Motherland

by Maria Hummel

  She set a lid ajar on the pot and crept upstairs to find Ani swooping his wooden plane through the air, Jürgen sleeping under an afghan by his brother’s hip. Hans was out gathering sticks for kindling.

  “He wakes up if I move,” Ani whispered, and then made a crashing sound through his teeth as his plane dove down. The view beyond the half-fogged window was gray-white and peaceful. It had been an entire week since the last air raid, and Liesl had a strange slack feeling whenever she looked at the sky, as if a rope once pulled taut was suddenly ripped free and falling.

  “You’re a good brother,” Liesl said.

  Ani put his nose to the window, avoiding her tender gaze. “How come you don’t have any brothers or sisters?”

  His frank question made her flush. “My parents just had me,” Liesl said.

  Ani drew a circle in the fog on the glass. “But how come they don’t visit?”

  Liesl sighed. She had been wanting to tell the boys that her mother had died when she was six. That she knew and understood their loneliness. But another part of her resisted. She did not like Hans and Ani thinking this was how the world worked: that mothers died and fathers disappeared, as hers had, soon after the pneumonia had taken her mother. War-addled brains, her uncle had said. Shiftless, said her aunt. They’d received one postcard from him from Chicago, USA, and never heard from him again. Liesl did not want Ani to know that once both parents vanished, a child became a burden to be passed around until some practical use was found for her. If she had favored her bonny, buxom Mutti, it might have been easier. But Liesl had resembled her father—thin and serious, with brown-red hair that frizzed loose from its braids. She wasn’t good at mending or strong enough for mucking stalls. She thrived at enduring the pummeling devotion of small children, however, and finally found her place as the caregiver for her sturdy, wild cousins, teaching them each to read and write and swim in the Badensee, as her mother had begun to teach her before she died. It wasn’t until Liesl had abandoned them for a position at the spa that she’d realized what she wanted: her own life, and one day, her own family.

  “They passed away,” she said finally. “But maybe you can meet my cousins sometime,” she added, though she knew her relatives would never leave their farm and village, much less Franconia.

  Jürgen stirred and woke, lifting his head, staring at them with wide, uncomprehending eyes.

  “How did your parents die?” Ani asked.

  “In the war. Your brother’s hungry,” she said, and carried Jürgen down to the kitchen to heat his milk.

  Someone knocked loudly on the front door. A hard, official sound.

  The fist dug into the wood and made it ring.

  Liesl felt her body moving across the kitchen with Jürgen, heard her voice call to Ani to stay upstairs.

  Her hand circled the doorknob but did not twist it open. The brass went from cool to warm, as she waited through another round of knocking. Jürgen slumped against her shoulder, sucking at his fingers. She sorted through the worst scenarios. Officials had opened her package to Frank. Officials had lifted the loaf of Christmas stollen, surprised at its weight, and broken it open to find the canister at its center, filled with the money and map he’d requested. They’d arrested Frank and sent him to a prison camp. Worse, someone had shot him on the spot for attempted desertion.

  Bile rose up her throat. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t open the door panicked like this.

  She gripped the handle and imagined lesser problems. Someone had caught Hans cutting willow sticks for kindling. Someone—many someones—didn’t approve of her marrying the handsome doctor two months after his beloved wife had died in childbirth. “We’ve done nothing wrong,” she would tell whomever it was, but that wasn’t really the point, was it? The point was to be liked, or if you couldn’t be liked, to be overlooked.

  The baby twisted his face into her neck. She turned the knob and opened the door.

  “Heil Hitler.” Herr Geiss’s arm flashed.

  Liesl adjusted Jürgen on her shoulder and raised her right hand. “It’s you,” she mumbled, flooded with relief and irritation. His physique reminded her of a pig’s—compact, strong, and small. She could see bare skin peeping out above his house slippers, the sliver of neck-flesh that his coat did not cover.

  “He’s getting big,” her neighbor said, nodding at Jürgen. The baby gurgled, revealing his six teeth.

  “Almost nine kilos now,” Liesl said. “Are you coming about your badge? I’ll get Ani to fetch it.”

  Herr Geiss’s slippers whispered on the snow. They were so old that his big toes cracked out the bottom edges. He blew out a gray cloud. “No, not about the badge,” he said.

  Did he know something about Frank? The thought chilled her. “Would you like to come in?” She stepped back, but Herr Geiss did not follow.

  “My daughter-in-law is arriving,” he said. “In a week’s time. She’s finally decided to leave Berlin and move in with me.” He huffed another cloud. “She has no other kin now. Her mother died in an air raid.”

  “That’s—that’s sad news,” Liesl said, unable to stop herself mentally calculating. An old widower and an unrelated young woman sharing a roof. An unseemly combination. And one that would use up all her neighbor’s extra ration coupons.

  Herr Geiss continued to stand there. He pulled a pair of black gloves from his pocket but did not put them on. The dark fingers hung from his pale hand. “My house . . .” He paused and cleared his throat. “I have an acceptable house, of course, but it needs some improvement.”

  “It’s a lovely home,” Liesl said, puzzled, as Jürgen snuggled into her neck. “You should really come in,” she told her neighbor. “The baby’s getting cold.”

  Herr Geiss shook his head. In the street behind him, a car bumped slowly through the dusk, stirring up slush.

  “I have good brooms and mops,” he said. “My Hilda used the best wax. I still have four good cans of it.”

  The first flakes of snow began to fall, brushing the brick garden wall and melting. Liesl blinked hard. “You want me to clean your house,” she said slowly. “Don’t you have a Putzfrau who comes?”

  A white fleck landed on Herr Geiss’s bald skull and vanished. “She’s expecting any day. I don’t know anyone else I trust—”

  So that’s how he saw her in his dismal hierarchy of human beings: not fit to mother, but fit to polish his floors. Yet she couldn’t refuse. Liesl tried to smile. “Then of course you can count on me.”

  He looked relieved. His heavy chin wagged as he thanked her. Suddenly he seemed to her like an aging caricature of the Aryan face she’d once admired: his fair hair melted away, his eyes too blue, his jaw too strong, his thick soldier’s body grown squat as a headstone.

  “I’ll set things straight in no time,” she said with false lightness.

  The snow fell harder, faster. It frosted the black gate and the heap of frozen dog turds that a fat dachshund deposited there every morning, led on its leash by Frau Hefter, a woman made invincible to neighborly criticism by the silver Mother’s Cross pinned to her coat for bearing six healthy German children.

  Her neighbor flashed his own tobacco-stained dentures. “Good night, then,” he said cheerily and reached out to squeeze Jürgen’s foot. The baby chuckled and pawed at the air. “Such a nice boy,” he said, turning away. “He has his mother’s smile.”

  Herr Geiss trudged down the walk, pausing when he reached the gate. “Tomorrow would be best,” he said, glancing back over his shoulder.

  “Tomorrow,” she repeated.

  Liesl was on the edge of the bed, her head pitched toward Jürgen’s cradle, when she woke to the sirens. Without opening her eyes, she threw off the eiderdown and grabbed the coat she kept hanging by the bed. She shoved her feet in Frank’s old Wandervögel boots. They gapped around her ankles even when she yanked the laces. She lit the lantern with a clumsy match. Her hands fumbled around Jürgen’s ribs as she lifted him, and he looked around dopily and sank
against her arm.

  She clomped to the hallway, calling for Hans and Ani.

  Ani burst alone from their bedroom in his pajamas, his eyes melted black by the lantern.

  “Where’s Hans?” she said.

  The boy pointed behind him. Liesl hurried into the bedroom where Hans was kneeling over a long row of white Juno cigarettes, each of them fat as a finger. He plucked them up one by one. He had “found” them by the railroad tracks that morning.

  A plane droned in the distance. Jürgen cried and writhed, his pelvis grinding into her hip.

  “What are you doing?” she shouted at Hans.

  “Here.” He held a Juno up to Jürgen.

  The baby grabbed it before Liesl could stop him. The cigarette poked from his fist.

  “He can’t play with that,” Liesl said, prying at the baby’s fingers. “Now get down to the cellar with your brother.”

  “It’s not a real attack,” said Hans.

  Jürgen ripped the cigarette free from her, shoved it in his mouth. He chortled, his six teeth crawling with hairs of tobacco. The siren groaned again.

  “That’s going to make him sick,” Liesl exclaimed as she forked the tobacco from the baby’s mouth and flicked it on the floor. Jürgen licked his lips and stared down at the mess.

  “I could have traded that,” Hans muttered.

  “Why would you want to make your brother sick?” she demanded.

  “I’m scared,” Ani said from the pitch-black hallway. “I don’t wanna go down there.”

  “Don’t be a baby,” said Hans. “You’re not the baby.”

  As if on cue, Jürgen began to cry.

  “Both of you. Downstairs. Now,” Liesl shouted. Her hand closed on Hans’s collar. He recoiled as if stabbed. The siren cut off in midmoan. They stared at each other, waiting, the silence huge and terrifying. The sky rumbled but the siren did not respond. Although Hannesburg had not been hit directly, the Allies had decimated neighboring Frankfurt last spring. A waiter at the spa had gone there and taken pictures of the destruction: buildings burned to hollow ruins, littered streets, and lines of women, standing on the rubble, passing buckets from an unseen reservoir while the city fixed its busted pipes. Liesl had been more troubled by the women’s hard, stiff faces than the fires—they looked as if someone had fixed their dread in stone.

  “See. It’s over,” said Hans. He held up his bouquet of cigarettes. “I knew it was far away.”

  “They haven’t sounded the all clear,” said Liesl.

  “But you know it’s over,” said Hans. “We can’t even hear any planes.”

  Liesl listened, waiting for the drone, the crash.

  Ani whimpered into her waist. His head was a warm soft ball. “It’s so cold,” he said in a muffled voice.

  “Grow up.” Hans raised his free hand and whacked Ani across the back of his knees.

  Ani moaned.

  “Stop,” Liesl said, suddenly beyond exhaustion. She took a breath to shout at Hans again but her voice didn’t come. She couldn’t even look at him, this stubborn, angry, miniature Frank, so she held Ani and Jürgen closer. “It’s safe to go back to bed now,” she said gently.

  “I want to be with you,” Ani said. “Please, Mutti?”

  At the word “Mutti,” her heart stuttered. She saw Hans dart a look at her. It was the first time either of them had called her any name but “her” and “you.”

  “You can all sleep in my room,” she heard herself say in a buoyant voice. “In our room. You can have Vati’s bed.”

  Ani clapped his hands. Hans’s eyes narrowed, his lips shriveling as if he tasted something bad.

  She couldn’t stop herself. “Or we can push them together and make one big bed,” she added. Heat filled her face as she stared defiantly down at the boy. His expression did not change but it hardened and pulsed.

  “Hurrah!” Ani cried and grabbed his eiderdown. “I want my own blanket.”

  “Moving the beds will mark the floor,” said Hans. “Vati will see the scratches.”

  “Nonsense,” said Liesl. “We’ll be careful.” She touched his shoulder. He flinched.

  “We’ll be warm! I want to keep Mutti warmy-warm,” said Ani.

  “You’re not the baby.” Hans twisted away from her, pushing ahead of Ani to get into the bedroom first, his bouquet of cigarettes still held high.

  Air raids unsettled Liesl’s stomach, so she set Jürgen in his cradle and left the boys alone to go to the bathroom. Frank jokingly called it “the Icebox” because its temperature was always several degrees colder than the lined metal cupboard where they kept their milk and butter. She felt her way to the frigid toilet and sat down.

  Frost caked the lone window in the Icebox. The pane was small and Frank had covered it poorly with blackout drape, so she could see out a crack to the closed shutters of Herr Geiss’s house. Liesl wondered what she would find there tomorrow. Herr Geiss had lost his only son to friendly fire more than a year ago. His wife had died years before. He lived in the villa alone, three floors all to himself, and rarely entertained any guests. Even Frank told her that he had not entered the Geiss house since Frau Geiss had passed. What would the rooms be like? How would she possibly finish cleaning them?

  A loud continuous moan broke her reverie: the all clear. As she clumped back down the darkened hallway to the bedroom, she resolved to tell the boys the plan was off. They could sleep in their own beds now.

  “We made a bad scratch,” Hans said from inside.

  Hans stood at the foot of the beds, holding the sputtering lantern. Ani had already claimed his spot in the center of the two mattresses, his eiderdown pulled up to his chin. Jürgen dozed in his cradle. Liesl hesitated, her order dying on her lips.

  “We made a baaaaad scratch,” Hans said again.

  Liesl couldn’t see anything on the boards but dust and some long, fine, golden strands. Susi’s hair. She fought the urge to wipe them up.

  “Save the kerosene. We’ll attend to it in the morning,” she told Hans, and tucked Jürgen’s blanket tighter around him. Then she climbed in next to Ani. Bone-tired. She slumped back on the pillow and shut her eyes. Her lids blinked when the room went black.

  “I’m warmy-warm next to Mutti,” Ani announced.

  “Sorry, Ani,” said Hans. From the placement of his voice, Liesl could tell that he was still standing at the edge of the bed. “You’ve got the crack.”

  “I’m next to Mutti,” Ani said again, and she felt one of his small fists push into her eiderdown and softly brush her shoulder. She kept her eyes closed.

  “It’s still the crack,” said Hans. “In the middle of the night, you’ll fall through.”

  “Hans,” said Liesl.

  But the older boy’s voice went on. “You’ll fall down through the floor and the cellar and all the way to the center of the earth where there is a big-nosed, hairy dwarf who will cook you in his stew.”

  “Will not,” said Ani, but his voice was uncertain.

  “Enough,” Liesl said wearily. “That’s an awful story.”

  “And then he’ll take your skin and wear it,” Hans said, his voice sly.

  “Enough!” Liesl sat up and glared in his direction. She could barely make out the slump of his shoulders.

  Instead of complying, Hans crawled onto the bed, over his brother’s body, leaning close to his ear. “When you wake up, we’ll think your body is you, but inside you’ll be a big-nosed, hairy dwarf,” he said rapidly. “The real Anselm will be dead.”

  “GO TO YOUR ROOM,” Liesl shouted, surprised by the force and volume of her voice. Hans scrambled off the bed. Ani whimpered under his blanket. Jürgen began to cry. With a curse, she threw herself out of bed and fumbled toward the baby, to rock him.

  The room filled with the baby’s aggravated sobs. Ignoring the other two boys, Liesl sang and danced with him until her shin slammed the bed. Pain jolted up her leg and she yelped. The baby cried on as if he’d been hit.

  She heard Hans grab
something on the bedside. A match hissed, struck, the flame making his face flower in the darkness. He glowered, motionless.

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” she said to him. “Don’t they have enough to give them nightmares?”

  Hans didn’t answer.

  Liesl turned away from him, stroking the baby’s sturdy, muscled spine. She walked to the shuttered window where she always looked down on the garden, and paced back again, bouncing and shushing. “Please go back to your room,” she said to Hans.

  He cast his eyes downward at the cigarettes on the table. His long lashes brushed his cheeks. Then he gave a tough little laugh and scooped up the white handful.

  “I’ll sell these for you,” he said in Frank’s jocular, teasing voice. “What do you want, a new dress?”

  Later, alone again, Liesl tossed on her bed. She’d shared the room with Frank for only thirty-six nights before he was ordered to serve in Weimar. For thirty-one of those nights they’d slept across the room from each other, her breath whispering, Frank’s soft snores rising. Thirty-one nights before she’d woken to him sitting at the edge of her bed, like a father watching his sleeping child. She’d opened her blankets and taken him in. Is it all right? he’d whispered when she’d shuddered at his touch. Yes. It’s all right. Yes. Five nights with their bodies moving against each other, awkward at first, then falling into pattern, into sleep afterward, legs twined like roots below soil. Had she disappointed him in comparison to Susi? Frank had always returned to his own bed by morning.