“But Friedenglückhasenland refuses to fight. It has never fought a war.”
“Because the bunnies would rather pick cherries.” I plucked another from the bowl between us.
“Or learn ballet steps.”
“Or go ice-skating.”
“It has magical protections, because the Krokodills are always trying to get in.”
“Everyone wants to get in.”
“Yes, because in Krokodilland people eat nothing but lederhosen.” She smiled at me, her teeth stained pink by the cherries we were eating. My mother had said no sweets before dinner, but Stefi whispered to us that we weren’t really breaking a rule because the cherries were sour.
“And the children never get to celebrate their birthdays.”
“And it is against the law to celebrate holidays or have a peaceful time together.”
“Where there are no vegetables. All there is to eat are stinging nettles that tear at your throat when you swallow and burn forever.”
“And all of the animals are poisonous.”
“Even the humans!”
“Yes, especially the humans.”
We grinned at each other, and spit the pits of our cherries into the bowl between us.
* * *
• • •
THE FOLLOWING YEAR, the school separated us.
The distance between our second-year classrooms infuriated me. I did my work but refused the advances of the other children, only interacting with them when it was strictly required. No matter how many times the teacher spoke to my parents, I remained on the periphery of my classroom.
At every recess, Anneliese and I raced each other to the playground to meet by the swings. Pushing our toes in the dirt, we told each other stories of our life elsewhere, our adventures in a country where rabbits nibbled pomegranate seeds at the movies and solved arguments with poetry contests or football matches.
In the mornings, I slipped new pages of our story into her school satchel where it hung on a hook outside of her classroom. Friedenglückhasenland was part of a nearby planet called Rose of Erta, I wrote. Its allies included the countries of Katzenland, Steinland, and Hamsterhimmel. These were those three islands inhabiting its inner sea.
The next morning there would be a new page slipped into my own satchel. “In Katzenland everything is made from apples,” Anneliese wrote. “There is apple tea and apple cookies and roasted apples and apple juice. All of the music is created from sounds that apples make falling, which is the most beautiful sound in the world.”
At the bottom of the page was an addendum: “P.S.—In all of Rose of Erta there is no Herr Kahn to slam his ruler down on your desk when you are trying to read something far more interesting than he is.”
* * *
• • •
WHEN I WAS SEPARATED from Anneliese, I resolutely refused to be happy. My mother had always said I was a stubborn child. When I was eighteen months old, she says, she took me with her to the post office to send a few letters and a parcel to her aunt in Graz. The postal clerk, apparently feeling festive, held out a tin of cookies to me, gingery Lebkuchen baked for Christmas. Clearly, this man had never had children, or he would have known better than to hold out an entire tin of Lebkuchen in front of a toddler. Despite my mother’s admonition to take just one, I reached in and grabbed a fistful. Furious and embarrassed, my mother ordered me to put them back. But the harder she tried to pry them from my fingers, the more tightly I clutched them, until they crumbled into a damp dust in my hand. If I couldn’t have them, no one would.
The postman was apparently unusually forgiving of my rudeness, but my mother never forgot that particular incident, reminding me of it every time I resisted a parental command.
Whenever I felt angry with my mother, I reminded myself that I came from somewhere else. I convinced myself that I had formed in Friedenglückhasenland. Anneliese and I agreed we had shared the womb of Mutti Hase, been born together, and lived in her palace for many years. We had only been born to separate mothers in Austria by some clerical error. “But it doesn’t matter,” Anneliese said. “Because we landed in the same building.”
I wasn’t cross with my mother very often. My mother was everything beautiful and good in the world. She smelled like lilacs and lemons. Her voice sent delicious shivers across my skin, even when she was singing something as simple as Brahms’s “Wiegenlied.”
When I explained to my mother that even though I first existed in Friedenglückhasenland, I eventually chose to be born a second time in Vienna, she smiled.
“Why Vienna?”
The answer was obvious. “You were here.”
“Erdnuss,” she said. “I’m honored. Of all the mothers you could have chosen.”
* * *
• • •
THE FOLLOWING YEAR the school gave up keeping us apart. “You’d think you’re Ianthe and Iphis, you two,” my mother said, half exasperated, half amused. It was entertaining to imagine myself as Iphis, a girl brought up disguised as a boy. Her father had sworn to kill her at birth if she wasn’t a boy, so her mother had kept her sex a secret. I thought of all the freedoms that granted Iphis—she could wear trousers and walk the streets alone, like my brother Willi. Like Odiane. I wondered if people on the street made fun of Odiane for the way she dressed, or if they just thought she was a boy and left her alone.
When Iphis was very young, she became close to another girl named Ianthe. Like Anneliese and me, they were always together. They studied together and played together and—I liked to think—invented worlds together. Eventually, they fell in love. When they became betrothed, Iphis’s mother Telethusa panicked. What would happen on the wedding night when Ianthe realized her love was a woman? She wept in despair, praying to the goddess Isis for rescue. And because two girls cannot be married, the night before the wedding the gods took pity on Iphis and changed her into a boy.
This ending had always bothered me. While I envied the freedom of boys, I didn’t want to actually be one. I did not want to become hairy and thick, with a scratchy beard. I liked the smooth curves of my face. If Isis was so powerful, why couldn’t she just make Ianthe happy that Iphis was a girl? Perhaps Ianthe had fallen in love with Iphis because she sensed her feminine nature, and would be repulsed by her abrupt maleness, by the coarse hairs sprouting on her face. Just as in so many fairy tales, we never got to find out what happened after that marriage. This was a serious flaw. Think of all of the things that could go wrong with a marriage! What if you discovered you had married a man who would hit his own daughter?
Six
In July 1936, Hitler orders mass arrests of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Roma. The SS establishes the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin.