Wunderland(65)

“The problem isn’t about what it means for me.”

“What, then?”

“This is about you. And Franz.”

Renate’s legs feel suddenly weak; she sinks slowly to sit on the carpet.

“If you calculate it,” her mother continues, “it comes to one extra eighth. An extra eighth of Jewish for each of you.”

Renate shakes her head. “I still don’t…”

Her mother sighs. “According to Herr Schultz, it means that you are now both five eighths Jewish. In other words, in their terms, fully Jewish.”

Vollst?ndig jüdisch. For a moment the words are merely sound, the way words repeated over and over become merely sound. Then, slowly, it starts to sink in. Vollst?ndig jüdisch. The horrible pictures in Der Stürmer. The stories about killing babies, drinking their blood.

Jüdisch.

“If he’s right,” her mother goes on, “and there is really no way to challenge him, it changes virtually everything for you both. All the regulations you weren’t subject to as Mischlinge they can apply to you as Jews. Franz would have to leave the university. You’d have to leave Gymnasium. But that’s not even the part I’m worried about.”

“It isn’t?”

Her mother shakes her head. “I’m worried about what happens when things get worse.”

“Worse?” Renate almost laughs. “How could they get any worse?”

Her mother uncrosses her legs, revealing a stocking ladder that runs directly over her left knee. “Mandatory factory work,” she says. “Tighter curfews. Arrests for even more ridiculous excuses they use now. There are other rumors too.” She rakes a hand through her hair. “I’m hearing horrible rumors.”

Renate rubs her aching temples, trying to translate. She knows that Jews are being arrested now for infringements as minor as jaywalking. That a man was jailed for merely being in a department store elevator alone with an Aryan woman. People are sent off to work camps for such things—her friend Abi Feingold’s father, for instance. He was sentenced to two months at the new Buchenwald facility after a traffic altercation with an SS Staffelführer. Shackled on his feet day and night during his imprisonment, he now can only sleep standing up in his own bedroom.

Numbly, she licks her lips. “Why was he upstairs?”

“He had,” her mother says, carefully, “said that he could negotiate on our behalf. But he said it would require ‘expenses.’?” And seeing Renate’s face: “Money, Liebchen. He wanted money. That’s all.” She sighs, rubbing her cheek in the same place the agent’s fingers had lingered. “The problem was that we don’t have it. Our savings are all but gone through. He offered to take the dining silver, but as that belonged to your father’s mother I would have had to tell Vati everything.”

“Why haven’t you told him? Surely he has the right….”

“Nein,” her mother says, so sharply Renate starts. “You have to promise me, Reni. You cannot tell him. Not what you saw today, or what I’m telling you. Not any of it.”

Renate feels the color draining from her face. It’s one thing to keep something from both parents, as a unit. It feels strange—transgressive, even unclean—to keep this secret with one, against the other.

Especially after what she’s just heard.

“Why not?” she asks, tonelessly.

“He’ll tell me to give in to them—to divorce him,” her mother says. “He’ll see it as the only way. He might even try to divorce me himself. And once he did that…” She stops for a moment and swallows, seeming to lose her voice. “Once he did that they’d arrest him immediately. I’m sure of it. We might never see him again.” She covers her face with her hands. “I couldn’t stand that. I couldn’t live.”

“But…” Inevitably, Renate’s own eyes fill, and squeezing them shut does nothing but push the tears over her lashes and down her cheeks. Keeping them closed, she wraps her arms around her belly and hugs herself, trying to counteract the hollow feeling that’s still growing there: the bleakness that feels like a physical ache.

“Reni.”

When she opens her eyes, her mother is gazing at her in a way that’s almost physical in its intensity, as though she could somehow wring the answer from her with her reddening eyes.

“Promise me,” she says.

Helplessly, Renate nods.

“So what did you pay them with?” she manages.

A Jew’s leftovers.

“All I have…had.” She takes a deep breath. “Oma Hildegard’s pieces.”

“The emeralds?” The four-piece set has been passed down from family matriarch to family matriarch on her mother’s side for at least five generations. It had never occurred to Renate that this pattern wouldn’t continue; that after her mother received them from her mother the jewels, in their lovely Oriental box, would one day reside in Renate’s own stocking drawer and—on very special occasions—lie against her own pale skin.

Her mother nods. “The necklace bought us four months. The earrings two. The brooch just one.” Breaking off, she dashes at her eyes with her sleeve. “Today he took the ring. But he said that it wasn’t going to be enough.”