Motherland (4 page)

He cast his eyes downward at the cigarettes on the table. His long lashes brushed his cheeks. Then he gave a tough little laugh and scooped up the white handful.

“I’ll sell these for you,” he said in Frank’s jocular, teasing voice. “What do you want, a new dress?”

Later, alone again, Liesl tossed on her bed. She’d shared the room with Frank for only thirty-six nights before he was ordered to serve in Weimar. For thirty-one of those nights they’d slept across the room from each other, her breath whispering, Frank’s soft snores rising. Thirty-one nights before she’d woken to him sitting at the edge of her bed, like a father watching his sleeping child. She’d opened her blankets and taken him in.
Is it all right?
he’d whispered when she’d shuddered at his touch.
Yes. It’s all right. Yes
. Five nights with their bodies moving against each other, awkward at first, then falling into pattern, into sleep afterward, legs twined like roots below soil. Had she disappointed him in comparison to Susi? Frank had always returned to his own bed by morning.

They’d never spoken about it. They’d rarely spoken aloud about anything but the house and the children and the war. Of Frank’s childhood, she knew little. Of hers, he knew only the name of a town, a pleasant description of a farm. They hadn’t reminisced about their
brief courtship at the Hartwald Spa, where she’d run the
Kinderhaus
and he’d treated the minor ailments of Nazi officers and their wives. She supposed Frank didn’t think about the past or the present because they were too mixed up. He was grieving, and then he was married, and then he was drafted. And then he was gone, and still grieving, and still married. When he went to sleep at night in Weimar, which wife did he miss?

Liesl lay on her stomach, eyes open. In the dark she couldn’t see the wardrobe that still hung some of Susi’s dresses, or the dresser that held Susi’s jewels, or the mirror above the vanity that had once reflected back a blond woman with round cheeks. But she felt the objects watching her with their sharp corners, their creaks. And beyond them she felt the great open space around her, space enough for two beds, a man and wife, and a baby, too. How different this room seemed compared to her tiny alcove at the spa, where there was nowhere to sit but one chair and the narrow cot, and whenever her best friend Uta came, Uta took the cot, messing up Liesl’s neat coverlet while she chatted and smoked. That room had reeked of girlhood, of their long, gossipy talks, of ash, of the herbs Liesl gathered and made into fragrant sachets, of wool stockings hung up to dry. She wished Uta would write. But Uta never wrote letters, except once, to announce she’d made it to Berlin and liked her job at the private officers’ club.

Liesl curled her fingers in her blanket and pulled it tight over her shoulders, around her chin, tighter and tighter, the way she’d done as a girl when she was scared of the dark.
Miss me
, she thought, first to Frank, and then to her oldest friend, and then to the dim, loving face that had become her memory of her mother. She pulled again until the wool strained over her back and she couldn’t move for holding herself.

Liesl tried not to suck in her breath when she saw the Geiss pantry: the ham hanging from a hook, a substantial wheel of Emmental, the tins of coffee and sugar, seven bottles of Riesling (she hadn’t meant to count, but her eyes did it for her), jars of sauerkraut and pickles, the red fingers of
Würstchen
, chocolate in purple wrappers. No wonder Herr Geiss had ration cards to spare.

“I don’t cook,” Herr Geiss said in an embarrassed voice. “So I have to make do with the ready-made.”

“Yes,” Liesl said, the musky scent of the ham almost choking her. Half of her wanted to throw it out the window and half wanted to tear into it with her bare teeth. She took a deep breath and jiggled Jürgen, who was looking around with dazed eyes. “Well. We all make do.”

They stood awkwardly in the Geiss kitchen, a bucket of mops and brooms and cloths between them. It was clear by the shininess of the brooms that Herr Geiss had gone out and procured some new cleaning gear. She reached out and touched a blue-painted handle. “Very nice,” she said.

“It’s enough, then?” he said. “You don’t have to do the stove. I clean that myself.”

Not the stove. Just the rest of a three-story house. She nodded.

“What do you hear from Frank? Saving lives, is he?”

“He’s busy,” Liesl said quickly. “His surgeries are very complicated.” She carried Jürgen back out to the stairs and called for Ani.

“I asked Frau Hefter to watch the infant,” Herr Geiss said from behind her. “She’s magic with children.”

Liesl froze. She’d had two awkward
Kaffees
with Frau Hefter, in which the other woman had asked her maiden name and pointedly stared at her beaky nose.

“She’s happy to help,” said Herr Geiss. “She loved Susi and her children, you know.”

Liesl waited for Ani to appear, and still it took a long time to hand Jürgen over. Or maybe it took only moments, but it seemed as if thousands of them were needed to wrap the baby just so, to pull his wool cap down against the winter wind, to kiss his brow and kiss it again, to watch his arms wave as Herr Geiss took him and positioned him the way Frank did, higher than a woman would, so that Jürgen’s head hung slightly over his broad shoulder.

And then it was done. Her arms were empty. They fell to her sides. “It sounds funny, but he sleeps best in a busy room,” she said.

The baby cooed and Herr Geiss giggled. “Ah, you are so light. So light,” he said as he carried Jürgen down the stairs. “What is she feeding you?”

Liesl lined up the mop, the broom, the cans of polish. She couldn’t even look around yet; she was trying to unfasten her mind from the baby, now being marched away from her. She hadn’t spoken with Frau Hefter since the October day she had rushed out of the house to catch Marta, Frank’s longtime housekeeper, in the ration lines. Liesl had found some extra coupons and wanted to bestow the prize on the housekeeper, who had taken Jürgen shopping and given her the morning off. From meters away, Liesl recognized the graceful matronly figure of Frau Hefter
standing beside Marta, making kissy noises at the baby in the pram. Jürgen dimpled and beamed. She was almost upon them when she heard what they were saying.

“Remember the time Susi visited the spa?” Frau Hefter said. “She wanted to stay a whole month, but he made her come home early. Now I wonder why.”

“She
loved company,” said Marta. “She would come down and talk to me during the children’s naps. She was never too proud.”

Their voices dropped out of earshot again, and then Marta said sourly,
“Unkraut vergeht nicht.” Weeds do not perish
.

It could have been her aunt’s voice speaking that dismissive phrase. For the Gypsies who came through Franconia with their begging children. For the town drunk. For the ugly black cat who dragged herself around, pregnant, every spring and fall, and left behind kittens no one wanted.
Unkraut vergeht nicht
.

Liesl spun around and hurried home. The houses beside her blurred into a broken line of brown and white, but she didn’t cry.

She managed to remain stone-faced around Marta all day. When night came, she sobbed into her pillow. The noise woke Frank, who was across the room on his own bed, having not yet touched her as a husband. He sat up in the dark and demanded to know why she was weeping. The story came out, muddled by sobs. Frau Hefter and Marta. They hated her. They had called her a weed.

“A weed?” He sounded amused. His derision angered her. His distance bothered her even more. Why wouldn’t he touch her?

“You know what I mean,” she said, and then pulled the eiderdown over her head, refusing to say anything else. In the morning, before Liesl fully understood what was happening, Frank had accused Marta of calling Liesl a
Mischling
, a half Jew, and endangering the family with her lies. Marta had quit. Liesl wept and railed at Frank for misunderstanding her and scaring off the only household help
she had. He had groused that she shouldn’t involve him in the overemotional affairs of women. Eventually their fighting had led to kissing, and kissing to Frank finally climbing into her bed at night. The children somehow noticed the change in both parents and became more agreeable. There was a blissful week when it seemed the broken, grieving Kappus family might begin to mend together. And then Frank had to leave for Weimar. And then the employment office said there might be a six-month delay in finding a new housekeeper. All available workers were needed in munitions factories.

Weeds do not perish
, Liesl thought angrily whenever Frau Hefter passed with her constantly pissing dachshund.
Yes, I am here to stay
.

And here she was, elevated to a
Putzfrau
herself now. She allotted herself five hours. Jürgen would enjoy the superior mothering of Frau Hefter, Herr Geiss would go to his
Stammtisch
at the local pub, Hans would stand in line for milk, and she and Ani would work together to whip the cobwebby Geiss house into proper order. Rags in hand, they began together in the kitchen, washing cabinets, but then he drifted away.

“What are you doing, Ani?” she called after a few minutes.

His voice was small and distant. “Cleaning.”

“What are you doing, Ani?” she called again, a quarter of an hour later.

“I’m cleaning . . . Mutti,” he said from the exact same spot.

His use of the endearing name didn’t thrill her now. It sounded like a bribe. She wrung out her rag, draped it over her wrist, and went to find him. The air was stale and musty, the furniture heavy, but not especially dirty. And yet something was strange about the Geiss house, something she couldn’t put her finger on.

Ani stood in the hallway. He was holding a waxen statue of the Führer, his hands curling around the knee-high boots. “Does the Führer know about the dwarf?”

“Oh,
Bübchen
, the dwarf’s not real.”

He stroked the boots with his thumb.

“Your brother just wanted to scare you.”

“Why?” His voice was very small.

“Because he doesn’t want you to be a baby anymore.”

She said it carelessly, focusing on her feather duster. Ani placed the statue back on the shelf and grabbed the next object, a porcelain figurine of a shepherdess, flowers crowning her hair and spilling from a basket.

He held up the simpering face to Liesl. “Can I take this home?”

“No, you may not.” Liesl grabbed the figure from him, setting it back on the grimy wood beside the Führer. “Why don’t you go explore for a while?”

Ani looked injured. “I was helping.”

“I know you were.” She bent and touched his cheek. “You’re a fine help.” She took the rag from Ani’s hand and tucked it in her apron pocket. “You were such a good boy, you deserve a break. Go scout for me, all right?”

Ani gave a gusty sigh and wandered off down the hall. His shoulder strap slid down. He had lost some weight, she decided, with a rush of worry.

“Come back and tell me what you find,” she called after him. “Just don’t touch anything.”

The Geisses and the Kappuses had been neighbors for fifty years, since before Frank was born, and the two villas angled toward each other, as if they were meant to be a pair.
Now we’re the Siamese twins
, Liesl said to herself, thinking of the tunnel. Through one of the living room windows, Herr Geiss had a perfect view of the Kappuses’ front door. Liesl paused at it, watching her new home from the outside: the heap of dachshund turds beside the rusting gate, the stoop marked by the small footprints of the boys. The deep brambles of the garden. An air
of waiting hung over everything. It must have been brighter and more orderly when both Frank and Susi lived there. It must have looked like a house full of life, instead of one half empty.

Yet now that Liesl stood in Herr Geiss’s house, she could feel the weight of his own loneliness, and it was far heavier. The air was almost wet with it, soaking the dark arms of the couches, the bare walls.

She looked up, startled by her revelation. That was it: All the walls were bare. Not a single painting or mirror hung anywhere.

Liesl called for Ani three times before setting off to look for him. Her heels clacked through the silent hall. Dust was already beginning to settle again, fuzzing the face of the Führer, the pretty shepherdess.

“Ani,” she said again. “Where do you always go?”