Motherland (17 page)

“But I’m not full!” Hans said, his face crumpling. “I’m not full!”

That night Liesl made Hans stand before her in his underclothes to make sure he hadn’t lost weight, too. He hadn’t. In fact he had grown a centimeter, according to the last mark on the closet doorjamb. Liesl leaned over him and made a new mark with a pencil. “You’re getting to be such a big boy,” she exclaimed, and was surprised when Hans blushed and bit his lip. “I mean, what else could I expect from ‘the man’ of the house?” she added, quailing at her clumsiness when he shoved past her and leapt into bed, pulling the covers over his head.

Despite the evidence that Hans had grown, she watched both him and Ani at mealtime now, intent that every spoonful she cooked made it into their mouths. She gave Jürgen milk with egg stirred in it, putting the bottle to his lips whenever she could. He twisted his head from side to side, as if to say, “Enough, enough.” No traces of his fever remained, and his color was good. He rolled about the floor, bashing chair legs.

“Watch out! He’ll get drafted soon,” said Uta. “He could take on a Russian tank.”

Ani regained some of his old energy. The day before the new tenants’ arrival, he joined Hans running upstairs and downstairs, clearing any last valuables from the first and third floors. Liesl delighted in watching him.
See?
she told Dr. Becker in her mind.
Does that look malnourished to you?

“Why are we scurrying about like serfs?” Uta complained at the constant racket. “They should be grateful to have a roof over their heads.”

Liesl ignored her. Labor was a way of dissolving her days into an attainable perfection. A wardrobe could be tidied and polished. A window could be washed of fly specks and dust. As long as she was moving, cleaning, sweeping, she would not become paralyzed by worry. Besides, she wanted to have everything ready for the strangers who were going to take over her home. To have a week’s worth of coal piled beside their stoves, a bucket of water for coffee and washing, the sills clean of dirt. To give them washed walls and polished floors, rooms that felt
prewar
, like the golden
Gugelhopf
cake.

Every morning, Liesl woke ready to attack a specific room, a box of unwanted things, to finally clear Susi’s clutter from the villa. The man from the housing office came one day with his teenage sons, a horse, and a blue sleigh with paint so cracked and faded that it must have dated to the last century. He and his sons piled the sleigh high with the villa’s stained tablecloths, the broken gateleg table, the ugly paintings of grapes and apples.

Their horse was tall and gray, with a lock of black mane that fell in his eyes. A gelding. He was old enough to work hard, but he looked like a handful, the way he tossed his head around at every little noise outside.

Liesl was watching him when she heard Uta come into the boys’ old bedroom—soon to be their living room. “I’m glad to have all that junk out,” Liesl said. “But it makes me miss her.”

“Who?”

“Susi.”

“You didn’t know her.”

“But I do. I can’t explain it,” Liesl said. Deep in a bedroom corner, behind a box of moth-eaten towels, she had found one of Susi’s sanitary pads, faintly stained. She’d stood there, holding the thick cotton a long time, before finally shoving it deep in the linen closet.

“I should go back to Berlin,” said Uta.

Liesl licked the corner of her apron and wiped at Jürgen’s sooty face. “I thought you were staying to find Dr. Schein.”

“I came to find him,” Uta said. “But I stayed . . . I don’t know why I stayed.”

Outside, the mover’s sons gestured for Hans and Ani to come closer and they did, cautiously, their hands in their pockets.

“I don’t want you to go,” Liesl said.

“I know.” Uta tucked her blond hair back behind her ear. She no longer set it in curls each night. It was longer and bushier and made her face look round and out of place, like a clock wearing a wig. Yet she still stubbornly wore her gold bracelet, the one Hans-Paul Jost had given her on the day of their elopement. They’d gone into a jeweler’s to pick out rings but emerged with the bracelet instead. Uta had thought she’d have the next day to buy a ring. She didn’t know that the marriage would be consummated but never officialized, the elder Mr. Jost would intercept them, and Hans-Paul Jost would disappear from her life, leaving her the one shining token of his affection.
My lucky shackle
, Uta called it. A thick, smooth band of French design, it was part of Uta’s mystique at the spa, but now it clashed with the apron and the unfixed hair.

“You’ll never take that off, will you?” Liesl said, gesturing.

“I had it appraised. Apparently the designer died young and it’s worth a fortune now,” said Uta, holding up her arm. “But no. It reminds me of where I came from.” There was an edge in her voice.

They regarded the boys together. Ani seemed much smaller than his brother.

“He’s doing better,” Liesl said hopefully. “Don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” Uta said.

“I think he probably just got what Jürgen had,” said Liesl. She sat down on the sofa, picked up the baby, and let him play with her shirt buttons. “I don’t think we need to see that doctor again, but I do need
to build Ani’s strength back up. I wish there was some way to get some lamb. My aunt used to make a wonderful lamb in sour cream.”

Uta turned away from the window, her mouth compressed to a line.

“Even a little liver, instead of all this gristle and bone,” Liesl said lightly. “Frau Hefter, how does she feed six children?”

When Uta didn’t answer a second time, Liesl set Jürgen down on the floor with some metal spoons. “I’m trying, you know,” she half shouted. To hide her tears, she thundered downstairs and all the way outside. She passed Hans and Ani, both watching the horse with wary, worshipful faces.

She walked right up to the gelding and reached out to comb his nose with her fingers. The velvet nostrils flared. She ran a hand along his neck. His fur tickled her palm with delicious spikiness, but when his musty, salty scent washed over her, the tears began to spill. Her mind flooded with images of the farm where she’d grown up: the steam of the barn in winter, the draft horses looming, giant as trees. She had always been lonely there, even caring for her nieces and nephews, but life hadn’t hurt so much. She wished she could see the animals again: their dusty, caked coats, the way their eyes did not look straight out of their faces, but sideways, watching everything coming and going.

The horse snorted. He nudged toward her pockets. “You be a good boy,” she croaked, smiling into the tears. “You be a good boy, now.” Then she brushed her wrist against her face and hurried back inside, ignoring the dumbfounded gazes of Hans and Ani.

“You always liked horses, didn’t you,” Uta said as Liesl thumped into the room again. “I was always jealous of how much they liked you.”

Liesl slid into slippers, picked up Jürgen, and sat him on the couch. He squirmed and made a noise of protest, craning for the floor. She put his fingers on one of her buttons.

“And I know you’re trying,” said Uta. “There isn’t a woman on earth who tries harder than you.”

Liesl snorted. “I can think of a few.”

The child’s fingers pushed her button in and out, in and out.

“It’s just—what will you do if Frank never comes home again?” said Uta.

Liesl shrugged. She felt the tears coming again.

“What will you do if this house gets destroyed?” said Uta. Her usual sardonic tone was gone.

Jürgen chuckled and grabbed her hair. He twisted it around his finger.

Liesl’s chin shot up. “What would you do?”

“I don’t know,” Uta said. “I don’t know anymore. That’s why I’m asking you.”

In the window’s light it was clear Uta was pregnant now. A sickle of flesh was growing at her waist, under her jawbone.

“I don’t know, either,” Liesl said. “I have them. Frank. The boys.” Jürgen yanked and her scalp stung. “Stop,” she murmured. “I have this life.”

Uta wiped her face with her hand. She tried to smirk, but her lips wobbled. “I don’t want this life,” she said. “That’s why I should go back. They must miss me like crazy. And I can look out for your husband when he gets there.”

“But you’re safe
here,”
Liesl whispered. “And the baby.”

Uta dotted the edges of her eyes with a handkerchief. “
Ja, ja,”
she said in the singsong, detached voice that women of their village had used when a crop failed or a barn burned down.

“Is my life really so awful?” Liesl demanded.

Outside, the man slapped the reins and the sled budged so slowly it seemed as if the landscape was shifting around it. Uta fisted her handkerchief and tucked it back in her pocket. She sniffed. “No,” she said. “It’s not awful at all.”

After her disappointment with Berte Geiss, Liesl tried to rein in her expectations for the new neighbors. Still, she felt predisposed to prefer the Dillmans. A humble family of miners from Silesia. They were already clear in her mind. According to the papers from the housing office, the wife was young and her children had simple names like Otto and Gertrude. Their clothes would be threadbare, their teeth crooked and gapped, but their cheeks ruddy, full of health. They would go to bed early, like good country people, and rise with the dawn.

The Winters, by contrast, hailed from a city in East Prussia that had a squalid reputation, and the children had grand, unpronounceable names like Giselher and Dankwart. Furthermore, they appeared to be almost all teenage boys, and capable, Liesl thought, of supporting their mother so she shouldn’t have to rely on strangers to take them in. The Winter family business was cleaning and repairing typewriters, which meant they would stink up the house with ink and solvent. And the noise! Clattering keys, dings, rattles, clunks—how would Jürgen ever nap?

Liesl worked to set her prejudices aside as eleven o’clock passed. The families were supposed to arrive at noon with the man from the housing office. Ani and Hans were already stuffed into starched shirts, and Jürgen wrapped in his best jumper. They played miserably under her vigilant watch. Even Uta had risen to the occasion and curled her
hair, but it was still too long and hung around her neck instead of her cheeks. She wore a look of amused disdain as Liesl bustled upstairs and downstairs, checking the rooms one last time. They sparkled, speckless and fragrant with the leathery smell of polish that Liesl had applied herself until long after midnight.

Finally the doorbell rang. The two families flooded through the threshold in no particular order, so it was hard to tell a Winter from a Dillman or a Dillman from a Winter, though one family seemed, as a rule, to have darker hair. Preceding them up the railing was a combined odor: wood smoke and urine and sour milk. How long had it been since they’d had a proper bath or sleep? Their clothes appeared pasted onto their bodies; the girls looked like baby dolls stuffed into the wrong outfits. The boys’ pants were short as knickers.

They didn’t stop still for proper introductions, either. The two mothers craned past Liesl to see the rooms beyond, and the kids burst through to take the stairs and check things out for themselves. Their steps made a thunder and their hands smudged clouds onto the polished rail. Within moments, all shine was gone.

“Dillmans upstairs, Winters downstairs,” a new man from the housing office said. He stood behind the families, holding a sheaf of papers. He had a crisp uniform and clean, trimmed fingernails, as if he, too, had dressed up for the occasion. “Dillmans upstairs, Winters downstairs.”