Wunderland(92)

His dark eyes dart from her to the brutish Jock to Jock’s blood-spattered victim. “He didn’t tell me that.”

“Well, it’s true. And these oafs are going to find themselves in a cell if they don’t listen.”

Turning back to Jock, she pulls herself up to her full height. “What is your full name and rank, anyway?” Always ask questions with authority. It’s one of the interview tactics she learned last month at the National Leadership School in Potsdam, where she and other rising BDM regional leaders were sent as part of their training. Of course, the interviews they’d been prepared for were with adolescent girls, as part of the screening process for new BDM recruits. But the strategy seems to work just as well on drunken Sturmtruppen.

“Schumacher,” Jock says, frowning confusedly. “SS-Mann Jock Schumacher.”

A quick beat of relief: he’s the lowest rank possible without technically still being only a candidate. “Put your dagger away, Jock,” she says. “This man served the Kaiser. He has two Iron Crosses.”

“A kike who served is still a kike,” says Jock, though his tone is now more petulant than threatening.

“He’s not any more of a kike than you or I are.”

He hesitates, and Ilse can all but see him struggling to weigh the wisdom of contesting her.

“It’s true! Please. Listen to her. It’s true.”

The voice—frightened, female, and familiar enough that even now Ilse’s pulse leaps in recognition—breaks in from just behind them. Turning, she sees Renate pushing toward them, white-faced and breathing heavily. She is wearing the familiar green woolen coat she had at fourteen, her pale wrists extending nakedly from the cuffs.

Like the rest of her family she is much thinner than when Ilse last talked to her. But in that instant she strikes Ilse as beautiful in an almost otherworldly way: her cheeks flushed pink, her dark eyes wide with fear. The wave of joy at seeing her is so powerful that it is almost disorienting; Ilse actually has to shut her eyes for a moment to suppress it.



* * *





“It’s true.” Renate’s voice sounds thin and childish to her own ears. She has to fight to keep the shock out of it: shock at the sight of her besieged family and home. Shock at that one moment when she thought Ilse was leading the attack. The almost equally shocking moment when she realized that in fact, Ilse was stepping in to try to protect them.

And yet she finds herself falling into line beside Ilse and the young man who stands beside her as though nothing at all has changed between them. “We’re Germans,” she says again. “None of us are Jews.”

Which is true, she reminds herself. She has never been as good a liar as Ilse. But she knows instinctively that at this moment, it is her father’s life that very likely depends on what she says next and how she says it. She stares up at the drunken stormtrooper, hoping desperately that she looks as authoritative as Ilse. “My father was baptized at the First Lutheran Church on Friedrichstra?e.”

She casts a quick glance at her mother, who has taken advantage of the interruption to yank herself away from the two men who were holding her. Lips set in a tight line, Lisbet Bauer makes a beeline for her husband and pulls him from his tormentor. Her father’s face is the color of chalk. They must have taken him from his bed straight to the street, as he is wearing nothing but the drawers and white cotton vest in which he sleeps at night. Renate’s throat tightens as she takes in the spattered blood. But while numerous, the spots at least don’t appear to be growing. She desperately hopes that this means that his wounds are superficial, unlike those of some of the men she’s seen on her way home.

“You’re the daughter?”

The boy speaking is the one who seems to be here with Ilse, given how close to her he is standing. He strikes her as almost unnervingly young, his face and torso still padded with childish fat, his dark eyes long-lashed like Franz’s.

She nods. “Yes.”

The boy looks at Ilse. “You know her too, Ida?”

Ida? Renate glances at Franz. He gives a faint nod.

“Absolutely,” says Ilse. “I’m telling you. I’ve known all of them for years.”

“I don’t think she knows her ankle from her Arschloch,” says the boy who is still holding Franz’s arms.

Another round of chuckles, but the sound is uneasy now. And the boy in the leather coat doesn’t even smile.

“It’s easy enough to clear up,” he says, and turns to Renate. “Go get his Kennkarte.”

Renate’s heart lurches. But before she can respond her mother is answering: “He’s had to apply for a new one. He dropped the old one in the water at Wannsee when we went boating there last month.”

She rattles off the mistruth with the same calm, commanding tone she uses to dispatch orderlies at the Jewish Hospital. Renate holds her breath as the boy turns to her father.

“This is true?”

Otto Bauer looks dazedly from his questioner to his wife. “Is what true?” he asks, slowly.

Oh God, Renate thinks. Not now. Please. Over the past months, as his work has dried up, his post and pension remain revoked, and even his beloved typewriter and bicycle have been confiscated (Jews are no longer allowed either), her father has been increasingly prone to periods of unresponsiveness. Her mother says it’s a symptom of his melancholia, that it will get better once life returns to normal. Renate knows better than to ask when that will be.