Motherland

by Maria Hummel

  Then she heard an adult male cough.

  “Who is it?” She froze. Her mind went to Uta’s lover. But he had no reason to come back here.

  “RLB,” said a gravelly male voice.

  She twisted the knob and saw Herr Geiss standing there, holding a large bundle inside a blanket. The old man was wearing the silver star of the air raid committee, only it appeared as if someone had picked out some of the stitches and left others. A hand could reach up and rip it right off his coat.

  “Herr Kappus, please,” the old man said hoarsely. The lines of his face looked carved by knives.

  “He’s with the baby,” she said. She heard Frank abruptly stop singing.

  Herr Geiss adjusted his hold on the bundle, hitching it higher up his chest. She smelled something scorched.

  “Get him, please,” said Herr Geiss.

  The shadows of the living room shifted and she felt Frank appear behind her.

  “We in the Reichsluftschutzbund extend our deepest regrets,” Herr Geiss said, his stoic expression collapsing. “There was a piece of unexploded ordnance on the brewery grounds . . .” He trailed off. A tiny blade of green drifted from beneath the blanket and fell to the floor.

  Frank shoved past Liesl and took the bundle from Herr Geiss’s arms. He made a wordless sound, clutching the blanket tight to him, revealing the shape of a small head and shoulders.

  Their old neighbor stepped back and bowed his head. Above and below, doors in the house clicked shut.

  “The field was marked for clearing,” said Herr Geiss, touching his star.

  Liesl heard a slam. Hans bounded up the stairs, his face open and expectant.

  Don’t come back now, she wanted to say, but she couldn’t breathe. She groped for air with her lips, her tongue, but nothing entered.

  She tried to see the closet room with the eyes of an American soldier. She viewed the two boys’ beds, jammed up against opposite walls, neatly made, and a painting of boys in sailboats above. She saw the light flooding from a small high window. No sign of a grown man anywhere. The room was as tidy as the rest of the apartment. The room had been scrubbed like the rest of the rooms. The sheets had been laundered and the blankets had been shaken over the balcony and the floors washed (not waxed—there was no wax). She breathed in. The smell was still there. Charred flesh. It permeated everything. The cemeteries were full—they’d had to bury Ani in the backyard. Frank had insisted they bury him—he dug the grave at night, all night—and then Frank had simply vanished, his body still present, but his spirit elsewhere. He was a man walking alone across the deep snow.

  She covered her mouth, smelling the sourness of her hand. One day, all day, she had walked around the house like this, with her mouth and nose cupped in her fingers, and Frank had pulled her palm down and told her to stop. Stop doing that. Stop covering your mouth.

  But she couldn’t stop, and Frank didn’t ask again. Instead, he began to obey her in everything. Every day he obeyed her more and more. She told him he couldn’t leave her. He stayed. She told him to hide. He hid. He squeezed his too-big body under his eldest son’s bed and pretended

  he was a mouse. Her orders; his compliance—it was the only thing that tethered them to their hours. Frank barely spoke above a whisper; his leaden eyes saw only what she pointed out. When he moved, his old grace was gone, replaced by a rickety gait and arms that flopped uselessly. He could not eat. He never once uttered the boy’s name. No one did.

  She dropped her hand to her side.

  She walked to the window and looked out. Three weeks in Hannesburg and the Americans had finally reached Hubertstrasse. They were two doors down—an officer and three enlisted men. She recognized their ranks now.

  News had come from the farm. Onkel Bernd arrested for God knows what. Half the animals slaughtered to feed a hungry battalion. No refuge there.

  News from the neighborhood was worse.

  Herr Geiss and his crates had been taken away, the old man locked in prison. As his last act, Herr Geiss had left a long letter explaining his daughter-in-law’s innocence, said Berte, who reappeared, hair matted and eyes dark with shadows, after two days of interrogations. She would not say what Herr Geiss was guilty of.

  “Better you don’t know anything,” she said.

  Because they would ask. The Americans were rounding up the men first, but the women would be next.

  Frau Winter. Frau Kappus. Frau Dillman. They would all be next.

  Sure that God had abandoned them all, Liesl put her faith in bribes. She bribed Frau Dillman and Frau Winter with all the hens’ eggs and rabbit meat besides. It was a simple bargain: They protected her husband; their children would eat. The butcher had nothing but offal to sell. The green grocer, some moldy barley. Trucks could not run because there was no fuel. Train tracks had been blown to twists of steel.

  People in Hamburg are eating ash pancakes, came the rumors.

  People in Cologne are eating grass soup.

  Berlin had not yet surrendered, but nobody said Heil Hitler in greeting anymore. They said Bleib übrig. Survive.

  Liesl said nothing to anyone in greeting or good-bye. She couldn’t bear talking. It made her taste the rot and burning in the air. She confined herself to the simple commands of the household, leaning on Hans for errands and firewood and water. Get this. Find that. After two weeks the gas was back on and they had light, but they kept the house dark, and Frank in shadow. Hans was likewise quiet, almost machine-like in his actions. He spoke in a dazed tone. He had not yet cried. Frank had not yet cried. Liesl’s eyes leaked all the time, but the action didn’t feel like crying. She touched the wet on her own cheeks and marveled at its strangeness and salt. The tears seemed alive, while every other part of her had withered and dried.

  Only the baby moved without caution. He seemed baffled by the walking ghosts around him, and when he wailed, his voice was shrill with anger. He smacked books down from the shelves and bit Hans when his brother pulled him away. The teeth made four red marks on Hans’s arm, one of them deep enough to bleed. Hans sucked at it. Liesl wondered dully if he was also trying not to smell death.

  Now Jürgen was sleeping and Hans was out scrounging for greens and seeds for the animals. The chickens were getting stringy and had laid half as many eggs this week. The bribes would not last. In desperation, she had crept downstairs at night and dug in the garden for Uta’s bracelet, but without success. She’d found the jars, but the familiar gold band simply wasn’t there. As if it had never existed.

  Frau Winter. Frau Kappus. Frau Dillman. The Americans would come, floor by floor. Both Frau Winter and Frau Dillman had promised Liesl again at Ani’s burial that they wouldn’t reveal Frank’s presence to the Americans. Frau Dillman had dispensed her forgiveness with dignity, adding, We need a man here, and made all her daughters pledge, too, their freckled faces solemn. But the bribes would not last.

  There was a scrambling noise under the bed.

  “I have to piss,” said Frank.

  “Shh. There’s a jar next to you.” She had thought of that. She went to the window. There was the officer, tall and black-haired, smoking a cigarette by their front gate. He called to Frieda and Grete Dillman, who were on their knees, weeding the garden, and they stood up together, their heads demurely down. Liesl saw the officer say something to Frieda, and Grete respond. Frieda smiled shyly. Grete pushed her sister forward and Frieda stood closer to the officer. She did not lift her head as he spoke to her, but she reached up slowly and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. So young, Liesl thought. Even younger than she and Uta had been when the war started.

  Liesl heard the sound of liquid filling the glass. The stench of urine filtered into the room. She reached under the bed. She saw the helpless curl of Frank’s hand. She took the warm jar to the Icebox and dumped it down the sink drain, avoiding her own reflection in the mirror. The toilet did not work because the water mains had not yet been fixed.

  There was a knock downstairs. You won’t fin
d anything here, Liesl thought. Her face had been expressionless so long it hurt to frown. She set the jar on the floor. Her hands felt dirty from the urine, and she turned the faucets, hot and cold, before remembering that no water would come. She stood there, frozen, her fingers out, the taps running nothing all over them, as Frau Winter opened the door and the sounds of the Americans entered her house: the clamor of boots on the floor, English and German words mixing.

  Liesl finally examined her reflection—her shocked eyes, the clumsy part in her hair, the deepened wrinkles around her mouth—unable to recognize any of it. Was this the face that others saw when they looked at her? Had she ever been young? Had she ever been as sweet and ripe as Frieda Dillman?

  Stay free, she willed Frieda Dillman, and it struck her.

  A daughter didn’t want her mother’s life. A daughter would trade anything—why not a piece of information?—for a new future.

  And then it was too late.

  Just as Liesl rushed back to beg Frank to get out from under the bed, to face his fate as he’d wanted, the soldiers were already climbing the stairs to the second floor, saying his name, announcing his arrest.

  Liesl’s interrogation took place in a villa that had belonged to a Frankfurt banker and his wife, now converted to an American headquarters. When Liesl arrived, Frau Hefter was already waiting among the other women in the former parlor. She smiled graciously, as if she’d invited Liesl for tea, and patted the empty seat beside her.

  “They’ve already called your name twice,” said Frau Hefter, her eyebrows raised.

  The room stank of sweat and cigars, and the rain-soaked coats of the other wives. Liesl felt several of them turn to look at her.

  “I can’t see why,” she said. They killed my son. They locked my husband away. What else do I have left?

  “No, I can’t, either.” Frau Hefter tipped her head and then smiled again. She had become a widow with four children (Georg had died defending Berlin; his elder brother in Poland), evicted from her house and living in an apartment in the Alt Stadt next to Marta, the old housekeeper, but she talked about none of this. Instead, she gave Liesl instructions on growing parsnips in window boxes. Two of her fingers had been crushed removing rubble, so she gestured with blackened nails, shaping wooden boxes and plants in the air. Her breath smelled terrible.

  The interrogations were running behind. The room grew steamier and Liesl’s hair stuck to her face. Each passing moment made her more restless. “How much longer, do you think?” she said.

  “The rest of our lives,” said Frau Hefter, and this time she did not smile.

  When Frau Hefter’s name was called, she did not greet the wiry and pale American captain who was doing the interrogations, although he spoke polite German. She wove through the woolly knees of the other women with her head high.

  They could all hear the questioning. The captain’s words were muffled by the gold-striped walls, but inside the room, his politeness was gone. His tone reminded Liesl of the sound of a knife being sharpened.

  Our husbands told us nothing, not even what you did to them. For weeks, news from Frank had been scarce—the Americans wouldn’t deliver mail to the POW camp—and then he’d suddenly appeared home, released to work on a labor crew closer to Hannesburg. His body had shriveled from hunger, his ribs like accordion keys, and he had lost several teeth and much of his hair. Frank’s spirits and body were so broken that Hans was afraid of him and spent all his time out of the house, trading film and cigarettes with the Americans to get food for the house. Liesl found herself treating Frank like a frail old man, and he hadn’t objected, sucking down soup, letting her wash his hair and shave his beard. He was even quieter than before, and smiled at no one but the baby. At night, he did not hold her, lowering himself down next to Jürgen instead. After a week, a truck came to take Frank away again. He never did anything but heal the wounded. He never did anything but love his family.

  When Frau Hefter came out, she bent down to whisper to Liesl, her face still coldly beautiful. “Don’t listen to his lies, dear.” Her foul breath gusted.

  Liesl was next. She took her seat on a bench that was still warm from the women before her. She answered questions about her date of birth, her marriage, her address. The captain’s face was pleasant enough, but she could feel his loathing. There were posters around town showing photographs of Jews starved to skeletons, and above, in English, REMEMBER THIS: NO FRATERNIZATION! The Americans had cut off their food relief. They wanted Germans to starve and they wanted them to starve in silence, unspoken to, unheard.

  The captain leaned forward on his elbows.

  “Frau Kappus,” he said in a flat, nasal German. “Who dug the hole in your cellar?”

  She shifted in her chair. “Our neighbor,” she said. “Herr Geiss.”

  “For what purpose?” The captain’s right eyelid must have been damaged somehow. It hung a little lower than the left. The left eye was the kind one. The right eye was the eye of contempt. It hung, slant-lidded, over the desk of some erstwhile German bureaucrat. The bureaucrat’s papers had been cleared away, but not his precious collection of steins on the shelf nearby. The Americans were careless like this; they did not come to live, only to occupy.

  “For what purpose?” he repeated.

  “If one of our houses was crushed, then we could escape through the other.”

  “And you say Herr Geiss did not come into your house.”

  “Not often.” Her gaze landed on a stein in the shape of Bismarck’s head. The top of the stein was Bismarck’s helmet. To drink from it, you had to open the prime minister’s skull.

  “And he stored nothing in your house.”

  “Not that I know of.”

  A shuffle of papers, then a picture of Uta in an evening gown next to her lover, his white collar unbuttoned, his mouth twisted as if he had just heard a joke.

  “I also have a report that this lady, Uta Müller, stayed in your home for almost a month and was visited by this gentleman.”

  “Uta stayed with us, yes. The gentleman only came once.” Her lips suddenly felt too thick to talk. “Do you know what happened to her?”

  “Quite a lot of connections you have in Berlin,” said the captain. “You tell me.”

  She fell silent. She would have heard from Uta by now, if Uta was still Uta Müller. She had poked around in the garden again for the bracelet, and found nothing.

  “Tell me what happened to the stolen art that your neighbor was trafficking,” the captain said.

  “The stolen art?”

  “You must have seen the crates going in and out.”

  “I saw some crates, but I didn’t know what was in them. His wife’s paintings.” She swallowed. “But Uta didn’t have anything to do with that.”

  He knew where she was. He wouldn’t look at her with that closed, cunning face.

  “She didn’t have the energy to leave the house,” Liesl added. “She . . . she was carrying a child.”

  For the first time, she saw surprise register in the captain. His right eyelid quivered and his mouth curled at one corner. No, not surprise. Disgust.

  Somewhere in the room a light bulb was flickering. She could see only one lamp before her, and it burned bright and steady. It had a bronze base in the shape of an eagle. The eagle had a fish in its talons.

  “You know where my friend is,” Liesl said in a hollow voice.

  The captain slid the picture back into a file.

  “I didn’t have anything to do with Herr Geiss’s business. And Uta, we were old friends,” she said. “We didn’t talk about the—the war.”

  “You worked at the Hartwald Spa together, serving elite S.S. officers for over a year, and you never talked about their crimes.”

  She wished she could do something with her clammy hands. “We worked there, yes,” she said. “We had conversations about the men, but not about what they did.”

  He blew out through his teeth.

  Indignation surged in her. “I
kept to myself,” she said. “I didn’t stay down at night.”

  “Stay down where?”

  Stay down at the banquets, the dances, in the arms of men. Stay for the music, the laughter, the gladness of being on top of the world. Suddenly she saw the officers in her mind: the blackness of their uniforms, their slick heads, their wolfish, flashing teeth.

  “I could have married one of them,” she said. “But they frightened me.”

  The captain leaned back, folding his arms. “You could have married one of them,” he repeated, his brow furrowing.

  “I had offers,” she said, her face burning.

  He shook his head, as if her statement amazed him. The flicker was getting worse, pulsing every other second.

  “I see,” he said again. “So instead you married Dr. Frank Kappus, who was arrested and sent to a POW camp for his service at Buchenwald.”

  “He didn’t work at Buchenwald,” she retorted. “He didn’t even know the name of that place.” The accusation had arisen after Frank’s arrest, after someone had requested his official records from Weimar, and they registered his treatment of a patient at the camp. It wasn’t true, and Frank had already disproven it with statements from his hospital. Yet the stain had remained on his record.

  “Or perhaps he didn’t tell you about it? Like everyone else in your life—your neighbor, your old friend—they didn’t tell you anything at all?”

  She shrugged.

  “What did you talk about, then?”

  “The children,” she said.

  “What else?”

  “Food. Coal,” she said. She couldn’t help it. She had to look around, find the lamp. She cranked her head to the back of the room. Where was it? There, on the wall. A torch socket with a little glass holder, the smallest light in the room.

  “It needs a new bulb,” she said, pointing.

  His voice rose. “You never had conversations about your country and what it was doing to the Jews?”

  She turned back. The flicker was driving her crazy. She felt her eyes beginning to blink in time with it.