Motherland (37 page)

She’d bribed the Winter boys to ask at the train stations. “Why don’t you wait for nightfall?” Frau Winter had said when she’d seen Liesl’s panicked face. “He’ll come home when he’s hungry.”

“It will be too late by then,” Liesl insisted.

She’d hugged Ani while he cried, and then praised him when he’d raised his head and said, hiccupping, that he had to be brave for Jürgen.

“Now I can teach you to fly,” Ani said to his brother, grabbing him under the arms and straining up. As Liesl cried out, he hefted the baby into the air and then lost his own balance. They both tumbled to the ground. Jürgen looked stunned but he didn’t wail.

“He doesn’t need to fly,” she said, reaching out a hand. But Ani was already trying to lift his brother again, shoving him forward. “Stop it,” she cried.

A door slammed downstairs and sirens began to blare. Liesl grabbed Jürgen in midtotter and told Ani to get the extra blankets. Her orders were cut off by another siren. She staggered, grabbed for the door handle. There was a heavy cracking sound toward the Louisenstrasse, and then the sky began to beat and thunder. The windows ground in their casings. She glanced out, hoping to see Hans running, but the street was empty, and shimmered strangely, like a street in a mirror’s reflection.

Ani appeared, shrouded in green wool, a stricken look on his face. Another boom, and plaster broke from the walls. She yelled to him to hold the railing, but he simply launched down the first set of steps, a green hump tumbling earthward. The doors to the Winters’ and Dillmans’ apartments opened and slammed. Frau Dillman, the Dillman girls, Frau Winter, her cluster of boys. The staircase was a river of bodies. They were pushing each other toward the dark narrow steps. Liesl took one last look for Hans and then plunged after them, clutching Jürgen, who started to squall at the top of his lungs.

Another boom, and plaster fell from a nail hole, dribbling down the wall. Frau Dillman screamed and shoved her daughters with her fat arms, but Frau Winter was not to be beaten to the cellar, and she scrambled ahead of them all. Her body tipped like a tall bottle. The siren groaned. The Dillman girls bobbed and shrieked, their heads full
of pin curls that glinted in the last of the sunlight. Another boom. They leapt and plunged en masse into the cellar, their hands clawing at the stone wall. Liesl heard a shrill scream and saw Ani disappear under the wave of bodies.

“You’re crushing him!” she cried.

The booms and sirens stopped for a moment, and a sudden silence struck. Jürgen wailed and then looked around, as if surprised by the sound of his own voice. She heard Ani whimpering.

“Don’t crush him!” Liesl shouted, but the explosions began again.

By the time Liesl made it into the cellar with Jürgen, their supplies were all over the floor and Ani was curled up beside the shelf, cupping his face while the others eddied around him. Liesl ran to him. She couldn’t hear her own voice trying to reassure him.

Nearby, Frau Winter was collapsed over a long gash in her arm. She moaned while her gaunt sons tried to bandage it with a shirt.

Frau Dillman, face stony, herded her girls through the hole in the wall, where Herr Geiss and Berte waited for them. A lantern was already burning there. Another boom, muffled now. The arching cellar bricks trembled and spilled grains of mortar. Liesl adjusted Jürgen on her hip and pulled Ani with her to a pinch of room beside Herr Geiss’s hole.

The explosions lessened, and Liesl tried to pry Ani’s fingers free. “Ani, look at me,” she shouted. “We’re safe now. We’re in the shelter you and your brother built.” Internally, she willed Hans to make it home. Ani shook her off and covered his eyes again, flicking his head.

The last Dillman girl trailed through the hole. She was holding a moth-eaten doll by the neck. “Hurry now. Don’t stay in there,” her mother shrilled from the other side. Liesl’s eyes met Frau Winter’s and a question flashed between them: Which one of their sons had initiated the attack on Frieda?

Not mine
, Liesl thought, and in Frau Winter’s gaze she saw the same stubborn doubt.

The explosions came in waves. A boom. The house shook. Liesl ducked, covering Jürgen’s head. Then rattle and rain, quaking, stillness. She raised her head, and just when her dry tongue passed across the dirt on her lips, just when she’d stopped clutching Jürgen so hard, another boom. Cans clattered on the shelves. Ani rocked and twitched, his hands cupping his eyes.

The suitcases against the near wall leapt. One sprang open, blossoming shirts and underwear. There was a scream from the other side of the hole and someone ran through, grabbing for the luggage.

It was Frieda. Her cheeks were red. Her new breasts strained against her sweater as she tried to shove the suitcase closed. It seemed like hours, her struggle. No one helped her. The Winter boys sat with their toes practically touching Frieda’s, their mouths slightly parted, their hands over their ears. If Hans had been there, Liesl would have made him offer a hand, but Hans was outside—in that hell—because of Frieda. Liesl couldn’t set the baby down. Frau Winter’s head was buried in her bloodied arm, her voice braying the Lord’s Prayer. The candles flickered and sputtered.

Finally Liesl scooted forward on her knees, still holding Jürgen, to assist Frieda. When another explosion shook the cellar, she reached out for a wall but misjudged the distance. Her hand fell through the hole between the cellars. She toppled. Jürgen gripped her neck.

“Mutti!” she heard Ani scream as her head banged on dirt. She tried to push herself up, clinging to the baby, but another explosion came and she tumbled. Jürgen began to wail. She could see into Herr Geiss’s side, the folded legs of the Dillman girls, and the dark hulk of the older man. His face was in shadow. She shifted Jürgen to her left arm and pushed up with the right, shoving back into the light, into Ani, who clung to her.

As soon as Liesl cleared the hole, the Dillman girl rushed through, clutching the closed suitcase. Another explosion, and Jürgen’s wails
grew urgent. Frau Winter’s praying sang somewhere underneath it, gnawing Liesl’s ears.

She shushed the baby, though she couldn’t hear herself, though soon another wailing joined his, the voice older and rawer, but the pitch and rhythm exactly the same. She saw the cellar’s eyes swivel to Ani. He squatted birdlike, his arms clamped to his sides, and screamed. His throat pulsed. His trousers climbed up his legs, exposing his bare shins and making his feet look like claws.

Liesl eased over to him, holding Jürgen against her ribs, and tried to put an arm around him. “Ani,” she called.

He raised his arms wing-like, clobbering her hard across the chin. She fell back. Another explosion and Ani launched up. For an instant he flew on the shaking air and then fell headfirst into one of the shelves. Cans tumbled off, rolling everywhere. Ani flapped again, throwing himself toward the ceiling.

Liesl saw the Winter boys look at each other, then their mother. En masse they scrambled toward the hole to Herr Geiss’s side. Their bodies moved in slow motion, gaining footholds, losing them as the explosions rained down. Dirt pocked their faces. As Ani screamed and flapped, smashing into walls, the boys disappeared, one by one. Finally only Frau Winter was left. She gave Liesl a pitying glance and shoved through, her black skirt trailing.

With the others gone, Hans’s green curtains suddenly came into view, hanging mildewed on the walls. Ani clawed at them, dragging the cloth down. The curtains snagged on his arms. They fluttered. He shrieked and tugged them high, his white face shining. His feet barely touched the ground. He seemed to be dancing on the broken, shifting air. He toppled, slamming the empty sauerkraut vat. Liesl tried to reach him, but she tripped on a can and lost her balance, almost dropping the baby. She sank to her knees, sobbing, cradling Jürgen.

Another boom. She was crouched across the cellar when one of Ani’s green wings dragged across a candle. Fire burst over the tatters
of cloth. The flame cast its sudden brightness. Ani’s screams changed. She bent and dropped the baby on a trampled blanket, then ran for the burning boy with her arms outstretched.

The plane surged over Hans and past the castle before it dropped its bombs. They fell like mulberries from a bowl and then the sky split into clouds of flame and dust. Hans peeled himself from the shelter door and ran back toward the brewery. His pants hung on him, wet with piss, and made his legs snag with every step. He retraced his footprints back to the brewery fence and shoved himself under, lying on his back. The metal snagged on the soaked bulge of his crotch. He kept pushing. The pants groaned and tore. His penis shriveled against the touch of the cold wind. He whimpered but he kept shoving—
there
, he was through—then he tugged the torn flap free from the wires.

The planes were circling back. He held his pants closed with his hand and sprinted inside the brewery. He didn’t know he was sobbing until he got inside, and his loud, harsh hiccups broke against the ancient walls.

“Shut up,” he shouted at himself. He pounded his fists into his quaking gut. “Shut up! Shut up!”

The rafters gaped above him, revealing nothing. He sobbed until he retched, falling to his hands and knees. Drool dripped from his mouth. He stared at the dirt. He stared at the scattered black seeds. The wet flap of his pants hung open.

A loud explosion made the building shake. Dust fell gently. He listened for wings and heard in the distance, far beyond the brewery, the feathering roar and crackle of fire.

He crawled under an old ledge in the wall and tried to make himself smaller, squeezing his knees into his face, one arm tightening over his ears, the other over his eyes.

After the air raid ended, he sat very still, unable to bring himself to move. He stared at the rafters until nightfall, and after nightfall he stared into the darkness, still cupping his knees. He played a game of closing his eyes, then opening them suddenly, and searching the blackness for the walls he knew were there.

Sometimes the walls moved. They were five, ten meters away, and sometimes they were centimeters from his nose. They had a reddish-black hue. They were the texture of felt, then of fur. Once he thought he saw feather patterns, a series of long straight stripes with spokes radiating from their lengths, but the moment he pushed his nose forward, the wall disappeared.

He was aware of things happening outside the brewery. He heard the giant iron door swing open and people stampede out, crying and howling at the fires and destroyed buildings in the center of town. He heard a man call that the power was out. He heard fire trucks racing, and the lower, rumbling growl of an army convoy. He heard a house fall in. He was pretty sure anyway. There was a long groan, and then a crumbling crash that sounded like boards and rocks being eaten by a giant mouth.

He made two bargains with himself.

If I go home, they will still be alive
.

If I don’t go home, they will still be alive
.

He remained frozen between the choices.

Sometimes he heard his own desperate voice begging to be let in, and he tried to lock the memory away.

The walls came closer. The walls drifted a kilometer off. They were the color of a night river. He could dive into them.

If I go home, they will still be alive
.

If I don’t go home, they will still be alive
.

He couldn’t get up now and walk home. His body hurt too much, and he was afraid of the dark outside the building. He was afraid his voice was still shrieking out there somewhere.

So when he heard someone calling his name, he squirmed his spine deeper into the dirt and clung to his knees. He stayed there when he heard the fence shake. He was so perfectly still an ant could crawl over him and think he was a stone. But he heard a grunt, and then a scraping sound, and then the voice was closer and it spoke his name urgently.

There was a hiss, and light flooded over him, making the ceiling’s cobwebs glow like an old woman’s hair.

His stepmother’s face appeared, covered with soot and mud.

He shrank deeper. His spine scraped the wall. It made the softest rustle. She turned and saw him. She ran closer, the oil lamp bobbing in her hand. He felt his face crumple and he pushed his fists against it. He ground his dirty knuckles into his eyes as she set the lamp down and pulled him into the nest of her lap, kissing his head. “They wouldn’t let me in,” he said in a choked voice.