Wunderland(66)

Renate stares at the floor, at a dark, whorling knot that is about the same size as Sigi’s pawprint, and as the brooch she will now never wear.

“I was hoping by this time that we’d have some sort of a plan in place,” her mother says. “That Onkel Felix—that wretch—would have finally agreed to sponsor you and Franz from New York. Or that our Cuban or Harbin visas might have come through. But it’s all just taking too long. The man at the Japanese consulate said it could be another year before we get permission to even go to Manchuria.”

“So…so they get all the jewelry, and you…” Renate swallows, still unable to say the words. “And they still are going to make us full Jews in the end?”

“Ja, if the agent has his way. Unless I divorce Vati.” Her mother nods slowly, as though just reaching the conclusion herself. “Yes. They will.”

It’s suddenly too much: Renate covers her face with her hands. “It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make any sense.” By this point she’s not even trying to hold them back; the tears simply stream down her cheeks. She tries to imagine their life without her father: no hat tossed upon homecoming, no tickling beard or sweet pipe smell when he hugs her. No rhythmic and reassuring clack-clack-clack from his office, when he’s working on his books that no one will ever publish now.

“It doesn’t make sense,” she whispers. And then despite everything, she is crawling forward toward her mother; she is laying her head in her lap as though she were again three.

“Oh, Liebchen.” Her mother makes a small, tight sound; she strokes Renate’s hair, her wet cheek.

“Why did he touch you?” Renate whispers.

At first her mother doesn’t answer. When she does, her voice is low and dull. “He touched me because he could.”

“Only because of that?”

Her eyes are closed, but she can sense her mother hesitating, debating. “Sometimes,” she starts, then shakes her head and falls silent.

A moment later she starts again. “Some men—very weak men—feel stronger and bigger when they can do that.”

“Do what?”

“Touch us. When they know we don’t want it. It’s…it’s a way for them to pretend to themselves that they are powerful. Important.”

Renate turns her head slightly, looking up at her mother’s face at the angle from which she saw it most often as an infant. In some ways she wishes she could simply go back to those days: to shrink and fatten and soften, lose her hair and her grown-up clothes, lose the aching need for nicotine and friendship and Rudi Gerhardt’s perfect, long-lost lips.

“But they can’t touch your mind,” her mother continues, nodding now as though she’s trying to convince herself. “They can only touch your mind if you let them. And they might change what they call us. But they can’t break us apart. We will remain a family. We’ll stay together. No matter what happens.”

She strokes Renate’s cheek again. “Yes?”

Renate hesitates. Then she nods. Inside, though, she is still hearing the man’s voice: A Jew’s leftovers. She is still seeing his fingers on her mother’s face. He has, she realizes, more than simply touched her mind. He has cut into it, the way he might cut into an apple with a knife.





10.


    Ilse


1937

    APRIL 10

DAM-GROSSER, EAST PRUSSIA


Dear Renate:

I will never send this letter to you. In all likelihood, I won’t keep it at all. I will finish it, and burn it, and scatter the ashes in the vegetable garden the other girls and I have planted behind our house. And yet as I go through my days in this strange German-but-not-German town, I find myself writing it anyway.

At first it was just in my head, so subtly and naturally that I didn’t realize it was a letter at all. When I did, of course, I tried to stop. But this little mental pen—I picture it as the fancy jade one you once gave me for Christmas—just continued scribbling away, and the more I ignored it the more insistently it scribbled. Last night it actually kept me awake—and this after a morning spent sowing a ten-hectare potato field, with no help but a German farmer and a doddering workhorse named Bobik. I finally dragged myself up before dawn and down to the darkened kitchen to let the words out onto the page.

Which leaves me here, at half past three in the morning, composing a letter I can’t seem to not write, to a person to whom I know I can no longer write.



Ilse chews on the tip of her pencil, rereading what she’s written in the flickering light of the single candle she has lit. She sounds, she knows, utterly insane—she can all but hear her former best friend laughing in derision. And yet the truth is that there have been moments in these past weeks when she has never felt quite so sane; so certain of her purpose on earth. What she and her fellow Arbeitsmaiden are accomplishing in this tiny Polish border town astonishes her on a daily basis, while confirming everything she’s ever believed about the revolutionary truth of their movement.

There are twelve of them in the labor camp, six per bunkroom, with Campleader Kass in her own little room at the end of the hall. The house was formerly a rectory; rickety and timeworn, it groans and hisses at night like an overworked old woman. A few of the Labor Maidens are convinced that it’s haunted. Indeed, a few days after arriving—when it all still felt like a holiday—they’d held a secret séance at midnight, holding hands and chanting improvised runes to summon whatever restless spirits might be sharing their residence. In the end, though, none appeared, and the ritual only served to make their own five thirty a.m. summons to work and breakfast that much harder.