Motherland (47 page)

Frank knew his eldest son secretly admired them, knew that the extra food and cigarettes that Hans brought home weren’t just found, but traded for, soldier by friendly soldier. Hans had a secret life in English, muttered in the bathroom and with his schoolmates, but Frank forbade it in the house. He could not hear the nasal sounds without feeling his stomach cramp, without remembering a giant, muddy field of men, surrounded by barbed wire, and how he’d asked for penicillin for his neighbor with pneumonia. “Penicillin”—it was the same in any language, but the American guards had pretended not to understand. When Frank
had persisted, one had jabbed him with his rifle butt, saying,
Nix, nix, you stupid Kraut!

His son couldn’t see it, couldn’t see how the American soldiers’ gifts to children were motivated by pity. He couldn’t see how their careless generosity mocked and demeaned the children’s parents, who could not provide for them.

All Hans saw was this:

His father, the surgeon, was now a lowly laborer on a logging crew north of town. His father, the proud driver of a Mercedes, was now sunburned and stooped from soreness, and hobbled on foot everywhere he went.

His stepmother refused his baby brother milk because there was none, and let Jürgen go barefoot, because she had no shoes for him.

His other brother was a mound in the yard.

And then Hans saw the happy Americans, swimming and shouting in the Kurpark pond, their well-fed bodies flashing as they cleaved the water.

Frank was fixing a loose latch on the rabbit hutch door when he heard his eldest son’s feet whispering on the wood behind him. He didn’t turn. He was nursing a thought that had occurred to him the week before: As much as he hated logging, he liked working with wood. If he couldn’t practice medicine, perhaps he could build things: furniture, cabinets. The principles of construction were not so different with flesh and wood, and wood lasted longer. It made something dead alive again. He worried that Liesl and his sons might not understand the decision. He thought Hartmann would have.

“Vati.” Something in Hans’s voice sounded strange. “I found these. In Ani’s mattress.”

Frank turned. On his son’s open palm, seven silver tubes twisted like worms. Frank lifted them, one by one, surprised by their lightness. He read the contents, his heart pounding. Not enough to kill a child, but enough to cause harm.

“They were stuck in there really deep,” said Hans.

“Lead white,” said Frank. It felt as if his skull were squeezing inward, closing off his sight. “Where would he get these?”

There was a pause. “From Frau Geiss’s studio.”

“How would he get in there?” Frank’s voice rose.

His son hung his blond head. His ears were pink. “Followed me through the hole in the cellar,” he mumbled. “He liked to look at the painting of Mother.”

The painting of Susi and Ani. Herr Geiss had given it to them at Ani’s funeral. Frank had framed it and the whole family had hung it together in his father’s study—still Frank’s and Liesl’s de facto bedroom. In all the harshness of those days after Ani’s death, the effort had been a single moment of communion—Hans holding the picture while Frank hammered the nail; Liesl holding Jürgen, whispering through her tears,
That’s your mother and your brother
.

So many shades of white in that picture—Susi’s dress, Ani’s face, the wall, the sky. The paint was as thick as butter, tufting at the edges. Frank’s head throbbed. He took a breath. “He must have been trying to paint something with them.”

“I didn’t find any paintings,” said Hans. “He never made any paintings.”

Frank avoided the boy’s gaze. He squeezed one of the tubes, feeling the last wetness shifting inside. “Did you ever catch him eating this?”

“No.” His son’s voice was breathless. He was waiting to be blamed. Or for someone else to be blamed.

A silence fell between them. Frank’s head hurt so badly he couldn’t look at his son. It hurt whenever he heard the name “Anselm,” whenever he saw a blond boy Ani’s age, and each and every Sunday afternoon when they ate their meal together. The absence at the table ate with them, a giant soundless mouth that gobbled their attempts at conversation. He blinked into the darkness of the hutch.

Flashes from the past months broke through: Ani hugging a lamb at the farm; the boy’s dismembered body in the blanket, its entire right leg lost except for a jutting femur. Liesl hadn’t been able to look—she’d begged Frank to cover it, to hide it—she was always trying to hide things, to pretend they didn’t exist: Hide! Hide! Hide from the doctors; hide from the Americans. Her hysteria to conceal, wasn’t that at the heart of this—

Every night Liesl slept near Frank in the room of their dead, under his father’s books, his wife’s and son’s picture. Every day she dressed his baby boy and fed them all that could be found. She scoured their pots. She wiped their floors. She patched their threadbare clothes. She did not blame him. They could not blame each other, but in their grief, she had begged Frank to hide and he had. He had retreated like a rat until the Americans flushed him from his hole. Liesl’s once-red hair was growing strands of gray, and her ribs and hipbones jutted from hunger. She looked older than twenty-five. She would go on this way, feeding and tending, never blaming, and his sons would scorn her because their father scorned her, not openly, but secretly, under his breath, as he sawed through trees in the dusty woods.

And his sons would hate themselves because their father hated himself. Because every time he walked home past the new wire fence around the brewery pasture, he thought,
I let him die
.

The brewery pasture was green now, thick with grasses that no animals grazed. In a few months it would yellow and sink under snow, and unless the Americans lifted the bans on international food relief, his sons would have nothing to eat but the rabbits in this hutch and the chickens downstairs, and the few jars of potatoes and cabbage Liesl was right now canning with Frau Winter in the kitchen. Thank God she had made some friends among the women—Frau Winter, Berte Geiss, Marta, and even that prissy peacock, Frau Hefter. They held each other up. They had cleared most of the streets themselves. They bartered—one woman’s handful of eggs for another’s supply of yarn—so that
every family had almost enough. There was something between them that the men could not touch.

Yet soon the families would have nothing to burn but the few scraps the Winter boys stole and Frank carried home in his pockets, and Frank would lose even his small salary from his lumber work. And then the winter illnesses would strike. And whom would they blame but themselves if Jürgen or Hans fell sick, and their skinny bodies had no reserves to fight? Frank could bear giving up on surgery, on the entire medical profession. He didn’t long for riches or respect. He just wanted the assurance that his other two sons would live.

And he wanted his family again, as whole as it could be.

Frank closed his fist around the paint tubes. His palms and fingers were scored with calluses and cuts. It stung his hand to close it.

“Even if he ate them, they’d give him a stomachache for sure,” he said finally. “But that’s all.”

“But it says ‘lead’ on there,” Hans said. “Dr. Becker said—”

“You’d have to eat a hundred of these tubes to get Dr. Becker’s numbers,” Frank lied. “It was something else.”

“But there isn’t anything else,” Hans said in an anguished tone.

“I’m going to throw these out,” said Frank, pocketing the tubes. “I don’t want your mother to see these.”

“But—”

“I don’t want you to mention this again,” Frank said, louder and clearer. He could feel the sharp ends of the tubes pricking his thigh. “I don’t want you to trouble her.” He looked his son in his own blue eyes, his own face, younger and irrevocably hardened.

Hans turned away and stuck his finger in the wire mesh of the hutch. A white rabbit hopped into view, whiskers trembling. They were always hungry, too.

“She has enough trouble keeping all of us fed and well.” Frank’s voice broke on the last word.

The rabbit sniffed at Hans’s finger and hopped away again.

“All right,” Hans said. “I won’t tell anyone.”

They stood in silence for a moment. A plane flew overhead and they both flinched.

The rabbit loped slowly back into the shadows of the hutch, hanging its head.

“Give it something,” Frank said gruffly to Hans, fishing in his other pocket for the carrot he’d pulled from the garden that morning. “It came to you,” he said. “So give it something.”

He handed his son the limp vegetable, warm from his body heat. Hans shoved it through the mesh and the bunny thumped back, eager, trembling, biting into the flesh with its sharp white teeth. At the sight of the boy feeding the mute, trusting animal, Frank was flooded with a new feeling, so rich and tender it was like a swallow of fresh cream.

It was relief. The feeling was relief.

Sometimes during that first starving winter after the war, Liesl remembered things that she wasn’t sure had happened. The memories seemed tethered to her hunger, to the state in between living and dying, when sleeping did not rest her body and breathing felt like gasping. They’d run out of food so fast: With the country divided and broken, the supplies Frank intended to supplement their family all winter were soon all they had to eat. In November, he killed the last rabbit and the rooster. By January, the once-robust Jürgen grew nervous and thin, and Liesl secretly went out begging American soldiers for their finished cans of meat and beans, hiding in an alley, cleaning the remains with her finger and feeding them to the baby. In February, with the aid ban lifted, Red Cross packages finally began to trickle in, but Hannesburg ran out of coal. Liesl and Frank took the children into their beds at night to keep them warm. Hans and his father arranged themselves head to toe, complaining loudly about each other’s feet, then fell fast asleep.

Liesl held Jürgen in the dark and monitored each shallow breath. As she drifted, willing his fragile life to endure, the memories came.

In one, it was an autumn morning in the villa, in the bedroom she shared with the baby. Frank had already left for his deployment in Weimar. Gas masks, a gift from Herr Geiss, lumped on her dresser.
The warped, empty faces lined up next to her wedding photo like ghoulish spectators.

She was staring at the masks, pondering the best place to store them, when Ani pushed open her door. He padded in and hovered over the baby dozing in the cradle. His blond hair stuck out in all directions, and his eyes were gluey and unfocused.

“Where do the people in my dreams go when my dreams are over?” he asked, picking up one of the masks, poking his fingers through the eyeholes. The scent of the black rubber rose.

Liesl put her arm around Ani and drew him toward her. She gently took the mask from his hands and set it out of reach.

“Whom did you dream of?” she said.

“Mother,” he said, then frowned. “And . . . people. We were lined up in the Kurpark. To drink from the fountain.”

A good dream, then
, Liesl thought, relieved. “That’s easy,” she said. “They’ll come back tonight, only with new faces and places.”

Ani had been pleased by the rhyme. “New faces and places,” he had repeated, leaning into her. “So I’ll see them again?” His chin lifted, his expression anxious and buoyant at once.

“Yes, you’ll see them again.”

When they were girls in Franconia, Uta liked to dive down in the small cold lake where teenage girls and young children spent the hot days, while their parents and brothers worked in the fields. Uta would buckle her back, feet flashing, and disappear for what seemed like forever, then come up with a closed fist, grinning.

“Look,” she shouted at Liesl, wiping the streams from her eyes. With her hair slicked by water, her face looked more rugged, almost boyish.
She opened her fist to show a handful of glittering pebbles and silt. “That’s the bottom.”

“No, it’s not,” Liesl said, because she wasn’t brave and she didn’t like to dive. “It’s only the bottom if you leave it there.”

Before they could fight, some younger child called to them, and Uta let the water wash her hand clean.

There was never enough time to argue. She and Liesl were needed elsewhere. They charged side by side toward shore, toward rescue.

That was the moment Liesl remembered most of all: the noisy togetherness of it, and the drag of the lake against her shins, and how they’d had to step high, so high, to run.