Motherland (29 page)

“All right, all right,” said the owner. “He’s getting tired.”

But others egged the dog on. The dog’s nails scraped the floor.

Frank arrived at Hartmann’s bed and was surprised to find the poet neither reading nor writing. Hartmann was sitting up, head bowed. His hair hung over his cheeks in lank strips. At first Frank thought he was asleep, but he saw Hartmann’s fingers clasping and unclasping.

Down the hall, the dog began to bark, excited and angry.

“Shut him up!” a patient shouted.

“You shut up!” someone shouted back.

Hartmann’s posture wasn’t good for a healing face. Frank gently touched his forehead and began to tilt him up. He paused when the light fell on the left side of the patient’s mouth. The swelling was soft but definite, bulging the skin graft. The transposed skin had a yellowish cast. Beneath, the sutures were already straining in the rotting tissue.

The dog barked, and a scuffle broke out. Nurses hurried from opposite ends of the ward.

Frank let go of Hartmann’s forehead, searching his own memory for any sign of edema in his brief visit the day before. He could recall only the roughened pink texture of healthy healing. Hartmann hadn’t complained of discomfort. He met Hartmann’s eyes. They were strangely blank.

“A setback,” Frank said. “We’ll treat it.”

The shadows on the wall climbed and sank. Frank called a nurse and gave her instructions for treating the swelling, but he could already tell that it wouldn’t work. The graft would die, and someone would have to peel it away, cut out the scar tissue, and try again. It could take months.

Frank pulled out a pad.
We’ll treat this right away
, he wrote. He smelled the delicate, almost soapy odor of dying skin and pus.

Hartmann took the paper.
There’s an investigator coming tomorrow
.

Frank read the message twice. He nodded, as if he understood the words.

Hartmann took the paper back.
They’ll find what they want to find
, he wrote.
It’s likely I’ll be taken away
. He pulled in his knees and hugged them like a boy. It was hard to read his expression, with the shadows of the room and the puckering scars, but he didn’t seem unhappy or worried. In fact, his whole being exuded an eagerness, as if he no longer had to wait for his fate.

I’ll speak on your behalf
, Frank wrote. The pen slid in his damp fingers.
You need time to heal
.

Don’t risk anything on my account
.

When Frank tried to touch his shoulder, Hartmann waved him away. Walking back up the ward, Frank felt for the capsule riding in his pocket. He could have crushed it or tossed it away by now, but he hadn’t.

He didn’t know how to say to Hartmann that he should want to live. You had to want to live. You had to respect life. But he knew his words would sound simple, and if he and Hartmann argued, Hartmann would win.

Frank didn’t sleep that night. He looked outside at the guard station, the incinerator, the concrete wall of the cistern, and the pines beyond. There had been some warm days and the snow had hardened on the ground. The sky was deep with stars. He mentally started and scrapped several letters to Liesl, expressing his concern, requesting more information, explaining about his denied furlough. When the night sky began to lighten, he washed his torso in cold water and stood there, feeling his skin freeze. His nipples and belly tensed first, and then everywhere prickled with goose bumps. The sensation did not make him feel any more wakeful. He shoved his arms into a shirt and buttoned it. He lay back down on his bed and tried to read Hartmann’s poems again, but the words buzzed and fluttered. He tucked them in his pocket. Down the hall, he heard others rising, and he emerged for his morning rounds, avoiding Hartmann. The operating room was empty, so he walked in and inhaled the smell of carbolic acid, remembering the soft, pulsing feel of the tissues he’d repaired and the drag of sutures through flesh.

He made his way to the cafeteria and drank coffee made from dandelion roots. There was not even chicory left in their kitchens. “Better brew in Berlin, I hope,” Frank told the cook. “I’m leaving in two days.”

The cook said he was sorry to see him go, but he didn’t look sorry, just sweaty and weary. Frank sat down and stared out the window at the pine woods beyond the cistern, formulating his plan of escape.

To avoid Linden and Frau Reiner, he went straight to the ward. He did not want to tell them about Hartmann. He did not want to talk to Hartmann, either, watching him from a distance, a sleeping lump on his bed. He wanted to take the clocks down from the walls, every single one, and advance the hours, through afternoon and nightfall, and dawn again. To have the telegram miss him, to have Hartmann’s infection fail to begin, because he was already in Berlin. To simultaneously be already on his way home.

The patients were eating their midday meal, a hard black gnarl of
Kommissbrot
and hot millet soup, when the first whistle came. Frank was holding a patient’s chart. Then the earth shook and the bowls spilled on their unprotected laps. Men roared with pain. The chart ripped in his hands. It happened fast and slow. The rumble. The flash. Hot soup. The roar. Rip. Splashed everywhere. It was a joke. A ridiculous act of God.

Home
. The back of Frank’s neck went cold. He dropped the chart and ducked. Another whistle, another boom. He staggered forward.
Home
. It took a long time to pull himself straight. The sky broke over the roof, smoke smell pouring through the cracks in the walls.

He grabbed a cart of soiled linen and pushed it toward the far door, lurching with each explosion. Around him, men scrambled to get under their beds. Their legs snared in their blankets. They lost their hats and grabbed for them, jamming the cloth back on their waxy skulls.

Hartmann was four meters away. Sirens wailed. Then three. Soldiers poured into the ward behind Frank, shouting, “Everyone, down!” Then two.

“Everyone, DOWN!” Then one.

Frank pulled the capsule from his pocket, lurched right, and rolled it under Hartmann’s bunk, seeing the brass glint and a hand close around it.

The cart jammed on a cot leg. Frank wrenched it free, lurched forward again. His boot slid on spilled millet soup and he almost lost his balance. Another boom, closer this time. Outside, flames rose beside the guard tower. If he could get to the cistern, he could hide on the ledge, make a break for the woods when no one was looking.

I’m tired
, screamed a man behind him. Or maybe he screamed something else, something Frank could not make out.

I’m tired is
what he heard. He burst through the doors.

Three steps onto the snow and he fell to his knees.

Propeller, nose, window, cockpit. A whir like a thousand bees. A blurred face.

Sprays of bullets pocked the snow beside Frank, but his body was whole, untouched. The plane passed over. He rose, the cold slapping his skin. The guard station was burning. Soldiers were lying in the snowdrifts, guns aimed at the sky. He put his head down and pushed toward the incinerator, the cistern beside it. The chest of his coat flattened against him.

As Frank shoved the cart up against the edge of the cistern, another bomb fell close by, smashing two houses at the edge of town. Their roofs caved in toward each other. He saw the soldiers swivel toward the fire; he saw the perfect moment: It opened for him the way a bow opens when you tug a ribbon just so and a woman’s hair falls loose from it, onto her bare shoulders. No one was looking directly at him. He stepped to the edge of the cistern and hovered there, his right foot stepping out over the empty space.

The left refused to follow, at least not in the way it should—a clean jump to the ledge that once held the boards to the latrine. Instead it hitched, like a cripple’s leg, and he lost his balance and tumbled into the
concrete pit, falling past the stained walls to the thick frozen lake at the bottom.

He landed on his tailbone, then fell on his side, like a sleeper, his cheek smashing into an empty cylinder of Zyklon. The edge of the metal pierced the skin just below his ear. The ashy waste groaned and cracked, cold grit grinding into his hair.

Frank scrambled up immediately and lost his balance on the slippery sludge, smacking into the cistern wall, muck smearing his coat. He touched the cut with his cleaner hand. It was wide but not deep. His tailbone ached, but his legs and vertebrae worked. Inside his coat pocket, he found a handkerchief and pressed it to the wound. One breath, two breaths. He pushed himself upright more slowly, stepping around the Zyklon cylinders. Zyklon was used routinely for delousing, but the canisters’ hollowed shapes, their warning labels (
GIFTGAS! POISON GAS!
) seemed ominous now. The other waste in the cistern was harder to identify: gray and black ash, freckles of white that could have been bone. He moved carefully across to a spot under the ledge. Best to hide for now, then figure a way out.

As the shock wore off, the smell set in. Then the shrieking and smashing of the air raid. Then the cold. He covered his nose with the clean part of his handkerchief and waited. No one had seen him fall, but the cart was up there. It could give him away. He edged closer to the wall but did not touch it.

The frozen sewage creaked. He looked down. He was standing on a charred femur.

Smoke drifted over the sky in gauzy veils. Frank could no longer hear the propellers screaming in the engines of the planes, just a dull insect drone. If Hartmann had taken the pill, he would be dead by
now, his body found. The other patients would have emerged from under their bunks.

At first, Frank was sure Hartmann would use it, would take the sudden release, but the more he thought about it, the more he wondered. He remembered the boy Hartmann had been, so different from the rest of them, not just for his brains but his essential stubbornness. Hartmann on that wild day in the wine cellar, his face quiet, alert, refusing to take sips from the contraband bottle one boy grabbed off a shelf. Hartmann at the Kurpark with Astrid, steering her with a light hand at her waist to the sulfur fountains, fishing a glass goblet from his coat so she could drink from crystal. The other boys had ridiculed him for being swoony over a girl, but Hartmann had ignored them. He loved propriety, courtliness. The rough conditions of wartime must have festered his formerly gallant soul, but would such a man choose a coward’s death? No, Hartmann would be obstinate enough to live to the end. To be convicted. To take his unjust punishment and force his murderers to stare into his destroyed face before they shot him.

A few bombs rattled the distance, and then, a light bouncing patter, as if the walker did not like letting his feet sink in the grainy snow. The iron door of the incinerator squeaked and yawned. Although Frank couldn’t see the visitor, he was sure it was Bundt. Who else would walk like that? He hid under the ledge, pressing his bleeding cheek.

The iron door slammed shut. The latch rattled into place. There was a cough. Then a stream of gray dust tumbled down through the air, smacked the ice, and gusted up. Frank shut his eyes too late. They stung with grit. He held his breath until he could no longer stand it, and then he gulped the thick air, his stomach revolting before his lungs. He gagged and bit his fist to keep from retching.

Another shovelful of ash, freckled with bones and metal.

A roar tickled at the base of Frank’s lungs and he had to swallow hard to keep it down. He screwed shut his eyes and pinched his nose
like a swimmer diving into deep water. Three, four, five more waterfalls of filth.

The cart squeaked as it rolled away. Frank loosened his grip from his face. The ledge had done little to protect him. The fine dust covered his clothes and hat and hair. He could feel the grit when he blinked his eyes, and in the place where his collar rubbed his neck. He touched his ears, and his fingertip came away gray.

He heard soldiers shouting and retreated back under the ledge, crouching. He curled his toes back into his feet and hugged his own torso, tucking his hands under his ribs. He sang in his head. Not songs for the Fatherland, but the little lullabies he’d listened to Susi and Liesl hum to his babies. Funny half melodies with nonsense words and endearments, they had always seemed a private language to him, something meant to be hidden from the lives of men. Now he could hear their little notes spread through his slowly chilling body as the sky opened and it began to snow, white falling on the black ash.