Motherland (30 page)
He opened his mouth and caught some flakes, but they didn’t relieve the caked dryness of his throat.
Someone shouted his name above. For an absurd moment, Frank thought it was Hartmann. He stood up a moment, gazing into the protecting clouds. Footsteps neared. Frank flattened himself against the crusted wall under the ledge, pressing every cell of his body back into the stones. He tried not to see his shadow, lying faintly over the heap of Zyklon cans.
Boots crunched to the edge of the hole. Chunks of ice fell and slid with the faint metallic sound of a penknife opening. Frank blinked. The warmth of his skull was melting the stone behind him. He could feel something slick leaking into his hair.
The voice called his name again. It was Linden. He was calling into the distance, but something broke his call, the way a line of trees would break it—as if the pine forest had moved closer to the cistern. Water
trickled down Frank’s skull. He listened hard and heard a faint but incessant drumming, like a herd plodding together. It wasn’t trees but the war that approached. More soldiers or more patients? How many more? What had his father said about his own retreat?
One day I looked up and even the mud was crawling south and east
.
Linden called his name a third time.
Sorry, friend
, Frank thought.
We’ll see each other again someday
.
“What is Schnell doing?” Linden said. “Turning them all back?”
The companion didn’t answer.
Linden whistled. “There must be a hundred of them. Two hundred. Buchenwald must have been hit worse than here.”
The prison camp. Frank’s mind returned to the typhus rumor, Schnell’s veiled threat. Would they leave the infected men behind? His lungs tickled. He wanted to cough but held it in.
“Look at him. He’s sending them away,” said Frau Reiner’s voice. “Look at the rags they’re wearing.”
“They’re prisoners,” said Linden. “We serve soldiers. We have seven empty beds.”
“Eight now,” said Frau Reiner.
“Right,” Linden growled. “Eight.”
Frank strained to listen.
“Who wants to be the one who tells him?” Linden added.
“Not me,” said Frau Reiner. “He’ll find out soon enough.”
So Hartmann had done it. A raw chill swept through Frank and he shuddered, choking on bile. His mind spun strangely to Hans and Ani: the two boys jumping off the stairs at home, first one step up, then two, then three, then five. With each step higher, they lost more control of their landings, until their bodies smacked the floor, sprawling on hands and knees. Frank wondered why he always let them get to that point of almost smashing themselves before he called to them to stop. Ani never wanted to stop.
“Go back!” someone yelled, followed by a gunshot. “Go back!”
“They ought to evacuate us all,” Frau Reiner said. “Or we’ll look like them by summer. Or him.”
“Do you think he had it all along?” asked Linden.
“Who knows,” said Frau Reiner after a moment. “Come on. Frank’s probably on the ward by now. He wouldn’t leave his patients.”
Frank stared at his hands, suddenly aware of the intensity of the cold creeping into his fingertips, the wet sludge on the back of his head. He wouldn’t survive out here overnight.
Shouts came from the direction of the hospital. Linden yelled back, “No sign of him!”
Their footsteps ground in the snow.
At dusk, Frank saw the first stars appear. He could see no pattern to them. His toes had to be frostbitten. How bad, he wasn’t sure. They’d been numb for some time. His mind was blurring, too. It kept returning to his last sight of Hartmann, the hand beneath the bed grabbing the metallic pellet. He couldn’t be sure that he had seen the hand. He couldn’t be sure that he’d heard his friends correctly. He forgot exactly what they’d said, except Frau Reiner’s last words:
He wouldn’t leave his patients
. Twice he took in a deep breath to cry out for help, and twice he let it go, afraid.
Footsteps approached the hole again, and this time, the voices were quick, the words few before a shot rang out and something heavy crashed to the snow above. Frank heard the door to the incinerator groan open, then slam shut again.
“Fire’s out.”
“Take his shoes and throw him in the hole, then.”
The other man grunted, and there was a silence followed by two soft thuds.
“What an idiot. Schnell had his eye on him for months.”
Hartmann.
No. Not months.
Something scraped over the ground and tumbled, headfirst, onto the ice. Falling, it looked like a sack, and landing, a body again. The skull was already cracked. Its blood spattered everywhere. The man’s eyes were invisible, his head a matted gob of hair and brain matter, but Frank would have recognized his small, delicate feet anywhere.
The footsteps crunched away. Winter wind rushed above the hole. The body was still. Bundt wore a thin shirt, and the small dark curls of hair over his shoulder blades and kidneys were visible through the linen. It matched the hair on his feet. Frank crept forward on the ice.
“Can you hear me?” he whispered. He lifted Bundt’s wrist and felt for the pulse. None. The skull wound was tattered—not a bullet’s torn entry, but the mark of a bludgeoning. He touched the edge and felt it give way like cartilage. He sat back on his heels and hovered there for a long time. Soldiers called from above. Frank staggered back under the ledge and sat down. The wetness in the corners of his eyes froze to beads. He patted his pants pocket and found a cigarette, tore through the paper, took out the small curl of tobacco, and thrust it in his mouth.
The chewing roused him. His teeth ground and ground. The spit gathering in the back of his mouth was thick and tasted like bark. His throat revolted and he spat the tobacco on the ash.
After waiting and listening, he scaled the one crack in the concrete that jagged up the western side and ended near the ledge. He couldn’t feel his fingers or his feet, so he didn’t know if they had a good grip. His body felt too heavy and unbalanced against the smallness of his footholds. He got almost two meters up and lost the right foot to the open air. Cautiously he kicked at the wall, finding the same crumbling gap. It would not bear his weight, so he held on tight with his fingers and
scooted up the left foot, hoping for a lucky break, a crack he couldn’t see. But his boot slid down the wall until it reached its old spot.
He hung in the dark and cold, unable to move.
He fell. He got up. He climbed. He fell. He got up. Climbed, fell. He threw himself against the wall so hard that his breath knocked loose from his body, and in his first few scrambling steps upward he was all flesh and no air—his body drew nothing into it—and then he gasped and tumbled again, without even reaching the height of the first attempt.
He searched Bundt’s clothes and found nothing. Nothing to help him climb out. Also nothing else—no photograph or papers, no clues to his identity.
He sat back down, bruised and out of breath. As his body stiffened in the cold, his mind kept working in its slow, muddy way. Bundt. Hartmann. The same man. Not the same. The opposite. Bundt had longed to live. Hartmann had longed to die, had always loved death. Like the rest of them, Hartmann had raised himself into a man, a soldier—but not out of hunger. Out of despair. Because if you yearn to die, every gesture matters. Every speech could be the last. Every act could be the final act. The king the miller the judge the question. The crystal goblet bulging from the jacket pocket.
The end defines the hero, but is always deferred.
One day it abruptly comes: The doctor slides death across the floor. The patient’s hand reaches out to grab it.
Fingers close.
The sky falls.
Frank didn’t know what time it was when he propped Bundt’s stiff body against the wall under the ledge and set a foot in the dead man’s waistband, and a hand on his shoulder, and scrabbled and kicked his way up until he reached the ledge and looped one leg over. He lay on the ledge for a long time, breathing and listening. Below him, Bundt slumped like a man leaning back to watch a woman pass. He looked
peaceful except for the icy tread marks on his face from Frank’s boots. It would be obvious that someone else had been in the cistern.
Frank lowered a leg and gently nudged Bundt until he fell facedown again.
The hospital was mostly dark but not silent. Kerosene light flickered behind glass and oilcloth. Inside, men were moaning, and nurses were still calling out names. Frank climbed over the wall and ran for the pines.
“I saw the parrot up there,” Ani whispered in the dark. “She saw it, too. I know she did.”
Hans pretended to sleep, but his breath was coming too fast and the blanket itched. He rolled over and stared toward the ceiling. Two days ago an official army notice had come, announcing that Vati had disappeared. Fräulein Müller had read it aloud to them, and his stepmother had almost burned herself, reaching toward the tile stove for balance.
Der Vermisste. Missing in action
. Ani dropped his dinner plate for no good reason and stared at the wreckage, surprised, and then Jürgen bumped his head on the corner of a table, and no one could stop him crying for half an hour.
Only Hans did not feel scared. He trusted his father. His father would come home and straighten it all out. He just wished Vati would hurry. A week had already passed since the raid on Weimar.
Dr. Becker had been called away to Frankfurt, so his replacement, an overwhelmed medical resident, examined Ani’s lab results while Liesl and Hans sat side by side on a narrow couch.
The lead concentration in his blood is lower
, he said finally, setting the paper in Ani’s file.
He’s better, then
. Their stepmother snapped her purse shut.
Can you tear up the psychiatric evaluation form?
The resident rubbed his bloodshot eyes.
I’m not qualified to do that, Frau Kappus. You’ll have to see Dr. Becker again
.
But Ani can stay home?
Ani can stay home
.
His stepmother had spent all the next day on a loud and joyful cleaning bout that sent even Fräulein Müller out to the market and the lending library. Yet Ani wasn’t really better. Just two days ago he had twisted his ankle falling down the stairs. Ani claimed it was an accident, but one of the Winter boys said he’d seen Ani spread his arms and leap.
“Why doesn’t your brother ever play with us?” Grete Dillman had asked him. She was the ugliest and sauciest of the neighbor girls, the kind of person who spat her words instead of speaking them.
“Ani’s too young.”
“I heard they want to lock him away in a loony bin.”
“No one wants to lock him away,” Hans had retorted. “And you have so many freckles you could be put in a zoo.”
That shut Grete up. He hadn’t liked being mean to her, but she talked too much.
“I saw the parrot,” Ani whispered again, bringing Hans back to the dark closet he shared with his brother.
“I’m sleeping.”
“Will you go with me to look for it?” Ani asked.
“Sure,” Hans muttered.
“But we don’t have any food for birds.”
“I’ll get some seeds.”
“Where?”
