Motherland (44 page)

“Susi never had your gift for infants,” he said. “She liked the boys better when they were walking and talking.” He looked at her, a searching gaze that made her uncomfortable. She walked to the couch and sat down.

“They’re all good boys,” she said to the top of Jürgen’s head.

“Sometimes I still don’t get it,” Frank said. “I didn’t have anything to offer you but three grief-stricken kids and my own absence, and you took it.” He cleared his throat. “You took it like it was a gift and you raised my sons when I couldn’t.” He walked back toward her and then crouched by her feet. “The whole time I was running home, I thought, why would she, except that she wanted a family, and this war took all the other men away.”

In his nearness, he looked younger, earnest, endearing. Liesl’s gaze fell to her wedding ring, the one that had been Susi’s before her. She wished the boys would come back, would light up the room with their bickering and laughter. She wished Frank would just accept the simple fact: We are together now. She didn’t want to think about the past or the future.

“And I thought, how can I be the man she deserves?” Frank’s voice cracked. He touched her knees. “I can get home. I can save my son. I can feed my family, and I can hide like the others, and when it’s safe—maybe months, maybe years—I can work again. It doesn’t have to be medicine. I’ll do anything.”

Liesl twisted the ring, feeling the gold pull away from her skin.

Frank kept holding her knees and talking, describing how everything changed the moment he stepped across his own threshold. He saw the walls that had protected his mother and father, his wives and children, and now new families. He saw the shelter his sons had fixed in case the rest of their home was destroyed, and the hole his neighbor had made to make it possible for one house to escape into another. Everything
was porous now, nothing closed, nothing fixed. A man could create himself anew.

He sounded giddy as a boy.

“You should rest,” she said. “You haven’t rested since you’ve been home.”

Frank rose and towered over her. “I’m not leaving again,” he said. “I’m not hiding. When the Americans come to this house, I’m going to be with you.”

What was he saying? He touched her shoulder. His hand weighed like a sack of meat. She shook it off.

“Liesl,” he said.

She shook her head, her legs clenched, her neck stiff, while Frank waited, shifting from foot to foot. There was a noise on the balcony as a black rabbit crossed the hutch and sniffed the mesh. Its ears swiveled back and forth.

“You’ll break their hearts,” she whispered.

The rabbit hopped back to the shadows. Frank touched her shoulder again, and this time she let him. She let him draw her up from the couch and close his arms around her and Jürgen. She breathed into the linen of his shirt, her legs weak and shaky.

What will you do if Frank never comes home?
she heard Uta’s voice again.

The door swung open. Hans stood there, frowning. “Ani’s gone,” he said.

Ani rounded the corner and then took off for the brewery pasture. He knew where the soft sprigs poked up through the soil. He knew because his mother had once showed him where to gather sorrel for
Sauerbraten
. He remembered walking beside her, tugging the tender shoots.

No one watched that field. No one would chase him away. He sprinted, and the women on their way to the ruined market stared, their hands tightening on their empty bags. He ran harder, even when one shouted at him, “Slow down! I thought there was a Yank behind you.”

Not a Yank, but surely Hans, once they figured out he was gone. Vati would send Hans right away, and Hans was fast. Faster. Ani could feel the old weakness in his bones and muscles, but he was getting strong again. His head was clearing, too. In the country, under the stars, he’d stopped having bad dreams and started to have good ones. He wanted to own his own yellow barn and fields one day. He’d announced it to his stepmother last night. She asked him why, and he said, because he liked growing things. Then she told him about sowing her own garden when she was a child—potatoes, peas, and cucumbers in a ring of daisies and asters. She told him about wandering barefoot in the rows of new barley with Fräulein Müller, and imagining they were queens of barley and all the green plants were their loyal subjects. Then she’d fallen silent.

Is that the end?
he’d asked.

The end of what?

The story
.

No. But I forget the rest
. She’d sounded sad.

Can I see your farm sometime, Mutti?

She’d pinched the bridge of her nose and covered her eyes with her thumbs.
Yes, yes, of course you can
, she’d said and smiled.

He knew she was not lying and she was not leaving. She would never leave them. He knew because of the way she looked at his father, and his father looked at her. It was as if a thin gold chain attached them. He remembered the same gold unspooling between himself and his mother, and how her love for him tugged him back whenever he ventured too far from the house. His recognition of this new love filled him with purpose. He would be a good boy. He would not cry or fall down. He would take care of Jürgen and show him how, in turn, to care for the bunnies. He felt bad for sneaking away, but he didn’t want the animals to go hungry.

He reached the edge of the pasture. It was thick and brown, with a few patches of melted snow. But here and there he could see the green shooting up beneath, and he began to bend, to grab and tear. His nose filled with the sweet aroma of ripped grass. He stuffed his pockets. He saw the small flat leaves of clover and picked it, too. There would be more. It didn’t matter if he stripped these few tender things out from the roots. More would grow. More and more. This was just the beginning.

He was almost ready to head home when he saw it.

Under a big hummock of dead grass, it hid, about the length of a grown man’s shoe. A flash of bright green. Beneath it, red. The arch of a wing. A claw.

He paused, his heart beating in his throat. He sneaked closer. He was reaching when his foot bumped something hard.

White light.

Fly up.

While Liesl was putting Jürgen down to sleep, she heard a knock on the door. Not Hans and Ani. Hans and Ani wouldn’t knock. They would just pile in, full of noise and purpose, Hans collaring his brother to show him off, safely returned.

Instead, it was Frau Winter announcing that a few streets over, the American officers were moving three whole families out of their villas.

“Their new headquarters,” she said.

Liesl listened to Frank thank her for the information and deftly herd her out, far quicker than she ever managed to do. The door thudded shut. After a few moments, the baby’s eyelids fluttered, and Liesl tiptoed out of the room.

“What did she say about the Americans?” she asked Frank when she rejoined him in the main room. He was sanding a few patches of rough wood on the hutch.

“They’re moving people out,” he said, his hands moving up and down, fine dust falling to the floor.

Liesl watched it fall, resisting the impulse to fetch a pan and broom. Instead she swept up Hans’s small handful of grass and put it in a clean ashtray.

She wanted Frank to understand that she wasn’t changing her mind about his plans. A father should do whatever he needed to stay alive for his family. There wasn’t anything more honorable than that.

A squall rose from the other room.

“I’ll get him,” Frank said, throwing down the sandpaper.

“He might go back to sleep,” Liesl said, but Frank was already down the hall. She picked up his coat, noting the missing button, and went to her sewing box to search for a match. The baby cried louder and then miraculously fell silent as Frank began to sing.

She heard the creak of feet outside the door, a rustling. “Come in. Quietly,” she said, irritated at the boys. “Your brother is trying to sleep.”

There was another creak.

“Come in,” she said, rising. “Hurry it up now.”

Then she heard an adult male cough.

“Who is it?” She froze. Her mind went to Uta’s lover. But he had no reason to come back here.

“RLB,” said a gravelly male voice.

She twisted the knob and saw Herr Geiss standing there, holding a large bundle inside a blanket. The old man was wearing the silver star of the air raid committee, only it appeared as if someone had picked out some of the stitches and left others. A hand could reach up and rip it right off his coat.

“Herr Kappus, please,” the old man said hoarsely. The lines of his face looked carved by knives.

“He’s with the baby,” she said. She heard Frank abruptly stop singing.

Herr Geiss adjusted his hold on the bundle, hitching it higher up his chest. She smelled something scorched.

“Get him, please,” said Herr Geiss.

The shadows of the living room shifted and she felt Frank appear behind her.

“We in the Reichsluftschutzbund extend our deepest regrets,” Herr Geiss said, his stoic expression collapsing. “There was a piece of unexploded ordnance on the brewery grounds . . .” He trailed off. A tiny blade of green drifted from beneath the blanket and fell to the floor.

Frank shoved past Liesl and took the bundle from Herr Geiss’s arms. He made a wordless sound, clutching the blanket tight to him, revealing the shape of a small head and shoulders.

Their old neighbor stepped back and bowed his head. Above and below, doors in the house clicked shut.

“The field was marked for clearing,” said Herr Geiss, touching his star.

Liesl heard a slam. Hans bounded up the stairs, his face open and expectant.

Don’t come back now
, she wanted to say, but she couldn’t breathe. She groped for air with her lips, her tongue, but nothing entered.

She tried to see the closet room with the eyes of an American soldier. She viewed the two boys’ beds, jammed up against opposite walls, neatly made, and a painting of boys in sailboats above. She saw the light flooding from a small high window. No sign of a grown man anywhere. The room was as tidy as the rest of the apartment. The room had been scrubbed like the rest of the rooms. The sheets had been laundered and the blankets had been shaken over the balcony and the floors washed (not waxed—there was no wax). She breathed in. The smell was still there. Charred flesh. It permeated everything. The cemeteries were full—they’d had to bury Ani in the backyard. Frank had insisted they bury him—he dug the grave at night, all night—and then Frank had simply vanished, his body still present, but his spirit elsewhere. He was a man walking alone across the deep snow.