Wunderland(57)

“I know more than enough now.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

Ava pulled her purse into her lap. Unsnapping the clasp, she withdrew the birth certificate and held it out.

Her mother took it warily, her pale eyes not moving from Ava’s face until she had it in her hands. When she looked up, her jaw was tight. “Where did you get this?”

Ava allowed herself a small smile. “You ordered it for me.”

“I…” Her mother took a sharp breath as this sank in as well. “My God,” she said. “What has happened to you?”

“What happened to me?” Ava’s voice was shaking now. She didn’t care. “What happened is that you wouldn’t tell me about my father. I decided to find out for myself.”

Her mother was shaking her head slowly. “I told you I’d tell you when it was time. It isn’t time yet. You’re not ready. You’re not…” She hesitated, bit her lip. “It was complicated.”

“There’s nothing complicated about murder.”

“Murder?” Her mother’s eyes widened, then narrowed. “What on earth are you talking about? It wasn’t murder.”

“What do you call it, then?”

Ilse hesitated. Ava recrossed her arms over her chest and waited. She could almost see her mother’s mind working furiously through the pale windows of her silvery eyes, could see the mental calculus behind Ilse’s next response. What have I told her. How much does she know. How much can I get away with not saying.

At last, sighing, she crossed the blue-checked linoleum floor and pulled the chair opposite Ava’s out for herself. “You must understand,” she said, slowly lowering herself into it, “that things were…different in those days. At the time, we—he—simply thought of it as journalism. We didn’t think of it as propaganda.”

“Is that what you thought he did?” Even to her own ears, Ava’s laugh sounded shrill, slightly mad. “Propaganda?”

“It is what he did.” Ilse looked affronted. “I know. We worked together. It’s why…” Seeming to catch herself, she stopped and shook her head. “He was a journalist.”

Ava started to laugh again, then stopped as it dawned on her that her mother was speaking in earnest.

“Do you really not know what he did in the East?” she asked quietly. “In Russia?”

“All I knew was that he was working for a general.” Ilse didn’t break her gaze; she didn’t even blink. “I forget the name. Someone quite high up. I think Kai made his appointments, took letters. That sort of thing. When I asked for more details he told me it was all classified.”

“It’s not classified anymore.” Heart pounding again, Ava reached into her purse and pulled out her sketchbook.

“What—” Ilse started.

“Notes,” Ava interrupted. “From the army notification archives. That’s where Ulrich and I went today. Would you like to hear them?”

Ilse looked dazed. “You went…”

But Ava was already flipping past her sketches to the shakily inscribed page where she’d jotted down phrases and dates. Not waiting for an answer, she started reading:

“Prior to his 1944 death at the hands of his Soviet captors, SS-Scharführer Hellewege was personal secretary and aide to SS-Obergruppenführer-General Max von Schenckendorff, commander of rear guard operations on the Eastern Front.”

Ilse nodded faintly. “That was it. Von Schenkendorff.”

Ava ignored her. “Von Schenkendorff is perhaps best known for an infamous three-day field conference on partisan counteroperations in the Russian city of Mogilev, held in 1942. Conference participants were bused to the nearby settlement of Knyazhichi for hands-on antipartisan training. However, upon finding that the town did not harbor partisans, Hellewege screened the existent population and compiled a list of the town’s fifty-one Jews.”

At the word Juden Ava glanced up briefly. Her mother’s face was ashen, her hands clenched before her on the table. She had gone very still.

“Of those,” Ava continued, “thirty-one—composed of men, women, and children—were summarily…” She shut her eyes, overcome again by what she was about to read. It was the first time she’d said it aloud.

“Thirty-one—” she repeated, “composed of men, women, and children—were summarily executed in the town square.”

As she finished, the words—furiously dashed off in what now seemed another lifetime—swam before her. She felt it return: that strangely weightless sensation of floating in murky, filthy water, pushed by a current over which she had no control: He did this, she thought. The man from whose seed I came into being. The man whose blood is in my blood. In her mind’s eye she was once more watching Ulrich read the page, his jaw tightening. His brown eyes hesitating for just the briefest, the most heart-sickening of moments before lifting to meet hers again.

When she opened her eyes, her mother hadn’t moved. Not a single muscle on her fine-boned face twitched. It was impossible to tell whether she was shocked or frightened or embarrassed. It was impossible to tell if she’d heard Ava at all.

Ava shut the sketchbook with a snap that sounded like a gunshot against the linoleum-limned silence.