Motherland (28 page)

Frank grabbed her wrist, pulling the capsule down, taking it back. The supply room door opened and Linden’s face appeared. The light in the hall shadowed his eyes. They looked at Frank’s hand cupping Frau Reiner’s, then at Frank, and then the door slammed.

“Linden!” Frank shouted.

“Let him go.” Frau Reiner gently retracted her fingers. “He’s too jealous of me anyway.”

Frank stared at her, absorbing the new fondness in her voice.

“You didn’t know?” She winked at him. “I thought he would have told you. It started the night before Hartmann’s surgery.”

“I don’t know what took you so long,” said Frank, but he couldn’t muster the old joking tone they used with each other. He was clutching
the capsule in his fist and his head kept swimming back to the message from Liesl, its urgency and lack of information. Why wouldn’t she say more? Why couldn’t she say more? He sorted through worst-case scenarios: Ani had caught something from those filthy refugees. Ani had fallen and injured himself. Ani had leukemia or cancer.

The only thing clear about the telegram was its request:
Come home
. It did not say,
Write back
. There was no time for discussion.

“Are you going to be all right?” said Frau Reiner.

“If you were a woman,” Frank said to the nurse, and then stopped. “I’m sorry.”

She rose and went to the door. “Just ask the question, you idiot,” she said, her hand on the knob.

“My wife asked me to come home now. In the telegram,” said Frank. “How serious do you think she is?”

Frau Reiner opened the door.

“I don’t know if she understands what she’s asking,” said Frank.

Frau Reiner made a noise in her throat. “If I were a woman,” she said over her shoulder, “I would only be serious about two things: the life of my children and the life of my husband. In that order.”

He asked Schnell for the furlough. Then he showed him the capsule. He held his palm out, expecting the captain to take it, but Schnell simply glanced at it and looked away. A red flag with the swastika hung on the wall behind his desk. The color drained everything else in the room: the chairs, a skat deck, a copy of a Karl May novel, and stacks of notebooks.

“Well,” said Schnell. “I’m sorry you had some unhappy news.”

Frank could feel the taut cords holding his head up. “My wife is young and inexperienced.” That wasn’t true. She was experienced with children. He’d seen her work with them for years. It was part of the reason he’d married her.

“Do you think our patients want to kill themselves?” said Schnell.

“No. Not now.”

“Do they seem unhappy to you?”

“Unstable,” said Frank, pocketing the capsule. “Every one of them is suffering from dystrophy.”

“Dysh-trophy?” The captain pronounced it with a slur on the
s
.

Frank heard himself explaining the condition of the patients: They had been starved, frozen, and forced into sleeplessness. They had faced lice and fever and death.

“The Russians proved in the last war that too many pressures can create a dystrophic condition in the body,” he said. When a man’s cells
were dystrophic, they were no longer capable of a normal reaction. If cells malfunctioned, everything went awry. A man could not respond to disease properly. He couldn’t even sleep or digest nutritious food.

Was Schnell nodding? His hairy nostrils fanned with breath.

As Frank talked, his mind spiraled away again, thinking about three boys who’d lost their mother to death, and then lost their father to distance. And to top it off, he’d brought a stranger into the house and said,
Here she is! Your brand-new mother!
He’d regarded his marriage to Liesl as his own heartbreaking but valorous decision to move on because life demanded it, but what if he’d mired them all, most of all
her
, in a swamp of unending grief ?

Frank continued, “They don’t make good decisions as soldiers and they don’t heal, at least not until the dystrophic condition has time to correct itself.” His eyes fell on the capsule. “Sometimes that takes weeks. Sometimes months of quiet and routine. Given the easy chance to end their lives, I fear they might make the wrong decision.”

Schnell pulled over one of his notebooks, scrawling something on a new page. Frank stood there, waiting for a response.

“Think of their mothers,” he said in a hoarse voice.

More silence, the pen drifting through its sentences.

“About the furlough, sir? I’m leaving in a few days anyway, so perhaps my new position could be postponed—”

Schnell snapped his book shut. “You know, if we lose this war, it’s because we took too much time,” he said. “Don’t waste any more of mine.”

Frank had always found it easy to talk to Liesl, even in their ridiculous first meeting with that half-drowned kid. There had been something about Liesl’s shy composure that had drawn him out, and for weeks after that encounter he’d avoided her, embarrassed. Liesl Nye wasn’t hard to avoid. She either worked with children or hid in her room or sometimes took walks by herself around the grounds. Rumor had it that she had turned down several admirers, that she and her friend Uta were secretly lovers. Single young women who stayed single made others gossip, but Frank assumed she just didn’t like the Nazi boors who leered at her.

Then one day, in the harrowing month after Susi’s death, he’d walked by the
Kinderhaus
and heard the babble of children and Liesl’s strong, sure voice above it. He peeked in the cabin window to see her flushed, animated face as she chased them and then crashed into a wooden chair squarely in her path. She laughed, but it was her look of complete surprise that got him. She hadn’t expected the chair to be there.
So young
, he thought wistfully.

At home, his newborn was passed around the neighborhood day and night, cared for by other mothers with infants. His elder sons cried themselves to sleep. He jerked awake in the dark, listening for their tears. He was so tired that his hands fumbled to tie his shoes. When
six weeks passed, Herr Geiss suggested a marriage service. Frank sat in interviews with the agent and two young, plump, pretty women who looked like vague replicas of Susi. He listened to them talk about their health and daily habits, their love of the movies and the Führer. They seemed swollen with innocence. It flooded their cheeks and spilled out of their mouths like milk. He asked for a different sort of candidate, someone hardworking and quiet, and was presented with a pear-shaped widow from Bavaria who took no sugar in her tea and assured him that he would never hear his sons whine again.

At first he found himself making excuses to pass by the
Kinderhaus
, to exchange a few words of greeting. He liked watching Liesl with the children—the happiness she seemed to cultivate around her in the small cabin. It reminded him of peacetime. The evening of the day he received his summons to Weimar, he picked a handful of violets from under a tree near the cabin. His clumsy hands ripped half of them out by the roots. He stood, stripping the dirt from the stems, wondering what he was doing. The violets were already wilting by the time he willed his feet to thump across the threshold.

Liesl was hanging hats back on a row of big nails. A bowler, a chef’s hat, a straw hat, a nurse’s cap. One of the nails was loose in the wall and as she turned it tumbled, pinging the floor.

“I’m sorry,” he said, holding the flowers behind his back. “I scared you.”

She didn’t retrieve the nail. She stared at him, rigid, as if he’d come to mug her.

“They must like that game. Playing grown-ups,” he said.

“Yes.” She touched her cheek. “What can I do for you, Dr. Kappus?”

He cleared his throat. “I brought these,” he said, and held out the flowers. She took them, but the damp stems stuck to his hand, and he almost had to wipe the violets into her palm. It wasn’t a thrilling touch, but a clammy exchange of wilt. “Sorry,” he said, forcing a laugh.

“I’ll find some water.” She carried the violets to the end of the room, where there was a small porcelain sink. He kept from turning his head but he was conscious of her red hair swept up and falling in the back, her hips, and that jaunty, clumsy walk that once again sent her knocking into her desk as she passed. Her hands slipped on the faucet before it turned.

“What happened to those Steitz boys—do you know?” Frank said, thinking of the day he’d first seen her, the sunlight on the water, Liesl rubbing cream from her finger. Ani hadn’t been born yet, and Liesl had just been a pretty young girl shivering with cold.

He heard a clunk and saw Liesl setting the violets down on a desk. They sagged over an eggcup. “They were training to be officers last I heard.” She shook her head. “I remember thinking they’d never grow up.”

Frank cleared his throat and shoved the nail back in the wall, restoring the bowler to its spot. “You have an extra nail,” he said to the wall. “I could give you a surgeon’s cap.”

“That would be lovely,” said Liesl. “Anything that’s not military.”

“I studied to be a surgeon,” said Frank, and blurted to her about his summons, wondering why his mouth kept talking. Middle-aged widower. Father of three. About to be drafted. How much more desperate could a man appear? He started backing away, toward the door.

“I wish you much courage,” Liesl said, following him.

“Why not a soldier’s cap?” Frank asked when he reached the threshold. “Surely that’s all they want to play anyway.”

She hesitated. “The boys—and girls—they get carried away. I stopped putting out war toys.”

Their eyes met, and he saw a new emotion in them. She had fought for this tiny shred of control, perhaps paid for it. “I just can’t watch it anymore.” Her voice deepened. “All that dying.”

Their faces were close. Liesl looked startled and ducked her head.

“Yes. Well, good night, then.” He turned.

“I’m sorry I didn’t have a vase,” she said from behind him.

“Next time, I’ll bring one,” Frank said.

“I like sunflowers,” he heard her say before he bolted into the night.

The dachshund was still in the ward when Frank hurried through at dinnertime, restless and sweating, unable to eat or face his friends, the happy new lovers.

The patients were playing a game with the dog, trying to get it to run between them for scraps of meat. In the early dark the dog’s happiness seemed suddenly desperate. Its black smile sagged as it loped from bed to bed.