Wunderland(7)

Rudi, as always, wears the attention like a becoming accessory: a fedora. A fancy wristwatch. Wiry and blond in his neatly pressed khaki uniform, he looks like he’s just in from a brisk hike. He’s one of those students for whom the shuffling sea of pubescent bodies parts unthinkingly, and upon whom even the grumpiest teachers seem to dote. Even Herr Steinberg, whose face might as well have been carved from granite, has been known to crack a smile in his presence.

“This is yours?” the librarian asks now, adjusting his round-rimmed spectacles.

“Yes, sir.” Rudi ducks his head in sincere-seeming humility. “I’m very sorry. I found it on K?nigsstra?e, just outside Israel’s this morning. It was just lying there, face up, on the street.”

Renate darts a glance at Ilse, who returns it, frowning. They both know exactly where Rudi lives. And that Israel’s—one of the biggest department stores in the city—is not on his way to school.

“And you picked it up,” the proctor posits. He’s moving away from Renate now, and she exhales the breath she’s been holding long enough that her lungs ache. “You picked it up,” he continues, “and then—it would seem—deemed it suitable to bring into our school.”

“Yes, sir.”

Rudi gazes up at him brightly. The teacher pushes his glasses further up the bridge of his nose. “And why would you do that?”

The boy leans forward, resting his flawless chin in his palm. “Well, for one thing, I of course didn’t want anyone else stumbling over this sort of degenerate image. But I also wanted to share it with my fellow students.”

Gasps erupt throughout the room like gas hissing from multiple pipe cracks. Even Herr Steinberg looks taken aback. “You didn’t want strangers on the street to see it, but wanted to show it off at school?”

“That’s correct.”

“May I ask why?”

Rudi smiles. “As a warning. About the kinds of depths to which some types can sometimes sink.”

“And what kinds of ‘types’ and ‘depths’ would those be?”

Renate twists her hands together beneath the polished top of the oaken table, feeling Ilse’s friendship ring digging into her palm.

“The depths of the baser races,” Rudi says. “Jews, for instance. I’m certain that it’s no coincidence at all that the card was outside a Jew business.”

Discernibly, at least, nothing in Herr Steinberg’s expression changes. But it seems to Renate that it compresses, tightening all over without a single feature actually shifting or moving.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes. Of course.” His Adam’s apple moves up, moves down. “And what do you propose I do with this now?”

“Why, give it back to me, of course,” says Rudi. “So I can warn my other classrooms.”

The answer breaks the room’s tension, the stuffy air rippling with barely suppressed snorts and giggles. Renate holds her breath, half expecting the teacher to explode as he famously does sometimes—as when, for instance, he intercepted Martin Beidryzcki’s caricature of Frau Bernhardt, endowed with a beard and enormous Titten. But to her astonishment, he merely drops the postcard onto Rudi’s textbook.

“Personally,” he says, “I’d suggest that you dispose of it properly, rather than springing it on other instructors who may not be as understanding as I am. Either way, my young man, I don’t want to see it—or anything like it—in my library again. Understood?”

The words themselves are authoritative enough. But the delivery is strangely thin, like a weak recitation in a play. Rudi seems to sense this too; as he slides the card into his satchel he actually smirks. Then, catching Renate staring, he gives her a very slow, deliberate wink. Her stomach clenches as though he’s punched her in the gut.

Next to her, Ilse manufactures a cough. “What just happened?” she murmurs beneath its cover.

“I’m not sure,” Renate whispers back. Her heart’s still pounding, but the shock of his wink has melted into a honeylike warmth in her stomach. For actually, she is sure. Or at least, sure of one thing: Rudolph Gerhardt has just saved her life.



* * *





“He’s sweet on you,” Ilse says later, as they walk past the yodeling youth, dropping in Pfennige and collecting yet more Winter Relief pins. “He must be. Why else would he take the fall?”

“Who knows?” Renate examines her lapel pin before tucking it into her coat collar next to the other three she has stuck there, carefully keeping her tone even. Secretly, however, she’s still thrumming with excitement. Let it be true, she thinks. Please, let it be true.

“And did you see Steinberg’s expression?” Ilse continues, sticking her own pin in her pocket. “It was just too funny. Martin drew a cartoon of it for me afterward.”

“I was too afraid to look at him. I honestly thought he was going to strangle me. Right on the spot. And by the way, you still haven’t apologized.”

“For what?”

“For making me draw his attention! Why did you punch me like that?”

“I didn’t punch you. I nudged you. A little. I barely moved at all.”

“If you didn’t move, then why did I almost fall off my chair?”