Motherland

by Maria Hummel

  Uta stumbled after the younger Kappus kid, loping and hopping ahead, his disintegrating shoes barely touching down on the snowy cobblestone before he lifted them again. “Hans,” Ani called to the shuttered houses, the woolly gray smoke. “Hans, Hans, Hans.”

  Every time Uta’s boots slipped, she felt the nausea at her center slide, too. If she fell, it would fall with her. If she halted, it would halt, slosh, spread. Even when she slept, it sank through her dreams, a sea creature squirming through soft seaweeds. She gripped the bracelet on her wrist and soldiered on.

  She’d insisted on leading the search, partly to escape the apartment where he had found her, to flee the furniture and walls his eyes had touched, and partly to escape Liesl’s worry and pity. Her friend’s woeful gaze followed her everywhere, and Uta couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t stand Liesl crying over her. If anyone heaped any more worries on Liesl, the poor girl would crack.

  Yes, she would have to go back to Berlin, and once she went back, she would be back forever, living in the rubble. Germany would lose the war. Men like him would be destroyed, and their women dragged through the mud. Emmy Göring and all the ladies with their stolen furs and jewels would be paraded in front of the world as bloodthirsty crows who’d fed on the corpses of the murdered. It didn’t matter that Uta hardly knew Emmy Göring, that she herself had refused to accept such gifts. Uta had never lusted for property, only company, only room after room full of elegant people. And she’d been to the right parties. She’d flattered and laughed in public. She would be standing in the edges of photographs, a pale, glowing face.

  The Kappus boy led her past the wall where the party posted its slogans: ALLE RÄDER MÜSSEN ROLLEN FÜR DEN SIEG. ALL WHEELS MUST ROLL FOR VICTORY. He was humming a breathless little song to himself and didn’t look up.

  Hans would have looked up. He was that kind of boy, always looking at the skies, always reading the signs. Which one was he following now? She didn’t think he was at the brewery, but it was the only clue they had.

  Ani led her down the road toward the last open pasture in Hannesburg, now an expanse of lumpy snow and yellow grass. The brewery property divided Liesl’s neighborhood of pleasant modern villas from the Alt Stadt, densely packed apartments where people still lived without cellars or indoor plumbing. The brewery lot was vast for the middle of town: on one side of it stood the rectangular ruins of what must have been a stable once. On the other rose a fence, its black iron gates tipped with white, around an ancient brick edifice with two towers. Whoever owned the building did not maintain it. The windows were cracked or missing; the locks on the gate had rusted. Nevertheless, improvements encroached. Beyond the far side of the building, the town had built a public shelter for families from the Alt Stadt. Uta had seen it on another walk. The shelter’s sign had been bright and new, its door swept clean.

  The cobblestone ended at grass, and Uta stumbled.

  “Slow down,” Uta said crossly, her stomach lurching. She put her hand in her coat pocket and touched the curve. She shouldn’t be sick this late. Women were sick early and then they got over it, and then they started to show. She had gone through four months without sickness. In the first three, she pretended that nothing had changed inside her body because the long expanse below her ribs remained flat as ever. Then one day, her bracelet felt tight on her wrist. Her stockings kept snapping off her thighs. Her legs and hips had gotten fat, and the fat was different, plush and creamy as goose liver. Her body had begun plumping itself.

  “Hans,” the boy called. They crossed the pasture on a bumpy, trampled trail and into the shadow cast by the brewery, drawing closer to each other. She could tell the boy wanted to take her hand, but she did not hold it out. Her own fingers were cold and they preferred to remain in her coat.

  Ani’s head bobbed around at the height of her growing waist. The tips of his ears and nose were rosy, accentuating the hollows in his cheeks and temples. He didn’t look like a proper child, but some creature made out of sticks and snow and blue dye that would collapse and melt away by summer.

  What terrible thoughts she had.

  “Hans,” she bellowed through the iron fence. Snow slid from the tips of the posts and tumbled down in little crumbs. On the gate hung a sign for the public shelter, pointing toward the other side of the building. Someone had scrawled KEIN JUDEN—NO JEWS—beneath it. Beyond, the brewery wall was blank, scored only by the narrow windows, and archways for three rotting doors.

  “Why on earth would he come here?” Uta said to Ani.

  “He finds things,” Ani said.

  Uta’s stomach churned again and she pressed her fingertips against her bracelet. Her lucky shackle. She’d always been so careful, and superstitious, too, that one mistake would protect her from another. But it hadn’t, and this baby was coming. It might be all right if she’d felt something—hope or tenderness—when she’d held Jürgen, but instead she’d felt nothing. She’d cupped his round, warm bottom; she’d stared into his pretty blue eyes. She’d sniffed the fresh scent of his skin, and felt nothing but a mild revulsion at the crumbs of undigested milk in the corner of his mouth.

  She staggered away from Ani. The boy remained, staring through the black rungs, his breath ghosting the air.

  “You’ll catch your death,” she snapped. “I’m going home.”

  “There’s a green bird in there,” said Ani.

  “Ach, Ani,” she said, stopping but not turning around. She faced the new expensive villas, their snakes of chimney smoke, their balconies with the winter-vacant window boxes. Some people here still had three pairs of shoes and all their children living. Some people here rose and washed their faces and spread marmalade on their bread and expected to go on this way forever. The protected heartland, an illusion that Goebbels had spoon-fed them for years. They didn’t know the doom that was coming. It amazed her.

  “We need to go home now, or they’ll start worrying about us,” Uta said.

  “I think it has a hurt wing,” said Ani, folding his arms. “I’m not going.”

  “Well, I am,” Uta said. Liesl humored him too much. She liked a touched child, a little golden boy. Liesl had always been fond of the old fairy tales; Uta remembered her rattling on about them at the Badensee when they watched the younger children splash in the water. She remembered the sand trailing through her fingers while Liesl spoke of the dirty little scullery maid dancing with the prince. It had all seemed possible once. “You better come, too, if you know what’s good for you.”

  The boy didn’t answer. Uta crunched out of the shadow of the building. As soon as she crossed into the gray sunlight, the uneasiness in her gut spread, her lunch squirting up her throat. She spat it on the snow. Yellow-gold, slickened lumps. Rutabaga stew. It had been almost as loathsome going down. She heard the boy come running. She peeked at him through her curtain of fallen blond hair. Beyond it, beyond him, she saw green. It was a tiny flash against the dull red wall of the brewery. When she straightened, wiping her mouth, it was gone.

  What bird would live here, in this desolate place?

  “You’re sick, too,” said Ani. His hands fluttered against her, as if he were trying to find a way into her coat. He elongated the last word, Sie sind kraaank, with a sigh for a fellow sufferer.

  “You’re not sick,” she said. “Neither am I.”

  She pushed him away and stared through the iron fence, combing the brewery wall with her eyes. Nothing moved.

  “You saw it.” Ani’s sudden grin made his face look thinner, skull-like. She thought she saw one of his twitching spells coming on, but instead he burst into speech. “You saw it, too. Wasn’t it green? I think it’s a parrot. Maybe someone lost a parrot. Can we go back? They live an old time. Long time.”

  Uta took out a handkerchief and dabbed her lips, smearing the cloth with yellow bile and red wax, her last good lipstick. Her last good anything from Berlin, the cigarettes and liquor gone. It was past time to go—to get out of the country, get a fake passport, get to Pa
ris.

  She tucked the handkerchief back in her pocket and swallowed the sour taste of her bile.

  “You saw it,” Ani repeated.

  She knelt down before him, smoothing his limp blond locks back from his eyes. He could be her biological child. He resembled her more than he did Liesl or Frank, but her own son would never wear such a sweet, pathetic expression. “I didn’t see anything,” she said.

  A tremor went through Ani. “I can still hear it,” he said. “It’s inside now.” And then he made a whooshing noise. “I can hear. I can hear itIcanhearitIcanhearit.”

  “Shh,” she said. “Let me listen.”

  She took a breath and cocked her head, pretending. The rising queasiness made it impossible for her to perceive anything beyond a meter’s radius. Here was this boy and the crusty circle of snow around him. Here he was, too skinny for his age, a head on a pole. A tiny king reigning over a shrinking white plain. Beyond him unraveled the rest of the world: buildings, wings, blood, shadows.

  “There’s nothing there,” Uta said in a low voice, hardening her grip on his hands. “And you know it.”

  The boy’s eyelids flickered as if she’d struck him. Wordlessly, she pulled him to her new fat chest, his wren-like shoulder blades poking into her forearms as she squeezed him. She hadn’t hugged a child since her brothers had been babies and the sensation of his cheekbones against her breasts startled her. Her nausea lessened. In its place she felt a fluttering in the tower of her throat. It felt like a word was trying to form there, and couldn’t.

  She pushed Ani gently away, and stood too fast. Spots burst before her eyes. As she stumbled, he watched her, his face dazed and pink.

  “You be good for your mother,” she said in a harsh voice. “You stop worrying her and get better, you hear?”

  The boy took a few steps back, his eyes on the ground.

  “She’d do anything for you,” Uta said.

  Clouds gathered in the west. It was snowing everywhere on the retreating German army, and soon the storm would be here. A cold wind touched her temples. She thought of the little collection of gold teeth that her lover kept, like wrinkled jewels, in a drawer.

  “We could bring it birdseed,” Ani said softly.

  She walked ahead of him back across the pasture, past the broken mud puddles and the slogans, past the train tracks with their small cornices of rust.

  Dusk drew long shadows around the rails, filling in between each wooden tie, one by one, until the second-to-last train looked as if it were rising out of a black lake. Hans rubbed his eyes as it shrieked to a halt.

  No one had come from Berlin all afternoon. No man that Berte had described, with a long chin and a quick gait that made him trip over his own feet. Instead, mostly women and children departed the trains, always fumbling to hold on to one thing too many: baskets of carrots, bags of potatoes, and once or twice a live chicken. The women and children were coming from two stops away, where the town faded to open fields and farms. Hans knew they had bartered their curios and jewelry for limp, old vegetables and stringy meat, but he liked to imagine that the pink-cheeked mother hurrying by him had gotten lucky, that her closed basket hid Lebkuchen and sour cherry jam, fresh hot rolls, a smoked ham. She was taking it home to her seven beautiful daughters, and they would eat until their bellies strained their dresses. If he caught the woman’s eye at the right moment, she would nod and invite him along, and he would become the girls’ friend and protector, and take their giant German shepherd for walks. When their house got bombed, he would dig them all out with his bare hands.

  The woman saw his stare and scowled at him. “Strassenkind,” she muttered. Street kid.

  “Where you headed, son?” said a voice.

  Hans looked up into a face that was slack as an old wineskin. “Nowhere,” he said. Then he noticed the uniform. “I don’t need a ticket, sir.”

  “You’ve been here three hours.”

  “I’m waiting for a friend, sir,” Hans said. “A soldier on furlough.”

  In the purple light, the stationmaster’s blond mustache had a greenish glow. It moved even when the man’s mouth wasn’t speaking, as if the hairs were consuming themselves.

  “He didn’t tell me which train,” Hans added.

  “Where’s he coming from?”

  Suddenly he couldn’t say the name—it was too big for his mouth. It was also a lie. Nobody was coming. He shrugged.

  “Last train is in half an hour,” said the stationmaster.

  Hans fixed his face with an obedient look. “I have a letter to deliver,” he said, and showed him the envelope, the name written in Berte’s hand. “Then I’m going home.”

  The stationmaster drove his hands into the pockets of his coat. “You get too cold, you come inside my office,” he said. “I got a little stove in there.”

  Hans thanked him and moved down to the far end of the station. He hunched his shoulders and leaned back against a column, trying to look as old as possible. He spied a cigarette someone had tossed to the snow. It was only half smoked and still burning. After glancing around, he picked it up and thrust it between his lips. He had smoked once or twice with his school friends but never developed a taste for it. Today the ash woke his mouth and he sucked deep, filling his lungs until they stung. He staggered a step, his legs suddenly exhausted from the long walk to the station and standing all day in the cold. His right hand clung to the cigarette and as soon as his breathing slowed, he sucked again, a bright cloud blooming in his skull. Another toke, and the bright cloud spun. Purple spread across the low hills. He smoked until the embers singed his fingers and he dropped the cigarette on the snow.

  They would be worried now, the dark coming on and no sign of him.

  He took out Berte’s letter and examined it. Her handwriting was gappy and incomplete, but she’d underlined the name with a single, sure stroke. The name meant nothing to Hans. It floated in his mind with her description of the man’s face, refusing to settle.

  He was waiting for nobody from Berlin. He was waiting for her rescuer, who was no one. He was waiting for his father, the new surgeon at the new hospital there. His stepmother said she had written to his father a letter about Ani, but he hadn’t written back. Vati would write back. She was lying about something.

  The stationmaster reappeared at his elbow. “How will you get home? If your friend doesn’t come.”

  “I don’t live far away,” said Hans.

  The stationmaster asked where. Hans told him.

  “Your mother’s at home?”

  “Yes.” His mouth tasted terrible. He was starting to feel sick.

  “Your father?”

  “He’s a Wehrmacht doctor.”

  “In France?”

  “Weimar.”

  A train whistled and surged into the station. The engine’s shadow passed across the stationmaster’s face and he swiveled away, retreating quickly as if someone in the distance had called his name. From the sky snow began to fall. The frozen lace landed on Hans’s cheek, melting as the steam gasped from the pistons and men began thumping down the steps and into the station. All of them had shoes, good or bad. All were dark or blond, tall or short, mustached or clean-shaven, fur-hatted or hunch-shouldered. Hans held out the letter, peering at chin after chin. He stood alone as the crowd eddied around him. A few people glanced at the white envelope. Nobody stopped. A flake of snow slid into his right eye, making it sting. Hans blinked. The arm holding the letter felt heavy. He switched arms, but the other ached immediately. He dropped both as the train materialized again before him, the passengers having all pushed past him.

  A conductor appeared in the doorway between cars and looked down at Hans. He was a young man, someone who ought to be a soldier, and he retreated back into the compartment without asking Hans why he was still waiting when everyone was gone. The snow fell over tossed cigarette butts, expired tickets. It made a soft white sugar of the ground beyond the station. It fell heavier as the stationmaster and two men surr
ounded him, talking to him with their remote voices, clamping his elbow, towing him away from the train to a waiting car, a back seat.

  “I haven’t done anything, sir,” Hans protested, alarmed. “I’m going home.”

  “Yes, you are.” The stationmaster slammed the door.

  The men drove fast, occasionally looking up at the sky, their headlights drawing yellow stripes on the shuttered walls of houses. Hans began to talk about the V-1 rockets that had destroyed London in the late summer. He loved the V-1s, even after they’d been superseded by the V-2s. The V-1s had the flavor of plums and the silence in the house after his mother’s death, and the sweet softness of a baby’s skull tucked under his chin as he carried Jürgen to his bath in the kitchen. The V-1s had given him purpose during those long hours when his father barely looked at him. He could still remember the radio broadcasts with their thrilling claims of “unchecked terror and destruction” in the streets of their enemies. The men driving the car did not respond to his commentary, except to glance back and grunt. He said he’d heard that the Führer was soon going to unveil a rocket powerful enough to reach New York. He had never said the words “New York” out loud before.

  “New York,” repeated the man driving, and his breath steamed the windshield.

  The tires lost their grip twice, but they didn’t skid until they reached Hans’s street, the vehicle sliding until it came to rest before Herr Geiss’s gate. The tops of the iron bars rose like bishop hats, dusted with white.

  “You get inside now,” said one of the men, cranking his head so that both eyes met Hans’s. “Stop worrying your mother.”

  Hans trudged back to his own gate, letting himself in, making it only three steps before his stepmother hurtled out and gathered him in her arms. Her light hands touched the back of his neck, his ears. “You’re so cold,” she said over and over. Her face looked red from weeping.

  Her tenderness shamed him. He shoved past her, up the stairs, ignoring Frau Winter and Frau Dillman peering from their own doorways, mothers upon mothers filling his motherless house. He couldn’t get over the feeling that he wasn’t there at all, even when he stepped across the threshold and Fräulein Müller moved for him so he could have the place closest to the stove.