Motherland

by Maria Hummel

  “I’ll fetch you some soup,” his stepmother said.

  Hans sank down to the sofa without comment. Jürgen slept in the cradle nearby, but he roused briefly to stare at his older brother with blue unseeing eyes before dozing off again. He was too big for it; his belly pressed its wooden sides and his legs had to curl to fit. His bedclothes were also old; his stepmother had stitched an extra ring of cloth to the cuffs to make them longer, and the cloth didn’t match. At the sight, Hans began to blubber, his sobs threshing his ribs, while Fräulein Müller looked on. He hated crying in front of her, and he tried to stop, but it just made the sobbing worse.

  “You had no right to worry her like that,” she said with surprising gentleness, and rose. “She’s got enough with your brothers.”

  He wiped his eyes and nose with the back of his hand. She walked to the corner of the room and took her hairbrush from a cabinet. Then she sat down in a chair and began to stroke her blond hair. When she was done, she would clean out the brush and throw the snarl into the stove, smelling up the room. She did it every night, and he hated it. He hated the stink and her lousy cooking, and how she wasted water and firewood, and sat forever on the toilet while everyone else crossed their legs. Stroke, stroke, stroke. Her hair crackled and shone.

  “Whore,” he said. Her right eyelid batted down fast, as if to stop an insect from flying into it.

  His stepmother rattled into the room with a tray of soup. “Is it warm enough in here? Are you warming up?”

  “I’m not cold,” said Hans. He leaned over the soup. It shimmered far below him. If he let himself fall toward it, it would take a long time to hit.

  “I’m not hungry, either,” he said.

  His stepmother sighed and perched on the last remaining chair. Her hands fluttered in her lap. The brush continued to move through Fräulein Müller’s hair. Her eyes were set on something far away. The ceiling thumped as the Dillmans moved around.

  “I suppose they informed you about the air raid on Weimar,” his stepmother said in a trembling voice.

  Hans didn’t answer.

  “We’ll hear from Vati soon, I’m sure,” she said. “He’s due to leave for Berlin—” She shook her head. “Hans, I have something to tell you.”

  Hans could feel a soaked chill at the back of his collar where snow had fallen and melted. The warmth in the room stabbed his toes and fingertips. He rubbed his palms on his knees.

  “The day we met with Dr. Becker, I wrote an urgent telegram to your father and asked him to come home. No matter what,” she said. “You know what that means?”

  He nodded.

  “I haven’t heard anything back. I don’t know where he is.” She spoke to the floor, her head in her hands, revealing her reddish crown of hair, its part uneven in the middle. “I was so scared for us,” she said in a muffled voice. “But I’m more scared now. I’m afraid the neighbors overheard a conversation I had with you,” she said to Fräulein Müller.

  Fräulein Müller shrugged. “What can they do? He’s not here.”

  So his stepmother had told her horrid friend about Vati, and not him. Hans wanted to make her sorry, but even more he wanted her to raise her head. He couldn’t stand the sight of the uneven part, the hair falling over her face. “Vati will come,” he said hoarsely. “My father will come home.”

  She pressed her fingers to her eyes.

  “You could have told me,” he said.

  She took a deep breath, but she didn’t say anything else.

  Her soup looked good—a glisten of fat clung to its surface and the potatoes were cut in his stepmother’s precise, thick pieces. He lifted his spoon, then set it down. He couldn’t. He was so tired. He was so sick of grown-up lies.

  “How was Ani today?” he said gruffly.

  “He was . . . he was worried about you,” said his stepmother. “He doesn’t know yet. Any of it.”

  “He can’t know about the telegram,” Hans said.

  “No.” She met his eyes. They understood the same dark thing: If Ani knew he was the reason they summoned Vati home, and Vati never made it, Ani would blame himself forever.

  “I want to tell him about the air raid.”

  “All right.”

  He set the soup bowl on the table beside him, letting it slosh. “Good night, then,” he said, and rose.

  “Hans, if you want to spend time with Frau Geiss,” he heard his stepmother say rapidly, “I’d like it to be here, upstairs, with us.”

  “I don’t want to spend time with Frau Geiss,” Hans said.

  His stepmother’s lips twisted. She glanced at Fräulein Müller.

  “I just want to go to sleep,” Hans said, and he left the room, trailing melted snow.

  He didn’t go down into the cellar that night or the next morning. He was shoveling the walk when the girl appeared. He had never seen her outside, in the open air, and at first he didn’t recognize her angular features or the lightness of her eyes. She looked older and faded, as if she had washed her skin too hard.

  He was sure she would know by now that his errand had been in vain, but her voice sounded jokey and amused.

  “I suppose he didn’t show,” she said.

  He pushed the shovel under the snow. It snagged and scraped on the hard substrata, and when he lifted it, bits of earth and grass clung to the whiteness. Below, a scar of mud. He tossed the snow aside and dug again. He didn’t know what to say to her. He couldn’t stand the hopelessness in her eyes.

  “He did show,” he said.

  “He did?”

  Hans nodded.

  “Did you give him my letter?”

  He dug better this time and threw the clean snow aside. There had been no word from Weimar yet. In the morning, Ani had taken the news of the bombing silently and crawled back in bed, throwing the covers over his head. Hide, he’d said in a muffled voice. Hide, hide.

  “Did you go?” The girl’s voice cracked. “You didn’t even go, did you?”

  He saw something flash by the windows in her house.

  “I gave it to him,” he said quickly. “But he has to go to Poland. He’s being sent to Poland today.”

  “How did he look?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  She bit her lip, rolled her eyes. “You boys,” she said. “He didn’t give you anything for me?” Her mouse ears looked pinker than ever.

  He rubbed his mouth. A bit of snow clung to his mitten and stung his lip.

  She took a step closer. He smelled her hair. He remembered its temperature, cool as well water, against his cheek, when she leaned against his chest, when they’d sat in the dark together, whispering all the things they hated in the houses above them, and promising each other if one got free, he or she would rescue the other.

  “A p-poem,” he stuttered.

  “Aw, that’s sweet.” She pushed him lightly in the chest. Her arm sloped downward to do it. She was taller than he. “Well, where is it?”

  “He made me learn it by heart, so it wouldn’t get lost,” said Hans, and he kept shoveling as he told her “The Plum Tree,” the words electrifying his mouth, making his tongue aware of how it licked the back of his teeth, the roof of his gums. The image of the plum tree filled his mind, its branches lush with fruit that ripened and fell to the ground without being picked, that rotted, shrouded by a blanket of drunken bees. When he looked up, he was surprised to see her covering her face with her hands.

  He had seen her weeping this way before. In the cellar’s darkness he would have stepped forward to comfort her, but now they stood out in the open air and there was nothing he could do but let the sound of his words die.

  A plane hummed overhead. Hans squinted up and saw it high up, a Focke-Wulf Condor, a transport plane, heading somewhere east.

  Ani curled on his bed and listened to Fräulein Müller go into the bathroom and shut the door. He grimaced as he heard the rustle of her clothes, the sigh she always gave when she sat down. He wished she were gone. She kept telling his
stepmother the parrot wasn’t real, even though she’d seen it. She rolled her eyes whenever he tried to bring it up. She brought a sick smell into the house that unsettled him. It clung to her clothes and her cooking and the hair she threw in the stove every night after picking it from her brush. It was worst when he woke up at night from one of his nightmares. Sometimes he was falling on top of mothers and children; sometimes they were falling on him, into a ditch. The river running through the ditch was red. There was a drain at its bottom, drinking and drinking. Ani wakened with his mouth gaping, his nostrils thick with Fräulein Müller’s stink.

  Vati would get rid of her when he came home. Vati would find the parrot, too, coax it down from the rafters of the brewery. He would know how to raise a bird. Ani fell asleep every night wishing for Vati, trying to dream of him striding through the door, but by morning all he remembered was the bloody drain.

  He dislodged the fifth and last tube from the hole in his mattress and pinched the bottom, moving the soft substance inside. Its consistency was softer than clay but thicker than liquid. He loved the feel of it between his thumb and forefinger, the way it gave into itself and separated and squished together again. He pressed it a few times, methodically, and then shoved it deeper into the crack of his mattress. He wouldn’t drink the white softness inside, not this week, not until after his next doctor visit. But one day he would drink again. It wasn’t like eating at all. It wasn’t like eating at all; it was like breathing in. It was breathing, and Mother would fill him and make him brave. Mother would be him, the image of her that was almost all he remembered now, her white dress warm with sun, her white arms around him.

  His fingers trembled as he pushed the tube down. Later. A grown-up would never find that crack. It was too small. The tube curled there like a seed, and he lowered his exhausted body over it, sheltering the secret.

  Weimar

  February 1945

  The patient’s brother reminded Frank painfully of Hans. The way he slouched, the way he stuffed his hands in his pockets. The pleasure of a good scheme written all over his face. The boy hooted as he watched the dachshund squirm over his older brother’s lap, licking and sniffing.

  “Robbi, Robbi.” The bedridden patient shouted. “I can’t believe you brought him all this way.”

  The dog stopped conversation all around. Doctors and nurses alike stared with dazed eyes at the full-snouted, wiggling joy. The dog didn’t seem to know what part of its owner’s body it wanted to touch first—it leapt and licked and clawed ears, then nose, then armpit, then wrist, then melted over the patient’s lap like a giant pile of caramel. It scratched its floppy ear with a battering toe and leapt up again, as if to say, Why are we still here? Let’s go! Let’s go!

  A handful of visitors had come and gone that day, but nothing compared to the arrival of the dog.

  “This is Robbi,” the patient said to his onlookers. “My brother brought him all the way from Schwarzburg.”

  Watching them, Frank felt a pang. He wanted Hans and Ani and Jürgen to be close brothers like this, willing to make sacrifices for each other. Mostly he wanted Hans to be gentler and not press his advantage on the younger, more malleable Ani. He hadn’t been able to sleep last night thinking about them, with all the refugees in the house, learning bad habits from a bunch of roughneck kids.

  A hand tugged his sleeve, and he looked down into a gaunt, unfamiliar face. Not his patient. “Someone’s trading these,” the fellow whispered, shoving a hard little object in Frank’s palm. “Don’t look at it now. I just want you to know.”

  Frank nodded and put the thing in his pocket. He went to pet the dachshund, finished with his morning routine, except for Hartmann, who as of yesterday was healing well, his apposing sutures already removed. Frank felt eager for the challenge of Berlin. For the first time, he nurtured a private, shameful hope that the war would continue. Another six months, that was all. Enough to learn, to earn a modest name for himself.

  Frank was just heading for the ward’s far doors when one of Schnell’s soldiers came in, shouting for him, holding a telegram. Frank took it and kept walking, into the hall with the supply room. He ripped it open.

  He had a hard time reading the words. The letters snagged and bounced.

  ANI ILL STOP SEND MEDICINE STOP

  Frank’s fingers opened and closed on the paper, crumpling it to a tiny ball.

  “Medicine” was the family’s emergency code word for Frank himself.

  She was summoning him home.

  Someone appeared at his elbow. Her dark head came up to his bicep. Frank stuffed the telegram in his pocket.

  “Is it bad news?” Frau Reiner said.

  Frank fought for speech. “Maybe,” he said. “One of my sons—” he breathed in sharply. “My middle son appears to be ill.”

  “I’m sorry. He’s Anselm, right?” said Frau Reiner.

  He nodded. Anselm. The name had never stuck, however, only the boy’s feminine-sounding nickname. Ani had soft features. His nose rounded at the tip. His eyes were lake-green and wide. Even his milk teeth curved where most children’s were straight. When Ani smiled, all Frank could see were circles and parts of circles, breaking and reforming like water around a flung stone. Ani was the healthiest kid from the day of his birth, never fussy like Hans, growing fat and dimpled at his mother’s breast. When Susi died, Ani kept asking when she would come back. Each time, Frank had explained gently that she was gone forever, but the information was like oil on water: It never fully sank in.

  “Your wife must be very worried.” Frau Reiner looked over her shoulder. “Is she the kind who gets worried?”

  “She’s never sent me a telegram before.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist.

  “You should sit down,” said Frau Reiner.

  “My Jürgen will be walking any day now,” he announced. “The baby. All my boys start walking at nine months, just like clockwork.” He felt his body lurch into step.

  Frau Reiner took his arm and guided him to the supply room door. She opened it, sat Frank down on a box, and took a seat opposite him. The light was dim and the room smelled like wood and ether. His knees bounced.

  “It happens quick, too,” said Frank. “One day they’re sitting. The next, they’re balancing with a chair, and by the end of the week they’re toddling around. Hoppe, hoppe.” He made a little figure with his fingers and walked it across the top of the box. She regarded him steadily.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Ask for a furlough.” He rubbed his face. No one had been granted a furlough since before Christmas. He wanted to read the telegram again, to make sure he’d gotten it right, but he didn’t want Frau Reiner to see it. He touched his pocket. Then he remembered the thing the patient had given him, and he pulled it out.

  It was a hard brass-colored capsule, the size of a bean, and it had a small inscription it. Frank read it and frowned, then showed it to Frau Reiner.

  “They’re trading these now,” he said hoarsely.

  She plucked the capsule and rolled it between her fingertips. “Cyanide,” she said in a wondering voice. “I’ve never seen it. I mean, I guess you can’t see it.” She smiled a tiny smile.

  “We can’t allow it.”

  “Can’t we?” she said thoughtfully. Her heart-shaped face tilted down. “Say I’m a good, loyal soldier. What if I fall into Russian hands?”

  “Then you survive it,” said Frank.

  “What if I get starved and beaten and die of malnutrition anyway?”

  “You don’t know that will happen.”

  “The odds are great.” She cocked her head. “Why not save me the suffering?”

  “It’s not for us to choose how we die,” Frank said.

  “You really believe that, don’t you?” She held the capsule up to the light the way jewelers hold precious stones. It was bigger than a bead, but smaller than a child’s eye.

  Frank grabbed her wrist, pulling the capsule down, taking it back. The
supply room door opened and Linden’s face appeared. The light in the hall shadowed his eyes. They looked at Frank’s hand cupping Frau Reiner’s, then at Frank, and then the door slammed.

  “Linden!” Frank shouted.

  “Let him go.” Frau Reiner gently retracted her fingers. “He’s too jealous of me anyway.”

  Frank stared at her, absorbing the new fondness in her voice.

  “You didn’t know?” She winked at him. “I thought he would have told you. It started the night before Hartmann’s surgery.”

  “I don’t know what took you so long,” said Frank, but he couldn’t muster the old joking tone they used with each other. He was clutching the capsule in his fist and his head kept swimming back to the message from Liesl, its urgency and lack of information. Why wouldn’t she say more? Why couldn’t she say more? He sorted through worst-case scenarios: Ani had caught something from those filthy refugees. Ani had fallen and injured himself. Ani had leukemia or cancer.

  The only thing clear about the telegram was its request: Come home. It did not say, Write back. There was no time for discussion.

  “Are you going to be all right?” said Frau Reiner.

  “If you were a woman,” Frank said to the nurse, and then stopped. “I’m sorry.”

  She rose and went to the door. “Just ask the question, you idiot,” she said, her hand on the knob.

  “My wife asked me to come home now. In the telegram,” said Frank. “How serious do you think she is?”

  Frau Reiner opened the door.

  “I don’t know if she understands what she’s asking,” said Frank.

  Frau Reiner made a noise in her throat. “If I were a woman,” she said over her shoulder, “I would only be serious about two things: the life of my children and the life of my husband. In that order.”