Wunderland(59)
Meanwhile Ilse has already reached the train. “You have to hurry,” she shouts over her shoulder. “Run! Do you hear me, Reni? Run!”
I do, Renate tries to shout. Of course I do. Wait. But when she parts her lips nothing emerges but a dry croak. Helpless, she flings her arms out as Ilse pounds on the carriage’s closed door (bang-bang-bang), still shouting her name: “Reni. Reni!”
Bang.
“Reni? Are you up?”
Renate opens her eyes, her panicked heart pounding in the dream’s dreadful wake. Her bedside light is still on, and the book she fell asleep reading sometime after two a.m. (The Rains Came, about floods and love in colonial India) lies half open next to her pillow. She pulls herself up in the bed slowly as the bedroom door bangs and rattles, her brother’s annoyed voice sounding over the racket: “Hey, slug! Are you even awake?”
“I’m awake,” she mumbles, reaching for her bedside water glass.
“Lisbet says you’ve a half hour to make your school trip.”
The water tastes like dust. Renate drinks it anyway while simultaneously rolling her eyes. She finds Franz’s new habit of addressing their parents by name both pretentious and profoundly annoying.
“I’m up,” she lies, and throws the book at the floor to simulate the effect of her feet landing there. The door emits one final, aggrieved rattle before the sound gives way to her brother’s heavy, uneven footsteps on their way back down the stairs. “She says she’s up,” she hears him call, his tone deliberately dubious.
Stretching painfully, Renate turns off the lamp and slowly slides from the rumpled bed. Making her way to the window, she stares out at the sleepy avenue, undisturbed but for a half-empty double-decker bus and a horse-drawn Milchwagen topped by clattering cans. Her heart rate has slowed, but there’s a chill emptiness in her gut in the wake of the dream’s cruel bait-and-switch: the dangled glimpse of that desperately longed-for reconciliation. The waking truth of its ever-clearer impossibility. Textbook anxiety dream, her mother would call it (and she would know, having written two textbooks on dreams). But why now? Renate hasn’t dreamt of Ilse—who actually is off on a yearlong Land Service assignment—in well over a month. And it’s certainly not as if Ilse has written her; not even a postcard, much less the long, newsy sort of letter she used to write when she went on holiday. Then again, as recently as this summer her former friend was still appearing in Renate’s dreams nearly nightly. The possibility that that nocturnal haunting might be about to reassert itself is enough to spark a dull shudder.
Shaking it off, Renate resolves to turn her thoughts to pleasanter topics—and for once, there is actually something pleasant to contemplate. For at exactly eight thirty today, her class will depart for the Berlin-Charlottenburg station and ride the U-Bahn together to Museum Island. There they will wander the Nordic Antiquities collection at the Neues, making sketches and jotting down thoughts and notes. Renate has always loved museum trips: The marvel of craftsmanship that’s endured for centuries. The way that age can be a ghostly presence in itself. This year, however, she has literally been counting down to the field trip. She’s not entirely certain she could survive the regular routine for another day.
Things at Bismarck Gymnasium have been bad now for months. But they got dramatically worse in late December, when Karolin Beidryzcki—the school’s last remaining full Jew—was finally and summarily expelled. As with all the Juden expulsions it happened with ruthless speed: one minute her old friend was surveying a trigonometry midterm. The next, she was piling her desk’s contents into a battered cardboard box, her eyes damp behind her perpetually broken glasses.
Looking back on it now, Renate knows that she shouldn’t have been surprised. Karolin had been the last full Jew in their class, the others having departed either for Jewish schools or for other, more Jewish-friendly countries. Rumor had it that the only reason Karolin had kept her place for so long was that her father had paid the headmaster for the privilege. Though to be truthful, Renate couldn’t understand why she’d even wanted to stay: from what she saw, the girl’s life had become a gauntlet of daily torment. Not only had Karolin’s teachers persisted in giving her poor and failing grades, but she’d been pushed, mocked, and even spit upon in the hallways; excluded from field trips, clubs, and films; and made to change into her gym uniform separately from the other girls. She’d told Renate that she could bear it all only because she knew that she’d soon be following her brother Martin to America—she was just waiting for her visa to be approved. But apparently Schuldirektor Heintz decided that she needed to wait elsewhere. Or else Herr Beidryzcki had finally run out of funds.
For her own part, Renate has managed school survival as a Mischling by keeping scrupulously to herself. She returns greetings when they are offered but initiates none of her own. All other verbal exchanges are kept short, and purely functional.
Most of all, though, she reads.
Reading, she’s discovered, gives her an excuse to avoid eye contact, and avoiding eye contact goes a long way in avoiding the sorts of unpleasant encounters that last year sometimes left her in tears. Like Sophia Sitz’s hateful one-way Palestine ticket. Or the time a few months later, when Trude Baumgarten waved her over in the library—only to ask her whether it was true her father killed “white” babies and drank their blood. Or the time a friend of Rudi’s called Renate’s mother a “Jew-loving whore”—right in front of Rudi himself, and Rudi not only said nothing but actually laughed. In such cases, Renate has learned, reading also gives her an excuse to not respond; she can simply pretend she hasn’t heard them.