Motherland

by Maria Hummel

  “Frau Kappus.”

  “No.”

  The captain’s face contorted again. Flick, flick, went the lamp.

  “Our middle son . . . was ill,” she said. “They wanted to send him to Hadamar.”

  The captain regarded her, chewing his lip. So he knew about that, too, and he didn’t care. The American flag hung behind him, dripping its red and white stripes. She blinked with the flicker, her eyes sore and dry. Her throat convulsed. What do you want me to say? You know everything. You must have it in your reports. My baby is hungry. His brother wants to die. My husband came home from your prisoner-of-war camp looking almost as thin as the Jews. Maybe we believed the lies about them. Maybe we didn’t look when they were taken away. We didn’t know where they were going. Now we can’t look at all. I can’t look at him and he can’t look at me, and no one can understand us but the dead.

  The captain said Uta’s lover’s name. “They were found together in his apartment,” he said, looking at his desk. “It appears he shot her, then shot himself. Suicide.” He sat back, hitched at his green pants. “I’m sorry.”

  He didn’t sound sorry. He didn’t sound human at all. His voice was a buzzing noise between his language and hers.

  “He was a bigwig at Plötzensee. A real saint,” the captain said sarcastically. “Used to treat his whole unit to champagne every hundred executions. But you had no idea.”

  But you. The flicker. Had no idea. The flicker.

  It was an effort to speak. “I said we didn’t talk about him.”

  “I see,” the captain said again.

  She shut her eyes, and for a moment she couldn’t see it. Then it began again, a tiny white pulse through her lids.

  “She was an old friend,” Liesl said. “We talked about our dreams.”

  The captain rubbed his eyes. “All right, Frau Kappus,” he said slowly. “You’re dismissed. Your house will be searched tomorrow.”

  “For what?” she asked hoarsely. “We have nothing hidden.”

  He looked at her blankly and then called to his assistant in English. The knife-like tone was gone. His voice was soggy with exasperation. She didn’t understand all the words he said, but he spoke the word “wife” over and over. All these wives, it sounded like he was saying. All these know-nothing wives.

  She bowed her head as she walked out of the room, down the stairs, into the bright sunlight. Her reflection flared on the glass window of a shop across the street. There she was: a woman slumped in a dark coat, fading handkerchief tied over her head, shoes falling apart. Her eyes looked farther away, too, even though that was not possible. Eyes couldn’t move backward inside a head, but that’s what hers looked like and felt like, as if the space between her and the rest of the world had widened, and she had a harder time seeing across it.

  You look like a crone, she heard Uta’s sharp words. Show them you have some spine.

  Liesl didn’t straighten. She kept her eyes on her feet, sidestepping cracked cobblestone or rubble, anything that could explode. She had been walking that way since the air raids and it made her dizzy to look up, to peer down the avenues, where scorch marks still scarred the walls.

  Better to play a game with the ground, to find the safest, easiest path. Better to clutch her empty purse, as if someone might rip it from her. From every other block she heard the pounding of hammers.

  July 1945

  Dear Frau Kappus—

  Thank you for your letter in June, and for your interest in our efforts to find homes for the juvenile survivors of Hadamar and other institutions. Please also thank Father Georg for carrying these messages between us.

  I am sorry to hear of the loss of your son. It must have taken great strength and resolve to contact me. I deliberated for some time before I replied because I have no desire to compound your grief.

  Let me tell you first about the history of our enterprise. In January and February of 1945, we built a small ward in our convent with the hopes of smuggling out juveniles from Hadamar and its feeder facilities. Although the state-organized euthanasia program was officially curtailed, we knew enough from insiders to be aware that doctors were still prescribing hundreds of lethal injections to patients deemed “unfit to live.”

  By March, our ward was ready. We arranged with our contact on the inside to smuggle twelve patients to our facility. They came to us in a medical delivery truck: four bundles of three children, each in thick blankets. I could have lifted each of those bundles with my own arms. The children were so emaciated it was clear that all our resources, including the services of a Limburg doctor, would not save them. Moreover, the escape had terrified the children. Five died that night, others in the ensuing weeks.

  Of the twelve, one survives. Rudy was the eldest. We estimate that he is sixteen. Now that he has gained weight and recovered his muscle strength, he is an affable fellow with mild mental retardation and a tendency to seizures. He has “terror nights” every few weeks, where he wakes screaming and thrashing and sometimes tries to hurt himself. We are all quite fond of him here, and it pains us to see him remember his agony. He rarely leaves our building out of fear of being abducted, and I expect we will become his permanent guardians.

  You asked if we needed resources, and hinted at the possibility of adoption. Although little remains of the population of Hadamar, the surrounding feeder institutions still have patients. Many of those patients are also severely malnourished and otherwise damaged by their living conditions. We are working with the institutions to provide adequate nutrition and nursing to the survivors, but our volunteer doctors do not recommend the relocation of those patients now, unless their immediate families claim them. Quite simply, in most cases, it is too late.

  I am sorry not to provide you with more hopeful information. We would gratefully use any more gifts you wish to make in the name of your son Anselm, and you are most welcome to visit us any time. In the meantime, thank you for the wooden toys you mailed us—your husband is quite an ingenious craftsman—and Rudy takes great joy in spinning the tops.

  My sincerest thanks and prayers,

  Sister Johann

  Limburg

  It was late August 1945. Hannesburg had cleared its rubble. The smell of fresh wood pervaded the Alt Stadt, but underneath a bitter, smoky odor still lingered.

  Frank had gained back ten kilos of the twenty he had lost in the spring, and his ribs no longer felt as if they were trying to escape through his skin. He could sleep four hours at a stretch and eat without panicked gulping. He had been fitted for dentures to replace the five teeth missing from his top jaw, three from his lower. When Frank talked, he felt the plates moving and pinching his words, and heard the soft lisp of Hartmann’s mouth when it had sighed. The noise made him cringe but feel strangely less alone.

  He didn’t know where he fit anymore.

  Not in his country. The citizens of Buchenwald’s neighboring towns had been paraded past the stacks of naked, starved bodies piled outside the liberated prison camp. International papers showed photos of the citizens’ horrified, averted faces as they walked the white rows. Write again to your friends in Weimar, Liesl had urged him. You were never there. Get them to fix your record.

  I wasn’t there, Frank thought. But I was close enough.

  He didn’t belong in his town, either, overrun by American GIs from its rubbled Alt Stadt to the moss-covered Roman settlement at its outskirts.

  Nor on his street. Herr Geiss had hung himself in prison. His daughter-in-law was secretly “engaged” to a buck-toothed kid from Selma, Alabama, USA, and seemed to enjoy inviting his comrades over to loot the old man’s house for souvenirs.

  Nor did he belong in his home, with its ever-changing tableau of refugees upstairs and downstairs. The Dillmans were gone, but the housing office had replaced them with a noisy brood of Schneiders. The Winters had taken in their own boarders, an elderly aunt and uncle who somehow made it west, and filled their apartment to splitting.

  Not even in his ow
n rooms. His eldest son had little use for him, and Jürgen was so attached to Liesl he rarely looked around for his Vati. Sometimes when Frank felt especially self-punishing, he tried to remember Ani’s face, but it hurt so much that his mind went black.

  Logging had torn tendons in his knees, muscles in his back, and he didn’t like standing straight anymore. He could hardly keep his teeth in when he talked. The man in the mirror wore a sullen, hangdog expression. He had lost. He was lost. Some days it seemed as though the two states amounted to the same thing.

  All the Allies had won, but the Americans most of all. Young GIs in green undershirts loitered on blankets in the Kurpark, smoking, waiting to be sent home. Their indolence was the hardest thing to take. Victory was theirs, and they accepted it as easily as the sunlight.

  Frank knew his eldest son secretly admired them, knew that the extra food and cigarettes that Hans brought home weren’t just found, but traded for, soldier by friendly soldier. Hans had a secret life in English, muttered in the bathroom and with his schoolmates, but Frank forbade it in the house. He could not hear the nasal sounds without feeling his stomach cramp, without remembering a giant, muddy field of men, surrounded by barbed wire, and how he’d asked for penicillin for his neighbor with pneumonia. “Penicillin”—it was the same in any language, but the American guards had pretended not to understand. When Frank had persisted, one had jabbed him with his rifle butt, saying, Nix, nix, you stupid Kraut!

  His son couldn’t see it, couldn’t see how the American soldiers’ gifts to children were motivated by pity. He couldn’t see how their careless generosity mocked and demeaned the children’s parents, who could not provide for them.

  All Hans saw was this:

  His father, the surgeon, was now a lowly laborer on a logging crew north of town. His father, the proud driver of a Mercedes, was now sunburned and stooped from soreness, and hobbled on foot everywhere he went.

  His stepmother refused his baby brother milk because there was none, and let Jürgen go barefoot, because she had no shoes for him.

  His other brother was a mound in the yard.

  And then Hans saw the happy Americans, swimming and shouting in the Kurpark pond, their well-fed bodies flashing as they cleaved the water.

  Frank was fixing a loose latch on the rabbit hutch door when he heard his eldest son’s feet whispering on the wood behind him. He didn’t turn. He was nursing a thought that had occurred to him the week before: As much as he hated logging, he liked working with wood. If he couldn’t practice medicine, perhaps he could build things: furniture, cabinets. The principles of construction were not so different with flesh and wood, and wood lasted longer. It made something dead alive again. He worried that Liesl and his sons might not understand the decision. He thought Hartmann would have.

  “Vati.” Something in Hans’s voice sounded strange. “I found these. In Ani’s mattress.”

  Frank turned. On his son’s open palm, seven silver tubes twisted like worms. Frank lifted them, one by one, surprised by their lightness. He read the contents, his heart pounding. Not enough to kill a child, but enough to cause harm.

  “They were stuck in there really deep,” said Hans.

  “Lead white,” said Frank. It felt as if his skull were squeezing inward, closing off his sight. “Where would he get these?”

  There was a pause. “From Frau Geiss’s studio.”

  “How would he get in there?” Frank’s voice rose.

  His son hung his blond head. His ears were pink. “Followed me through the hole in the cellar,” he mumbled. “He liked to look at the painting of Mother.”

  The painting of Susi and Ani. Herr Geiss had given it to them at Ani’s funeral. Frank had framed it and the whole family had hung it together in his father’s study—still Frank’s and Liesl’s de facto bedroom. In all the harshness of those days after Ani’s death, the effort had been a single moment of communion—Hans holding the picture while Frank hammered the nail; Liesl holding Jürgen, whispering through her tears, That’s your mother and your brother.

  So many shades of white in that picture—Susi’s dress, Ani’s face, the wall, the sky. The paint was as thick as butter, tufting at the edges. Frank’s head throbbed. He took a breath. “He must have been trying to paint something with them.”

  “I didn’t find any paintings,” said Hans. “He never made any paintings.”

  Frank avoided the boy’s gaze. He squeezed one of the tubes, feeling the last wetness shifting inside. “Did you ever catch him eating this?”

  “No.” His son’s voice was breathless. He was waiting to be blamed. Or for someone else to be blamed.

  A silence fell between them. Frank’s head hurt so badly he couldn’t look at his son. It hurt whenever he heard the name “Anselm,” whenever he saw a blond boy Ani’s age, and each and every Sunday afternoon when they ate their meal together. The absence at the table ate with them, a giant soundless mouth that gobbled their attempts at conversation. He blinked into the darkness of the hutch.

  Flashes from the past months broke through: Ani hugging a lamb at the farm; the boy’s dismembered body in the blanket, its entire right leg lost except for a jutting femur. Liesl hadn’t been able to look—she’d begged Frank to cover it, to hide it—she was always trying to hide things, to pretend they didn’t exist: Hide! Hide! Hide from the doctors; hide from the Americans. Her hysteria to conceal, wasn’t that at the heart of this—

  Every night Liesl slept near Frank in the room of their dead, under his father’s books, his wife’s and son’s picture. Every day she dressed his baby boy and fed them all that could be found. She scoured their pots. She wiped their floors. She patched their threadbare clothes. She did not blame him. They could not blame each other, but in their grief, she had begged Frank to hide and he had. He had retreated like a rat until the Americans flushed him from his hole. Liesl’s once-red hair was growing strands of gray, and her ribs and hipbones jutted from hunger. She looked older than twenty-five. She would go on this way, feeding and tending, never blaming, and his sons would scorn her because their father scorned her, not openly, but secretly, under his breath, as he sawed through trees in the dusty woods.

  And his sons would hate themselves because their father hated himself. Because every time he walked home past the new wire fence around the brewery pasture, he thought, I let him die.

  The brewery pasture was green now, thick with grasses that no animals grazed. In a few months it would yellow and sink under snow, and unless the Americans lifted the bans on international food relief, his sons would have nothing to eat but the rabbits in this hutch and the chickens downstairs, and the few jars of potatoes and cabbage Liesl was right now canning with Frau Winter in the kitchen. Thank God she had made some friends among the women—Frau Winter, Berte Geiss, Marta, and even that prissy peacock, Frau Hefter. They held each other up. They had cleared most of the streets themselves. They bartered—one woman’s handful of eggs for another’s supply of yarn—so that every family had almost enough. There was something between them that the men could not touch.

  Yet soon the families would have nothing to burn but the few scraps the Winter boys stole and Frank carried home in his pockets, and Frank would lose even his small salary from his lumber work. And then the winter illnesses would strike. And whom would they blame but themselves if Jürgen or Hans fell sick, and their skinny bodies had no reserves to fight? Frank could bear giving up on surgery, on the entire medical profession. He didn’t long for riches or respect. He just wanted the assurance that his other two sons would live.

  And he wanted his family again, as whole as it could be.

  Frank closed his fist around the paint tubes. His palms and fingers were scored with calluses and cuts. It stung his hand to close it.

  “Even if he ate them, they’d give him a stomachache for sure,” he said finally. “But that’s all.”

  “But it says ‘lead’ on there,” Hans said. “Dr. Becker said—”

  “You’d h
ave to eat a hundred of these tubes to get Dr. Becker’s numbers,” Frank lied. “It was something else.”

  “But there isn’t anything else,” Hans said in an anguished tone.

  “I’m going to throw these out,” said Frank, pocketing the tubes. “I don’t want your mother to see these.”

  “But—”

  “I don’t want you to mention this again,” Frank said, louder and clearer. He could feel the sharp ends of the tubes pricking his thigh. “I don’t want you to trouble her.” He looked his son in his own blue eyes, his own face, younger and irrevocably hardened.

  Hans turned away and stuck his finger in the wire mesh of the hutch. A white rabbit hopped into view, whiskers trembling. They were always hungry, too.

  “She has enough trouble keeping all of us fed and well.” Frank’s voice broke on the last word.

  The rabbit sniffed at Hans’s finger and hopped away again.

  “All right,” Hans said. “I won’t tell anyone.”

  They stood in silence for a moment. A plane flew overhead and they both flinched.

  The rabbit loped slowly back into the shadows of the hutch, hanging its head.

  “Give it something,” Frank said gruffly to Hans, fishing in his other pocket for the carrot he’d pulled from the garden that morning. “It came to you,” he said. “So give it something.”

  He handed his son the limp vegetable, warm from his body heat. Hans shoved it through the mesh and the bunny thumped back, eager, trembling, biting into the flesh with its sharp white teeth. At the sight of the boy feeding the mute, trusting animal, Frank was flooded with a new feeling, so rich and tender it was like a swallow of fresh cream.

  It was relief. The feeling was relief.

  Sometimes during that first starving winter after the war, Liesl remembered things that she wasn’t sure had happened. The memories seemed tethered to her hunger, to the state in between living and dying, when sleeping did not rest her body and breathing felt like gasping. They’d run out of food so fast: With the country divided and broken, the supplies Frank intended to supplement their family all winter were soon all they had to eat. In November, he killed the last rabbit and the rooster. By January, the once-robust Jürgen grew nervous and thin, and Liesl secretly went out begging American soldiers for their finished cans of meat and beans, hiding in an alley, cleaning the remains with her finger and feeding them to the baby. In February, with the aid ban lifted, Red Cross packages finally began to trickle in, but Hannesburg ran out of coal. Liesl and Frank took the children into their beds at night to keep them warm. Hans and his father arranged themselves head to toe, complaining loudly about each other’s feet, then fell fast asleep.