Motherland

by Maria Hummel

  “I heard you’re leaving,” Frau Reiner whispered.

  He pretended not to hear her, straightening, snapping off the lamp. He eased it from his sweaty temples and handed it to her, avoiding her eyes. “Let’s have a full set of X-rays, and get the dentist to look at him,” he said with brusque cheer. “Was there anyone else I should see?”

  At the front of every classroom in Frank’s childhood perched the same figure, thick and bunchy in the hips, erect in the spine and cowlick. Hartmann’s voice always issued forth as an amused whine, even as a child. His peers had loathed him, and some of his teachers, too. Frank could still remember crabby, graying Herr Nuss, standing in the dusty schoolroom light, telling a story:

  When the king built a castle near the mill, he hated the noise of it, the wheat grinding in the stones. So the king took his case before the judge. Make him move the mill, he demanded. I am king. The judge ruled for the miller. The king had to move his castle or put up with the racket. And the king obeyed.

  “This is law in Germany,” said Herr Nuss. “This is Rechtsstaat. Even our rulers have to bow to it.”

  Hartmann’s big head shot up. “Then how come you don’t have to wash your desk every day, and we do?” he wanted to know, and most of the kids watched approvingly as Hartmann got the switch.

  But Frank’s father had adored Hartmann. Herr Kappus had never had a student like him, in all his days as a Latin teacher. What he admired most was Hartmann’s fluency. For Herr Kappus, son of a janitor, conquering every cognate had required superior strength and resolve. He excelled at instructing the average student, but how much more thrilling to bask in the light of a star! He followed the young critic and poet’s progress as he left gymnasium and entered university, as Hartmann published tracts on Heine and Goethe, always informing Frank of the latest achievement.

  Frank was glad his father couldn’t see his favorite now. He circled Hartmann’s bedside the next day, not stopping but watching all the same as the patient sat up and began playing skat with his neighbors, as the afternoon light whitened the ward’s windows. Hartmann’s bandages were off, per Frank’s orders, but he wore a green scarf to hide his face. Beside him, the other patients looked suddenly exposed. Brimges’s nose had a fat, tubular pedicle feeding it from his temple, and Alliner’s destroyed cheek was purple with healing scars. They were patients who’d come to Frank as monsters, and now their fearsome visages were finally giving way to mere ugliness. He knew that they hated their new faces, but at least they could grow used to them. They could walk down a street without terrifying women and children. What had Alliner said? At least I don’t look like a creature no more.

  Frank rubbed his sleepless eyes. Around midnight, he had begun speculating that the new patient wasn’t Hartmann at all but someone posing as him. He recalled the boy’s big brow, his pale eyes. Had they developed into this elegant, destroyed skull? It was possible, but weren’t the ears all wrong? Hadn’t Hartmann’s ears stuck out from his head? This man’s lay flat.

  When a nurse brought Hartmann some soup, Frank watched the scarf come off and the mouth attempt to eat. He sat down silently beside the patient, regarding the lipless hole flexing at the pressure of the spoon. Hiss, suck. The muscles had knit together to make a flap that worked like a second, outer tongue. Its motion made the thinnest skin bleed along the cheekbone. Hiss, suck. A dry noise, a wet noise, machine-like, inhuman. Hartmann’s neighbors glanced at him and then away.

  Frank leaned forward and dabbed at Hartmann’s blood with some gauze. He felt the gray-blue eyes fall on him, then back to the soup. Hartmann took three more spoonfuls. Hiss, suck. Then he offered Frank the bowl.

  “You should eat it all,” Frank said before he remembered the patient was deaf. He took the bowl and gestured at Hartmann to finish, but the flap sucked inward against the teeth and the man pulled his scarf back over his face.

  Frank set the soup on the window ledge, found a pen and paper. You need more nourishment in order to heal.

  The eyes read it. The shoulders shrugged slightly, as if to say, What else is new?

  Are you in pain? How intense?

  The response came quickly: How intense is drowning?

  Do you want morphine? Frank wrote, grateful he did not have to utter the word aloud, in earshot of other patients. Not everyone was offered relief.

  Not yet, wrote Hartmann.

  You don’t have to suffer.

  Hartmann read the sentence and leaned back, looping his hands over his knees. He seemed to be studying some spot in the air above the other patients’ beds. He shook his head slightly, as if amused by the statement, as if he now owned pain the way he’d once owned knowledge.

  Frank took a breath and scrawled. How is your mother? Would you like me to write to her?

  There was a hesitation, and then the hand took the pen. I really don’t remember you.

  Hartmann’s blue eyes were hard and cold, but the corners glistened. Frank held the message for a moment. The scarf rippled with the patient’s breath. Frank wondered if Hartmann’s nerves still sent pure signals up his skull about the pain of his stretched lips. Or was their communication as broken and fragmented as the flesh? Could the neural paths be restored by surgery; could the wounded man feel whole again? He’d pondered this question with every patient, but less so each time.

  Alliner had told him, It feels like a sharp mask is inside my skin. Like I got two faces. Only one is made of glass and it doesn’t move, and that night Frank had dreamed he was on stage, his own face heavy and split by a second face. He’d woken gurgling and pulling at his throat, and decided not to ask again. In a few short months, he’d learned to force his mind away from whatever he could not accomplish. Contemplation led to horror, and horror made it impossible to see the small gains of his incisions and grafts.

  But Hartmann. He couldn’t look at Hartmann without seeing memory itself. Every day at their elementary school’s end, all the boys had burst up from their desks except the star, who’d stared at his cloudy, sponged-off slate. No one had ever walked home with him but the occasional brainy girl.

  Excuse me again, Frank wrote. Mistaken identity. He picked up the soup bowl and spoon. “Let’s have some more, shall we?” he said aloud, scooping some broth.

  Hartmann gestured for the pen again and put the pad by his side as he wrote another message.

  Nothing wrong with my hands. I can feed myself.

  Writing letters home was a strain. Frank didn’t know how to explain about the glassy-eyed patients who arrived with centimeter-deep pools of lice on their sunken bellies. Or how the wards sounded at night, full of groans and foul, rattling coughs. He didn’t want to pain Liesl, so he mostly stuck to comments about the weather and responses to news of his sons. He didn’t know how to tell Liesl that he loved her, either. Some nights he just held the pendant he’d bought for her until it warmed in his palm. Other nights, he looked at her picture, trying to memorize her features. She wasn’t classically pretty like Susi. Her nose was too large, her thick red hair didn’t obey hats or combs, but the snapshot had caught the catlike arch of her brows, her winsome, radiant smile.

  Yet the night after Frank met Hartmann, he wrote to Liesl about the transfer to Berlin, and this time the letter emerged easily. It almost sounded like another man writing, someone confident with words, a father who knew he was making the best choice for his family, a good German who did not believe the war would end. He also mentioned his old classmate, changing the details to make it seem as if he and Hartmann had mutually recognized each other. He’d sworn he would operate on Hartmann somehow, before he left. I owe it to him. The two stories wound together: a surgeon describing his devotion to injured men. I owe it to them. When ink covered the whole paper, Frank folded it without reading it and dropped it in the hospital’s outbox.

  All day he tried to imagine Liesl reading it, but couldn’t. What would she think? How would she know that he still had the rucksack packed and hidden beneath his bed? That if ever she ca
lled to him, he would come? He could never say such things with the censors.

  The package from her appeared in his room the following afternoon, as if summoned. He opened it gingerly, but the box had clearly been raided long ago, its paper ripped and retaped, the tape dirty from transport. If there had been money or a map, it was gone now, stolen before the package even reached the hospital. All that was left was an innocent, golden, Christmas stollen, wrapped in butcher paper, and a brief letter.

  Frank looked out the window toward Schnell’s office, relieved and astonished at his earlier foolhardiness, the dangerous game he’d asked Liesl to play. Someone’s greed had saved them somewhere along the way. He scanned the letter.

  I had no nuts or fruit, Liesl had written. Just a few raisins and one big fig. Enjoy! Your loving wife.

  Frank turned the loaf over in his hands. He’d never heard of figs in stollen, but Liesl had her own country ways of cooking: big, salty, hearty slices of things, lots of butter, meats baked wet and soft. It had taken some getting used to, but he missed it now. It pained him to think of her receiving his letter in return, announcing his departure for Berlin. He would write her another note tonight.

  Since it was hospital tradition to share the bounty of care packages, Frank brought the loaf to the small annex where the medical staff ate its meals together. He didn’t like most of them. The other doctors were young, ambitious, and talked about the patients as if they were conquests and not people. The technicians were too quiet and deferential. He really wanted only to offer the holiday bread to his friends by the window: the anesthesiologist, Garren Linden, his comforting hulk leaned against the sill, and Anna Reiner, the only nurse who dared to infiltrate the men’s conversations. She looked tiny beside her bearded admirer. She kept smoothing her black hair behind her ear while Linden talked about Beethoven.

  “Eight nice, proper slices,” Frank announced, making small marks on the floury top with his scalpel.

  The other staff members were chattering about Ardennes. One of the younger doctors had a cousin who was part of a secret operation to go behind Allied lines. The doctor had a way of talking loudly and then softly so the whole room ended up listening to him. His hair sat on his head like a shellacked sponge. “He speaks perfect English because he spent a year in Minnesota,” the doctor said. “He’s supposed to pretend to be a lost American, and then sabotage their plans.”

  “It seems like the Amis would jump on any reason to go home,” Frau Reiner said politely.

  “Ja and they’ve already got two,” blurted Linden. “French beer and French whores.”

  Everyone laughed except the doctor, who said, “Please, not in front of the lady.”

  Frank watched Frau Reiner grin and chuck Linden on the arm. “That’s right, you oaf.”

  “My apologies, Madame,” Linden mumbled, but he looked pleased.

  “Apology accepted,” the doctor said without a trace of humor. “At any rate, we Germans talk with our throats. Americans talk with their noses.” He described how his cousin mastered the American English accents by ladling a teaspoon of water into his mouth and trying not to spill a drop as he spoke a sentence.

  “Good. Day,” said Frau Reiner in English.

  “No, no,” said the doctor. “They’d shoot at you for that. The words to greet people are ‘How Dee.’”

  “How Dee,” Frau Reiner mimicked with great seriousness, her eyebrows rising. “How Dee, sir?”

  Her voice sounded so pinched everyone laughed again. Only Bundt, the Pole who operated the hospital incinerator, shook his head and stared at the stollen. A sickly smell emanated from him. The incinerator was a poorly built brick oven out in the field behind the hospital. Its engineer had been called away for duty elsewhere before he’d finished it. The incinerator leaked smoke and took too much fuel, but Bundt stuffed it daily with infected linens, trash, amputated limbs, and sometimes the unidentified dead. Then he dumped the ash into a nearby cistern, an open, concrete-lined pit that had been the barracks’ latrine before indoor plumbing. The cistern’s frozen sluice would smell unbearable in the summer, but no one expected the hospital to last that long.

  Frank began to cut.

  “The surgeon begins his delicate work,” said Frau Reiner.

  “Who wants an end piece?” Frank said. To his surprise, it felt pleasant to be slicing bread in the cold, barely heated room, surrounded by his countrymen. Christmas had hardly happened at the hospital and Frank missed the year-end traditions. A spicy fragrance rose from the sweet loaf. His mouth watered.

  “I’ll take the end,” growled Linden.

  He handed the crust to Linden and kept cutting. Crumbs fell onto the wooden table, on the graffiti carved by the soldiers who had once trained here. The golden bits dribbled across a deeply gouged swastika, a scrap of lyrics from the “Horst Wessel Song,” Der Tag für Freiheit und für Brot bumsen bricht an! The day for freedom and bread fucking is coming!

  A crumb of the stollen made its way to Frank’s mouth and he paused for a moment, letting its sweetness spread over his tongue. It was then that he looked down and saw what Bundt was looking at.

  It could have been a fig, but the color and texture were wrong. It was black and shiny and it protruded from the open bread ever so slightly in the bottom right corner. Liesl had baked a film canister into the stollen. No doubt it held the money and map. The sight of the smooth, dark case made his ribs tighten. There it was, a little black egg, ready to hatch: the promise he’d made to her to run. As soon as the time was right.

  Linden was biting into his slice, his jaw working. “Excellent,” he pronounced with a full mouth. A crumb fell on Frau Reiner’s sleeve. She stared at it a moment before brushing it away.

  “I’ll take a middle piece,” said Bundt. He had not moved a muscle, but it felt to Frank as if the Pole had taken three steps closer, was looming right over the table. His eyes were the color of a wet pelt.

  Frank frowned at the stollen and sliced hard at the end, making the bread vault off the table and into his lap, then put on a show of trying to catch it, and let it tumble to the floor. It hit the dirty boards with a thud. His companions cried out.

  “No matter,” Frank called and dove down, quickly breaking off the hunk with the film canister and stuffing it into his sock. The floor smelled like mud. Bundt’s tiny feet did not move, and Frank noticed how his shoes were nothing more than strips of leather sewn to socks and bits of blackened board. He had to look close to see their counterfeit nature, to guess how cold it must be to walk outside every day and shovel trash into an oven, to perform this thankless task and know there was no reward but not being sent to a prison camp.

  Frank rose with the bread held high. Lint and dust smeared the white flour. He whacked it off. “Good as new,” he said, slicing furiously. He felt the others exchanging glances; they had all been in surgery with him, had seen the quick precision of his movements. He heard their thoughts, Is this one cracking up, too?

  “Clean as new,” Frank said again, handing around the pieces. The doctors and technicians took them reluctantly, examining the bread for dirt. Only Bundt ate his without even looking at it. His brown eyes bored into Frank’s as he chewed.

  “You haven’t even tasted yours—are you trying to poison us?” said Frau Reiner, smiling.

  The film canister dug into Frank’s shin. He used his other boot to try to shove it deeper into the sock as he took a bite of the bread. He chewed the dry sweet slice, then swallowed. “I’m trying to make it last,” he said.

  One afternoon, Frank’s rounds ended with a gastrointestinal mystery case in the smaller ward where they housed the patients with infectious diseases. He didn’t like visiting this ward because his own cases were so vulnerable to contagion, but another doctor wanted him to examine the open sores on the patient’s face. The patient had worked as a guard at the criminal camp on the west side of Weimar. The doctors there had given up on him.

  Frank wound his way through the beds. The patient wa
s easy to find. He did not look like the others. He did not look like a soldier at all: His cheeks were too pale and soft, and he did not shift his legs restlessly like the men who had foot trouble from marching. He hunched away from them, his blanket drawn high. Around his mouth, ulcers spread away like a trail of thick red ants.

  Frank sat down on a stool beside the bed, pressing a knuckle into his tired back. He’d already read the notes, but he introduced himself and asked the man the same questions again. The soldier insisted he hadn’t swallowed anything strange, and he ate little more than bread and soup, but he couldn’t keep anything in, and what came out was bloody. His malaise increased daily. “I don’t need surgery,” the man said, fluttering his fingertips over the sores. “If that’s what you’re here for.”

  “No, you don’t,” said Frank. He pressed the man’s belly. It felt firm and springy. The man’s heartbeat was normal. His breath was even, his green eyes clear.

  “No pain?” said Frank.

  The man stared at him as if he didn’t understand the question.

  “Are you feeling any pain? In your stomach, or . . . ?”

  “Some,” the soldier said. “When I go.”

  “Have you ever bled like this before?”

  The soldier shook his shaved head.

  “How about the sores?”

  Another shake.

  Gastrointestinal hemorrhaging was not uncommon among the infantry, but its causes were hard to pinpoint. Since it was the soldier’s first experience with the condition, Frank suspected a parasite, but he couldn’t figure how the bug had not infected the rest of the POW camp. Pathology wasn’t his specialty, but he decided to ask anyway: “Are the prisoners sick?”

  The soldier shrugged. “If doctors get to them,” he added with a harsh little laugh.

  “What do you mean?”

  The soldier mumbled that he’d heard that the doctors at the camp were injecting live subjects with infected typhus blood. To perfect a vaccine.