Motherland (11 page)

Liesl wanted to like Berte Geiss. She needed a friend, her own friend, especially after receiving Frank’s letter about his transfer to Berlin. It would just be a wartime post, a real opportunity, he assured her, the underline swift and light.

Frank wasn’t coming home. He wasn’t preparing to slip away from the surrender that they both knew was imminent. He was stepping deeper into the hornet’s nest and pretending he didn’t hear the buzzing all around him.

Although she wrote back a simple note of congratulations, Liesl kept the letter in her apron pocket, squeezing it from time to time so that it lost its creases and crumpled. Whenever she took it out, his words looked more and more garbled. The writings of a madman. She and Frank had never fought before, but now she was angry with him. It made her wish that she liked the taste of cigarettes, so she could puff out gusts of smoke.

She didn’t want Frank to think that she didn’t believe in him, or worse, that she couldn’t continue to care for the children on her own, so she held her tongue. But Berlin was a trap. It didn’t hold real opportunity at all, unless you counted being captured and starved by the Red Army.

Liesl was sure the poor, fleeing Berte Geiss would agree. She fantasized often about Berte’s impending arrival, which had been mysteriously delayed twice. Her mind filled with hazy dreams of the two of them cooking and sewing together, laughing over the boys’ antics, of linking
their arms as they marched out into the cold gaze of the neighborhood. She had anticipated a homely young woman with a sad, sincere smile, someone she felt she could trust. Her fantasy Berte wore a plain bob and tucked her brown hair back behind her ear. Berte would profess an affinity for Chopin and a private longing to travel to Greece one day and see the Acropolis. She wouldn’t have any friends here, either.

When the real Berte finally arrived, Liesl was standing in the window, trying to dress Jürgen, a daily task that required vigilance and muscle, as the boy hated clothes. “Sit still,” she told him with gritted teeth. She heard a loud noise outside and automatically checked the sky, but it was a dark car pulling up in front of the Geiss house. Herr Geiss emerged first, then strode around the puffing tail pipe and opened the other door. No one appeared. He waited, his heavy face darkening.

Jürgen squirmed free of her hands and rolled on his belly, cutting off access to his shirt buttons. “Come here, you,” she said as he giggled.

Below, Herr Geiss extended an arm and yanked. A female form tumbled out, her blond hair spilling in her face. She staggered right, then left, then stood, swaying, gazing up at the enormous house. She was clutching a handkerchief in one hand. She pressed it hard to her mouth, then buckled and threw up all over the snow. Herr Geiss looped both arms around her and muscled her into the house. He did not introduce Berte to Liesl until two days later, when Liesl and the children were coming back from the post office.

“These are your neighbors,” he said to Berte, and introduced Liesl as the “new” Frau Kappus. “I leave you women to get acquainted.” He bowed his head and hustled away.

Berte extended a limp, cool hand. At first glance she seemed pretty, but then it became clear that something almost imperceptible was wrong with her face—her chin was too small, her eyebrows too plucked and sparse. She looked like the smudged painting of a doll.

“Would you like to come in for some tea?” Liesl asked.

The girl shook her head. “I’m still exhausted.”

Beside them, Ani and Hans began to swordfight with sticks they’d picked up along the way home. Jürgen struggled up in his pram and stared over at them.

“Their father must be handsome,” Berte commented. “For you to put up with three little boys.”

Liesl didn’t know what to say. “They’re good boys.”

“You’re dead,” Ani cried, stabbing his stick at his brother’s heart. “I’m not little,” he said to Berte.

“Don’t shout, Ani,” Hans muttered with a glance at the girl.

“You’re dead,” Ani whispered triumphantly. Hans knocked away his stick and they started fighting again.

Liesl proposed that Berte go with her to Elizabethenstrasse the next day. “I could show you the shelters in case you get stuck shopping during a raid. And the best butcher and baker.”

“Oh, thanks, but I like to find things on my own,” Berte said. “It makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something.” And then she turned around and walked back into the Geiss house, the boys’ sticks still whacking.

A few days later, Liesl tried again as she and Berte crossed paths near the Kurpark. She offered to share their wash kitchen on laundry day. “I wouldn’t mind the company,” she said, smiling into Berte’s blank face. The girl’s nostrils were red from rubbing.

“I’ve already hired a laundress,” Berte said. She pointed down a path. “Is that the way to the sulfur fountains? Do they taste really awful? Actually, don’t tell me. I’m going to try them anyway.”

A few days later, on the way home from the market, Liesl spotted a blond-haired woman strutting down the street ahead of her. The
woman’s boots were red saffian, laced halfway up her shapely calves. Her coat was Persian lamb, designed in an hourglass shape, though it was a couple of sizes too big, making it hard to see the outline of her body.

Could it be Berte Geiss? Maybe. Berte Geiss was liable to wear something too showy and expensive for their small town, but she wouldn’t strut. Berte would scurry with her head down, as if late for an appointment. Nevertheless something about the woman was familiar.

To her surprise the woman stopped at the Kappuses’ gate. Her head tilted back to take in the whole villa and her blond hair spilled back, revealing her high cheekbones and rosebud mouth. Liesl frowned. It couldn’t be.

The woman turned and looked back, and Liesl felt her knees go to jelly.

It was her. It was Uta.

Liesl reached down and tucked Jürgen’s blanket around him, suddenly unsure how to respond.
It’s Uta
, she told herself.
Why aren’t you glad to see her?

Because something had to be wrong. Uta would never show up unannounced unless something was wrong.

“Liesl! There you are!” Uta’s hand shot up into a wave. Her furs rippled around her as she hurried toward them.

Liesl waved back. Then her eyes dropped to the gray potatoes, the chicken hanging its dead feet out of the edge of the basket under the pram. Seeing Uta’s gloves, she was suddenly aware of her broken nails, her thick knuckles, scarred from cooking and cleaning. She reached down and lifted Jürgen so the baby was between them as Uta leaned in for a kiss, smacking both cheeks.

“What a surprise to see you,” Liesl said. “All the way from Berlin?”

Uta nodded, her eyes fastened on the graceful upper balcony of the house. “I can’t believe you’re all alone here. You must have some good friends in the housing office.”

Liesl gestured at the Geiss home. “Our neighbor keeps us off the list.”

“Good neighbor,” Uta said in an appraising tone. “How old is he?”

“Too old,” Liesl said, not smiling. “This is Jürgen.”

As she lifted the baby toward Uta, he gurgled and scrunched up his face.

“Goodness, you’d think he would have gotten bigger than that. It’s been months since I saw you last,” Uta said, her expression mirroring the baby’s skepticism.

“They don’t grow that fast,” Liesl said with a forced laugh. “But he can already sit up on his own now.”

“Marvelous,” Uta said without enthusiasm. A silence fell between them. Liesl knew Uta was taking stock of her, of the pram and the potatoes, the limp dead fowl, of the house and the absent husband, wondering if Liesl should be pitied or envied.

And wasn’t she trying to figure out the same thing? Uta’s fur coat gave off a lush, feathery smell. Her red boots were the brightest thing on the whole street, except her lips, smudged lightly with forbidden scarlet lipstick. You could see her from a kilometer away and know the kind of woman she was. Yet up close, looking into that warm open face, Liesl felt a rush of affection for her oldest friend, whom she’d met at nine at the Badensee, teaming up to watch all their young charges—her nieces and nephews, Uta’s grubby little brothers. How much they had been through together: the endless BDM meetings where they’d giggled through the patriotic songs, Uta’s trouble with the local burgher’s son, then leaving Franconia for jobs at the spa. Uta seemed shorter and rounder, as if something in Berlin had punched her down. Her blue eyes had new cracks at the corners.

Liesl threaded her free arm through Uta’s and pulled her toward the door. “Come meet the older boys. You’ll like them better,” she said. “They talk and take orders.”

“Mm. Will they fetch me a hot steamy bath and some steak tartare?” Uta replied in her mellow voice.

Liesl laughed. “More like a pile of snowballs and a dead spider they found in the cellar.”

As they crossed through the gate they stumbled into each other, and Liesl smelled her friend’s cologne. The scent was pungent, baptismal; it drowned her nose and left an aftertaste of limes and sugar.

Liesl sighed. “I’m glad to see you,” she said, meaning it.

“I heard your pram squeaking behind me the whole way down the street,” Uta said softly. “You didn’t seem that glad.”

“It isn’t like that—” Liesl said, but Uta kissed her again on the cheek.

“I won’t stay long, all right?” she said. “I just need to make some arrangements.”

Hans crept away from the window as the strange woman entered the house. He padded softly down the hall to his grandfather’s study. He liked to sit at the desk and draw airplanes. Sometimes he drew Messerschmitts and other planes he had seen, but more often he drew imaginary planes, equipped with special weapons: red and white flame-shooters, dragon-toothed torpedoes, and blaster bombs that could blow up whole cities. Because paper was scarce, he made his drawings in the margins of his grandfather’s books, and whenever his stepmother came by, he dropped the pencil and pretended to be reading. “What book is that?” she would ask, and if it wasn’t a title she recognized, she would smile and let it go.

His father wouldn’t have let it go. Vati didn’t like the boys touching Grossvater’s books. He treated them like statues, rare and precious, insisting on dusting them himself. “Get out of there. Let them be,” he said whenever he saw Hans in the room.

“But I’m supposed to read,” Hans objected once. “Or I won’t grow up.”

“You don’t need books to grow up,” his father said. “Follow your heart.”

Hans didn’t understand what to make of that advice. How could he know if his heart was right? For example, he wanted to love his real mother forever, but her face was fading in his mind. The other day
he had spent a good hour trying to remember if she had ears like his, with the lobe connected, or like Ani’s, with the lobe detached. Also, was it wrong that his ribs no longer ached every time he thought of her? Was it bad to decide his stepmother was kind, even though she did everything the wrong way? He wished she wouldn’t let Ani be such a baby. He wished she would grow her hair long and braid it. He wished she would give him Vati’s letters, but she folded them all up and hid them somewhere.

He drew the nose of a plane, a sharp thin tail. He added wings, four engines, and a cockpit window. A B-17. It should be silver-blue. It should float like a ship. His hand paused. Then he hastily sketched in a face,
X’
s for eyes, a body slumped against the glass. This plane had a dead pilot. It was falling from the sky.