by Maria Hummel
The horse snorted. He nudged toward her pockets. “You be a good boy,” she croaked, smiling into the tears. “You be a good boy, now.” Then she brushed her wrist against her face and hurried back inside, ignoring the dumbfounded gazes of Hans and Ani.
“You always liked horses, didn’t you,” Uta said as Liesl thumped into the room again. “I was always jealous of how much they liked you.”
Liesl slid into slippers, picked up Jürgen, and sat him on the couch. He squirmed and made a noise of protest, craning for the floor. She put his fingers on one of her buttons.
“And I know you’re trying,” said Uta. “There isn’t a woman on earth who tries harder than you.”
Liesl snorted. “I can think of a few.”
The child’s fingers pushed her button in and out, in and out.
“It’s just—what will you do if Frank never comes home again?” said Uta.
Liesl shrugged. She felt the tears coming again.
“What will you do if this house gets destroyed?” said Uta. Her usual sardonic tone was gone.
Jürgen chuckled and grabbed her hair. He twisted it around his finger.
Liesl’s chin shot up. “What would you do?”
“I don’t know,” Uta said. “I don’t know anymore. That’s why I’m asking you.”
In the window’s light it was clear Uta was pregnant now. A sickle of flesh was growing at her waist, under her jawbone.
“I don’t know, either,” Liesl said. “I have them. Frank. The boys.” Jürgen yanked and her scalp stung. “Stop,” she murmured. “I have this life.”
Uta wiped her face with her hand. She tried to smirk, but her lips wobbled. “I don’t want this life,” she said. “That’s why I should go back. They must miss me like crazy. And I can look out for your husband when he gets there.”
“But you’re safe here,” Liesl whispered. “And the baby.”
Uta dotted the edges of her eyes with a handkerchief. “Ja, ja,” she said in the singsong, detached voice that women of their village had used when a crop failed or a barn burned down.
“Is my life really so awful?” Liesl demanded.
Outside, the man slapped the reins and the sled budged so slowly it seemed as if the landscape was shifting around it. Uta fisted her handkerchief and tucked it back in her pocket. She sniffed. “No,” she said. “It’s not awful at all.”
After her disappointment with Berte Geiss, Liesl tried to rein in her expectations for the new neighbors. Still, she felt predisposed to prefer the Dillmans. A humble family of miners from Silesia. They were already clear in her mind. According to the papers from the housing office, the wife was young and her children had simple names like Otto and Gertrude. Their clothes would be threadbare, their teeth crooked and gapped, but their cheeks ruddy, full of health. They would go to bed early, like good country people, and rise with the dawn.
The Winters, by contrast, hailed from a city in East Prussia that had a squalid reputation, and the children had grand, unpronounceable names like Giselher and Dankwart. Furthermore, they appeared to be almost all teenage boys, and capable, Liesl thought, of supporting their mother so she shouldn’t have to rely on strangers to take them in. The Winter family business was cleaning and repairing typewriters, which meant they would stink up the house with ink and solvent. And the noise! Clattering keys, dings, rattles, clunks—how would Jürgen ever nap?
Liesl worked to set her prejudices aside as eleven o’clock passed. The families were supposed to arrive at noon with the man from the housing office. Ani and Hans were already stuffed into starched shirts, and Jürgen wrapped in his best jumper. They played miserably under her vigilant watch. Even Uta had risen to the occasion and curled her hair, but it was still too long and hung around her neck instead of her cheeks. She wore a look of amused disdain as Liesl bustled upstairs and downstairs, checking the rooms one last time. They sparkled, speckless and fragrant with the leathery smell of polish that Liesl had applied herself until long after midnight.
Finally the doorbell rang. The two families flooded through the threshold in no particular order, so it was hard to tell a Winter from a Dillman or a Dillman from a Winter, though one family seemed, as a rule, to have darker hair. Preceding them up the railing was a combined odor: wood smoke and urine and sour milk. How long had it been since they’d had a proper bath or sleep? Their clothes appeared pasted onto their bodies; the girls looked like baby dolls stuffed into the wrong outfits. The boys’ pants were short as knickers.
They didn’t stop still for proper introductions, either. The two mothers craned past Liesl to see the rooms beyond, and the kids burst through to take the stairs and check things out for themselves. Their steps made a thunder and their hands smudged clouds onto the polished rail. Within moments, all shine was gone.
“Dillmans upstairs, Winters downstairs,” a new man from the housing office said. He stood behind the families, holding a sheaf of papers. He had a crisp uniform and clean, trimmed fingernails, as if he, too, had dressed up for the occasion. “Dillmans upstairs, Winters downstairs.”
But the kids didn’t listen. They ran pell-mell into every empty room, and Hans leapt after them, calling out, “Wait, wait.”
Ani followed his brother, clinging to the rail. The jerky, weak way he moved caught one mother’s eyes.
“Children,” the mother said, reaching for the boys who were already too far away.
“He’s not contagious,” Liesl said loudly, her cheeks burning. “He’s not contagious at all.”
And then they all were looking at Ani, the kids and the mothers and the government official, and she saw how different he seemed from the other children. Their limbs were made of muscle and sinew, their dirt-smudged faces mobile and full of curiosity. Ani gave them a smile, his usual innocent, hopeful smile, upper teeth poking over his lip, but the blue pallor of his skin distorted it and made it look sad and hungry. “This is my house,” he said, his head flicking once, twice, three times to the right, his eyes blinking rapidly. For a moment, the entire stairwell fell silent as the boy twitched and jerked.
Weimar
January 1945
In the cafeteria, Linden, Frank, and Frau Reiner ate the way they operated on patients: together, not looking at one another, making jibes from the corners of their mouths. There was nothing to savor about the meals. The cook’s chief ingredient appeared to be exertion; he made his stews with so much noise that people joked that his hands must be made of the same iron as his pots. Crash. Clank. The pungent, greased-up flavors always stuck in Frank’s throat.
One day Frau Reiner launched into an extended complaint about the nurse’s undersupplied accommodations. “Frau Hupper has two pillows and she won’t share either of them with the new girls,” she said. “Everybody knows, but she pretends she doesn’t notice.”
“Maybe she’s saving her pillows for Herr Hupper,” said Linden. “Mail,” he added, pointing at the delivery boy. Mail. The high point or low point of a day. They all stopped talking until the boy came to their table.
Frank was expecting a letter from the chief surgeon at the new hospital in Berlin. He’d written about Hartmann’s case, hoping the surgeon would be intrigued enough to accept the patient. Instead, the boy handed him a letter from Liesl, and something with an OKW seal for Frau Reiner.
“It’s a transfer,” Linden said to the nurse. “They’re sending you away, too.”
Frau Reiner ran her finger over the seal and did not open it.
Frank ripped into his letter, scanning the loopy, cheerful handwriting of his second wife. After a few sentences, the words began to blur. He caught a phrase here and there, housing office and they sound like clean families and bed in your father’s study, but his mind balked at picturing what Liesl was describing: his childhood home invaded, his sons crushed into a closet bedroom, his wife and baby sleeping on the study’s dusty floor.
He let the papers fall next to his soup bowl and attacked the stew. It tasted like a rat’s backwas
h. After a few bites, he set his spoon down.
“Bad news?” said Frau Reiner. She had pushed up her striped sleeves and taken off her white cap, and she looked like a farmwife sitting down for supper.
He forced himself to shrug as he explained the refugees moving into his house, squashing his family into a single floor, while the neighbor’s house gaped empty, housing one man and his daughter-in-law. What had happened to Herr Geiss’s promise? He’d told Frank that the house would stay off the refugee list. “Just eleven women and children tramping all over my home,” he said.
“Bad luck,” said Linden. He turned to Frau Reiner. “Why don’t you open it?”
Frau Reiner placed her thumb under the envelope flap and tore. Linden tried to scan it over her shoulder, but she pulled away. “I’m going to Berlin, too,” she said, her tone unreadable.
“I knew it,” said Linden. “And now they’ll send me to Bavaria to put the cows to sleep.”
“Different hospital,” said Frau Reiner, still reading. “But it’s in the center of town.”
“How romantic,” said Linden. “You and Frank can meet by the light of the incendiary bombs.”
Frank shifted in his chair. Linden’s banter suddenly irritated him. He kept seeing filthy kids climbing on his parents’ wedding furniture, sleeping in his beds. One family might have been tolerable, but two? How did such things happen?
Out the window, Bundt pushed his cart to the incinerator, still wearing the same rags for shoes.
“Stupid Polack,” he heard himself say. “He thinks I’m going to run. He accused me of it the other day.”
His friends looked at him, their mouths slightly open. In all their conversations, none of them had ever mentioned desertion.
“Crazy, isn’t it?” Frank took a sip of bitter ersatz coffee. “I’m about to be promoted.”
“Bundt?” Linden’s brown eyes widened with disbelief. “He can’t even speak German. Were you reading his mind?”
“He was reading his smoke signals,” said Frau Reiner.
Linden smirked and swabbed at the crumbs in his beard.
Frank felt a rush of aggravation again, this time at himself, for playing along with the endless, pointless joking, for drawing Bundt into it. He folded Liesl’s letter. He creased the sentences about the new hordes filling his house, and stuffed them away. He scraped up the last of his stew. The din of the room filled his ears.
After dark, he went to find Bundt. He wanted to buy the shoes back. The least he could do now was to send all his gifts home, to give his family some pleasure.
The Pole had his own small quarters off the main ward. Frank knocked. After a silence, he opened the door and looked in. The room was unheated, no light but dim moonrays leaking through one small window. Frank shivered in his coat. A blanket rested on the floor, folded into an exact rectangle, like a flag on a coffin. A photograph hung from a nail. It showed Bundt and a young woman, practically a girl, with a baby in her arms. That was all. The room had no closet and no shelves. If Bundt had found the shoes, they weren’t here. Or maybe they were hidden under the floor. Frank prodded the planks with his toes, looking for a loose one. He heard a voice on the other side of the wall and jumped back a step. Then he realized Bundt’s room bordered one of the wards. At night Bundt must have slept on the floor, beneath the level of the patient’s beds.
Frank slipped out the door and was halfway down the hall when he ran into the Pole.
“Evening,” Frank said.
Bundt nodded and slowed his gait, and Frank slowed, too, but they didn’t stop; they kept passing each other. Bundt’s ashy smell filled the narrow space.
“Did you find them?” Frank blurted when he was almost beyond the Pole.
Bundt halted. He was holding thick fireplace gloves in one hand and he looked down at them. “These?” he said. “I get these because my hands was burning. From one of nurses.” He smiled up. “Pretty one, too.”
“I gave you some shoes,” Frank said.
Bundt cocked his head. “You gave me shoes,” he repeated in a puzzled tone.
“I was saving them for my son,” said Frank.
“You gave me boy shoes. For my son?” Bundt’s grin widened.
“No. For you.” Frank found himself grinning, too, a big, sloppy clown grin. “They’re not in your room. I know you hid them somewhere,” he said. “Name your price. I’ll pay you for them.”
Bundt’s body went utterly still. His round cheeks fell sharply from their bones. “You search my room,” he said slowly. “What I have in there? I have nothing.”
“But I’m offering to pay you,” said Frank. “How much do you want?”
Bundt’s eyes were cold.
“You pay me all your money for a thousand years, and it not be enough,” he said finally.
“Never mind,” Frank muttered, and started off down the hall.
“Ten thousand years,” Bundt called after him.
It was sleeting outside when Frank read the chief surgeon’s letter twice, three times, and then scribbled Hartmann’s name into the operating log. All the way to the wards, the roof rattled with the sound of the frozen rain, and his mind ran over the confident but respectful tone of his future colleague. The surgeon hinted that if Frank’s remote skin graft on Hartmann was a success, then Frank might be able to put together a clinical trial in Berlin. Such scientific study wouldn’t end with the end of the war. The promises made Frank heady, but he steeled himself to stay calm. Hartmann’s surgery would be a test, he told himself. If he succeeded, if he proved himself, perhaps he could bargain for a furlough to go home before Berlin.
You can’t be transferred, he wrote to Hartmann, perched on the edge of his bed. But he thinks I can try a remote skin graft. If it takes, you may only need a minor second operation.
How soon?
Frank grinned. We can start prepping you tomorrow.
Hartmann seized his hand. Its dry, claw-like texture surprised Frank. It felt like the hand of an old man. He spoke aloud, without realizing it, “It’s all right, don’t thank me yet,” but then he felt the hard thing Hartmann had shoved from his cuff into Frank’s. A white wedge. Frank pulled away, and for a moment they just stared at each other; Frank was conscious that some new kind of transaction had passed between them, not just the sympathy of doctor and patient, or of old childhood friends, but something more demanding and dangerous. His stomach twisted. I have a career now, he whispered internally. I have a wife and sons.
He rose without speaking and left Hartmann’s bedside. He didn’t dare glance to see if anyone had noticed, but he shoved his hands into his coat, pushing the wedge of paper deep.
The sleet stopped abruptly and a silence spread over the wards. He heard his own footsteps passing by the foot of the patient’s beds, and their broken conversations resuming. He heard one fellow complaining about his frostbitten feet, and another relating the exact recipe for his father’s Spätzle, and others bargaining for cigarettes and magazines. The patients had an extensive black market, trading goods and services. Once Schnell had cracked down on a patient offering sexual favors, but for the most part the bartering ebbed and flowed undisturbed.
He passed through the far door and entered the storage room, relieved to be alone among the silent crates and bottles. What if the paper was simply a message for Hartmann’s mother? Or something humble like a recipe or a list of possessions? Or a will? What if it was intended for someone else? He fingered the smooth wedge. If he opened it, he would be taking responsibility for what was inside. He could be implicated. He could be arrested.
A movement outside the window caught Frank’s eye. He peered out.
There had to be at least thirty people walking down the road. They wore dresses and suits several layers thick against the cold, making their figures puffy and oversize. They were all women and children, except for one elderly man. They surrounded a single wagon pulled by a horse. Out of it jutted a tarp-covered rectangle, moored on every side by ropes. A smal
l rip in the tarp showed a golden wood beneath, and the round knob of a chest of drawers. The chest appeared to be the only furniture they were transporting. But the roads to the east were broken ruts of mud and snow—how had they gotten it this far?
Schnell and his guards walked out to the group with their guns drawn, shouting and gesturing. A woman produced papers from inside her coat, and the captain paged through them. Then he shoved them back at her and barked another command. After a moment, she climbed into the wagon and with stiff hands began unknotting the ropes holding down the tarp. Schnell’s shoulders twitched as she struggled with the twine. A kid jumped up beside her. The guns rose perceptibly. She ordered the boy down with an anguished look.
Finally the ropes came free and the woman peeled back the tarp, then pulled at the top drawers. Whatever was inside was so heavy, her arms wagged as she propped it up. She said something to Schnell, and he yelled again, his face pink.
With a look of pain she pulled the drawer fully out, and a few black insects rose up. They were smaller than buttons. They circled lazily, drifting down. The soldiers danced back, guns higher. She tipped the drawer. Inside, golden-brown ledges, the sleepy motions of tiny bodies. Honeycomb. They were beekeepers.
Schnell waved them on. Frank turned away, impressed with the woman’s calm. Her fearlessness pricked at him. He slowly opened Hartmann’s papers.
The first page, in tiny, crabbed handwriting, was an inscription. Man without a Face—These poems are to be published in the event of my death. They are dedicated to Frank and Otto Kappus.—Heinrich Hartmann
The second page had only ten words on it. The third, barely fifteen. Frank read and flipped, and read and flipped, puzzled. The poems didn’t make any sense at all, their language warped and knotted, their images tortured. There were no rhymes, no rhythmic lines, no sentiments at all except the most twisted kind. What did black hands / swamp and clutch mean? Flog spark cuttle? Here and there phrases stood out that made Frank think of that winter, its bleakness and fear and lonely hours. Only the strong / have fallen, Hartmann wrote. When every tree / wears / the shadow / of white.
