Wunderland(61)

When she reaches the blackboard, Herr Bachmann clears his throat uncomfortably and runs a spidery hand through his ginger hair. He has narrow brown eyes and a face that has always reminded Renate of an otter.

“Good news,” he announces. “You are getting the day off!”

“Off?”

(Behind her a hissing whisper: Jude! Or is she imagining it?)

“Yes. Today.”

“From what?”

(There it is again: Juuuuuude!)

Herr Bachmann chuckles, the sound mirthless and forced. “From everything. School. Schoolwork.” He clears his throat again. “And of course, today’s expedition to the Neues.”

The mention of the museum lands like a leaden shot put in her gut. “But…why?”

Behind her someone half suppresses a snort so that it comes out sounding like a flattened sneeze. Like a stone dropped in a pond, it sets free a wider ripple of titters. Renate feels her ears turning red.

“I’m allowed to go,” she says, pulling herself fully upright. “By the museum, I mean. It’s only full Jews that aren’t permitted there.” She tries to say it as assertively and as calmly as she can, the way her mother responded when their local Geheime Staatspolizei agent came by last month to again “discuss” her marriage to Vati (“We married in 1916,” Lisbet Bauer had informed him crisply. “The race laws don’t apply in our case.”).

But Herr Bachmann just shakes his head. “This isn’t actually about the museum.” He rubs his thin hands together. “I’m afraid that there has been a—a request.”

“A request,” Renate repeats mechanically.

“Yes.” He nods. “To keep this particular outing exclusively German.”

“Who…”

But he cuts her off quickly. “It is more than one, in fact. In fact…” He lowers his voice slightly, almost pleadingly. “It was almost unanimous. And given that we are, in fact, exploring Germany’s Nordic roots, and that you are in fact neither German nor Nordic, the headmaster has decided to honor it.”

For a moment she is back in the dream: running breathlessly, yet unable to move. A Snark verse floats like a baleful soap bubble through her mind:


“Be a man!” said the Bellman

in wrath, as he heard

The Butcher beginning to sob.

“Should we meet with a Jubjub

that desperate bird

We shall need all our strength for the job!”



When she’d first learned the poem, the word Jubjub alone had been enough to set her giggling. Now, though, it feels faraway and fractured. She shuts her eyes, ordering herself not to cry. When she opens them again Herr Bachmann is gazing at her with what looks like real concern.

“Actually,” he is saying, “this way you’ll have more time to write your essay on how Marxism led to Germany’s defeat in the Great War and shaped the Treaty of Versailles.” He winks. “Silver linings.”

In happier days he’d been one of her favorite teachers. He’d even lent her history books about ancient China and Egypt at one point, when she’d told him she wanted to write about foreign countries, like Pearl Buck. Last year, though, he wouldn’t even sign her autograph book at year’s end. “It might get us both in trouble,” he’d said, sadly.

“Are you all right?” The teacher is still gazing at her with that uncomfortable not-quite smile. “You seem pale.”

He is throwing her a lifeline. Renate scrabbles for it blindly. “Yes,” she whispers. “I mean, no. I do feel ill, all of a sudden. I should probably go home.”

Cheeks burning, she turns and begins what feels like the longest walk she has ever taken in her life; past Sophia Sitz and Trude Baumgarten and all the other uniformed girls who look on in undisguised triumph.



* * *





The trip home is almost as interminable. Without a book before her she feels defenseless, shiveringly vulnerable to the gazes of strangers who she is sure must be wondering why a schoolgirl is on the streets at half past nine. Too anxious to ride the tram back, she walks instead, quickly, keeping her gaze glued to the ground, ignoring the budding trees on Unter den Linden and Potsdamer Platz and the bright display window at the Schloss-Konditorei, with its official Star of David sign in the window oddly juxtaposed against the lamb-shaped Osterkuchen and Easter bread. She pauses before it, staring not at the sweets but at the familiar six-pointed symbol, remembering the long-ago day when she and Ilse had put the stars up on her bedroom ceiling. Or more accurately, Ilse had put them up for Renate, since they both knew Renate would almost certainly fall to her demise if she tried to stand on the chair they’d precariously balanced atop her homework desk in the center of the room.

Did you know, she remembers Ilse saying, cellotape in one hand and paper cutout in the other, that a lot of the stars we see at night are actually dead already?

How? Renate had asked. If they’re dead, how can we still be seeing them?

Something about how long the light takes to get here. They die, but the light they send out takes such a long time to reach Earth that it only reaches us after the dying. Squinting at the ceiling, Ilse pressed one paper star above her head, then looked back at Renate (who was holding the constellation chart) for approval. Renate nodded.