Motherland (18 page)
But the kids didn’t listen. They ran pell-mell into every empty room, and Hans leapt after them, calling out, “Wait, wait.”
Ani followed his brother, clinging to the rail. The jerky, weak way he moved caught one mother’s eyes.
“Children,” the mother said, reaching for the boys who were already too far away.
“He’s not contagious,” Liesl said loudly, her cheeks burning. “He’s not contagious at all.”
And then they all were looking at Ani, the kids and the mothers and
the government official, and she saw how different he seemed from the other children. Their limbs were made of muscle and sinew, their dirt-smudged faces mobile and full of curiosity. Ani gave them a smile, his usual innocent, hopeful smile, upper teeth poking over his lip, but the blue pallor of his skin distorted it and made it look sad and hungry. “This is my house,” he said, his head flicking once, twice, three times to the right, his eyes blinking rapidly. For a moment, the entire stairwell fell silent as the boy twitched and jerked.
In the cafeteria, Linden, Frank, and Frau Reiner ate the way they operated on patients: together, not looking at one another, making jibes from the corners of their mouths. There was nothing to savor about the meals. The cook’s chief ingredient appeared to be exertion; he made his stews with so much noise that people joked that his hands must be made of the same iron as his pots. Crash. Clank. The pungent, greased-up flavors always stuck in Frank’s throat.
One day Frau Reiner launched into an extended complaint about the nurse’s undersupplied accommodations. “Frau Hupper has two pillows and she won’t share either of them with the new girls,” she said. “Everybody knows, but she pretends she doesn’t notice.”
“Maybe she’s saving her pillows for Herr Hupper,” said Linden. “Mail,” he added, pointing at the delivery boy. Mail. The high point or low point of a day. They all stopped talking until the boy came to their table.
Frank was expecting a letter from the chief surgeon at the new hospital in Berlin. He’d written about Hartmann’s case, hoping the surgeon would be intrigued enough to accept the patient. Instead, the boy handed him a letter from Liesl, and something with an OKW seal for Frau Reiner.
“It’s a transfer,” Linden said to the nurse. “They’re sending you away, too.”
Frau Reiner ran her finger over the seal and did not open it.
Frank ripped into his letter, scanning the loopy, cheerful handwriting of his second wife. After a few sentences, the words began to blur. He caught a phrase here and there,
housing office
and
they sound like clean families
and
bed in your father’s study
, but his mind balked at picturing what Liesl was describing: his childhood home invaded, his sons crushed into a closet bedroom, his wife and baby sleeping on the study’s dusty floor.
He let the papers fall next to his soup bowl and attacked the stew. It tasted like a rat’s backwash. After a few bites, he set his spoon down.
“Bad news?” said Frau Reiner. She had pushed up her striped sleeves and taken off her white cap, and she looked like a farmwife sitting down for supper.
He forced himself to shrug as he explained the refugees moving into his house, squashing his family into a single floor, while the neighbor’s house gaped empty, housing one man and his daughter-in-law. What had happened to Herr Geiss’s promise? He’d told Frank that the house would stay off the refugee list. “Just eleven women and children tramping all over my home,” he said.
“Bad luck,” said Linden. He turned to Frau Reiner. “Why don’t you open it?”
Frau Reiner placed her thumb under the envelope flap and tore. Linden tried to scan it over her shoulder, but she pulled away. “I’m going to Berlin, too,” she said, her tone unreadable.
“I knew it,” said Linden. “And now they’ll send me to Bavaria to put the cows to sleep.”
“Different hospital,” said Frau Reiner, still reading. “But it’s in the center of town.”
“How romantic,” said Linden. “You and Frank can meet by the light of the incendiary bombs.”
Frank shifted in his chair. Linden’s banter suddenly irritated him. He kept seeing filthy kids climbing on his parents’ wedding furniture,
sleeping in his beds. One family might have been tolerable, but two? How did such things happen?
Out the window, Bundt pushed his cart to the incinerator, still wearing the same rags for shoes.
“Stupid Polack,” he heard himself say. “He thinks I’m going to run. He accused me of it the other day.”
His friends looked at him, their mouths slightly open. In all their conversations, none of them had ever mentioned desertion.
“Crazy, isn’t it?” Frank took a sip of bitter ersatz coffee. “I’m about to be promoted.”
“Bundt?” Linden’s brown eyes widened with disbelief. “He can’t even speak German. Were you reading his mind?”
“He was reading his smoke signals,” said Frau Reiner.
Linden smirked and swabbed at the crumbs in his beard.
Frank felt a rush of aggravation again, this time at himself, for playing along with the endless, pointless joking, for drawing Bundt into it. He folded Liesl’s letter. He creased the sentences about the new hordes filling his house, and stuffed them away. He scraped up the last of his stew. The din of the room filled his ears.
After dark, he went to find Bundt. He wanted to buy the shoes back. The least he could do now was to send all his gifts home, to give his family some pleasure.
The Pole had his own small quarters off the main ward. Frank knocked. After a silence, he opened the door and looked in. The room was unheated, no light but dim moonrays leaking through one small window. Frank shivered in his coat. A blanket rested on the floor, folded into an exact rectangle, like a flag on a coffin. A photograph hung from a nail. It showed Bundt and a young woman, practically a girl, with a
baby in her arms. That was all. The room had no closet and no shelves. If Bundt had found the shoes, they weren’t here. Or maybe they were hidden under the floor. Frank prodded the planks with his toes, looking for a loose one. He heard a voice on the other side of the wall and jumped back a step. Then he realized Bundt’s room bordered one of the wards. At night Bundt must have slept on the floor, beneath the level of the patient’s beds.
Frank slipped out the door and was halfway down the hall when he ran into the Pole.
“Evening,” Frank said.
Bundt nodded and slowed his gait, and Frank slowed, too, but they didn’t stop; they kept passing each other. Bundt’s ashy smell filled the narrow space.
“Did you find them?” Frank blurted when he was almost beyond the Pole.
Bundt halted. He was holding thick fireplace gloves in one hand and he looked down at them. “These?” he said. “I get these because my hands was burning. From one of nurses.” He smiled up. “Pretty one, too.”
“I gave you some shoes,” Frank said.
Bundt cocked his head. “You gave me shoes,” he repeated in a puzzled tone.
“I was saving them for my son,” said Frank.
“You gave me boy shoes. For my son?” Bundt’s grin widened.
“No. For you.” Frank found himself grinning, too, a big, sloppy clown grin. “They’re not in your room. I know you hid them somewhere,” he said. “Name your price. I’ll pay you for them.”
Bundt’s body went utterly still. His round cheeks fell sharply from their bones. “You search my room,” he said slowly. “What I have in there? I have nothing.”
“But I’m offering to pay you,” said Frank. “How much do you want?”
Bundt’s eyes were cold.
“You pay me all your money for a thousand years, and it not be enough,” he said finally.
“Never mind,” Frank muttered, and started off down the hall.
“Ten thousand years,” Bundt called after him.
It was sleeting outside when Frank read the chief surgeon’s letter twice, three times, and then scribbled Hartmann’s name into the operating log. All the way to the wards, the roof rattled with the sound of the frozen rain, and his mind ran over the confident but respectful tone of his future colleague. The surgeon hinted that if Frank’s remote skin graft on Hartmann was a success, then Frank might be able to put together a clinical trial in Berlin. Such scientific study wouldn’t end with the end of the war. The promises made Frank heady, but he steeled himself to stay calm. Hartmann’s surgery would be a test, he told himself. If he succeeded, if he proved himself, perhaps he could bargain for a furlough to go home before Berlin.
You can’t be transferred
, he wrote to Hartmann, perched on the edge of his bed.
But he thinks I can try a remote skin graft. If it takes, you may only need a minor second operation
.
How soon?
Frank grinned.
We can start prepping you tomorrow
.
Hartmann seized his hand. Its dry, claw-like texture surprised Frank. It felt like the hand of an old man. He spoke aloud, without realizing it, “It’s all right, don’t thank me yet,” but then he felt the hard thing Hartmann had shoved from his cuff into Frank’s. A white wedge. Frank pulled away, and for a moment they just stared at each other;
Frank was conscious that some new kind of transaction had passed between them, not just the sympathy of doctor and patient, or of old childhood friends, but something more demanding and dangerous. His stomach twisted.
I have a career now
, he whispered internally.
I have a wife and sons
.
He rose without speaking and left Hartmann’s bedside. He didn’t dare glance to see if anyone had noticed, but he shoved his hands into his coat, pushing the wedge of paper deep.
The sleet stopped abruptly and a silence spread over the wards. He heard his own footsteps passing by the foot of the patient’s beds, and their broken conversations resuming. He heard one fellow complaining about his frostbitten feet, and another relating the exact recipe for his father’s
Spätzle
, and others bargaining for cigarettes and magazines. The patients had an extensive black market, trading goods and services. Once Schnell had cracked down on a patient offering sexual favors, but for the most part the bartering ebbed and flowed undisturbed.
He passed through the far door and entered the storage room, relieved to be alone among the silent crates and bottles. What if the paper was simply a message for Hartmann’s mother? Or something humble like a recipe or a list of possessions? Or a will? What if it was intended for someone else? He fingered the smooth wedge. If he opened it, he would be taking responsibility for what was inside. He could be implicated. He could be arrested.