Motherland (31 page)

Hans threw off his covers and sat up, staring across the short, dim space to his brother’s bed. “Trust me,” he said. “Don’t you trust me?”

His brother didn’t answer. Upstairs, someone started walking around, creaking the boards. The naked feet of the Dillman girls.

“Vati would want you to trust me,” Hans said.

Ani did not reply. Ani never wanted to talk about Vati anymore, not since the report that he’d gone missing.

“Or don’t you remember Vati?” Hans said.

“What kind of seeds are in the jungle?” Ani’s voice was small and remote.

“Do you know how far away the jungle is?” said Hans. “Someone’s been feeding it birdseed.”

“Maybe it’s trying to get back.”

“Maybe,” said Hans. “Maybe it was born in a cage.”

His brother fell silent again. Hans flopped back. Above him, he heard a high sound, the sag of springs. The Dillman girls were going to sleep. They slept four to a bed; he’d seen it when he’d been upstairs. Two girls slept one way and two the other way, their feet tangled in one another’s hair. The oldest one was thirteen; the youngest, four. Frieda was the prettiest, but she was shy.

“We should go to sleep,” Hans said.

“I was trying to sleep,” said Ani. “You just woke me up again.”

“I’ll get the seeds, all right?” Hans said.

But he didn’t.

Instead he went as often as he could to the brewery pasture, where a loose federation of older children gathered. It wasn’t just his old schoolmates anymore—it was the Dillmans and the Winters and other refugee children now billeted in town. The refugee kids were bolder and coarser, and they weren’t afraid of bombings or their mothers, and they were so many! The sheer numbers of kids enthralled them all. They could have formed their own army.

For days they’d been playing a game called Kidnap in a crumbling rectangle of brick and stone that was the foundation of the brewery’s
former stable. The rules were simple: The girls and smaller children were always imprisoned in a low stone stall, and one gang of boys defended them, while the other gang tried to engineer their escape. As soon as the captives escaped, the roles reversed. The girls and younger children were always the prize and the burden. There was never a victor for long.

One other rule kept the game in check: You couldn’t touch a girl. You could order her around if she was your bounty. She had to do what you asked, such as make you mud cakes or fetch you a cup of water, but touching was off-limits, unless it was for assistance. Hans never asked the girls to do anything. He didn’t dare, but he fought for them valiantly. For his efforts, the Dillman girls insisted that Hans be the one who lifted them over the wall when they escaped. Sometimes when his hands gripped their ribs, he felt a warm ache inside.

Under the guise of doing errands on overcast days, Hans joined the game. Daring the Lancasters and Wellingtons that cruised high over the clouds, he was almost happy. To run across the packed snow and mud took his mind off his brother, and worrying about when Dr. Becker was coming back, and his missing-in-action father. Whenever Hans came upon the game, it was already started, and whenever he left, the other children played on. He wouldn’t have been surprised if he showed up at midnight and their dark bodies were there, fighting and fleeing each other.

Hans kept to himself about the game at the stable, and his stepmother didn’t ask. She seemed afraid of him since he’d run away. He didn’t tell Ani, either. His brother would ruin things by acting strange. Hans was relieved that Ani appeared to prefer staying home, orbiting the baby and their stepmother and the awful Fräulein Müller. Hans wanted his own time to daydream about the Dillman girls, and about Berte slipping back down to the cellar to beg him to be her friend again. Most of all, he wanted to imagine Vati coming home and fixing Ani. Vati would have to stay hidden until the war ended, but he could have Hans’s bed and Hans would sleep on the floor.

Hans couldn’t picture the war ending, although that was all that the adults talked about. He didn’t believe the Amis would make it past the Rhine and across the cities and farmlands to Hannesburg. He couldn’t fathom enemies on his own streets, walking past the, slogans like, our hearts beat for our country and the red flags on the roof of the R
athaus
. The Americans and Russians might conquer other parts of Germany. The country might grow smaller. They might become like castle dwellers who retreat to their stone keep, but the German army would hold its ground, and his father would return to the front when Ani was well again.

At the end of that first week of Vati’s disappearance, Hans arrived at the edge of the pasture to hear a familiar, nervous giggle. His stomach contracted and his pants slid toward his hips. He grabbed his waistband, hunting the rubble with his eyes.

One of the refugee boys was screaming toward the prison stall, where Ani stood alone, separated from the clump of girls and small children. Ani stood very still and straight, his arms welded to his sides. It looked as if someone had hammered him into the ground. There was a rope around his neck.

“I said, ‘Move!’” shouted the refugee kid.

“I said move!” Ani squawked back.

Frieda Dillman grabbed Ani’s rope and tugged gently. He squawked again and lifted his arms and coasted away along the broken wall.

“Stop it, Ani,” pleaded Frieda. “Just play the game with us.”

Ani squawked again. A clod of dirt hit him in the face. He fell over, his arms still straight.

“Irre,”
Hans heard the other kids say.
Loony
. He watched in horror as the advancing team threw more clods on Ani, and the younger boy bounced and twitched, and then the girls pulled him to his feet. Ani struggled for balance, his arms still outstretched. “I said move! I said move!” he repeated in an awkward falsetto.

“Loony, loony, loony!” shrieked Grete Dillman.

“Stop!” Hans shouted, and broke through the children to reach his brother. Up close he could see the bruises already swelling on Ani’s cheeks and where the rope had bitten into his neck. His brother glanced at him, showing no sign of recognition.

“Stop!” Ani squawked back.

“Ani!” said Hans. “Go home.”

“Ani go home,” mimicked his brother. His eyes sickled up as if something was funny, but no laugh came out of his mouth.

“Who did this to him?” Hans shouted at Frieda Dillman. She was the second oldest, already with a bosom that pushed out her shirt. Her forehead crinkled. She stared at him as if he were speaking another language.

“Who put the rope around his neck?” Hans demanded.

“He wanted to play with us,” scoffed Grete Dillman, tossing her braids. “Everyone knows he’s crazy.”

“He’s not crazy,” Frieda said faintly.

“Crazy,” Ani echoed.

“Why are you talking like this?” Hans said to him.

His brother just stared at him with his sickled eyes and then let out a squawk.

“Shut up!” Hans grabbed for his brother, but Ani flapped free and began to run headfirst into the wall. Hans groped for the rope, his fingers closing around it. His brother choked and fell into the slush.

“Ani,” Hans cried and tumbled to the ground beside him, hugging his brother’s thin shoulders. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, as Ani curled his knees in, still coughing.

“Shut up,” Ani imitated in a whisper, but the parrot voice was fading. “Shut up. Ani. I’m sorry.”

“Let’s go home,” Hans said, and he ignored the others as he helped
his brother to his feet and loosened the rope from his neck. He threw it to the ground and put an arm around Ani’s shoulder, guiding him away.

As soon as they passed a few blocks and started crossing the Kurpark, Ani’s color returned. “Are you all right?” said Hans.

Ani touched his mouth with his fingers.

“Why did you go there?”

“I saw the kids playing. They’re scaring it away,” Ani said.

The parrot again. “Just stay at home,” said Hans. “All right?”

“You don’t stay at home.”

“I’m older.”

Ani scratched his neck. It was mostly dirt on his face, not bruises. It would wash off.

“It’s not that fun anyway. The game,” said Hans.

“Then why does everybody go?”

“I don’t know,” said Hans.

He couldn’t explain why the game of Kidnap kept drawing him back, nor could he remember what his days were like before he started playing it. The game hadn’t existed and now it did. His body wore the marks of it, the bruises on his shins and hips, but it had made a deeper impression on his mind. All day, at night, he catalogued his opponents: what fellows were good runners, what fellows could push him down, and who got tired first. The teams always shifted; that’s what made it so hard to win and so hard to quit.

As he and Ani reached their street and passed under the branches of a familiar chestnut tree, Hans worried about who was winning. The sides would be uneven without him. He wouldn’t be the one to lift the Dillmans over the wall anymore, not if he stayed away. He stopped still and let his brother walk on. Ani turned, his expression puzzled.

“You’re safe now. I’m going back,” Hans told him.

Ani’s face fell. “Don’t go.”

“I have to go,” said Hans. “One of them is going to trade me some sunflower seeds. For the parrot. If I don’t go, I won’t get them, and then we can’t lure it out.”

Ani continued to regard him sorrowfully.

“Don’t tell Mutti,” Hans said, backing away, passing the chestnut. “You know you weren’t supposed to be there.”

His brother’s face grew smaller and less distinct. Hans couldn’t see the bruises or dirt at all anymore. A few more steps, and Ani was just a small figure in a canyon of leafless trees.

As soon as Hans slipped into the apartment that night, his stepmother was there, wearing one of Marta’s aprons and smelling of turnips. Her red hair sprang from a bun at the back of her head, and her cheeks were pink from hovering over steaming pots.

Ugly
, Hans thought, though he knew it wasn’t true. She never looked ugly. She just looked different, sharper and more angular than his mother. She’d never hit him, but her presence was always a blow. He tried to hurry past her.

“What happened to your brother?” she demanded. “Where have you been?”

“Nowhere,” he said, squeezing by her into the living room.

Fräulein Müller was sitting on the sofa. She promised she was leaving that Sunday, and it wouldn’t be soon enough. “Fetch those for me, will you, Hans?” she said, pointing to the blocks his brother had swept to the floor.

As he bent, he heard his stepmother storm in after him. “Your brother was hurt out there,” she said. “He’s been hiding in your room since he came home.”

“He’s fine,” said Hans.

“He’s not fine. And I assumed you had nothing to do with it, surely not his own brother, so I went and knocked on the Dillmans’ door and gave them a piece of my mind.” She paused, catching her breath. His stepmother had been giving the Dillmans a piece of her mind a lot lately: about the noise, about the messes in the wash kitchen. “Then Grete Dillman told me
you
were there.”

“I didn’t know Ani would show up,” said Hans. “I brought him home as soon as I saw him. Why did you let him out?” He threw the blocks on the couch next to Fräulein Müller, narrowly missing his baby brother’s fist as he grabbed for more.

His stepmother stepped closer to him, her shadow lengthening in the gaslight. “What happened outside?” she said.

He couldn’t tell her. The memory of the rope and Ani falling to the slush made him too unsettled to talk. “We were just playing a game,” he mumbled. “Ani got carried away.”

“Hans,” his stepmother said. He saw her glance at Fräulein Müller. “Hans, I want you to stay home and play with your brother and do your studies in the afternoons. If you disobey me, you’ll be . . . locked up. In your room.”

A short laugh escaped his lips. He gaped at her in disbelief.
Locked up?

“You’re the one who let him out,” he said.

His stepmother looked over to her friend again. Fräulein Müller made a tower and Jürgen knocked it down.

“Strong boy,” Fräulein Müller said approvingly. “A boy can wreck the tower, but a man learns how to build it.” She took the baby’s pudgy hand and closed it around a block. It was clear Fräulein Müller had put his stepmother up to this, with all her muttering about not “spoiling” them. Well, she might set rules, but he refused to listen.

“I’ll go lock myself up right now,” he said, knowing he didn’t sound like himself. He didn’t sound like any German son talking to his elders. Both women recoiled. He marveled at his insolence, but it continued to
spill out. “If that’s all right with you. Is that all right?” he asked, and left the room before they could answer.

Ani curled on the bed, quiet but not sleeping.

“Did you get my sunflower seeds?” he asked when Hans came in.

“Not yet.”

Ani sighed.

“I want to tell you something.” Hans took the atlas from under his pillow and spread it on the floor. “Vati is on his way,” he said. He ran his finger over the bird’s-eye distance between Weimar and Hannesburg, coasting over hills, rivers, the finished and unfinished Autobahn.