Wunderland(41)
Don’t fret too much, he has added. After all, as a foreigner you can’t be expected to write in German with the fluency of a native.
Renate fists her hands against her thighs: if only she could she’d scrunch the thing up and hurl it in his face. But of course, she knows better. The first and only time Karolin even contested a mark he’d given her he’d ripped the paper in half before the whole class and further degraded it from a Poor to a Fail.
Instead, Renate folds the assignment into the tightest wad she can manage before shoving it into her satchel’s furthest reaches.
Closing her eyes, she breathes in slowly, out slowly. Just get through today, she thinks. She recites it over and over—through today, through today—until, eventually, her heart stops pounding in protest.
* * *
It’s been her mantra ever since her Mischling unmasking. For a full week after that disastrous day she’d remained locked in her room, emerging only to return barely touched trays of food to the hallway, or to scurry to the washroom and back. She’d ignored Franz’s quiet knocks and Sigmund’s frenzied scratchings and her parents’ pained pleas to come downstairs, to let us help, to talk this over. She ignored Ilse’s four phone calls and two personal visits, not even answering when her mother knocked to let her know her friend was waiting in the downstairs hallway. She even ignored her beloved books, for when she tried to read one it was as though the letters and words had been somehow rearranged in some unintelligible format. The only thing she felt capable of doing was sitting and staring down at Ragdoll Alice from Wonderland: she of the boneless hug, the Mona Lisa–stitched smile, the unsurprised blue-button eyes.
Don’t open the door was the doll’s silent suggestion. If you wait long enough you’ll wake up like I did, and it will all have been nothing more than a dream.
But after five largely sleepless nights and increasingly unwashed days it became clear that this wasn’t likely to happen. And so on the sixth day—a Sunday—Renate pulled the chair from beneath her doorknob and crept down the hall into Franz’s room—silently, and very early, the way she’d often done as a small girl. She had perched on his coverlet, hugging her knees until he somehow sensed her through his dreams, and—gradually, begrudgingly—emerged from them with groans and fluttering lashes to find her staring at him miserably.
“What do I do?” she whispered. “I can’t go back. I won’t survive the year.”
“Don’t think of the year,” he said, his voice still gravelly with sleep, his black curls a tangled halo around his head. “Don’t think about it that way. Just think about getting through today.”
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
“I can’t, Franz.”
“You can. Jews have gotten through worse.”
“Stop saying that! I’m not a Jew!”
“All right, Schwester. I take it back.” His tone was indulgent, as though she were three again and threatening to throw one of her tantrums. And just as he had when she was three, he pulled the covers back and moved over for her: “Komm!”
The bed was small now, of course, and they were both far too old. But after a moment’s hesitation she slid in next to him anyway, settling on her back beside him with her arms folded behind her head, staring up at his white, sunlight-striped ceiling. They didn’t embrace or even touch; for this (they both sensed) would have been too strange. But he did turn his head to look at her sympathetically.
“Another suggestion?” he asked.
And when she nodded: “Take a bath. Du stinkst.”
Renate glared at him: “Shut up.” But she lifted her arm, taking a careful whiff of herself beneath it, blinking in mortification because he was right: she did stink.
And then they were both laughing; and after the laughter simply lying there, his brown eyes shut and hers open, the slowing sleepsong of his breath like a calming lullaby.
A day later, she bathed, dressed, and dragged herself back to Gymnasium—or rather, the strange, new place it had become in her absence.
* * *
Recrossing her ankles under her desk, Renate feels the hard point of Sofi’s envelope poking through the thin material of her skirt pocket. Pulling it out, she leans over to drop it into her satchel before stopping and studying it for a moment.
The sensible thing to do, of course, is to open the thing after school, away from Herr Hartmann’s further wrath and Karolin’s (inevitably) bruised feelings. But suddenly she doesn’t care what makes sense and what doesn’t. Not when nothing really makes sense to begin with.
Setting it in her lap, she runs her fingertip over the elaborate rendering of her name: Fr?ulein Renate Bauer. Just seeing it like that, written out so carefully and beautifully, feels like a much-needed affirmation: I exist. And not only that, she is going to a party—her first of the year. At least, her first not counting a dismal gathering last month at the Beidryzckis’ home. Closing her eyes, Renate imagines it: a glowing ballroom, chandeliers casting glinting rainbows of life. Pink punch in crystal goblets. The sweet terror of being asked to dance by a boy. The joy of dancing. Really dancing again! True, they will probably only play dreary, boring German songs now that the government’s denounced swing and jazz as Neger-Kike Musik. But it will be heavenly nonetheless to circle a dance floor in her best red shoes, in her best white dress. To feel a boy’s arms around her waist.