Motherland

by Maria Hummel

  There’s a hospital in Berlin, he wrote. I may be transferred there.

  Hartmann shook his head vigorously. Fix me here.

  It will take multiple procedures. Berlin would be the safest place.

  Berlin will be pulverized.

  Frank opened his palms, his sympathy ebbing again. That was Hartmann all right. That imperial manner even when he had a monster’s face.

  They sat in silence. Outside the window, a few flakes of snow drifted over the darkened field, the hunkered black shape of the incinerator.

  Hartmann started scribbling again. For now you could help me remember. Frank felt the slate eyes on his, searching. Were we really friends?

  He took the pencil. Yes.

  News of the OKW’s orders and Frank’s imminent transfer to Berlin must have spread, as the incoming ambulances brought fewer and fewer patients in need of reconstruction. Frank spent half his days doing rounds, checking on his healing soldiers, listening to their complaints. They seemed to appreciate him less the more available he was (I can’t sleep in this place. How long till you can cut my legs apart again? The itch, can’t you do anything for it?), so in the afternoons he hid in the supply room and read his books again, looking for the best way to fix Hartmann. He didn’t receive any more packages from Liesl. Instead, she’d written him a long letter about the boys, concluding with a few lines that casually congratulated him on the promotion. We’re all proud of you. The boys want to visit you in the capital, she wrote, as if it were as easy as taking a holiday. Maybe she thought it was. There was no way to know how much news was making it west. The national broadcasts were full of lies.

  As soon as I get settled there, I’ll apply for a furlough. I know it’s time I came home, he wrote back, hoping she would understand that he did not intend to get caught by the Red Army, no matter where he was stationed.

  Schnell surprised him washing up one afternoon after a routine leg graft surgery. “I heard more news about your hospital,” he said. “It’s almost ready. Seventy beds in total.” He beamed at Frank, pink and pleased.

  “Room enough for my current patients?” said Frank.

  Schnell nodded distantly. He was watching Frank’s hands rubbing themselves together in the cold stream. “The beds may be already spoken for.”

  “Lieutenant Hartmann is an old classmate of mine,” Frank said.

  “Is he?” Schnell sounded curious.

  “Could you tell Braun I’d appreciate the favor?” said Frank.

  “Lieutenant Hartmann,” Schnell said over the falling water. “One of his men had accused him of writing treasonous messages before the explosion.”

  Frank kept scrubbing, trying to hide his surprise. “He’s a poet,” he said. “He writes a lot of gobbledygook. Maybe the fellow misinterpreted.”

  “There will be an investigation,” said Schnell. He coughed. “Meanwhile I was quite sorry to hear about your patient from Buchenwald.”

  Frank frowned at the name. “Where?”

  “The soldier from the prison camp,” said Schnell. “His infection killed him.”

  The man had been ill, but not fatally so.

  “What infection?” Frank said. He turned off the faucet and faced the officer.

  Schnell’s eyes shifted, as if somehow he were looking through Frank instead of at him. “I know your time is valuable,” he said. “I won’t let our staff bother you with any other nonsurgical cases.”

  Although his voice was mild and unthreatening, it didn’t matter how he spoke.

  Frank’s gaze fell to his hands. What infection? he wanted to ask again, but the words did not come. He watched the water drip off his fingers. Wet and cold, his hands seemed like separate creatures, small animals that moved and grasped and sewed flesh without him. They had no voice but the voice of repair. They would go to Berlin to do their work.

  “Thank you,” he muttered finally. He kept his head bowed until he felt the other man turn away.

  He went to Hartmann that evening. He wrote down every memory he had of the other boy, from the miller and the king story to his father’s tales of Hartmann’s prowess in school. Then he told his own.

  You know the Schloss in the center of town, he wrote. One year, we were allowed to go inside, and a bunch of us boys sneaked away and tried to find the wine cellar.

  Tell me the colors.

  Frank looked up, puzzled.

  Hartmann’s hand moved again. Of what you saw.

  He thought a minute, and then the pencil began to shape letters.

  The walls were white. When we found the stairs down, yellow. Under the earth, gray-black. I had trouble breathing down there. Thick dust and so much glass.

  His hand tired, even more than it did in surgery, but he shook it and kept writing. He was starting to like the silence of sitting with the other man and taking a long time to say a few words. And strangely, he was starting to like the words, too, how they hurt a little when he thought of them, how they were like tiny pins fixing his memory in place.

  We got lost. You helped us find the way out. You read the labels and you knew the wines were organized by year.

  He finished with a flourish and tap of the pencil, and showed it to Hartmann. The man was silent, but water filled the corners of his eyes again.

  You got tight with a girl named Astrid. She stayed with her aunt and uncle for a while. He did not write that the other girls laughed secretly at Astrid for liking Hartmann, the undesirable one.

  I don’t remember her.

  She was pretty and plump, wrote Frank.

  Sounds like you’re talking about poultry.

  Frank shrugged and grinned. He heard a sucking sound under the scarf and wondered if Hartmann was laughing. He didn’t know what to say about Schnell’s warning. Hartmann’s failed transfer to Berlin. The skin under the scarf was healing, the scabs thickening and loosening. Soon they would fall off and leave purple-pink scars. The distorted mouth would be able to flex and open, and eventually it might even learn to speak.

  You were accused of treason. Do you remember?

  Something flinched behind the scarf. Yes. All that writing burned up.

  There’s supposed to be an investigation.

  Hartmann’s eyelids drooped.

  I’m tired, he wrote.

  But Frank’s hand kept moving. Do you remember when the fair came to town? He went on, doing the best he could to conjure his memory of the clown and the bearded lady and the tattooed man.

  That I remember, wrote Hartmann. And the Gypsy who ran a booth, he stole the candlesticks from the church.

  Frank didn’t recall this, but he nodded.

  He ran away but he left his dog, some little mutt, wrote Hartmann. Some of the kids wanted to drown it. They dragged it to the Kurpark. Frank watched Hartmann’s hand stop and go completely still. Hartmann made a sucking noise, as if impatient at his hand’s immobility, but he did not write any more. His fingers curled into a fist. Fine blond hair covered his whole wrist, fanning toward his knuckles.

  The silence was different than silence in speech. In speech, when a man stopped talking he used his eyes or his mouth to say what he didn’t want to say aloud, but the hand held no expression. The sentence trailed off like footsteps in a blizzard.

  Frank wished he felt sorry for Hartmann, but the poet’s wordlessness suddenly left him cold. He couldn’t feel anything for the little mutt, although he could easily imagine its death, the children’s hands pushing the muzzle under the surface of the pond, paws kicking and splashing. A froth of breath. The furry body gone still. He could see it perfectly, although the memory was not his own, and he felt only the ice of recognition.

  He patted Hartmann on the shoulder and rose and left the ward.

  Back in his room, he did not bother to turn on a lamp. Keeping his hat and coat on, he eased the rucksack from under his bed and took out Ani’s shoes. He carried them in the crook of his arm, out the door to the empty black and silver yard. His feet found the tramped path to the in
cinerator. His breath hung in ghosts as he slipped and stomped on the frozen crust, his ears already stinging. He set the shoes on the snow beside the dark, squat oven. They looked too small and supple, too alive, to belong there. He swallowed hard. After a moment, he prodded them into the shadows with his foot. Then he turned away before he could grab them back. He began whistling a tune as he walked inside, his boots cracking the ice. He stopped when he realized the song was “Rosemarie.”

  Hannesburg

  January 1945

  Liesl wanted to like Berte Geiss. She needed a friend, her own friend, especially after receiving Frank’s letter about his transfer to Berlin. It would just be a wartime post, a real opportunity, he assured her, the underline swift and light.

  Frank wasn’t coming home. He wasn’t preparing to slip away from the surrender that they both knew was imminent. He was stepping deeper into the hornet’s nest and pretending he didn’t hear the buzzing all around him.

  Although she wrote back a simple note of congratulations, Liesl kept the letter in her apron pocket, squeezing it from time to time so that it lost its creases and crumpled. Whenever she took it out, his words looked more and more garbled. The writings of a madman. She and Frank had never fought before, but now she was angry with him. It made her wish that she liked the taste of cigarettes, so she could puff out gusts of smoke.

  She didn’t want Frank to think that she didn’t believe in him, or worse, that she couldn’t continue to care for the children on her own, so she held her tongue. But Berlin was a trap. It didn’t hold real opportunity at all, unless you counted being captured and starved by the Red Army.

  Liesl was sure the poor, fleeing Berte Geiss would agree. She fantasized often about Berte’s impending arrival, which had been mysteriously delayed twice. Her mind filled with hazy dreams of the two of them cooking and sewing together, laughing over the boys’ antics, of linking their arms as they marched out into the cold gaze of the neighborhood. She had anticipated a homely young woman with a sad, sincere smile, someone she felt she could trust. Her fantasy Berte wore a plain bob and tucked her brown hair back behind her ear. Berte would profess an affinity for Chopin and a private longing to travel to Greece one day and see the Acropolis. She wouldn’t have any friends here, either.

  When the real Berte finally arrived, Liesl was standing in the window, trying to dress Jürgen, a daily task that required vigilance and muscle, as the boy hated clothes. “Sit still,” she told him with gritted teeth. She heard a loud noise outside and automatically checked the sky, but it was a dark car pulling up in front of the Geiss house. Herr Geiss emerged first, then strode around the puffing tail pipe and opened the other door. No one appeared. He waited, his heavy face darkening.

  Jürgen squirmed free of her hands and rolled on his belly, cutting off access to his shirt buttons. “Come here, you,” she said as he giggled.

  Below, Herr Geiss extended an arm and yanked. A female form tumbled out, her blond hair spilling in her face. She staggered right, then left, then stood, swaying, gazing up at the enormous house. She was clutching a handkerchief in one hand. She pressed it hard to her mouth, then buckled and threw up all over the snow. Herr Geiss looped both arms around her and muscled her into the house. He did not introduce Berte to Liesl until two days later, when Liesl and the children were coming back from the post office.

  “These are your neighbors,” he said to Berte, and introduced Liesl as the “new” Frau Kappus. “I leave you women to get acquainted.” He bowed his head and hustled away.

  Berte extended a limp, cool hand. At first glance she seemed pretty, but then it became clear that something almost imperceptible was wrong with her face—her chin was too small, her eyebrows too plucked and sparse. She looked like the smudged painting of a doll.

  “Would you like to come in for some tea?” Liesl asked.

  The girl shook her head. “I’m still exhausted.”

  Beside them, Ani and Hans began to swordfight with sticks they’d picked up along the way home. Jürgen struggled up in his pram and stared over at them.

  “Their father must be handsome,” Berte commented. “For you to put up with three little boys.”

  Liesl didn’t know what to say. “They’re good boys.”

  “You’re dead,” Ani cried, stabbing his stick at his brother’s heart. “I’m not little,” he said to Berte.

  “Don’t shout, Ani,” Hans muttered with a glance at the girl.

  “You’re dead,” Ani whispered triumphantly. Hans knocked away his stick and they started fighting again.

  Liesl proposed that Berte go with her to Elizabethenstrasse the next day. “I could show you the shelters in case you get stuck shopping during a raid. And the best butcher and baker.”

  “Oh, thanks, but I like to find things on my own,” Berte said. “It makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something.” And then she turned around and walked back into the Geiss house, the boys’ sticks still whacking.

  A few days later, Liesl tried again as she and Berte crossed paths near the Kurpark. She offered to share their wash kitchen on laundry day. “I wouldn’t mind the company,” she said, smiling into Berte’s blank face. The girl’s nostrils were red from rubbing.

  “I’ve already hired a laundress,” Berte said. She pointed down a path. “Is that the way to the sulfur fountains? Do they taste really awful? Actually, don’t tell me. I’m going to try them anyway.”

  A few days later, on the way home from the market, Liesl spotted a blond-haired woman strutting down the street ahead of her. The woman’s boots were red saffian, laced halfway up her shapely calves. Her coat was Persian lamb, designed in an hourglass shape, though it was a couple of sizes too big, making it hard to see the outline of her body.

  Could it be Berte Geiss? Maybe. Berte Geiss was liable to wear something too showy and expensive for their small town, but she wouldn’t strut. Berte would scurry with her head down, as if late for an appointment. Nevertheless something about the woman was familiar.

  To her surprise the woman stopped at the Kappuses’ gate. Her head tilted back to take in the whole villa and her blond hair spilled back, revealing her high cheekbones and rosebud mouth. Liesl frowned. It couldn’t be.

  The woman turned and looked back, and Liesl felt her knees go to jelly.

  It was her. It was Uta.

  Liesl reached down and tucked Jürgen’s blanket around him, suddenly unsure how to respond. It’s Uta, she told herself. Why aren’t you glad to see her?

  Because something had to be wrong. Uta would never show up unannounced unless something was wrong.

  “Liesl! There you are!” Uta’s hand shot up into a wave. Her furs rippled around her as she hurried toward them.

  Liesl waved back. Then her eyes dropped to the gray potatoes, the chicken hanging its dead feet out of the edge of the basket under the pram. Seeing Uta’s gloves, she was suddenly aware of her broken nails, her thick knuckles, scarred from cooking and cleaning. She reached down and lifted Jürgen so the baby was between them as Uta leaned in for a kiss, smacking both cheeks.

  “What a surprise to see you,” Liesl said. “All the way from Berlin?”

  Uta nodded, her eyes fastened on the graceful upper balcony of the house. “I can’t believe you’re all alone here. You must have some good friends in the housing office.”

  Liesl gestured at the Geiss home. “Our neighbor keeps us off the list.”

  “Good neighbor,” Uta said in an appraising tone. “How old is he?”

  “Too old,” Liesl said, not smiling. “This is Jürgen.”

  As she lifted the baby toward Uta, he gurgled and scrunched up his face.

  “Goodness, you’d think he would have gotten bigger than that. It’s been months since I saw you last,” Uta said, her expression mirroring the baby’s skepticism.

  “They don’t grow that fast,” Liesl said with a forced laugh. “But he can already sit up on his own now.”

  “Marvelous,” Uta said without enthusias
m. A silence fell between them. Liesl knew Uta was taking stock of her, of the pram and the potatoes, the limp dead fowl, of the house and the absent husband, wondering if Liesl should be pitied or envied.

  And wasn’t she trying to figure out the same thing? Uta’s fur coat gave off a lush, feathery smell. Her red boots were the brightest thing on the whole street, except her lips, smudged lightly with forbidden scarlet lipstick. You could see her from a kilometer away and know the kind of woman she was. Yet up close, looking into that warm open face, Liesl felt a rush of affection for her oldest friend, whom she’d met at nine at the Badensee, teaming up to watch all their young charges—her nieces and nephews, Uta’s grubby little brothers. How much they had been through together: the endless BDM meetings where they’d giggled through the patriotic songs, Uta’s trouble with the local burgher’s son, then leaving Franconia for jobs at the spa. Uta seemed shorter and rounder, as if something in Berlin had punched her down. Her blue eyes had new cracks at the corners.

  Liesl threaded her free arm through Uta’s and pulled her toward the door. “Come meet the older boys. You’ll like them better,” she said. “They talk and take orders.”

  “Mm. Will they fetch me a hot steamy bath and some steak tartare?” Uta replied in her mellow voice.

  Liesl laughed. “More like a pile of snowballs and a dead spider they found in the cellar.”

  As they crossed through the gate they stumbled into each other, and Liesl smelled her friend’s cologne. The scent was pungent, baptismal; it drowned her nose and left an aftertaste of limes and sugar.

  Liesl sighed. “I’m glad to see you,” she said, meaning it.

  “I heard your pram squeaking behind me the whole way down the street,” Uta said softly. “You didn’t seem that glad.”

  “It isn’t like that—” Liesl said, but Uta kissed her again on the cheek.

  “I won’t stay long, all right?” she said. “I just need to make some arrangements.”

  Hans crept away from the window as the strange woman entered the house. He padded softly down the hall to his grandfather’s study. He liked to sit at the desk and draw airplanes. Sometimes he drew Messerschmitts and other planes he had seen, but more often he drew imaginary planes, equipped with special weapons: red and white flame-shooters, dragon-toothed torpedoes, and blaster bombs that could blow up whole cities. Because paper was scarce, he made his drawings in the margins of his grandfather’s books, and whenever his stepmother came by, he dropped the pencil and pretended to be reading. “What book is that?” she would ask, and if it wasn’t a title she recognized, she would smile and let it go.