Motherland (41 page)

The silence extended. And then she ran to him, baby and all, lurching into an embrace.

“Careful, careful,” Frank murmured as he folded them both in his arms.

“Where are the boys?” she said into his shirt, and at almost the same time, he said, “Where have you been?” then answered, “They’re down with the chickens. Is this my baby?” He smiled at Jürgen.

“I was clearing rubble,” said Liesl, and then she burst into tears. “They were going to take Ani away—” she said, sobbing. “I wouldn’t have sent that telegram, but I was so afraid—”

“He’s going to be all right.” Frank said, but he moved away from her. “Is this my boy?” he said to the child.

Jürgen gurgled back and Frank gently shook the baby’s fist.

“Ani’s getting better every day,” he said.

She gulped and shook, her face wet. “He’s better?”

“You should have seen him with the animals,” said Frank, and described Ani spending hours in the barn, currying anything with fur until the cows’ and ponies’ coats crackled. “They would have won all the prizes at the fair.” Ani ate well, too. Especially after he was allowed to sample from Bernd’s secret store of cheeses, Frank said, adding a chuckle that sounded forced. His stories sounded wrong, like the off-color jokes she used to overhear her uncle telling. She had never been able to fully comprehend their details, and their endings mystified her.

“And he slept well?” she interrupted.

Frank was across the room again. “Most nights,” he said.

“Did he tell you anything?”

“No.” Frank sighed. “Let’s not talk about this right now. I just want to see my son. And you.”

But she couldn’t stop. Frank had to know how hard she’d tried. “I looked! I looked every day. I asked him every day,” Liesl said. She felt her lips drawing back, baring her teeth, and she covered them with her free hand and turned away.

A silence fell between them. Frank walked back and took Jürgen from her. The baby squirmed and stretched his arms for Liesl. “Muh-muh,” he said.

“That’s your father, now,” Liesl said softly.

The baby whined. A rabbit whumped into view. It was small and black with one white spot on its back. Frank carried Jürgen to the window.

The rabbit hopped to her shoe and sniffed. It sniffed the toe, then the side, the heel, one long ear flopping. Then it loped slowly away. Liesl wiped her eyes. “They’re lovely.”

“I’m trying to keep Ani from naming them all,” Frank said. “He wants them all to be pets.”

“It’s not safe for you here, Frank,” Liesl whispered.

“Muh-muhhhh,” Jürgen wailed. Frank handed him back.

“I had to be sure you were provided for,” said Frank. “Things are going to get worse after we surrender. There won’t be enough food. I want you and the children to have your own meat and eggs and the seeds for a garden. It won’t be an easy year.”

She pressed her cheek into Jürgen’s head, trying not to cry again. She didn’t like the way he said “you and the children.” The baby frowned and grabbed her hair.

“How did you manage to get into Hannesburg?” she asked.

Frank picked up the bunny with one swift hand and petted its head.
“We had quite a ride,” he murmured. “Four rabbits, three chickens, and two sons on top of the lorry, and a father riding under the crates.”

The bunny twisted and he let it down. It bounded behind the couch.

“I want Ani to be safe,” Liesl whispered. “All of us to be safe.”

“Ani will improve,” said Frank, his eyebrows contracting. “He’s a strong fellow, and he’s pulling through. You’ll see when he comes upstairs.” He took a step nearer to her again, his beard still startling her every time she looked at him. “And I’m here now. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“Someone will denounce you,” said Liesl.

“You have to understand something. This is my house,” Frank’s voice rose. “This is my father’s house. I’m not abandoning it.”

She started to shake again. How could he be so loyal to this simple brick and plaster, that staircase and that balcony, when it all could be blown up tomorrow? Better to flee where bombs would not follow them. To keep flesh and bone whole. “We have to think about what’s best for—”

He cut her off with a look, and a bitter salt filled her mouth. He wasn’t the same Frank. First that beard, and then the angles of his face and body, his scrawny hips—he wasn’t the same man anymore.

“We should turn on the radio,” Liesl mumbled, fumbling with the knob. A march was playing. “We shouldn’t shout.”

The door opened behind them and Hans and Ani stormed in. After three weeks they both looked ruddier and fatter, and Ani wore a pair of new baggy trousers cinched at the waist with twine. Liesl knelt down and opened the arm that wasn’t holding Jürgen and they jostled in to hug her with silly grins on their faces. She didn’t know what she’d expected of their reunion, but it felt just right and too brief at once. The boys extracted themselves and began patrolling the room. Jürgen demanded to get down, too, and pulled up on the legs of his brothers.

“The chickens are thirsty,” Hans said loudly to his father. “We need a lot of water for them. And a water trough.”

“Where are my bunnies?” Ani said.

She studied him as he rooted among the furniture. He seemed older, his face ruddy, his movements smooth and confident. If he was getting better in the country, Frank ought to have stayed. They all ought to go back together.

“We’ll have eggs for Easter,” said Frank. “And a beet for dye. Susi always liked that tradition. The boys, too.”

Did he think she was Susi now? Would Susi let them talk about holiday decorating when the Americans were coming, and Ani needed quiet, and Frank could become a prisoner of war?

The radio changed songs. A familiar stink rose from Jürgen’s vicinity—he’d soiled his diaper.

“Their mother used to write their names in wax so when they dipped the eggs their names would show,” Frank said.

“I can write my own name now,” said Ani.

“I’m sorry,” Liesl said. She could feel herself starting to tear up again, and she turned so they would not see. “The baby needs to be changed.” She ran with Jürgen to the study and shut the door.

God knows, he’d had time to think, to prepare. The whole endless march through the snow, the days in the basement in Bad Vilbel, he’d felt his own skin tighten around his ribs; he’d felt his head swim with daydreams of roasts and strudel, felt his teeth going loose in his mouth, and calculated what he would need to save his family from hunger. The animals. The seeds. The wood and nails and chicken wire. A saw and sandpaper. Two hammers, one for him and one for his eldest son. The latch and hook for the gate. He’d even thought about the noise it would take to build the hutch by dark, and he’d hung blankets over the living room door to muffle the sound.

Frank didn’t care if the neighbors noticed his presence. Even if they could find some authority left in Hannesburg willing to arrest him that night, it would take hours and hours. He just wanted to finish the hutch. He’d showed Hans the plan, sketched out on a scrap of envelope, and they’d each built a side while Ani watched, stroking the rabbits and telling them not to be afraid. Ani was part of the blueprint, too. Frank wanted him to see them making a safe, secure home. Shaping something in the wreckage.

“You’re a natural,” he told Hans, and saw his face burn with pride.

By the time the first candle burned low, they had finished the walls and floor. It was time to fit the door. Frank had thought of the smaller
nails he would need to hold the wire to the door, and the tiny taps it would take to send them into the wood. He had saved those blows for Ani. He sent Hans to get another candle and beckoned to his middle son. “Here,” he said, taking a nail from his mouth and holding it against the wood. With his other hand, he gave Ani the hammer. “Just the slightest tap now.”

He waited, ready for the hard smack that would inevitably come, bruising his thumb. He felt Ani’s eyes on him.

“Why is Mutti hiding?” the boy said.

“She’s not hiding. She’s changing the baby.”

“She’s taking a long time.”

Frank flushed. “She’ll come out when she’s ready.”

The boy continued to regard him. He set the hammer on the floor.

“Go on,” Frank said.

Ani rose and ran toward the study. He threw back the blanket and disappeared behind it, then shut the door.

On his long journey home, Frank had not thought about Liesl, or rather he had thought about Liesl often, but as an agent in his plans. He’d thought she would understand him, as she’d always understood him before. In her quiet way, she would be grateful for the animals, the hutch, the seeds he’d brought for a garden. She would see these gifts as he saw them: promises of survival.

He would tell her about his desertion after the boys had gone to bed, starting with his escape from the cistern and his hungry, exhausted days in the forest. He would describe his relief at finding a gamekeeper’s cabin, at resting there and eating someone’s old dusty provisions until his frostbite healed. He would skip the long days walking, getting lost, retracing his steps, and turn to getting arrested, rotting anonymously
in a cellar converted to a jail cell while a local official asked around for the reward he would get for handing the deserter over.
The man’s greed saved me
, he would say.
He thought I might be worth something
. One night, the man’s daughter inexplicably let him free. After that, it was surprisingly easy getting to the farm, easy to find Bernd and ask him to get a message to his wife. He would not be ashamed of the desertion. After all, he’d done it in the name of his family. And he’d worked hard, mucking stalls and butchering hogs for the sake of a few chickens and rabbits, the supplies for a hutch, also in the name of his family. And risked his life to get those things here, all in the name of his family.

But what he hadn’t expected was that his family would change. That Hans would act gruff as a little man, that Ani would be . . . whatever he had become. Frank had a hard time finding a word for it. As a doctor, he might spin a diagnosis around the symptoms of lead poisoning: impaired cognition and motor control, confusion, fatigue. Yet as a father, the best term he could come up with was “maimed.” Ani had been maimed. In mind as well as body.

He would never forget Ani stumbling toward him with his burned arm and hissing with pain as he’d wrapped both tight around his father. Or watching Ani struggle to tie his shoelaces. Or waking to see Ani stumbling after a cat around the dark farmhouse, whispering to himself,
If we don’t cry out, they’ll think we’re dead. They won’t hurt us if they think we’re dead
. For two weeks, Frank couldn’t hold more than a two-sentence conversation with his second son, because Ani’s mind wandered so easily and because he mixed up words—“farm” for “barn” and “shell” for “coat.”

All Ani wanted to do was see the animals in the barn, but his desire had a compulsion to it, as if he couldn’t stop being with them. He’d come back from his endless grooming sessions, eat with a silent, distracted air, go obediently to sleep, and wake screaming from terrible nightmares. Day after day, night after night.

And then one night, Ani had slept the whole way through. And then two, then three nights in a row. He ran without tripping over his feet, and the clouds in his eyes began to clear. When a new pony was born, he’d begged to name it White Wing, and ran around all day grinning when Bernd said yes. Whole paragraphs erupted from his lips when he described the splendors of the horse. He’d stopped twitching and flicking his head.

Ani’s turn toward wellness in a few short weeks astonished Frank. He’d never anticipated his own son would be living proof of his thoughts on dystrophy, how the constant pressures on Germany’s soldiers had made it impossible for them to heal. But Ani hadn’t been a soldier sleeping out in snowy, lice-ridden trenches, waiting for a Russian attack. Ani had been a six-year-old in a sturdy house, with a mother and brothers, and food on the table. Ani had fallen ill after Frank had gone, but long before the terrors of the air raid. He had succumbed under Liesl’s care.

Frank had read and reread Liesl’s letter, but her order of events confused him. He asked Hans to tell him the story of Ani’s illness from the beginning. He could tell that the older boy hadn’t paid much attention. Or hadn’t been privy to much. There had been doctor visits, yes—not with the doctor Frank recommended, but someone else, Dr. Becker, who had found a high concentration of lead in Ani’s blood. And then things got murky. Though no one seemed to know what caused the lead poisoning, the doctor had wanted to send Ani away to an asylum.