by Monica Hesse
We are still. Both of us are completely still.
“Please don’t tell anyone I said that,” she whispers. “I don’t know why I did. It’s not true. I just want to go home. I want to go home so badly.”
I want to tell her that I know what it is to be terrified for your family. How I make my father drill a hundred Latin verbs every night because I am trying to make sure his head is filled with that instead of with sadness.
“Whatever you say to me,” I start, “whatever—”
A rattle pierces the air. Someone outside is jiggering the handle of the door. It hasn’t opened yet; it must be jammed with dust. Haruko looks at me, scared.
Before I can think about why I’m doing it, I blow out the lamp and grab Haruko’s wrist. We both scramble over her ice block, crouching in the blackness.
The door jerks open and a flashlight sweeps over the shed. It’s a camp employee, probably checking to make sure nothing was damaged in the storm. We hold our breath as the light sweeps the floor.
Haruko’s arm is cold against mine, and I can feel her soft hair brushing against my neck as we crouch behind the ice block. The guard whistles, taking his time, moving his flashlight in a methodical pattern. He reaches our side of the room and Haruko clutches my knee, trying to make herself smaller, and my leg burns where she’s touching it.
I want the guard to hurry, but in that moment I also want him to take his time, in that moment it would be all right if he took forever. I know my face must be red. I don’t know what is wrong with me. I don’t know why I wanted to put that bobby pin back in her hair instead of handing it to her.
The guard finishes his inspection and turns away, still whistling the same song. As he leaves, Haruko’s fingers slowly loosen from my knee, but I can’t move anything until her hand is gone. I can’t even breathe. I don’t even need to.
Then the door swings closed. A rush of stale air pours in from the outside. The latch clicks, a final-sounding noise, and something has changed. Or something has disappeared.
I’m suddenly aware again of how cold it is in here. The dust under my collar and in the creases of my knees itches in a way it didn’t a few minutes ago. My mouth feels unbearably dry.
Haruko stands up again, brushing off her skirt, feeling her hair to make sure the pins are in place. With the light from the lamp gone, she is just a silhouette.
“I guess it was silly to hide,” she says, rolling up the sleeve of her cardigan so the hole doesn’t show. “We had to find someplace to go in the storm; it’s not illegal for us to be in here.”
“That must mean the storm is over, though,” I say, trying to busy myself by searching in the dark for my book.
“I lost track of the time. How long were we here?” She makes a show of slapping her forehead. “Why would you know—you don’t have a clock, either.” She laughs nervously; she’s not acting like the same person she was before the guard came in, but neither am I.
“I don’t think it’s been more than half an hour.”
In the dark, I can’t figure out if she wants to say anything else, or if she wants me to say anything else. In the dark, I don’t want to risk saying, I’ll see you tomorrow, when I shouldn’t make assumptions. “I’ll fold up the blankets” is what I say finally. “You can leave first.”
The sun is setting outside. I make myself jog, first because my body feels filled with loose, confusing energy, and then because I’m thinking of my parents, who must be at home and wondering where I am. But Mutti and Vati aren’t there when I get back to our house. I worry that they’re looking for me, that when I didn’t come home they went to find me in the storm. Then I see the table, where my father has left a note with one word on it:
Hospital.
SEVEN
MARGOT
I REACH THE HOSPITAL PANTING, MY CHEST STABBING AS I RUN UP the dust-covered pathway marked with two sets of footprints. At least that means my mother walked here by herself. At least they didn’t have to wheel her in on a stretcher.
Inside, my eyes search the big room: Rows of white beds. Two patients with thermometers in their mouths. Young nurses’ aides in caps.
“Margot!”
Thank God. Thank God. Gott sei dank.
Vati and my mother are at the bed near the end of the room, the most private setup this building allows. She looks pale, but smiles when she sees me.
“It’s nothing.” She makes a calming gesture with her hands before I can say anything out loud. “It’s nothing worth this fuss. I fainted, but it was because I’d been standing and hadn’t eaten much.”
“Because you’ve been sick all day,” Vati reproaches her. “It’s worth more than a fuss.”
I’m still trying to calm my racing heart when a new voice interrupts us.
“I agree with your husband,” the voice says, and the three of us turn toward a sandy-haired man in a white coat, carrying a clipboard.
“It’s always good to be on the safe side, and I’m glad you came in, Mrs. Krukow,” the doctor says. “That being said, it does seem like based on what you told the nurse, you’re right: It was the heat, combined with an empty stomach, combined with the roll call. I’m going to recommend that you receive an exemption from participating. You shouldn’t have to, in your condition.” He makes a few notes. “After having your feet up for a bit, are you feeling any better? Anything we can do to make you more comfortable?”
“I don’t suppose you’re hiding any Schwangerschaftstee in your pharmacy, are you?”
The doctor looks at my father, like maybe my mother is one of the brides who came to the United States but hasn’t quite learned English. My mother’s vocabulary is bigger than my father’s, but there’s no English translation for this word.
“Pregnancy tea,” I explain for the doctor. “It’s a mix of herbs. I think it has stinging nettle and peppermint.”
“And Saint-John’s-wort, and a few other things,” my mother adds. “All German women drink it. It helps with nausea. With Margot, my own mother sent me some special.”
My father turns impatiently to the doctor. “Can you get her some of that?” he asks. “Some of that tea, can you send her home with that?”
I already know the answer will be no. Of course the doctor can’t send her home with that. The doctor had never heard of that.
“I’m sorry, but we don’t prescribe such, ah, regional remedies. For common nausea like your wife’s, we would instruct her to have bed rest, fluids, and perhaps some soda crackers.”
“My wife’s situation is not common.” He is furious. “My wife has already been through—my wife’s situation is not common.”
“Jakob.” Mutti lays a hand on his arm, which he shakes off.
“I’m sorry, Ina, but it’s not. Your situation is not common. This time it’s got to—you’ve got to be more careful this time.”
“Do you think I was not careful the other times?” Her voice is stony.
The doctor looks back and forth uncomfortably between them as he tries to figure out how to make peace. “Of course, if you feel it helped last time, there’s no harm in trying it again. You said you arranged for your mother to send you some last time?” he asks. “Perhaps that could happen again. Where does she live? You are from Iowa?”
“In Heidelberg,” my mother whispers. “My parents are still in Germany.”
“Of course.” The doctor looks embarrassed. No tea will be traveling to the United States from Germany, even if we weren’t in Crystal City.
He murmurs something about soda crackers, about seeing if he can get her some to take home, and then excuses himself. As soon as the doctor is out of earshot, my father leans in.
“This is ridiculous,” he says through clenched teeth. “A pregnant woman, held prisoner, and denied the treatment that she needs.”
“They’re not denying her treatment if they don’t have the treatment to give to anyone,” I reassure him. “They’re not trying to help other people more than they’re trying to help
her.”
“Yes, Jakob,” my mother says. “He told me to do the same thing he would have told one of his American patients to do. Which is rest. Which is what I will do, like thousands of women have before me. If we weren’t in here, we still wouldn’t be able to get mail from Heidelberg, at least not without Red Cross assists.”
What my mother is saying is true, I suppose. But what my father is saying is also true. We had German friends in Iowa. A whole network of busybody women, Tantchens, who would have canisters of tea in their kitchens or know how to make it themselves.
My mother’s shoes are off and I can see how bloated her feet are. She’s barely far enough along to show around her belly; there’s a bump only when she presses her dress flat against her stomach. She’s not as far along as she got last time. But her feet and legs are bloated. That’s how she knew, she said, that she was expecting again. I take one of her feet in my hands and rub it.
She nestles into the pillow. “This bed,” she says. “I don’t want to malinger, but I am perfectly willing to pretend to be as sick as I need to in order to stay in this bed.”
My father stiffens. “I did the best I could with the beds in our hut,” he says shortly.
“I know, Jakob.” My mother sighs.
“You think I didn’t do enough, but I did the best I could.”
“I am not criticizing you, I’m merely saying that I am comfortable, finally.”
But my father isn’t listening anymore. He’s barely paying attention to us at all, chewing his lip as he sorts through something.
“I bet I know who could get the Schwangerschaftstee,” he says, taking my mother’s hand.
My mother and I look at each other. “No, you don’t,” I say quickly.
“He knows everybody in the camp,” Vati says stubbornly. “He’s in contact with lots of people on the outside.”
My mother flinches. “I don’t know why you would talk about this. Nothing would make me feel sicker than accepting something that way.”
“For God’s sake, he believes crazy things but he’s not a bad man. He has a wife who has been pregnant.”
“Promise me you won’t,” my mother demands. “His gifts come with strings.” We haven’t mentioned Frederick Kruse’s name, but we all know who we’re talking about.
“Excuse us, we don’t mean to bother you,” a new voice says. The three of us whip around, acting like we’ve been caught in some conspiracy instead of trying to figure out how to get tea for a pregnant woman.
Standing by the side of the bed are two of the Japanese nurse’s aides I saw when I first came into the hospital. Close up, I realize one of the women I thought was an aide is actually in a doctor’s coat. She’s not a teenager, either, but a middle-aged woman, petite and shorter than I am. I have never seen a woman doctor before, much less a Japanese woman who is obviously a detainee herself. But I recognize this woman. Her face is more angular, but they have the same forehead and chin.
“Mrs. Tanaka,” I blurt out.
My own mother looks at me, confused. “Have you met?” she asks.
Haruko had been so focused on talking about her brother that I almost forgot about the rest of the family with her.
I spent the storm with your daughter. She told me about Ken. I watched her cry.
I don’t say this. “Her name is on her coat” is what I say. I don’t entirely know why I told that lie. I just know the icehouse is a secret.
Mrs. Tanaka—Dr. Tanaka—says something to us in Japanese, and the nurse’s aide, the one who had spoken to us before, quickly translates.
“She says she heard what you were looking for,” the aide says. “She says that some tea is sold in the Japanese commissary. It’s bad American stuff, not like what you are looking for, but you might find it soothing anyway.”
My mother smiles. “What a kind offer,” she begins, at the same time my father shakes his head.
“We don’t need charity,” he says shortly. “From other people. I can take care of my family, thank you.”
“It’s not charity, she’s a doctor and she’s trying to be nice.” I put my hand on his arm. It diffuses things sometimes to put a hand on his arm.
“She should be doing her job.”
“This is her job.”
“Her job is interrupting family conversations?”
“Please, grosse Schnecke.”
Grosse Schnecke. Big snail. I am calling him by the nickname I haven’t used in years, because of how much it made him laugh a few weeks ago to call me kleine Schnecke, little snail.
“It’s not what your mother was looking for, and we don’t need it,” Vati says again.
“Jakob.”
“I know how to take care of you and Margot!” he explodes. “Why do you both always act this way? These worried looks that you always exchange behind my back? I am a part of this family!”
“We don’t always do any—”
“You think I am weak.”
My father’s voice raises in a growl, a sound I have never heard come out of his mouth before. He flings my mother’s hand away roughly, and she immediately cradles it with her other hand.
Dr. Tanaka looks concerned before the aide finishes translating; she hasn’t needed to understand English to know what is happening. I wonder if Dr. Tanaka talks about her patients at home. I wonder if tonight at dinner, she’ll tell Haruko about the fight between the German parents with a daughter her age. The thought fills me with dread.
“Come for a walk with me, Vati,” I say abruptly. “Mutti can rest for a minute and we can stretch our legs.”
My mother is still trying to smile at Dr. Tanaka, but it’s so forced.
“A walk. Please, for me.”
“This bed will not fly away while you’re gone,” Mutti says. There’s a tremble in her voice, desperation for us to leave. “I will be right here. They probably need to talk to me about private woman-things.”
I lead him out of the building to the hospital courtyard, which is filled with mesquite trees. Branches litter the grass, blown off in the storm; the two benches are too dusty to sit on. “What is wrong?” I ask my father as we walk laps around the yard.
“What do you mean, what is wrong? I’m worried about your mother. I have to care for my family.”
“The doctors are caring for her now.”
“The American ones aren’t. They won’t do it.”
“The… the Americans?” I say, confused.
“It’s other Germans who are always offering to help. What have the Americans done besides hurt us? Would we be getting this treatment if I were home in Berlin?”
Other Germans? Home in Berlin? “Vati.” I am calm. I am steady. Inside I am trying to pretend what he’s said is normal, but I know it’s not, because if he’d talked like this earlier today, I would have been too embarrassed to admit it to Haruko in the icehouse. “Vati, what happened? This doesn’t sound like it’s about Mutti.”
He kicks at the landscaping underneath the mesquite trees. “I got a letter.” He cuts off, glancing to the hospital door, where a nurse has brought out a patient in a wheelchair. He nods for me to follow him farther away, and starts to talk again when we’re out of earshot. “I got a letter from Mr. Lammey. He wants to lease our land to someone else. He can’t have it sit.”
“Oh,” I say, as lead fills my stomach. “Oh. I see.”
Our land. That’s how I’ve always thought about it. How my parents have always talked about it. We were the ones who decided where to plant corn and where to plant barley. We plowed it in neat rows. We worked after dark, because Mutti and Vati wouldn’t let me stay home from school in harvesting season the way other students did.
But of course it wasn’t ever our land. It was Hank Lammey’s land. We rented it; we paid him in crops. That’s what this is about—the profits, I tell myself. Mr. Lammey can’t make a living if nobody is farming that land.
“He said it’s too difficult, to have a German enemy alien as a tenant. He said that
he doesn’t feel that way about us personally, but the way other people feel…”
“But you’re going to write him back, right?” I say. “And remind him that we have friends in town, and that it wouldn’t be like that?”
“I’ve already written the letter. I sent it this morning.”
Mr. Lammey owns the land, but we built the house. Year after year, starting when I was small and they first settled in Fort Dodge and began working that plot. They saved money, and they bought lumber and built our house, room by room.
“I learned how to swim in the Lammeys’ pond,” I say. I don’t know why I’m remembering this now. “Remember? Mutti and I were both in our underthings when she taught me. I kept being afraid the Lammey boys would see, but Mr. Lammey said if he caught them looking, he would whip them.”
“I think your mother would have whipped them herself.”
“Scolded them, at least.”
“Did she ever tell you about the landlord of the first room we rented in Iowa? You might have been too small to remember it.”
I shake my head. I don’t think I’ve heard this story.
“We had barely started building the house,” Vati says. “The three of us were crammed into a shabby room in a boardinghouse, and there was a hole in the door. Your mother became convinced the landlord was spying on her when she got dressed. I wanted to have a word with him, of course, but she told me she would handle it. When I came home the next day she’d hung a sign covering the hole that said, Ten cents a peep. Or maybe it was an envelope with, If you must peep, have the decency to pay.”
“Was there a cat who lived in that house? A big orange one that used to scratch me?”
“Jingles. I’m surprised you can remember that.”
Barely. I remember the cat, and a bedraggled yard that my father would chase me in, and how he would come home from working on the farmhouse caked in dirt and my mother would pour bucket after bucket of boiled water into a metal tub for his bath. She never complained. Even when it was so cold that she had to throw rocks into the well to break the ice before drawing up the bucket, she never complained. “What did you do when you saw the sign, the one that Mutti made?”
