Motherland

by Maria Hummel

  The explosions lessened, and Liesl tried to pry Ani’s fingers free. “Ani, look at me,” she shouted. “We’re safe now. We’re in the shelter you and your brother built.” Internally, she willed Hans to make it home. Ani shook her off and covered his eyes again, flicking his head.

  The last Dillman girl trailed through the hole. She was holding a moth-eaten doll by the neck. “Hurry now. Don’t stay in there,” her mother shrilled from the other side. Liesl’s eyes met Frau Winter’s and a question flashed between them: Which one of their sons had initiated the attack on Frieda?

  Not mine, Liesl thought, and in Frau Winter’s gaze she saw the same stubborn doubt.

  The explosions came in waves. A boom. The house shook. Liesl ducked, covering Jürgen’s head. Then rattle and rain, quaking, stillness. She raised her head, and just when her dry tongue passed across the dirt on her lips, just when she’d stopped clutching Jürgen so hard, another boom. Cans clattered on the shelves. Ani rocked and twitched, his hands cupping his eyes.

  The suitcases against the near wall leapt. One sprang open, blossoming shirts and underwear. There was a scream from the other side of the hole and someone ran through, grabbing for the luggage.

  It was Frieda. Her cheeks were red. Her new breasts strained against her sweater as she tried to shove the suitcase closed. It seemed like hours, her struggle. No one helped her. The Winter boys sat with their toes practically touching Frieda’s, their mouths slightly parted, their hands over their ears. If Hans had been there, Liesl would have made him offer a hand, but Hans was outside—in that hell—because of Frieda. Liesl couldn’t set the baby down. Frau Winter’s head was buried in her bloodied arm, her voice braying the Lord’s Prayer. The candles flickered and sputtered.

  Finally Liesl scooted forward on her knees, still holding Jürgen, to assist Frieda. When another explosion shook the cellar, she reached out for a wall but misjudged the distance. Her hand fell through the hole between the cellars. She toppled. Jürgen gripped her neck.

  “Mutti!” she heard Ani scream as her head banged on dirt. She tried to push herself up, clinging to the baby, but another explosion came and she tumbled. Jürgen began to wail. She could see into Herr Geiss’s side, the folded legs of the Dillman girls, and the dark hulk of the older man. His face was in shadow. She shifted Jürgen to her left arm and pushed up with the right, shoving back into the light, into Ani, who clung to her.

  As soon as Liesl cleared the hole, the Dillman girl rushed through, clutching the closed suitcase. Another explosion, and Jürgen’s wails grew urgent. Frau Winter’s praying sang somewhere underneath it, gnawing Liesl’s ears.

  She shushed the baby, though she couldn’t hear herself, though soon another wailing joined his, the voice older and rawer, but the pitch and rhythm exactly the same. She saw the cellar’s eyes swivel to Ani. He squatted birdlike, his arms clamped to his sides, and screamed. His throat pulsed. His trousers climbed up his legs, exposing his bare shins and making his feet look like claws.

  Liesl eased over to him, holding Jürgen against her ribs, and tried to put an arm around him. “Ani,” she called.

  He raised his arms wing-like, clobbering her hard across the chin. She fell back. Another explosion and Ani launched up. For an instant he flew on the shaking air and then fell headfirst into one of the shelves. Cans tumbled off, rolling everywhere. Ani flapped again, throwing himself toward the ceiling.

  Liesl saw the Winter boys look at each other, then their mother. En masse they scrambled toward the hole to Herr Geiss’s side. Their bodies moved in slow motion, gaining footholds, losing them as the explosions rained down. Dirt pocked their faces. As Ani screamed and flapped, smashing into walls, the boys disappeared, one by one. Finally only Frau Winter was left. She gave Liesl a pitying glance and shoved through, her black skirt trailing.

  With the others gone, Hans’s green curtains suddenly came into view, hanging mildewed on the walls. Ani clawed at them, dragging the cloth down. The curtains snagged on his arms. They fluttered. He shrieked and tugged them high, his white face shining. His feet barely touched the ground. He seemed to be dancing on the broken, shifting air. He toppled, slamming the empty sauerkraut vat. Liesl tried to reach him, but she tripped on a can and lost her balance, almost dropping the baby. She sank to her knees, sobbing, cradling Jürgen.

  Another boom. She was crouched across the cellar when one of Ani’s green wings dragged across a candle. Fire burst over the tatters of cloth. The flame cast its sudden brightness. Ani’s screams changed. She bent and dropped the baby on a trampled blanket, then ran for the burning boy with her arms outstretched.

  The plane surged over Hans and past the castle before it dropped its bombs. They fell like mulberries from a bowl and then the sky split into clouds of flame and dust. Hans peeled himself from the shelter door and ran back toward the brewery. His pants hung on him, wet with piss, and made his legs snag with every step. He retraced his footprints back to the brewery fence and shoved himself under, lying on his back. The metal snagged on the soaked bulge of his crotch. He kept pushing. The pants groaned and tore. His penis shriveled against the touch of the cold wind. He whimpered but he kept shoving—there, he was through—then he tugged the torn flap free from the wires.

  The planes were circling back. He held his pants closed with his hand and sprinted inside the brewery. He didn’t know he was sobbing until he got inside, and his loud, harsh hiccups broke against the ancient walls.

  “Shut up,” he shouted at himself. He pounded his fists into his quaking gut. “Shut up! Shut up!”

  The rafters gaped above him, revealing nothing. He sobbed until he retched, falling to his hands and knees. Drool dripped from his mouth. He stared at the dirt. He stared at the scattered black seeds. The wet flap of his pants hung open.

  A loud explosion made the building shake. Dust fell gently. He listened for wings and heard in the distance, far beyond the brewery, the feathering roar and crackle of fire.

  He crawled under an old ledge in the wall and tried to make himself smaller, squeezing his knees into his face, one arm tightening over his ears, the other over his eyes.

  After the air raid ended, he sat very still, unable to bring himself to move. He stared at the rafters until nightfall, and after nightfall he stared into the darkness, still cupping his knees. He played a game of closing his eyes, then opening them suddenly, and searching the blackness for the walls he knew were there.

  Sometimes the walls moved. They were five, ten meters away, and sometimes they were centimeters from his nose. They had a reddish-black hue. They were the texture of felt, then of fur. Once he thought he saw feather patterns, a series of long straight stripes with spokes radiating from their lengths, but the moment he pushed his nose forward, the wall disappeared.

  He was aware of things happening outside the brewery. He heard the giant iron door swing open and people stampede out, crying and howling at the fires and destroyed buildings in the center of town. He heard a man call that the power was out. He heard fire trucks racing, and the lower, rumbling growl of an army convoy. He heard a house fall in. He was pretty sure anyway. There was a long groan, and then a crumbling crash that sounded like boards and rocks being eaten by a giant mouth.

  He made two bargains with himself.

  If I go home, they will still be alive.

  If I don’t go home, they will still be alive.

  He remained frozen between the choices.

  Sometimes he heard his own desperate voice begging to be let in, and he tried to lock the memory away.

  The walls came closer. The walls drifted a kilometer off. They were the color of a night river. He could dive into them.

  If I go home, they will still be alive.

  If I don’t go home, they will still be alive.

  He couldn’t get up now and walk home. His body hurt too much, and he was afraid of the dark outside the building. He was afraid his voice was still shrieking out there somewhere.

  So when he heard s
omeone calling his name, he squirmed his spine deeper into the dirt and clung to his knees. He stayed there when he heard the fence shake. He was so perfectly still an ant could crawl over him and think he was a stone. But he heard a grunt, and then a scraping sound, and then the voice was closer and it spoke his name urgently.

  There was a hiss, and light flooded over him, making the ceiling’s cobwebs glow like an old woman’s hair.

  His stepmother’s face appeared, covered with soot and mud.

  He shrank deeper. His spine scraped the wall. It made the softest rustle. She turned and saw him. She ran closer, the oil lamp bobbing in her hand. He felt his face crumple and he pushed his fists against it. He ground his dirty knuckles into his eyes as she set the lamp down and pulled him into the nest of her lap, kissing his head. “They wouldn’t let me in,” he said in a choked voice.

  She rocked him gently, gathering him up with her thin arms, holding him against the cold. He wept so hard he shook.

  “Shh, now,” he heard her say. “You’re here.” And she kept saying it every few moments, but softer and softer, until he had to stop sobbing to hear it.

  Before they set out for the walk back, she told Hans quickly about Ani, about the burn on Ani’s right arm, and how she’d wrapped it in salve and a torn sheet. She said that Ani had calmed after the explosions stopped. “Right away,” she said, because she saw Hans’s worried face. (It wasn’t exactly true: First Ani stopped flapping, then he stopped screaming, and finally he just lay there and breathed, like a rabbit exhausted by a trap.)

  “When we came upstairs, he saw the sunflower seed you left him. He said I would find you at the brewery,” she finished.

  She did not say that she didn’t believe Ani at first, that she was afraid to venture out. All the unexploded ordnance everywhere. The chance of another raid. Being mistaken for a looter by the RLB.

  She did not say that it was Berte Geiss who made her go, who volunteered to stay with Ani and Jürgen on their side of the cellar. The young woman had suddenly emerged from the hole. “Go,” she said, her face pale but her voice strong and sure. “I heard what Ani said. I’ll watch them. Go.”

  Liesl would never tell Hans how harrowing it was to step out alone, on the black, broken streets, and fumble her way to the brewery with no light, every tiptoe a step that could end her life. Their street had not been bombed, but the farther she’d ranged from their villa, beyond the neighbors of neighbors, the more destruction she’d seen: a roof punched in and smoldering; shattered window glass and drifting pieces of paper; the pit where a house had been; a pile of rubble where three men dug furiously, all wearing the stars of the RLB. Stones and ash spun under their shovels. One of the men smoked furiously while he dug, the embers of his cigarette dropping tiny sparks. It took Liesl a moment to recognize that it was Herr Unter, the old man who sold her rabbit meat. The dimness accentuated the lines of his face, making him look ancient.

  Liesl heard boots clack on the cobblestone and hid in a threshold while a soldier in uniform passed, peering left and right.

  She listened to the men dig, wondering whose house it was.

  “I heard her,” said one of the men hoarsely. “The little girl. She called out. I’m sure of it.”

  The others did not respond. Their blades clanged the stone.

  When Liesl was certain it was safe, she crept out over a path of broken glass and did not look back.

  Farther along, a water main had broken and she had to cross a frothy, filthy river, soaking her boots.

  Then the black plum of an unexploded bomb had appeared right in the middle of her path. She’d stopped altogether, staring at it.

  Frank is dead, the bomb whispered. Its sinister message paralyzed her. Frank is dead.

  She had not allowed herself to imagine it until that moment, her nostrils clogged with smoke, her eardrums still ringing with the sound of explosions. Something had fallen on Frank. Something had lifted up under him and hurled him into the air like an animal shaking off a rider. Something had buried him. Her mouth opened, and it felt as if she was breathing in something solid; walls would fill her instead of air, and she would harden.

  A shrill whistle a block away broke her reverie and she stumbled sideways, around the bomb, into deeper shadows. She’d had to feel her way then, wincing at every crunch of glass or gravel.

  The entire journey—less than a kilometer—had taken her two hours.

  The way back with Hans seemed easier, but it went no faster. They picked their way lightly through the rubble, hardly stepping down. The boy understood to be quiet and motioned when he needed to point out a shard of twisted pipe in their path, a sudden hole. They hid together when they heard someone shout, “RLB! Who’s there?” and Hans’s breath made a damp patch on her waist.

  When they reached their street, Hans paused. Liesl watched him gaze on the downed sticks and leaves, the rash of black soot on all the walls and the blinded windows, but every one of the houses whole and entire. Then he spoke. “I didn’t mean to hurt Frieda,” he said in a small tight voice, and then he burst into tears again.

  Liesl did not put her arms around him this time, although she wanted to. She watched him weep, watched until his shoulders stopped shaking and he wiped his eyes. “Then apologize to her and her mother,” she said in a calm voice.

  The boy held back.

  “Come on,” she said.

  “Is Vati dead?” he said.

  How had he guessed her fear? She staggered and caught herself. A stone rolled away from her feet. “I don’t know,” she said.

  They walked forward in silence. When they were just a few houses away, she tripped again. This time a muscle wrenched in her ankle. She cried out.

  The boy grabbed her arm, steadying her. A ray of moonlight illuminated his face, and in that moment he looked so much like Frank she almost gasped. She leaned into Hans, suddenly exhausted, and felt him lean back at her. They held each other all the way to the gate.

  Jürgen was asleep in Berte’s arms when they returned. In fact, both boys appeared to have been dozing, Jürgen on Berte’s lap and Ani lying against her side.

  “You made it,” Berte said weakly.

  Two of the Winter boys had also returned to claim some free space, their lanky limbs stretched on the bare earth. But the others still crowded in the Geiss cellar. Light and whispers trickled through the hole.

  Liesl spoke into it. “He’s been found,” she said. “Our Hans. He’s safe.”

  There was a silence and then Herr Geiss spoke. “Glad news,” he said.

  She felt Hans step forward beside her, saw the contrite expression on his face. She saw his mouth working on the apology he had to utter to Frieda and Fran Dillman.

  “Where’s my parrot?” Ani’s voice rose. “Did you give it the seeds?”

  Beyond the hole, Frau Dillman whispered something and her daughters giggled.

  Liesl gripped Hans’s arm and pulled him back. He could apologize to the girl later if he wanted, but she wasn’t going to give that woman—or any of them—the satisfaction of hearing him now. Not when they’d left her alone with a baby and a burning child.

  Hans seemed confused, but then he shrugged and slumped down beside his brother.

  “Where is it?” Ani said again.

  “I gave it the seeds and it flew away before the raid,” Hans said after a moment. “You were right. It wanted to go back to the jungle.” He looked at his brother’s arm, bandaged in strips of one of Frank’s old shirts. “Does it hurt?”

  Ani turned his hollow gaze on Liesl. “It’s going to die,” he whispered.

  “You don’t know that,” said Liesl.

  “It’s too far to the jungle,” said Ani.

  Liesl looked to Hans for help, but he sank down on the cellar floor and pulled a blanket up into a hood, cloaking his face. “I’m tired,” he muttered.

  “In the morning we can find everything,” Berte said in a strained voice. “We just all need to sleep.”

 
; “Sleep would be nice,” said Herr Geiss from the other side of the cellar, and Liesl heard Frau Dillman titter again. A wave of loathing swept through her. She hated them all: the ones who’d ignored her son’s fists on the shelter door, the ones who’d left her alone with Ani burning. The one who’d let her best friend go, the one who’d let Ani sicken.

  She took Jürgen from Berte and settled against the wall.

  Berte leaned forward on her arms and began to cry softly into her knees. Liesl touched her hair but the girl shook her off.

  “I’m all right,” she said, sniffing. “I’m all right. Get some sleep.”

  But Liesl couldn’t sleep. She just kept checking her sons—Hans, Jürgen, then Ani. Hans and the baby slept. Ani stared into the darkness, holding his burned arm. He hardly blinked or moved his head. His wet eyeballs caught the light. Sometimes he reached up a hand and ran it over his own face, his fingers probing his nose, his lips, as if he had never felt them before.

  Late in the night, more explosions.

  After it ended, there was no answering rat-tat of anti-aircraft fire, Liesl realized with a fresh dread. The flak towers were down, the Luftwaffe gone. There was no one to protect them now.

  The morning drew a halo at the top of the stairs. It pulsed and beckoned. New world, new world, it seemed to say, as if they had all voyaged somewhere strange and dangerous.

  The hole flooded with traffic. The Winter boys darted from the Geiss cellar into Liesl’s and ran upstairs, followed by the Dillman girls. Hans sprinted after them. Herr Geiss barged through to look at Ani’s burn. He pronounced it minor, but he looked at the boy thoughtfully for a long time, and his heavy chin fell to his chest.

  Liesl wanted to talk with him, but the mothers were needed in the kitchen to mete out food. Liesl avoided Frau Dillman’s eyes as they made a hasty congress to discuss their collective stores: a few loaves of bread, some potatoes, a smidge of lard, horseradish, rutabagas, cabbage, a tiny chunk of salted ham. Gas and water were off. Firewood and coal were low. They could smell the burning from the city’s center. The stench was greasy and sharp, as if someone had roasted rubber. Frau Winter hailed a boy passing in the street, who told them the post office had received a direct hit. Probably fifty dead there alone.