Motherland (26 page)

Dusk drew long shadows around the rails, filling in between each wooden tie, one by one, until the second-to-last train looked as if it were rising out of a black lake. Hans rubbed his eyes as it shrieked to a halt.

No one had come from Berlin all afternoon. No man that Berte had described, with a long chin and a quick gait that made him trip over his own feet. Instead, mostly women and children departed the trains, always fumbling to hold on to one thing too many: baskets of carrots, bags of potatoes, and once or twice a live chicken. The women and children were coming from two stops away, where the town faded to open fields and farms. Hans knew they had bartered their curios and jewelry for limp, old vegetables and stringy meat, but he liked to imagine that the pink-cheeked mother hurrying by him had gotten lucky, that her closed basket hid
Lebkuchen
and sour cherry jam, fresh hot rolls, a smoked ham. She was taking it home to her seven beautiful daughters, and they would eat until their bellies strained their dresses. If he caught the woman’s eye at the right moment, she would nod and invite him along, and he would become the girls’ friend and protector, and take their giant German shepherd for walks. When their house got bombed, he would dig them all out with his bare hands.

The woman saw his stare and scowled at him.
“Strassenkind,”
she muttered.
Street kid
.

“Where you headed, son?” said a voice.

Hans looked up into a face that was slack as an old wineskin. “Nowhere,” he said. Then he noticed the uniform. “I don’t need a ticket, sir.”

“You’ve been here three hours.”

“I’m waiting for a friend, sir,” Hans said. “A soldier on furlough.”

In the purple light, the stationmaster’s blond mustache had a greenish glow. It moved even when the man’s mouth wasn’t speaking, as if the hairs were consuming themselves.

“He didn’t tell me which train,” Hans added.

“Where’s he coming from?”

Suddenly he couldn’t say the name—it was too big for his mouth. It was also a lie. Nobody was coming. He shrugged.

“Last train is in half an hour,” said the stationmaster.

Hans fixed his face with an obedient look. “I have a letter to deliver,” he said, and showed him the envelope, the name written in Berte’s hand. “Then I’m going home.”

The stationmaster drove his hands into the pockets of his coat. “You get too cold, you come inside my office,” he said. “I got a little stove in there.”

Hans thanked him and moved down to the far end of the station. He hunched his shoulders and leaned back against a column, trying to look as old as possible. He spied a cigarette someone had tossed to the snow. It was only half smoked and still burning. After glancing around, he picked it up and thrust it between his lips. He had smoked once or twice with his school friends but never developed a taste for it. Today the ash woke his mouth and he sucked deep, filling his lungs until they stung. He staggered a step, his legs suddenly exhausted from the long walk to the station and standing all day in the cold. His right hand clung to the cigarette and as soon as his breathing slowed, he sucked again, a bright cloud blooming in his skull. Another toke, and the bright cloud
spun. Purple spread across the low hills. He smoked until the embers singed his fingers and he dropped the cigarette on the snow.

They would be worried now, the dark coming on and no sign of him.

He took out Berte’s letter and examined it. Her handwriting was gappy and incomplete, but she’d underlined the name with a single, sure stroke. The name meant nothing to Hans. It floated in his mind with her description of the man’s face, refusing to settle.

He was waiting for nobody from Berlin. He was waiting for her rescuer, who was no one. He was waiting for his father, the new surgeon at the new hospital there. His stepmother said she had written to his father a letter about Ani, but he hadn’t written back. Vati would write back. She was lying about something.

The stationmaster reappeared at his elbow. “How will you get home? If your friend doesn’t come.”

“I don’t live far away,” said Hans.

The stationmaster asked where. Hans told him.

“Your mother’s at home?”

“Yes.” His mouth tasted terrible. He was starting to feel sick.

“Your father?”

“He’s a Wehrmacht doctor.”

“In France?”

“Weimar.”

A train whistled and surged into the station. The engine’s shadow passed across the stationmaster’s face and he swiveled away, retreating quickly as if someone in the distance had called his name. From the sky snow began to fall. The frozen lace landed on Hans’s cheek, melting as the steam gasped from the pistons and men began thumping down the steps and into the station. All of them had shoes, good or bad. All were dark or blond, tall or short, mustached or clean-shaven, fur-hatted or hunch-shouldered. Hans held out the letter, peering at chin after chin. He stood alone as the crowd eddied around him. A few people glanced
at the white envelope. Nobody stopped. A flake of snow slid into his right eye, making it sting. Hans blinked. The arm holding the letter felt heavy. He switched arms, but the other ached immediately. He dropped both as the train materialized again before him, the passengers having all pushed past him.

A conductor appeared in the doorway between cars and looked down at Hans. He was a young man, someone who ought to be a soldier, and he retreated back into the compartment without asking Hans why he was still waiting when everyone was gone. The snow fell over tossed cigarette butts, expired tickets. It made a soft white sugar of the ground beyond the station. It fell heavier as the stationmaster and two men surrounded him, talking to him with their remote voices, clamping his elbow, towing him away from the train to a waiting car, a back seat.

“I haven’t done anything, sir,” Hans protested, alarmed. “I’m going home.”

“Yes, you are.” The stationmaster slammed the door.

The men drove fast, occasionally looking up at the sky, their headlights drawing yellow stripes on the shuttered walls of houses. Hans began to talk about the V-1 rockets that had destroyed London in the late summer. He loved the V-1s, even after they’d been superseded by the V-2s. The V-1s had the flavor of plums and the silence in the house after his mother’s death, and the sweet softness of a baby’s skull tucked under his chin as he carried Jürgen to his bath in the kitchen. The V-1s had given him purpose during those long hours when his father barely looked at him. He could still remember the radio broadcasts with their thrilling claims of “unchecked terror and destruction” in the streets of their enemies. The men driving the car did not respond to his commentary, except to glance back and grunt. He said he’d heard that the Führer was soon going to unveil a rocket powerful enough to reach New York. He had never said the words “New York” out loud before.

“New York,” repeated the man driving, and his breath steamed the windshield.

The tires lost their grip twice, but they didn’t skid until they reached Hans’s street, the vehicle sliding until it came to rest before Herr Geiss’s gate. The tops of the iron bars rose like bishop hats, dusted with white.

“You get inside now,” said one of the men, cranking his head so that both eyes met Hans’s. “Stop worrying your mother.”

Hans trudged back to his own gate, letting himself in, making it only three steps before his stepmother hurtled out and gathered him in her arms. Her light hands touched the back of his neck, his ears. “You’re so cold,” she said over and over. Her face looked red from weeping.

Her tenderness shamed him. He shoved past her, up the stairs, ignoring Frau Winter and Frau Dillman peering from their own doorways, mothers upon mothers filling his motherless house. He couldn’t get over the feeling that he wasn’t there at all, even when he stepped across the threshold and Fräulein Müller moved for him so he could have the place closest to the stove.

“I’ll fetch you some soup,” his stepmother said.

Hans sank down to the sofa without comment. Jürgen slept in the cradle nearby, but he roused briefly to stare at his older brother with blue unseeing eyes before dozing off again. He was too big for it; his belly pressed its wooden sides and his legs had to curl to fit. His bedclothes were also old; his stepmother had stitched an extra ring of cloth to the cuffs to make them longer, and the cloth didn’t match. At the sight, Hans began to blubber, his sobs threshing his ribs, while Fräulein Müller looked on. He hated crying in front of her, and he tried to stop, but it just made the sobbing worse.

“You had no right to worry her like that,” she said with surprising gentleness, and rose. “She’s got enough with your brothers.”

He wiped his eyes and nose with the back of his hand. She walked to the corner of the room and took her hairbrush from a cabinet. Then
she sat down in a chair and began to stroke her blond hair. When she was done, she would clean out the brush and throw the snarl into the stove, smelling up the room. She did it every night, and he hated it. He hated the stink and her lousy cooking, and how she wasted water and firewood, and sat forever on the toilet while everyone else crossed their legs. Stroke, stroke, stroke. Her hair crackled and shone.

“Whore,” he said. Her right eyelid batted down fast, as if to stop an insect from flying into it.

His stepmother rattled into the room with a tray of soup. “Is it warm enough in here? Are you warming up?”

“I’m not cold,” said Hans. He leaned over the soup. It shimmered far below him. If he let himself fall toward it, it would take a long time to hit.

“I’m not hungry, either,” he said.

His stepmother sighed and perched on the last remaining chair. Her hands fluttered in her lap. The brush continued to move through Fräulein Müller’s hair. Her eyes were set on something far away. The ceiling thumped as the Dillmans moved around.

“I suppose they informed you about the air raid on Weimar,” his stepmother said in a trembling voice.

Hans didn’t answer.

“We’ll hear from Vati soon, I’m sure,” she said. “He’s due to leave for Berlin—” She shook her head. “Hans, I have something to tell you.”

Hans could feel a soaked chill at the back of his collar where snow had fallen and melted. The warmth in the room stabbed his toes and fingertips. He rubbed his palms on his knees.

“The day we met with Dr. Becker, I wrote an urgent telegram to your father and asked him to come home. No matter what,” she said. “You know what that means?”

He nodded.

“I haven’t heard anything back. I don’t know where he is.” She spoke to the floor, her head in her hands, revealing her reddish crown of hair, its part uneven in the middle. “I was so scared for us,” she said in a muffled voice. “But I’m more scared now. I’m afraid the neighbors overheard a conversation I had with you,” she said to Fräulein Müller.

Fräulein Müller shrugged. “What can they do? He’s not here.”

So his stepmother had told her horrid friend about Vati, and not him. Hans wanted to make her sorry, but even more he wanted her to raise her head. He couldn’t stand the sight of the uneven part, the hair falling over her face. “Vati will come,” he said hoarsely. “My father will come home.”

She pressed her fingers to her eyes.

“You could have told me,” he said.

She took a deep breath, but she didn’t say anything else.

Her soup looked good—a glisten of fat clung to its surface and the potatoes were cut in his stepmother’s precise, thick pieces. He lifted his spoon, then set it down. He couldn’t. He was so tired. He was so sick of grown-up lies.

“How was Ani today?” he said gruffly.

“He was . . . he was worried about you,” said his stepmother. “He doesn’t know yet. Any of it.”

“He can’t know about the telegram,” Hans said.

“No.” She met his eyes. They understood the same dark thing: If Ani knew he was the reason they summoned Vati home, and Vati never made it, Ani would blame himself forever.

“I want to tell him about the air raid.”

“All right.”

He set the soup bowl on the table beside him, letting it slosh. “Good night, then,” he said, and rose.

“Hans, if you want to spend time with Frau Geiss,” he heard his stepmother say rapidly, “I’d like it to be here, upstairs, with us.”

“I don’t want to spend time with Frau Geiss,” Hans said.

His stepmother’s lips twisted. She glanced at Fräulein Müller.

“I just want to go to sleep,” Hans said, and he left the room, trailing melted snow.

He didn’t go down into the cellar that night or the next morning. He was shoveling the walk when the girl appeared. He had never seen her outside, in the open air, and at first he didn’t recognize her angular features or the lightness of her eyes. She looked older and faded, as if she had washed her skin too hard.

He was sure she would know by now that his errand had been in vain, but her voice sounded jokey and amused.

“I suppose he didn’t show,” she said.

He pushed the shovel under the snow. It snagged and scraped on the hard substrata, and when he lifted it, bits of earth and grass clung to the whiteness. Below, a scar of mud. He tossed the snow aside and dug again. He didn’t know what to say to her. He couldn’t stand the hopelessness in her eyes.