Wunderland(73)
Sacrifices have to be made to secure the future of our nation.
And in the end, isn’t that what matters—Germany’s future? Working together in order to make it great? Isn’t that far and away more important than my na?vely girlish ideas of romance?
As I write this, I am realizing anew that it is for the same reason—Germany’s needs, and my commitment to meeting those needs—that I had to sever our friendship in the way that I did. For whatever our shared history, and whatever promises and plans we made, the facts remain irrevocable: First, that you are a Jew. Second, that your family also has unapologetic ties to Socialism: Not only was your mother’s father a former leader of the Socialist party, but your brother has attended Socialist meetings and even held them in your very home. In fact, as far as I know he is continuing to attend and hold them now.
So in the end, you are really an enemy of the nation on not just one, but on two counts. And that is precisely why I must not send this.
In fact, as I leaf through these pages now I can see that it really wasn’t even you to whom I was writing in the first place. Rather, I was writing a kind of ghost; the ghost of a friendship that has long since died. The ghost of who I thought you were, and who I truly am now.
Because the truth is, I long ago wrote you out of my life.
Ilse
Setting down her pencil, Ilse pauses for a moment, reading and rereading her last line.
Then, very carefully, she picks up the pages in one hand and her candle in the other. Carrying both over to the metal basin where she washed the dinner dishes last night (in penance for being late), she holds the candle to the corner edge of the missive until it catches. Then she drops the whole thing into the sink, watching dispassionately as it turns to ash before her eyes.
11.
Ava
1949
“She’s a housewife,” declared the boy two rows up from Ava’s seat in the back of the classroom. “And my father is an accountant.”
“Gut,” said Frau Klepf. “And do you know what an accountant does, Klaus?”
“He does sums with other people’s money.”
The teacher smiled, displaying yellowing teeth. “Something like that. You may sit. Next?”
A girl in the second-grade section leapt up, and Ava felt herself shrink in her seat. She’d been dreading the first day of Grundschule enough before walking in and discovering she’d have to “talk a little about her family” before the class. Now she found herself wishing she could simply sink below the earth so that when her turn came, the teacher would skip her.
“Abbi Schumer,” the second-grader piped, her looped braids swinging slightly. “I have a baby sister whose name is Marte. She cries all the time. My father owns a candy shop on Hochofenstra?e. Mother’s a Hausfrau too, but she’d rather have a job.”
“Is that so.”
“Ja. She says she only doesn’t because Vati is a caveman.”
The classroom erupted with hushed giggles, and someone grunted gutturally—Ooga-Booga! Ava kept her eyes glued to her desk. Its wooden surface was worn and battered and—despite traces of frequent sandings—still tagged with symbols, phrases, and initials: mysterious messages for the future from pupils past. Tracing one with her forefinger (L.G.N. + G.F.R. = W.L.f. I.) she wondered whether, decoded, it might instruct her on what to say when her turn came. Experimentally, she gave it a try: My mother is a magazine editor. My father…
Nothing came: no self-forming thought finished the phrase in her head. No miraculous epiphany transmitted itself from the old wood into the whorled surface of her fingertip.
Before her to the left a girl in a crisp seersucker dress was standing. “Lotte Reinhardt,” she was saying. “My mum is a dressmaker.” (Of course she is, Ava thought, glancing glumly down at her own patched and worn frock.) “I have one brother. He’s a bother. He’s named Frederick, after my father.”
Frau Klepf smiled. “You may find him less bothersome now that you won’t be spending all your time together this year. And what does your father do?”
“He was a Generalleutnant.” Lotte paused. Then, lowering her voice: “He fell in Stalingrad.”
The teacher nodded. But she didn’t press for further details, or say my condolences as she had when first-rower Jeni Gruenbaum tearfully noted that her mother had recently died of stomach cancer. In fact, she hadn’t pressed for details on any of the fathers who were reportedly felled by the War. Fell, Ava noted, being the word they’d all used. As though they’d all just toppled over like wooden soldiers.
They were on the row right in front of Ava’s now; she felt her palms prickle with sweat. Eins, zwei, drei: six more desks to her turn.
Mein-Vater-mein-Vater-mein-Vater…Still nothing. She slumped a little deeper in her chair, intending to keep both her eyes and her head down until the very last possible moment. Barely a moment later, though, something high and tinny in the teacher’s tone made her look up again.
“A camp?” Frau Klepf was repeating. “You say she died in a camp?”
The gangly boy she was addressing—Ava had missed his name—was standing in a way that suggested he’d rather be doing anything else: his sharp shoulders hunched forward, his chin tucked into his chest. His fists clenched at the ends of his bony arms.