Wunderland(49)
“So do I.”
“Well, some of us actually want our graduation certificates. And it’s bad enough that you have me skipping school in the first place.”
“I have you skipping?” She switched the radio off in disgust. “This was your idea, remember?”
“My idea was that you go there.”
“Which I couldn’t do, unless you drove me. And you got your license a year early out of it.”
“From a counterfeiter and a hussy. I love you, but you’re a terrible influence. Here.” Reaching under his seat, he retrieved a worn road atlas and tossed it into her lap. “See if you can steer us straight. Don’t forget that north is up.”
Ich liebe dich. She felt, as she had in past weeks, a strange sense of disorientation over the declaration, as though he’d unintentionally called her by the wrong name.
Shaking the feeling off, Ava flipped through the Michelin until she found the route to the capital. For a moment she just stared at the inkblot-shaped space: Berlin. Embattled city of her birth. Hazily recalled hometown of her happiest years. And, she now knew, the starting point of a story she’d been seeking practically every day since she’d been weepingly removed from that city by Berlin’s wartime Child Welfare services. Not her own sad-sack tale of abandonment and reluctant reunification with a mother uninterested in mothering. Nor was it Ilse’s story; her mother kept that narrative locked inside her nearly as tightly as she’d have liked to keep Ava locked into their little yellow row house. This was another story, belonging to another parent: the nameless, unmentioned third in Ava’s incomplete family triad.
Only he wasn’t nameless any longer.
Her finger still on the former capital, Ava silently recited to herself the three words that had felt like a magical incantation when she first read them:
Nikolaus Gunther Hellewege.
And then, experimentally: Mein Vater.
* * *
The day’s extraordinary expedition had its roots in what had started as a quite ordinary afternoon three months earlier. Sitting (unchaperoned) together atop Ulrich’s rumpled bed, Ava and Ulrich had been doing what they now did nearly every day after school: French kissing, smoking English cigarettes, and listening to American music. Ulrich had also been filling out an application for his automobile learner’s permit, and Ava had his birth certificate in her lap, along with a photograph that had slipped out of the file he’d kept it in. Holding the latter to the light, she’d tilted her head appreciatively. “She looked like an angel.”
Ulrich’s mother had been a lithe redhead with dark green eyes, though in the black-and-white photo she looked like a brown-eyed brunette. Either way, she’d been ethereally lovely in that way only women who have been dancers can be. “Seraphina Sara Bergen,” Ava read dreamily off the certificate. “Even her name sounds angelic.”
“It was meant to sound Jewish,” he’d said, flipping over the form. “Her original middle name was Ingrid.”
“Why’d she change it?”
“It was the law.” His eyes were still on the application form. “All Jews had to have a Jewish-sounding middle name.”
Ava frowned, trying to recall whether this bizarre detail had been covered in any of their patchy history lessons. Information on both world wars—but particularly the second one—was usually dispersed cryptically and vaguely: a terse chapter on Hitler’s seemingly self-propelled ascent to power. A chalkboard list titled “Enemies of the Reich” that included Communists, Jews, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Far more traumatizing was the day her class was led to the school’s downstairs auditorium, where with neither introduction nor explanation they were shown Alain Resnais’s brutally blunt concentration camp documentary, Night and Fog. After the last searing images—walking corpses, cloth made from human hair, shower-room walls scored by scrabbling fingernails—had faded, the stunned students were let out early to be bludgeoned by the wintry afternoon brightness. After vomiting in the school courtyard Ava had looked for Ulrich—only to discover that he and the school’s one other student of Jewish descent had quietly been given the whole afternoon off.
“So Jews had to choose new names?” she asked.
“There was no choice,” he said, copying down the Opel’s year, color, and make. “Men got ‘Israel.’ Women got ‘Sara.’?”
“Israel?” Ava grimaced. “The women got the better end of that deal, didn’t they.”
At that he did look up, briefly. Then he looked down again.
“Not really,” he said.
Immediately she recognized her mistake. She knew his mother’s story: how her marriage to his Catholic father staved off the cattle cars and the camps until the very last months of the war, when the dreaded “Notice of Deportation” was delivered to the Judenhaus they’d been forced into. How Doktor Bergen had pleaded with her to go into hiding at the home of one of his patients, and how she’d initially seemed to agree—only to slip out of her hiding spot on the appointed morning of her summons with her designated single suitcase. I can’t bear the thought, she had written, that an attempt to save myself might result in repercussions for you or—worse—for our child. Better to go quietly and alone than risk the lives of those I love.