Motherland (24 page)

“Herein, herein,”
Liesl said, her hand trembling on the handle.

The man’s eyes were exactly at the height of hers and she saw them first. They were darker than black coffee and set deep and close together, and they absorbed her in a glance. His mouth was sensual and full. His lips quirked when she touched her bare neck, as if he had anticipated the effect he would have on her.

“May I help you?” she said.

“He comes to see Fräulein Müller,” said Frau Winter.

Jürgen sucked at the last of the bottle, making squeaky, slurping sounds. He’d drunk it too fast. She raised him to her shoulder and thumped his back.

The man cleared his throat.

She gave him an apologetic smile. “Oh,” she said. “You must be Herr Heinz,” she said, inventing a surname. The man didn’t blink. He was staring past her, into the apartment.

“No,” he said, and introduced himself. His voice was deep and pleasant. “She wasn’t expecting me.”

“Well, I don’t recall that name, but Uta knows so many people,” Liesl said.

The man stepped across the threshold and shut the door on Frau Winter’s jutting chin. His lightless eyes soaked in every centimeter of the room. His silence and the way he searched unnerved her. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. It wasn’t just looking that he was doing, but hunting. Her spine hurt from standing stiffly. The baby felt
like lead in her arms. What was she supposed to say to this man? Uta hadn’t told her what to say.

“Maybe she mentioned you and I forgot,” she said. “My sons have been ill and I can’t remember anything these days. She left yesterday.”

He eyed the impression in the sofa pillows. “Where did she go?”

“I don’t know,” said Liesl. The words were tumbling out now. “She wouldn’t say. But she was terribly worried about her friends in Berlin. Did you come from there?” She took the empty bottle from Jürgen.

The man didn’t answer. Liesl could feel the presence of Uta on the balcony, freezing around her unborn child, as the man’s eyes traveled over the cuckoo clock, the painted Madonna, their little black radio, the rocking horse with the nearly hairless mane. A chill went through her. Through his gaze, she saw how easily each of these everyday artifacts could be unstitched, undone: the radio wires ripped like guts, the horse’s glass eyes picked out.

To fill the quiet she chattered about Frank’s deployment to the capital.

The man barely nodded at her prattle. Instead, his eyes moved to Jürgen, fastened to her side. The baby looked up, solemn, with Frank’s blue eyes. The man smiled, and his face brightened until it was boyish and charming again.

“Fräulein Müller—she was well?” he said.

“She didn’t catch anything from us, thank goodness,” said Liesl.

Jürgen chuckled, and the man smiled again. And then, as if it belonged to a separate body from the smile, his hand reached out toward the baby.

“He’s not yours, is he?” he said. His palm covered Jürgen’s entire skull, the baby’s ear, his golden hair, then his eyes.

Liesl wrenched Jürgen away, holding him so tight he cried out.

“She was only here a few days,” she whispered.

“A few days?” He sounded bored. She followed his eyes out the window. The winter light made a distance of the town—the shuttered houses, the park with its withered gardens. And the imaginary ripping
began again: the roofs unthreaded, neighbors unraveled from their clothes and left naked, corpses. He wasn’t looking at her, but she had never in her life felt so exposed.

“I told you, my children have been sick,” she heard herself whine. Her knees buckled and she had to grip the sofa to stand.

“Tell her I’ll be back for her a week from Sunday.” He opened the door.

“Don’t take the book of Mother,” Ani said.

Hans looked up from shoving his spare shirt into a rucksack. His brother lay on the narrow bunk across the small closet where they slept. Hans wished Ani would get up. He wished Ani would make sense when he talked. But the frail-looking boy on the bed no longer responded to his will. Ani suddenly seemed impervious to all outside influences: Hans’s exhortations to play, their stepmother’s constant questioning, even the threat of the doctor taking him away. Instead, Ani staggered and flopped around, muttering replies to invisible people around him, mixing up words. The worst thing was, he didn’t trust Hans enough to tell him what he’d eaten. The worst thing was, Hans couldn’t trust him to stop.

Ani’s sickness was like having a troll in the house, a great hulking, hairy thing that couldn’t be overlooked or drowned out. It followed Hans: into the bathroom, which smelled funny after Ani’s use, in the closet bedroom, where he woke to Ani slapping his head against the wall. The troll said nothing, but the look it gave was troubled and greedy. It cast its giant shadow everywhere, except down below with Berte. There in the cramped dark next to the girl, the troll did not come. It could not pass into the circle of air that seemed to vibrate around Berte like a kind of wordless singing. Hans had never looked at a girl so much, or been
so entranced by another body: the smooth way she rose and sat, her awkward little laughs, the feathery touch of her hair on his arm. Sitting beside Berte, Hans felt his mind sharpen with purpose. She wanted to escape. He would help her. He did not think past that moment, that resistance, or how he would feel if Berte was gone. He pictured only his defiance. He would help her, and hurt them.

“I mean Mother’s picture,” said Ani now. “You’re running away, aren’t you?”

“I’m not running,” Hans muttered, and put his palm to his brother’s brow. “Do you have a fever again?”

Ani’s forehead was cool. “I never had a fever,” he said. His eyes clouded in some indefinable way. “I’m glad you’re staying.”

“I’m not staying.”

“But you said you were.”

“I’m
going
away. Not running away.”

“Why?”

Hans couldn’t explain. He didn’t understand it himself, but he could still feel the pressure of Berte’s arms around him in the cold cellar air.

“I don’t have to be a prisoner here,” he mumbled.

Ani poked his finger through the gap in the blanket. “Hide,” he said urgently to the air in front of him and ducked his head. “There isn’t much time.”

There was a commotion in the hall outside, like a flock of birds descending, the voices of his stepmother and neighbor separate at first and then all chirping at once.

“It’s almost too late,” Ani whispered, his eyes hollow.

Hans threw his rucksack over his shoulder. “You hide. I’ll be back soon,” he said. He crept from the closet room and into the study, where a second door led out on the staircase. He listened until he heard his stepmother and the stranger enter the apartment through the front.

Then he slipped out, passing a railing he’d cracked with a flying ball a few days before his father left for Weimar. Vati had been furious.
You don’t know who’s down there
, he’d shouted.
You don’t know who you might hit!

He’d grabbed Hans by the shoulders.
I was six years old when my father left for war, and I had to become the man of the house, understand?

Hans reached the door.

Outside the air would be gray, and the open lawns of the Kurpark would seem like targets for enemy planes, and the streetcars would be running late, if at all. He would go farther than he had ever walked alone, past the hospital where his father had worked, and to another train station, where he would meet a man coming from Berlin and give Berte’s letter to him.

You’re the only one who understands me
, Berte had said.

His stepmother called his name upstairs. The house began to close around him like a coat.

The man who opened the door to their apartment was so short his elbows bent to hold the stair railing. Yet his eyes made Hans think of tar.

“I’m sure she went back to Berlin,” he heard his stepmother say from inside. “She was so bored here.” Then her frightened face appeared by the man’s shoulder. “Hans,” she cried.

He turned and ran.

A long minute after Liesl’s knock, Berte Geiss came to the door. She was wearing the same outfit she always wore, a gray cropped jacket and tight skirt, her hair fluffed around her young face. She wore an orange and red scarf in her pocket and traces of lipstick, like an American actress. She looked neither pleased nor worried to see Liesl.

Liesl held a parcel in one arm and Jürgen in another, a heavy wool shawl draped around them both. She’d never felt old in this neighborhood of plumping wives and haggard refugees, but Berte Geiss’s sleek combination of glamour and insouciance unsettled her. The girl was playing a part in a movie, not living real life.

“Guten Tag,”
Berte said, opening the door. “My father-in-law is out.”

“I came to speak to you,” said Liesl. Her body still felt wobbly and tense after Uta’s lover’s visit, her friend’s pale weeping, but her head was clear. She would find Hans. She would keep her sons close.

Berte eyed her coolly. “Your baby is getting fat,” she said. “That’s good, isn’t it?”

She didn’t invite them in, so Liesl walked up the stairs, until their bodies flanked each other and Berte had to step back or push them over. Berte gave way, letting them into the warm, dim vestibule. “Excuse me,” she squeaked. And she pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed her nose.

“Excuse
me,”
said Liesl. “I won’t stay long. My eldest son has run away. I thought you might know where he is.”

“Try the market? He’s obsessed with running errands for you,” Berte said, coming to a stop beside a buffet table. A heavy china candelabra drooped over it, filigreed with cobwebs. Liesl had feathered it clean last time she was here. The drapes were closed, but she could see the thick soft layers of dust on all the furniture, as if it were ever so slowly growing a beard. She briefly felt ashamed for Herr Geiss—had he expected his daughter-in-law to become his maid, too?

“You really don’t know where he is?” said Liesl.

“No.” Berte shrugged. “If I did, I’d tell you.”

Liesl examined her. She was fairly sure the girl was lying, and embarrassed, too, but Berte did not blush.

“You can’t keep track of boys,” Berte added. “They do what they want.” She stepped forward and made a comic mouth at Jürgen. He grabbed the air in front of her.

Liesl set her newsprint parcel down on the buffet. “Hans is too young to be your friend,” she said.

“I don’t know what
that
means,” said Berte.

“I think you do.”

Berte touched her hair. Her eyes met Liesl’s and held them.

Liesl looked away first, gesturing to the parcel she’d carefully wrapped with newsprint. “Herr Geiss told me you have a fondness for horseradish. I found this jar when I was cleaning our house. I thought you might want it,” she said, and turned toward the door.

She heard the girl clear her throat. “Everything you say is being overheard, you know,” Berte said from behind her. “She tells my father-in-law all kinds of things about you.”

Liesl stopped in her tracks. “Who?”

“Your tenant. The upstairs one. I don’t know how you can stand her.”

The baby began to squirm. “Do you mind if I set him down a moment?” Liesl said.

Berte made an accommodating gesture with her hand. Liesl set the shawl on the floor and placed Jürgen on top of it. He headed toward the hollow of space under the buffet table. “He likes caves,” Liesl said.