Motherland (8 page)

Since it was hospital tradition to share the bounty of care packages, Frank brought the loaf to the small annex where the medical staff ate its meals together. He didn’t like most of them. The other doctors were young, ambitious, and talked about the patients as if they were conquests and not people. The technicians were too quiet and deferential. He really wanted only to offer the holiday bread to his friends by the window:
the anesthesiologist, Garren Linden, his comforting hulk leaned against the sill, and Anna Reiner, the only nurse who dared to infiltrate the men’s conversations. She looked tiny beside her bearded admirer. She kept smoothing her black hair behind her ear while Linden talked about Beethoven.

“Eight nice, proper slices,” Frank announced, making small marks on the floury top with his scalpel.

The other staff members were chattering about Ardennes. One of the younger doctors had a cousin who was part of a secret operation to go behind Allied lines. The doctor had a way of talking loudly and then softly so the whole room ended up listening to him. His hair sat on his head like a shellacked sponge. “He speaks perfect English because he spent a year in Minnesota,” the doctor said. “He’s supposed to pretend to be a lost American, and then sabotage their plans.”

“It seems like the Amis would jump on any reason to go home,” Frau Reiner said politely.

“Ja
and they’ve already got two,” blurted Linden. “French beer and French whores.”

Everyone laughed except the doctor, who said, “Please, not in front of the lady.”

Frank watched Frau Reiner grin and chuck Linden on the arm. “That’s right, you oaf.”

“My apologies, Madame,” Linden mumbled, but he looked pleased.

“Apology accepted,” the doctor said without a trace of humor. “At any rate, we Germans talk with our throats. Americans talk with their noses.” He described how his cousin mastered the American English accents by ladling a teaspoon of water into his mouth and trying not to spill a drop as he spoke a sentence.

“Good. Day,” said Frau Reiner in English.

“No, no,” said the doctor. “They’d shoot at you for that. The words to greet people are ‘How Dee.’”

“How Dee,” Frau Reiner mimicked with great seriousness, her eyebrows rising. “How Dee, sir?”

Her voice sounded so pinched everyone laughed again. Only Bundt, the Pole who operated the hospital incinerator, shook his head and stared at the stollen. A sickly smell emanated from him. The incinerator was a poorly built brick oven out in the field behind the hospital. Its engineer had been called away for duty elsewhere before he’d finished it. The incinerator leaked smoke and took too much fuel, but Bundt stuffed it daily with infected linens, trash, amputated limbs, and sometimes the unidentified dead. Then he dumped the ash into a nearby cistern, an open, concrete-lined pit that had been the barracks’ latrine before indoor plumbing. The cistern’s frozen sluice would smell unbearable in the summer, but no one expected the hospital to last that long.

Frank began to cut.

“The surgeon begins his delicate work,” said Frau Reiner.

“Who wants an end piece?” Frank said. To his surprise, it felt pleasant to be slicing bread in the cold, barely heated room, surrounded by his countrymen. Christmas had hardly happened at the hospital and Frank missed the year-end traditions. A spicy fragrance rose from the sweet loaf. His mouth watered.

“I’ll take the end,” growled Linden.

He handed the crust to Linden and kept cutting. Crumbs fell onto the wooden table, on the graffiti carved by the soldiers who had once trained here. The golden bits dribbled across a deeply gouged swastika, a scrap of lyrics from the “Horst Wessel Song,”
Der Tag für Freiheit und für Brot bumsen bricht an! The day for freedom and bread fucking is coming!

A crumb of the stollen made its way to Frank’s mouth and he paused for a moment, letting its sweetness spread over his tongue. It was then that he looked down and saw what Bundt was looking at.

It could have been a fig, but the color and texture were wrong. It was black and shiny and it protruded from the open bread ever so slightly in
the bottom right corner. Liesl had baked a film canister into the stollen. No doubt it held the money and map. The sight of the smooth, dark case made his ribs tighten. There it was, a little black egg, ready to hatch: the promise he’d made to her to run. As soon as the time was right.

Linden was biting into his slice, his jaw working. “Excellent,” he pronounced with a full mouth. A crumb fell on Frau Reiner’s sleeve. She stared at it a moment before brushing it away.

“I’ll take a middle piece,” said Bundt. He had not moved a muscle, but it felt to Frank as if the Pole had taken three steps closer, was looming right over the table. His eyes were the color of a wet pelt.

Frank frowned at the stollen and sliced hard at the end, making the bread vault off the table and into his lap, then put on a show of trying to catch it, and let it tumble to the floor. It hit the dirty boards with a thud. His companions cried out.

“No matter,” Frank called and dove down, quickly breaking off the hunk with the film canister and stuffing it into his sock. The floor smelled like mud. Bundt’s tiny feet did not move, and Frank noticed how his shoes were nothing more than strips of leather sewn to socks and bits of blackened board. He had to look close to see their counterfeit nature, to guess how cold it must be to walk outside every day and shovel trash into an oven, to perform this thankless task and know there was no reward but not being sent to a prison camp.

Frank rose with the bread held high. Lint and dust smeared the white flour. He whacked it off. “Good as new,” he said, slicing furiously. He felt the others exchanging glances; they had all been in surgery with him, had seen the quick precision of his movements. He heard their thoughts,
Is this one cracking up, too?

“Clean as new,” Frank said again, handing around the pieces. The doctors and technicians took them reluctantly, examining the bread for dirt. Only Bundt ate his without even looking at it. His brown eyes bored into Frank’s as he chewed.

“You haven’t even tasted yours—are you trying to poison us?” said Frau Reiner, smiling.

The film canister dug into Frank’s shin. He used his other boot to try to shove it deeper into the sock as he took a bite of the bread. He chewed the dry sweet slice, then swallowed. “I’m trying to make it last,” he said.

One afternoon, Frank’s rounds ended with a gastrointestinal mystery case in the smaller ward where they housed the patients with infectious diseases. He didn’t like visiting this ward because his own cases were so vulnerable to contagion, but another doctor wanted him to examine the open sores on the patient’s face. The patient had worked as a guard at the criminal camp on the west side of Weimar. The doctors there had given up on him.

Frank wound his way through the beds. The patient was easy to find. He did not look like the others. He did not look like a soldier at all: His cheeks were too pale and soft, and he did not shift his legs restlessly like the men who had foot trouble from marching. He hunched away from them, his blanket drawn high. Around his mouth, ulcers spread away like a trail of thick red ants.

Frank sat down on a stool beside the bed, pressing a knuckle into his tired back. He’d already read the notes, but he introduced himself and asked the man the same questions again. The soldier insisted he hadn’t swallowed anything strange, and he ate little more than bread and soup, but he couldn’t keep anything in, and what came out was bloody. His malaise increased daily. “I don’t need surgery,” the man said, fluttering his fingertips over the sores. “If that’s what you’re here for.”

“No, you don’t,” said Frank. He pressed the man’s belly. It felt firm and springy. The man’s heartbeat was normal. His breath was even, his green eyes clear.

“No pain?” said Frank.

The man stared at him as if he didn’t understand the question.

“Are you feeling any pain? In your stomach, or . . . ?”

“Some,” the soldier said. “When I go.”

“Have you ever bled like this before?”

The soldier shook his shaved head.

“How about the sores?”

Another shake.

Gastrointestinal hemorrhaging was not uncommon among the infantry, but its causes were hard to pinpoint. Since it was the soldier’s first experience with the condition, Frank suspected a parasite, but he couldn’t figure how the bug had not infected the rest of the POW camp. Pathology wasn’t his specialty, but he decided to ask anyway: “Are the prisoners sick?”

The soldier shrugged. “If doctors get to them,” he added with a harsh little laugh.

“What do you mean?”

The soldier mumbled that he’d heard that the doctors at the camp were injecting live subjects with infected typhus blood. To perfect a vaccine.

Frank’s tongue felt heavy as he asked the soldier to speak up. His own hospital’s typhus patients were kept in a private, darkened room, a row of mumbling bodies splitting with fevers and bloody rashes. A third of them would die.

Just then a black uniform drifted by. One of Schnell’s underlings. The patient turned his head to the side and pursed his lips. Frank waited. The patient blinked, his lashes thick as a child’s.

“Anything else you want to tell me?” Frank said.

“I’m weak,” said the man. “I can’t walk thirty meters.”

Frank reiterated the other doctor’s prescription: Atebrin, rest, and broth. “If you’re still passing blood in a week, they’ll reevaluate.”

As he left the soldier’s bedside, a strange sensation crept over Frank. It was a wet dirty feeling, not an itch exactly, and not a chill. Frank had felt it several times since arriving in Weimar, and at first he suspected lice, but he was careful with his clothes and no amount of hygiene made it go away. It crawled down his shoulders and up to his temples, and down to his gut and up to his brow, and in the cracks of skin around his knees and groin. Sitting down, lying down did nothing to help it. It coated his whole exhausted torso, shifting its clammy grip.

He didn’t know anything about the prison camp, except that its prisoners mostly worked in local munitions factories. A different set of doctors staffed KZs. Until October, until he’d left Hannesburg, such places seemed very far away. The problem of the enemy’s captured soldiers an abstraction. The problem of dangerous native foreigners, Jews, Gypsies, also an abstraction. Frank didn’t know any “foreigners” except the two Jews who had been his medical school professors. He doubted they were communists, but one had left the country; the other moved to the ghetto with his family and had subsequently fallen out of contact.

In Hannesburg, Frank had assuaged his regret over doing nothing to resist the crackdown on non-Germans by reminding himself that he didn’t “fit in,” as Susi had wanted. He had never voted for the Nazi Party. He’d hung no pictures of Hitler. He spent minimal time at the spa, hurrying home to his wife and sons. He kept his father’s book collection intact, knowing dozens of banned volumes were scattered throughout it, and neglected to inform Susi of a conversation with his father, a month before his death, hinting that the elder Herr Kappus had given money to help an old colleague’s family after the synagogue had burned. They’d managed to get visas out of Germany.
I’m an old man. I have nothing to lose
,
his father had said, waving away Frank’s offer to assist him. But his face had looked gaunt, as if something had frightened him. Weeks later, he was dead of a stroke.

Frank took a breath, but the disgusting sensation only deepened. An orderly pushed a giant tub past him on a cart. Frank put his hand on his shoulder.

“Give me that,” he said.

“But Herr Doktor,” protested the orderly. Frank brushed past him and began emptying bedpans, pouring the sluice of piss and excrement into the tub on top of the soiled bandages. His skin shuddered inside his clothes. He gripped the cart handle harder, shoved it out the door.

A soft gust of paraffin followed him, and then cold air smacked him in the face. The edges of his eyelids tightened. Sweat on the back of his neck froze into tiny icicles. He blinked, pushing toward the incinerator, the cistern beyond. A squat brick oven and a concrete hole—they were the only structures in the flat field before the pine woods. They inhabited the desolate space like a pair of unlikely friends. Smoke rose from the incinerator. It took in flesh and bandages and gave out cinders and ash. The cistern received, a rapidly filling pit behind a low lip of gray wall.