Wunderland(94)

Turning, he begins to limp toward the door.

Renate remains where she is. For a moment they just look at one another.

“Ida Fuchs,” she says, finally. “I didn’t think I’d hear from her again.”

“Me neither.” Despite herself, Ilse smiles. “Turns out she’s not all bad in the end.”

Renate smiles back—a weak curve of her full lips that makes Ilse’s throat constrict again.

“I feel like I need to thank you,” Renate continues. “But I can’t…I can’t think of the right words.”

“Don’t thank me. Just leave,” Ilse says tightly. “All of you. There’s no place for you here now.”

“We’re trying.” Renate’s voice catches slightly. “We’ve been on the waitlist for American visas for over two years. We’ve applied to five other countries as well. No one will take us.”

The hurt and helplessness on her face hit Ilse in the chest the way her brick had hit the baker they’d visited as friends. Ilse fiddles with the bag’s buckle, trying to keep her composure. “It was just this once,” she says, in a low voice. “I can’t do it again.” She hesitates miserably, before adding: “I have to go.”

Renate swallows. “Me too,” she says. But she remains rooted to the spot, and Ilse feels her chocolate eyes locked on her back as she turns in the direction of the U-Bahn.

Keep walking, she tells herself.

But after a few steps she stops and looks back. “I wrote you a letter,” she says.

Renate blinks. “When?”

“When I was in the East.”

“I didn’t get it,” says Renate slowly.

“I didn’t send it,” says Ilse.

“Why not?” The look on Renate’s face—confusion mixed with hope—actually almost hurts to see. Because we can’t be friends, Ilse thinks. Because I miss you too much. Because you are what’s wrong with everything.

“Leave,” she repeats.

And turning on her heel, she walks away.





15.


    Ava


1946

“You know she’s dead,” said Maja. Her black eyes danced as she stood on tiptoe, holding the crumpled paper just out of Ava’s reach. “She was probably raped and killed by the Ivans. You know that, right?”

“Give it back,” said Ava, and leapt again, in futility. She didn’t know what rape meant, except that it was awful and hurt a lot, and that it had happened to some of the other girls at the orphanage. One of them, Katje, had only been five. After arriving at the Children’s Home of the Holy Mother Katje hadn’t made a sound for a whole week. But the first time she saw the orphanage’s Ami supervisors—Kapit?n Ron and Leutnant Tommy—she screamed and screamed until she outright fainted.

“Well, do you?” Maja said now. “Answer me.”

“She wasn’t,” said Ava. Thinking: I will not cry.

“She was,” said Maja, and reaching out she gave Ava’s shoulder a shove. Behind her, Hanne Rossing and Anja Blum watched, their eyes shining.

“She was,” Maja repeated. “Probably by a hundred of them at once. Big, stinky, dirty Russians. They probably split her apart so she looked like a slab of meat. And then they left her naked and bleeding in the snow, to die.”

She shoved Ava again, hard enough this time to make her stagger. As Ava caught her balance her tongue caught in her teeth. The sick-sweet taste of blood triggered nausea and a hot rush of tears. She squeezed her eyes shut, but the droplets spilled out anyway, converging in stinging, salty tracks down her cheeks.

“Awww,” said Maja, delighted. “Is Babypisse bawling?” Babypisse was the nickname she’d given Ava the first day she’d arrived here, when she’d discovered Ava still sometimes wet the bed.

Behind her, Hanne and Anja screeched with laughter.

“Look at this thing,” Maja added. Ava opened her eyes to see Maja mockingly waving her drawing, back and forth. It was supposed to have been of a Banane, an item Ava had never seen in real life but had seen pictures of in books and magazines.

“It looks like a cock,” Maja declared. “A big yellow Ivan cock. Auf Wiedersehen, Ivan.”

And with a flourish, she tore the picture in half.



* * *





“She’s just jealous,” Ava’s friend Greta said later, as she brushed and parted Ava’s hair for Presentation.

“But why is she jealous?” Ava sniffled, then wiped her nose on her sleeve.

“Stand still,” Greta chastised, and yanked the brush down for emphasis. “She’s jealous because you have a mother and she doesn’t.” Dividing the left side into three parts, Greta started to braid, pausing to check her work from both sides in the mirror. They were in the washroom, where the older girl—Ava’s one self-proclaimed ally at Holy Mother—had just helped Ava splash her face with cold water.

“But no one knows where my mother is,” said Ava. A slab of meat. Naked and bleeding. She tried to black the words out of her mind the way she blacked out mistakes in her drawings.

“But not knowing is still so much better than knowing for sure that she’s dead.”