Motherland (13 page)

“Who’s the woman visiting your stepmother?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Hans.

“She looks rich.”

He hesitated. He had heard Fräulein Müller drop the name of the
Reichsmarschall
and his wife, but he didn’t believe a person like her could know someone like that. She was probably puffing herself up.

“I don’t think she’s rich. She only had one suitcase.”

The lock did not budge. Hans fumbled for the pliers, dropping the screwdriver on the ground with a clonk. “Ani, where are you?” he said testily, as if his brother was responsible for the noise.

“In here,” said the voice again.

He knocked at the lock with the pliers.

“Hurry up,” Berte said again, but now her voice was curious and he felt her eyes on him.

“I’m trying.”

“I got married when I was sixteen,” she said. Her breath blew a small warm wind against the crown of his head.

He drew back. “May I break it? If I break it, I can probably open it.”

Her thin shoulders rose, making her unbuttoned collar fall open.

He closed the pliers on the lock and twisted, ripping into the brass. His hands ached. The metal groaned but did not give. “It’s really stuck,” he said, hysteria in his voice.

“You’re a little
Kohlenklau,”
she said. “I saw you snitching wood from the park.”

Coal snatcher
. Hans blinked. His eyeballs felt hot and dry. His lids scraped over them. He kept twisting the pliers.

“Will you steal something for me sometime?” She leaned in, her cheek radiating heat into his. He wanted to pull away. He wanted to calmly stroll from the room and get his brother and walk down the stairs and out through the cellar hole into his own house. But instead his hands kept cranking at the metal until it shrieked and broke and her cheek was touching his. Her softness startled him. He jerked back, and then the suitcase sprang open to reveal snakes of hose, all heaped and coiled on top of one another, in the pale, variegated shades of flesh. The girl gave a cry. She pulled the suitcase away, her knees closing, her hands fluttering down to the stockings.

Hans stared at her. He dimly remembered drawing a Lancaster that morning. He recalled listening to their little black radio for any reports from Weimar. He remembered Ani and his infernal licorice. But he couldn’t remember how to say good-bye to the girl and leave. It was completely beyond his comprehension, that simple casual courtesy,
Gute Nacht
.

“I didn’t mean to break it,” he said.

Then loud planes passed overhead and they both flinched, waiting for a siren. In the pause, Berte sank her hand deeper into her stockings and a tremor of genuine fear crossed her face. She looked as if she was going to be sick.

The siren did not sound. The girl withdrew her hand from the suitcase. “Why are you still here?” she said in a tight voice.

Once Hans started moving, he did not stop, not to drag Ani from the adjacent room, not to ask what he was doing, not to pause in the cellar, or wish his stepmother good night. He went straight to bed with the screwdriver and pliers still in his hand, holding them under his pillow, their hard edges grinding, clanking every time he turned over.
Kohlenklau
, the double
k’
s like a door slamming twice.
Will you steal something for me sometime?
For the first night since his father had left, Hans did not dream of him.

In the silence after the planes passed over, Uta sagged onto the couch in Otto Kappus’s study and looked up at the ceiling. “I’ll never forget my first sight of you,” she said. “A little daisy from the fields, and now look at you: the very picture of
Bürgertum.”

Liesl pulled an eiderdown from the wardrobe and handed it to her friend, listening with one ear for Jürgen, sleeping in the other room.

“Remember how I used to visit you on Sunday nights and tell you all the spa gossip?” said Uta. “I always loved your room. It was so peaceful, so sweet, so positively Liesl.” Her blue eyes glistened. “But this is yours, too. I’m happy for you.”

Liesl sat down on the edge of the couch. “Thank you,” she said.

“What did you use to make that room smell so good? Something with orange slices.”

Her room. It had been so small, any scent had filled it. And high up. She’d been able to look out, down to the courtyard where clients walked in robes to the sulfur baths and massage rooms, but no one could ever see back in.

“I stuffed an orange with cloves,” said Liesl. “When we could get oranges.” She thought she heard a muffled cry, and wanted to rise, but felt her friend’s eyes on her and stayed still.

“That’s right,” said Uta. “You were always handy with herbs. You
used to make me marigold water for my hair.” She smiled. “Did I tell you what Göring said to Emmy about her hair the other day?”

Liesl hesitated, silent. She didn’t want to hear about Emmy Göring’s hair, though she missed her talks with Uta. Sunday gossip nights had been a tradition, and in the loneliness of her life at the spa Liesl had looked forward to news, any news, especially Uta’s chatter about this or that officer or his mistress’s or wife’s scandalous behavior. An unspoken contract between the two friends dictated that they would always find fault with the other women for wanting a man too much. You didn’t let men stake their claims. You didn’t believe in
Kinder, Kirche, Küche
, like the girls they’d grown up with, now farmer’s and baker’s wives, orbiting their children, their church, their kitchen.

You stayed free.

Stay free
—it had been both their prayer and their battle hymn.
Stay free when
two adjutants fought over Uta in the courtyard, their knuckles thudding like hammers into meat.
Stay free when
a peach-faced Bavarian officer started leaving poems for Liesl at the
Kinderhaus
. No love, and certainly no marriage. Uta put her singing first, and Liesl pledged her heart to the state. Instead of loving flesh-and-blood men, she loved the voice of the Führer, and instead of loving her own children, she fell for the pitiful orphans in paper clothes in
The Soviet Paradise
, and sat through speech after speech against the horrors of Jewish Bolshevism.

But her fervor had died long before Frank proposed, and now it all seemed like such a long time ago. Another life.

“No, what did Göring say?” Liesl forced herself to say. “To Emmy?”

“Never mind. You don’t care,” said Uta, propping herself on one arm. “I’m here because I want to find Dr. Schein.”

The name sent a jolt down Liesl’s spine. She tiptoed to the hall and peered into the darkness, toward the boys’ room. No noise. She pulled the door shut and sat down at Frank’s father’s desk, the only other chair in the room.

Again?
She wanted to say, but instead she asked if Dr. Schein had moved from the city where they had gone together seven years ago, first by train, then two kilometers on foot, their cheeks burning as the neighborhoods got shabbier and shabbier.

“Maybe,” said Uta. “They said he relocated his practice.”

“Did you ask at the registration office?” Liesl said.

“Still listed in Franconia. But he’s not there.”

“It was a long time ago,” Liesl said. “He could be anywhere by now.”

“I know,” Uta said. “But you could go to your husband’s old office and find out where Dr. Schein moved his practice. Say your husband needs to reach him. They’ll be able to make some calls. I’ve got money if you need to grease the wheels.”

Liesl walked to the wall where there hung a watercolor of the town’s famous lone white tower. It was a drenched picture, the tower smudged by fog and rain. She stared into its dreariness, trying to pull herself back to the conversation.

“There wasn’t anyone in Berlin?” she said finally.

“If this child’s father found out about its existence, he would make me deliver it and take it away from me,” said Uta. “He knows I’m not cut out to be a mother.”

Liesl touched the wall that connected the study to the bedroom where she and Jürgen slept. She remembered how they both stumbled on the broken cobblestone near Dr. Schein’s, how Uta had clutched her arm and asked,
What am I doing?
and she had said,
You’re doing the right thing
, because they were both so young. They needed to stay free. But now the thought of walking that walk again turned Liesl’s stomach. “We can raise the baby here,” she said quietly. “Frank and I will do it.”

Uta made a noise. “You would, wouldn’t you?” she murmured. “That’s why you’re my one true friend.” Then she sighed. “I can’t bring a monster into the world.”

“Your child would never be a monster,” protested Liesl.

“Maybe not mine. But his might,” Uta said, and then uttered a name Liesl didn’t recognize. She smiled grimly. “He likes his work, and he works at Plötzensee Prison.”

Plötzensee Prison, where Nazi resistors went to die, by guillotine or hanging. Liesl could not meet her friend’s gaze. “Does he know you’re gone?”

Uta didn’t reply right away. “He’s paying for my singing lessons,” she said. “He’s terribly critical of everyone, even Piaf and Dietrich, but he thinks I have real talent.” Her pupils were so huge the irises had vanished.

Liesl folded her arms. “I didn’t know you still wanted to sing,” she said.

“I want to be free,” said Uta. “When the war’s over, there’ll be Amis and Tommies crawling all over the country, wanting to be entertained. I’m learning English songs on my own.”

“You can’t plan for that,” Liesl said sharply. “You can’t just plan for that.”

“Why not?” said Uta. “Your life has changed. Why can’t mine?” She pulled up her right sleeve, revealing a familiar flash of gold: the thick modern bracelet that her first love, Hans-Paul Jost, had given her years ago. Uta had never sold or traded it, despite his betrayal. She unsnapped its amethyst clasp and set it on the desk.

A thin, urgent cry rose from the other room. “I’ll do what I can for you tomorrow,” Liesl said. “I need to turn out the light now.” Without waiting for a reply, she flicked the switch. Darkness bloomed over the room, erasing every shape: the desk, the bracelet, Uta lying on the sofa with her black-soaked eyes.

Liesl climbed in bed but couldn’t sleep. She stared at the outlines of the cradle, trying not to resent her friend. It was good to see Uta again, and Uta was in trouble again, serious trouble. Liesl couldn’t have one
condition without the other. And now Liesl had three innocent children to care for, and not once had her friend considered them. Arriving with her red boots and her pride.
I’ve got money
. Well, why couldn’t she spend it finding a doctor herself ?

Liesl punched her pillow. She turned her mind to the book she was reading, but it was just an old tome of fairy tales. The characters never changed. Good girls stayed good, and the bad ones were witches. She turned her mind to Frank. Not Frank now, not Frank-heading-to-Berlin-and-abandoning-them-all, but Frank-who’d-wooed-her. It was girlish and naïve, she knew, but it comforted her to sort through their brief courtship, and the years of chance meetings at the spa before that, wondering when the romance had begun.

Frank had never shown any interest in her, not until after he was widowed. No. He had been too faithful to Susi for that. That first day by the pond, Liesl was sure she’d seemed like a silly, stupid teenager to him, all soaked and dripping over the Steitz boy she’d rescued. “Not stupid,” Frank had confirmed later. “Maybe silly. You looked like a drowned cat.”

That didn’t sound particularly enamored. Well, all right. A husband shouldn’t notice young girls. And yet if he hadn’t defended Liesl that day, and she him, would she trust him now? Was love just made up of simple incidents in which you brought out the best in another?

The day had begun ordinarily enough, with Frau Steitz, the wife of a high-ranking S.S. officer, arriving at the
Kinderhaus
flustered, pushing her twin nine-year-old boys ahead of her.

“I have an appointment. With Dr. Kappus,” she said, retreating out the door. “I’ll be back in an hour or two. Be good, Ernst. Be good, Max.”

After five minutes of watching the boys pretend they were panzer units and smash the toys in the one-story cottage, Liesl took them to the pond and accidentally dozed off. She woke to a wet thud and the sound of someone screaming, “Max, Max!” One of the boys was floundering
in the water, the other gripping a floating log. Liesl leapt up, dazed, and threw herself into the pond.