The German House

by Annette Hess

  Part Three

  THE SCRAWNY BOY, wearing a uniform several sizes too big for him, trips over an endless carpet. The orange sky is so low, the boy can almost touch it. But he’s looking down. The carpet arches and ensnares his feet, but the boy breaks free and tumbles onward, his weapon at the ready. He’s not alone. Other children run alongside him, wheezing, falling, getting up. They all carry weapons. The boy’s ears prick up—there’s a rumbling and rattling approaching in the distance. He freezes and stares at the sweeping horizon. A row of black silhouettes appears before the fiery heavens, creeping slowly and inexorably toward him. Tanks, mighty and faceless, crawling over the carpet, hundreds, thousands of them, in one endless row toward the children. “Retreat!” the boy screams, but the other children continue on, as though deaf and blind. The boy watches as the first tank runs over two children. It swallows them noiselessly. “Retreat! I said retreat!!” the boy screams more loudly. He seizes one of the children walking past him toward the tanks, and the boy briefly turns his face to him. It’s Thomas Preisgau, his best friend. “We have to retreat, Thomas!” But Thomas breaks away from him and strides toward one of the tanks. It devours him. The scrawny boy cries in despair, “No! No!!”

  “Hey there, little one, wake up. Stefan . . .” Stefan opened his eyes and blinked. Someone was bent over him with a worried look. “You’re dreaming.” Stefan felt relief at the sound of his father’s voice. He looked around—he was lying in his bed, in his room. Light fell in through the open door. Purzel sat panting at the foot of the bed, as if he had just been trudging through the swamp alongside Stefan. Ludwig swatted the dog on the snout and Purzel growled, but Ludwig was unimpressed and shooed him from the bed. “You’ve got no business being in here, you pest!” Purzel jumped reluctantly to the floor. Ludwig stroked Stefan’s sweaty hair.

  “You were having a nightmare.”

  “Daddy, I was yelling, but they wouldn’t listen to me!”

  “Sometimes we dream about terrible things. But everything is okay now. You’re safe at home.”

  “Do you sometimes dream about terrible things too?”

  His father did not respond. He straightened out the twisted bedspread and tucked it in tightly around his son. Then he said, “I’ll leave the door open. You sleep well now,” and stepped over Purzel, who was still out of breath, and the toys littering the carpet, and left the room. Stefan heard him shuffling back to bed. He left the hallway light on. Toppled soldiers lay in the small band of light that shone on the carpet. Stefan had thrown no small number of them into a pile. Perhaps he had pretended those were the dead.

  Next door, Eva lay awake in bed, on her back with her hands folded. “Retreat!” she had heard her brother calling. She had been about to get up, when their parents’ bedroom door opened and someone went over to Stefan. She heard her father and Stefan talking through the wall. It was just before four. Eva hadn’t fallen asleep yet. The incident from the night before played in an endless loop in her mind, like a short, grotesque film. In the restaurant earlier, after Edith locked the door behind Fräulein Wittkopp and Frau Lenze, Eva, who was wiping down the tables, turned to her parents and asked the question. Though it made her heart race and she was terrified of the answer, she summoned the courage she needed.

  “How do you know that man?”

  Her father, who was flushing out the beer taps behind the bar, shot her mother a look. Edith took Eva’s washrag, turned, and replied as she walked away that they didn’t know why he had behaved so strangely. They had never seen him or his companion before. Ludwig nodded, dried out the sink, and turned off the light. They filed out the door to the stairwell. They left their daughter behind in the dining room.

  Eva began to sweat and threw off the two blankets. She could not recall a time when her parents had lied to her so blatantly. She stared at the shadow of Don Quixote, whose lance quivered threateningly. He was poised to attack. For the first time ever, he was against her. Her teeth began to chatter and she pulled the covers back on. It was five thirty before Eva fell into a light, feverish half sleep. He spat at Mum’s feet. He doesn’t like her. That’s a good thing. It’s good. Jürgen would also say that’s a good sign. Then why are they lying? Eva opened her eyes again. It was getting light out. Don Quixote had disappeared from her ceiling. Otto Cohn’s dark hat sat on the shelf.

  “THIS CAN’T BE.” Annegret, wearing her white uniform in the nurses’ lounge, stepped over to the window overlooking the inner courtyard. She pulled the green curtain around herself like a blanket, as if she wanted to wrap herself up in it, as if she wanted to disappear into it like a child hiding from the world. Doctor Küssner came over to her and tried to gently loose her from the curtain, which was threatening to tear from the rod above. He spoke to her reassuringly. About how they were sometimes powerless, about how they could do everything humanly possible but couldn’t work miracles. About how Annegret had done everything she could. He said more along those lines, till Annegret suddenly and soberly uncoiled herself from the curtain and told him to “quit it with the bullshit blather.” She sat down at the Formica table in the middle of the room; there was a plate of cookies that had probably gone soft and stale overnight. “‘Everything humanly possible’? That sounds so pathetic,” she said bitterly. She covered her ears with her hands, as though she couldn’t stand to hear any more. Küssner looked at the back of Annegret’s head, at the little nurse’s cap and her white-blond hair like surgical cotton. “Will you come?” She did not respond. He gently pulled her hands from her ears. “Will you come back to see him?” Annegret did not look at Küssner but said softly, “I’m sorry, Hartmut, but I can’t be witness to that.” He lingered for a moment, then went out to the child dying in room five. Annegret began to eat the cookies.

  Küssner crossed the hallway. He was also upset by this case. Two weeks earlier, the nine-month-old Martin Fasse had undergone surgery performed by a veteran specialist—it was a complicated but critical procedure to reverse a congenital stricture of the esophagus, which the undernourished boy had withstood remarkably well. For ten days, they could positively watch him gain weight. Four days ago, though, he had unexpectedly developed diarrhea and begun vomiting. Penicillin did nothing, antiviral agents did nothing, and he couldn’t keep their tonics down. Martin steadily declined, and even Annegret, the master of nursing children back to health, had looked uncharacteristically fearful. Last night, she stayed with the boy almost without pause, dabbing his little, bluish mouth by turns with milk and water, and ultimately she picked up the whimpering, rapidly cooling child and carried him close to her body, to warm him up. Martin went very still at about four in the morning, and Küssner had to search for a pulse, moving his stethoscope across the child’s sunken chest. Stepping into the room now, which held just three bassinets for especially critical cases, he could see from the door that Martin had lost the battle. Küssner stepped up to him and performed a final examination of the tiny body, which had already gone cold. He looked at the clock and recorded five thirty as the time of death in the medical chart. As he wrote, he thought about the fact that in just a few hours, he would have to account for another case of infant diarrhea to the hospital director. Enhanced hygiene measures—boiling all bottles and nipples twice before use, changing bed linens daily, medical staff washing their hands before and after every patient contact—had not brought about any improvement. Küssner was at a loss. When he returned to the nurses’ lounge moments later, the plate of cookies was empty. Annegret stood at a cupboard, preparing the morning meal for the children who could not yet be nursed. She dispensed powdered milk among the bottles. Water boiled in a kettle. “Would you like to see him one more time?” Annegret shook her head. Küssner came up to Annegret, turned her around to face him, and hugged her. She stiffened but did not resist. Küssner said he would wait till seven, then call the parents. Why wake them now with news like this? Annegret pulled away from him, drew herself up, stroked his cheek briefly, firmly, and replied that she had a
good connection with Frau Fasse. She would call. She turned her back to Küssner and poured the boiling water. He looked at her back and thought, Today’s the day.

  After Küssner stood before the hospital director for three quarters of an hour, trying to radiate competence and optimism regarding what had happened, when all he felt was helpless and sad, he went home, exhausted, to his recently constructed, single-family house on the outskirts of town. He paused in the front hallway and listened to the noises in the house. The kids were at school, their colorful slippers stowed under the coatrack. Ingrid was busy upstairs with the radio on. A Schlager pop song played, and Ingrid joined in the refrain, “All of Paris is dreaming of love.” Küssner thought of Annegret and her disdain for any form of sentimentality, the way she sneered the time he suggested they take a trip to said city of love. “Romance is dishonesty in disguise,” she said. He turned to the mirror and saw a tired man who appeared much older than he was. His hair had long since taken its leave. Soon enough, he would start gaining weight and develop blocked arteries and suffer a heart attack at forty-five, like his father. He had not been happy in his marriage. As Küssner still stood there, Ingrid came downstairs, carrying a heap of used bedclothes, cheery tangles of flowers printed on white. She moved jauntily, energetically. She smiled at the sight of her husband. As always, he was struck by what a unique, timeless beauty she possessed, and what a miracle it was that she had chosen as average a man as he was. He did not smile back, and she also turned serious.

  “Did something happen?”

  “I have to speak with you, Ingrid.” Ingrid dropped the laundry by the door to the basement and turned to him expectantly. She waited.

  “Let’s go to the living room.”

  “I’m starting to get scared. What have you got cooked up this time? We are not moving again, though! I like living here! The children like living here—”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Doctor Hartmut Küssner followed his unsuspecting wife into the living room.

  EVA DID SOMETHING UNUSUAL that morning too. She was not needed in court, so she visited Jürgen unannounced at his office at the Schoormann warehouse. She had been there only once before, late one evening when he led her through the many stories of puzzling passageways, and she peeked into deserted rooms packed floor to ceiling with products and into a gloomy hall containing endlessly long tables and conveyor belts, where shipping started every morning at four. “This place starts humming like a beehive,” Jürgen said. They climbed the stairs to the roof, where they kissed under a ledge, because it had started raining. The sound of the rain hitting the window façade in Jürgen’s office grew louder and louder as Eva spun around in his executive chair, pulling up her skirt as if by accident till her thighs and underwear were fully exposed. Jürgen abruptly crouched before her on the carpet, collapsed between her knees, and pressed his face so forcefully into her lap that it hurt. She held her breath and waited. Only seconds later, Jürgen stood back up and said that they were leaving. She had come at an inconvenient time today, she could tell. He greeted her distractedly and helped her with her transitional coat—bright red and brand new—and said, with a slight edge to his voice, “Aren’t we seeing each other this evening?” Eva sat down in one of the visitor chairs. “What’s so urgent?” Jürgen continued. His curt tone threw her off. “I needed someone to talk to, Jürgen.” “Do you want something to drink? A cup of coffee? I do have a meeting in five minutes.” Eva watched the way Jürgen took a seat behind his big, shiny black desk, as though behind a barricade. She noted how deep-set his eyes were, and how dismissive he seemed with his arms crossed like that. He was almost alien to her at that moment, and she saw him through her parents’ eyes: shadowy, black-haired, rich. Jürgen could sense her skepticism, and he spread out his arms and smiled with a sigh. “Eva, spit it out, since you’re here.”

  Eva haltingly began to tell him, first about the encounter in the ladies’ room at the municipal building months earlier and the feeling she had, that she knew the main defendant’s wife from somewhere. About her clear memory of the man in the white coat, who showed her the number tattooed on his arm, and about how, even as a child, she had been able to count from one to ten in Polish. About her recurring suspicions that she was somehow connected to the camp. Finally, she told him about the incident in the restaurant. About her parents, who had lied to her. That they had not been able to look her in the eye at breakfast that morning.