Motherland

by Maria Hummel

  His father wouldn’t have let it go. Vati didn’t like the boys touching Grossvater’s books. He treated them like statues, rare and precious, insisting on dusting them himself. “Get out of there. Let them be,” he said whenever he saw Hans in the room.

  “But I’m supposed to read,” Hans objected once. “Or I won’t grow up.”

  “You don’t need books to grow up,” his father said. “Follow your heart.”

  Hans didn’t understand what to make of that advice. How could he know if his heart was right? For example, he wanted to love his real mother forever, but her face was fading in his mind. The other day he had spent a good hour trying to remember if she had ears like his, with the lobe connected, or like Ani’s, with the lobe detached. Also, was it wrong that his ribs no longer ached every time he thought of her? Was it bad to decide his stepmother was kind, even though she did everything the wrong way? He wished she wouldn’t let Ani be such a baby. He wished she would grow her hair long and braid it. He wished she would give him Vati’s letters, but she folded them all up and hid them somewhere.

  He drew the nose of a plane, a sharp thin tail. He added wings, four engines, and a cockpit window. A B-17. It should be silver-blue. It should float like a ship. His hand paused. Then he hastily sketched in a face, X’s for eyes, a body slumped against the glass. This plane had a dead pilot. It was falling from the sky.

  He was drawing in a book of poetry and the next poem was called “The Plum Tree.” Normally he didn’t read the words in his grandfather’s books, but the first line ended with the word “Mirabellen.” After his mother’s death, the house had filled with the yellow plums. Mirabellen were in season, so everyone brought some. The scabby orbs piled high in the kitchen and attracted flies. Hans had tried to eat his way through them. First they were delicious, and then they tasted rancid. The words in the poem were like the plums, too many, heaped and dense, and he shoved his way through them, fumbling to understand what the poet was saying about the branch and the fruit. Yet when he reached the last line, something loosened inside his skull and broke free. Das Ende finde ich.

  The hairs on the back of his neck began to rise the way they did when he was afraid in the dark cellar.

  He heard a smacking noise and saw his brother standing in the doorway, chewing. Hans shut the book. “What are you eating?”

  “Mutti wants you to come down and meet Fräulein Müller,” Ani said.

  The casual use of “Mutti” rankled Hans. “I’m busy,” he said.

  Ani took a black licorice from his pocket and popped it in his mouth.

  “Where did you get that?” Hans said.

  “Fräulein Müller.”

  Hans frowned at the book’s cover. The title read Im Osten. In the East.

  “She’s got chocolate, too.”

  Hans sighed and climbed down from his father’s chair, suddenly aware of how hungry he was, how his stomach had retreated from the waistline of his trousers. He licked his hand and smoothed his hair back. He caught his reflection in the glass cabinets and took a deep breath, stretching out his chest.

  “Why do you look at yourself so much?” said Ani.

  Hans ignored him, speeding up his pace and tripping on a fringe of carpet, tumbling to his knees and hands. His brother stood over him, still chewing, as if he had expected the fall. Hans felt a flare of anger at the attentive look on Ani’s face. Ani was always scrutinizing people as if they were books to be read. He asked so many questions at school that both the teachers and the other students disliked him, and Hans had to fight more than once to keep older boys from taunting his brother. His mother used to scold Hans for it, but his stepmother looked as though she wanted to cry every time she saw his bruises.

  Hans brushed off his stinging hands and was about to stand when his eye caught on the thing that had tripped him. Not the carpet, but a loose wedge of wood sticking up. A loose plank. It might have treasure beneath it: gold coins or jewelry they could trade for more food and firewood. Or it might be something secret that Ani shouldn’t see, like the account book that his stepmother showed him once when his brothers were asleep, a disappointing tally of the household’s large expenses and small income.

  Suddenly he heard her, calling their names. Hans clambered to his feet and clapped his brother on the shoulder.

  “I was watching you, silly,” he said. “If you can see me in the reflection, then I can see you, too.”

  Within two short hours, Hans discovered many horrible things about Fräulein Müller: She talked too much, she made his stepmother forget important things like the fact that he did not like mustard anywhere near his potatoes, and she smoked and waved her hand in the air after every puff, shooing the stinking clouds to other people’s heads. The way she dressed also filled him with misgivings; her skin peeked out in places he was used to seeing cloth and he wished it were not so visible.

  During their midday meal she complained to Hans about his habit of scraping his fork against his teeth when he ate.

  “It makes the most hideous sound, darling,” she said, patting his arm.

  During dinner, she made his stepmother blush by complaining that stale bread gave her a toothache.

  Worst of all, Fräulein Müller was to sleep on the sofa in Hans’s grandfather’s study. His stepmother did not indicate how long the woman would stay, nor did she make any accommodation for the disruption in the boy’s daily routine.

  “We never use it,” his stepmother told Fräulein Müller. “Except Hans. He likes to read books in there sometimes. But he can find somewhere else.”

  A strange expression had come over his stepmother since her friend’s arrival. It was a lot like Ani’s just before Christmas this year. December 1944 had been the first year Ani had talked reverently about the stollen his mother baked for them, or the tree and its lighted candles. His gaze kept rolling back in his head, as if he were trying to see it again in his mind. Every time Fräulein Müller laughed, their stepmother laughed, too, and she did the same thing with her eyes.

  Hans waited until they were washing the dishes. He told his brother to come with him. With a last glance over his shoulder, he saw their stepmother cuddle baby Jürgen in her lap and hold a bottle of milk to his lips. Fräulein Müller’s hand trembled as she dunked a dish in the water.

  “Emmy says Göring waited too long to marry her, or she might have had more children,” Fräulein Müller said. “She says he’s never gotten over Carin.”

  His stepmother looked puzzled, and then that Christmas look stole over her face.

  “Go on,” Hans whispered to Ani, and the younger boy obediently began to climb the steps.

  “I don’t know what it’s like for you,” Fräulein Müller said. “But Emmy says if she had to do it all over, she’d never marry a widower. Always playing second fiddle to a ghost.”

  His stepmother bent to the baby, her red hair curtaining her expression. “She shouldn’t talk that way about her husband,” she said softly. Her shoulders started to shake.

  Hans swallowed. He had never seen her cry, and the sight troubled him.

  “Ach, Liebling. You miss him, don’t you,” Fräulein Müller said after a moment. She swished the sink with her hand, dredging up silverware. The forks and spoons streamed, glinting. “You’d miss him less if you had a housekeeper.”

  Hans shouldered his coat and tiptoed up the steps to the unheated second floor. He always sensed his father’s presence in the silent rooms on the second story, maybe because his stepmother had overtaken the first floor with her cooking, sewing, and baby-tending. Without Marta, the bedrooms and study didn’t get cleaned much, and the dust that layered over the books and unused medical equipment could have touched his father’s skin the last time he was here.

  He hurried into the study and told Ani to wait in the hall.

  “Why?”

  “To keep watch,” Hans said. “Give the Indian signal if you hear anyone coming.”

  He waited until his brother left before kneeli
ng. The plank was stuck hard. His grandfather’s letter opener grated at the wood, the cold metal warming in his hands.

  Always playing second fiddle to a ghost.

  His mother wasn’t a ghost. She was real. She had left them all at the hospital’s entrance, kissing the top of Hans’s head, telling him to watch after Ani. The next time he’d seen her, she’d been boxed in oak.

  Sometimes he imagined going through the hospital doors to find her still in there, waiting for the family to bring her home. Her hair would fan out over the pillow, and her covers would be pulled up high, over her stomach and chest. A nurse would be sitting with her, because his Mutti always made friends, wherever she went.

  The plank sprang loose with a squeal. Dust rose from the hole. The grit caught on his eyelids and in the back of his throat. He tried not to cough.

  Inside lay a single sheet of paper, facedown.

  Frowning, he lifted it, turned it over, and sat back on his heels in the dim light of the lamp.

  It was a charcoal outline of a man, naked, his body splayed over a couch. One leg was propped on the cushions and one dangled off; the man’s penis slumped against his lower thigh. He was not large or muscled, but narrow in the chest. His face was turned away.

  A tiny word was written in the corner: Bloss. Bare. Though there were no clothes on the man, he looked as if he was still hiding himself, as if he had just averted his eyes before the artist could see too much. Hans recognized him. It was his grandfather.

  He dropped the picture and pushed the plank back into place. A dirty taste filled his mouth. He stood quickly. He kicked the carpet back over the plank, shrugged on his coat, and walked down the stairs, passing Ani’s small, thin silhouette.

  “Nothing,” he said without looking at his brother. “Now I have to check on our supplies in the cellar.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Would I lie? Get your coat and you can come with me.”

  While his brother jogged off to the closet, Hans skirted the kitchen where the women were talking and slipped down the dark steps. His stepmother’s voice followed him, and he heard snatches of her words: “so hard to . . . they all need new clothes . . .” He kept the lamp hooded until he was halfway down and then let the smoky yellow light spring over the dirt walls. The lower he went, the more his breath began to slow. Everything in their shelter was his construction. He had made it practical and comfortable for them. He had made it a second home, their real home if the one upstairs was bombed.

  Just before he passed out of earshot, Hans heard Fräulein Müller say, “That older one, he’s in love with you.”

  An invisible hammer slammed into both of Hans’s knees. He froze, listening for his stepmother’s answer, but Jürgen made a fussy cry and a chair scraped as she rose and creaked back and forth across the floor with him.

  Stumbling on clumsy legs, Hans thundered down the last steps and into the damp, carpeted room lined with shelves holding their food, gas masks, water, fuel. Just last week, he had hung some old green curtains on the wall, where windows might ordinarily go. He angled the light over the room, the curtains, breathing hard gusts of hate at Fräulein Müller and her oozing voice. If they had an air raid tonight, he would tell her there wasn’t space. There wasn’t really, not if their two neighbors ever needed to squeeze in. She could go back to Berlin and find somebody else to insult.

  “You breathe like a horse,” said a young woman’s voice.

  He spun to see a dark shape on Herr Geiss’s side of the hole.

  “What’s it to you?” Hans retorted.

  The dark shape didn’t reply.

  “What are you doing down here?” he said.

  “I was looking for a tool to help me open a suitcase,” she said. “The lock’s stuck.”

  “Herr Geiss can help you,” Hans said.

  “Herr Geiss isn’t home.” The figure shifted and poured through the hole, Berte Geiss’s mouth and cheeks suddenly snagged by the light of the lamp. Her round eyes blinked at Hans.

  “What are you doing down here?” she asked.

  “Checking on supplies.” Hans moved off with his lantern, adjusting the canned sardines on the shelf.

  “You do that a lot.”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t talk to girls at school. He didn’t know why anyone would think he liked any female at all.

  “Would some of your supplies include a pair of pliers?” said Berte.

  He shrugged.

  “A screwdriver? I’m down to my last pair of hose.” When she pleaded, her voice sounded younger. He went to the tool shelf and slid his hand around two handles.

  Footsteps thudded down from above. “What are you doing?” said Ani, his skinny legs pausing on the steps.

  Hans shoved the tools in his front pocket, suddenly aware of the metal digging into his right thigh. “I’m helping Frau Geiss with her suitcase,” he said, watching the girl disappear through the hole like a drop of ink sliding off a desk. As he followed her into the wall, the earth scraped his skull. A damp crumb kissed his neck. He paused.

  “You can come if you want,” he said, without looking behind him.

  In the second-floor hallway, the girl vanished through a threshold. He knew it was her bedroom even without stepping through the doorway because it gave off a vague flowery scent, and though it was as dark as the rest of the house it seemed warmer. It was also mysteriously and intensely cluttered. From the hallway, he could see heaps of dresses and shoes, spilled jewelry, open drawers, an empty sleeve trailing across the wooden floorboards, as if inviting another two-dimensional guest to dance. He backed up and called his brother’s name.

  “In here,” Ani said from somewhere on the same floor.

  “Hurry up,” hissed Berte.

  Hans took the tools from his pocket and held them out before him. He breathed in deep before entering the room, closing his lips around the air.

  She sat on the bed, a lamp lit beside her, her skinny legs slightly parted, the suitcase on her lap.

  “Totally kaputt,” she said. “I told him not to be cheap.”

  “Who?”

  Her eyes flashed over him. “You need a haircut. Doesn’t she ever cut your hair?”

  Still holding his breath, Hans stretched out his hand to take the suitcase, but the girl’s knuckles whitened. “I’ll hold it, silly,” she said. Her voice was cross.

  He bent down and inserted his screwdriver into the lock, aware of his heavy head angled toward her chest, aware of its rise and curve. His hands jiggled above the gap between her thighs.

  “Who’s the woman visiting your stepmother?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Hans.

  “She looks rich.”

  He hesitated. He had heard Fräulein Müller drop the name of the Reichsmarschall and his wife, but he didn’t believe a person like her could know someone like that. She was probably puffing herself up.

  “I don’t think she’s rich. She only had one suitcase.”

  The lock did not budge. Hans fumbled for the pliers, dropping the screwdriver on the ground with a clonk. “Ani, where are you?” he said testily, as if his brother was responsible for the noise.

  “In here,” said the voice again.

  He knocked at the lock with the pliers.

  “Hurry up,” Berte said again, but now her voice was curious and he felt her eyes on him.

  “I’m trying.”

  “I got married when I was sixteen,” she said. Her breath blew a small warm wind against the crown of his head.

  He drew back. “May I break it? If I break it, I can probably open it.”

  Her thin shoulders rose, making her unbuttoned collar fall open.

  He closed the pliers on the lock and twisted, ripping into the brass. His hands ached. The metal groaned but did not give. “It’s really stuck,” he said, hysteria in his voice.

  “You’re a little Kohlenklau,” she said. “I saw you snitching wood from the park.”

  Coal snatcher. Hans blinke
d. His eyeballs felt hot and dry. His lids scraped over them. He kept twisting the pliers.

  “Will you steal something for me sometime?” She leaned in, her cheek radiating heat into his. He wanted to pull away. He wanted to calmly stroll from the room and get his brother and walk down the stairs and out through the cellar hole into his own house. But instead his hands kept cranking at the metal until it shrieked and broke and her cheek was touching his. Her softness startled him. He jerked back, and then the suitcase sprang open to reveal snakes of hose, all heaped and coiled on top of one another, in the pale, variegated shades of flesh. The girl gave a cry. She pulled the suitcase away, her knees closing, her hands fluttering down to the stockings.

  Hans stared at her. He dimly remembered drawing a Lancaster that morning. He recalled listening to their little black radio for any reports from Weimar. He remembered Ani and his infernal licorice. But he couldn’t remember how to say good-bye to the girl and leave. It was completely beyond his comprehension, that simple casual courtesy, Gute Nacht.

  “I didn’t mean to break it,” he said.

  Then loud planes passed overhead and they both flinched, waiting for a siren. In the pause, Berte sank her hand deeper into her stockings and a tremor of genuine fear crossed her face. She looked as if she was going to be sick.

  The siren did not sound. The girl withdrew her hand from the suitcase. “Why are you still here?” she said in a tight voice.

  Once Hans started moving, he did not stop, not to drag Ani from the adjacent room, not to ask what he was doing, not to pause in the cellar, or wish his stepmother good night. He went straight to bed with the screwdriver and pliers still in his hand, holding them under his pillow, their hard edges grinding, clanking every time he turned over. Kohlenklau, the double k’s like a door slamming twice. Will you steal something for me sometime? For the first night since his father had left, Hans did not dream of him.