Motherland

by Maria Hummel

  Frau Dillman was still trembling. Liesl put her hand on her shoulders but the other woman brushed it away.

  “I wanted my girls to be safe,” Frau Dillman said in an accusing tone.

  “She is safe here,” said Liesl, hearing Ani open the door. She didn’t want him to know about this. “She must be mistaken about Hans.”

  Frau Dillman shook the ripped cloth. “You’ve seen how he looks at them! Like he owns them,” she shouted. “And you and your airs from the day we came! ‘Could you please not hang your laundry outside? Could you please refrain from clomping around?’ Like we are some kind of cows!”

  Ani descended slowly, his hand on the rail. Frau Dillman’s face pulsed with fury. “And that one,” she said.

  “My sons have never hurt anybody,” Liesl retorted before Frau Dillman could say any more. “You don’t have to be afraid for your girls. Not in my house.”

  Frau Dillman reared back. “I am always afraid for them,” she said, and thrust the cloth under her arm. She huffed up the stairs past Ani. “Always,” she said to him.

  Now the key was on the shelf, and Liesl had to explain to Ani why his brother was locked in his room. She’d sent Ani downstairs for one last load of wood. He was taking a long time, as if he also dreaded their conversation.

  She set Jürgen down with his blocks and began to feed the stove. The orange heat of the fire baked her face. She blinked and kept her eyes averted as Ani stumbled back in. His ankles extended from his pants. He needed bigger clothes. It surprised her that he was growing.

  Ani dumped the firewood in the box beside the stove, rattling the logs so they collapsed in a mostly even pile.

  “Your brother is locked in his room,” Liesl said. “And you’re not to go in there.”

  “Why?” Ani’s eyes were wide.

  She still didn’t know how to say it. “He and some other boys ripped Frieda Dillman’s coat.”

  Ani looked toward the hall to their closet room. “For how long?”

  “What?”

  “How long does he have to stay in there?”

  The crime hadn’t even registered, only the punishment.

  Behind them, Jürgen reached out and scattered his blocks across the floor. Liesl shut the stove door. “Until I say he can come out,” she said, because she didn’t know how long to lock up a boy . . . a day? Two days? It was Uta’s idea; it had been Uta’s solution to Hans’s increasing disobedience. Uta had seemed to think that Hans would emerge a different boy, chastened by the discipline he needed. At least he was being quiet now.

  “Can I talk to him through the door?” asked Ani.

  “No.”

  “How about Morse code?”

  She reached out and took his hand, pulling him toward her. His steps were stumbling, reluctant. He kept his head down.

  “Ani, look at me,” she said, and lifted his chin. “It’s not a game. Your brother hurt a girl.”

  His eyes met hers, and his lips began to shake. “But I want to miss him. To see him.”

  “I miss him, too,” Liesl said. She put her arms around him and hugged him, then checked the hem of his pants. There wasn’t any fabric left to let out. He would need new trousers from somewhere.

  She gave him an extra squeeze and let go. His eyes were still troubled. “Am I a loony?” he asked.

  The word knifed her.

  “You ate something that was bad for you,” she said. “But it doesn’t mean you’ll be sick forever.”

  He ducked his chin.

  “What did you eat, Ani?” she asked gently, for the hundredth time. “If you’d show me, we could get rid of it together.”

  His body went rigid. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t.”

  She reached for him again, but he hopped back, squawking. His arms rose into wings and he flapped to the other side of the room. Jürgen looked up from his blocks and watched him. Then the baby began to gabble his brother’s name, Anh, Anh. She plucked him up and sat back on the sofa, holding his damp, warm weight. “That’s right. That’s Ani. That’s your brother.”

  The older boy climbed on a chair and drew his legs under him.

  “You’re growing, Ani,” she said. “You’re going to be big soon, like Hans. Did you know that?” She couldn’t look at Ani, perching like a bird, so she talked to Jürgen’s soft head. “You’ll have to tell your baby brother all about your mother, so he doesn’t forget her.” Her voice was hoarse.

  Ani didn’t answer. He stared straight ahead. Then he lifted an outstretched arm to his cheek and rubbed his nose and mouth against it, as if he were preening feathers.

  Hans couldn’t sleep, so he kept plotting his father’s journey home, penciling different routes on the map. Vati curving east by accident, almost meeting the Russian army. Vati hiding in a castle ruin and staying there until the coast was clear. Vati on foot, on bicycle, on a train. Hans started to feel his own thighs aching from the long walk, his own toes freezing and hardening with frostbite. He imagined a farm wife rescuing Vati, half dead in her barn, and hiding him in her hayloft. Soon Vati would be here and he would listen to Hans. He would understand that Hans never meant to hurt Frieda Dillman, and he would make his new wife sorry for locking Hans up. Stay out of the affairs of men, he would tell her.

  Hans found the badge of the RLB and traced the star on the map, then wrote his own name inside it. He liked how the shape confined the letters and made sense of them. Hans Friedrich Kappus. He swore his own oath: to love and defend his brothers forever. Especially Ani. He wasn’t going to ditch him for the other kids anymore. He mentally added a promise about the parrot: If it’s in my power, I’ll find it, Brother, and bring it home.

  He grew hungry. He plucked up the little bag of sunflower seeds and stared at it. Then he ate one, only one, and watched the door.

  It wasn’t yet light out when his eyes opened. He woke thinking he’d heard a click, but he didn’t believe it. No noise came from the hall. He pushed himself from his bed and walked barefoot across the cold, stinging floor to the doorknob. He bent down and peered through the keyhole. Blankness and a still wall beyond. If he could shrink to half a centimeter tall, he could crawl out and lower himself on a thread to the floor. He was still entertaining the thought when his hand reached up and tried the knob. It snagged—locked!—no, it wasn’t locked; it was rolling all the way to the right and the door was swinging loose in his hand. He held it halfway and peered into the dim hall, seeing no one. He listened for noises, but the apartment was still. It was as if an invisible snow had fallen through the rooms and coated everything. His breath sounded loud in his ears.

  “Ani,” he whispered. The silence was complete.

  He shut the door carefully and dressed, tucking the sunflower seeds in his pocket. He looked around for a peg to jam in the lock, to make it look as though he’d let himself free.

  Before leaving, he pulled the seeds out again, and plucked a single black one from his palm. He left it on Ani’s pillow. A clue only Ani would understand.

  As Hans crossed the pasture, he glanced over at the stable ruin, seeing it for a moment as it once must have been: a long brick building, with doors for the horses, their broad noses poking out. A romantic place, full of golden straw and the chance to ride away on the back of a stallion. Now it was empty, laid bare by decades, the rubble glistening with frost. Hans wondered if anyone would show up today, or if the game was over for good. Remembering what happened to Frieda made him heartsick and angry. It was all the Winters’ faults for changing the rules. They could have played forever if they had followed their own rules.

  Hans looked around again to make sure he was alone, then flattened against the ground and shoved under the gate that guarded the building from trespassers. He walked up to the building, suddenly awed by the sheer walls, their age, the gaping oak door he stepped through. The instant reek of mildew made him blink and wrinkle his nose. It was hard to imagine busy workers here, or the giant brew kegs that had once held beer. The building had bee
n empty as long as he’d been alive, a vaulting cavern, its second floor burned away by a long-ago fire. Char streaked the inside walls and the rafters above. Cobwebs and dust hung like wigs from iron hooks.

  Hans reached into his coat pocket, fisting his hand carefully around the hard shells inside. He drew his fingers out, still balled, and slowly opened his palm. A few sunflower seeds stuck to his fingers and he combed them down with his other hand, making a tidy black pile. Then he extended his arm out, waiting for the parrot.

  He hoped the parrot would understand him as animals understand each other. That a silent communion would pass between them, and the bird would fly down and eat from his hand. That it would come home. It would sleep in their room at night, and ride on Ani’s shoulders by day, as though his brother were a seafarer returned from a long, strange voyage.

  Sirens groaned on the daylight outside. The groan divided against itself, and divided again. Voices called in the distance. Metal clanged.

  On the far side of the building, people were entering the public shelter. It had a giant iron door fastened to bolts. On one of his scavenging missions, Hans had studied the door before, entranced by its size. It latched from the inside and could hold back fire.

  He hesitated, forcing his palm to stay steady. The daytime raids were usually factories and railroads, not the center of town. He stared into the black seeds, willing the bird down from the apse.

  The seeds popped into the air and he staggered forward. He was almost to his knees before his ears registered the crash. The blast was so loud, it made his teeth rattle. The black seeds tumbled to the earth. He dropped to gather them and the building shook again. He crashed to his elbow, bruising it. With quick fingers he scraped up most of the seeds, shoving them in his pocket. Another blast. He bit his tongue. Tasted blood.

  Damp dirt tumbled from overhead, pattering his hair, the back of his neck. He struggled to rise. Another blast. The walls seemed to be throwing themselves higher, away from the earth. A brick thudded the floor a few meters away. Hans bent like a sprinter and launched himself forward toward the brewery door, the gate beyond.

  Another crash slammed his temple into the doorjamb. He fell, holding his brow, feeling first the impact and then the pain. He rolled to his side, half in the shadow and half in the light. His eyes blinked through a heavy rush of tears. He rubbed them away with his arm, his buttons scraping at his skin.

  Outside, planes ripped over the center of town. The prim lines of the castle, the red roofs, and the plaster city looked tiny under the onslaught. Oblongs plummeted from the aircrafts. Ash and mud rose a few delayed instants later, as if the earth had swallowed the artillery and was vomiting it back up.

  Hans dove under the fence, shimmying through the mud, lurching to his knees, rising into a run. Just before he passed out of sight of the brewery entrance, he looked back for the parrot.

  He saw no movement, but he felt a cold intelligence inside the building, watching him.

  The sky thundered again and his legs collapsed. He smashed the wet grass, then ran alongside the worn brick wall, taking the corner. In the distance, he spied the big iron door, the wall above it marked with a white-and-black sign. The shelter was for the Alt Stadt, for the poor people with no basements of their own. A few meters and he would be there. His mind flashed to the people inside—haggard, toothless mothers who shrilled at their snot-nosed kids, elderly men who didn’t remember to wipe themselves. His stepmother and brothers would be at home in their own cellar, frantic for him.

  The siren wailed. A plane tore through the air overhead, low enough to glimpse its blister of machine guns, pivoting left and right. Hans sprinted the last ten meters.

  The plane passed, bullets tattering the ground, making the wet soil pop like grease in a pan. Hans slammed the damp door. “Let me in!” he screamed, beating the metal.

  Another plane circled. Hans hugged the door. “Let me in!” he called again.

  A small object tumbled from the plane’s belly and into the pasture behind the brewery. Hans braced himself for an explosion. It did not come.

  “Let me in!” his voice was still calling, rising on the “in,” so that the word became a scream.

  A shadow coasted over Hans’s face. He glanced up. The underbelly of the plane was right over him—the rivets, the silver blur of the engines—but its noise was so loud, so total, that the sensation of its passing was like a sudden blindness. Hans clawed at his eyes.

  The plane surged skyward. Hans pummeled the door. He punched it so hard his knuckles split, and then he punched it harder.

  The siren wailed, a long drawn-out sound that broke the roar of the planes. A peculiar quiet followed—not a silence but a lower, whining drone as the planes took the sky. Hans pressed his ear to the door. He could hear the people murmuring inside. Why couldn’t they hear him?

  He screamed out his name, his address, his father’s and mother’s names.

  Why couldn’t they hear him?

  “Just let me in!” he pleaded. The whine was getting louder.

  “Let me in!” His bloody knuckles hammered the door. The planes were circling. They would bomb again. Hans scrambled back, waiting for the lock to unclick, but the door did not budge.

  He pushed himself to standing. He would run. He had to run. A plane descended, shrieking over him. He fell back on the door, his hands folding themselves over the back of his head, so tight they mashed his shaking face into the metal and he tasted the flat, cold flavor of his father’s stethoscope, and helmets, and knives. He shut his eyes.

  The baby balanced on one foot, wobbled on his axis, then let the second foot down on a lump of carpet and toppled with a whump. He pushed his behind in the air and rose again, holding the sofa. One foot, then the next. One foot, then the next. His soft woolen socks crushing under his weight. One foot. He was treading beyond the sofa now, to the open space between furniture and stove. He was walking toward the green tile with his arms outstretched.

  “He’s really walking! He’s walking! My baby brother’s walking!” Ani shouted from his perch on the sofa.

  “Right into the stove,” Liesl said, scooping up the taut spring that Jürgen had become. He squirmed to be let down and started his march again, this time toward the table where Uta used to pile her ashtray and stale candies. Now it held a map traced with Hans’s hand, and a star at the edge of it that bore Hans’s handwritten name. Hans was going to find his father, or to join the fighting, but either way it was clear that he had intended to go far.

  She’d checked the lock, found the little peg he’d jammed into it.

  She’d bribed the Winter boys to ask at the train stations. “Why don’t you wait for nightfall?” Frau Winter had said when she’d seen Liesl’s panicked face. “He’ll come home when he’s hungry.”

  “It will be too late by then,” Liesl insisted.

  She’d hugged Ani while he cried, and then praised him when he’d raised his head and said, hiccupping, that he had to be brave for Jürgen.

  “Now I can teach you to fly,” Ani said to his brother, grabbing him under the arms and straining up. As Liesl cried out, he hefted the baby into the air and then lost his own balance. They both tumbled to the ground. Jürgen looked stunned but he didn’t wail.

  “He doesn’t need to fly,” she said, reaching out a hand. But Ani was already trying to lift his brother again, shoving him forward. “Stop it,” she cried.

  A door slammed downstairs and sirens began to blare. Liesl grabbed Jürgen in midtotter and told Ani to get the extra blankets. Her orders were cut off by another siren. She staggered, grabbed for the door handle. There was a heavy cracking sound toward the Louisenstrasse, and then the sky began to beat and thunder. The windows ground in their casings. She glanced out, hoping to see Hans running, but the street was empty, and shimmered strangely, like a street in a mirror’s reflection.

  Ani appeared, shrouded in green wool, a stricken look on his face. Another boom, and plaster broke from the walls. She yelled
to him to hold the railing, but he simply launched down the first set of steps, a green hump tumbling earthward. The doors to the Winters’ and Dillmans’ apartments opened and slammed. Frau Dillman, the Dillman girls, Frau Winter, her cluster of boys. The staircase was a river of bodies. They were pushing each other toward the dark narrow steps. Liesl took one last look for Hans and then plunged after them, clutching Jürgen, who started to squall at the top of his lungs.

  Another boom, and plaster fell from a nail hole, dribbling down the wall. Frau Dillman screamed and shoved her daughters with her fat arms, but Frau Winter was not to be beaten to the cellar, and she scrambled ahead of them all. Her body tipped like a tall bottle. The siren groaned. The Dillman girls bobbed and shrieked, their heads full of pin curls that glinted in the last of the sunlight. Another boom. They leapt and plunged en masse into the cellar, their hands clawing at the stone wall. Liesl heard a shrill scream and saw Ani disappear under the wave of bodies.

  “You’re crushing him!” she cried.

  The booms and sirens stopped for a moment, and a sudden silence struck. Jürgen wailed and then looked around, as if surprised by the sound of his own voice. She heard Ani whimpering.

  “Don’t crush him!” Liesl shouted, but the explosions began again.

  By the time Liesl made it into the cellar with Jürgen, their supplies were all over the floor and Ani was curled up beside the shelf, cupping his face while the others eddied around him. Liesl ran to him. She couldn’t hear her own voice trying to reassure him.

  Nearby, Frau Winter was collapsed over a long gash in her arm. She moaned while her gaunt sons tried to bandage it with a shirt.

  Frau Dillman, face stony, herded her girls through the hole in the wall, where Herr Geiss and Berte waited for them. A lantern was already burning there. Another boom, muffled now. The arching cellar bricks trembled and spilled grains of mortar. Liesl adjusted Jürgen on her hip and pulled Ani with her to a pinch of room beside Herr Geiss’s hole.