Motherland (45 page)

She covered her mouth, smelling the sourness of her hand. One day, all day, she had walked around the house like this, with her mouth and nose cupped in her fingers, and Frank had pulled her palm down and told her to stop.
Stop doing that. Stop covering your mouth
.

But she couldn’t stop, and Frank didn’t ask again. Instead, he began to obey her in everything. Every day he obeyed her more and more. She told him he couldn’t leave her. He stayed. She told him to hide. He hid. He squeezed his too-big body under his eldest son’s bed and pretended

he was a mouse. Her orders; his compliance—it was the only thing that tethered them to their hours. Frank barely spoke above a whisper; his leaden eyes saw only what she pointed out. When he moved, his old grace was gone, replaced by a rickety gait and arms that flopped uselessly. He could not eat. He never once uttered the boy’s name. No one did.

She dropped her hand to her side.

She walked to the window and looked out. Three weeks in Hannesburg and the Americans had finally reached Hubertstrasse. They were two doors down—an officer and three enlisted men. She recognized their ranks now.

News had come from the farm. Onkel Bernd arrested for God knows what. Half the animals slaughtered to feed a hungry battalion. No refuge there.

News from the neighborhood was worse.

Herr Geiss and his crates had been taken away, the old man locked in prison. As his last act, Herr Geiss had left a long letter explaining his daughter-in-law’s innocence, said Berte, who reappeared, hair matted and eyes dark with shadows, after two days of interrogations. She would not say what Herr Geiss was guilty of.

“Better you don’t know anything,” she said.

Because they would ask. The Americans were rounding up the men first, but the women would be next.

Frau Winter. Frau Kappus. Frau Dillman. They would all be next.

Sure that God had abandoned them all, Liesl put her faith in bribes. She bribed Frau Dillman and Frau Winter with all the hens’ eggs and rabbit meat besides. It was a simple bargain: They protected her husband; their children would eat. The butcher had nothing but offal to sell. The green grocer, some moldy barley. Trucks could not run because there was no fuel. Train tracks had been blown to twists of steel.

People in Hamburg are eating ash pancakes
, came the rumors.

People in Cologne are eating grass soup
.

Berlin had not yet surrendered, but nobody said
Heil Hitler
in greeting anymore. They said
Bleib übrig. Survive
.

Liesl said nothing to anyone in greeting or good-bye. She couldn’t bear talking. It made her taste the rot and burning in the air. She confined herself to the simple commands of the household, leaning on Hans for errands and firewood and water. Get this. Find that. After two weeks the gas was back on and they had light, but they kept the house dark, and Frank in shadow. Hans was likewise quiet, almost machine-like in his actions. He spoke in a dazed tone. He had not yet cried. Frank had not yet cried. Liesl’s eyes leaked all the time, but the action didn’t feel like crying. She touched the wet on her own cheeks and marveled at its strangeness and salt. The tears seemed alive, while every other part of her had withered and dried.

Only the baby moved without caution. He seemed baffled by the walking ghosts around him, and when he wailed, his voice was shrill with anger. He smacked books down from the shelves and bit Hans when his brother pulled him away. The teeth made four red marks on Hans’s arm, one of them deep enough to bleed. Hans sucked at it. Liesl wondered dully if he was also trying not to smell death.

Now Jürgen was sleeping and Hans was out scrounging for greens and seeds for the animals. The chickens were getting stringy and had laid half as many eggs this week. The bribes would not last. In desperation, she had crept downstairs at night and dug in the garden for Uta’s bracelet, but without success. She’d found the jars, but the familiar gold band simply wasn’t there. As if it had never existed.

Frau Winter. Frau Kappus. Frau Dillman. The Americans would come, floor by floor. Both Frau Winter and Frau Dillman had promised Liesl again at Ani’s burial that they wouldn’t reveal Frank’s presence to the Americans. Frau Dillman had dispensed her forgiveness with dignity, adding,
We need a man here
, and made all her daughters pledge, too, their freckled faces solemn. But the bribes would not last.

There was a scrambling noise under the bed.

“I have to piss,” said Frank.

“Shh. There’s a jar next to you.” She had thought of that. She went to the window. There was the officer, tall and black-haired, smoking a cigarette by their front gate. He called to Frieda and Grete Dillman, who were on their knees, weeding the garden, and they stood up together, their heads demurely down. Liesl saw the officer say something to Frieda, and Grete respond. Frieda smiled shyly. Grete pushed her sister forward and Frieda stood closer to the officer. She did not lift her head as he spoke to her, but she reached up slowly and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
So young
, Liesl thought. Even younger than she and Uta had been when the war started.

Liesl heard the sound of liquid filling the glass. The stench of urine filtered into the room. She reached under the bed. She saw the helpless curl of Frank’s hand. She took the warm jar to the Icebox and dumped it down the sink drain, avoiding her own reflection in the mirror. The toilet did not work because the water mains had not yet been fixed.

There was a knock downstairs.
You won’t find anything here
, Liesl thought. Her face had been expressionless so long it hurt to frown. She set the jar on the floor. Her hands felt dirty from the urine, and she turned the faucets, hot and cold, before remembering that no water would come. She stood there, frozen, her fingers out, the taps running nothing all over them, as Frau Winter opened the door and the sounds of the Americans entered her house: the clamor of boots on the floor, English and German words mixing.

Liesl finally examined her reflection—her shocked eyes, the clumsy part in her hair, the deepened wrinkles around her mouth—unable to recognize any of it. Was this the face that others saw when they looked at her? Had she ever been young? Had she ever been as sweet and ripe as Frieda Dillman?

Stay free
, she willed Frieda Dillman, and it struck her.

A daughter didn’t want her mother’s life. A daughter would trade anything—why not a piece of information?—for a new future.

And then it was too late.

Just as Liesl rushed back to beg Frank to get out from under the bed, to face his fate as he’d wanted, the soldiers were already climbing the stairs to the second floor, saying his name, announcing his arrest.

Liesl’s interrogation took place in a villa that had belonged to a Frankfurt banker and his wife, now converted to an American headquarters. When Liesl arrived, Frau Hefter was already waiting among the other women in the former parlor. She smiled graciously, as if she’d invited Liesl for tea, and patted the empty seat beside her.

“They’ve already called your name twice,” said Frau Hefter, her eyebrows raised.

The room stank of sweat and cigars, and the rain-soaked coats of the other wives. Liesl felt several of them turn to look at her.

“I can’t see why,” she said.
They killed my son. They locked my husband away. What else do I have left?

“No, I can’t, either.” Frau Hefter tipped her head and then smiled again. She had become a widow with four children (Georg had died defending Berlin; his elder brother in Poland), evicted from her house and living in an apartment in the Alt Stadt next to Marta, the old housekeeper, but she talked about none of this. Instead, she gave Liesl instructions on growing parsnips in window boxes. Two of her fingers had been crushed removing rubble, so she gestured with blackened nails, shaping wooden boxes and plants in the air. Her breath smelled terrible.

The interrogations were running behind. The room grew steamier
and Liesl’s hair stuck to her face. Each passing moment made her more restless. “How much longer, do you think?” she said.

“The rest of our lives,” said Frau Hefter, and this time she did not smile.

When Frau Hefter’s name was called, she did not greet the wiry and pale American captain who was doing the interrogations, although he spoke polite German. She wove through the woolly knees of the other women with her head high.

They could all hear the questioning. The captain’s words were muffled by the gold-striped walls, but inside the room, his politeness was gone. His tone reminded Liesl of the sound of a knife being sharpened.

Our husbands told us nothing, not even what you did to them
. For weeks, news from Frank had been scarce—the Americans wouldn’t deliver mail to the POW camp—and then he’d suddenly appeared home, released to work on a labor crew closer to Hannesburg. His body had shriveled from hunger, his ribs like accordion keys, and he had lost several teeth and much of his hair. Frank’s spirits and body were so broken that Hans was afraid of him and spent all his time out of the house, trading film and cigarettes with the Americans to get food for the house. Liesl found herself treating Frank like a frail old man, and he hadn’t objected, sucking down soup, letting her wash his hair and shave his beard. He was even quieter than before, and smiled at no one but the baby. At night, he did not hold her, lowering himself down next to Jürgen instead. After a week, a truck came to take Frank away again.
He never did anything but heal the wounded. He never did anything but love his family
.

When Frau Hefter came out, she bent down to whisper to Liesl, her face still coldly beautiful. “Don’t listen to his lies, dear.” Her foul breath gusted.

Liesl was next. She took her seat on a bench that was still warm from the women before her. She answered questions about her date of birth, her marriage, her address. The captain’s face was pleasant enough, but
she could feel his loathing. There were posters around town showing photographs of Jews starved to skeletons, and above, in English,
REMEMBER THIS: NO FRATERNIZATION!
The Americans had cut off their food relief. They wanted Germans to starve and they wanted them to starve in silence, unspoken to, unheard.

The captain leaned forward on his elbows.

“Frau Kappus,” he said in a flat, nasal German. “Who dug the hole in your cellar?”

She shifted in her chair. “Our neighbor,” she said. “Herr Geiss.”

“For what purpose?” The captain’s right eyelid must have been damaged somehow. It hung a little lower than the left. The left eye was the kind one. The right eye was the eye of contempt. It hung, slant-lidded, over the desk of some erstwhile German bureaucrat. The bureaucrat’s papers had been cleared away, but not his precious collection of steins on the shelf nearby. The Americans were careless like this; they did not come to live, only to occupy.

“For what purpose?” he repeated.

“If one of our houses was crushed, then we could escape through the other.”

“And you say Herr Geiss did not come into your house.”

“Not often.” Her gaze landed on a stein in the shape of Bismarck’s head. The top of the stein was Bismarck’s helmet. To drink from it, you had to open the prime minister’s skull.

“And he stored nothing in your house.”

“Not that I know of.”

A shuffle of papers, then a picture of Uta in an evening gown next to her lover, his white collar unbuttoned, his mouth twisted as if he had just heard a joke.

“I also have a report that this lady, Uta Müller, stayed in your home for almost a month and was visited by this gentleman.”

“Uta stayed with us, yes. The gentleman only came once.” Her lips suddenly felt too thick to talk. “Do you know what happened to her?”

“Quite a lot of connections you have in Berlin,” said the captain. “You tell me.”

She fell silent. She would have heard from Uta by now, if Uta was still Uta Müller. She had poked around in the garden again for the bracelet, and found nothing.

“Tell me what happened to the stolen art that your neighbor was trafficking,” the captain said.

“The stolen art?”

“You must have seen the crates going in and out.”

“I saw some crates, but I didn’t know what was in them. His wife’s paintings.” She swallowed. “But Uta didn’t have anything to do with that.”