Motherland (7 page)

Frank inked his full name, and
Do you remember me?
He held the paper up for the bandaged man to read.

The eyes scanned the words. Frank waited for them to flare with recognition. Instead they moved to Frank’s face and the head slowly shook.

You were my father’s student. Herr Otto Kappus
.

A hesitation and then another shake.

Frank’s stomach began to knot.
Heinrich Hartmann from Hannesburg, yes?

This time the man’s hand rose and wagged for the pen. Frank put the pen in it and held the pad vertical while the hand scratched.

Yes
.

And then the fist fell to the table and the eyes closed. Just like that. Interview over, leaving Frank standing there, his next question ready, his fingers curling to write it. The whitewashed room gaped around him, and his coat felt thin and stiff.

“Christ, he’s exhausted,” said Frau Reiner. “How are we going to feed him enough?”

Frank didn’t answer, breathing into the uneasy feeling that spread through him whenever he was reminded of his father’s death. The room blurred. Beyond the double doors, he heard the clatter of wounded
men being herded to the delousing chambers. There, they would strip and hang their clothes to be gassed and sterilized while they showered in another room. It had to be done, but the practice bothered Frank. The hospital welcomed its patients like criminals.

“Once you start talking about old times, he’ll know who you are,” said Frau Reiner. She stood close to him.

“I don’t think he talks much,” muttered Frank.

“Best kind of man.”

He switched on his headlamp and peered into the hole that had been Hartmann’s mouth. The light flashed over the glistening maw, the exposed roots of teeth. Every bite the man took had to be an agony. “We’ll be able to reconstruct the mouth, but it will probably take more than one procedure,” he said to her, pointing. “He’s fortunate, though. The mandible isn’t fractured. He hasn’t lost bone, just tissue.”

“I heard you’re leaving,” Frau Reiner whispered.

He pretended not to hear her, straightening, snapping off the lamp. He eased it from his sweaty temples and handed it to her, avoiding her eyes. “Let’s have a full set of X-rays, and get the dentist to look at him,” he said with brusque cheer. “Was there anyone else I should see?”

At the front of every classroom in Frank’s childhood perched the same figure, thick and bunchy in the hips, erect in the spine and cowlick. Hartmann’s voice always issued forth as an amused whine, even as a child. His peers had loathed him, and some of his teachers, too. Frank could still remember crabby, graying Herr Nuss, standing in the dusty schoolroom light, telling a story:

When the king built a castle near the mill, he hated the noise of it, the wheat grinding in the stones. So the king took his case before the judge
. Make him move the mill,
he demanded
. I am king.
The judge ruled for the miller. The king had to move his castle or put up with the racket. And the king obeyed
.

“This is law in Germany,” said Herr Nuss. “This is
Rechtsstaat
. Even our rulers have to bow to it.”

Hartmann’s big head shot up. “Then how come you don’t have to wash your desk every day, and we do?” he wanted to know, and most of the kids watched approvingly as Hartmann got the switch.

But Frank’s father had adored Hartmann. Herr Kappus had never had a student like him, in all his days as a Latin teacher. What he admired most was Hartmann’s fluency. For Herr Kappus, son of a janitor, conquering every cognate had required superior strength and resolve. He excelled at instructing the average student, but how much more thrilling to bask in the light of a star! He followed the young
critic and poet’s progress as he left gymnasium and entered university, as Hartmann published tracts on Heine and Goethe, always informing Frank of the latest achievement.

Frank was glad his father couldn’t see his favorite now. He circled Hartmann’s bedside the next day, not stopping but watching all the same as the patient sat up and began playing skat with his neighbors, as the afternoon light whitened the ward’s windows. Hartmann’s bandages were off, per Frank’s orders, but he wore a green scarf to hide his face. Beside him, the other patients looked suddenly exposed. Brimges’s nose had a fat, tubular pedicle feeding it from his temple, and Alliner’s destroyed cheek was purple with healing scars. They were patients who’d come to Frank as monsters, and now their fearsome visages were finally giving way to mere ugliness. He knew that they hated their new faces, but at least they could grow used to them. They could walk down a street without terrifying women and children. What had Alliner said?
At least I don’t look like a creature no more
.

Frank rubbed his sleepless eyes. Around midnight, he had begun speculating that the new patient wasn’t Hartmann at all but someone posing as him. He recalled the boy’s big brow, his pale eyes. Had they developed into this elegant, destroyed skull? It was possible, but weren’t the ears all wrong? Hadn’t Hartmann’s ears stuck out from his head? This man’s lay flat.

When a nurse brought Hartmann some soup, Frank watched the scarf come off and the mouth attempt to eat. He sat down silently beside the patient, regarding the lipless hole flexing at the pressure of the spoon. Hiss, suck. The muscles had knit together to make a flap that worked like a second, outer tongue. Its motion made the thinnest skin bleed along the cheekbone. Hiss, suck. A dry noise, a wet noise, machine-like, inhuman. Hartmann’s neighbors glanced at him and then away.

Frank leaned forward and dabbed at Hartmann’s blood with some gauze. He felt the gray-blue eyes fall on him, then back to the soup.
Hartmann took three more spoonfuls. Hiss, suck. Then he offered Frank the bowl.

“You should eat it all,” Frank said before he remembered the patient was deaf. He took the bowl and gestured at Hartmann to finish, but the flap sucked inward against the teeth and the man pulled his scarf back over his face.

Frank set the soup on the window ledge, found a pen and paper.
You need more nourishment in order to heal
.

The eyes read it. The shoulders shrugged slightly, as if to say,
What else is new?

Are you in pain? How intense?

The response came quickly:
How intense is drowning?

Do you want morphine?
Frank wrote, grateful he did not have to utter the word aloud, in earshot of other patients. Not everyone was offered relief.

Not yet
, wrote Hartmann.

You don’t have to suffer
.

Hartmann read the sentence and leaned back, looping his hands over his knees. He seemed to be studying some spot in the air above the other patients’ beds. He shook his head slightly, as if amused by the statement, as if he now owned pain the way he’d once owned knowledge.

Frank took a breath and scrawled.
How is your mother? Would you like me to write to her?

There was a hesitation, and then the hand took the pen.
I really don’t remember you
.

Hartmann’s blue eyes were hard and cold, but the corners glistened. Frank held the message for a moment. The scarf rippled with the patient’s breath. Frank wondered if Hartmann’s nerves still sent pure signals up his skull about the pain of his stretched lips. Or was their communication as broken and fragmented as the flesh? Could the neural paths be restored by surgery; could the wounded man feel
whole again? He’d pondered this question with every patient, but less so each time.

Alliner had told him,
It feels like a sharp mask is inside my skin. Like I got two faces. Only one is made of glass and it doesn’t move
, and that night Frank had dreamed he was on stage, his own face heavy and split by a second face. He’d woken gurgling and pulling at his throat, and decided not to ask again. In a few short months, he’d learned to force his mind away from whatever he could not accomplish. Contemplation led to horror, and horror made it impossible to see the small gains of his incisions and grafts.

But Hartmann. He couldn’t look at Hartmann without seeing memory itself. Every day at their elementary school’s end, all the boys had burst up from their desks except the star, who’d stared at his cloudy, sponged-off slate. No one had ever walked home with him but the occasional brainy girl.

Excuse me again
, Frank wrote.
Mistaken identity
. He picked up the soup bowl and spoon. “Let’s have some more, shall we?” he said aloud, scooping some broth.

Hartmann gestured for the pen again and put the pad by his side as he wrote another message.

Nothing wrong with my hands. I can feed myself
.

Writing letters home was a strain. Frank didn’t know how to explain about the glassy-eyed patients who arrived with centimeter-deep pools of lice on their sunken bellies. Or how the wards sounded at night, full of groans and foul, rattling coughs. He didn’t want to pain Liesl, so he mostly stuck to comments about the weather and responses to news of his sons. He didn’t know how to tell Liesl that he loved her, either. Some nights he just held the pendant he’d bought for her until it warmed in his palm. Other nights, he looked at her picture, trying to memorize her features. She wasn’t classically pretty like Susi. Her nose was too large, her thick red hair didn’t obey hats or combs, but the snapshot had caught the catlike arch of her brows, her winsome, radiant smile.

Yet the night after Frank met Hartmann, he wrote to Liesl about the transfer to Berlin, and this time the letter emerged easily. It almost sounded like another man writing, someone confident with words, a father who knew he was making the best choice for his family, a good German who did not believe the war would end. He also mentioned his old classmate, changing the details to make it seem as if he and Hartmann had mutually recognized each other. He’d sworn he would operate on Hartmann somehow, before he left.
I owe it to him
. The two stories wound together: a surgeon describing his devotion to injured
men.
I owe it to them
. When ink covered the whole paper, Frank folded it without reading it and dropped it in the hospital’s outbox.

All day he tried to imagine Liesl reading it, but couldn’t. What would she think? How would she know that he still had the rucksack packed and hidden beneath his bed? That if ever she called to him, he would come? He could never say such things with the censors.

The package from her appeared in his room the following afternoon, as if summoned. He opened it gingerly, but the box had clearly been raided long ago, its paper ripped and retaped, the tape dirty from transport. If there had been money or a map, it was gone now, stolen before the package even reached the hospital. All that was left was an innocent, golden, Christmas stollen, wrapped in butcher paper, and a brief letter.

Frank looked out the window toward Schnell’s office, relieved and astonished at his earlier foolhardiness, the dangerous game he’d asked Liesl to play. Someone’s greed had saved them somewhere along the way. He scanned the letter.

I had no nuts or fruit
, Liesl had written.
Just a few raisins and one big fig. Enjoy! Your loving wife
.

Frank turned the loaf over in his hands. He’d never heard of figs in stollen, but Liesl had her own country ways of cooking: big, salty, hearty slices of things, lots of butter, meats baked wet and soft. It had taken some getting used to, but he missed it now. It pained him to think of her receiving his letter in return, announcing his departure for Berlin. He would write her another note tonight.