Motherland

by Maria Hummel

  He asked Schnell for the furlough. Then he showed him the capsule. He held his palm out, expecting the captain to take it, but Schnell simply glanced at it and looked away. A red flag with the swastika hung on the wall behind his desk. The color drained everything else in the room: the chairs, a skat deck, a copy of a Karl May novel, and stacks of notebooks.

  “Well,” said Schnell. “I’m sorry you had some unhappy news.”

  Frank could feel the taut cords holding his head up. “My wife is young and inexperienced.” That wasn’t true. She was experienced with children. He’d seen her work with them for years. It was part of the reason he’d married her.

  “Do you think our patients want to kill themselves?” said Schnell.

  “No. Not now.”

  “Do they seem unhappy to you?”

  “Unstable,” said Frank, pocketing the capsule. “Every one of them is suffering from dystrophy.”

  “Dysh-trophy?” The captain pronounced it with a slur on the s.

  Frank heard himself explaining the condition of the patients: They had been starved, frozen, and forced into sleeplessness. They had faced lice and fever and death.

  “The Russians proved in the last war that too many pressures can create a dystrophic condition in the body,” he said. When a man’s cells were dystrophic, they were no longer capable of a normal reaction. If cells malfunctioned, everything went awry. A man could not respond to disease properly. He couldn’t even sleep or digest nutritious food.

  Was Schnell nodding? His hairy nostrils fanned with breath.

  As Frank talked, his mind spiraled away again, thinking about three boys who’d lost their mother to death, and then lost their father to distance. And to top it off, he’d brought a stranger into the house and said, Here she is! Your brand-new mother! He’d regarded his marriage to Liesl as his own heartbreaking but valorous decision to move on because life demanded it, but what if he’d mired them all, most of all her, in a swamp of unending grief ?

  Frank continued, “They don’t make good decisions as soldiers and they don’t heal, at least not until the dystrophic condition has time to correct itself.” His eyes fell on the capsule. “Sometimes that takes weeks. Sometimes months of quiet and routine. Given the easy chance to end their lives, I fear they might make the wrong decision.”

  Schnell pulled over one of his notebooks, scrawling something on a new page. Frank stood there, waiting for a response.

  “Think of their mothers,” he said in a hoarse voice.

  More silence, the pen drifting through its sentences.

  “About the furlough, sir? I’m leaving in a few days anyway, so perhaps my new position could be postponed—”

  Schnell snapped his book shut. “You know, if we lose this war, it’s because we took too much time,” he said. “Don’t waste any more of mine.”

  Frank had always found it easy to talk to Liesl, even in their ridiculous first meeting with that half-drowned kid. There had been something about Liesl’s shy composure that had drawn him out, and for weeks after that encounter he’d avoided her, embarrassed. Liesl Nye wasn’t hard to avoid. She either worked with children or hid in her room or sometimes took walks by herself around the grounds. Rumor had it that she had turned down several admirers, that she and her friend Uta were secretly lovers. Single young women who stayed single made others gossip, but Frank assumed she just didn’t like the Nazi boors who leered at her.

  Then one day, in the harrowing month after Susi’s death, he’d walked by the Kinderhaus and heard the babble of children and Liesl’s strong, sure voice above it. He peeked in the cabin window to see her flushed, animated face as she chased them and then crashed into a wooden chair squarely in her path. She laughed, but it was her look of complete surprise that got him. She hadn’t expected the chair to be there. So young, he thought wistfully.

  At home, his newborn was passed around the neighborhood day and night, cared for by other mothers with infants. His elder sons cried themselves to sleep. He jerked awake in the dark, listening for their tears. He was so tired that his hands fumbled to tie his shoes. When six weeks passed, Herr Geiss suggested a marriage service. Frank sat in interviews with the agent and two young, plump, pretty women who looked like vague replicas of Susi. He listened to them talk about their health and daily habits, their love of the movies and the Führer. They seemed swollen with innocence. It flooded their cheeks and spilled out of their mouths like milk. He asked for a different sort of candidate, someone hardworking and quiet, and was presented with a pear-shaped widow from Bavaria who took no sugar in her tea and assured him that he would never hear his sons whine again.

  At first he found himself making excuses to pass by the Kinderhaus, to exchange a few words of greeting. He liked watching Liesl with the children—the happiness she seemed to cultivate around her in the small cabin. It reminded him of peacetime. The evening of the day he received his summons to Weimar, he picked a handful of violets from under a tree near the cabin. His clumsy hands ripped half of them out by the roots. He stood, stripping the dirt from the stems, wondering what he was doing. The violets were already wilting by the time he willed his feet to thump across the threshold.

  Liesl was hanging hats back on a row of big nails. A bowler, a chef’s hat, a straw hat, a nurse’s cap. One of the nails was loose in the wall and as she turned it tumbled, pinging the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, holding the flowers behind his back. “I scared you.”

  She didn’t retrieve the nail. She stared at him, rigid, as if he’d come to mug her.

  “They must like that game. Playing grown-ups,” he said.

  “Yes.” She touched her cheek. “What can I do for you, Dr. Kappus?”

  He cleared his throat. “I brought these,” he said, and held out the flowers. She took them, but the damp stems stuck to his hand, and he almost had to wipe the violets into her palm. It wasn’t a thrilling touch, but a clammy exchange of wilt. “Sorry,” he said, forcing a laugh.

  “I’ll find some water.” She carried the violets to the end of the room, where there was a small porcelain sink. He kept from turning his head but he was conscious of her red hair swept up and falling in the back, her hips, and that jaunty, clumsy walk that once again sent her knocking into her desk as she passed. Her hands slipped on the faucet before it turned.

  “What happened to those Steitz boys—do you know?” Frank said, thinking of the day he’d first seen her, the sunlight on the water, Liesl rubbing cream from her finger. Ani hadn’t been born yet, and Liesl had just been a pretty young girl shivering with cold.

  He heard a clunk and saw Liesl setting the violets down on a desk. They sagged over an eggcup. “They were training to be officers last I heard.” She shook her head. “I remember thinking they’d never grow up.”

  Frank cleared his throat and shoved the nail back in the wall, restoring the bowler to its spot. “You have an extra nail,” he said to the wall. “I could give you a surgeon’s cap.”

  “That would be lovely,” said Liesl. “Anything that’s not military.”

  “I studied to be a surgeon,” said Frank, and blurted to her about his summons, wondering why his mouth kept talking. Middle-aged widower. Father of three. About to be drafted. How much more desperate could a man appear? He started backing away, toward the door.

  “I wish you much courage,” Liesl said, following him.

  “Why not a soldier’s cap?” Frank asked when he reached the threshold. “Surely that’s all they want to play anyway.”

  She hesitated. “The boys—and girls—they get carried away. I stopped putting out war toys.”

  Their eyes met, and he saw a new emotion in them. She had fought for this tiny shred of control, perhaps paid for it. “I just can’t watch it anymore.” Her voice deepened. “All that dying.”

  Their faces were close. Liesl looked startled and ducked her head.

  “Yes. Well, good night, then.” He turned.

  “I’m sorry I did
n’t have a vase,” she said from behind him.

  “Next time, I’ll bring one,” Frank said.

  “I like sunflowers,” he heard her say before he bolted into the night.

  The dachshund was still in the ward when Frank hurried through at dinnertime, restless and sweating, unable to eat or face his friends, the happy new lovers.

  The patients were playing a game with the dog, trying to get it to run between them for scraps of meat. In the early dark the dog’s happiness seemed suddenly desperate. Its black smile sagged as it loped from bed to bed.

  “All right, all right,” said the owner. “He’s getting tired.”

  But others egged the dog on. The dog’s nails scraped the floor.

  Frank arrived at Hartmann’s bed and was surprised to find the poet neither reading nor writing. Hartmann was sitting up, head bowed. His hair hung over his cheeks in lank strips. At first Frank thought he was asleep, but he saw Hartmann’s fingers clasping and unclasping.

  Down the hall, the dog began to bark, excited and angry.

  “Shut him up!” a patient shouted.

  “You shut up!” someone shouted back.

  Hartmann’s posture wasn’t good for a healing face. Frank gently touched his forehead and began to tilt him up. He paused when the light fell on the left side of the patient’s mouth. The swelling was soft but definite, bulging the skin graft. The transposed skin had a yellowish cast. Beneath, the sutures were already straining in the rotting tissue.

  The dog barked, and a scuffle broke out. Nurses hurried from opposite ends of the ward.

  Frank let go of Hartmann’s forehead, searching his own memory for any sign of edema in his brief visit the day before. He could recall only the roughened pink texture of healthy healing. Hartmann hadn’t complained of discomfort. He met Hartmann’s eyes. They were strangely blank.

  “A setback,” Frank said. “We’ll treat it.”

  The shadows on the wall climbed and sank. Frank called a nurse and gave her instructions for treating the swelling, but he could already tell that it wouldn’t work. The graft would die, and someone would have to peel it away, cut out the scar tissue, and try again. It could take months.

  Frank pulled out a pad. We’ll treat this right away, he wrote. He smelled the delicate, almost soapy odor of dying skin and pus.

  Hartmann took the paper. There’s an investigator coming tomorrow.

  Frank read the message twice. He nodded, as if he understood the words.

  Hartmann took the paper back. They’ll find what they want to find, he wrote. It’s likely I’ll be taken away. He pulled in his knees and hugged them like a boy. It was hard to read his expression, with the shadows of the room and the puckering scars, but he didn’t seem unhappy or worried. In fact, his whole being exuded an eagerness, as if he no longer had to wait for his fate.

  I’ll speak on your behalf, Frank wrote. The pen slid in his damp fingers. You need time to heal.

  Don’t risk anything on my account.

  When Frank tried to touch his shoulder, Hartmann waved him away. Walking back up the ward, Frank felt for the capsule riding in his pocket. He could have crushed it or tossed it away by now, but he hadn’t.

  He didn’t know how to say to Hartmann that he should want to live. You had to want to live. You had to respect life. But he knew his words would sound simple, and if he and Hartmann argued, Hartmann would win.

  Frank didn’t sleep that night. He looked outside at the guard station, the incinerator, the concrete wall of the cistern, and the pines beyond. There had been some warm days and the snow had hardened on the ground. The sky was deep with stars. He mentally started and scrapped several letters to Liesl, expressing his concern, requesting more information, explaining about his denied furlough. When the night sky began to lighten, he washed his torso in cold water and stood there, feeling his skin freeze. His nipples and belly tensed first, and then everywhere prickled with goose bumps. The sensation did not make him feel any more wakeful. He shoved his arms into a shirt and buttoned it. He lay back down on his bed and tried to read Hartmann’s poems again, but the words buzzed and fluttered. He tucked them in his pocket. Down the hall, he heard others rising, and he emerged for his morning rounds, avoiding Hartmann. The operating room was empty, so he walked in and inhaled the smell of carbolic acid, remembering the soft, pulsing feel of the tissues he’d repaired and the drag of sutures through flesh.

  He made his way to the cafeteria and drank coffee made from dandelion roots. There was not even chicory left in their kitchens. “Better brew in Berlin, I hope,” Frank told the cook. “I’m leaving in two days.”

  The cook said he was sorry to see him go, but he didn’t look sorry, just sweaty and weary. Frank sat down and stared out the window at the pine woods beyond the cistern, formulating his plan of escape.

  To avoid Linden and Frau Reiner, he went straight to the ward. He did not want to tell them about Hartmann. He did not want to talk to Hartmann, either, watching him from a distance, a sleeping lump on his bed. He wanted to take the clocks down from the walls, every single one, and advance the hours, through afternoon and nightfall, and dawn again. To have the telegram miss him, to have Hartmann’s infection fail to begin, because he was already in Berlin. To simultaneously be already on his way home.

  The patients were eating their midday meal, a hard black gnarl of Kommissbrot and hot millet soup, when the first whistle came. Frank was holding a patient’s chart. Then the earth shook and the bowls spilled on their unprotected laps. Men roared with pain. The chart ripped in his hands. It happened fast and slow. The rumble. The flash. Hot soup. The roar. Rip. Splashed everywhere. It was a joke. A ridiculous act of God.

  Home. The back of Frank’s neck went cold. He dropped the chart and ducked. Another whistle, another boom. He staggered forward. Home. It took a long time to pull himself straight. The sky broke over the roof, smoke smell pouring through the cracks in the walls.

  He grabbed a cart of soiled linen and pushed it toward the far door, lurching with each explosion. Around him, men scrambled to get under their beds. Their legs snared in their blankets. They lost their hats and grabbed for them, jamming the cloth back on their waxy skulls.

  Hartmann was four meters away. Sirens wailed. Then three. Soldiers poured into the ward behind Frank, shouting, “Everyone, down!” Then two.

  “Everyone, DOWN!” Then one.

  Frank pulled the capsule from his pocket, lurched right, and rolled it under Hartmann’s bunk, seeing the brass glint and a hand close around it.

  The cart jammed on a cot leg. Frank wrenched it free, lurched forward again. His boot slid on spilled millet soup and he almost lost his balance. Another boom, closer this time. Outside, flames rose beside the guard tower. If he could get to the cistern, he could hide on the ledge, make a break for the woods when no one was looking.

  I’m tired, screamed a man behind him. Or maybe he screamed something else, something Frank could not make out.

  I’m tired is what he heard. He burst through the doors.

  Three steps onto the snow and he fell to his knees.

  Propeller, nose, window, cockpit. A whir like a thousand bees. A blurred face.

  Sprays of bullets pocked the snow beside Frank, but his body was whole, untouched. The plane passed over. He rose, the cold slapping his skin. The guard station was burning. Soldiers were lying in the snowdrifts, guns aimed at the sky. He put his head down and pushed toward the incinerator, the cistern beside it. The chest of his coat flattened against him.

  As Frank shoved the cart up against the edge of the cistern, another bomb fell close by, smashing two houses at the edge of town. Their roofs caved in toward each other. He saw the soldiers swivel toward the fire; he saw the perfect moment: It opened for him the way a bow opens when you tug a ribbon just so and a woman’s hair falls loose from it, onto her bare shoulders. No one was looking directly at him. He stepped to the edge of the cistern and hovered there, his right foot stepping out over the empty s
pace.

  The left refused to follow, at least not in the way it should—a clean jump to the ledge that once held the boards to the latrine. Instead it hitched, like a cripple’s leg, and he lost his balance and tumbled into the concrete pit, falling past the stained walls to the thick frozen lake at the bottom.

  He landed on his tailbone, then fell on his side, like a sleeper, his cheek smashing into an empty cylinder of Zyklon. The edge of the metal pierced the skin just below his ear. The ashy waste groaned and cracked, cold grit grinding into his hair.

  Frank scrambled up immediately and lost his balance on the slippery sludge, smacking into the cistern wall, muck smearing his coat. He touched the cut with his cleaner hand. It was wide but not deep. His tailbone ached, but his legs and vertebrae worked. Inside his coat pocket, he found a handkerchief and pressed it to the wound. One breath, two breaths. He pushed himself upright more slowly, stepping around the Zyklon cylinders. Zyklon was used routinely for delousing, but the canisters’ hollowed shapes, their warning labels (GIFTGAS! POISON GAS!) seemed ominous now. The other waste in the cistern was harder to identify: gray and black ash, freckles of white that could have been bone. He moved carefully across to a spot under the ledge. Best to hide for now, then figure a way out.

  As the shock wore off, the smell set in. Then the shrieking and smashing of the air raid. Then the cold. He covered his nose with the clean part of his handkerchief and waited. No one had seen him fall, but the cart was up there. It could give him away. He edged closer to the wall but did not touch it.

  The frozen sewage creaked. He looked down. He was standing on a charred femur.

  Smoke drifted over the sky in gauzy veils. Frank could no longer hear the propellers screaming in the engines of the planes, just a dull insect drone. If Hartmann had taken the pill, he would be dead by now, his body found. The other patients would have emerged from under their bunks.

  At first, Frank was sure Hartmann would use it, would take the sudden release, but the more he thought about it, the more he wondered. He remembered the boy Hartmann had been, so different from the rest of them, not just for his brains but his essential stubbornness. Hartmann on that wild day in the wine cellar, his face quiet, alert, refusing to take sips from the contraband bottle one boy grabbed off a shelf. Hartmann at the Kurpark with Astrid, steering her with a light hand at her waist to the sulfur fountains, fishing a glass goblet from his coat so she could drink from crystal. The other boys had ridiculed him for being swoony over a girl, but Hartmann had ignored them. He loved propriety, courtliness. The rough conditions of wartime must have festered his formerly gallant soul, but would such a man choose a coward’s death? No, Hartmann would be obstinate enough to live to the end. To be convicted. To take his unjust punishment and force his murderers to stare into his destroyed face before they shot him.