Motherland

by Maria Hummel

  They’d never spoken about it. They’d rarely spoken aloud about anything but the house and the children and the war. Of Frank’s childhood, she knew little. Of hers, he knew only the name of a town, a pleasant description of a farm. They hadn’t reminisced about their brief courtship at the Hartwald Spa, where she’d run the Kinderhaus and he’d treated the minor ailments of Nazi officers and their wives. She supposed Frank didn’t think about the past or the present because they were too mixed up. He was grieving, and then he was married, and then he was drafted. And then he was gone, and still grieving, and still married. When he went to sleep at night in Weimar, which wife did he miss?

  Liesl lay on her stomach, eyes open. In the dark she couldn’t see the wardrobe that still hung some of Susi’s dresses, or the dresser that held Susi’s jewels, or the mirror above the vanity that had once reflected back a blond woman with round cheeks. But she felt the objects watching her with their sharp corners, their creaks. And beyond them she felt the great open space around her, space enough for two beds, a man and wife, and a baby, too. How different this room seemed compared to her tiny alcove at the spa, where there was nowhere to sit but one chair and the narrow cot, and whenever her best friend Uta came, Uta took the cot, messing up Liesl’s neat coverlet while she chatted and smoked. That room had reeked of girlhood, of their long, gossipy talks, of ash, of the herbs Liesl gathered and made into fragrant sachets, of wool stockings hung up to dry. She wished Uta would write. But Uta never wrote letters, except once, to announce she’d made it to Berlin and liked her job at the private officers’ club.

  Liesl curled her fingers in her blanket and pulled it tight over her shoulders, around her chin, tighter and tighter, the way she’d done as a girl when she was scared of the dark. Miss me, she thought, first to Frank, and then to her oldest friend, and then to the dim, loving face that had become her memory of her mother. She pulled again until the wool strained over her back and she couldn’t move for holding herself.

  Liesl tried not to suck in her breath when she saw the Geiss pantry: the ham hanging from a hook, a substantial wheel of Emmental, the tins of coffee and sugar, seven bottles of Riesling (she hadn’t meant to count, but her eyes did it for her), jars of sauerkraut and pickles, the red fingers of Würstchen, chocolate in purple wrappers. No wonder Herr Geiss had ration cards to spare.

  “I don’t cook,” Herr Geiss said in an embarrassed voice. “So I have to make do with the ready-made.”

  “Yes,” Liesl said, the musky scent of the ham almost choking her. Half of her wanted to throw it out the window and half wanted to tear into it with her bare teeth. She took a deep breath and jiggled Jürgen, who was looking around with dazed eyes. “Well. We all make do.”

  They stood awkwardly in the Geiss kitchen, a bucket of mops and brooms and cloths between them. It was clear by the shininess of the brooms that Herr Geiss had gone out and procured some new cleaning gear. She reached out and touched a blue-painted handle. “Very nice,” she said.

  “It’s enough, then?” he said. “You don’t have to do the stove. I clean that myself.”

  Not the stove. Just the rest of a three-story house. She nodded.

  “What do you hear from Frank? Saving lives, is he?”

  “He’s busy,” Liesl said quickly. “His surgeries are very complicated.” She carried Jürgen back out to the stairs and called for Ani.

  “I asked Frau Hefter to watch the infant,” Herr Geiss said from behind her. “She’s magic with children.”

  Liesl froze. She’d had two awkward Kaffees with Frau Hefter, in which the other woman had asked her maiden name and pointedly stared at her beaky nose.

  “She’s happy to help,” said Herr Geiss. “She loved Susi and her children, you know.”

  Liesl waited for Ani to appear, and still it took a long time to hand Jürgen over. Or maybe it took only moments, but it seemed as if thousands of them were needed to wrap the baby just so, to pull his wool cap down against the winter wind, to kiss his brow and kiss it again, to watch his arms wave as Herr Geiss took him and positioned him the way Frank did, higher than a woman would, so that Jürgen’s head hung slightly over his broad shoulder.

  And then it was done. Her arms were empty. They fell to her sides. “It sounds funny, but he sleeps best in a busy room,” she said.

  The baby cooed and Herr Geiss giggled. “Ah, you are so light. So light,” he said as he carried Jürgen down the stairs. “What is she feeding you?”

  Liesl lined up the mop, the broom, the cans of polish. She couldn’t even look around yet; she was trying to unfasten her mind from the baby, now being marched away from her. She hadn’t spoken with Frau Hefter since the October day she had rushed out of the house to catch Marta, Frank’s longtime housekeeper, in the ration lines. Liesl had found some extra coupons and wanted to bestow the prize on the housekeeper, who had taken Jürgen shopping and given her the morning off. From meters away, Liesl recognized the graceful matronly figure of Frau Hefter standing beside Marta, making kissy noises at the baby in the pram. Jürgen dimpled and beamed. She was almost upon them when she heard what they were saying.

  “Remember the time Susi visited the spa?” Frau Hefter said. “She wanted to stay a whole month, but he made her come home early. Now I wonder why.”

  “She loved company,” said Marta. “She would come down and talk to me during the children’s naps. She was never too proud.”

  Their voices dropped out of earshot again, and then Marta said sourly, “Unkraut vergeht nicht.” Weeds do not perish.

  It could have been her aunt’s voice speaking that dismissive phrase. For the Gypsies who came through Franconia with their begging children. For the town drunk. For the ugly black cat who dragged herself around, pregnant, every spring and fall, and left behind kittens no one wanted. Unkraut vergeht nicht.

  Liesl spun around and hurried home. The houses beside her blurred into a broken line of brown and white, but she didn’t cry.

  She managed to remain stone-faced around Marta all day. When night came, she sobbed into her pillow. The noise woke Frank, who was across the room on his own bed, having not yet touched her as a husband. He sat up in the dark and demanded to know why she was weeping. The story came out, muddled by sobs. Frau Hefter and Marta. They hated her. They had called her a weed.

  “A weed?” He sounded amused. His derision angered her. His distance bothered her even more. Why wouldn’t he touch her?

  “You know what I mean,” she said, and then pulled the eiderdown over her head, refusing to say anything else. In the morning, before Liesl fully understood what was happening, Frank had accused Marta of calling Liesl a Mischling, a half Jew, and endangering the family with her lies. Marta had quit. Liesl wept and railed at Frank for misunderstanding her and scaring off the only household help she had. He had groused that she shouldn’t involve him in the overemotional affairs of women. Eventually their fighting had led to kissing, and kissing to Frank finally climbing into her bed at night. The children somehow noticed the change in both parents and became more agreeable. There was a blissful week when it seemed the broken, grieving Kappus family might begin to mend together. And then Frank had to leave for Weimar. And then the employment office said there might be a six-month delay in finding a new housekeeper. All available workers were needed in munitions factories.

  Weeds do not perish, Liesl thought angrily whenever Frau Hefter passed with her constantly pissing dachshund. Yes, I am here to stay.

  And here she was, elevated to a Putzfrau herself now. She allotted herself five hours. Jürgen would enjoy the superior mothering of Frau Hefter, Herr Geiss would go to his Stammtisch at the local pub, Hans would stand in line for milk, and she and Ani would work together to whip the cobwebby Geiss house into proper order. Rags in hand, they began together in the kitchen, washing cabinets, but then he drifted away.

  “What are you doing, Ani?” she called after a few minutes.

  His voice was small and distant. “Cleaning.”

/>   “What are you doing, Ani?” she called again, a quarter of an hour later.

  “I’m cleaning . . . Mutti,” he said from the exact same spot.

  His use of the endearing name didn’t thrill her now. It sounded like a bribe. She wrung out her rag, draped it over her wrist, and went to find him. The air was stale and musty, the furniture heavy, but not especially dirty. And yet something was strange about the Geiss house, something she couldn’t put her finger on.

  Ani stood in the hallway. He was holding a waxen statue of the Führer, his hands curling around the knee-high boots. “Does the Führer know about the dwarf?”

  “Oh, Bübchen, the dwarf’s not real.”

  He stroked the boots with his thumb.

  “Your brother just wanted to scare you.”

  “Why?” His voice was very small.

  “Because he doesn’t want you to be a baby anymore.”

  She said it carelessly, focusing on her feather duster. Ani placed the statue back on the shelf and grabbed the next object, a porcelain figurine of a shepherdess, flowers crowning her hair and spilling from a basket.

  He held up the simpering face to Liesl. “Can I take this home?”

  “No, you may not.” Liesl grabbed the figure from him, setting it back on the grimy wood beside the Führer. “Why don’t you go explore for a while?”

  Ani looked injured. “I was helping.”

  “I know you were.” She bent and touched his cheek. “You’re a fine help.” She took the rag from Ani’s hand and tucked it in her apron pocket. “You were such a good boy, you deserve a break. Go scout for me, all right?”

  Ani gave a gusty sigh and wandered off down the hall. His shoulder strap slid down. He had lost some weight, she decided, with a rush of worry.

  “Come back and tell me what you find,” she called after him. “Just don’t touch anything.”

  The Geisses and the Kappuses had been neighbors for fifty years, since before Frank was born, and the two villas angled toward each other, as if they were meant to be a pair. Now we’re the Siamese twins, Liesl said to herself, thinking of the tunnel. Through one of the living room windows, Herr Geiss had a perfect view of the Kappuses’ front door. Liesl paused at it, watching her new home from the outside: the heap of dachshund turds beside the rusting gate, the stoop marked by the small footprints of the boys. The deep brambles of the garden. An air of waiting hung over everything. It must have been brighter and more orderly when both Frank and Susi lived there. It must have looked like a house full of life, instead of one half empty.

  Yet now that Liesl stood in Herr Geiss’s house, she could feel the weight of his own loneliness, and it was far heavier. The air was almost wet with it, soaking the dark arms of the couches, the bare walls.

  She looked up, startled by her revelation. That was it: All the walls were bare. Not a single painting or mirror hung anywhere.

  Liesl called for Ani three times before setting off to look for him. Her heels clacked through the silent hall. Dust was already beginning to settle again, fuzzing the face of the Führer, the pretty shepherdess.

  “Ani,” she said again. “Where do you always go?”

  Finally she heard his muffled voice from a bedroom down the hall. “In here.”

  “It’s almost time to get the baby and go home,” she said.

  No response.

  “You better not be making any messes,” she warned as she stepped through the doorway.

  Tilted canvases filled the room beyond, some in frames, some loose, their brass staples showing. Some were of laden tables of fruit and game, and others were of women, and one or two looked very old and dusty. An easel stood empty by the window. Light flowed into the room, thick and gold with dust. It clung to the tubes of paints collected in a basket, and the stiff, color-spattered coat that Frau Geiss must have worn as a smock. Ani was sitting in the opposite corner, his legs crossed, looking at an unframed canvas. His small hands clutched it from either side. Liesl saw the smears of grime on his fingers.

  “Ani, that’s not yours,” she said as she strode in. “Put that down, or you’ll get it dirty.”

  He released the painting slowly. It showed a young blond mother in a white dress, holding her baby in a white-walled garden. The woman’s large pale arms circled the child, who was sitting upright, playing with a wooden boat, its sail striped with red. Tenderness suffused the mother’s face. It was easy to see her resemblance in his upturned nose, his soft square jaw, even the way he touched the sail, with a gentle, pondering finger.

  The child was Ani. Around him and his mother, violets bloomed, their centers black. On the mother’s left hand was the ring that Liesl now wore.

  Weimar

  December 1944

  For Hans, he had a book. For baby Jürgen, he had a rattle that he’d carved from a pine branch with one of the hospital scalpels. For Ani, he had a pair of shoes. They were good leather shoes, not the wooden clogs that most kids wore, not the shabby paper sandals of the poorest families, but shoes that smelled of hide, of the days before the war when schoolboys kicked real footballs into real nets. What a sound—that gasp of rope, that swish of victory. Frank had not heard it in years.

  The shoes’ former owner had cracked a few wrinkles in the leather uppers. They jagged and branched like lightning. Brightness scuffed the soles. But shoes this well made could last Ani for years, the toes stuffed with newsprint, and then with his growing feet. Ani could run in them. He could balance atop a stone wall and hop from one garden to another.

  Frank had hidden his sons’ gifts alongside an amber pendant the color of Liesl’s eyes. He had bought it off a nurse. He had paid too much, but he’d wanted something special for her. Together, all his presents nestled under a loose plank, next to the cans of lard and bouillon cubes that Liesl had sent him, ten packs of Junos, a bundle of reichsmark, and a needle and thread to darn the socks he would rip to shreds covering the two hundred fifty kilometers back to his hometown. The gifts and supplies gathered dust in the darkness. Frank sat a few feet above them on the bed, his cramped hands curled on top of an empty rucksack. In his mind, he packed it. He stuffed the shoes in the rucksack first, then the necklace, the rattle, and the book.

  He felt bad about the book. It wasn’t a good gift like the shoes. He could already sense his eldest son’s somber eyes on him, interpreting the gesture. New shoes for Ani. A book about horses for Hans. Hans didn’t like horses. He liked tanks. He would be ten by the time Frank returned, and Ani halfway to seven. They would be taller and thinner, and they wouldn’t run to him the way they once had, blond heads cupped under his chin.

  Frank imagined their future shyness, even their anger. He recalled his words to Hans, I was six years old when my own father left to serve our country, his voice brimming until it broke. His emotion had embarrassed him and he’d gripped Hans by his thin shoulders until the boy’s eyes popped. I had to be the man around here, understand?

  It was not what he’d meant to say.

  Frank slumped lower, jarring his arms. Jolts of pain shot up his wrists. After spending six hours trying to reconstruct a young Rhinelander’s severed nose, Frank’s fingers had curled into a clutch. He tried to stretch them flat, but they ached and stabbed.

  To shake off the pain, he tried to imagine standing now and sliding the rucksack onto his back. It didn’t feel right. The corner of the book would jab his spine.

  A siren whined. Out the window, Frank saw a string of ambulances bumping into the rutted hospital yard from the east. To the west lay the road to Weimar, the cultural capital, where the country’s greatest poet had lived and died.

  It was the third influx that day. They had radioed ahead and Frank had been ordered to rest through it.

  “You couldn’t cut a straight line through a loaf of bread,” the scrub nurse had said, herding him out.

  Frank averted his eyes from the pane. He tried not to listen to the sound of doors opening, the orderlies calling out directions toward the delousing
chambers. He kept mentally shoving things into the rucksack. It was a nightly habit, indulging in a dark fantasy of the Russians closing in from the east, Warsaw, Poznan, then his escape and flight. He had been plotting it since the October day he’d arrived, a rusty reconstructive surgeon expected to repair the limbs and faces of men blown apart in battle. And while the soldiers’ skin healed until they were ready for the surgeries he wasn’t sure he could accomplish, he’d found the rucksack and added the cigarettes, wishing guiltily for the war to end before he had to cut into men.

  Boots clacked down the hall outside his room. Frank hid the rucksack under the coverlet.

  The steps grew louder. Then a whistle. It was Captain Schnell tweedling a popular song. The lyrics bubbled through Frank’s mind: “Es ist so schön Soldat zu sein, Rosemarie . . . Nicht jeder Tag bringt Sonnenschein, Rosemarie.” It’s so nice to be a soldier, Rosemarie. Not every day brings sunshine, Rosemarie. Susi had always hated it (Don’t make me Rosemarie!), and so sometimes he’d sung it to tease her. Frank felt his face go heavy, remembering.

  Schnell’s head poked through the doorway. “Taking a break?” he said. “They’ll be delousing for quite a while.”

  Frank raised his hands, wrists parallel, like a prisoner. “Linden sent me away. To rest.”

  Dr. Linden, Frank’s anesthesiologist, had nicknamed the captain der Schnellwachsener for the hair that continually grew from his ears and nose. But hair wasn’t really Schnell’s main feature. It wasn’t weight, either, though Schnell had the same barrel figure as Göring. It was the color of his cheeks: so pink they were almost garish. It looked as if he rubbed his face in beet juice every morning.

  Schnell was a Party fanatic, the sort Frank had spent most of his spa years avoiding, infuriating Susi. You could be a Gauleiter by now, if you’d just try to fit in. Fitting in didn’t mean Frank had to agree with all the rhetoric and flag-waving. It just meant being pleasant at the right times. If pleasantness had had a Party, Susi would have been its Führerin. No one had ever been able to refuse her warm smile, and she didn’t care who succumbed to her, as long as they increased her social power. Susi could butter up the most rabid of Frank’s patients, a Dachau colonel known for publically beating an insolent waiter, and remain completely apolitical. It was a fact that still fascinated and troubled Frank.