Motherland

by Maria Hummel

  Frank’s tongue felt heavy as he asked the soldier to speak up. His own hospital’s typhus patients were kept in a private, darkened room, a row of mumbling bodies splitting with fevers and bloody rashes. A third of them would die.

  Just then a black uniform drifted by. One of Schnell’s underlings. The patient turned his head to the side and pursed his lips. Frank waited. The patient blinked, his lashes thick as a child’s.

  “Anything else you want to tell me?” Frank said.

  “I’m weak,” said the man. “I can’t walk thirty meters.”

  Frank reiterated the other doctor’s prescription: Atebrin, rest, and broth. “If you’re still passing blood in a week, they’ll reevaluate.”

  As he left the soldier’s bedside, a strange sensation crept over Frank. It was a wet dirty feeling, not an itch exactly, and not a chill. Frank had felt it several times since arriving in Weimar, and at first he suspected lice, but he was careful with his clothes and no amount of hygiene made it go away. It crawled down his shoulders and up to his temples, and down to his gut and up to his brow, and in the cracks of skin around his knees and groin. Sitting down, lying down did nothing to help it. It coated his whole exhausted torso, shifting its clammy grip.

  He didn’t know anything about the prison camp, except that its prisoners mostly worked in local munitions factories. A different set of doctors staffed KZs. Until October, until he’d left Hannesburg, such places seemed very far away. The problem of the enemy’s captured soldiers an abstraction. The problem of dangerous native foreigners, Jews, Gypsies, also an abstraction. Frank didn’t know any “foreigners” except the two Jews who had been his medical school professors. He doubted they were communists, but one had left the country; the other moved to the ghetto with his family and had subsequently fallen out of contact.

  In Hannesburg, Frank had assuaged his regret over doing nothing to resist the crackdown on non-Germans by reminding himself that he didn’t “fit in,” as Susi had wanted. He had never voted for the Nazi Party. He’d hung no pictures of Hitler. He spent minimal time at the spa, hurrying home to his wife and sons. He kept his father’s book collection intact, knowing dozens of banned volumes were scattered throughout it, and neglected to inform Susi of a conversation with his father, a month before his death, hinting that the elder Herr Kappus had given money to help an old colleague’s family after the synagogue had burned. They’d managed to get visas out of Germany. I’m an old man. I have nothing to lose, his father had said, waving away Frank’s offer to assist him. But his face had looked gaunt, as if something had frightened him. Weeks later, he was dead of a stroke.

  Frank took a breath, but the disgusting sensation only deepened. An orderly pushed a giant tub past him on a cart. Frank put his hand on his shoulder.

  “Give me that,” he said.

  “But Herr Doktor,” protested the orderly. Frank brushed past him and began emptying bedpans, pouring the sluice of piss and excrement into the tub on top of the soiled bandages. His skin shuddered inside his clothes. He gripped the cart handle harder, shoved it out the door.

  A soft gust of paraffin followed him, and then cold air smacked him in the face. The edges of his eyelids tightened. Sweat on the back of his neck froze into tiny icicles. He blinked, pushing toward the incinerator, the cistern beyond. A squat brick oven and a concrete hole—they were the only structures in the flat field before the pine woods. They inhabited the desolate space like a pair of unlikely friends. Smoke rose from the incinerator. It took in flesh and bandages and gave out cinders and ash. The cistern received, a rapidly filling pit behind a low lip of gray wall.

  The cart lodged in the snow. Frank shoved. The liquid sloshed again, a drop slapping Frank under the eye and freezing there. He wiped it away with a curse.

  Bundt stepped out from the other side of the oven and watched him, unmoving. His stolid form balanced between the ruts, his hand trailing a cart behind him. Frank’s eyes fell to Bundt’s dainty feet, tiny parcels wrapped in wool and strapped to wood.

  Ani’s shoes would fit Bundt.

  Frank wiped his brow and pushed again at the cart.

  There was a crunching sound as the Pole began to walk toward Frank, a smirk creeping across his flat, moon face. “Pull,” he said.

  “Pull what?” said Frank.

  “Pull,” repeated Bundt, advancing until the stench of his coat and hair clogged Frank’s nose. His forehead and cheeks wore tiny freckles of ash. “Can’t push in snow,” he said softly. “Pull.”

  “Look, I have something—” Frank started to say about the shoes, but Bundt reached past him and yanked the cart up, freeing its wheels.

  “See?” he said.

  Frank nodded, breathing through his teeth. He and Bundt were so close now he could count the individual hairs in Bundt’s eyebrows.

  “If you run,” Bundt gestured at the soldiers patrolling the hospital yard to stop deserters, the snow-punched fields beyond. “How far you must go?”

  The warmth in his voice caught Frank by surprise. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  Bundt hung his head, smiling blandly.

  Frank wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. Shoes, he thought, but he couldn’t say it.

  Bundt continued to smile. “You are just waiting for the real time.”

  “The what?”

  “The real time,” Bundt repeated. “For to see your family again, right? You have sons? I have sons.”

  Blood pounded in Frank’s ears. He grabbed the tub of piss.

  “Threaten me, and I’ll report you,” he heard himself say. Then he staggered away from Bundt and hauled it to the edge of the concrete pit, pouring the contents onto the yellowish-red crust below. Six meters square and almost three meters deep, the walls of the cistern were dark with stains, but it never seemed to fill. A meter down jutted a ledge where the last war’s soldiers must have rested their feet. The last war. His father’s war, lost, lost badly, plunging Germany into a shame so deep Frank remembered the odor of it, like rotten potatoes, permeating his childhood.

  He threw the tub down and filled it with an ashy, white armload, then dumped the contents in the cistern. Something flickered across the broken crust. A gray animal, furtive and delicate. He watched until it vanished. When he looked up again, Bundt was already halfway toward the ward, towing his bloodstained cart behind him.

  Just before Christmas the year before, Susi had announced she was pregnant again. They were sitting beside their tree, beside the creamy candles that had not yet been lit, after the two boys had gone to bed.

  “You need another son,” she’d said, smiling. “It’s the right time.”

  “The right time,” Frank had repeated, shaking his head.

  “It is,” she’d assured him. In the dim light, her eyes looked lustrous. He’d known her all his life. In kindergarten she and Frank had built a house together with blocks, and in the Leisestunde, when the children were supposed to be absolutely silent and listen to the birds outside, he’d made faces to get her to laugh. She was the girl he’d followed home one day, without understanding why, and had hung on her gate until she came out to speak with him.

  But she was different now, too, a mother, a commander of boys. And their precious domestic life was a small fire in a world of shadows.

  Unable to put words to the mix of pleasure and dread he’d felt, Frank had kissed her. Their lips locked and pulled apart with habitual efficiency. He wished he’d kissed her harder.

  “I’m happy,” said Susi.

  Frank reached out and righted a candle that had tipped. He and Susi had both been so careful since Ani’s birth, when she’d lost so much blood she’d fainted. He’d almost stopped making love to her altogether, although sometimes in his sleep he would wake with them already entwined, his body tense with lust.

  The pregnancy had indeed made Susi happy, and the boys, too. It hadn’t occurred to Frank until he saw Hans and Ani that spring cuddled around their mother’s growi
ng belly that they had all wanted something to look forward to, and the boys and their mother were already pulling together for when he’d be called away. Part of him wanted to be called. The fall of Stalingrad, the grim reports from France made it certain. All the fathers were gone or going, and it was time to join them. To do his duty instead of rotting in a safe corner of the Fatherland.

  And yet still he drove to his office in the spa’s grove of yellow buildings, and checked the throat of a man who choked on a fish bone, and the prostate of an aging diplomat, and drove home. Occasionally, sitting alone with his charts and instruments, Frank imagined himself in uniform, boarding a train, as his father had decades before. He pictured Susi’s round eyes filled with tears as he said good-bye. The stoic, shadowed faces of his sons. The vision made his palms sweat, but he returned to it often, wondering, until the day his youngest son was born.

  He had not been in the room when Susi had died. They’d cleaned it up before they’d called him. They’d swabbed the blood from her body and his living son’s, and they’d covered her and wrapped the boy. The room smelled like carbolic acid when Frank was finally invited in. The sharpness stung. Nothing moved in the whole scene—not the nurses, not the machines, not the still body of his wife. Nothing moved, except his son, blinking with his ancient eyes.

  He gazed without feeling on the stillness and the child, and backed out of the room. The obstetrician followed on his heels explaining about the hemorrhage, Susi’s dropping heart rate, everything happening so fast. Frank had the impression he was being told this a second time, that he had already been informed of his wife’s death on the way to the room, but he hadn’t listened. Outside, in the courtyard he smoked and stared at the ground until the obstetrician left him. Then he was alone, but he didn’t feel alone, because the wind was blowing, and his skin felt raw as a sunburn.

  Within an hour, the other Frauen came, Frau Hefter leading the pack. He spoke finally and they heard his babble. They saw his dry hard gaze. They shushed and tutted, and organized the funeral and burial. They fed Susi’s family, her parents and brothers, who came to mourn from their new home in the Ruhr. They bought cans of formula and kept the infant’s small needy body away from Frank for days. He tried to play with his other sons. He sat on the floor with them but he couldn’t follow their simple games, and after a while, they circumnavigated him like a piece of furniture. He did his best to thank his friends and neighbors at the funeral, but his words sounded like nonsense. He sat in his father’s study, holding the baby, staring at the books, until Marta told him to go back to work.

  Only when he was treating patients again did he feel anything other than panic, and most often it was a shuddering sense of compassion for the physical pains they experienced. Once, after Frau Wilhelm left the examining room, coughing with her cancerous lungs, he’d locked himself in the custodian’s closet and sobbed for a quarter of an hour, without tears. He could never tell when the grief would overtake him. It even emerged with a case of lice in a spa waiter’s head. Just seeing the man’s pink scalp crawling with bodies—life feeding on life—made Frank reel back and excuse himself, gagging.

  By the time the draft notice finally came, he was thinking about quitting clinical practice for good and applying for an administrative job. It wasn’t as if he had many real patients anyway. He could crawl up inside a numbing heap of paperwork for the rest of the war, maybe even the rest of thirty years, and after that it wouldn’t hurt anymore.

  By the light of a lamp, he’d read his draft letter over and again—reconstructive surgery unit, Weimar—while pushing Jürgen’s cradle with his foot. Army hospital. Two weeks’ training. Surgery unit. Three grieving boys. And everything he’d given up for Susi—his career, his freedom—handed to him again. The baby gazed up at him. Jürgen had not yet learned to smile, but his eyes were fathomless. My son, thought Frank, flooded with remorse and love. Back and forth he pushed, letting the curved wood swing.

  At night, Frank buried his anxiety about going to Berlin by worrying instead over how to fix Hartmann’s face in just one operation. He paged through his books on reconstructive surgery, frowning at how little the medicine had advanced since the last war. There were his notes, written in his big, exuberant twenty-year-old hand. How new it had all seemed when he’d been a student! He remembered his reverence for the pedicle: strips of skin cut from arms, necks, and abdomens, and fashioned into living tubes to nourish destroyed faces. The pedicles slithered over the neck, hugging a missing nose, a ravaged cheek. For weeks, one could bring healing blood and tissue to the open flesh, but it wasn’t pretty. The men looked as if they were being devoured by snakes made of their own skin.

  The use of the pedicle required multiple procedures. Distant flaps had to be moved up the body. A surgeon would connect a strip from the abdomen to an arm. After a few weeks, when the bridge of skin was secure, the surgeon disconnected the strip from the abdomen and reattached it to the head. The belly fed the arm, and then the arm fed the face.

  The pedicle was a more effective procedure than a skin graft, because it almost always ensured a healing flow of blood and nutrients. Yet it had slowly fallen out of favor. The pedicle took too long. It looked ghastly. There was a risk of infection in each transfer. The metaphor of the pedicle was unnerving, too: A man had to be attached to himself in order to heal, and the attachment was so fragile and tender it could be ruptured with the tiniest of movements. The patients complained of its sensation on the face; the extra pudge of skin made them feel as if they were being muffled. On the arm, they felt shackled.

  Hartmann might not need a pedicle, but he had a pedicle problem. He would need to be cut, and heal, and be cut again. After the first cut, he would look worse. He would feel worse, too. The stitches would be itchy and painful. They would make the flesh bubble and crimp. They might even rip out. A second operation wouldn’t be possible in four or five weeks. If Frank left his work undone, there was no guarantee that someone would continue it.

  He ought to talk to Hartmann, to see if he could pull any strings to get himself transferred to Berlin. He rose and passed the door to the infectious disease ward. The typhus rumor gnawed at him. Linden had shrugged at it. Why poison your free labor? Frau Reiner agreed. How would they contain the disease? But the crawling sensation began again. Frank tried to shake it off by coughing and rubbing the hair on his arms.

  Hartmann was sitting upright, writing in a small notebook. His hair looked clean, his clothes crisp. The nurses must be taking good care of him. Frank had seen to that, telling them that they were caring for a poet, who might celebrate them in verse one day.

  As Frank approached, Hartmann set down his pen and slowly closed the notebook. His posture caught Frank’s eye—that slight bowing of the shoulders, the hips thrust forward—he was a man caving into himself. The vision contrasted sharply to the boy with the stick up his spine at the head of the classroom. Frank felt a sting at the sides of his mouth, a bitter grimace. You and me, he thought. We finally understand suffering.

  Yet when he sat down to write to Hartmann about the transfer, he found he couldn’t do it. The pencil sat heavy in his hand. When it moved, it shaped different letters.

  Do you remember Susi Waller?

  Hartmann’s eyes blinked. Yes. I do.

  I married her.

  A hesitation, and then, She was a lovely girl.

  We had three sons. She passed this year, with the birth of my youngest.

  Hartmann scratched an immediate reply: I’m sorry.

  Did you ever marry?

  No. Then a pause. Moved around too much.

  I never figured you for the army.

  You didn’t know me.

  Do you still write poems?

  Hartmann shrugged.

  My father admired your poems.

  One of the few.

  Modest!

  Truly. Hartmann shifted on the bed. His legs extended in front of him, the trousers bagging around his calves and thighs. I wish I remembered
him.

  Frank’s throat closed, and he sat there stiffly, gripping the pen. He remembered his father. He remembered mostly that he disappointed him, by being rash and loud, a carouser, an uneven student. By loving Karl May more than Thomas Mann. By pursuing Susi, whose “iron will,” his father said dismissively, made up “for what she lacked in imagination.” His father hadn’t lived long enough to see Frank complete medical school, to meet his sons. He imagined they would be closer now.

  You say he was a teacher? wrote Hartmann.

  Latin.

  Hartmann looked up, out the window near his bed where frost climbed in intricate webs. Then he bent to the paper. Can I trust you?

  Of course. I’m your doctor.

  Need more assurance than that.

  Frank wondered what game Hartmann was playing now. He wished they could just talk instead of write.

  My father admired you, he wrote finally. I wouldn’t betray his memory.

  Hartmann took the paper and stared at it for a long time. Frank thought he had fallen asleep. But then the pencil began to move.

  There are—Hartmann’s hand paused—gaps. Things I can’t recall. Voices I hear. Buzzing and ringing. I didn’t want to admit this. Because I want the surgery. I don’t want to be sent somewhere else. “Unwertes Leben.”

  One by one, Hartmann’s confessions rolled into hard pebbles, knocking inside Frank’s skull. Hearing voices. Buzzing and ringing. Unwertes Leben, the term for the mentally unstable and infirm. The government obliged doctors to register patients with mental illness or serious brain damage and then transfer them to state institutions. Frank had never been to one such institution, but he heard they were purposely underfunded. Unwertes Leben. Life unworthy of life. Frank watched Hartmann cross out each word he’d just written, making a black tangle of the page. He wished he still believed that the German law would protect Hartmann, a German soldier, the way it had protected the miller in the case against the king. He took the pad.