Motherland (27 page)
“He did show,” he said.
“He did?”
Hans nodded.
“Did you give him my letter?”
He dug better this time and threw the clean snow aside. There had been no word from Weimar yet. In the morning, Ani had taken the news of the bombing silently and crawled back in bed, throwing the covers over his head.
Hide
, he’d said in a muffled voice.
Hide, hide
.
“Did you go?” The girl’s voice cracked. “You didn’t even go, did you?”
He saw something flash by the windows in her house.
“I gave it to him,” he said quickly. “But he has to go to Poland. He’s being sent to Poland today.”
“How did he look?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
She bit her lip, rolled her eyes. “You boys,” she said. “He didn’t give you anything for me?” Her mouse ears looked pinker than ever.
He rubbed his mouth. A bit of snow clung to his mitten and stung his lip.
She took a step closer. He smelled her hair. He remembered its temperature, cool as well water, against his cheek, when she leaned against his chest, when they’d sat in the dark together, whispering all the things they hated in the houses above them, and promising each other if one got free, he or she would rescue the other.
“A p-poem,” he stuttered.
“Aw, that’s sweet.” She pushed him lightly in the chest. Her arm sloped downward to do it. She was taller than he. “Well, where is it?”
“He made me learn it by heart, so it wouldn’t get lost,” said Hans, and he kept shoveling as he told her “The Plum Tree,” the words electrifying his mouth, making his tongue aware of how it licked the back of his teeth, the roof of his gums. The image of the plum tree filled his mind, its branches lush with fruit that ripened and fell to the ground without being picked, that rotted, shrouded by a blanket of drunken bees. When he looked up, he was surprised to see her covering her face with her hands.
He had seen her weeping this way before. In the cellar’s darkness he would have stepped forward to comfort her, but now they stood out in the open air and there was nothing he could do but let the sound of his words die.
A plane hummed overhead. Hans squinted up and saw it high up, a Focke-Wulf Condor, a transport plane, heading somewhere east.
Ani curled on his bed and listened to Fräulein Müller go into the bathroom and shut the door. He grimaced as he heard the rustle of her clothes, the sigh she always gave when she sat down. He wished she were gone. She kept telling his stepmother the parrot wasn’t real, even though she’d seen it. She rolled her eyes whenever he tried to bring it up. She brought a sick smell into the house that unsettled him. It clung to her clothes and her cooking and the hair she threw in the stove every night after picking it from her brush. It was worst when he woke up at night from one of his nightmares. Sometimes he was falling on top of mothers and children; sometimes they were falling on him, into a ditch. The river running through the ditch was red. There was a drain at its bottom, drinking and drinking. Ani wakened with his mouth gaping, his nostrils thick with Fräulein Müller’s stink.
Vati would get rid of her when he came home. Vati would find the parrot, too, coax it down from the rafters of the brewery. He would know how to raise a bird. Ani fell asleep every night wishing for Vati, trying to dream of him striding through the door, but by morning all he remembered was the bloody drain.
He dislodged the fifth and last tube from the hole in his mattress and pinched the bottom, moving the soft substance inside. Its consistency was softer than clay but thicker than liquid. He loved the feel of it
between his thumb and forefinger, the way it gave into itself and separated and squished together again. He pressed it a few times, methodically, and then shoved it deeper into the crack of his mattress. He wouldn’t drink the white softness inside, not this week, not until after his next doctor visit. But one day he would drink again. It wasn’t like eating at all. It wasn’t like eating at all; it was like breathing in. It
was
breathing, and Mother would fill him and make him brave. Mother would be him, the image of her that was almost all he remembered now, her white dress warm with sun, her white arms around him.
His fingers trembled as he pushed the tube down. Later. A grown-up would never find that crack. It was too small. The tube curled there like a seed, and he lowered his exhausted body over it, sheltering the secret.
The patient’s brother reminded Frank painfully of Hans. The way he slouched, the way he stuffed his hands in his pockets. The pleasure of a good scheme written all over his face. The boy hooted as he watched the dachshund squirm over his older brother’s lap, licking and sniffing.
“Robbi, Robbi.” The bedridden patient shouted. “I can’t believe you brought him all this way.”
The dog stopped conversation all around. Doctors and nurses alike stared with dazed eyes at the full-snouted, wiggling joy. The dog didn’t seem to know what part of its owner’s body it wanted to touch first—it leapt and licked and clawed ears, then nose, then armpit, then wrist, then melted over the patient’s lap like a giant pile of caramel. It scratched its floppy ear with a battering toe and leapt up again, as if to say,
Why are we still here? Let’s go! Let’s go!
A handful of visitors had come and gone that day, but nothing compared to the arrival of the dog.
“This is Robbi,” the patient said to his onlookers. “My brother brought him all the way from Schwarzburg.”
Watching them, Frank felt a pang. He wanted Hans and Ani and Jürgen to be close brothers like this, willing to make sacrifices for each other. Mostly he wanted Hans to be gentler and not press his advantage on the younger, more malleable Ani. He hadn’t been able to sleep last
night thinking about them, with all the refugees in the house, learning bad habits from a bunch of roughneck kids.
A hand tugged his sleeve, and he looked down into a gaunt, unfamiliar face. Not his patient. “Someone’s trading these,” the fellow whispered, shoving a hard little object in Frank’s palm. “Don’t look at it now. I just want you to know.”
Frank nodded and put the thing in his pocket. He went to pet the dachshund, finished with his morning routine, except for Hartmann, who as of yesterday was healing well, his apposing sutures already removed. Frank felt eager for the challenge of Berlin. For the first time, he nurtured a private, shameful hope that the war would continue. Another six months, that was all. Enough to learn, to earn a modest name for himself.
Frank was just heading for the ward’s far doors when one of Schnell’s soldiers came in, shouting for him, holding a telegram. Frank took it and kept walking, into the hall with the supply room. He ripped it open.
He had a hard time reading the words. The letters snagged and bounced.
ANI ILL STOP SEND MEDICINE STOP
Frank’s fingers opened and closed on the paper, crumpling it to a tiny ball.
“Medicine” was the family’s emergency code word for Frank himself.
She was summoning him home.
Someone appeared at his elbow. Her dark head came up to his bicep. Frank stuffed the telegram in his pocket.
“Is it bad news?” Frau Reiner said.
Frank fought for speech. “Maybe,” he said. “One of my sons—” he breathed in sharply. “My middle son appears to be ill.”
“I’m sorry. He’s Anselm, right?” said Frau Reiner.
He nodded. Anselm. The name had never stuck, however, only the boy’s feminine-sounding nickname. Ani had soft features. His
nose rounded at the tip. His eyes were lake-green and wide. Even his milk teeth curved where most children’s were straight. When Ani smiled, all Frank could see were circles and parts of circles, breaking and reforming like water around a flung stone. Ani was the healthiest kid from the day of his birth, never fussy like Hans, growing fat and dimpled at his mother’s breast. When Susi died, Ani kept asking when she would come back. Each time, Frank had explained gently that she was gone forever, but the information was like oil on water: It never fully sank in.
“Your wife must be very worried.” Frau Reiner looked over her shoulder. “Is she the kind who gets worried?”
“She’s never sent me a telegram before.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist.
“You should sit down,” said Frau Reiner.
“My Jürgen will be walking any day now,” he announced. “The baby. All my boys start walking at nine months, just like clockwork.” He felt his body lurch into step.
Frau Reiner took his arm and guided him to the supply room door. She opened it, sat Frank down on a box, and took a seat opposite him. The light was dim and the room smelled like wood and ether. His knees bounced.
“It happens quick, too,” said Frank. “One day they’re sitting. The next, they’re balancing with a chair, and by the end of the week they’re toddling around.
Hoppe, hoppe.”
He made a little figure with his fingers and walked it across the top of the box. She regarded him steadily.
“So what are you going to do?”
“Ask for a furlough.” He rubbed his face. No one had been granted a furlough since before Christmas. He wanted to read the telegram again, to make sure he’d gotten it right, but he didn’t want Frau Reiner to see it. He touched his pocket. Then he remembered the thing the patient had given him, and he pulled it out.
It was a hard brass-colored capsule, the size of a bean, and it had a small inscription it. Frank read it and frowned, then showed it to Frau Reiner.
“They’re trading these now,” he said hoarsely.
She plucked the capsule and rolled it between her fingertips. “Cyanide,” she said in a wondering voice. “I’ve never seen it. I mean, I guess you can’t see it.” She smiled a tiny smile.
“We can’t allow it.”
“Can’t we?” she said thoughtfully. Her heart-shaped face tilted down. “Say I’m a good, loyal soldier. What if I fall into Russian hands?”
“Then you survive it,” said Frank.
“What if I get starved and beaten and die of malnutrition anyway?”
“You don’t know that will happen.”
“The odds are great.” She cocked her head. “Why not save me the suffering?”
“It’s not for us to choose how we die,” Frank said.
“You really believe that, don’t you?” She held the capsule up to the light the way jewelers hold precious stones. It was bigger than a bead, but smaller than a child’s eye.
