Motherland (19 page)

A movement outside the window caught Frank’s eye. He peered out.

There had to be at least thirty people walking down the road. They wore dresses and suits several layers thick against the cold, making their figures puffy and oversize. They were all women and children, except for one elderly man. They surrounded a single wagon pulled by a horse. Out of it jutted a tarp-covered rectangle, moored on every side by ropes. A small rip in the tarp showed a golden wood beneath, and the round knob of a chest of drawers. The chest appeared to be the only
furniture they were transporting. But the roads to the east were broken ruts of mud and snow—how had they gotten it this far?

Schnell and his guards walked out to the group with their guns drawn, shouting and gesturing. A woman produced papers from inside her coat, and the captain paged through them. Then he shoved them back at her and barked another command. After a moment, she climbed into the wagon and with stiff hands began unknotting the ropes holding down the tarp. Schnell’s shoulders twitched as she struggled with the twine. A kid jumped up beside her. The guns rose perceptibly. She ordered the boy down with an anguished look.

Finally the ropes came free and the woman peeled back the tarp, then pulled at the top drawers. Whatever was inside was so heavy, her arms wagged as she propped it up. She said something to Schnell, and he yelled again, his face pink.

With a look of pain she pulled the drawer fully out, and a few black insects rose up. They were smaller than buttons. They circled lazily, drifting down. The soldiers danced back, guns higher. She tipped the drawer. Inside, golden-brown ledges, the sleepy motions of tiny bodies. Honeycomb. They were beekeepers.

Schnell waved them on. Frank turned away, impressed with the woman’s calm. Her fearlessness pricked at him. He slowly opened Hartmann’s papers.

The first page, in tiny, crabbed handwriting, was an inscription.
Man without a Face
—
These poems are to be published in the event of my death. They are dedicated to Frank and Otto Kappus
.—
Heinrich Hartmann

The second page had only ten words on it. The third, barely fifteen. Frank read and flipped, and read and flipped, puzzled. The poems didn’t make any sense at all, their language warped and knotted, their images tortured. There were no rhymes, no rhythmic lines, no sentiments at all except the most twisted kind. What did
black hands / swamp and clutch
mean?
Flog spark cuttle?
Here and there phrases stood out that made
Frank think of that winter, its bleakness and fear and lonely hours.
Only the strong / have fallen
, Hartmann wrote.
When every tree
/
wears
/
the shadow / of white
.

Maybe it was brilliance. Or maybe these were the writings of a madman. They certainly didn’t contribute to Hartmann’s case for sanity.

Frank folded the packet and stuffed it under a ledge. His mind spun back to the surgeon’s explanation of successful remote grafts, how some doctors in Strasbourg had mapped vascular tissue and found the greatest concentration in the groin skin, making it most reliable for a remote graft. Of course all this was new, very new, the surgeon warned. Two or three separate surgeries using local flaps would be safer, but that option could take six months. If Frank felt the risk was worth it, then he could try a combination of techniques, remote and local. The chief surgeon seemed to be suggesting that experimentation was the order of the day—who knew how many patients lay ahead of them, and how quickly they would have to learn and adapt to the ravages of war?

Hartmann was running out of time. The graft could be done. It could be done.

Two shots rang out, and Frank peered out the window again. The refugees and their wagon had hustled nearly beyond the hospital grounds. The mothers looked back in fear, but the soldiers weren’t aiming at them. They were firing at the ground, leaping back, a strange, menacing glee on their faces.

It took Frank another moment to realize: They were shooting the bees.

Hartmann’s body looked shrunken and flat on the operating table. His ankles and feet protruded from the sheet, bony and gnarled, like roots exposed by storms. Linden loomed over his head, showing the patient the silver hook of his tracheal speculum, the machine that would pump ether and oxygen through it.

Linden was a lavish explainer. He claimed that patients were more comfortable if they knew what his machine was doing, as if in two minutes they might digest his several years of training, not to mention the sight of the metal and tubes, and the clinical clip of his words (
intra-tracheal, stop-cocks)
. Today Linden was especially dramatic, overcompensating for the patient’s deafness with wild gestures and expressions. His hands flung outward. His eyebrows rose and waggled.

Hartmann’s gaze wandered from the machine to Frank, and then to Frau Reiner, arranging the tray of surgical instruments. She was clattering, too—her usual lithe, swift movements clumsy and disturbed.

Frank closed his eyes, mapping his stage of the procedure: Remove the scar tissue, make an oblique excision on the right cheek and rotate the fat flap, suture, add opposing sutures, excise remote graft . . . and there he stalled, wondering how fast his hands could work. It would take hours.

“Do you think he understands?” Linden asked from the head of the bed.

“Well enough,” said Frank. His arms and fingers were tense, ready. In Berlin, the surgeons would work in teams, learning from each other. He couldn’t fathom the luxury of that. He moved next to Linden.

“Ready.” He nodded at Hartmann, then slowly peeled away his scarf.

Frank studied the man’s destroyed face for the last time. He took in the broad forehead, the straight, even brows and nose, the blasted drain of Hartmann’s mouth. He’d grown used to focusing on each half of Hartmann’s face separately. Either he looked Hartmann in the eyes above his scarf, friend to friend, or he looked at the wound, doctor to patient, examining the healing tissues, the remains of the upper lip. He tilted the head back to see into the mouth, mapping the mucosal membranes. He noted the tiny hairs growing on the cleft of skin under Hartmann’s nose.

“We’ll begin then,” he said to Hartmann aloud.

The patient made a sucking sound, and his drain-lip flexed. Was he trying to say something? “Get him some paper,” Frank said to Frau Reiner. But when she produced it, Hartmann waved it away.

Frank and his assistants retired to the sinks outside to scrub in. They soaped in uncharacteristic silence. Above them planes rumbled, and they all stopped for a moment. No siren. They scrubbed again: knuckles, palms, wrists. The soap was slick, hard, and greaseless, and no matter how Frank rubbed it, it wouldn’t lather.

“Might as well wash with a stone,” offered Frank, waiting for Linden to twist the observation into a joke. But Linden didn’t say anything.

“This stuff would make better ammunition,” Frank added.

More silence.

“What’s with you two?”

He saw his friends exchange a glance.

“Just concerned about the surgery,” Frau Reiner said after a moment.

Frank looked at Linden, who simply shrugged.

But their usual animated expressions were missing. They let him walk first back into the room and took their positions as somberly as pallbearers.
So be it
, thought Frank, irritated.
No time to get cold feet now
.

He waited for Linden to thread the patient’s throat with gas. A chill crept over his damp, waiting hands.

They did it in seven hours. Frank’s legs grew weary after three and he rested on a stool, but his fingers cramped only in the last ninety minutes: suturing and suturing, first the subcutaneous netting holding the skin together, and then the apposing sutures that would be cut in a few days.

One line ran up the right side of Hartmann’s mouth, where Frank had turned the skin inward to repair the damage to the mucosal cavities. There, hair would likely grow soon, furring the inside of Hartmann’s cheek. Hartmann’s mouth wouldn’t be able to move until both sides healed, and then he would have to learn to use his newly made lips, if he chose to try to talk again. Deafness sometimes made it difficult to recover speech.

A thin veil of new skin covered the left side of Hartmann’s mouth, concealing more scar excisions. High on his right thigh, blood leaked into fresh bandages. Never had Frank worked so long or so intensely, but he hadn’t slipped once, not once in the whole delicate procedure. The stitches would have made a king’s tailor proud.

If Hartmann healed without edema or infection, his scars would slowly fade. Within a year, Hartmann’s face might look crooked and punched in, but it would have a real mouth, a jawline.

As Frank held Linden’s heavy Agfa and took pictures of the finished surgery, he felt a rush of gratitude for his colleagues. They were still working. Frau Reiner was readying hot saline packs for Hartmann’s face
and the patch on Hartmann’s inner thigh, where they’d taken the graft. Linden was cleaning his catheter and machine. He’d given Hartmann enough gas to sleep through his first dressing.

“Thank you,” Frank said. He didn’t know how to talk to them seriously, to say how much he’d miss them, how proud he was of them all. To keep them from seeing the tears in his eyes, he rushed from the room, saying he would call for an orderly to return Hartmann to his bed. “He needs hourly monitoring,” he called back. “I want to see him as soon as he wakes.”

The moment Frank passed through the operating room doors, disappointment washed through him. His eyes roved the antechamber with its utilitarian shelves and sinks, adjusting to the lesser light. His murky reflection wobbled over the steel basin as he washed his hands again and blearily shoved his arms into his coat and buttoned it. He realized he’d expected the surgery to foil him in some way, to find himself fumbling with an excision or a suture, and he hadn’t fumbled, not once.

Through the doors, he heard Frau Reiner murmur something to Linden, something about “relief,” and Linden’s hoarse reply, mostly inaudible except for the words “not professional.”

Maybe they thought he’d gone too far with this surgery.

Or maybe they had never trusted his skill.

His mouth filled with a bitter taste. Well, it was done. Everything was done here.

It was dark when Hartmann finally started to stir. Frank was already sitting by his bed, massaging his cramping fingers in the dimness. The lights had been turned out in the ward to conserve electricity, but several of the patients had procured their own kerosene lanterns. Shadows flickered on the walls as Frank held up a note.

The surgery went well. Are you in pain?

The patient’s dressings quaked and a soft hiss escaped him. Frank couldn’t tell if it was a yes or no.

I’ll call for some morphine
, he wrote.

Hartmann’s shoulders convulsed and he began to throw up a green-black liquid. Frank had anticipated nausea after so many hours under anesthesia, but he had to move fast, or the man might choke or tear his sutures. He yelled for a nurse and lifted Hartmann’s bony skull in his hand, propping him up, using the pillow to catch the vomit. Hartmann shook again. The vomit smelled metallic. The sutures strained.

Frank heard footsteps and called out an order for morphine, fresh dressings; he heard his voice clear and direct, but it sounded as if it were a long way off, that he and Hartmann were in another room, another ward, away from the rest of them. The skull he was holding was not a head, but a life, and it was unraveling into a sour, stinking spit. Hartmann’s convulsions were so violent he would tear out the stitches. Frank gripped him by the ears, forcing Hartmann’s head straight. “I don’t know if you can hear me, but you have to relax and keep still. You have to keep your mouth still,” he said. He heard a wordless, anguished groan in return, and he wrapped himself more tightly around the head, knowing his touch was causing agony.

The retching slowed and ceased. Frank let go. The nurse came. Hartmann’s lids fluttered as she reached for his dressings.

“Give him the morphine first,” said Frank, shaking with exhaustion. “Make sure he can sleep through the night.”

He waited for the shot to kick in but still felt Hartmann flinch as he checked the bloodied sutures. The stitching had held. Frank’s relief made him so tired that his eyes stopped focusing. With clumsy fingers, he wrote a note to Hartmann promising that he’d return in the morning to discuss the surgery, and then he stumbled his way back through the rows of beds.