Motherland (20 page)

The next morning Frank brought Hartmann’s poems in one pocket, and a mirror in the other, touching it from time to time. The mirror felt like a giant coin. Hartmann was awake but immobile, slumped toward his feet. He looked at Frank with dull eyes, then looked away.

Good morning
, Frank wrote, sitting down on the edge of the bed.
You’re looking well
.

Hartmann didn’t respond, and Frank bowed his head for a moment, uncertain how to proceed. The morning after surgery was often the hardest for patients—the after-effects of the nausea combined badly with the patients’ disappointment that they would never be their old selves again. Until the moment a man went under the knife, he believed the knife would restore the past, instead of shaping a new future. Frank remembered Alliner weeping silently for hours.

As the silence between them deepened, Frank busied himself with examination: heart, lungs, palpation of the abdomen, the old ritual of touch and listening that joined doctor and patient. Even in the worst cases, it comforted him to go through these tasks. Hartmann’s respiratory rate was low, but other vital signs were normal.

With a mounting dread, Frank checked the sutures. Miraculously all but two remained unbroken, and they could be restitched with a local anesthetic. By the light of day, it was clear that the graft skin was a different shade than the rest of Hartmann’s face, and pocked with a few hairs that would eventually fall out. The swelling had worsened overnight, which was to be expected, but it made the graft look as if it were straining to break free. He felt Hartmann’s eyes on him and he forced his expression to remain neutral. The work was good, the stitches clean and even.

He switched on his headlamp and shone it into Hartmann’s eyes. He read the chart. The nurse had given Hartmann another shot of morphine at dawn. He had taken some water and had not thrown up again.

Frank fumbled with his pad, writing an apology, then crossing it out.

Would you like to see yourself ?

Hartmann took the silver oval. He faced his reflection, but his eyes didn’t focus.

It’s a beginning
, Frank wrote.
The mouth will heal the fastest. You should be able to eat solid food in a week or two
. He explained about how hot saline packs promoted circulation, and stressed the importance of avoiding tension on the sutures.
No smiling. You must be a serious man
, he added, wondering if he should joke.

Hartmann handed the mirror back to Frank. He took the pad and scribbled.
You’ll be going soon then
.

Before Frank could respond, Frau Reiner gestured from a few beds away, asking him to sign an order.

“How’s he doing?” she asked in a low voice as Frank wrote his signature.

“He’ll get used to it,” Frank said.

When he got back to Hartmann’s bedside, he felt for the sheaf of poems. He pulled them from his pocket and held them out, his hand shaking at their barely discernible weight. Hartmann didn’t move. He had fallen asleep. His half-shuttered eyes took on a trusting, boyhood softness.

Frank tucked the poems back in his pocket again, suddenly unable to part with them.

Hannesburg

February 1945

Dillman. The nameplate appeared above the Kappuses’ within two days of the tenants’ arrival. The little wooden slat, inked in a neat childish hand, was the only thing small and neat about the clan, which spilled out of its third-floor rooms and into the wash kitchen at all hours. The four girls (the lone boy, Otto, was serving in the Ukraine) scattered their ribbons and shrill giggles everywhere. They had somehow managed to procure a record player and played their two albums at all hours, dancing their big, clomping feet across the floor. Of all of them, only the second oldest, Frieda, seemed genuinely kind—in a downcast sort of way. She was also the prettiest, having escaped the freckles and frizzy brown heads of the rest of the Dillmans. For this, her sisters treated her with a mix of reverence and scorn.

Frau Dillman trotted about, elaborately, almost joyously polite the first week of their habitation on Hubertstrasse 6. She sang out her praises for the rooms, the view, the neighborhood. But when Liesl confronted her regarding the nightly wail of the record player, Frau Dillman’s shoulders grew as rigid as a cornered cat’s. After Liesl stopped her a second time to confer over the soggy underthings left strewn about the wash kitchen, Frau Dillman’s eyes began to blink hard whenever they crossed paths.

“Overrun and overplucked,” was Uta’s comment when Liesl complained about their new neighbor’s touchiness. “She’s too tired to get along.”

This was the new Uta, glazed and contented by her pregnancy.

“Can’t you side with me for once?” Liesl retorted.

“I am siding with you. You can’t change her, so just let her alone.”

So Liesl tried to leave Frau Dillman alone, even when the woman complained, in a voice laced with resentment, about the broken heaters in their rooms. “Perhaps someone from the housing office can come,” Liesl had said, and made the request, but no one came. Likewise the employment office had never come through with a new housekeeper, and the local Wehrmacht office could not get any more packages to Frank.

It was as if the country were slowly becoming paralyzed. Soon, they would all stop moving, one by one, until Hans and Ani froze in their Luftwaffe games and the Dillman girls in their last dance step.

But not Frau Winter.

Frau Winter was up at all hours, ready to talk. She burst from her apartment at the slightest creak of the steps, her black, old-fashioned widow’s weeds swirling about her. Her fierce face looked as if it had been molded by glaciers, a terrain of deep crevices with two frigid pools for eyes. Frau Winter never smiled. Her laugh was a throttled rasp. But there was something intangibly confident and pleased about her, as if she had been waiting all her days for life to turn so brutal, and now that it had, she had the satisfaction of being prepared.

Her teenage sons were never home, so she cornered Liesl. Each of her stories was a swinging fist: When they evacuated East Prussia, her eldest daughter was carrying her infant on a pillow, covered in a blanket. They had to muscle and shove to get on a train. They had to jam in with hundreds of others, so tight it was as if they were hanging by their shoulders. “Like we were the clothes in the wardrobe,” Frau Winter said in her sonorous, imperfect German. It wasn’t until the next
station that the daughter realized that the pillow was empty. Her baby had fallen somewhere.

“And then my Hilde took herself,” Frau Winter said, lunging forward, as if tackling someone invisible in front of her. It took Liesl a minute to realize the girl had thrown herself in front of a train or out of the train, she wasn’t sure which. She didn’t want to know.

“And then Friedrich,
ach
.” Frau Winter had shaken her head. “We had to get off the train to look for Hilde and we could not get another one. So we walked for days and he just collapsed. There was no doctor. Your husband is a doctor, yes? So maybe he would know what happened when a man just collapses like that and says his chest is tight to breathe. Maybe heart attack. But what could we do but keep walking?”

When Liesl blinked, her eyelids felt too dry. She handed Frau Winter the bucket of meager cleaning supplies she’d scrounged for her—a box of soap flakes, a brush, a pile of rags—and fled.

Frau Winter’s glittering grief undid her. It made her fear the worst. Frank trapped in a besieged Berlin, and Ani . . . Liesl had taken him to Dr. Becker, who sent him to the hospital clinic to have his blood tested, and now they were waiting through four teeth-gritting days for the results. Ani was gaining weight again, but the Dillmans and their constant ruckus woke him at night, crying out from nightmares.
They keep falling on me, Mutti
. He clutched his belly in pain. Sometimes he staggered as if someone invisible had whacked him from behind. She had the same conversation with him over and over.

Did you eat something funny? Something you ate made you sick
.

Nothing
.

You must have eaten something
.

I didn’t eat anything
.

Ani. Tell the truth to me
.

It was Fräulein Müller’s cooking, Mutti
, and he grimaced and blinked.
Anyway, I’m getting better now
.

After the boys were in bed, Liesl posited various theories aloud to Uta. Ani had worms. Ani had eaten some poisonous mushroom in the cellar.

“Write to the boy’s father,” said Uta. “He knows him best.”

But Liesl still hadn’t. She couldn’t, at least not until the blood test results. Frank had just finished a miracle surgery on his old classmate. He needed to go to Berlin now, to become the surgeon he was meant to be. And besides, she didn’t want Frank to think she couldn’t care for the children. To send them away to his sister, to one of Herr Geiss’s contacts in the country. The baby was learning to walk—but not to anyone, just to her. Jürgen slammed his chest into her and hugged her with all his trembling strength. If she left the house without him, he cried. He was too big for his cradle, so she made a pallet on the study floor for them both, and all night he pressed his warm body into her spine and clutched her hair. He was the only reason she could sleep at all.

“Did Anselm admit to eating anything?” Dr. Becker said after he closed his office door, leaving Ani alone in the examining room. They had been inside together for nearly half an hour without her, their murmuring too indistinct to catch any words.

“No. Did he tell
you
?” She didn’t mean to sound so defensive.

He regarded her for a moment, then nodded. “He didn’t tell me, but his blood showed a high concentration of lead,” he said.

“Lead,” Liesl repeated faintly. The word conjured images of pipes. Lead pipes. But the pipes at Frank’s house were made of copper.

“Enough to cause motor and cognitive damage,” said the doctor. “Too soon to say if it’s irreversible.” Then he lit a cigarette, took a few puffs, and stubbed it out while she summoned a response.

“Could the test be wrong?” Liesl said, her mind sorting through all the possible objects in their house. Hans’s toy soldiers? Was he eating
them?

“Unlikely.” The doctor shoved his hands in his coat pockets. “I haven’t seen these exact symptoms before, but they’re not atypical for lead poisoning. It would also explain the fatigue, the loss of appetite.”

Poisoning
. The word didn’t belong to Ani. Not dear Ani who’d fed his baby brother his bottle that morning, and asked,
Why doesn’t milk taste like grass?

A sudden patience descended over Liesl. “But I don’t understand why he would eat something like that,” she said slowly. “He’s not a baby. He knows what he’s putting in his mouth.”

Dr. Becker lit another cigarette. “Exactly why this is so troubling,” he said. “Very troubling.”

All through Dr. Becker’s house call, she’d resented him, even though he had been kind. Here in the office, it was opposite. His clean soapy smell had the acid tang of lye, and his brown eyes looked cold. With a shock, she recognized the expression in them. He wasn’t sympathizing with her anymore. He blamed her.

“Can’t we give him anything? A medicine?”

“There is a chelating agent that would bind to the lead and help him excrete the metal,” the doctor said, “but it’s risky to use with children.” He explained that the agent could cause fever, abdominal pain, even a coma if Ani took too much. A proper diet, and no more exposure to lead, would be safer, and then if—