Motherland

by Maria Hummel

  “Ani,” she said. “Tell the doctor what’s bothering you.”

  “My stomach hurts sometimes,” said the boy, handing back the headlamp.

  “He took a dislike to my friend’s cooking,” she said.

  “Anything else?” the doctor said to Ani.

  “No,” said Ani. Then he added in a smaller voice, “I just keep falling down, but most of the time it’s when I’m sleeping.”

  “You keep falling down,” the doctor repeated, his voice rising slightly.

  The boy was sitting in a square of light from the window. It made his hair shine, but his skin looked bruised and pale. “I have bad dreams all the time,” said Ani. “I fall on people who are falling on other people in a big hole, and no one can get out because the soldiers have guns and the houses are burning behind us.”

  “You didn’t tell me that,” said Liesl. Was he dreaming about the refugees?

  He raised his face to her, his brow pinched. “Hans says I’m a baby if I cry about bad dreams.”

  Her collar felt tight on her throat. “Ach, Ani, don’t listen to your brother. You come to me if you’re scared.”

  Something went dark in Ani’s eyes.

  “And sometimes when you’re awake, you also fall?” persisted Dr. Becker.

  The boy shrugged.

  “What else is wrong, Anselm?” said the doctor.

  The boy shrugged again, his gaze on his knees. He wouldn’t say anything more, so Liesl had to supply the answers to Dr. Becker’s questions about food and bowel movements and how many hours Ani slept, but the boy’s bowed head made it seem as if she had silenced him. That there was another truth lurking, waiting to be found. She ground her fingernails into her palms while the doctor’s stethoscope roved Ani’s chest and back, as he checked the boy’s eyes and ears. One part of her was certain the man would find nothing, and another expected the worst: some terrible cancer or blood problem that would devastate them all.

  The room was bare except for the boys’ beds, the deceased Frau Geiss’s paintings of the sailing boys on the wall. The floor looked scratched and dull, and she wondered when she’d find the time to polish it smooth. Tomorrow it would become their living room.

  Finally the doctor nodded and packed his tools back in his black leather bag. He motioned for Liesl to follow him into the hall and closed the door. He was going to tell her something awful. She could see it in his shoulders, the way they humped in his gray coat.

  “His brother’s fever only lasted a few days,” she said to his back. “But he didn’t have any appetite, either.”

  Dr. Becker halted. “You keep mentioning the baby. Do you need me to examine him, too?”

  “No. No, he’s better now.”

  The doctor regarded her with his keen brown eyes.

  “Truthfully,” she said. “You can see him if you want.”

  Dr. Becker did not let his gaze falter. “Anselm looks malnourished,” he said.

  Heat surged up Liesl’s neck. “I feed them good, hearty meals,” she retorted.

  “Maybe he’s not eating them.”

  “He eats! They all eat! They’d eat the plates and silver if I let them,” she snapped. The doctor didn’t respond. She put her hand to her eyes, pressing her tear ducts with her forefinger and thumb. “I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I don’t sleep well.”

  From upstairs came a clang, then a grating sound. The man from the housing office was trying to install a stove in her and Frank’s old bedroom. She opened her eyes and tried to smile. “You can see how difficult it is,” she said. Clang, grate, clang. Her skull rang with the sound. “Sometimes it’s too much,” she added, and her voice sounded frightened.

  Dr. Becker’s eyes narrowed. “Of course.”

  “But then I always tell myself, tomorrow will be better!” she said.

  “Sometimes children . . .” he paused. “I see all kinds of things these days. Have you ever caught him eating something other than food?”

  “Of course not.” She tried to joke, “Unless you count my friend’s cooking.”

  “How long has your friend been cooking?”

  “Just a week.”

  Jürgen’s cry echoed from downstairs. He was in their old living room with Uta and Hans and eleven pieces of furniture. They couldn’t move it all upstairs, but she couldn’t decide what to keep.

  “Anselm has been hungry longer than a week, by looks of it,” said Dr. Becker. She staggered as he pulled her by the shoulder away from the bedroom door. “I’d have a good look around.” His voice wormed into her ear. “See if you find anything in the house that’s open. Soaps or paints. If you find something, let me know immediately. I think he’s hiding something.”

  She stepped away, her mouth twisting into a smile. Imagine Ani hiding something!

  “But couldn’t he have what the baby had?” she said. “Just worse because he’s older?”

  “Their symptoms don’t match,” Dr. Becker said. He reached for his black bag.

  Clang, clang, and then something heavy grinding in the grit of the floor.

  “Maybe it’s another illness,” she said, faltering at his gaze.

  He shook his head. “I find that a doctor’s visit is quite a curative in situations like this,” he added cheerfully. “Visit me again Friday if he doesn’t improve.” He began walking toward the stairs.

  “But—” she said.

  Wood scraped the landing below. It was Hans, pushing a cherry nightstand. “What are you doing?” she said.

  “I’m taking it to the cellar.”

  “The damp will rot it,” she said.

  “Where else am I supposed to put it?” said Hans, blinking his too-long hair from his eyes.

  Bang, thump.

  “Good day, then,” said Dr. Becker, reaching the stairs.

  She heard her high voice expressing how grateful she was that he’d made a house visit. She rushed to the banister and held on to his coat, with just her thumb and fingertip, the way staff guided guests at the spa who got too drunk and rowdy. It was the kind of touch that signalled deference and respect, and she wished he would respond to it, would understand that he’d gotten it all wrong, the hunger was not in the house, the hunger had come from outside, from the plane-filled skies, from the burning Rathäuser, from the widows and orphans crawling all over Germany with their carts and rags.

  “Ani wouldn’t lie to me,” she said over the banging.

  Dr. Becker looked at her hand and gently shook it off. “I’m afraid we don’t know that,” he said.

  Ani was sitting in the pool of light, holding one of his planes. She sat down next to him, suddenly terrified of the crook in his spine, of the bones that popped from his wrists.

  “I’m not sick, am I?” he said.

  She drew him to her, her skin shrinking the slightest bit when they touched.

  “Not really sick,” she said. “But the doctor asked you some important questions.”

  He nodded into her elbow.

  “Did you tell him the truth?”

  There was a pause and he nodded again.

  “You haven’t put anything funny in your mouth?”

  “No.”

  “Have you been hungry?” Her voice shook.

  He was silent.

  “Ani.”

  “I’m not hungry.” He sounded patient, as though he was spelling out a word for her.

  She ran her hands over his shoulders. His warm breath gusted through her sleeve.

  “Soap doesn’t taste very good, does it?” she said in a light voice. “It looks good sometimes, but it doesn’t taste good at all.”

  Ani pulled away from her. “I don’t eat soap.”

  “What about anything . . . different? Something you picked up outside?”

  He shook his head.

  “Are you having bad dreams about the refugees?”

  “I’m tired of questions,” Ani said.

  There was a loud crash upstairs. Liesl ducked. Ani covered his ears.

/>   “They’re coming,” he whispered, his eyes focused on empty space. “Watch out. Hide.”

  “Ani,” she said.

  “Hide,” he said again, and made the noise of an explosion.

  She pried his right hand from the side of his head.

  “Ani. I want you to wake me if you have any more bad dreams.”

  He rolled away from her, his palms cupped back to his skull. “Shhh. Stop crying. They’ll hear us,” he pleaded in a desolate voice.

  Above his head, the children in the paintings sailed on blue water. She smoothed her skirt over her knees and stood, her joints groaning. She felt suddenly old, older than the sleepless night of her first air raid, older than the night Frank left for Weimar. She would have to tell Frank, but how? How could she explain what was happening to Ani? The tendons in her fingers throbbed as she turned the doorknob and let herself silently out.

  The next day Liesl sent Hans to the spa to beg one of her old friends on the kitchen staff for some special treats for Ani. Hans came back with a package wrapped in newsprint and a cake box.

  “What’s in here?” Liesl asked, taking the box from Hans. It felt light, as if there was hardly more than a single slice of cake inside.

  “That’s Rouladen,” Hans said, thunking the package on the table. The juice from the beef and bacon rolls had leaked through the newspaper onto his fingers and he licked them slowly, attentive as a cat, as Liesl cut the string on the cake box. The rising scents of the meat made her woozy. Malnourished! Ani would soon be eating the richest meal in Hannesburg.

  She lifted the box lid and cried aloud. Inside sat a golden ring, dusted with sugar: a miniature Gugelhopf cake. It looked almost too perfect to eat, and it was so small, barely enough for each of them to have a couple bites.

  Uta leaned in, inhaling. “It’s positively 1939,” she said. “Remember how we lived on cake and cream that summer?”

  Liesl blushed as the boys’ eyes turned on her. She had spent most of that summer alternating between homesickness and euphoria, grateful for her job at the Kinderhaus and certain she would mess it up.

  “All those cherry tortes?” said Uta. “The almond fingers?”

  Liesl shook her head, perplexed by her friend’s nostalgia. That morning, Uta had wanted to go to the spa with Hans, to visit her old friends.

  I though you were hiding, Liesl had said.

  Uta had frowned. No, you’re right. You’re right. But the decision had put her in a blue mood all day, as if Liesl had imprisoned her. Lately Uta had stopped talking altogether about staying or going.

  “I don’t remember,” Liesl said aloud.

  “I suppose you were too busy knitting scarves for soldiers,” Uta said now. She turned to the boys. “Your stepmother must have saved the frostbitten chins of an entire panzer regiment.”

  “Let’s cut some slices,” Liesl said, and doled out the tiny pieces.

  She watched Ani’s long-lashed lids tremble at the surprising richness. He set his fork down after half a bite. His slice had a curved gouge in its middle.

  “Look, a smile,” he said, showing it to Liesl.

  “Eat the smile, too,” she said, watching the sugar glisten in the light.

  He frowned. “If I eat it, it will be gone.”

  “Actually, it will be inside you,” said Liesl, her voice falsely bright. “Please eat it.”

  Hans shoved his last bite in his mouth and chewed.

  “Just eat it, Ani,” he said, spewing crumbs.

  “I can’t,” Ani said. He pushed the plate away. His chin dropped to his chest, and his shoulders pinched inward, as if he were trying to make himself smaller. “I’m full.”

  “I’m not.” Hans reached across the table, fork lifted. Ani kept his head bowed.

  “Not quite 1939, but close,” Uta said, pushing her own plate away. “It used to be sweeter.”

  The older boy’s fork kept descending.

  “Hans,” Liesl said in a warning tone. “That’s your brother’s slice. You had yours.”

  “But I’m not full!” Hans said, his face crumpling. “I’m not full!”

  That night Liesl made Hans stand before her in his underclothes to make sure he hadn’t lost weight, too. He hadn’t. In fact he had grown a centimeter, according to the last mark on the closet doorjamb. Liesl leaned over him and made a new mark with a pencil. “You’re getting to be such a big boy,” she exclaimed, and was surprised when Hans blushed and bit his lip. “I mean, what else could I expect from ‘the man’ of the house?” she added, quailing at her clumsiness when he shoved past her and leapt into bed, pulling the covers over his head.

  Despite the evidence that Hans had grown, she watched both him and Ani at mealtime now, intent that every spoonful she cooked made it into their mouths. She gave Jürgen milk with egg stirred in it, putting the bottle to his lips whenever she could. He twisted his head from side to side, as if to say, “Enough, enough.” No traces of his fever remained, and his color was good. He rolled about the floor, bashing chair legs.

  “Watch out! He’ll get drafted soon,” said Uta. “He could take on a Russian tank.”

  Ani regained some of his old energy. The day before the new tenants’ arrival, he joined Hans running upstairs and downstairs, clearing any last valuables from the first and third floors. Liesl delighted in watching him. See? she told Dr. Becker in her mind. Does that look malnourished to you?

  “Why are we scurrying about like serfs?” Uta complained at the constant racket. “They should be grateful to have a roof over their heads.”

  Liesl ignored her. Labor was a way of dissolving her days into an attainable perfection. A wardrobe could be tidied and polished. A window could be washed of fly specks and dust. As long as she was moving, cleaning, sweeping, she would not become paralyzed by worry. Besides, she wanted to have everything ready for the strangers who were going to take over her home. To have a week’s worth of coal piled beside their stoves, a bucket of water for coffee and washing, the sills clean of dirt. To give them washed walls and polished floors, rooms that felt prewar, like the golden Gugelhopf cake.

  Every morning, Liesl woke ready to attack a specific room, a box of unwanted things, to finally clear Susi’s clutter from the villa. The man from the housing office came one day with his teenage sons, a horse, and a blue sleigh with paint so cracked and faded that it must have dated to the last century. He and his sons piled the sleigh high with the villa’s stained tablecloths, the broken gateleg table, the ugly paintings of grapes and apples.

  Their horse was tall and gray, with a lock of black mane that fell in his eyes. A gelding. He was old enough to work hard, but he looked like a handful, the way he tossed his head around at every little noise outside.

  Liesl was watching him when she heard Uta come into the boys’ old bedroom—soon to be their living room. “I’m glad to have all that junk out,” Liesl said. “But it makes me miss her.”

  “Who?”

  “Susi.”

  “You didn’t know her.”

  “But I do. I can’t explain it,” Liesl said. Deep in a bedroom corner, behind a box of moth-eaten towels, she had found one of Susi’s sanitary pads, faintly stained. She’d stood there, holding the thick cotton a long time, before finally shoving it deep in the linen closet.

  “I should go back to Berlin,” said Uta.

  Liesl licked the corner of her apron and wiped at Jürgen’s sooty face. “I thought you were staying to find Dr. Schein.”

  “I came to find him,” Uta said. “But I stayed . . . I don’t know why I stayed.”

  Outside, the mover’s sons gestured for Hans and Ani to come closer and they did, cautiously, their hands in their pockets.

  “I don’t want you to go,” Liesl said.

  “I know.” Uta tucked her blond hair back behind her ear. She no longer set it in curls each night. It was longer and bushier and made her face look round and out of place, like a clock wearing a wig. Yet she still stubbornly wore her gold bracelet, the
one Hans-Paul Jost had given her on the day of their elopement. They’d gone into a jeweler’s to pick out rings but emerged with the bracelet instead. Uta had thought she’d have the next day to buy a ring. She didn’t know that the marriage would be consummated but never officialized, the elder Mr. Jost would intercept them, and Hans-Paul Jost would disappear from her life, leaving her the one shining token of his affection. My lucky shackle, Uta called it. A thick, smooth band of French design, it was part of Uta’s mystique at the spa, but now it clashed with the apron and the unfixed hair.

  “You’ll never take that off, will you?” Liesl said, gesturing.

  “I had it appraised. Apparently the designer died young and it’s worth a fortune now,” said Uta, holding up her arm. “But no. It reminds me of where I came from.” There was an edge in her voice.

  They regarded the boys together. Ani seemed much smaller than his brother.

  “He’s doing better,” Liesl said hopefully. “Don’t you think?”

  “Maybe,” Uta said.

  “I think he probably just got what Jürgen had,” said Liesl. She sat down on the sofa, picked up the baby, and let him play with her shirt buttons. “I don’t think we need to see that doctor again, but I do need to build Ani’s strength back up. I wish there was some way to get some lamb. My aunt used to make a wonderful lamb in sour cream.”

  Uta turned away from the window, her mouth compressed to a line.

  “Even a little liver, instead of all this gristle and bone,” Liesl said lightly. “Frau Hefter, how does she feed six children?”

  When Uta didn’t answer a second time, Liesl set Jürgen down on the floor with some metal spoons. “I’m trying, you know,” she half shouted. To hide her tears, she thundered downstairs and all the way outside. She passed Hans and Ani, both watching the horse with wary, worshipful faces.

  She walked right up to the gelding and reached out to comb his nose with her fingers. The velvet nostrils flared. She ran a hand along his neck. His fur tickled her palm with delicious spikiness, but when his musty, salty scent washed over her, the tears began to spill. Her mind flooded with images of the farm where she’d grown up: the steam of the barn in winter, the draft horses looming, giant as trees. She had always been lonely there, even caring for her nieces and nephews, but life hadn’t hurt so much. She wished she could see the animals again: their dusty, caked coats, the way their eyes did not look straight out of their faces, but sideways, watching everything coming and going.