Wunderland(44)

It wasn’t until after Christmas that things completely changed between them.



* * *





Ilse had spent most of the winter holiday on an HJ/BDM-sponsored ski trip, and when she returned, it was without the promised telephone call announcing the fact and with (it was rumored) a new sweetheart. And while no one knew for sure who this mystery boy was, the name Renate heard mentioned drove a steel spike through her soul.

“Just ask her,” suggested Karolin, when Renate confided in her. “She’ll surely tell you, one way or the other.”

But in that first week back at school Ilse was as maddeningly elusive as Rudi had been after Renate’s fall from racial grace. She’d arrive in class after Renate but before the teachers, disappearing in the opposite order afterward. She was pointedly absent from all their old meeting spots—the courtyard fountain, the windowside table in the library. The old hitching post outside the school’s main front entrance. When, in desperation, Renate finally cornered her on the route home one day, Ilse heard her out stiffly, looking intensely uncomfortable. Yes, she knew she’d said she’d telephone when they came back from Ischgl. And no, she hadn’t, because she’d been unusually busy. No, she didn’t know when she’d next come to Renate’s house; it seemed likely she’d be unusually busy indefinitely. And no, Rudi Gerhardt was nothing more than a friend to her. But she didn’t want to discuss it, she hadn’t the time, there was a Winter Relief drive effort she had to write about for the newsletter.

As if to prove her point, she turned toward a passing M?del and threw her arm up in the now-ubiquitous gesture: “Heil Hitler!”

It was a gesture Renate had seen a thousand times in past months. For some reason, though, this time it felt different: not merely reflexive but irrevocable. As though with that single upward swing of her right arm Ilse was severing their connection, once and for all.

It wasn’t until she was in bed that night, staring up at the stars they’d cut together, that Renate realized what had really set it apart.

It was Ilse’s hand: it had been bare. Renate’s friendship ring had been nowhere in sight.



* * *





At home she kicks her boots off by the front door and is almost knocked over by Sigi’s leaping, stub-wagging welcome. On another day she might have pushed him off in annoyance. Now, though, she buries her face in his wiry pelt, as grateful for his unshakable canine love as she is pained by all it can’t replace. “You know what, Sig?” she whispers into his perked furry ear. “You may just be my new best girlfriend.”

“Reni?” Her mother’s voice floats from the kitchen.

“Guter Hund,” she murmurs, releasing the Schnauzer.

“Welcome home.” Her mother has long since dispensed with her former greeting, How was school? the answers have become too depressing for both of them. “Can you come here for a minute?” she calls instead. “I need an opinion.”

“About dinner?”

“Yes.”

Renate grimaces. They’ve had to let Maria go, as she’s well below the legal age limit for an Aryan woman working in a Jewish household. Renate’s mother tried to stress the situation’s silver lining, the “opportunity” to “learn something about cooking” in addition to the monthly savings of fifteen Reichsmarks, now doubly needed since Renate’s father has been forced from his university position. But the fruits of this educational endeavor have been decidedly mixed. Whether by deliberate inclination or simply because she’s too busy (with writing her own book, with taking on private clients in an effort to make up for Vati’s lost income, with writing foreign clinics in search of work for herself and foreign universities in search of work for her husband) nearly every meal Lisbet Bauer produces has something noticeably—sometimes nauseatingly—wrong with it. The soufflé attempted last Saturday was so marble-hard that even Sigi had wanted nothing to do with it. The potatoes in the Hasenpfeffer were so overboiled and mealy that the salad tasted more like a potato soup, while the cabbage for the Kohlroulade was so undercooked that Franz joked he’d lost a tooth trying to chew it.

But worst of all was Sunday’s Sauerbraten. Finding herself out of both vinegar and cooking wine, Renate’s mother had improvised with vodka—specifically, horseradish spirits that had been in their liquor cabinet since her husband’s service reunion two years earlier. It was like eating beef soaked in garlic and gasoline. Franz joked that he could blow up the police station he passed daily on Franz?sische Stra?e by farting at it and striking a match—a comment that not only earned him no rebuke but actual laughter from both parents.

Hovering in the doorway now, Renate inhales with some caution. But the air smells deceptively appetizing.

“Komm rein, Liebling,” says her mother, sounding slightly distracted. A cigarette clamped between her lips, she is stirring her pot with almost aggressive force, as though trying to beat the meal into submission. “What do you think?”

“About what?”

“What I’m making. How does it smell?”

Renate sniffs again. “It smells…good?”

“I followed the recipe this time. Proper ingredients. Proper amounts. Who knew it would make such a difference?”

“Who knew,” echoes Renate, though she can’t help wondering whether her mother’s psychotherapeutic approach is similarly scattered. “How was work?”