Motherland (5 page)
Finally she heard his muffled voice from a bedroom down the hall. “In here.”
“It’s almost time to get the baby and go home,” she said.
No response.
“You better not be making any messes,” she warned as she stepped through the doorway.
Tilted canvases filled the room beyond, some in frames, some loose, their brass staples showing. Some were of laden tables of fruit and game, and others were of women, and one or two looked very old and dusty. An easel stood empty by the window. Light flowed into the room, thick and gold with dust. It clung to the tubes of paints collected in a basket, and the stiff, color-spattered coat that Frau Geiss must have worn as a smock. Ani was sitting in the opposite corner, his legs crossed, looking at an unframed canvas. His small hands clutched it from either side. Liesl saw the smears of grime on his fingers.
“Ani, that’s not yours,” she said as she strode in. “Put that down, or you’ll get it dirty.”
He released the painting slowly. It showed a young blond mother in a white dress, holding her baby in a white-walled garden. The woman’s
large pale arms circled the child, who was sitting upright, playing with a wooden boat, its sail striped with red. Tenderness suffused the mother’s face. It was easy to see her resemblance in his upturned nose, his soft square jaw, even the way he touched the sail, with a gentle, pondering finger.
The child was Ani. Around him and his mother, violets bloomed, their centers black. On the mother’s left hand was the ring that Liesl now wore.
For Hans, he had a book. For baby Jürgen, he had a rattle that he’d carved from a pine branch with one of the hospital scalpels. For Ani, he had a pair of shoes. They were good leather shoes, not the wooden clogs that most kids wore, not the shabby paper sandals of the poorest families, but shoes that smelled of hide, of the days before the war when schoolboys kicked real footballs into real nets. What a sound—that gasp of rope, that swish of victory. Frank had not heard it in years.
The shoes’ former owner had cracked a few wrinkles in the leather uppers. They jagged and branched like lightning. Brightness scuffed the soles. But shoes this well made could last Ani for years, the toes stuffed with newsprint, and then with his growing feet. Ani could run in them. He could balance atop a stone wall and hop from one garden to another.
Frank had hidden his sons’ gifts alongside an amber pendant the color of Liesl’s eyes. He had bought it off a nurse. He had paid too much, but he’d wanted something special for her. Together, all his presents nestled under a loose plank, next to the cans of lard and bouillon cubes that Liesl had sent him, ten packs of Junos, a bundle of reichsmark, and a needle and thread to darn the socks he would rip to shreds covering the two hundred fifty kilometers back to his hometown. The gifts and supplies gathered dust in the darkness. Frank sat a few feet above them on the bed, his cramped hands curled on top of an empty rucksack. In
his mind, he packed it. He stuffed the shoes in the rucksack first, then the necklace, the rattle, and the book.
He felt bad about the book. It wasn’t a good gift like the shoes. He could already sense his eldest son’s somber eyes on him, interpreting the gesture. New shoes for Ani. A book about horses for Hans. Hans didn’t like horses. He liked tanks. He would be ten by the time Frank returned, and Ani halfway to seven. They would be taller and thinner, and they wouldn’t run to him the way they once had, blond heads cupped under his chin.
Frank imagined their future shyness, even their anger. He recalled his words to Hans,
I was six years old when my own father left to serve our country
, his voice brimming until it broke. His emotion had embarrassed him and he’d gripped Hans by his thin shoulders until the boy’s eyes popped.
I had to be the man around here, understand?
It was not what he’d meant to say.
Frank slumped lower, jarring his arms. Jolts of pain shot up his wrists. After spending six hours trying to reconstruct a young Rhinelander’s severed nose, Frank’s fingers had curled into a clutch. He tried to stretch them flat, but they ached and stabbed.
To shake off the pain, he tried to imagine standing now and sliding the rucksack onto his back. It didn’t feel right. The corner of the book would jab his spine.
A siren whined. Out the window, Frank saw a string of ambulances bumping into the rutted hospital yard from the east. To the west lay the road to Weimar, the cultural capital, where the country’s greatest poet had lived and died.
It was the third influx that day. They had radioed ahead and Frank had been ordered to rest through it.
“You couldn’t cut a straight line through a loaf of bread,” the scrub nurse had said, herding him out.
Frank averted his eyes from the pane. He tried not to listen to the sound of doors opening, the orderlies calling out directions toward the
delousing chambers. He kept mentally shoving things into the rucksack. It was a nightly habit, indulging in a dark fantasy of the Russians closing in from the east, Warsaw, Poznan, then his escape and flight. He had been plotting it since the October day he’d arrived, a rusty reconstructive surgeon expected to repair the limbs and faces of men blown apart in battle. And while the soldiers’ skin healed until they were ready for the surgeries he wasn’t sure he could accomplish, he’d found the rucksack and added the cigarettes, wishing guiltily for the war to end before he had to cut into men.
Boots clacked down the hall outside his room. Frank hid the rucksack under the coverlet.
The steps grew louder. Then a whistle. It was Captain Schnell tweedling a popular song. The lyrics bubbled through Frank’s mind:
“Es ist so schön Soldat zu sein, Rosemarie . . . Nicht jeder Tag bringt Sonnenschein, Rosemarie.” It’s so nice to be a soldier, Rosemarie. Not every day brings sunshine, Rosemarie
. Susi had always hated it (
Don’t make me Rosemarie!
), and so sometimes he’d sung it to tease her. Frank felt his face go heavy, remembering.
Schnell’s head poked through the doorway. “Taking a break?” he said. “They’ll be delousing for quite a while.”
Frank raised his hands, wrists parallel, like a prisoner. “Linden sent me away. To rest.”
Dr. Linden, Frank’s anesthesiologist, had nicknamed the captain
der Schnellwachsener
for the hair that continually grew from his ears and nose. But hair wasn’t really Schnell’s main feature. It wasn’t weight, either, though Schnell had the same barrel figure as Göring. It was the color of his cheeks: so pink they were almost garish. It looked as if he rubbed his face in beet juice every morning.
Schnell was a Party fanatic, the sort Frank had spent most of his spa years avoiding, infuriating Susi.
You could be a
Gauleiter
by now, if you’d just try to fit in
. Fitting in didn’t mean Frank had to agree with
all the rhetoric and flag-waving. It just meant being pleasant at the right times. If pleasantness had had a Party, Susi would have been its
Führerin
. No one had ever been able to refuse her warm smile, and she didn’t care who succumbed to her, as long as they increased her social power. Susi could butter up the most rabid of Frank’s patients, a Dachau colonel known for publically beating an insolent waiter, and remain completely apolitical. It was a fact that still fascinated and troubled Frank.
“Won’t help, though. I can’t sleep,” Frank added.
The captain’s eyes flickered over Frank’s fingers, as if he suspected the surgeon was exaggerating the pain. “Yes,” he said. “Well. A delivery came for you today.”
Frank forced himself not to wince. In Liesl’s last letter, she’d hinted at sending a package containing money and a map. As Schnell clacked across the threshold, the room tightened and shrank to a tiny cell. Frank focused on the rusty joints of his cot.
The captain held out a thin slip of paper. A telegram. The swastika had been wrinkled by someone’s thumb.
“Take it,” said Schnell. “You’re a lucky man.”
The paper slid into Frank’s shaking palm.
“The OKW has summoned you to Berlin,” said Schnell. He was pink all the way up to his ears.
Frank kept his face blank as he read the orders: Report to the Schwester Theresa Krankenhaus in Berlin by February 10. He had never heard of the Schwester Theresa Krankenhaus, but the deployment was a ticket to hell. Berlin was under constant bombardment: the Americans by day, the British at night. If the Russians crossed the Oder (
when
they crossed the Oder), they would join the party with their howitzers.
Frank stared at the paper, trying to compose himself. February 10 was six weeks away. The stiff straps of the rucksack bulged into the back of his thigh.
“From what I hear from Dr. Braun, they’re consolidating several reconstructive teams to Berlin,” said Schnell. “The whole hospital will be devoted to patients like yours.”
Dr. Braun had hastily trained Frank when he’d first arrived in October and then moved on. Frank hadn’t thought he’d made much of an impression on the brusque, gray-headed surgeon—but he must have been following Frank’s cases, which, Frank had to admit, had been mostly successful. A whole hospital! To work with more skilled surgeons, to finally have the right equipment, to teach each other as the British had done at Sidcup in the last war. His mind began to swim at the possibilities—the collegial atmosphere, the medical breakthroughs.
It had to be a mistake.
“Am I the only one?” he said, thinking of his team, Linden and Frau Reiner.
“So far,” Schnell said, and held out his hand. After a moment’s hesitation, Frank gave the telegram back to him.
“You seem surprised,” said Schnell, and then after a pause, “I wasn’t.”
The generosity in his tone sounded genuine. Frank rubbed his throbbing hands.
“Ever modest!” said Schnell. “We’ll have an armed escort for you,” he added. “Are you a good shot?”
Frank shifted on the bed. “I trained,” he said, and his eyes fell on Schnell’s shining boots. “But I’m not—”
“I learned to shoot when I was seven years old,” Schnell said, and described holding the giant gun while his father walked him through the steps of loading, aiming, firing, and swearing on his life to protect his mother and sisters.
“Once I had to stop a thief,” Schnell said. “I blasted out his knee in the dark.” He touched the Celtic cross pinned exactly halfway up his torso. “So I blast him with a bullet and he starts screaming,” he said. “I drop the gun and light the lamp.”
Frank shook his head. What would he tell Liesl?
“And what do you know, it was our neighbor,” Schnell said in a wondering voice. “Our next-door neighbor.”
“It’s been a long day,” Frank said, and pressed his fists to his eyes, but Schnell went on, describing how his mother burst in and started weeping, and the neighbor screamed in pain as the police came and took him away.
With his eyes closed, Frank’s mind spun, imagining what would happen if he wrote home about the news.
A summons to Berlin
. He imagined Liesl’s frown as she scanned the letter.
Someone must have noticed the work I’ve done here
. But Berlin! The last stronghold of the Reich. Escaping Weimar would be far easier when the Red Army came.
Schnell’s cough snapped Frank back into the room with the peeling yellow paint.
“Strange thing was, I knew it was him before I saw his face in the firelight,” the captain said. His cheeks were so bright they pulsed.