Motherland (10 page)
Hartmann shrugged.
My father admired your poems
.
One of the few
.
Modest!
Truly
. Hartmann shifted on the bed. His legs extended in front of him, the trousers bagging around his calves and thighs.
I wish I remembered him
.
Frank’s throat closed, and he sat there stiffly, gripping the pen. He remembered his father. He remembered mostly that he disappointed him, by being rash and loud, a carouser, an uneven student. By loving Karl May more than Thomas Mann. By pursuing Susi, whose “iron will,” his father said dismissively, made up “for what she lacked in imagination.” His father hadn’t lived long enough to see Frank complete medical school, to meet his sons. He imagined they would be closer now.
You say he was a teacher?
wrote Hartmann.
Latin
.
Hartmann looked up, out the window near his bed where frost climbed in intricate webs. Then he bent to the paper.
Can I trust you?
Of course. I’m your doctor
.
Need more assurance than that
.
Frank wondered what game Hartmann was playing now. He wished they could just talk instead of write.
My father admired you
, he wrote finally.
I wouldn’t betray his memory
.
Hartmann took the paper and stared at it for a long time. Frank thought he had fallen asleep. But then the pencil began to move.
There are
—Hartmann’s hand paused—
gaps. Things I can’t recall. Voices I hear. Buzzing and ringing. I didn’t want to admit this. Because I want the surgery. I don’t want to be sent somewhere else. “Unwertes Leben.”
One by one, Hartmann’s confessions rolled into hard pebbles, knocking inside Frank’s skull. Hearing voices. Buzzing and ringing.
Unwertes Leben
, the term for the mentally unstable and infirm. The government obliged doctors to register patients with mental illness or serious brain damage and then transfer them to state institutions. Frank had never been to one such institution, but he heard they were purposely underfunded.
Unwertes Leben
. Life unworthy of life. Frank watched Hartmann cross out each word he’d just written, making a black tangle of the page. He wished he still believed that the German law would protect Hartmann, a German soldier, the way it had protected the miller in the case against the king. He took the pad.
There’s a hospital in Berlin
, he wrote.
I may be transferred there
.
Hartmann shook his head vigorously.
Fix me here
.
It will take multiple procedures. Berlin would be the safest place
.
Berlin will be pulverized
.
Frank opened his palms, his sympathy ebbing again. That was Hartmann all right. That imperial manner even when he had a monster’s face.
They sat in silence. Outside the window, a few flakes of snow drifted over the darkened field, the hunkered black shape of the incinerator.
Hartmann started scribbling again.
For now you could help me remember
. Frank felt the slate eyes on his, searching.
Were we really friends?
He took the pencil.
Yes
.
News of the OKW’s orders and Frank’s imminent transfer to Berlin must have spread, as the incoming ambulances brought fewer and fewer patients in need of reconstruction. Frank spent half his days doing rounds, checking on his healing soldiers, listening to their complaints. They seemed to appreciate him less the more available he was (
I can’t sleep in this place. How long till you can cut my legs apart again? The itch, can’t you do anything for it?)
, so in the afternoons he hid in the supply room and read his books again, looking for the best way to fix Hartmann. He didn’t receive any more packages from Liesl. Instead, she’d written him a long letter about the boys, concluding with a few lines that casually congratulated him on the promotion.
We’re all proud of you. The boys want to visit you in the capital
, she wrote, as if it were as easy as taking a holiday. Maybe she thought it was. There was no way to know how much news was making it west. The national broadcasts were full of lies.
As soon as I get settled there, I’ll apply for a furlough. I know it’s time I came home
, he wrote back, hoping she would understand that he did not intend to get caught by the Red Army, no matter where he was stationed.
Schnell surprised him washing up one afternoon after a routine leg graft surgery. “I heard more news about your hospital,” he said. “It’s almost ready. Seventy beds in total.” He beamed at Frank, pink and pleased.
“Room enough for my current patients?” said Frank.
Schnell nodded distantly. He was watching Frank’s hands rubbing themselves together in the cold stream. “The beds may be already spoken for.”
“Lieutenant Hartmann is an old classmate of mine,” Frank said.
“Is he?” Schnell sounded curious.
“Could you tell Braun I’d appreciate the favor?” said Frank.
“Lieutenant Hartmann,” Schnell said over the falling water. “One of his men had accused him of writing treasonous messages before the explosion.”
Frank kept scrubbing, trying to hide his surprise. “He’s a poet,” he said. “He writes a lot of gobbledygook. Maybe the fellow misinterpreted.”
“There will be an investigation,” said Schnell. He coughed. “Meanwhile I was quite sorry to hear about your patient from Buchenwald.”
Frank frowned at the name. “Where?”
“The soldier from the prison camp,” said Schnell. “His infection killed him.”
The man had been ill, but not fatally so.
“What infection?” Frank said. He turned off the faucet and faced the officer.
Schnell’s eyes shifted, as if somehow he were looking through Frank instead of at him. “I know your time is valuable,” he said. “I won’t let our staff bother you with any other nonsurgical cases.”
Although his voice was mild and unthreatening, it didn’t matter how he spoke.
Frank’s gaze fell to his hands.
What infection?
he wanted to ask again, but the words did not come. He watched the water drip off his fingers. Wet and cold, his hands seemed like separate creatures, small animals that moved and grasped and sewed flesh without him. They had no voice but the voice of repair. They would go to Berlin to do their work.
“Thank you,” he muttered finally. He kept his head bowed until he felt the other man turn away.
He went to Hartmann that evening. He wrote down every memory he had of the other boy, from the miller and the king story to his father’s tales of Hartmann’s prowess in school. Then he told his own.
You know the
Schloss
in the center of town
, he wrote.
One year, we were allowed to go inside, and a bunch of us boys sneaked away and tried to find the wine cellar
.
Tell me the colors
.
Frank looked up, puzzled.
Hartmann’s hand moved again.
Of what you saw
.
He thought a minute, and then the pencil began to shape letters.
The walls were white. When we found the stairs down, yellow. Under the earth, gray-black. I had trouble breathing down there. Thick dust and so much glass
.
His hand tired, even more than it did in surgery, but he shook it and kept writing. He was starting to like the silence of sitting with the other man and taking a long time to say a few words. And strangely, he was starting to like the words, too, how they hurt a little when he thought of them, how they were like tiny pins fixing his memory in place.
We got lost. You helped us find the way out. You read the labels and you knew the wines were organized by year
.
He finished with a flourish and tap of the pencil, and showed it to Hartmann. The man was silent, but water filled the corners of his eyes again.
You got tight with a girl named Astrid. She stayed with her aunt and uncle for a while
. He did not write that the other girls laughed secretly at Astrid for liking Hartmann, the undesirable one.
I don’t remember her
.
She was pretty and plump
, wrote Frank.
Sounds like you’re talking about poultry
.
Frank shrugged and grinned. He heard a sucking sound under the scarf and wondered if Hartmann was laughing. He didn’t know what to say about Schnell’s warning. Hartmann’s failed transfer to Berlin. The
skin under the scarf was healing, the scabs thickening and loosening. Soon they would fall off and leave purple-pink scars. The distorted mouth would be able to flex and open, and eventually it might even learn to speak.
You were accused of treason. Do you remember?
Something flinched behind the scarf.
Yes. All that writing burned up
.
There’s supposed to be an investigation
.
Hartmann’s eyelids drooped.
I’m tired
, he wrote.
But Frank’s hand kept moving.
Do you remember when the fair came to town?
He went on, doing the best he could to conjure his memory of the clown and the bearded lady and the tattooed man.
That I remember
, wrote Hartmann.
And the Gypsy who ran a booth, he stole the candlesticks from the church
.
Frank didn’t recall this, but he nodded.
He ran away but he left his dog, some little mutt
, wrote Hartmann.
Some of the kids wanted to drown it. They dragged it to the Kurpark
. Frank watched Hartmann’s hand stop and go completely still. Hartmann made a sucking noise, as if impatient at his hand’s immobility, but he did not write any more. His fingers curled into a fist. Fine blond hair covered his whole wrist, fanning toward his knuckles.
The silence was different than silence in speech. In speech, when a man stopped talking he used his eyes or his mouth to say what he didn’t want to say aloud, but the hand held no expression. The sentence trailed off like footsteps in a blizzard.
Frank wished he felt sorry for Hartmann, but the poet’s wordlessness suddenly left him cold. He couldn’t feel anything for the little mutt, although he could easily imagine its death, the children’s hands pushing the muzzle under the surface of the pond, paws kicking and splashing. A froth of breath. The furry body gone still. He could see it perfectly, although the memory was not his own, and he felt only the ice of recognition.
He patted Hartmann on the shoulder and rose and left the ward.
Back in his room, he did not bother to turn on a lamp. Keeping his hat and coat on, he eased the rucksack from under his bed and took out Ani’s shoes. He carried them in the crook of his arm, out the door to the empty black and silver yard. His feet found the tramped path to the incinerator. His breath hung in ghosts as he slipped and stomped on the frozen crust, his ears already stinging. He set the shoes on the snow beside the dark, squat oven. They looked too small and supple, too alive, to belong there. He swallowed hard. After a moment, he prodded them into the shadows with his foot. Then he turned away before he could grab them back. He began whistling a tune as he walked inside, his boots cracking the ice. He stopped when he realized the song was “Rosemarie.”