Wunderland(72)

As he spoke, she saw that he was opening a drawer in the desk, from which he pulled out a bottle and two small glasses. He filled one, tossed it back, then filled both of them and picked them up. As he circled out from behind the desk with them, there came a pulsing sense of disorientation, as though the solid ground she’d thought she stood on revealed itself to be the floor of a moving train. As he drew even with her, she fought a foolish but intense urge to turn on her heel, to bolt breathlessly toward the door.

“It strikes me that you just might be headed for great places,” he was saying. “And I believe that I can make that journey both shorter and more…comfortable for you. What do you say?”

He was slurring slightly, and she realized that he actually seemed somewhat drunk—a fact she found less worrying than infuriating at first. For here he was, this man sent to represent the Reich to the village! Here he was, taking meetings on the safety of his people, on the needs and concerns of Germany’s vulnerable new settlers. And he was tipsy! It struck Ilse suddenly that he might not even remember their discussion later. In which case the entire endeavor—the hard-earned list of names from the butcher; the hour wasted with that idiot of a secretary; not to mention the fact that Ilse would need some sort of excuse to explain missing dinner (and by now she’ll certainly have missed it)—all of it, apparently, was for nothing.

“Bitte,” he was saying. “Let’s toast.”

“No thank you.” She shook her head. He pretended to be shocked.

“Why not?”

“I am here to work,” she told him tightly. “Not to drink.”

“Oh, come now,” he said, chuckling again. “You’re a city girl, aren’t you? You must be. All you Arbeitsmaiden are. I’m sure you have all sorts of decadent habits.”

He was standing very close now, and still holding the glass out so that it was practically beneath her nose. Because she could think of nothing else to do, Ilse finally took it from him.

“Good girl,” he said. “Prost.”

They clinked; he once again tossed his back. After a moment, holding her breath, Ilse did too.

“There,” he said. “That wasn’t so bad, now. Was it?”

In fact the liquor tasted like petrol and felt like fire against her throat: she immediately started to cough. Still chuckling, he took her glass back and set it on a coffee table by the couch against the side wall. For a moment he seemed to study it, and Ilse felt her pulse leap in a warning she didn’t have time to fully decode. But he turned back again and started walking toward the door.

That was it, she told herself, with a silent sigh of relief. All he wanted was a drink. And now, he’ll tell me that I can go.

But when he got to the door, the Hauptsturmführer neither held it open nor ushered Ilse out.

Instead, he closed it firmly and turned the bolt.

As he strode back toward her, Ilse found that she could neither move nor breathe. “Hauptsturmführer,” she gasped, trying frantically to think of something to say to distract him, to bring the situation back to something even approaching normal.

But by that point he was upon her. And without another word, he took her into his arms.

What she’d remember most of what followed was not the meaty feel of his fingers against her neck, or the tobacco-and-Schnapps smell of his breath. What she’d recall was the icy shock of it: the abrupt recognition of the bizarre, colossal chasm between what she’d thought her purpose here was and what he’d probably seen it as from the start. The stinging realization that such things can happen with such speed, and with such irrevocable force.

That in the end, it really only takes a few moments.



* * *





In the Lagerhaus kitchen the cuckoo clock above the icebox chirps once, to mark the half hour past four. Blinking up at it, Ilse realizes she’s been staring blankly at her letter for something approaching thirty minutes, and that she needs to get back upstairs before the rest of the house wakes. After missing dinner last night she barely avoided outhouse duty by arguing that she’d had to walk her bike all the way back from work. Which was only half untrue: Ilse had had to walk it, though not, as she’d claimed, because of a flat, but because while the bleeding hadn’t lasted for very long it had still been too painful for her to perch upon the hard leather saddle. Dazedly, she wonders whether this will still be the case today, and if so, how she’ll get herself to the Michalskis’.

For a moment that strange, moving-not-moving sensation from the Hauptsturmführer’s office returns. Squeezing her eyes shut, Ilse waits for it to pass before setting her pencil tip back on the page.


Do you remember when you were with Rudi, our pledge to share with one another all the “juicy” details of our future love affairs? I finally have started one, though I will admit that it is not at all the sort of affair I ever expected to be sharing. In fact, it is with a man much older than myself, though of impeccable Aryan lineage and an impressive Party standing. It came about this evening, quite suddenly. So suddenly, in fact, that I will admit that I was somewhat shaken by it all. But as I lay in bed tonight, failing to fall asleep and finding myself instead writing this impossible letter to you, it occurred to me that perhaps what happened with Hauptsturmführer Wainer was like that moment in Herr Michalski’s field, when I pushed through the invisible gateway between tedium and pain and emerged with such overwhelming love for my country and its people. After all, he agreed to help me ensure the security of myself and my fellow Arbeitsmaiden in town. And he told me that he saw potential in me, and that he was going to help me realize it. Surely these two outcomes alone are worth the pain initial discomfort surprise of the Hauptsturmführer’s romantic attentions.