Wunderland(80)

When Ava looked up she was expecting the familiar tight-lipped face look of disapproval. Instead she saw that Ilse had her blond head in her hands. Her shoulders shook. Ava realized with shock that she was crying.

“Mutti?” Standing, she softly touched her mother’s elbow.

For a moment, Ilse didn’t move. Then, shaking off her daughter’s hand she stood, wiping her eyes with her shirtcuffs. “Take your things upstairs, please,” she said, her voice strained. “I need to get started on dinner.”

“But…”

“Ava. Do I need to get the hairbrush?”

Ava felt her chin quiver. More upsetting than the familiar threat was the sense that a very rare window—one into her mother’s secret, true self—had just been cracked, and then quickly slammed shut. But Ava knew better than to try to pry it back open.

Blinking back tears, she began gathering her books and papers before making her way shakily to the door. Once there, though, she turned back again. “Mutti.”

Her mother was piling things onto the counter: an onion, a jar of tomatoes, a bag of meat.

“Just one question?”

“Nein.” Ilse set the onion on a cutting board. “We’ll discuss it when you are older.”

“Bitte. Can you just tell me—how did he really fall?”

Slowly, her mother turned around. “Was he really killed in battle, you mean?” Her silvery eyes were now rimmed in red—a contrast that was somehow unsettling.

Ava nodded.

Ilse hesitated again. Very slightly, she shook her head, and Ava’s heart gave a startled leap.

“Then he’s alive?” she said, breathlessly.

Her mother shut her eyes. “I will not have this discussion now,” she said, teeth gritted. “Go upstairs. This instant.”

“But…”

A sharp retort echoed abruptly through the room, making Ava jump in surprise. For a confused moment she somehow thought that her mother had been shot, before realizing Ilse had simply slammed shut the knife drawer.

“This instant!” It came out almost a howl.

Ava turned on her heel and ran to the front stairwell, the salty warmth blurring her vision so that she miscalculated where the step was and almost tripped. Trying to steady herself, she reached her hand out for the banister, barely missing the framed picture that perched beneath it: her and Ilse, shortly after her mother magically appeared at the Home of the Holy Mother. In the picture Ilse’s strong arms looped loosely around Ava’s skinny waist; her blond plaits tangled with Ava’s chestnut. Her smile was stiff; Ava’s face solemn, faintly confused. Reaching out, Ava ran a finger along the sculpted edge of the sterling silver frame.

Then, with equal deliberation, she swiped the whole picture off the table, sending it skittering the length of the polished oak before crashing onto the floor, the glass pane shattering into a dozen glinting, jagged pieces.





12.


    Renate


1938

Renate races down Kronberger Stra?e, deploring Daphne du Maurier and buttoning her too-small coat against the chill.

It is the second time in four days that she’s completely missed her stop. On Friday, she’d caught the oversight almost immediately and got the driver to pull over, and so only had to run back a short way to school. Today, though, the number 8 made it halfway to Nikolassee before the conductor called out jovially over his shoulder. “Skipping class today, are we, Fr?ulein?” And even then, Renate was so immersed in Jack Favell’s evil plan to blackmail Max de Winter that she had to be called again before she caught on.

Cursing beneath her breath, she glances down at her wrist before remembering that she pawned her watch last week so she’d have money for Christmas presents. But given the spectral silence of the St. John church bells (which chime on the quarter hour) she calculates that it is at the earliest 8:03, and at the latest 8:18. Neither of which would matter if her first class weren’t English and her first teacher Herr Lawerenz.

A Great War veteran with a severe limp and a disposition so ferocious that he could shout down any Nazi instructor from Renate’s old school, Herr Lawerenz inspires raw terror in his overcrowded classrooms with a single bang of his walking stick. He has never been known to smile, though opinion is divided as to whether this sobriety reflects war trauma or the fact that he was simply born an Arschloch. He also seems to have taken more of a dislike to Renate than to his other students, though she can’t understand why. Her work in his class is strong; she contributes articulately to class discussions and always raises her hand before speaking. She even tries to make him smile, in part because after her last school experience she’s desperate to be liked by her teachers, but also for the simple challenge. Last Monday, for instance, when informed by him that her tardiness meant she’d missed his introduction to the English pluperfect, she pointed out that she’d been reading Gone with the Wind in the original English, and that it happened to be in the past tense. “So you see,” she’d said (in English), smiling in what she thought was a winning way, “I really haven’t missed anything at all.”

The class laughed. Herr Lawerenz did not. Instead, he slammed his cane on the parquet floor with such force that Renate half expected the wooden slats to shatter.

“Be late again,” he’d said ominously (and in German), “and you’ll find yourself facing suspension. And then we will see what you will miss.”