Wunderland(98)
“Gut.” Rising to her feet, the Mutter Oberin gestured for Ava to stand as well. “Now go back to your bunk, please, and spend the next two hours before supper thinking about what we have discussed.”
Pushing herself to her feet, Ava smoothed her threadworn dress over her thighs and followed the nun to the door. As she was opening it, however, a soft knock sounded and Sister Agnes stuck her head in.
“Do you have a moment for some discharge paperwork?” she asked.
“Of course!” The Mother Superior’s voice seemed almost relieved. “Who is the lucky child?”
Beaming, the younger nun pushed the door fully open while beckoning behind her with her free hand.
“Danke,” said a familiar voice.
Ava looked up to see Frau and Herr Dunkel poised in the hallway. Between them, holding both their hands, stood Maja.
As the two girls stared at one another, for once Maja’s gaze held none of its usual loathing and scorn. Joy and wonder had suffused her pinched features with a softness that Ava had never seen there before.
“Oh my dear! Congratulations!” Sweeping past Ava, the Mother Superior enfolded the older girl in her arms, a smile spreading across her withered cheeks. As she turned to the Dunkels, Ava looked up to see Sister Agnes looking down with a strange expression, one brimming with both pity and self-satisfaction. You see, it seemed to say. I told you so.
* * *
“Is it a castle?”
“No.” Tongue tip tucked between her lips, Ava carefully scraped off the top layer of her structure. Theresia pulled her thin cardigan more tightly against the April chill and jutted out her lower lip. A recent arrival to the orphanage, she was five but looked three, and even younger when she smiled since half her teeth were missing. Like other recent additions at the orphanage she’d lost her parents to the Schwarzer Hunger brought on by a winter colder and longer than even Mutter Oberin claimed to have ever seen. (“He is punishing us for our sins,” she’d explained at one Sunday night sermon, though when asked what those sins were she’d just shaken her head.)
For some reason, Theresia had fixed on Ava as her new best friend, a designation Ava found irksome rather than flattering. She had no interest in making friends these days—and certainly not tiny, toothless ones who wouldn’t stop asking her questions and had terrible breath to boot. Still, Theresia trailed her around the orphanage, nestling beside her at mealtime and perching uninvited on Ava’s bunk. This morning, the younger girl had actually offered Ava half her breakfast ration of dry bread and margarine after Ava complained she was still hungry. It was an offer that took all of Ava’s might to refuse, which only served to make the whole thing more annoying.
“Why isn’t it a castle?” the smaller girl was asking now. “It looks like a castle.”
“Because it’s a house.”
“What kind of a house?”
“Just a house.”
“Can I help build it?”
“No. And stop bothering me.”
Scowling, Ava shifted so that her back faced her interrogator and blocked her project from Theresia’s meddlesome sight. The latter let loose a short, hurt sigh before resuming her own project, a hole she’d been struggling for the past half hour to claw into the still half-frozen sand. Ava huddled over her building again, focusing this time on the arching hole of the doorway. As she’d told Theresia, it was not a castle but a house, one as close in style and appearance to what her Oma and Opi’s had been as Ava could manage. Since the weather had finally warmed enough for them to play outside coatless (though few of them had coats in the first place), this had become her new obsession: molded versions of food items that she wanted to eat, and of buildings in which she’d like to live. She had crafted sand-cakes and sand-cottages, sand-pretzels and sand-palaces. She built them with a focus so intent that it sometimes made her dizzy, so single-minded that she often missed the bell that signaled the end of playtime. When she did hear it, she’d stand up and stomp her creations back into their original grit, an act that felt both transgressive and deeply satisfying.
She turned her attention to the roof, using the spade’s tip to etch in the illusion of overlapping tiles. She was just trying to decide where the chimney should go when she heard someone calling her from somewhere behind her: “Ava! Ava!”
Looking over her shoulder, Ava spotted Greta flying toward her from the direction of the chapel, her cheeks pink, her face bright with delight. Frowning, Ava turned back to her structure.
Since Maja’s adoption a half year earlier, their relationship had changed. Ava hadn’t exactly stopped talking to the older girl. But she had stopped seeking her out; had stopped climbing into her bunk at night for whispered tales of mythic foods and famous paintings. It helped, of course, that since Maja was gone Ava no longer needed Greta’s protection from her. But Ava herself had changed too. She knew better, now, than to let herself dream of things that would never come to be—and better than to believe people like Greta, who encouraged her to dream of them.
“Ava!” Greta called again.
“Ava?” Theresia echoed, poking Ava’s shoulder with a sandy finger.
“Leave me alone.” Turning back to her house, Ava began carefully carving out a chimney, not looking up until Greta hurled herself into the sand pit between Ava and the younger girl, her left knee knocking into a carefully lathed wall in the process.