Wunderland(62)

So if they’re dead, what we’re seeing, Renate said, is like a ghost? The ghost of a star?

Ja. Ilse had nodded. A beautiful, shining ghost star.

Gazing at Herr Schloss’s six-pointed star of shame, it strikes Renate now that he—that all of them—are not unlike those dead stars Ilse had spoken of. They go about their lives, reading and baking and hoping, sending out the impression of still being fully living, engaged human beings. The truth, though, is that they are simply sending out ghostly light into space, obscuring the fact of their own erasure.

The observation hits with a chilly bleakness that feels like the touch of death itself. Spinning away from the window, Renate races past the Fasanenstra?e Synagogue, still fighting back tears, until she finally reaches her building and all but sprints up the front steps in relief.

Inside, she kicks her boots off and leaves her bookbag beside them, pausing only for a muttered inquiry:

“Hallo?”

As expected, there is no response: at ten o’clock in the morning the only Bauer at home is Sigi, who greets her with a sleepy tail wag from beneath the dining room table. She makes her way through the foyer, pausing at the bottom of the stairs to listen again, just to be sure.

Up until last week her father would have been home, at least, doing whatever it was that he did in his office all day. Now, though, he works at the Jüdische Gemeinde on Kantstra?e helping aspiring emigrants navigate the baffling process of leaving the country: Filling in emigration and visa applications. Working out departure taxes and bank fees. Itemizing and assessing hundreds of pages’ worth of household belongings down to the last spare trouser button. He calls the work “demoralizing,” but Lisbet Bauer insists he do it. She has confided in Renate that without a structured schedule and daily interaction with others, she fears her husband will fall into full-blown depression.

Still battling tears as she half slides, half walks in her bobby socks, Renate makes her way into the sun-filled sitting room. There she rummages around in a cubby in the antique oak secretary until she finds the half pack of Monas that she filched from her mother’s purse last week.

Dragging the desk chair to the wall, she sets the ashtray on the sill and cracks the window, deftly pulling one of the cigarettes out with her lips, a trick picked up by watching Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express two years ago, though the smoking itself is a new habit, taken up more from boredom than anything else. She initially found it vile but has since come to appreciate the nicotine’s softening effect on her nerves. Not to mention the much-needed sense of glamour and sophistication it seems to add to her gloomy existence. Her parents, she knows, would certainly not appreciate these things—yet another double standard, since they let Franz smoke at sixteen. But since neither of them will be home for several hours at least, Renate doesn’t bother herself with what they’d think.

Silver linings, she thinks, tipping her head back and exhaling a low and misty-white groan.

Staring up at the paneled ceiling, she tries to push past the despair, to fully absorb what just happened and what it means. Certainly it’s a bad sign, if she’s now seen as so loathsome that her classmates won’t even let her come on a class outing with them. And yet why? What has changed? She’s no more or less Jewish now than she had been when her ancestry first came out. Or is it possible that Franz was right; that the Jewish “blood” everyone seems obsessed with doesn’t remain constant but rather spreads, like black ink in her veins, eventually tainting the entirety?

Experimentally, Renate holds a thumb over her wrist’s pulse point, as though she might be able to detect the answer in her own muted bloodbeat. But of course, it feels the same as it always has felt, merrily pumping her cells on their endless anatomical loops.

Perhaps, she muses, the best thing after all would be to go to a fully Jewish school, like Karolin has. She’s heard mixed things about them: that they are terribly overcrowded, but emotionally much freer and more open. That the instructors are overworked and exhausted and—as the law limits Jewish teachers to just five students—mostly Aryan, but not pointedly abusive as they are in German schools, where they must take pains to demonstrate their Reich loyalty. That the student body changes daily as various students leave the country, their spots filled by other students liberated from their former schools, by force or by choice. That there are no Hakenkreuz flags or daily pledges to serve the Führer, and no Hitler portraits glaring down in pale disgust. “It’s so much easier to write now,” Karolin reported when Renate ran into her on the street a few weeks ago. “I can’t describe it. It’s as though the pens there are lighter, somehow. Or magic.”

Clearly, she still hadn’t found anyone to fix her glasses (all but impossible since Jewish eye doctors have been stripped of licenses and Aryans declared off-limits to Jews). But despite that, despite everything, she had actually seemed almost happy. And this, in turn, had sparked an unexpected surge of jealousy on Renate’s part.

Now Renate wonders: would it be worth it? Or is she better off clinging to her spot at Bismarck—no matter how awful—in the hopes of finishing her Abitur there and having a chance at university? At least, presuming universities still admit Mischlinge at that point? Sighing, she shuts her eyes. It’s like trying to chart a course through life-threatening waves in a toxic ocean, with neither a compass nor a map.

Dispiritedly, she picks up the paper Franz left on the desktop, rifling through its cheap, gray-toned sheets. It’s Der Mischling Berliner, the mixed-race biweekly he started bringing home last month from somewhere. Still smoking, Renate skims a story about half Jews enlisting in Hitler’s army and an advice column on reading the Nuremberg Race Laws correctly before paging to the classifieds on the back page. Franz likes to read them aloud in a nasal, news-announcer voice: Tall and kind 2nd Degree of 32 years seeks like young lady with marriage interests. Blond/blue-eyed preferable, not essential. Pleasantly plump 1st Degree lady—35 but young at heart!—seeks 1st Degree Gentleman age 30–50 for companionship and possible commitment. But it’s a struggle to keep her eyes on the page. Renate’s head throbs, and she keeps seeing Herr Bachmann’s careful face; keeps hearing his voice, low and tight with discomfort: Almost unanimous. Neither German nor Nordic. And behind it, that ever-flowing, malicious-whispering river: Jude. Halbjude. Mischling. Jude…