Motherland (46 page)

He knew where she was. He wouldn’t look at her with that closed, cunning face.

“She didn’t have the energy to leave the house,” Liesl added. “She . . . she was carrying a child.”

For the first time, she saw surprise register in the captain. His right eyelid quivered and his mouth curled at one corner. No, not surprise. Disgust.

Somewhere in the room a light bulb was flickering. She could see only one lamp before her, and it burned bright and steady. It had a bronze base in the shape of an eagle. The eagle had a fish in its talons.

“You know where my friend is,” Liesl said in a hollow voice.

The captain slid the picture back into a file.

“I didn’t have anything to do with Herr Geiss’s business. And Uta, we were old friends,” she said. “We didn’t talk about the—the war.”

“You worked at the Hartwald Spa together, serving elite S.S. officers for over a year, and you never talked about their crimes.”

She wished she could do something with her clammy hands. “We worked there, yes,” she said. “We had conversations about the men, but not about what they did.”

He blew out through his teeth.

Indignation surged in her. “I kept to myself,” she said. “I didn’t stay down at night.”

“Stay down where?”

Stay down at the banquets, the dances, in the arms of men. Stay for the music, the laughter, the gladness of being on top of the world. Suddenly she saw the officers in her mind: the blackness of their uniforms, their slick heads, their wolfish, flashing teeth.

“I could have married one of them,” she said. “But they frightened me.”

The captain leaned back, folding his arms. “You could have married one of them,” he repeated, his brow furrowing.

“I had offers,” she said, her face burning.

He shook his head, as if her statement amazed him. The flicker was getting worse, pulsing every other second.

“I see,” he said again. “So instead you married Dr. Frank Kappus, who was arrested and sent to a POW camp for his service at Buchenwald.”

“He didn’t work at Buchenwald,” she retorted. “He didn’t even know the name of that place.” The accusation had arisen after Frank’s arrest, after someone had requested his official records from Weimar, and they registered his treatment of a patient at the camp. It wasn’t true, and Frank had already disproven it with statements from his hospital. Yet the stain had remained on his record.

“Or perhaps he didn’t tell you about it? Like everyone else in your life—your neighbor, your old friend—they didn’t tell you anything at all?”

She shrugged.

“What did you talk about, then?”

“The children,” she said.

“What else?”

“Food. Coal,” she said. She couldn’t help it. She had to look around, find the lamp. She cranked her head to the back of the room. Where was it? There, on the wall. A torch socket with a little glass holder, the smallest light in the room.

“It needs a new bulb,” she said, pointing.

His voice rose. “You never had conversations about your country and what it was doing to the Jews?”

She turned back. The flicker was driving her crazy. She felt her eyes beginning to blink in time with it.

“Frau Kappus.”

“No.”

The captain’s face contorted again. Flick, flick, went the lamp.

“Our middle son . . . was ill,” she said. “They wanted to send him to Hadamar.”

The captain regarded her, chewing his lip. So he knew about that, too, and he didn’t care. The American flag hung behind him, dripping its red and white stripes. She blinked with the flicker, her eyes sore and dry. Her throat convulsed.
What do you want me to say? You know everything. You must have it in your reports. My baby is hungry. His brother wants to die. My husband came home from your prisoner-of-war camp looking almost as thin as the Jews. Maybe we believed the lies about them. Maybe we didn’t look when they were taken away. We didn’t know where they were going. Now we can’t look at all. I can’t look at him and he can’t look at me, and no one can understand us but the dead
.

The captain said Uta’s lover’s name. “They were found together in his apartment,” he said, looking at his desk. “It appears he shot her, then shot himself. Suicide.” He sat back, hitched at his green pants. “I’m sorry.”

He didn’t sound sorry. He didn’t sound human at all. His voice was a buzzing noise between his language and hers.

“He was a bigwig at Plötzensee. A real saint,” the captain said sarcastically. “Used to treat his whole unit to champagne every hundred executions. But you had no idea.”

But you
. The flicker.
Had no idea
. The flicker.

It was an effort to speak. “I said we didn’t talk about him.”

“I see,” the captain said again.

She shut her eyes, and for a moment she couldn’t see it. Then it began again, a tiny white pulse through her lids.

“She was an old friend,” Liesl said. “We talked about our dreams.”

The captain rubbed his eyes. “All right, Frau Kappus,” he said slowly. “You’re dismissed. Your house will be searched tomorrow.”

“For what?” she asked hoarsely. “We have nothing hidden.”

He looked at her blankly and then called to his assistant in English. The knife-like tone was gone. His voice was soggy with exasperation. She didn’t understand all the words he said, but he spoke the word “wife” over and over.
All these wives
, it sounded like he was saying.
All these know-nothing wives
.

She bowed her head as she walked out of the room, down the stairs, into the bright sunlight. Her reflection flared on the glass window of a shop across the street. There she was: a woman slumped in a dark coat, fading handkerchief tied over her head, shoes falling apart. Her eyes looked farther away, too, even though that was not possible. Eyes couldn’t move backward inside a head, but that’s what hers looked like and felt like, as if the space between her and the rest of the world had widened, and she had a harder time seeing across it.

You look like a crone
, she heard Uta’s sharp words.
Show them you have some spine
.

Liesl didn’t straighten. She kept her eyes on her feet, sidestepping cracked cobblestone or rubble, anything that could explode. She had been walking that way since the air raids and it made her dizzy to look up, to peer down the avenues, where scorch marks still scarred the walls.

Better to play a game with the ground, to find the safest, easiest path. Better to clutch her empty purse, as if someone might rip it from her. From every other block she heard the pounding of hammers.

July 1945

Dear Frau Kappus
—

Thank you for your letter in June, and for your interest in our efforts to find homes for the juvenile survivors of Hadamar and other institutions. Please also thank Father Georg for carrying these messages between us
.

I am sorry to hear of the loss of your son. It must have taken great strength and resolve to contact me. I deliberated for some time before I replied because I have no desire to compound your grief
.

Let me tell you first about the history of our enterprise. In January and February of 1945, we built a small ward in our convent with the hopes of smuggling out juveniles from Hadamar and its feeder facilities. Although the state-organized euthanasia program was officially curtailed, we knew enough from insiders to be aware that doctors were still prescribing hundreds of lethal injections to patients deemed “unfit to live.”

By March, our ward was ready. We arranged with our contact on the inside to smuggle twelve patients to our facility. They came to us in a medical delivery truck: four bundles of three children, each in thick blankets. I could have lifted each of those bundles with my own arms. The children were so emaciated it was clear that all our resources, including the services of a Limburg doctor, would not save them. Moreover, the escape had terrified the children. Five died that night, others in the ensuing weeks
.

Of the twelve, one survives. Rudy was the eldest. We estimate that he is sixteen. Now that he has gained weight and recovered his muscle strength, he is an affable fellow with mild mental retardation and a tendency to seizures. He has “terror nights” every few weeks, where he wakes screaming and thrashing and sometimes tries to hurt
himself. We are all quite fond of him here, and it pains us to see him remember his agony. He rarely leaves our building out of fear of being abducted, and I expect we will become his permanent guardians
.

You asked if we needed resources, and hinted at the possibility of adoption. Although little remains of the population of Hadamar, the surrounding feeder institutions still have patients. Many of those patients are also severely malnourished and otherwise damaged by their living conditions. We are working with the institutions to provide adequate nutrition and nursing to the survivors, but our volunteer doctors do not recommend the relocation of those patients now, unless their immediate families claim them. Quite simply, in most cases, it is too late
.

I am sorry not to provide you with more hopeful information. We would gratefully use any more gifts you wish to make in the name of your son Anselm, and you are most welcome to visit us any time. In the meantime, thank you for the wooden toys you mailed us—your husband is quite an ingenious craftsman—and Rudy takes great joy in spinning the tops
.

My sincerest thanks and prayers
,

Sister Johann

Limburg

It was late August 1945. Hannesburg had cleared its rubble. The smell of fresh wood pervaded the Alt Stadt, but underneath a bitter, smoky odor still lingered.

Frank had gained back ten kilos of the twenty he had lost in the spring, and his ribs no longer felt as if they were trying to escape through his skin. He could sleep four hours at a stretch and eat without panicked gulping. He had been fitted for dentures to replace the five teeth missing from his top jaw, three from his lower. When Frank talked, he felt the plates moving and pinching his words, and heard the soft lisp of Hartmann’s mouth when it had sighed. The noise made him cringe but feel strangely less alone.

He didn’t know where he fit anymore.

Not in his country. The citizens of Buchenwald’s neighboring towns had been paraded past the stacks of naked, starved bodies piled outside the liberated prison camp. International papers showed photos of the citizens’ horrified, averted faces as they walked the white rows.
Write again to your friends in Weimar
, Liesl had urged him.
You were never there. Get them to fix your record
.

I wasn’t there
, Frank thought.
But I was close enough
.

He didn’t belong in his town, either, overrun by American GIs from its rubbled Alt Stadt to the moss-covered Roman settlement at its outskirts.

Nor on his street. Herr Geiss had hung himself in prison. His daughter-in-law was secretly “engaged” to a buck-toothed kid from Selma, Alabama, USA, and seemed to enjoy inviting his comrades over to loot the old man’s house for souvenirs.

Nor did he belong in his home, with its ever-changing tableau of refugees upstairs and downstairs. The Dillmans were gone, but the housing office had replaced them with a noisy brood of Schneiders. The Winters had taken in their own boarders, an elderly aunt and uncle who somehow made it west, and filled their apartment to splitting.

Not even in his own rooms. His eldest son had little use for him, and Jürgen was so attached to Liesl he rarely looked around for his
Vati
. Sometimes when Frank felt especially self-punishing, he tried to remember Ani’s face, but it hurt so much that his mind went black.

Logging had torn tendons in his knees, muscles in his back, and he didn’t like standing straight anymore. He could hardly keep his teeth in when he talked. The man in the mirror wore a sullen, hangdog expression. He had lost. He was lost. Some days it seemed as though the two states amounted to the same thing.

All the Allies had won, but the Americans most of all. Young GIs in green undershirts loitered on blankets in the Kurpark, smoking, waiting to be sent home. Their indolence was the hardest thing to take. Victory was theirs, and they accepted it as easily as the sunlight.