Motherland (22 page)

Liesl had seen a doctor from Hadamar once at the spa. She could still hear the cool, pitying way he’d said
minderwertiger Kinder. Inferior children
. She vividly remembered the short film he’d shown of his patients. A boy with two clubfeet swimming toward each other like pale fish. A girl with a drooping, toothy mouth and vacant eyes. A teenager with a mashed-in forehead whose pants still puffed over a diaper.

No, maybe she had been reckless for writing Frank, but she couldn’t let Ani go to such a place. She was going to search the house again. She was going to walk Ani’s route to school and scour every block with
her eyes. She would get a second opinion. Hans would help her. Breath flooded her mouth, tasting of dried soap and mildew and kerosene.

The door slammed upstairs. Maybe Hans was already home. The thought of actually telling him about the lead poisoning made her falter. She could see his stern, boyish face filling with pain.

“He blamed me,” she said to Uta.

“Who?”

“The doctor. He made it seem like—” She swallowed. “Like I was a neglectful mother.”

“You?” Uta said scornfully. In the milky light of the wash kitchen, her movements looked slow as she bent down and lifted the laundry basket to the next line of clothes. Liesl waited for Uta to say more, but she didn’t. She just started in on the shirts, pulling them free of their pins and folding them. Then she sniffed and wiped her eyes with the back of her bare wrist. She wasn’t wearing her bracelet.

“You can stay here,” Liesl said. “You don’t have to go back there.”

Uta cleared her throat. She straightened. “I wouldn’t spare the rod. Ani ate something. Make him tell you what it was.”

“You want me to beat the truth out of my son?”

“Always worked for my brothers.”

Across Liesl’s mind flashed an image of the Müller boys with their perpetually snotty noses and stained shirts. There wasn’t a particle of them that was as sensitive as Ani. She knew children—hadn’t she run the
Kinderhaus
for seven years?—and the thought of striking a boy like Ani made her ill. A retort rose to her lips, but she suppressed it. Uta was upset.

“I’m going upstairs,” Liesl said. “And I’m going to talk to them both. About the lead.” She turned away, then paused. “And I don’t want anyone to know about me contacting Frank. Not even the boys. I told Ani I was writing to my aunt. To ask if we can visit.”

“Go visit. Get far away from Frankfurt. Get away from any city,” said Uta. “And take the corset, for Frank’s sake. It’ll lift your breasts up into sweet little loaves.”

Liesl made a grimace, but she grabbed the lingerie. As she turned away, she thought she heard a creak somewhere in the cellar.

“Who’s there?” she asked, her eyes adjusting to the gloom of the coal cellar, the family’s shelter, the hole to the Geiss house. She couldn’t see anything but the shadows of shelves, and when she reached the stairs, they were empty.

Neither of the boys seemed to understand the news at first. Hans seemed angry for some reason, and Ani looked at her with a puzzled face, as if she were explaining some complex mathematical equation. But when she announced that if Ani didn’t improve in the next two weeks, the doctor wanted to send him away, Ani’s face crumpled and he wailed like a baby. Hans shot up from the sofa and started flinging wood into the stove.

“That’s not fair,” he said. “You can’t do that.”

“It’s not me,” said Liesl.

“You want him to be sent away,” Hans said, his lower lip extending. “And me, too. You want to be alone with my little brother.”

“Hans. Watch your mouth,” Liesl snapped, but she felt tears blistering in the corners of her eyes.

“I don’t want to gooooo.” Ani’s wailing woke Jürgen, who began his own complaint from the other room, and then Frau Dillman knocked on her floor to protest the noise, which made the baby cry louder.

“I don’t want to g-g-o,” Ani said as Liesl rushed to the study to scoop up Jürgen.

“Would you please and forever stop being a baby,” Hans said.

“I don’t want to g-g-go,” Ani sobbed.

“Then tell us what you ate, so we can tell the doctor, and all of this can be over,” Liesl said when she came back into the room, patting and shushing.

For a moment, Ani’s face opened, but then he glanced at Hans, and his expression shut again. “I didn’t eat anything,” he said with lowered brows. “I didn’t.”

“Ani,” Hans said. “Just tell, or they’re going to send you away.”

Jürgen squirmed to get down and began to crawl across the floor toward his oldest brother’s feet.

“Tell us now, Ani,” Liesl insisted. Uta’s advice flashed in her mind, and she reached for Ani’s shoulders. What kind of mother couldn’t get the truth from her own child? If Ani just told, the doctor would trust her. Her fingers tightened over his bony arms.

Ani cowered, blocking his head with his hands. “I didn’t eat anything,” he whimpered. “You’re hurting me.”

“Don’t hurt him,” shouted Hans.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw the baby watching her uncertainly. Jürgen’s lower lip began to tremble. Her resolve died. She couldn’t do it.

“Then I want us to search this apartment together. Every inch,” she declared with hollow conviction. “And then I’m finding another doctor.”

“I don’t want to go to another doctor,” said Ani.

“Our father is a doctor,” Hans said. “He’d never send Ani away.”

“No, he wouldn’t,” said Liesl. “I’m writing to ask him to—to contact Dr. Becker.” She wiped the wet corners of her eyes.

Hans seemed surprised by her tears and averted his gaze. When Jürgen reached him, Hans lifted him up, looking so much like his father in the motion of his body, the tenderness of his hands.

We need you
. Liesl thought.
All of us
.

Jürgen smiled at Hans, but then he looked around anxiously for her.

“You’re my brother,” Hans said, jostling the frowning baby. “Why can’t I hold you?”

Two days passed. Berlin was on fire. Ordinarily Liesl could shove the air raids on other cities to one painful corner of her mind, but with Uta in the house, glued to the radio, moaning and shaking her head, the destruction punctuated every hour. The Reich Chancellery was burning. St. Michael’s Church had been bombed to a broken shell. The street of linden trees in Uta’s old neighborhood was a sea of bricks and branches.

And through all this, no word from Frank. Liesl was sure that his silence meant that he hadn’t gotten a furlough. He must be intending to desert. Or perhaps the telegram had never reached him?

She opened an atlas and looked up Kiedrich and Hadamar, the towns that Dr. Becker had mentioned. Less than fifty kilometers away. Too close. Her dread increased.

The doctor from Hadamar had visited the Hartwald Spa in early 1940—she remembered because it was the winter that Uta had started singing at the spa after lunch, and while she was waiting for Uta to begin, Liesl had overhead the conference next door through the thin walls.

So often the meetings in the spa’s private room were military in nature—this or that campaign, the giant oak table overflowing with maps and atlases, the names of Ukrainian mountains, Balkan towns. Liesl was so accustomed to tuning out these conversations that she heard the name “Hadamar” several times before she realized the man was talking about the city near Limburg. And he was talking about children. The hope that he might be some bigwig in education made her drift closer, peeking through a crack in the wall to get a good look at
him. She harbored dreams of getting her teacher certificate and running her own kindergarten one day. Powerful men came to the spa. Perhaps this one could help her get a scholarship.

The man at the front of the room was tall and almost bald, with an unsmiling mouth and dark eyebrows that arched sharply downward. With expressionless eyes, he rattled off a set of figures about the cost of long-term mental patient care in the current German system. Two words stuck out to her. He said them often, and each time with a kind of detached pity, the way one might talk about a hopelessly broken machine.

Minderwertiger Kinder. Inferior children
.

Liesl watched, transfixed, as he turned on a projector and showed his film of the boy with the fish feet and the toothy blank-eyed girl. The twisted human visages made the viewers grunt and look away. Matches flared as the officers lit cigarettes. The movie went to a black screen with the word “Hadamar,” and then a camera revealed a long ward filled with beds, a tall brick building with arching windows.

Hadamar was not a school. The man was not an education official.

Herr Doktor?
someone said, and queried about the likelihood of parents releasing their children to the state asylum for treatment.

The doctor smoothed his tie.
A questionnaire is being prepared that will soon go out to all public health officials and mental institutions. A qualified team will evaluate the answers and determine which patients must be admitted and which terminated
.

But what about the parents?
the questioner persisted.
Surely some will protest
.

Irritation flashed across the doctor’s face.
Procedures will be implemented to ensure parental compliance
.

Liesl pulled back from the crack and strode away. She found a table close to the stage and listened with fierce concentration to Uta’s songs, hearing her friend’s sensuous phrasing, every flat and sharp note. Liesl stuffed herself on
Sachertorte
. Everyone understood that the Reich’s future depended on a strong and able population. These decisions about
human potential were best left to Germany’s superior doctors. Yet Liesl couldn’t help feeling as if someone or something were following her all day. Whenever she looked back, she saw blank sunlight.

Hadamar. She vaguely remembered the bishop of Limburg later protesting the euthanizing of patients at the institution, and that the deaths had been officially stopped by Hitler’s own orders. But what had they done to those poor children in the film? She would never hand Ani over.

Unable to sit still, even at night, Liesl wandered dry-eyed and cold through the apartment after the boys and Uta were asleep. She plucked up pillows. She looked behind curtains. She searched the cellar, staring into the sauerkraut vat, wishing it could tell her what secrets it had heard. She told herself that she was still looking for whatever lead Ani had eaten, but she also peeked in high places where he could not reach, and cleaned dust off the curving moldings with her finger. She stood on the black velvet cushions of Susi’s Biedermeier chairs to reach even higher. She shook out all the fabrics, the rugs, the curtains, speckling the moonlit snow with dirt. She washed the walls one night, all the way to the ceiling, watching the clear water run over the back of her hand.

Her nocturnal activities made her tired and cross with everyone: the baby for tearing apart a bookshelf and scattering the volumes all over the floor; Hans for abandoning his brothers to play with the Dillman and Winter children; Uta for telling Liesl again that she allowed the boys to run all over her, why didn’t she just lay down the law? Only Ani escaped Liesl’s ire. He’d become almost heartwrenchingly obedient, his blond head appearing at her elbow every morning, asking how he could help her that day, and she’d think,
There is nothing wrong with this child
. Yet later she would find him in the kitchen, begging some invisible person not to lock him up, or at the stove, trying to melt an iron pan to make shackles for his ankles, and she just wanted to fold him into her arms and fix him with all the love she had.

The second opinion confirmed Ani’s lab results. Although the other doctor was kind to Liesl and Ani, he seemed unwilling to contradict Dr. Becker.

“Dr. Becker has the best psychiatry expertise in Hannesburg,” he said nervously. “I’m sorry,” he added, and rubbed his bald head.

“What do you know about this Kiedrich asylum?”

The doctor leaned forward, lowering his voice. “My advice—Keep the boy out of the state system altogether. All the institutions around here are funnels to Hadamar.”

“What happens at Hadamar?”

The doctor opened the drawer to his desk and shut it again. “I’m sorry. I have too many other patients waiting.” He called to his receptionist.

“But what am I supposed to do?” Liesl said.