Motherland

by Maria Hummel

  At the end of that first week of Vati’s disappearance, Hans arrived at the edge of the pasture to hear a familiar, nervous giggle. His stomach contracted and his pants slid toward his hips. He grabbed his waistband, hunting the rubble with his eyes.

  One of the refugee boys was screaming toward the prison stall, where Ani stood alone, separated from the clump of girls and small children. Ani stood very still and straight, his arms welded to his sides. It looked as if someone had hammered him into the ground. There was a rope around his neck.

  “I said, ‘Move!’” shouted the refugee kid.

  “I said move!” Ani squawked back.

  Frieda Dillman grabbed Ani’s rope and tugged gently. He squawked again and lifted his arms and coasted away along the broken wall.

  “Stop it, Ani,” pleaded Frieda. “Just play the game with us.”

  Ani squawked again. A clod of dirt hit him in the face. He fell over, his arms still straight.

  “Irre,” Hans heard the other kids say. Loony. He watched in horror as the advancing team threw more clods on Ani, and the younger boy bounced and twitched, and then the girls pulled him to his feet. Ani struggled for balance, his arms still outstretched. “I said move! I said move!” he repeated in an awkward falsetto.

  “Loony, loony, loony!” shrieked Grete Dillman.

  “Stop!” Hans shouted, and broke through the children to reach his brother. Up close he could see the bruises already swelling on Ani’s cheeks and where the rope had bitten into his neck. His brother glanced at him, showing no sign of recognition.

  “Stop!” Ani squawked back.

  “Ani!” said Hans. “Go home.”

  “Ani go home,” mimicked his brother. His eyes sickled up as if something was funny, but no laugh came out of his mouth.

  “Who did this to him?” Hans shouted at Frieda Dillman. She was the second oldest, already with a bosom that pushed out her shirt. Her forehead crinkled. She stared at him as if he were speaking another language.

  “Who put the rope around his neck?” Hans demanded.

  “He wanted to play with us,” scoffed Grete Dillman, tossing her braids. “Everyone knows he’s crazy.”

  “He’s not crazy,” Frieda said faintly.

  “Crazy,” Ani echoed.

  “Why are you talking like this?” Hans said to him.

  His brother just stared at him with his sickled eyes and then let out a squawk.

  “Shut up!” Hans grabbed for his brother, but Ani flapped free and began to run headfirst into the wall. Hans groped for the rope, his fingers closing around it. His brother choked and fell into the slush.

  “Ani,” Hans cried and tumbled to the ground beside him, hugging his brother’s thin shoulders. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, as Ani curled his knees in, still coughing.

  “Shut up,” Ani imitated in a whisper, but the parrot voice was fading. “Shut up. Ani. I’m sorry.”

  “Let’s go home,” Hans said, and he ignored the others as he helped his brother to his feet and loosened the rope from his neck. He threw it to the ground and put an arm around Ani’s shoulder, guiding him away.

  As soon as they passed a few blocks and started crossing the Kurpark, Ani’s color returned. “Are you all right?” said Hans.

  Ani touched his mouth with his fingers.

  “Why did you go there?”

  “I saw the kids playing. They’re scaring it away,” Ani said.

  The parrot again. “Just stay at home,” said Hans. “All right?”

  “You don’t stay at home.”

  “I’m older.”

  Ani scratched his neck. It was mostly dirt on his face, not bruises. It would wash off.

  “It’s not that fun anyway. The game,” said Hans.

  “Then why does everybody go?”

  “I don’t know,” said Hans.

  He couldn’t explain why the game of Kidnap kept drawing him back, nor could he remember what his days were like before he started playing it. The game hadn’t existed and now it did. His body wore the marks of it, the bruises on his shins and hips, but it had made a deeper impression on his mind. All day, at night, he catalogued his opponents: what fellows were good runners, what fellows could push him down, and who got tired first. The teams always shifted; that’s what made it so hard to win and so hard to quit.

  As he and Ani reached their street and passed under the branches of a familiar chestnut tree, Hans worried about who was winning. The sides would be uneven without him. He wouldn’t be the one to lift the Dillmans over the wall anymore, not if he stayed away. He stopped still and let his brother walk on. Ani turned, his expression puzzled.

  “You’re safe now. I’m going back,” Hans told him.

  Ani’s face fell. “Don’t go.”

  “I have to go,” said Hans. “One of them is going to trade me some sunflower seeds. For the parrot. If I don’t go, I won’t get them, and then we can’t lure it out.”

  Ani continued to regard him sorrowfully.

  “Don’t tell Mutti,” Hans said, backing away, passing the chestnut. “You know you weren’t supposed to be there.”

  His brother’s face grew smaller and less distinct. Hans couldn’t see the bruises or dirt at all anymore. A few more steps, and Ani was just a small figure in a canyon of leafless trees.

  As soon as Hans slipped into the apartment that night, his stepmother was there, wearing one of Marta’s aprons and smelling of turnips. Her red hair sprang from a bun at the back of her head, and her cheeks were pink from hovering over steaming pots.

  Ugly, Hans thought, though he knew it wasn’t true. She never looked ugly. She just looked different, sharper and more angular than his mother. She’d never hit him, but her presence was always a blow. He tried to hurry past her.

  “What happened to your brother?” she demanded. “Where have you been?”

  “Nowhere,” he said, squeezing by her into the living room.

  Fräulein Müller was sitting on the sofa. She promised she was leaving that Sunday, and it wouldn’t be soon enough. “Fetch those for me, will you, Hans?” she said, pointing to the blocks his brother had swept to the floor.

  As he bent, he heard his stepmother storm in after him. “Your brother was hurt out there,” she said. “He’s been hiding in your room since he came home.”

  “He’s fine,” said Hans.

  “He’s not fine. And I assumed you had nothing to do with it, surely not his own brother, so I went and knocked on the Dillmans’ door and gave them a piece of my mind.” She paused, catching her breath. His stepmother had been giving the Dillmans a piece of her mind a lot lately: about the noise, about the messes in the wash kitchen. “Then Grete Dillman told me you were there.”

  “I didn’t know Ani would show up,” said Hans. “I brought him home as soon as I saw him. Why did you let him out?” He threw the blocks on the couch next to Fräulein Müller, narrowly missing his baby brother’s fist as he grabbed for more.

  His stepmother stepped closer to him, her shadow lengthening in the gaslight. “What happened outside?” she said.

  He couldn’t tell her. The memory of the rope and Ani falling to the slush made him too unsettled to talk. “We were just playing a game,” he mumbled. “Ani got carried away.”

  “Hans,” his stepmother said. He saw her glance at Fräulein Müller. “Hans, I want you to stay home and play with your brother and do your studies in the afternoons. If you disobey me, you’ll be . . . locked up. In your room.”

  A short laugh escaped his lips. He gaped at her in disbelief. Locked up?

  “You’re the one who let him out,” he said.

  His stepmother looked over to her friend again. Fräulein Müller made a tower and Jürgen knocked it down.

  “Strong boy,” Fräulein Müller said approvingly. “A boy can wreck the tower, but a man learns how to build it.” She took the baby’s pudgy hand and closed it around a block. It was clear Fräulein Müller had put his stepmother up to this, with all her mutteri
ng about not “spoiling” them. Well, she might set rules, but he refused to listen.

  “I’ll go lock myself up right now,” he said, knowing he didn’t sound like himself. He didn’t sound like any German son talking to his elders. Both women recoiled. He marveled at his insolence, but it continued to spill out. “If that’s all right with you. Is that all right?” he asked, and left the room before they could answer.

  Ani curled on the bed, quiet but not sleeping.

  “Did you get my sunflower seeds?” he asked when Hans came in.

  “Not yet.”

  Ani sighed.

  “I want to tell you something.” Hans took the atlas from under his pillow and spread it on the floor. “Vati is on his way,” he said. He ran his finger over the bird’s-eye distance between Weimar and Hannesburg, coasting over hills, rivers, the finished and unfinished Autobahn.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do. I see it in my head. Like a dream, only I know it’s true.” He waited for his brother to protest, but Ani nodded. “He’s walking. That’s why it’s taking so long. He’s trying to stay in the trees.”

  Ani watched him silently from his bed. There were still red marks on his neck.

  “He has to be good at hiding and sleeping in the cold,” said Hans. “And sometimes he has to take eggs from people’s henhouses so he can eat something.”

  Hans traced a different route, following the roads. “He has a gun, but he doesn’t use it. He promised his father that he would never kill anything, unless it was a mercy.”

  “Is that true?” Ani said.

  Hans looked up. His father had told him that once, but he couldn’t remember when or where. He nodded. “Grossvati made him promise. Anyway, he’s coming, and I don’t want you to be scared. He’s coming home.”

  “Why didn’t you get my sunflower seeds?” said Ani.

  Hans’s cheeks burned. “He didn’t have them,” he said. “One of the other kids is going out to a farm again soon.”

  Ani began to blink rapidly. “But it’s winter now.”

  “They cut off the sunflowers’ heads in summer and dry them,” said Hans.

  “Is it a mercy to kill sunflowers?” asked Ani. Blink, blink. Blink, blink.

  “Ach, Ani. Grossvati wasn’t talking about flowers,” Hans said. His brother still looked upset. He tried to change the subject. “Remember when we went to Onkel Bernd’s?” he said. It had been just last spring, but it seemed like ages ago now. Their mother had been big with Jürgen and she’d taken them for a week at their father’s friend’s dairy farm. “We made a castle in the hayloft and hid from Mother, and she got so mad at us. Remember?”

  He choked on the last words. Mother hadn’t been able to climb the ladder and find them, so she’d called and called, while they’d hid, giggling. Ani had seemed closer in age to him then, shoulder-to-shoulder beside Hans in the scratchy pile of bales.

  Ani shrugged.

  Hans cleared his throat. “If you sniff a sunflower seed, you can still smell the July sun inside it. Mother told us that.”

  “I don’t want to smell it,” said Ani.

  The baby pulled himself up and swayed, beaming between Liesl’s and Uta’s knees. In the afternoon light, he looked as jolly as a cherub painted on a cathedral ceiling. Liesl and Uta were supposed to be letting out the seams of Uta’s dresses, but Jürgen’s elation at learning to walk was infectious, and the two of them had been sitting there, needles and thread cast aside, for the better part of an hour, watching him stand and tumble. The two older boys were outside shoveling the front walk.

  It was the second Friday since Uta’s lover’s visit. Liesl had two days left with Uta, and two dresses to restitch at the waist. She could not believe it was true. Her needle kept pricking her finger when she sewed. Don’t go. Yet the closer it got to Sunday, the more Uta whisked about with a giddy air, as if she were listening to some upbeat polka the rest of them couldn’t hear. No sign of fear, no concern for herself or the child inside her. “Don’t worry about me,” she’d said whenever Liesl asked. “I’ll go back with him and I’ll be fine. I’m always fine.”

  Always fine. Even though Uta was too pregnant now for an abortion. Even though the Red Army had crossed the Oder and would soon advance on Berlin.

  Liesl slipped her fingers into Jürgen’s fists and directed him slowly toward Uta. “Walk to Tante Uta now,” she encouraged. The baby took a step and buckled, landing on his rump. He looked up at them, astonished.

  “It’s like he forgets he can fall,” Uta marveled. “Until whump! He falls again.”

  “Try again, fall again,” Liesl said, and then spoke what had been on her mind all day. “I did write to my aunt, to see if we all could go to Franconia. Us and the boys.” The words had flown from her pen, explaining Ani’s predicament, her wish to see her cousins again. “You could go first and we’d meet you.”

  Uta didn’t reply for a moment. “That’s kind of you.” She looked at Liesl. “But you know the black sheep never goes back to her flock.”

  Liesl flushed. She knew it wouldn’t be the same for Uta. Everyone in the village still remembered the broken elopement between the tavern keeper’s daughter and the burgher’s son. The Josts still owned half the town, although Hans-Paul was elsewhere, overseeing his father’s eight canning factories, married to an heiress with thick lips and no children as yet.

  “You’ll be safer there,” she said uncertainly.

  “Don’t worry about me. What about Frank?”

  Liesl felt the child’s weight tugging on her hand. She propped him with her knee. “He can come for us or send for us,” she said.

  “Really,” said Uta. “He’s just going to waltz into the nearest station and buy a train ticket?”

  “That’s not the point,” Liesl said, wishing she could articulate the series of bargains she’d made with herself. If she waited for Frank, the worst would happen: A telegram announcing his death or arrest would come in his place. But if she didn’t wait, the telegram could never reach them. The inevitable would be lost somewhere. She stared into his photograph every night and tried to remember the way he said her name. She relived their conversations and recalled the weight of his arms around her shoulders. But as each day passed, it was getting harder to feel his presence. Where was Frank? What would Frank want? When she closed her eyes and tried to picture him, all she saw was Ani, his boyish face uplifted, waiting. Ani needed to go.

  “I’m doing it for his sons,” she said. “When Dr. Becker comes back—”

  “Do you think Dr. Becker is really worrying his head about one sick child?” Uta said.

  Liesl kept her face neutral and forced herself to shrug. Uta didn’t know about the note that had come last week from Dr. Becker, requesting another visit with Ani. Liesl had torn it to shreds and tossed them in the stove.

  “But I want to get Ani somewhere quiet. I want you somewhere safe. I wrote to Frank’s friend Bernd. He has a farm. But he never wrote back.”

  Uta’s reply was interrupted by the apartment door opening, and Hans and Ani marching in, Ani bearing a bundle of small sticks, Hans holding a basket and an envelope.

  “It’s from Frau Hefter,” he said.

  Liesl took the card and read it with growing surprise. “She says she’s very sorry to hear that Frank has gone missing, and she hopes the children like blood sausage. She says she wants us to come to a Frauenschaft meeting tomorrow.” The next words made her stumble: “She says there are neighbors upon neighbors lined up to help us with meals. We just have to say the word.”

  Frau Hefter. Liesl couldn’t get over it. She hadn’t seen the woman since the day of Ani’s bad news, except for brief greetings in the market.

  “I like blood sausage,” said Hans.

  “Is there any cake?” said Ani.

  “There, see?” said Uta. Her expression was hard to read.

  “See what?” Hans’s head snapped up.

  “But this is too much,” said Liesl. “Why ar
e they being so kind to us?”

  “Maybe they’ve wanted to be kind all along,” said Uta. “Maybe you don’t have to go.”

  “Go where?” said Hans.

  “Let’s see what she packed.” Liesl set the basket on the floor and the boys swarmed it, even baby Jürgen, twining his soft fingers over the wicker side and shaking the paper. The exploration of the basket gave all three boys glorious expressions—they hadn’t had something good to open in so long. They were gentle with one another: Hans handed Ani the parcel to open, and Ani gave Jürgen the string to dangle in his fist. Ani yelped when he saw the marzipan tube, somehow saved since Christmas. He looked so pleased it was painful. Hans turned a tin of sardines over and over in his hands. There was even a small sachet of black tea for Uta and Liesl.

  “No cigarettes,” commented Uta, but she sounded impressed.

  When the basket was empty, Hans lifted up his baby brother and balanced the wicker bowl on Jürgen’s head like a helmet. “Sieg Heil!” he said, saluting.

  The baby dimpled and swatted at his brother.

  Ani laughed with delight. “Jürgen is our general,” he said, patting his younger brother’s back.

  “Careful with him,” said Liesl, but she grinned at the boys and they grinned back.

  The baby punched skyward. The basket tumbled and spun across the floor. They all cheered.

  “Hurry up in there,” Liesl said, pounding on the bathroom door. “I’m going to be late for the meeting.”

  “Why is it so important to be on time?” came Uta’s muffled voice.

  “So I can make an appearance and come straight home,” said Liesl. It was Uta’s last day in Hannesburg. Liesl didn’t want to leave her side for an instant, but she had to go to the meeting or she would look ungrateful for Frau Hefter’s kindness. Uta volunteered to stay with Ani and Jürgen while Hans went off to help a neighbor chop firewood. Ani wasn’t fit for company yet. He’d taken to flapping from room to room, pretending he was a bird.