Wunderland(75)
“Given, however,” the teacher continued, “that it is our very first day, I am prepared to make some exceptions. Ava, would you like to try that answer again? Politely, and with the respect due to an elder?”
A bead of sweat started a slow, tickling journey down the center of Ava’s spine. “She writes about housekeeping. And—and other things.”
“Thank you. And the rest of your family? Brothers? Sisters?”
Ava shook her head slowly, thinking bitte-nein-bitte-nein-bitte-nein. But inevitably, Frau Klepf did. “And your father?”
“He…” Ava swallowed. “He…”
“I’m sorry, Ava. I didn’t catch that.”
“He fell,” Ava mumbled, only slightly louder.
“He fell in battle?”
“He fell…he fell in a KZ.”
“A KZ?” Frau Klepf seemed caught off-guard by the statement. “Do you know where?”
Ava shook her head numbly. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about him at all. Except for that he fell.”
She stared at the sand-colored wooden floor as shocked giggling and rustling arose softly around her. It dawned on her that she actually hated her mother—really hated her—for keeping the truth locked away like this. As though by not telling Ava anything she was somehow protecting her, when in fact it was the opposite of protection.
When she looked up again, Frau Klepf was studying her with a look much like the one Ilse had worn when Ava showed her a dead pigeon on the street. “Very well.” She sighed. “You may sit.”
Ava sank into her chair, her limbs rubbery with relief. But as the teacher turned toward the blackboard, she was also aware, deep in her belly, of just the slightest sense of letdown. It was the same feeling she got when her mother listened to her without seeming to hear her, or looked at her without seeming to see her. At those times Ava felt as invisible as the magically cloaked prince in the Dancing Princesses story. At those times, she felt like a ghost in her own life.
* * *
In the afternoon they were given a half hour in the garden, which was less a garden than a big dirt square filled with cigarette butts and rubble. As the other children picked out rocks for goal markers and one another for teammates, Ava hung back, half hopeful, half intimidated. She had no real sports skills beyond skipping rope, and had had little chance to build any up, since after one dismally failed conscription into a neighborhood snowball fight she never played with other children on her block. But the possibility of being included was tempting enough that she lingered as the others organized themselves—at least, until one of the boys called out: “Hey you! Bastard smartmouth! Was your missing dad a baller?”
“Didn’t you hear her?” someone else hooted back. “She doesn’t know anything about him!”
Face burning, Ava scuttled in the opposite direction. She wasn’t sure where she was going until she all but tripped right onto it: a flat, large rock beneath a dead-looking oak tree.
Sinking down, she pulled from her pocket a pencil stub and her little sketchbook, then paged through to the picture she’d started the prior night. It showed a girl roughly her own age, roughly resembling herself (lean-limbed, sharp-chinned, straight dark hair in two braids). Except that while Ava was sitting cross-legged on a big flat piece of granite, the sketchpad girl was hurling herself into a well. Or, more specifically, poised on the rocky rim of the well, contemplating its moist and murky depths. It had taken hours to get the body position right, using as a model her only doll (chipped and bisque-headed, named for the nation stamped upon its back). The well was based on a soup bowl against which Ava had painstakingly propped “Japan” after stripping her down to her tiny knickers.
Now it was time for the face.
Ava chewed on her pencil tip, which tasted woody and salty and strangely comforting as always. What kind of expression would a girl wear if her own mother had ordered her to jump into a deep, dark well, and possibly drown?
Shutting her eyes, she tried to summon it: the moment, the feeling. The fear. A mineral tang of shale and cement; a green algae hint. For the barest of moments, the footballers’ shrieks and calls faded, and along with them the morning’s sticky anxiety, the hot shame of her exposure as a “smartmouth” and a bastard within less than three hours of the starting bell. Instead she was almost there: in the half world that might actually exist between dingy Bremen and glimmering Grimm. The air around her quivering the way water shivers and glistens before parting before her…
“Are you asleep?”
Startling, Ava popped her eyes open to see Ulrich Something-or-Other, the boy whose mother really had died in a KZ. Ulrich stood directly in front of her, a battered paperback beneath his arm and somber curiosity on his face.
“Of course not,” she said, quickly covering her notebook. Go away.
Instead he drew closer, pushing his glasses up again in that same anxious, jerky fashion that Ava suddenly identified as intensely annoying. “What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
“Drawing.” He said it almost gently, as though introducing her to the concept. “The question is, what are you drawing?”
She glowered down at his feet. His boots were worn straight through at the toe: she could make out a striped sock. On closer examination, the sock also had a hole in it, revealing a single, dirt-mooned toenail.