Motherland (23 page)

He sighed. “Hide him. Take him to the country.”

The country. Just the thought of seeing a farm again made Liesl’s heart lift a little. Although Hannesburg had no strategic importance, it could become a target anyway. And yet she couldn’t send Ani alone, and how would she get any news to or from Frank if they all left home? How could she decide without him?

Surely the asylum wouldn’t admit Ani if he improved. The boy was eating well now, and his color was coming back. If his numbers went down, Dr. Becker would have to rip up his form and let them go home. Wouldn’t he?

If, then
. These bargains she played with herself. She’d been playing them for years. As if she were the one who held the power, and not him, and not them—the state she’d once worshipped because it had paved over the ache of her homesickness and orphanhood, because it had justified her running away from home, from a conventional life, to be an independent woman.

Motherless, fatherless, Liesl had woken every morning in that first year at the spa, lifted her eyes to the Führer’s portrait hanging at the
Kinderhaus
, and pledged him her service. In return, his kind brown eyes
offered her protection and a kind of benevolent severity.
I trust you to be a good girl
, he seemed to say.
To keep your virtue
. And she had, knitting socks for his soldiers, nurturing his officers’ children, watching and nodding at anti-Bolshevist films in the evening.

She couldn’t name the day it started to change—maybe the afternoon she’d met Frank, or maybe eavesdropping on the Hadamar doctor, or maybe when the quiet, gentle piano player disappeared because he was rumored to have Jewish blood. Maybe it was the first air raid siren, or the tenth. Her pride started to leak away and in its place grew fear. She wasn’t afraid of getting caught—no, her papers were good, her reputation spotless. Her days passed in the same old way, with the same three meals: a common breakfast and
Mittagessen
with the spa staff, a lonely evening supper in her room. At night, a book, or rarely, when Uta prevailed, dancing with the officers. The Führer still watched over her, but his mouth looked downcast, then cruel.

Then, at some point after 1940, after Paris fell and London was burning, a new kind of etiquette swept through them all like a chilly wind. Suddenly trust and good faith were out of fashion, and it was more seemly to be careful about what you said and to whom you said it. Imperceptibly, Liesl’s anxiety deepened, worsened as the Wehrmacht began to lose instead of win, as more citizens were drafted to military projects in the east, and gaunt, dull-eyed gangs of political prisoners fixed the streets. By 1944, everyone was sure the spa would close, the staff deployed elsewhere, back to Berlin, off to factories. A wrong word might get you a bad assignment. Liesl found her eyes shifting from side to side as she spoke, checking to see who was listening. Her spine stiffened and it hurt sometimes to bend to pull on her stockings. Uta planned to go to the capital, to get a job in an officers’ club.
Come with me
, she’d begged.
You can get work as a typist
. And Liesl had agreed, until the evening Frank, widowed two months, had walked through the door of the
Kinderhaus
with his wilting bouquet of violets.

If, then
. If Frank never came home, then what would she do now?

That night Liesl dreamed of standing alone under a night sky, facing a black hillside. The whole world was behind her, silent, deserted, destroyed. Only the hill was alive. Tall, stalk-like flowers bloomed all over it. They had been burned to a crisp.

You must speak for us
, they rattled at her.

She held her hands over her ears, thinking,
Leave me alone
.

She woke the next morning relieved to let the day’s routines take over. First stop, a tiptoe downstairs to fetch Jürgen’s milk, without alerting Frau Winter and inviting a new barrage of advice. She opened the icebox door, noting that the Dillmans had somewhere procured eggs and butter and had not shared the information. She noted that the Winters had left their dirty pots in the sink again. She poured Jürgen’s bottle, set it in a pan on the stove to warm, then added some sticks to the fire.

A board squeaked and she spun to see Hans creeping out of the cellar. His cheeks were pink and he didn’t look sleepy at all.

“It’s early to be up,” she observed.

He grunted and grabbed a heel of rye from the bread box, wolfing it down.

“What were you doing down there anyway?” she demanded. “Are the Winters down there, too?”

“No.”

“The Dillman girls?”

“I was sleeping,” he said, his voice high and defensive. “Sometimes I sleep down there.”

“You’ll catch your death. It’s freezing.” She reached over and touched his hands. They were hot. He looked away.

“Hans, was someone else in the cellar?” Those Dillman girls. It had to be.

Hans didn’t answer. One of his cheeks was brighter than the other, flushed all the way across the bone. He bit and chewed, staring into the space between her waist and his body.

“I’m going to ask you one more time,” said Liesl. “Who was in the cellar?”

He finished the crust and wiped his hands on his trousers. “I told you,” he said. “No one.”

“All right,” said Liesl. “I’ll ask Herr Geiss if he’s heard anything.”

Hans’s head shot up. His eyes burned into her now.

Not the Dillmans. The realization spread. Was it possible? Berte Geiss was eighteen. Hans wasn’t even ten yet.

“Hans,” she said gently. “Are you—”

Just then Frau Winter entered the kitchen, humming one of her tuneless songs. “Your milk is boiling over,” she said.

Liesl lifted the pan and whacked it down on an unlit burner.

“Can I go?” Hans snarled.

She felt Frau Winter’s eyes on her, judging the mutinous tone of her son. “No,” said Liesl. “You’re going to stay within my sight for the rest of this week. No trips upstairs or downstairs, and Fräulein Müller will run the errands.”

“That’s not fair!” shouted Hans.

Frau Winter regarded them with keen interest as Hans ran for the door. Liesl grabbed his arm but he twisted away and bolted up the stairs.

“You know what I do?” said Frau Winter as Liesl poured the milk, wincing as the glass burned her fingertips. It was too hot.

From the rooms above she heard Jürgen begin to cry.

“No,” Liesl snapped. She topped off the bottle with cold milk from the icebox. Was it still too hot? She couldn’t tell.

“I think they are running around and around because they are looking for their father,” said Frau Winter. “And they can’t find him anywhere.”

Their father. She tested the milk with her finger. She couldn’t tell.

The baby’s cry shook her skull.

“And so I tell them that Führer is their father. The Führer is watching them,” Frau Winter said from behind her. “Because maybe they aren’t scared of me. But they are always scared of him.”

Liesl ran up the steps, cupping the bottle’s rim, wishing she’d brought the nipple to seal it. The white liquid sloshed. Jürgen wanted milk exactly the heat of a body. He recognized that heat though he had never fed from his mother’s breast. She heard Hans’s voice inside, then Uta’s.

What would Frank do about Hans’s lying and sneaking around with that girl?

Not girl. Woman. Hans was ten years old.

The stove door slammed, the latch rattling into place. Jürgen cried louder.

“Those peasants and their
hamstern,”
Frau Winter called after her, holding up old, soft rutabagas in both fists. “They’re hoarding everything. Eating their bacon while we starve in the cities.”

Liesl tripped on the top step, her hand slipping on the milk. The bottle clonked on the steps, sloshing half its contents before she caught it.

She heard Frau Winter sigh, a little half-caught breath. Liesl’s aunt used to make the same noise when Liesl accidentally dropped an egg or tore her skirt.

Cursing herself, she used her apron to mop the milk. She could feel Frau Winter watching her. The cloth soaked the liquid, already smelling faintly sour. Her eyes watered and she blinked the tears away. “It’s not broken,” she said aloud. She rose again.

She was just about to enter the apartment when she heard a soft, retreating knock on the house’s front door, as if the knocker’s hand was reluctant to actually touch the wood. She turned to see the silhouette of a small man standing beyond the window, his shoulders muscular, his neck bulging with a scarf. She hesitated, wondering if he had news about Frank.

“You go to your baby. I will get it,” said Frau Winter. She bustled earthward, her old-fashioned black skirt rustling.

Liesl ran up the steps.

“Someone is here,” she shouted to Uta, bursting through the door, grabbing Jürgen from his cradle. “Where did Hans go? Did you see him?”

“He went to his room,” Uta said. She had abruptly stopped listening to the radio. Her panicked look was gone, replaced by dull incomprehension. She deflated into the sofa each morning until she was nothing more than a hump of wool afghan. “Who’s here?”

“I don’t know. It looks like a tiny man,” said Liesl, and then she heard her neighbor’s voice rising from downstairs: “Fräulein who?” and then, “Fräulein Müller!”

Uta’s face contracted. With sudden energy, she threw off the blanket and leapt up.

“Hide me,” she said, pressing her rounding belly. She had taken to wearing Liesl’s apron all the time, like a
Putzfrau
, and her pale thumb traveled over a stain from yesterday’s chicken soup. “Tell him I’ve gone.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s probably just a telegram for you,” said Liesl, hoisting Jürgen so he balanced on her hip. He reached for the milk. She held the bottle higher. “Hans!” She yelled in the direction of the closet he shared with Ani. “Where did he go?”

Uta grabbed the afghan and padded across the room to the balcony door, flinging the blanket over her shoulders. “I’m not here,” she said in an urgent voice, tugging at the lock, the hasp. “Don’t let him find me.”

Liesl set the milk down on a table, almost dropping it again.

“It’s too cold. You’ll catch your death,” she hissed. She could hear Frau Winter talking loudly to the man below.

“Help me get this door open,” Uta pleaded. “Please.”

Jürgen bawled.

“Please,” Uta repeated, yanking on the handle.

Liesl set the baby down in his cradle again, letting him wail as she helped her friend slide the door open and tiptoe in her stocking feet to the part of the ledge that was hidden by wall. “Here,” Liesl said, and kicked off her boots, throwing them at Uta. Uta shoved her small feet into them. Her mouth had crimped at the edges and her blue eyes stared out from a stiff mask. Even her blond hair looked suddenly darker, as if someone had soaked it in oil.

She stood against the wall, looming over the back garden, the view of the brewery, the roundness in her figure shrouded by the blanket. Her breath gusted and vanished.

Jürgen squalled. Liesl shut the balcony door, cold air blasting over her. She scooped the baby again in her arms. “Shh,” she said, and grabbed a nipple, ramming it on the bottle, her hands fumbling, then succeeding, popping it in the baby’s mouth. “Hans,” she said.

Knuckles rapped on the door. “A visitor for you,” Frau Winter sang out.

“Hans,” Liesl said again. “Can you get the door?”

“A visitor for Fräulein Müller,” Frau Winter said.

“She’s not home,” Liesl sang back. Signs of Uta were strewn all over the room: her cigarettes, her handwriting scrawled on a shopping list, a ghost of her lipstick on a teacup.

There was a silence outside, and then a knock, harder.

“Hans,” Liesl said. The boy did not appear. Jürgen guzzled, milk leaking from the corner of his mouth. The knock.

“Frau Kappus,” said a man’s voice. It was silky and officious. “Open up, please.”

“Just a moment,” Liesl said, smoothing her hair, licking and biting her lips to bring blood into them.

Still she waited. The boy must be hiding in his room. No time to bother with him now. She carried Jürgen to the door, his mouth still working the nipple.

“Guten Tag,”
Frau Winter’s voice said again. “Frau Kaaaapp-usss. This is her door. She is wife and stepmother to three—”