Wunderland(83)

Instead they wait, eight young bodies sitting and standing motionless and ramrod straight. Sixteen eyes remain glued to the slow-passing street scenery as though it were a movie screen, and they were waiting for some monster—a trudging clay-trailing Golem, a maiden-clutching King Kong—to burst forth from the shadows.

For several stops they see nothing. But as they approach the Friedrichstra?e the smell of smoke fills the air, and she hears a dull, rowdy roar punctuated by drunken singing and shattering glass. The trolley turns onto the main avenue, and Renate catches a glimpse of what at first looks like garbage strewn over the sidewalks and street. But as the tram pulls even she sees that it is not garbage at all but brand-new goods: clothing with tags still on it, some of it half ripped off headless mannequins. Cans of food, dented but unopened. Worst of all (for her): books, with pages and covers ripped.

And the glass. Everywhere, there is glass. Shards of porcelain, stained glass, crystal-cut pieces from a chandelier—it all sparkles sharply in the weak morning light.

The tram lurches onto the main avenue, where the view is partially obstructed by a double-decker bus at a dead stop in front of the action, its two-score-odd passengers watching the proceedings with the bemused expressions of opera attendees. As they pass the stalled vehicle Renate for the first time sees the full extent of the chaos. The hairs on the back of her neck prickle.

The stores are under siege by bands of men, egged on by a crowd of laughing, applauding pedestrians. Many of the rioters appear to be drunk, staggering as they shout and sing and smash. None of them are wearing the familiar brown shirts and red armbands, but most have the burly, beef-faced look of stormtroopers. And the songs they bellow about plunging knives and Jewish blood are as unmistakable as the SS’s signature Horst Wessel anthem.

Barely breathing, she stares out at the roaming marauders, a mix of young and middle-aged men and boys. Some of the latter are in Hitlerjugend uniform; others in civilian clothes. They are working as a group; as the number 8 stops for a signal she sees one boy smash a wooden table that has been dragged from a nearby furniture store, pounding and hacking at one of the legs until he manages to pry it off completely. This he hands to another boy, who bellows in approval before he unsteadily clambers onto what appears to be a matching dining room chair. He then begins to whack at the neon sign over the shop door, methodically destroying its two-word promise of Feine M?bel letter by glassy, shattering letter.

As he demolishes the l the others burst into applause, which is quickly picked up by onlookers. The boy leaps off the chair, tripping and falling flat but never once losing his giddy grin. A Polizist offers an arm to help him back onto his feet, then pats him jovially on the back.

Renate finally breaks her silence. “I can’t believe that all of this is because a Pole shot a German,” she whispers to Stella Goldschlag.

Stella, her blond braids as perfect and parallel as golden tram rails down her back, shakes her head. “It’s just an excuse.”

A man in a tan trench coat who has been smoking and reading Die B?rsen-Zeitung looks up from his position against the carriage wall.

“An excuse for what?”

“An excuse to destroy us,” says Stella, her voice cracking.

“Get a grip,” hisses Gartner Rabin, who is sitting across the car next to Rita Oelburg, a thin and studious girl with bruiselike shadows beneath her eyes. “We’re not supposed to draw attention to ourselves.”

Stella tightens her lips and stares down at her neat black boots. “I hate being a Jew,” she murmurs.

Renate studies her sidelong. Stella is easily the prettiest female in the Jüdische Privatschule—or at least, the prettiest by German standards. With smooth pale skin and eyes as blue as the painted flowers on a Chinese teacup, she looks like a girl for whom nothing ever goes wrong. On a normal school day the boys try to outperform one another around her. In fact, Gartner, who has now returned to staring tightly out at the devastation, actually did a handstand on the railing of the school’s second-floor balcony in September, purely for Stella’s benefit. Losing his grip, he’d fallen right off and crashed into the hyacinth bushes below, ending up with an arm cast which, in fact, only came off last week. And yet somehow, it all seems like something that happened deep in the past already. An event in a book she’s all but forgotten…

The tram, which had finally started to move forward, stops again with a metallic shriek and a shudder.

For a moment no one moves. From outside comes the crystalline crash of another window shattering.

“Oh, wonderful,” mumbles a man in the rear corner of the car. “Right in the middle of it all.”

As if to underscore the point, a passing group of rioters slap their carriage, hard enough that it rocks slightly on its rails. As the marauders bellow with laughter, the Goldschmidt students stare straight ahead, and Renate realizes with horror that they are trapped here, mere meters from the violence. It would take just moments for the mob to shift their focus.

“What should we do?” whispers Stella, as another nearby window breaks. “Should we get off?”

“But what if they see us?” asks Rita, her voice shrill with fear.

“Shut up,” hisses Gartner, his teeth gritted. “Just shut up, all of you. Can’t you?”

The girls fall silent. Outside, the air fills with catcalls and wolf whistles, and reflexively Renate turns to see the source of the laughter. It comes from a group pillaging a storefront she recognizes as a lingerie shop her mother has frequented. As she watches, one of the boys reaches into the display he’s just broken into and begins tossing out handfuls of silky, fluttery clothing, which the others drape coyly over their jackets and sweaters before ripping them to shreds with their hands. A moment later the proprietor—a bearded, birdlike man who was once a dancer in the Paris Opera Ballet—appears at the front door, waving his thin arms. He is shouting something, but the looters don’t appear to be listening. Instead they begin to laughingly push him back and forth among themselves, a human pinball in some nightmarish machine.