s further behind than ever in her schoolwork. But in Herr Hartmann’s class it doesn’t seem to matter. A staunch Party man, he frequently assigns Ilse’s newsletter items for Press Study. Last week’s was about an upcoming visit by the British Boy Scouts to Berlin and the joint activities planned for them and the Hitlerjugend. “Unsere kleine Journalistin,” Herr Hartmann calls her. Our little lady journalist.

“On to business,” he pronounces now. “I’ve got last week’s essays to give back: Expanding the Volkland: Our Need for New Space.” Pulling a sheaf of papers from his briefcase, he lays the first one down on Ilse’s desk with a flourish. “Fr?ulein von Fischer’s paper gets the prize this week. Exemplary work. It will go in the usual spot.” He jerks his chin at the side wall, upon which hangs a framed picture of the Führer, looking mournful. Beneath it, the week’s showcase-able assignments are thumbtacked in a neat row.

“The rest of you did acceptably well. With the usual exceptions.”

Beside her, Karolin sighs. Indisputably their class’s star student in past years, like Renate she now struggles just to pass. It’s the same with all of the back-row students, including mousy-looking Amelia Kronberg and Rosa Sartro, rumored to be half Gypsy. It doesn’t help that whenever assignments have to do with das Volk and Deutsche Politik they—as non-Deutsch and non-Volk—are assigned different topics, almost always on things not covered in class. (This one: Water Systems in Ancient Mesopotamia.)

“Is there even a point?” Karolin mutters beneath her breath now.

It’s barely a whisper. Nevertheless, one row up Herr Hartmann pauses, his ear cocked like a hound hearing the hunt trumpet.

“Fr?ulein Beetle,” he says, frowning and using the name he’s given her (Beidryzcki, he says, is too much of a “foreign tongue teaser”). “What are you hissing and clacking about back there?”

“Nothing, sir,” Karolin says quickly. “I was—just asking Renate for a pencil.”

Renate half lifts her own pencil and nods. The teacher ignores her. “You came to class without a means of writing?”

“I—I have a pencil, sir,” says Karolin. “But I just discovered the tip was broken.”

“And no backup.”

He is still smiling. But there’s a tightness to his grin that Renate knows all too well. She feels her fingers clenching around her friend’s alibi even as the axe falls: “Demerit for unpreparedness. You too, Fr?ulein Bauer.”

Renate blinks. “Sir?”

“For your role in distracting the class.”

“But I…”

“Shut your Yid trap,” he snaps.

Renate’s breath catches like a fishbone in her throat.

A stunned silence descends, followed by a single, nervous-sounding giggle from somewhere in the front. It sounds suspiciously like Sofi Sitz. Renate fixes her gaze on the pencil sharpener, biting her lower lip to keep it from trembling. A meter away Ilse sits in her chair, her shoulders stiffened, her figure motionless.

Turn around, Renate wills her, as Herr Hartmann resumes his distribution. But the blond girl doesn’t move.

Upon reaching Renate’s row Herr Hartmann announces its results for the general benefit of all: “Incoherent (slap)…Sloppy (slap)…Devoid of logic (slap).” But as he returns Renate’s he merely lifts an eyebrow, slamming the paper facedown atop her notebook. Only when he’s reached his lectern does she allow herself to quickly flip the page over and survey his commentary.

Despite the complete randomness of the topic, she’d spent extra time on this one, interviewing her father extensively and on his suggestion researching Mesopotamia and Ancient Sewage in the big Ancient Civilizations Enzyklop?die at the Charlottenburg public library. She’d included several carefully penciled diagrams and even typed it up on Vati’s Adler, all in the hope she might break through the wall of Substandards and Disappointings her teachers have been piling against her. She certainly wasn’t looking for the sort of praise she once took for granted; the Beautifully wordeds and Well dones and Quite Impressive Fr?ulein Bauers. She was aiming, at most, for Good Enough. But to no avail: overscrawled the neat black lettering, in Reich red, is Herr Hartmann’s verdict: Pathetic.