Motherland (2 page)

A thin cry came from upstairs.

“All right,” Liesl said, not moving. “But I’m writing to Herr Kappus about this.”

The cry lengthened to a scream.

The scraping paused. “Where’s that child?” said the voice from behind the wall. “I hear a child crying.”

She did not answer Herr Geiss, but she turned and mounted the first step. “Ani, Hans, time to go upstairs.”

“I want to stay here,” said Hans.

“I want to stay here,” said Ani.

“It’s time to go upstairs,” she said, louder.

The baby wailed. The boys did not move. They stared at the hole, transfixed.

“If you don’t come, there will be no dinner for either of you,” she snapped.

The mention of food made the boys wilt back from the wall.

“We were just looking,” Ani said, his eyes wide. He was such a beautiful boy—it struck her every day like a splash of water to the face.

She cleared her throat, sure Herr Geiss was still listening, thinking,
Cruel stepmother, depriving these growing boys
.

Or was he thinking that she ought to have a firmer hand with them?

“I found some elderberry jam,” she said.

Ani started toward her, but Hans hooked his fingers over his brother’s shoulder, holding him back.

“Fine, then. Two minutes,” she said, hastening up the stairs. Slap-slap-slap, a pathetic retreat in house slippers.

Later, when the older boys were washing up, she carried Jürgen carefully back down the steps and listened to the silence until she was sure Herr Geiss had gone.

A thin veil of light fell through the cellar’s low window. Blinking, she felt her way along the crumbly wall. After five paces, she sensed a shift in the air, a cold draft stinging her ankles where her tights had ripped. She stopped, peered. The gap was the size of a man’s shoulders. Through it, blackness poured, the same coal-soaked air as their own cellar’s, but somehow richer, deeper. She looked closer. At least a meter of packed dirt and stones separated the houses’ two walls. It must have taken days to dig, and probably the help of other men. Herr Geiss could have asked her first. But why would he? Herr Geiss knew best. He was a member of the local air raid committee, and he had studied everything there was to know about protecting their houses from bombs.

“What do you think of this?” she murmured to the baby, holding him up to the crumbling edge. Jürgen stretched out a fat paw and batted the dirt and stones. “Do you think your
Vati
will approve?”

A few stones tumbled. The baby swatted at the wall again and more dirt fell. He began to giggle, and reached out with both hands, grabbing the rim with open fingers.

“Stop,” she cried. She pulled the baby back to her chest with her left hand and lurched back toward the steps.

Her knee thudded against something heavy and cold. It was the vat that had held the family’s sauerkraut every winter. This year, the sauerkraut had rotted in the weeks after Liesl had arrived, after the housekeeper had abandoned the family. Liesl hadn’t known that pushing down the cabbage was part of the housekeeper’s daily duties until the morning she looked out from the second story and saw Frank dumping the moldy brew out onto the grass. She couldn’t get the image out of her mind: Frank’s back quaking uncontrollably as he upended the earthenware tub and scrubbed it clean. But he’d never said anything to her—no accusation, no explanation.

For his last package, she’d made a stollen dough from Susi’s handwritten recipe, kneaded and shaped it carefully around a film canister stuffed with reichsmark and a map of Germany, and paid a local bakery more than the loaf was worth to bake it hard and golden. In every step of the stollen’s production, Liesl was conscious of her inevitable failure. It would never taste like Susi’s. It would never get past the censors. Nevertheless she’d wrapped the loaf carefully in butcher paper so it wouldn’t grow stale and wrote a note warning Frank about the “fig” she’d baked whole inside. She wondered if he’d understand. She could tell by the soft way Frank looked at her that he didn’t think she was capable of deceit. He’d ironed her old life flat with his desire, then molded her into what he needed. The young wife. She leaned her cheek into Jürgen’s warm skull. The new mother.

Ani held the badge in one hand, rubbing it clean with his other cuff. Then he raised the eight-pointed star to a place above his heart and addressed her solemnly, “Could you please sew this on for me, please?”

The white metal glowed. “What is it?”

“The badge of the Reichsluftschutzbund,” said Hans, hovering behind. “Herr Geiss has asked us to be members.”

“I see,” said Liesl. They were all in the kitchen, Jürgen awake and fiddling with a cup, Hans and Ani dusty and triumphant and hungry. The blood had returned to their faces. They no longer looked like statues but poorly tended children, their hair shaggy and clothes mended past politeness. Hans climbed into the chair at the head of the table and picked at his nose.

“Hans,” she said.

He withdrew his hand and rubbed it on his leg.

“Are you sure he meant to give you that?” she said. “It looks official.”

“It is official.” Hans hunched over his plate and picked up his knife and fork. “What’s for dinner?”

Liesl showed him her saucepan. Hans scowled but said nothing. Ani continued to grin, adjusting the placement of the star. “Herr Geiss says we need to paint our beams with limes so they don’t burn,” he said.

“Limes!” exclaimed Liesl.

“He means quicklime,” said Hans.

Ani adjusted the star again and gave a quick, one-armed salute. “And our neighbors’, too.”

Liesl winced. “The two of you are—” She could just imagine Frank’s face if he saw a military badge on his six-year-old’s chest. “Your father will say you are too young for this.”

“I’m almost old enough to join the Jungvolk. That makes me old enough for duty,” said Hans. The word “duty” sounded dark and cold coming from his young throat. He met her eyes. “But I want Ani to have it.”

As their gazes locked, Liesl felt an understanding flash between them: The unhappiness they both shared should not be spread to Ani, radiant Ani, fingering his eight-pointed star and imagining that green limes could be found in a winter so barren that all Liesl could drum
up for dinner that night was boiled potatoes, applesauce, and a quarter of wurst for each of them. Ani could eat sawdust and sleep on nails as long as his faith in one thing was not broken—that his father would come home. He had a skinny body and a handsome head, and his grin split his face like a knife did a melon, pure and true. In school other boys teased him for his innocence, for his big questions—“Why are our ears shaped like bathtubs?” he asked her one day—and Hans defended him. Hans wrote his father careful, stern letters, and he always reported about Ani’s safety, his contentment, in an overly mature tone, as if Ani were an inside joke they shared.
Anselm is learning his letters
, he wrote.
You can guess that he has his own way of holding the pen
.

She began to serve out the potatoes, their buttery aroma filling the kitchen. “You can carry the star in your pocket for now,” she said.

“It’s not the same,” Ani protested.

“I know,” said Liesl. She had drunk the coffee cold, in one gulp, after coming back upstairs, and tasted none of it.

It took Liesl a long time to cut up the rabbit she had bought from Herr Unter, a neighbor who raised them in hutches behind his house. The white animal had looked plumper alive. Now it was as flat as a sock, and the small sinews kept slipping in her hands as she tried to separate skin and flesh. When she finished, she had only a handful of meat. She dumped it in boiling water, adding chopped carrot, onion, barley, and a pinch of brittle, graying rosemary.

It was a small meal, but she still felt obligated to be grateful for it. She had grown up with her aunt’s and uncle’s stories of starvation after the last war. Her aunt claimed that she’d chewed yarn dipped in grease to make her stomach feel full. Her uncle said he’d eaten a soup made from boiled crickets. They told, and sometimes shouted, these stories to their six children and Liesl, to remind them all to appreciate their laden table. Liesl had excelled at gratitude. She ate it for supper, always the last to be served. She wore it on her back, always clothed in her aunt’s stained, cast-off jumpers. She listened to it all night, positioned as nurse outside each incoming baby’s room, ordered to wake if he cried. She would be in Franconia still, head bowed and dutiful, if her friend Uta had not rescued her with the chance to work at the spa in Hannesburg.

She set a lid ajar on the pot and crept upstairs to find Ani swooping
his wooden plane through the air, Jürgen sleeping under an afghan by his brother’s hip. Hans was out gathering sticks for kindling.

“He wakes up if I move,” Ani whispered, and then made a crashing sound through his teeth as his plane dove down. The view beyond the half-fogged window was gray-white and peaceful. It had been an entire week since the last air raid, and Liesl had a strange slack feeling whenever she looked at the sky, as if a rope once pulled taut was suddenly ripped free and falling.

“You’re a good brother,” Liesl said.

Ani put his nose to the window, avoiding her tender gaze. “How come you don’t have any brothers or sisters?”

His frank question made her flush. “My parents just had me,” Liesl said.

Ani drew a circle in the fog on the glass. “But how come they don’t visit?”

Liesl sighed. She had been wanting to tell the boys that her mother had died when she was six. That she knew and understood their loneliness. But another part of her resisted. She did not like Hans and Ani thinking this was how the world worked: that mothers died and fathers disappeared, as hers had, soon after the pneumonia had taken her mother. War-addled brains, her uncle had said. Shiftless, said her aunt. They’d received one postcard from him from Chicago, USA, and never heard from him again. Liesl did not want Ani to know that once both parents vanished, a child became a burden to be passed around until some practical use was found for her. If she had favored her bonny, buxom
Mutti
, it might have been easier. But Liesl had resembled her father—thin and serious, with brown-red hair that frizzed loose from its braids. She wasn’t good at mending or strong enough for mucking stalls. She thrived at enduring the pummeling devotion of small children, however, and finally found her place as the caregiver for her sturdy, wild cousins, teaching them each to read and write and swim in the Badensee,
as her mother had begun to teach her before she died. It wasn’t until Liesl had abandoned them for a position at the spa that she’d realized what she wanted: her own life, and one day, her own family.

“They passed away,” she said finally. “But maybe you can meet my cousins sometime,” she added, though she knew her relatives would never leave their farm and village, much less Franconia.

Jürgen stirred and woke, lifting his head, staring at them with wide, uncomprehending eyes.

“How did your parents die?” Ani asked.

“In the war. Your brother’s hungry,” she said, and carried Jürgen down to the kitchen to heat his milk.

Someone knocked loudly on the front door. A hard, official sound.

The fist dug into the wood and made it ring.

Liesl felt her body moving across the kitchen with Jürgen, heard her voice call to Ani to stay upstairs.

Her hand circled the doorknob but did not twist it open. The brass went from cool to warm, as she waited through another round of knocking. Jürgen slumped against her shoulder, sucking at his fingers. She sorted through the worst scenarios. Officials had opened her package to Frank. Officials had lifted the loaf of Christmas stollen, surprised at its weight, and broken it open to find the canister at its center, filled with the money and map he’d requested. They’d arrested Frank and sent him to a prison camp. Worse, someone had shot him on the spot for attempted desertion.

Bile rose up her throat. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t open the door panicked like this.

She gripped the handle and imagined lesser problems. Someone had caught Hans cutting willow sticks for kindling. Someone—many someones—didn’t approve of her marrying the handsome doctor two months after his beloved wife had died in childbirth. “We’ve done nothing wrong,” she would tell whomever it was, but that wasn’t really
the point, was it? The point was to be liked, or if you couldn’t be liked, to be overlooked.