Motherland

by Maria Hummel

  “Won’t help, though. I can’t sleep,” Frank added.

  The captain’s eyes flickered over Frank’s fingers, as if he suspected the surgeon was exaggerating the pain. “Yes,” he said. “Well. A delivery came for you today.”

  Frank forced himself not to wince. In Liesl’s last letter, she’d hinted at sending a package containing money and a map. As Schnell clacked across the threshold, the room tightened and shrank to a tiny cell. Frank focused on the rusty joints of his cot.

  The captain held out a thin slip of paper. A telegram. The swastika had been wrinkled by someone’s thumb.

  “Take it,” said Schnell. “You’re a lucky man.”

  The paper slid into Frank’s shaking palm.

  “The OKW has summoned you to Berlin,” said Schnell. He was pink all the way up to his ears.

  Frank kept his face blank as he read the orders: Report to the Schwester Theresa Krankenhaus in Berlin by February 10. He had never heard of the Schwester Theresa Krankenhaus, but the deployment was a ticket to hell. Berlin was under constant bombardment: the Americans by day, the British at night. If the Russians crossed the Oder (when they crossed the Oder), they would join the party with their howitzers.

  Frank stared at the paper, trying to compose himself. February 10 was six weeks away. The stiff straps of the rucksack bulged into the back of his thigh.

  “From what I hear from Dr. Braun, they’re consolidating several reconstructive teams to Berlin,” said Schnell. “The whole hospital will be devoted to patients like yours.”

  Dr. Braun had hastily trained Frank when he’d first arrived in October and then moved on. Frank hadn’t thought he’d made much of an impression on the brusque, gray-headed surgeon—but he must have been following Frank’s cases, which, Frank had to admit, had been mostly successful. A whole hospital! To work with more skilled surgeons, to finally have the right equipment, to teach each other as the British had done at Sidcup in the last war. His mind began to swim at the possibilities—the collegial atmosphere, the medical breakthroughs.

  It had to be a mistake.

  “Am I the only one?” he said, thinking of his team, Linden and Frau Reiner.

  “So far,” Schnell said, and held out his hand. After a moment’s hesitation, Frank gave the telegram back to him.

  “You seem surprised,” said Schnell, and then after a pause, “I wasn’t.”

  The generosity in his tone sounded genuine. Frank rubbed his throbbing hands.

  “Ever modest!” said Schnell. “We’ll have an armed escort for you,” he added. “Are you a good shot?”

  Frank shifted on the bed. “I trained,” he said, and his eyes fell on Schnell’s shining boots. “But I’m not—”

  “I learned to shoot when I was seven years old,” Schnell said, and described holding the giant gun while his father walked him through the steps of loading, aiming, firing, and swearing on his life to protect his mother and sisters.

  “Once I had to stop a thief,” Schnell said. “I blasted out his knee in the dark.” He touched the Celtic cross pinned exactly halfway up his torso. “So I blast him with a bullet and he starts screaming,” he said. “I drop the gun and light the lamp.”

  Frank shook his head. What would he tell Liesl?

  “And what do you know, it was our neighbor,” Schnell said in a wondering voice. “Our next-door neighbor.”

  “It’s been a long day,” Frank said, and pressed his fists to his eyes, but Schnell went on, describing how his mother burst in and started weeping, and the neighbor screamed in pain as the police came and took him away.

  With his eyes closed, Frank’s mind spun, imagining what would happen if he wrote home about the news. A summons to Berlin. He imagined Liesl’s frown as she scanned the letter. Someone must have noticed the work I’ve done here. But Berlin! The last stronghold of the Reich. Escaping Weimar would be far easier when the Red Army came.

  Schnell’s cough snapped Frank back into the room with the peeling yellow paint.

  “Strange thing was, I knew it was him before I saw his face in the firelight,” the captain said. His cheeks were so bright they pulsed.

  Frank had to look away. He grunted. “Smart kid.”

  The siren sounded again outside and the captain glanced out the window.

  “We had to become soldiers so young, didn’t we?” Schnell murmured, and again he appeared to be waiting for some acknowledgment: Yes, on the thousand nights when my father did not come home, I lay in my bed and imagined I was him in France. And yes, I shot those bastards, shot them all dead. Now my own sons are aiming into the same dark and firing.

  “We did what we had to do,” Frank said finally.

  “That’s exactly so.” Schnell sounded pleased. He slapped the doorjamb. “Have a good sleep.”

  Frank said good-bye and listened to the boots receding. Yet instead of lying back, he raised his eyes to the glass, the crowded yard. More boys from the Volkssturm. The only thing the hospital had not run out of in the past month was razor blades. The patients were all too young to need them. They came from the front full of heady, agonized optimism, their chatter filling the white-painted rooms. They came with fever, frostbite, and festering wounds but were everlastingly grateful to be hauled out of reach of the Russians. Better to die among their own than to have their balls ripped off, their eyes gouged out with spoons.

  Germany was retreating, drawing all its resources back to the capital. And he was a resource. He was a resource. But he was also a husband and father.

  Frank pulled the rucksack back out, tipping open its dark mouth.

  Another ambulance drove into the yard, carving black tracks in the snow and mud. An orderly threw its doors open. Frank watched as the wounded unloaded, some hopping down, some easing to the bumper and sliding off. Others were carried.

  The last came out on a stretcher, his body limp, his face engulfed in bandages. It was impossible to see if his eyes were open, and yet his chest swelled when the orderlies lifted him down.

  The deep breath seemed to say I made it. Frank’s eyelids hurt.

  By the time the last patients reached the door to the hospital, he heard a quick patter in the hall and someone calling his name.

  He shook his fingers hard, the knuckles knocking together until they straightened. Ignoring the pain, he stood.

  The rucksack slapped the floor, the leather sighing as it fell against itself. He pushed it under his mattress.

  On the way from his barracks to the hospital’s main building, Frank passed into the freezing night. A cloudy night, safe from raids. Into the bluing air he walked, feeling its color and sharpness grip him. His lashes hardened and stuck. He passed in sight of the guard station and the hospital’s incinerator, both in the distance, on opposite sides of the field outside Weimar where the military encampment rose. He passed the humps of summer grass, buried under trampled snow, and the ribbons of moonlight that showed the wheel ruts. He passed the old Frank, who would not have noticed such things, the man before Susi’s death, who had not felt beaten by time. He passed the darkness of the pines beyond the fields, and the thought of Liesl, clutching him like a life preserver in her sleep the night before he’d left Hannesburg. He passed the end of the war and kept walking back to the war’s beginning, when the job at the spa was just a stopping place on the way to his surgical career, just a temporary title so he could spend time with his young sons and give his wife the luxuries she longed for. He passed his father’s death of a sudden stroke, and the move into his father’s villa so that his sons could run and sleep in the same childhood rooms, and bounce a ball against the same garden wall. He passed the beginning of the war and walked back to the day he assisted in his first surgery, fixing the cleft palate of a teenage girl, and heard the chief surgeon’s approving silence at his incisions, his capacity to focus. The names of great medical men had still burned in his mind then: Antonio Branca, Heinrich von Pfolsprundt, Sir Harold Delf Gillies. They rose like flares into the sky of his fut
ure and faded slowly, year by year, first as he realized that he would never be a great man and, later, that he might never be anyone at all. But the weight of a scalpel in his hand had never changed. And his hands were stronger and surer than ever, as if they had been waiting to do this work.

  He passed the sunken spot in the snow where Frau Reiner, his scrub nurse, had thrown up after their first solo surgery—on nineteen-year-old Helmut Alliner—extending a local flap over the boy’s shattered cheek. He passed his own sleepless nights before Alliner’s surgery, and every surgery after, knowing he was finally learning his craft, but on live men, while his sons grieved alone with their new mother. He passed the day he married Liesl, and the weeks after their wedding, when he’d slept on a separate bed, afraid to make her pregnant, afraid she would want to be. He passed the night they’d first made love. Liesl had shuddered at first, then clung to him, wrapping her legs around him and biting his shoulder so her moans wouldn’t wake the baby.

  He passed a stick poking up from the snow, where a German shepherd used to be tied. It had been a hospital mascot until one night in November when an ambulance had run it over. Garren Linden had loved the dog, and he begged Frank to try to save it, so they tried, gassing the beast’s muzzle until it calmed, and stitching up the great big wound in its head. It died anyway, and they got drunk together and took the dog to Bundt, the Pole who ran the incinerator, and watched its fur catch fire.

  Clutching his coat close around him, Frank went the long way, around the back of the main ward. He entered a side door by the storage room, where supplies were running out. The loss wasn’t drastic yet. Replacement medicines, equipment, and bandages still arrived weekly, checklisted and accounted for, but each month the crates were fewer. Rumors reached them that all the country’s factories were being converted to munitions-making, that deep in the mountains near Weimar, the army was building a giant weapon that could reach London and Moscow and New York. The missiles would fly, enemies across the oceans and plains would die, and the German people could go home. And home would be the whole world.

  No one believed the rumors, but no one spoke up against them, either. All night, planes roared overhead. When it was cloudy, it was impossible to tell which countries had sent them into the sky.

  Frank worried most about the dropping stores of morphine. Nothing else relieved the suffering of burn victims, and he had two patients who would die from pain without it. He cracked the door and peered in the storage room. Light fell over the shelves, and bottles glimmered. He heard a muffled giggle, and shut the door. His stomach twisted as he took the hall toward the examining room where Frau Reiner usually triaged his patients. He breathed into the feeling, wondering why, why be jealous of a couple of people sneaking some fun in these bitter nights? But it wasn’t jealousy exactly. It was the feeling you got after a funeral, when you saw a woman laughing, and she looked ridiculous with her mouth hanging open like that and her breath chuffing out, and you wished you could remember how to do it, let go of yourself so lightly, so easily.

  A flood of new patients entered the hall, led by an orderly, and Frank winced at the beaten faces of the German army. A few noticed the stripes on his coat and fumbled for their caps as he passed, but others just stared at the floor, struggling to put one foot in front of the other. How long before the surrender? If there could be time enough to go to Berlin—

  A soldier swayed into him. He reached out and propped up the kid, the weight like a wet sandbag in Frank’s palm, until the kid’s comrades grabbed him and pulled him along. It all happened without a word. Frank halted for a moment, ashamed of his wish. Then he passed his own name, whispered by the orderly. Doktor Kappus, one of our best surgeons. And then he was at the examining room door.

  The patient’s face was still covered when Frank arrived. Gauze encircled the face from the nose down to the chin, smoothing the man’s profile to an egg. A thatch of thin, mud-colored hair poked from his head. On his upper cheeks, a sickly beard was growing. He appeared to be asleep.

  Frank approached him silently. The man’s chest rose and fell with a steady breath, and from underneath the gauze came a light wheezing, like the last gasp of air in a bellows. Bones protruded in his exposed wrists. There was a natural heft to the patient’s frame, but hunger had carved out every hollow.

  Frank heard the scrub nurse come in behind him, and he twisted to glimpse Frau Reiner’s black hair, pouty red lips. The widow from Wuppertal. Linden was in love with her.

  “Cause of injury?” said Frank.

  The nurse read from a letter in the patient’s pocket: A large piece of shell had entered the patient’s mouth and come out the other side. Considerable damage to the skin and muscles, though the jaw was mostly intact. “Four weeks ago,” she said. “He’s been in a field hospital.”

  Frank eyed the dirty bandages. “They should have brought him here sooner,” he said. He nodded at her to peel them away, watching the tension in the skin beneath. What once had been a jaw and chin now looked like a shallow basin of flesh with a drain in the middle. The vertical, outward slopes of a healthy cheek caved inward, and the healing skin was thin and blue, the pulp of muscle still visible under it. However poor and useless the dressing, though, there was no sign of infection. A relief. Another few weeks of healing, and the man might be operable. He gently set the bandages back in place. They weren’t necessary, but he didn’t want to shock the patient if he was used to wearing them.

  “Officer or enlisted?” Frank said as he checked the man’s neck. It was completely intact. Linden would have no trouble with tracheal anesthesia. He gestured to the nurse to open the patient’s shirt, and the man’s eyelids fluttered. Frank bent next to her and fitted his stethoscope to his ears. He could smell Frau Reiner’s hair. It had a clean, earthy odor, like warm hay.

  “Officer, I believe,” said Frau Reiner. She straightened and returned to the papers again.

  The heartbeat was strong but rapid. A milky sheen suffused the skin of the chest.

  “Might need a transfusion,” said Frank.

  “Lieutenant,” read Frau Reiner. “Heinrich Hartmann.”

  Frank jerked. His stethoscope whacked the table and woke the patient, who looked up with startled gray-blue eyes.

  “Lieutenant Hartmann,” said Frank, forcing a smile. “I’m Doktor Kappus.”

  He waited, but the eyes blinked, unrecognizing. Could it be another man with the same name? Both were common enough.

  “You’ve been brought here for surgery,” Frank said, and explained how they let the face heal before they reshaped it. “The more skin we have to work with, the better,” he said.

  “Heinrich Hartmann, birthplace Hannesburg,” said Frau Reiner. “Your hometown.”

  The patient stared blankly. He and Frank hadn’t seen each other since they were children, but surely Hartmann would remember the name. If not the son’s, then the father’s.

  “He’s deaf,” said Frau Reiner, still reading. “It says here that you can communicate with him in writing, that he can read and respond.”

  “I think I might know him,” said Frank, already scribbling on a pad. “I think we went to school together.” He was surprised how happy and agitated he was to meet an old schoolfellow again, someone from the days when his own father had gone off to fight. Someone who remembered the clatter of horse hooves down Elizabethenstrasse, the egg man and milkman making their rounds. But Hartmann, of all people! His mind whirred back: Hartmann’s father had never come home from France. Hartmann’s mother had reared him alone, nurturing his brilliance and scorn until they shone like the beams of searchlights.

  Frank inked his full name, and Do you remember me? He held the paper up for the bandaged man to read.

  The eyes scanned the words. Frank waited for them to flare with recognition. Instead they moved to Frank’s face and the head slowly shook.

  You were my father’s student. Herr Otto Kappus.

  A hesitation and then another shake.

  Frank’
s stomach began to knot. Heinrich Hartmann from Hannesburg, yes?

  This time the man’s hand rose and wagged for the pen. Frank put the pen in it and held the pad vertical while the hand scratched.

  Yes.

  And then the fist fell to the table and the eyes closed. Just like that. Interview over, leaving Frank standing there, his next question ready, his fingers curling to write it. The whitewashed room gaped around him, and his coat felt thin and stiff.

  “Christ, he’s exhausted,” said Frau Reiner. “How are we going to feed him enough?”

  Frank didn’t answer, breathing into the uneasy feeling that spread through him whenever he was reminded of his father’s death. The room blurred. Beyond the double doors, he heard the clatter of wounded men being herded to the delousing chambers. There, they would strip and hang their clothes to be gassed and sterilized while they showered in another room. It had to be done, but the practice bothered Frank. The hospital welcomed its patients like criminals.

  “Once you start talking about old times, he’ll know who you are,” said Frau Reiner. She stood close to him.

  “I don’t think he talks much,” muttered Frank.

  “Best kind of man.”

  He switched on his headlamp and peered into the hole that had been Hartmann’s mouth. The light flashed over the glistening maw, the exposed roots of teeth. Every bite the man took had to be an agony. “We’ll be able to reconstruct the mouth, but it will probably take more than one procedure,” he said to her, pointing. “He’s fortunate, though. The mandible isn’t fractured. He hasn’t lost bone, just tissue.”