Motherland

by Maria Hummel

  Maybe it was brilliance. Or maybe these were the writings of a madman. They certainly didn’t contribute to Hartmann’s case for sanity.

  Frank folded the packet and stuffed it under a ledge. His mind spun back to the surgeon’s explanation of successful remote grafts, how some doctors in Strasbourg had mapped vascular tissue and found the greatest concentration in the groin skin, making it most reliable for a remote graft. Of course all this was new, very new, the surgeon warned. Two or three separate surgeries using local flaps would be safer, but that option could take six months. If Frank felt the risk was worth it, then he could try a combination of techniques, remote and local. The chief surgeon seemed to be suggesting that experimentation was the order of the day—who knew how many patients lay ahead of them, and how quickly they would have to learn and adapt to the ravages of war?

  Hartmann was running out of time. The graft could be done. It could be done.

  Two shots rang out, and Frank peered out the window again. The refugees and their wagon had hustled nearly beyond the hospital grounds. The mothers looked back in fear, but the soldiers weren’t aiming at them. They were firing at the ground, leaping back, a strange, menacing glee on their faces.

  It took Frank another moment to realize: They were shooting the bees.

  Hartmann’s body looked shrunken and flat on the operating table. His ankles and feet protruded from the sheet, bony and gnarled, like roots exposed by storms. Linden loomed over his head, showing the patient the silver hook of his tracheal speculum, the machine that would pump ether and oxygen through it.

  Linden was a lavish explainer. He claimed that patients were more comfortable if they knew what his machine was doing, as if in two minutes they might digest his several years of training, not to mention the sight of the metal and tubes, and the clinical clip of his words (intra-tracheal, stop-cocks). Today Linden was especially dramatic, overcompensating for the patient’s deafness with wild gestures and expressions. His hands flung outward. His eyebrows rose and waggled.

  Hartmann’s gaze wandered from the machine to Frank, and then to Frau Reiner, arranging the tray of surgical instruments. She was clattering, too—her usual lithe, swift movements clumsy and disturbed.

  Frank closed his eyes, mapping his stage of the procedure: Remove the scar tissue, make an oblique excision on the right cheek and rotate the fat flap, suture, add opposing sutures, excise remote graft . . . and there he stalled, wondering how fast his hands could work. It would take hours.

  “Do you think he understands?” Linden asked from the head of the bed.

  “Well enough,” said Frank. His arms and fingers were tense, ready. In Berlin, the surgeons would work in teams, learning from each other. He couldn’t fathom the luxury of that. He moved next to Linden.

  “Ready.” He nodded at Hartmann, then slowly peeled away his scarf.

  Frank studied the man’s destroyed face for the last time. He took in the broad forehead, the straight, even brows and nose, the blasted drain of Hartmann’s mouth. He’d grown used to focusing on each half of Hartmann’s face separately. Either he looked Hartmann in the eyes above his scarf, friend to friend, or he looked at the wound, doctor to patient, examining the healing tissues, the remains of the upper lip. He tilted the head back to see into the mouth, mapping the mucosal membranes. He noted the tiny hairs growing on the cleft of skin under Hartmann’s nose.

  “We’ll begin then,” he said to Hartmann aloud.

  The patient made a sucking sound, and his drain-lip flexed. Was he trying to say something? “Get him some paper,” Frank said to Frau Reiner. But when she produced it, Hartmann waved it away.

  Frank and his assistants retired to the sinks outside to scrub in. They soaped in uncharacteristic silence. Above them planes rumbled, and they all stopped for a moment. No siren. They scrubbed again: knuckles, palms, wrists. The soap was slick, hard, and greaseless, and no matter how Frank rubbed it, it wouldn’t lather.

  “Might as well wash with a stone,” offered Frank, waiting for Linden to twist the observation into a joke. But Linden didn’t say anything.

  “This stuff would make better ammunition,” Frank added.

  More silence.

  “What’s with you two?”

  He saw his friends exchange a glance.

  “Just concerned about the surgery,” Frau Reiner said after a moment.

  Frank looked at Linden, who simply shrugged.

  But their usual animated expressions were missing. They let him walk first back into the room and took their positions as somberly as pallbearers. So be it, thought Frank, irritated. No time to get cold feet now.

  He waited for Linden to thread the patient’s throat with gas. A chill crept over his damp, waiting hands.

  They did it in seven hours. Frank’s legs grew weary after three and he rested on a stool, but his fingers cramped only in the last ninety minutes: suturing and suturing, first the subcutaneous netting holding the skin together, and then the apposing sutures that would be cut in a few days.

  One line ran up the right side of Hartmann’s mouth, where Frank had turned the skin inward to repair the damage to the mucosal cavities. There, hair would likely grow soon, furring the inside of Hartmann’s cheek. Hartmann’s mouth wouldn’t be able to move until both sides healed, and then he would have to learn to use his newly made lips, if he chose to try to talk again. Deafness sometimes made it difficult to recover speech.

  A thin veil of new skin covered the left side of Hartmann’s mouth, concealing more scar excisions. High on his right thigh, blood leaked into fresh bandages. Never had Frank worked so long or so intensely, but he hadn’t slipped once, not once in the whole delicate procedure. The stitches would have made a king’s tailor proud.

  If Hartmann healed without edema or infection, his scars would slowly fade. Within a year, Hartmann’s face might look crooked and punched in, but it would have a real mouth, a jawline.

  As Frank held Linden’s heavy Agfa and took pictures of the finished surgery, he felt a rush of gratitude for his colleagues. They were still working. Frau Reiner was readying hot saline packs for Hartmann’s face and the patch on Hartmann’s inner thigh, where they’d taken the graft. Linden was cleaning his catheter and machine. He’d given Hartmann enough gas to sleep through his first dressing.

  “Thank you,” Frank said. He didn’t know how to talk to them seriously, to say how much he’d miss them, how proud he was of them all. To keep them from seeing the tears in his eyes, he rushed from the room, saying he would call for an orderly to return Hartmann to his bed. “He needs hourly monitoring,” he called back. “I want to see him as soon as he wakes.”

  The moment Frank passed through the operating room doors, disappointment washed through him. His eyes roved the antechamber with its utilitarian shelves and sinks, adjusting to the lesser light. His murky reflection wobbled over the steel basin as he washed his hands again and blearily shoved his arms into his coat and buttoned it. He realized he’d expected the surgery to foil him in some way, to find himself fumbling with an excision or a suture, and he hadn’t fumbled, not once.

  Through the doors, he heard Frau Reiner murmur something to Linden, something about “relief,” and Linden’s hoarse reply, mostly inaudible except for the words “not professional.”

  Maybe they thought he’d gone too far with this surgery.

  Or maybe they had never trusted his skill.

  His mouth filled with a bitter taste. Well, it was done. Everything was done here.

  It was dark when Hartmann finally started to stir. Frank was already sitting by his bed, massaging his cramping fingers in the dimness. The lights had been turned out in the ward to conserve electricity, but several of the patients had procured their own kerosene lanterns. Shadows flickered on the walls as Frank held up a note.

  The surgery went well. Are you in pain?

  The patient’s dressings quaked and a soft hiss escaped him. Frank couldn’t tell if it was a yes or no.

 
I’ll call for some morphine, he wrote.

  Hartmann’s shoulders convulsed and he began to throw up a green-black liquid. Frank had anticipated nausea after so many hours under anesthesia, but he had to move fast, or the man might choke or tear his sutures. He yelled for a nurse and lifted Hartmann’s bony skull in his hand, propping him up, using the pillow to catch the vomit. Hartmann shook again. The vomit smelled metallic. The sutures strained.

  Frank heard footsteps and called out an order for morphine, fresh dressings; he heard his voice clear and direct, but it sounded as if it were a long way off, that he and Hartmann were in another room, another ward, away from the rest of them. The skull he was holding was not a head, but a life, and it was unraveling into a sour, stinking spit. Hartmann’s convulsions were so violent he would tear out the stitches. Frank gripped him by the ears, forcing Hartmann’s head straight. “I don’t know if you can hear me, but you have to relax and keep still. You have to keep your mouth still,” he said. He heard a wordless, anguished groan in return, and he wrapped himself more tightly around the head, knowing his touch was causing agony.

  The retching slowed and ceased. Frank let go. The nurse came. Hartmann’s lids fluttered as she reached for his dressings.

  “Give him the morphine first,” said Frank, shaking with exhaustion. “Make sure he can sleep through the night.”

  He waited for the shot to kick in but still felt Hartmann flinch as he checked the bloodied sutures. The stitching had held. Frank’s relief made him so tired that his eyes stopped focusing. With clumsy fingers, he wrote a note to Hartmann promising that he’d return in the morning to discuss the surgery, and then he stumbled his way back through the rows of beds.

  The next morning Frank brought Hartmann’s poems in one pocket, and a mirror in the other, touching it from time to time. The mirror felt like a giant coin. Hartmann was awake but immobile, slumped toward his feet. He looked at Frank with dull eyes, then looked away.

  Good morning, Frank wrote, sitting down on the edge of the bed. You’re looking well.

  Hartmann didn’t respond, and Frank bowed his head for a moment, uncertain how to proceed. The morning after surgery was often the hardest for patients—the after-effects of the nausea combined badly with the patients’ disappointment that they would never be their old selves again. Until the moment a man went under the knife, he believed the knife would restore the past, instead of shaping a new future. Frank remembered Alliner weeping silently for hours.

  As the silence between them deepened, Frank busied himself with examination: heart, lungs, palpation of the abdomen, the old ritual of touch and listening that joined doctor and patient. Even in the worst cases, it comforted him to go through these tasks. Hartmann’s respiratory rate was low, but other vital signs were normal.

  With a mounting dread, Frank checked the sutures. Miraculously all but two remained unbroken, and they could be restitched with a local anesthetic. By the light of day, it was clear that the graft skin was a different shade than the rest of Hartmann’s face, and pocked with a few hairs that would eventually fall out. The swelling had worsened overnight, which was to be expected, but it made the graft look as if it were straining to break free. He felt Hartmann’s eyes on him and he forced his expression to remain neutral. The work was good, the stitches clean and even.

  He switched on his headlamp and shone it into Hartmann’s eyes. He read the chart. The nurse had given Hartmann another shot of morphine at dawn. He had taken some water and had not thrown up again.

  Frank fumbled with his pad, writing an apology, then crossing it out.

  Would you like to see yourself ?

  Hartmann took the silver oval. He faced his reflection, but his eyes didn’t focus.

  It’s a beginning, Frank wrote. The mouth will heal the fastest. You should be able to eat solid food in a week or two. He explained about how hot saline packs promoted circulation, and stressed the importance of avoiding tension on the sutures. No smiling. You must be a serious man, he added, wondering if he should joke.

  Hartmann handed the mirror back to Frank. He took the pad and scribbled. You’ll be going soon then.

  Before Frank could respond, Frau Reiner gestured from a few beds away, asking him to sign an order.

  “How’s he doing?” she asked in a low voice as Frank wrote his signature.

  “He’ll get used to it,” Frank said.

  When he got back to Hartmann’s bedside, he felt for the sheaf of poems. He pulled them from his pocket and held them out, his hand shaking at their barely discernible weight. Hartmann didn’t move. He had fallen asleep. His half-shuttered eyes took on a trusting, boyhood softness.

  Frank tucked the poems back in his pocket again, suddenly unable to part with them.

  Hannesburg

  February 1945

  Dillman. The nameplate appeared above the Kappuses’ within two days of the tenants’ arrival. The little wooden slat, inked in a neat childish hand, was the only thing small and neat about the clan, which spilled out of its third-floor rooms and into the wash kitchen at all hours. The four girls (the lone boy, Otto, was serving in the Ukraine) scattered their ribbons and shrill giggles everywhere. They had somehow managed to procure a record player and played their two albums at all hours, dancing their big, clomping feet across the floor. Of all of them, only the second oldest, Frieda, seemed genuinely kind—in a downcast sort of way. She was also the prettiest, having escaped the freckles and frizzy brown heads of the rest of the Dillmans. For this, her sisters treated her with a mix of reverence and scorn.

  Frau Dillman trotted about, elaborately, almost joyously polite the first week of their habitation on Hubertstrasse 6. She sang out her praises for the rooms, the view, the neighborhood. But when Liesl confronted her regarding the nightly wail of the record player, Frau Dillman’s shoulders grew as rigid as a cornered cat’s. After Liesl stopped her a second time to confer over the soggy underthings left strewn about the wash kitchen, Frau Dillman’s eyes began to blink hard whenever they crossed paths.

  “Overrun and overplucked,” was Uta’s comment when Liesl complained about their new neighbor’s touchiness. “She’s too tired to get along.”

  This was the new Uta, glazed and contented by her pregnancy.

  “Can’t you side with me for once?” Liesl retorted.

  “I am siding with you. You can’t change her, so just let her alone.”

  So Liesl tried to leave Frau Dillman alone, even when the woman complained, in a voice laced with resentment, about the broken heaters in their rooms. “Perhaps someone from the housing office can come,” Liesl had said, and made the request, but no one came. Likewise the employment office had never come through with a new housekeeper, and the local Wehrmacht office could not get any more packages to Frank.

  It was as if the country were slowly becoming paralyzed. Soon, they would all stop moving, one by one, until Hans and Ani froze in their Luftwaffe games and the Dillman girls in their last dance step.

  But not Frau Winter.

  Frau Winter was up at all hours, ready to talk. She burst from her apartment at the slightest creak of the steps, her black, old-fashioned widow’s weeds swirling about her. Her fierce face looked as if it had been molded by glaciers, a terrain of deep crevices with two frigid pools for eyes. Frau Winter never smiled. Her laugh was a throttled rasp. But there was something intangibly confident and pleased about her, as if she had been waiting all her days for life to turn so brutal, and now that it had, she had the satisfaction of being prepared.

  Her teenage sons were never home, so she cornered Liesl. Each of her stories was a swinging fist: When they evacuated East Prussia, her eldest daughter was carrying her infant on a pillow, covered in a blanket. They had to muscle and shove to get on a train. They had to jam in with hundreds of others, so tight it was as if they were hanging by their shoulders. “Like we were the clothes in the wardrobe,” Frau Winter said in her sonorous, imperfect German. It wasn’t until the next station that the daug
hter realized that the pillow was empty. Her baby had fallen somewhere.

  “And then my Hilde took herself,” Frau Winter said, lunging forward, as if tackling someone invisible in front of her. It took Liesl a minute to realize the girl had thrown herself in front of a train or out of the train, she wasn’t sure which. She didn’t want to know.

  “And then Friedrich, ach.” Frau Winter had shaken her head. “We had to get off the train to look for Hilde and we could not get another one. So we walked for days and he just collapsed. There was no doctor. Your husband is a doctor, yes? So maybe he would know what happened when a man just collapses like that and says his chest is tight to breathe. Maybe heart attack. But what could we do but keep walking?”

  When Liesl blinked, her eyelids felt too dry. She handed Frau Winter the bucket of meager cleaning supplies she’d scrounged for her—a box of soap flakes, a brush, a pile of rags—and fled.

  Frau Winter’s glittering grief undid her. It made her fear the worst. Frank trapped in a besieged Berlin, and Ani . . . Liesl had taken him to Dr. Becker, who sent him to the hospital clinic to have his blood tested, and now they were waiting through four teeth-gritting days for the results. Ani was gaining weight again, but the Dillmans and their constant ruckus woke him at night, crying out from nightmares. They keep falling on me, Mutti. He clutched his belly in pain. Sometimes he staggered as if someone invisible had whacked him from behind. She had the same conversation with him over and over.