Motherland (25 page)

“Primitive instinct,” said Berte. “The love of caves. Self-protection, I guess.”

“What does she say about me exactly?” Liesl fought to sound calm.

“Oh, she’s worried you’re going to be harboring a deserter, for one,” Berte said airily. “And that your crazy little boy will set fire to the house one day. She honestly doesn’t know how she can bear it all.” She cleared her throat again, a tiny sound. “Not without a strong man around.”

“Set fire to the
house
?” Liesl said. “Ani has never harmed anyone in his life.”

“That’s what my father-in-law told her,” said Berte. “He’s quite fond of your sons. And anyway, he just went away on a business trip, so he’s preoccupied.”

Liesl tried to sort through the pieces of information Berte had just related. Of course their house was crawling with Dillmans—the girls strewed themselves everywhere—so it was possible one of them had overheard a private conversation between herself and Uta.
Feind hort mit
. The enemy was listening, all right.

“Just thought you should know,” said Berte.

The baby peeked out at them and grinned, batting the table legs with his hands. A funny expression crossed Berte’s face. “He looks a lot like Hans,” she said.

“Yes, well,” Liesl said. “I should be going. Thank you. For letting us come in.” She plucked Jürgen from his cave and wrapped the shawl around them both again. The whole process took a couple of cumbersome minutes during which Berte watched her in silence. “It’s
so cold out there today,” Liesl added, and hitched her skirt with her free hand to take the steps down to the walk.

“He really ran away?” Berte called after her.

Liesl nodded without turning around.

“I know he likes to go to the old brewery,” Berte said. “He found some cigarettes there once. He’s convinced he’ll get lucky again.”

Uta stumbled after the younger Kappus kid, loping and hopping ahead, his disintegrating shoes barely touching down on the snowy cobblestone before he lifted them again. “Hans,” Ani called to the shuttered houses, the woolly gray smoke. “Hans, Hans, Hans.”

Every time Uta’s boots slipped, she felt the nausea at her center slide, too. If she fell, it would fall with her. If she halted, it would halt, slosh, spread. Even when she slept, it sank through her dreams, a sea creature squirming through soft seaweeds. She gripped the bracelet on her wrist and soldiered on.

She’d insisted on leading the search, partly to escape the apartment where he had found her, to flee the furniture and walls his eyes had touched, and partly to escape Liesl’s worry and pity. Her friend’s woeful gaze followed her everywhere, and Uta couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t stand Liesl crying over her. If anyone heaped any more worries on Liesl, the poor girl would crack.

Yes, she would have to go back to Berlin, and once she went back, she would be back forever, living in the rubble. Germany would lose the war. Men like him would be destroyed, and their women dragged through the mud. Emmy Göring and all the ladies with their stolen furs and jewels would be paraded in front of the world as bloodthirsty crows who’d fed on the corpses of the murdered. It didn’t matter that Uta
hardly knew Emmy Göring, that she herself had refused to accept such gifts. Uta had never lusted for property, only company, only room after room full of elegant people. And she’d been to the right parties. She’d flattered and laughed in public. She would be standing in the edges of photographs, a pale, glowing face.

The Kappus boy led her past the wall where the party posted its slogans:
ALLE RÄDER MÜSSEN ROLLEN FÜR DEN SIEG. ALL WHEELS MUST ROLL FOR VICTORY
. He was humming a breathless little song to himself and didn’t look up.

Hans would have looked up. He was that kind of boy, always looking at the skies, always reading the signs. Which one was he following now? She didn’t think he was at the brewery, but it was the only clue they had.

Ani led her down the road toward the last open pasture in Hannesburg, now an expanse of lumpy snow and yellow grass. The brewery property divided Liesl’s neighborhood of pleasant modern villas from the Alt Stadt, densely packed apartments where people still lived without cellars or indoor plumbing. The brewery lot was vast for the middle of town: on one side of it stood the rectangular ruins of what must have been a stable once. On the other rose a fence, its black iron gates tipped with white, around an ancient brick edifice with two towers. Whoever owned the building did not maintain it. The windows were cracked or missing; the locks on the gate had rusted. Nevertheless, improvements encroached. Beyond the far side of the building, the town had built a public shelter for families from the Alt Stadt. Uta had seen it on another walk. The shelter’s sign had been bright and new, its door swept clean.

The cobblestone ended at grass, and Uta stumbled.

“Slow down,” Uta said crossly, her stomach lurching. She put her hand in her coat pocket and touched the curve. She shouldn’t be sick this late. Women were sick early and then they got over it, and then they started to show. She had gone through four months without sickness. In the first three, she pretended that nothing had changed inside her body because the long expanse below her ribs remained flat as ever. Then one
day, her bracelet felt tight on her wrist. Her stockings kept snapping off her thighs. Her legs and hips had gotten fat, and the fat was different, plush and creamy as goose liver. Her body had begun plumping itself.

“Hans,” the boy called. They crossed the pasture on a bumpy, trampled trail and into the shadow cast by the brewery, drawing closer to each other. She could tell the boy wanted to take her hand, but she did not hold it out. Her own fingers were cold and they preferred to remain in her coat.

Ani’s head bobbed around at the height of her growing waist. The tips of his ears and nose were rosy, accentuating the hollows in his cheeks and temples. He didn’t look like a proper child, but some creature made out of sticks and snow and blue dye that would collapse and melt away by summer.

What terrible thoughts she had.

“Hans,” she bellowed through the iron fence. Snow slid from the tips of the posts and tumbled down in little crumbs. On the gate hung a sign for the public shelter, pointing toward the other side of the building. Someone had scrawled
KEIN JUDEN
—
NO JEWS
—beneath it. Beyond, the brewery wall was blank, scored only by the narrow windows, and archways for three rotting doors.

“Why on earth would he come here?” Uta said to Ani.

“He finds things,” Ani said.

Uta’s stomach churned again and she pressed her fingertips against her bracelet. Her lucky shackle. She’d always been so careful, and superstitious, too, that one mistake would protect her from another. But it hadn’t, and this baby was coming. It might be all right if she’d felt something—hope or tenderness—when she’d held Jürgen, but instead she’d felt nothing. She’d cupped his round, warm bottom; she’d stared into his pretty blue eyes. She’d sniffed the fresh scent of his skin, and felt nothing but a mild revulsion at the crumbs of undigested milk in the corner of his mouth.

She staggered away from Ani. The boy remained, staring through the black rungs, his breath ghosting the air.

“You’ll catch your death,” she snapped. “I’m going home.”

“There’s a green bird in there,” said Ani.

“Ach
, Ani,” she said, stopping but not turning around. She faced the new expensive villas, their snakes of chimney smoke, their balconies with the winter-vacant window boxes. Some people here still had three pairs of shoes and all their children living. Some people here rose and washed their faces and spread marmalade on their bread and expected to go on this way forever. The protected heartland, an illusion that Goebbels had spoon-fed them for years. They didn’t know the doom that was coming. It amazed her.

“We need to go home now, or they’ll start worrying about us,” Uta said.

“I think it has a hurt wing,” said Ani, folding his arms. “I’m not going.”

“Well, I am,” Uta said. Liesl humored him too much. She liked a touched child, a little golden boy. Liesl had always been fond of the old fairy tales; Uta remembered her rattling on about them at the Badensee when they watched the younger children splash in the water. She remembered the sand trailing through her fingers while Liesl spoke of the dirty little scullery maid dancing with the prince. It had all seemed possible once. “You better come, too, if you know what’s good for you.”

The boy didn’t answer. Uta crunched out of the shadow of the building. As soon as she crossed into the gray sunlight, the uneasiness in her gut spread, her lunch squirting up her throat. She spat it on the snow. Yellow-gold, slickened lumps. Rutabaga stew. It had been almost as loathsome going down. She heard the boy come running. She peeked at him through her curtain of fallen blond hair. Beyond it, beyond him, she saw green. It was a tiny flash against the dull red wall of the brewery. When she straightened, wiping her mouth, it was gone.

What bird would live here, in this desolate place?

“You’re sick, too,” said Ani. His hands fluttered against her, as if he were trying to find a way into her coat. He elongated the last word,
Sie sind kraaank
, with a sigh for a fellow sufferer.

“You’re not sick,” she said. “Neither am I.”

She pushed him away and stared through the iron fence, combing the brewery wall with her eyes. Nothing moved.

“You saw it.” Ani’s sudden grin made his face look thinner, skull-like. She thought she saw one of his twitching spells coming on, but instead he burst into speech. “You saw it, too. Wasn’t it green? I think it’s a parrot. Maybe someone lost a parrot. Can we go back? They live an old time. Long time.”

Uta took out a handkerchief and dabbed her lips, smearing the cloth with yellow bile and red wax, her last good lipstick. Her last good anything from Berlin, the cigarettes and liquor gone. It was past time to go—to get out of the country, get a fake passport, get to Paris.

She tucked the handkerchief back in her pocket and swallowed the sour taste of her bile.

“You saw it,” Ani repeated.

She knelt down before him, smoothing his limp blond locks back from his eyes. He could be her biological child. He resembled her more than he did Liesl or Frank, but her own son would never wear such a sweet, pathetic expression. “I didn’t see anything,” she said.

A tremor went through Ani. “I can still hear it,” he said. “It’s inside now.” And then he made a whooshing noise. “I can hear. I can hear itIcanhearitIcanhearit.”

“Shh,” she said. “Let me listen.”

She took a breath and cocked her head, pretending. The rising queasiness made it impossible for her to perceive anything beyond a meter’s radius. Here was this boy and the crusty circle of snow around him. Here he was, too skinny for his age, a head on a pole. A tiny king
reigning over a shrinking white plain. Beyond him unraveled the rest of the world: buildings, wings, blood, shadows.

“There’s nothing there,” Uta said in a low voice, hardening her grip on his hands. “And you know it.”

The boy’s eyelids flickered as if she’d struck him. Wordlessly, she pulled him to her new fat chest, his wren-like shoulder blades poking into her forearms as she squeezed him. She hadn’t hugged a child since her brothers had been babies and the sensation of his cheekbones against her breasts startled her. Her nausea lessened. In its place she felt a fluttering in the tower of her throat. It felt like a word was trying to form there, and couldn’t.

She pushed Ani gently away, and stood too fast. Spots burst before her eyes. As she stumbled, he watched her, his face dazed and pink.

“You be good for your mother,” she said in a harsh voice. “You stop worrying her and get better, you hear?”

The boy took a few steps back, his eyes on the ground.

“She’d do anything for you,” Uta said.

Clouds gathered in the west. It was snowing everywhere on the retreating German army, and soon the storm would be here. A cold wind touched her temples. She thought of the little collection of gold teeth that her lover kept, like wrinkled jewels, in a drawer.

“We could bring it birdseed,” Ani said softly.

She walked ahead of him back across the pasture, past the broken mud puddles and the slogans, past the train tracks with their small cornices of rust.