Motherland (35 page)

Hans was done with his errands, but he didn’t want to go home. He didn’t want his stepmother to give him another job to do. He could see from the commotion of bodies in the old stable that a game of Kidnap was on. He dropped his parcels at the edge: winter-soft tubers and sunflower seeds—finally Ani’s sunflower seeds! He jogged to join the team that was down a man.

The snow had given way to mud. Even the girls were filthy. The streaks on their cheeks and hair made them seem desperate. More of a plunder and less of a treasure. When they shrieked, their voices sounded harsh, crow-like. When they ran, they kicked up spatter.

“Kiss my boots!” the oldest Winter brother commanded the girls after he’d rescued them. He climbed into the stone stall and gestured for them to kneel in the mud. “I freed you. Kiss my boots.” He was tall and hawk-like, with hair on his upper lip. He smoked in the bathroom at home and used up all their newspaper. Hans hated and admired him.

The five girls stared at him, fingering a braid, chewing a lip. The other boys shifted from foot to foot.

“That’s against the rules—” Hans started to say.

But Frieda Dillman was already sinking down and kissing the shoe. She bolted up again, swabbing her lips. The others quickly followed. The game resumed. The girls were locked in Hans’s team’s prison, then escorted to safety, and then someone else shouted, “Kiss our shoes,” and the girls lined up again. Hans saw the backs of their necks below their wool hats, and that one girl had a strawberry birthmark at her nape. His lips and fingers were numb with cold. He didn’t understand what was happening, only he was fighting with the other team again—not just throwing mud and running, but grappling body to body—and as he was flung to the earth he saw the girls shoved up against the wall and heard their shrieks, some of them frightened and others pleased, and he rose and tackled and threw a boy down, and pushed his own hips into the scratchy wool coat of a girl, and her eyes widened as she crashed into the stone wall, and then an elbow snaked around his neck and he backed off, choking, and heard the first tear of cloth and the first real scream, and then he was hitting the ground, his cheek mashing into slick mud.

He rose, his feet sliding, his arms swinging. His back wasn’t even straight when he saw the torn fabric and the bare breast beneath, a little
pillow of flesh puckered by a single dark red button. Frieda Dillman pulled her jacket closed and staggered away.

Above them, three planes droned.

Hans turned and ran for the edge of the lot, shoving the rutabagas in his coat, the sunflower seeds in an inner pocket. He heard the footfalls of others beside him, but he didn’t turn his head. He didn’t look left or right but kept his eyes on his shoes, skimming from the wet mud to wet cobblestone to the sandy path of the Kurpark and back to his own street.

His stepmother and brothers were still at the lending library, where they went once a week. Hans put the vegetables in the pantry. He washed himself fast with lukewarm water from the top of the stove. He ran upstairs. He put the sunflower seeds on Ani’s bed. But his heart kept thumping and he didn’t know how to calm it. He pulled out the atlas and traced a different route for his father, going south to Rudolstadt, and then east to Bad Vilbel, through the Black Forest. Then maybe a short leg by train, and then what? What was taking Vati so long?

He heard the thuds of the Dillmans returning, heading upstairs to their apartment. He curled in his knees and held them tight. His eyes traced cities and roads, but in his mind, he saw Frieda Dillman’s bare breast. He laid his head down on the atlas, as if listening to it. After what seemed like hours of waiting, he dozed, waking only when he heard the lock to the closet door click. He bolted up.

“Ani,” he said. “I’m in here.”

“I heard what happened to Frieda Dillman,” said his stepmother’s voice. “I heard you were part of it.”

There was a coldness in her tone that he’d never heard before. He faced the white-painted door, words of apology and explanation stuck in his throat.

“You’ll stay there and think about what you’ve done,” she said.

His eyes fell on the sunflower seeds. “Can Ani come in?” he said, his throat rusty. “I have something for him.”

“Ani will sleep in the study with me and your brother,” she said. “God help us, there won’t be an air raid tonight.” He heard his baby brother gabble to himself as she carried him away. The vocalizations sounded almost intelligible. Hans strained to hear them. He thought he heard
good boy, good boy
, but then it sounded like nonsense afterward.

Liesl carried the key to the living room and set it down on a shelf, beyond Jürgen’s reach. She let him pull himself up on her, his head banging into her knees as he balanced on the floor. So she’d finally put her foot down. Liesl wished she could tell Uta. She wished she had the energy to be proud or relieved, but she didn’t.

Locking Hans up merely produced another thing to wait for: the moment when she let Hans out. She would add it to her expanding list: for Frank to return, for the raids to end, for Ani’s health to be restored. It saddened her to realize that she’d seen enough of Ani’s behaviors—the twitching, the stumbling, the conversations with the invisible—to know what triggered them, and if she kept Ani away from loud noises and crowds, she could minimize his outbursts. What else could she do but lock him up, too? Her aunt’s reply had been kind, but Liesl could read between the lines: There simply wasn’t room for them all in Franconia. And wouldn’t it be safer to stay put in a small spa town?

Was it safer? Liesl’s constant dread of raids, of the American invasion, made it hard to focus. She found herself stunned by the simplest tasks, changing Jürgen’s diaper or lighting the stove, her mind blanking on the steps it took to finish. According to the radio, the Americans were less than a day’s train ride away now, and within weeks, they would be here. The Americans. She had first formulated an impression of them from
seeing
Gone with the Wind
when it had played at the spa. In
Gone with the Wind
, the Americans had worn blue and gray uniforms and ridden horses. The Yankees seemed seedy in comparison to the Confederates, who’d fought nobly for a bad cause. Afterward Liesl and Uta had argued whether or not Scarlett O’Hara deserved what she got: a handful of earth, a red sky.

I don’t think she’ll ever be happy
, Liesl remembered saying.

I don’t think she wants to be
, Uta had replied.

The Americans weren’t fighting on their own land now, against their own people. They had no faces. They hid inside their tanks and planes and shot their bombs. They were marching on the Rhine. The banks of the big slow river were crawling with men from both sides, and reports from the north and west were full of death. Dams broken, a flood in the Ruhr, trapping whole German divisions against the onslaught. Boys and old men from nearby villages taking their places behind the Wehrmacht with their pheasant rifles and rusty revolvers. How long could they hold out? The clocks ticked faster every day. The squeaky bicycles outside sounded as if they were crying.

And now this. Liesl had come back from the lending library to a sobbing Frau Dillman, standing in the threshold of the Winters’ apartment.

“There you are,” Frau Dillman said, turning. Her face was blotchy with rage.

“Go get us some firewood from the coal cellar,” Liesl told Ani.

He looked at her as if he didn’t understand.

“Go,” she said.

She waited the endless moments it took Ani to enter the kitchen and clomp down the basement steps before she ascended with the baby to meet the other women. She was certain she’d done something wrong in the house (left the water running somewhere?), but when she saw Frau Winter’s cool expression, she faltered. She gripped Jürgen tighter.

The story emerged in shrill tones and gasps: The neighbor boys, including the Winters, including Hans, had attacked her daughters.

Attacked where? Frau Winter wanted to know.

And how?

And who?

“Surely not my sons,” said Frau Winter. With each question her face looked narrower.

“Frieda said it was all of them,” said Frau Dillman. “But by name, she mentioned ‘Hans Kappus.’” She held out the cloth she’d wadded in her hands. A flimsy coat, with a jagged tear in the cotton.

Just then Ani returned with the load of firewood. “Bring it upstairs, and get some more for tonight,” Liesl choked out. The women didn’t say anything as the boy shuffled up the stairs, clinging to the rail with his one free hand, but Liesl could feel their judgment. “That’s a good boy,” she called after Ani. He did not turn or quicken his steps. Finally he went into the apartment, clicking the door behind him.

Frau Winter fingered the loose threads briefly and then dropped her head. “Your daughter,” she said quietly. “She is . . . untouched?”

“I think so. My other girls say so,” Frau Dillman said, wiping her eyes.

“That is good. Then I won’t kill my boys. Just beat them senseless,” said Frau Winter, turning away. “I’m very sorry to your Frieda,” she said with her spine to them. Her narrow shoulders slumped. She went into her apartment and shut the door.

Frau Dillman was still trembling. Liesl put her hand on her shoulders but the other woman brushed it away.

“I wanted my girls to be safe,” Frau Dillman said in an accusing tone.

“She is safe here,” said Liesl, hearing Ani open the door. She didn’t want him to know about this. “She must be mistaken about Hans.”

Frau Dillman shook the ripped cloth. “You’ve seen how he looks at them! Like he owns them,” she shouted. “And you and your airs from the day we came! ‘Could you please not hang your laundry outside?
Could you please
refrain
from
clomping around
?’ Like we are some kind of cows!”

Ani descended slowly, his hand on the rail. Frau Dillman’s face pulsed with fury. “And
that
one,” she said.

“My sons have never hurt anybody,” Liesl retorted before Frau Dillman could say any more. “You don’t have to be afraid for your girls. Not in my house.”

Frau Dillman reared back. “I am always afraid for them,” she said, and thrust the cloth under her arm. She huffed up the stairs past Ani. “Always,” she said to him.

Now the key was on the shelf, and Liesl had to explain to Ani why his brother was locked in his room. She’d sent Ani downstairs for one last load of wood. He was taking a long time, as if he also dreaded their conversation.

She set Jürgen down with his blocks and began to feed the stove. The orange heat of the fire baked her face. She blinked and kept her eyes averted as Ani stumbled back in. His ankles extended from his pants. He needed bigger clothes. It surprised her that he was growing.

Ani dumped the firewood in the box beside the stove, rattling the logs so they collapsed in a mostly even pile.

“Your brother is locked in his room,” Liesl said. “And you’re not to go in there.”

“Why?” Ani’s eyes were wide.

She still didn’t know how to say it. “He and some other boys ripped Frieda Dillman’s coat.”

Ani looked toward the hall to their closet room. “For how long?”

“What?”

“How long does he have to stay in there?”

The crime hadn’t even registered, only the punishment.

Behind them, Jürgen reached out and scattered his blocks across the floor. Liesl shut the stove door. “Until I say he can come out,” she said, because she didn’t know how long to lock up a boy . . . a day? Two days? It was Uta’s idea; it had been Uta’s solution to Hans’s increasing disobedience. Uta had seemed to think that Hans would emerge a different boy, chastened by the discipline he needed. At least he was being quiet now.

“Can I talk to him through the door?” asked Ani.

“No.”

“How about Morse code?”

She reached out and took his hand, pulling him toward her. His steps were stumbling, reluctant. He kept his head down.

“Ani, look at me,” she said, and lifted his chin. “It’s not a game. Your brother hurt a girl.”

His eyes met hers, and his lips began to shake. “But I want to miss him. To see him.”

“I miss him, too,” Liesl said. She put her arms around him and hugged him, then checked the hem of his pants. There wasn’t any fabric left to let out. He would need new trousers from somewhere.