Wunderland(45)

“Getting worse.” Her mother’s lips tighten around her cigarette. “Now that Doktor G?ring has forced out all the non-Aryans he’s turned to the publications.” The Psychotherapy Institute has recently been annexed by the Deutsches Institut für Psychologie, a government institute, and its new director is a cousin to Field Marshal G?ring.

“Everything but Freud vanished over the weekend,” her mother continues. “And even the Freud isn’t available, since they’re keeping it locked up in a cupboard for which only G?ring has the key.”

“Why keep it at all?”

Her mother shrugs. “It’s a signed first edition. Perhaps they think it’s worth something. Or perhaps even our esteemed government has to accept Die Traumdeutung as the foundation of the field—even if they don’t want anyone to read it. Na, ja.”

Setting her cigarette on a saucer, her mother extends her wooden spoon. Steam sloughs from it into the air; Renate takes a tentative taste. Meaty richness floods her mouth.

“Eintopf?” she asks. The stew is Ilse’s favorite, one Renate has helped her and her downstairs kitchen staff prepare a dozen times. But there is, of course, no reason to note this now.

“You win the prize,” says her mother. The slight smile that appears almost looks strange on her thin face; it’s been that long since Renate last saw one. For some reason, it evokes not a responsive smile of her own but a wave of grief strong enough that her body sways with it. She finds herself blinking back tears.

“Reni,” says her mother, frowning. “What is it?”

“I just…” Renate licks the last salty trace of stew from her lips, trying to think of how to phrase it. “I know that I…don’t have things as hard as other people. No one’s arrested me. Or chased me out of a classroom. No one’s told me to break up my family.”

Her mother nods. Threatened with a beating by his former classmates, Franz and two of the other Jews in his class recently had to flee their lecture hall through a back window. Professor Bauer, meanwhile, has been brought in for “questioning” by the local Gestapo over rumors (false) of supposed Socialist connections. And Renate’s mother has been visited twice by the same agents and urged to “seriously consider” divorcing Vati. “For the sake of my future career,” she repeated in disbelief, over undercooked sausage and soggy spaetzle. “Next they’ll want me to do what that awful woman in the papers did: claim my children aren’t Mischlinge because their fathers were secret Aryan lovers from my past.”

Renate is ashamed to remember how her thoughts buzzed at that. Not just the idea of her mother having a lover (and could she? She was certainly pretty enough, though to be honest Renate has no idea how she’d find the time) but the idea that by changing one small part of one’s story, one could erase the damning blood in one’s veins. She’d even allowed herself to imagine it: marching into the school office with the coveted Certificate of Blood Purity. Seeing Ilse by their fountain and having her pale face light up upon seeing Renate, instead of closing off as it always did now. And Rudi…Rudi. Oh, Rudi.

It took her several moments more to process that the fantasy only worked if she cut her kind, gentle Vati entirely out of her life.

“But…” her mother prompts.

“But…” Renate swallows, hard. What she really wants to ask is that her mother make it better; make it go away. That she magically dismiss the pathetic paper and the Yid trap and the one-way ticket to Jerusalem as she has always dismissed everything else. To take Renate into her lap, murmuring shush-shush-shush, stroking her hair and brow and cheek. What she really wants is to curl up into a ball and have her mother surround her, a fleshly shield against the world.

“Yes?” her mother repeats, her tone now slightly impatient.

“I miss her,” Renate says quietly.

For a moment there’s no sound beyond the bubbling of the pot’s contents. Then she hears her mother sigh, feels her strong and wiry arms press lightly against her back.

“Klar. I miss her too.”

Renate lays her head on her mother’s thin shoulder, noticing that the seam of her sweater has split apart there. Noticing, too, how little flesh her mother actually has these days. Lisbet Bauer has always been birdlike, delicate. But now her face is drawn and peaked, the flesh stretched so sharply over her cheeks that Renate all but sees the underlying bone.

“I thought today that things might be changing back.”

Her mother tucks a strand behind Renate’s ear. “And why was that?”

“I…I left class. I walked out. And she came out to bring me back.”

Her mother leans back to look at her. “You left class? Without permission?”

Renate nods, flushing a little. “They were being hateful. All of them. Even the teacher.”

Lisbet Bauer shakes her head. “Reni. We’ve talked about this. You simply must learn to…”

“I know. Get through the day. But, Mama—that’s the thing. Today I didn’t think I could do it. I was pretty sure if I stayed there I’d do something awful. And so I left, and then Ilse came after me. And then…”

Her mother leans against the stove, crossing her arms. “And then?”

Renate squeezes her eyes shut, seeing it again: Sofi’s ticket, which she’d pulled out again in the hallway. Its cheery message (Please don’t bother returning!) cutting all the more cruelly because—as it slowly dawned on her now—there was actually nowhere she could go. She couldn’t go back into the classroom she’d just stormed out of. She certainly couldn’t waltz out the front door. She was as trapped as a Yid rat in a cage.