by Maria Hummel
In the silence after the planes passed over, Uta sagged onto the couch in Otto Kappus’s study and looked up at the ceiling. “I’ll never forget my first sight of you,” she said. “A little daisy from the fields, and now look at you: the very picture of Bürgertum.”
Liesl pulled an eiderdown from the wardrobe and handed it to her friend, listening with one ear for Jürgen, sleeping in the other room.
“Remember how I used to visit you on Sunday nights and tell you all the spa gossip?” said Uta. “I always loved your room. It was so peaceful, so sweet, so positively Liesl.” Her blue eyes glistened. “But this is yours, too. I’m happy for you.”
Liesl sat down on the edge of the couch. “Thank you,” she said.
“What did you use to make that room smell so good? Something with orange slices.”
Her room. It had been so small, any scent had filled it. And high up. She’d been able to look out, down to the courtyard where clients walked in robes to the sulfur baths and massage rooms, but no one could ever see back in.
“I stuffed an orange with cloves,” said Liesl. “When we could get oranges.” She thought she heard a muffled cry, and wanted to rise, but felt her friend’s eyes on her and stayed still.
“That’s right,” said Uta. “You were always handy with herbs. You used to make me marigold water for my hair.” She smiled. “Did I tell you what Göring said to Emmy about her hair the other day?”
Liesl hesitated, silent. She didn’t want to hear about Emmy Göring’s hair, though she missed her talks with Uta. Sunday gossip nights had been a tradition, and in the loneliness of her life at the spa Liesl had looked forward to news, any news, especially Uta’s chatter about this or that officer or his mistress’s or wife’s scandalous behavior. An unspoken contract between the two friends dictated that they would always find fault with the other women for wanting a man too much. You didn’t let men stake their claims. You didn’t believe in Kinder, Kirche, Küche, like the girls they’d grown up with, now farmer’s and baker’s wives, orbiting their children, their church, their kitchen.
You stayed free.
Stay free—it had been both their prayer and their battle hymn. Stay free when two adjutants fought over Uta in the courtyard, their knuckles thudding like hammers into meat. Stay free when a peach-faced Bavarian officer started leaving poems for Liesl at the Kinderhaus. No love, and certainly no marriage. Uta put her singing first, and Liesl pledged her heart to the state. Instead of loving flesh-and-blood men, she loved the voice of the Führer, and instead of loving her own children, she fell for the pitiful orphans in paper clothes in The Soviet Paradise, and sat through speech after speech against the horrors of Jewish Bolshevism.
But her fervor had died long before Frank proposed, and now it all seemed like such a long time ago. Another life.
“No, what did Göring say?” Liesl forced herself to say. “To Emmy?”
“Never mind. You don’t care,” said Uta, propping herself on one arm. “I’m here because I want to find Dr. Schein.”
The name sent a jolt down Liesl’s spine. She tiptoed to the hall and peered into the darkness, toward the boys’ room. No noise. She pulled the door shut and sat down at Frank’s father’s desk, the only other chair in the room.
Again? She wanted to say, but instead she asked if Dr. Schein had moved from the city where they had gone together seven years ago, first by train, then two kilometers on foot, their cheeks burning as the neighborhoods got shabbier and shabbier.
“Maybe,” said Uta. “They said he relocated his practice.”
“Did you ask at the registration office?” Liesl said.
“Still listed in Franconia. But he’s not there.”
“It was a long time ago,” Liesl said. “He could be anywhere by now.”
“I know,” Uta said. “But you could go to your husband’s old office and find out where Dr. Schein moved his practice. Say your husband needs to reach him. They’ll be able to make some calls. I’ve got money if you need to grease the wheels.”
Liesl walked to the wall where there hung a watercolor of the town’s famous lone white tower. It was a drenched picture, the tower smudged by fog and rain. She stared into its dreariness, trying to pull herself back to the conversation.
“There wasn’t anyone in Berlin?” she said finally.
“If this child’s father found out about its existence, he would make me deliver it and take it away from me,” said Uta. “He knows I’m not cut out to be a mother.”
Liesl touched the wall that connected the study to the bedroom where she and Jürgen slept. She remembered how they both stumbled on the broken cobblestone near Dr. Schein’s, how Uta had clutched her arm and asked, What am I doing? and she had said, You’re doing the right thing, because they were both so young. They needed to stay free. But now the thought of walking that walk again turned Liesl’s stomach. “We can raise the baby here,” she said quietly. “Frank and I will do it.”
Uta made a noise. “You would, wouldn’t you?” she murmured. “That’s why you’re my one true friend.” Then she sighed. “I can’t bring a monster into the world.”
“Your child would never be a monster,” protested Liesl.
“Maybe not mine. But his might,” Uta said, and then uttered a name Liesl didn’t recognize. She smiled grimly. “He likes his work, and he works at Plötzensee Prison.”
Plötzensee Prison, where Nazi resistors went to die, by guillotine or hanging. Liesl could not meet her friend’s gaze. “Does he know you’re gone?”
Uta didn’t reply right away. “He’s paying for my singing lessons,” she said. “He’s terribly critical of everyone, even Piaf and Dietrich, but he thinks I have real talent.” Her pupils were so huge the irises had vanished.
Liesl folded her arms. “I didn’t know you still wanted to sing,” she said.
“I want to be free,” said Uta. “When the war’s over, there’ll be Amis and Tommies crawling all over the country, wanting to be entertained. I’m learning English songs on my own.”
“You can’t plan for that,” Liesl said sharply. “You can’t just plan for that.”
“Why not?” said Uta. “Your life has changed. Why can’t mine?” She pulled up her right sleeve, revealing a familiar flash of gold: the thick modern bracelet that her first love, Hans-Paul Jost, had given her years ago. Uta had never sold or traded it, despite his betrayal. She unsnapped its amethyst clasp and set it on the desk.
A thin, urgent cry rose from the other room. “I’ll do what I can for you tomorrow,” Liesl said. “I need to turn out the light now.” Without waiting for a reply, she flicked the switch. Darkness bloomed over the room, erasing every shape: the desk, the bracelet, Uta lying on the sofa with her black-soaked eyes.
Liesl climbed in bed but couldn’t sleep. She stared at the outlines of the cradle, trying not to resent her friend. It was good to see Uta again, and Uta was in trouble again, serious trouble. Liesl couldn’t have one condition without the other. And now Liesl had three innocent children to care for, and not once had her friend considered them. Arriving with her red boots and her pride. I’ve got money. Well, why couldn’t she spend it finding a doctor herself ?
Liesl punched her pillow. She turned her mind to the book she was reading, but it was just an old tome of fairy tales. The characters never changed. Good girls stayed good, and the bad ones were witches. She turned her mind to Frank. Not Frank now, not Frank-heading-to-Berlin-and-abandoning-them-all, but Frank-who’d-wooed-her. It was girlish and naïve, she knew, but it comforted her to sort through their brief courtship, and the years of chance meetings at the spa before that, wondering when the romance had begun.
Frank had never shown any interest in her, not until after he was widowed. No. He had been too faithful to Susi for that. That first day by the pond, Liesl was sure she’d seemed like a silly, stupid teenager to him, all soaked and dripping over the Steitz boy she’d rescued. “Not stupid,” Frank had confirmed later. “Maybe silly. Y
ou looked like a drowned cat.”
That didn’t sound particularly enamored. Well, all right. A husband shouldn’t notice young girls. And yet if he hadn’t defended Liesl that day, and she him, would she trust him now? Was love just made up of simple incidents in which you brought out the best in another?
The day had begun ordinarily enough, with Frau Steitz, the wife of a high-ranking S.S. officer, arriving at the Kinderhaus flustered, pushing her twin nine-year-old boys ahead of her.
“I have an appointment. With Dr. Kappus,” she said, retreating out the door. “I’ll be back in an hour or two. Be good, Ernst. Be good, Max.”
After five minutes of watching the boys pretend they were panzer units and smash the toys in the one-story cottage, Liesl took them to the pond and accidentally dozed off. She woke to a wet thud and the sound of someone screaming, “Max, Max!” One of the boys was floundering in the water, the other gripping a floating log. Liesl leapt up, dazed, and threw herself into the pond.
A few thrashing minutes later, one twin ran for help while Liesl helped the other twin hobble onto the grass and sank down beside him, spreading out her robe, propping the boy’s skull.
“Ernst pushed me,” he said.
“It was an accident,” she said in a firm but consoling tone. Inside, she panicked. She would be fired for this, and then what? Back to the farm where no one wanted her? Her wet suit wilted against her belly with each exhale.
“Can you sit up?” said a male voice.
Liesl leapt up to face him, tall, blond, a spa co-worker she knew by name only. Unlike most of the staff, he wore no uniform, just a rumpled white shirt and wool trousers, and he carried a large leather bag loosely in his fingers, the way a tennis player might hold his racket after a game.
“Oh,” she said. “Is his mother coming?”
Something about the man’s expression made her aware of her wet hair, plastered to her forehead and ears. She lifted the rank locks and pushed them back.
“I heard the shouts.” The man set his leather bag on the grass, kneeling down beside the boy. He spoke quietly to him, first putting pressure on the head wound, then asking Max to squeeze his fingertips and toes, and touching each joint as he did. Without even looking at Liesl, he opened the bag, tossed her a white lab coat, and told her to put it on before she got hypothermia. Chills slid up her arms as she shoved them through the cotton.
“Am I going to bleed to death?” said Max.
“You’ll have a headache, that’s all.” The doctor looked Liesl in the eyes. The frankness in his gaze unnerved her. “Keep a good watch on him,” he said to her. “Wake him up once or twice tonight—”
“I’m not—” Liesl said, puzzled. She attacked her wet hair again, trying to sweep it behind her ear. “Do you know where his mother went?”
The doctor looked puzzled. “No.”
An awkward silence fell. The doctor pulled out a silver pocket watch, staring at the face. Max sniffed and leaked more tears. Liesl hugged the white coat closer, peering up the hill to the circle of yellow-painted buildings where officers soaked and relaxed.
“You have another appointment?” she said.
“Just bedtime.” The doctor gave a comic frown. “I have my own children to get home to.”
“That’s wonderful. How many?”
His cheeks flushed. “Well, just one,” he said. “And one on the way.”
Liesl’s congratulations faded as Ernst and his father appeared on the crest of the hill and barreled down the grass toward Max. Colonel Steitz wore his S.S. uniform buttoned to the top, his robust body puffing out of the tight black cuffs and collar. Earlier that summer, he had ordered two of his officers to beat up a waiter behind the kitchen. The waiter had made a snide comment about the Führer’s height. The beating had left him half deaf.
“What happened here?” the colonel snarled when he reached them.
Liesl felt the corners of her mouth quirking into a stupid grin, but she couldn’t speak.
“Your son was just being a good German boy,” the doctor said. “He has to risk his life at least once a day.”
The colonel laughed and sank down to his knees beside Max. “Twice a day for my boys.”
“Ernst pushed me off the log,” said Max.
“Ach, Max.” His father cuffed him lightly on the chest.
“He did. She didn’t believe me.”
Liesl shrank back, but the colonel didn’t even look at her. “No one likes a tattle,” he said gruffly to his son as the doctor told the colonel to watch Max carefully that night.
“I want some hot chocolate,” Max said.
“I’ll be back on Friday,” Dr. Kappus said. “I’d like to see him again then, Colonel Schultz.”
“Steitz,” said the colonel. He gathered Max up in his arms and lifted him like a bride. “You’re all right, Maxling,” he murmured into his son’s wet hair. Ernst stepped closer. Suddenly both boys seemed much younger, and their father larger, like the statue of a man.
“Good day, then,” the doctor said, turning away.
The colonel reached out and grabbed his sleeve. “And my wife? Where is she anyway?”
The doctor gazed at the hand twisted in the cloth.
“Frau Steitz,” the colonel bellowed. “Where is she?”
“I have no idea.” The doctor didn’t move, but his neck grew hard cords.
“She had an appointment with you at two,” Steitz growled. “Surely you saw her?”
As the doctor shook his head slowly, Max shifted to better regard the scene.
The colonel’s eyes began to bulge. “She had an appointment—”
“Oh, that’s right,” Liesl heard herself say. “She told me she was going for a walk instead.” She ignored Max’s sudden stare.
The colonel snorted. “Well, they didn’t hire you for your brains, did they?” he said, and resumed climbing the hill with his sons.
Liesl bowed her head and waited for the doctor to leave, but he remained beside her, watching the family retreat. Wind shifted over the pond. Near the far shore, a duck paddled alone, its brown feathers ruffled white.
When the family was almost out of sight, Liesl straightened. “Good day, then,” she said.
The doctor bent wordlessly and picked up his leather bag. A wadded blue napkin rolled out across the grass to reveal a slice of almond pastry. Whipped cream squeezed out the sides. He made a soft, embarrassed noise, half chuckle, half sigh. Liesl plucked up the cake, rewrapping the napkin.
“For your son,” she said, holding it out. The cake was heavy, flesh-weight.
The doctor’s fingers grazed hers as he accepted it. “My wife, actually,” he said, with a rueful smile. “It’s a bribe.”
Liesl picked up her bloody robe and folded it under her arm.
“She wants to know why I won’t bring her here,” he said. “Our little Hans could run around and she could relax. She deserves to relax.”
“It’s a good place for that,” Liesl said.
Water trickled down her scalp.
“Pardon me,” he said, and grabbed his bag. “Who are you here with anyway?”
Liesl blinked. On her index finger was a tiny tuft of whipped cream. She rubbed it away with her thumb, spreading the grease. She felt him watching her. She forced her voice to be light. “I run the Kinderhaus.” She pulled off one sleeve of the coat, but there was a sudden motion beside her, like a bird flying past her waist. When she looked down, she saw his broad hand encircling her wrist.
“Please keep it. You’re still cold,” he said, and showed her the prickled skin on her arms.
She’d refused, of course, blushing. Frank had shrugged, checked his watch, and rushed away, patting the cake in his pocket.
The hospital where Frank used to work was an old castle of a building. Its plumbing and lighting dated from the days before electricity and running water, and it had adapted uneasily to modernization. Iron hooks for oil lamps still remained, curving like torture instruments from th
e walls. The new lighting gave the old plaster a damp, cheesy hue and drove the spiders to the darkest corners, where they spun deep furs and dotted them with egg sacs. The engineers had not been able to submerge all the new pipes, so cords of metal ran everywhere, catching Liesl’s reflection and warping it as she hurried down the corridor to the medical records office.
The pram rattled before her. Jürgen’s hat slid off just as she reached the door. She stretched down to straighten it. When her fingers grazed his bare skin, she halted. She cupped her palm over his forehead. Hot. He rolled his face away and whimpered. She touched her own brow for reference. It didn’t feel much warmer than her hand. The baby blinked, but his eyes seemed unfocused. She ought to turn around. She ought to turn around right now, but she had promised to help Uta.
Inside a man sat before a large collection of ledgers. They rose in neat towers all over his desk and lined the shelves behind him from floor to ceiling. A few gaped open on the desk, exposing long columns of numbers and letters. The air had the stifled quality of a room that contains too much paper. The man did not look happy to see her. His hands drifted fitfully over his columns as she explained that her husband needed to get in touch with an old colleague.
“He has a special case just like one Dr. Schein had,” Liesl said, hoping the excuse would be enough.
The man checked his stacks with his eyes. He seemed afraid that she would make some sudden move and knock them down. He softened slightly when he heard Frank’s name but insisted it was not part of his job to handle the addresses of outside doctors. His job was handling patient records at this hospital.
Well, then who might be in charge of the addresses of doctors?
