Wunderland(74)

“Yes,” he said. “Auschwitz.” He shuffled his feet. “That’s a KZ,” he added, still speaking to the floor.

“I’m aware.” Frau Klepf sounded slightly breathless. “So your mother was an…was employed by this place?”

“Employed?” The boy blinked at her. “You mean like working there for money?”

Flushing slightly, the teacher nodded her head.

Placing a finger on the taped-up bridge of his glasses, the boy pushed them further up on his nose. “No,” he said shortly.

Frau Klepf waited a moment. When he said nothing more she cleared her throat. “Well, Ulrich,” she said. “I’m very sorry for your loss. You may sit.”

As the boy slumped back into his chair Ava studied the neatly shaven back of his head. It looked both soft and prickly, like a porcupine’s belly; if she were to draw it she’d do it with a series of short, dark lines and dots. She didn’t know what KZ stood for, but she knew it was one of those terms that—like the War, the Defeat, the Russians—only surfaced in very serious adult conversations.

“Who is next?” Frau Klepf asked brightly, even though it was obvious since they were going in order.

As the next two students went (Lena, Max, only children, Hausfrau, judge, baker, banker), Ava wiped her palms against the skirt of the let-out-both-ways dress and willed her jackhammer heart to be quiet. My father is…What on earth could she say? She couldn’t tell them the truth, that she didn’t know who her father was, beyond that he’d been a soldier and had died. She could maybe just say he’d fallen, as a dozen other students had. But then she’d have to say where he’d fallen, and she didn’t know, and she couldn’t trust herself to repeat any of the strange-sounding names (Stalingrad? Kursk? Voronezh?) correctly—much less convincingly. Particularly given how nervous she was, and that nervousness made her say things she didn’t really mean to say, like Yes, thank you when someone had just asked her name, or You as well when they’d asked how she was. It was almost as if she were missing some magic incantation or charm that made chatting so natural and easy for most people. She’d tried to tell her mother about this, but Ilse had dismissed it with an “Ach, there’s that colorful imagination of yours again.” As though Ava’s imagination were a gaudy and unwelcome guest.

As the girl next to her rattled off that her father was a dentist and her mother a dental hygienist, another thought struck: if Ava convinced herself she was invisible, she actually would be by the time her turn came. I am air, she told herself, squeezing her eyes shut. I am empty air in a chair. You can see right through me to the window.

But as the dental duo’s daughter sat back, Frau Klepf was already launching into her query: “Und am Ende, we have…?”

Air, Ava thought.

But even as she thought it she could feel them: thirty-odd curious gazes brushing like hovering bees against her clearly-still-very-visible skin.

She opened her eyes.

“Ava,” she murmured.

The teacher frowned. “Ava what? And please stand.”

Reluctantly, she clambered to her feet. “Von Fischer.”

“I’m certainly very pleased to meet you, Ava,” said Frau Klepf, in the shiny voice grown-ups use when they really are saying I’m a grown-up and you’re certainly not. “Can you tell us a little bit about your family?”

Family, Ava thought. As usual, she had trouble connecting the term to herself. She and her mother were related, of course, and yet as a unit they somehow felt less “familial” than simply pragmatic: as though they’d been assigned slots in the same living space.

“My mother is, ah, a writer and editor,” Ava said, scuffing her right calf with the worn toe of her left shoe. “For Burda. That’s a women’s magazine.”

“Ah!” beamed the teacher. “I read Burda! And do you know what she writes about?”

“Women’s issues.” It came out more like a question.

“And could you tell us what, exactly, ‘women’s issues’ might be?”

And of course, Ava could have. She could have mentioned keeping house like a proper German housewife, and cooking wholesome meals on a tight budget. She could have told them about refurbishing one’s husband’s Wehrmacht jacket into a child’s winter overcoat, or repurposing old Hakenkreuz flags into cheerful holiday coasters. Or letting one’s daughter’s dresses out in both directions in order to make them last another year. She could have spoken about Ilse’s advice column, entitled Liebe Tante even though as far as Ava knew Ilse had no aunts and wasn’t one herself.

Instead, she said: “If you really read Burda you’d already know what they are.”

The hush that fell on the room was so cotton-thick that she all but felt it on the top of her head.

“That,” said Frau Klepf slowly, “is a very good example of how one ought not speak to one’s teacher. On any other day, in fact, I’d be forced to consider whether punishment might be in order.” She turned her gaze to the far classroom corner, and for the first time Ava noticed the branch there, casually propped in the crevice where the two gray walls met. Stripped and supple and thin as a whip. She had heard of children being switched by parents, though her own mother preferred the back of her paddle-shaped hairbrush, applied with expert aim and efficiency.