Motherland (38 page)

She rocked him gently, gathering him up with her thin arms, holding him against the cold. He wept so hard he shook.

“Shh, now,” he heard her say. “You’re here.” And she kept saying it every few moments, but softer and softer, until he had to stop sobbing to hear it.

Before they set out for the walk back, she told Hans quickly about Ani, about the burn on Ani’s right arm, and how she’d wrapped it in salve and a torn sheet. She said that Ani had calmed after the explosions stopped. “Right away,” she said, because she saw Hans’s worried face. (It wasn’t exactly true: First Ani stopped flapping, then he stopped screaming, and finally he just lay there and breathed, like a rabbit exhausted by a trap.)

“When we came upstairs, he saw the sunflower seed you left him. He said I would find you at the brewery,” she finished.

She did not say that she didn’t believe Ani at first, that she was afraid to venture out. All the unexploded ordnance everywhere. The chance of another raid. Being mistaken for a looter by the RLB.

She did not say that it was Berte Geiss who made her go, who volunteered to stay with Ani and Jürgen on their side of the cellar. The young woman had suddenly emerged from the hole. “Go,” she said, her face pale but her voice strong and sure. “I heard what Ani said. I’ll watch them. Go.”

Liesl would never tell Hans how harrowing it was to step out alone, on the black, broken streets, and fumble her way to the brewery with no light, every tiptoe a step that could end her life. Their street had not been bombed, but the farther she’d ranged from their villa, beyond the neighbors of neighbors, the more destruction she’d seen: a roof
punched in and smoldering; shattered window glass and drifting pieces of paper; the pit where a house had been; a pile of rubble where three men dug furiously, all wearing the stars of the RLB. Stones and ash spun under their shovels. One of the men smoked furiously while he dug, the embers of his cigarette dropping tiny sparks. It took Liesl a moment to recognize that it was Herr Unter, the old man who sold her rabbit meat. The dimness accentuated the lines of his face, making him look ancient.

Liesl heard boots clack on the cobblestone and hid in a threshold while a soldier in uniform passed, peering left and right.

She listened to the men dig, wondering whose house it was.

“I heard her,” said one of the men hoarsely. “The little girl. She called out. I’m sure of it.”

The others did not respond. Their blades clanged the stone.

When Liesl was certain it was safe, she crept out over a path of broken glass and did not look back.

Farther along, a water main had broken and she had to cross a frothy, filthy river, soaking her boots.

Then the black plum of an unexploded bomb had appeared right in the middle of her path. She’d stopped altogether, staring at it.

Frank is dead
, the bomb whispered. Its sinister message paralyzed her.
Frank is dead
.

She had not allowed herself to imagine it until that moment, her nostrils clogged with smoke, her eardrums still ringing with the sound of explosions. Something had fallen on Frank. Something had lifted up under him and hurled him into the air like an animal shaking off a rider. Something had buried him. Her mouth opened, and it felt as if she was breathing in something solid; walls would fill her instead of air, and she would harden.

A shrill whistle a block away broke her reverie and she stumbled sideways, around the bomb, into deeper shadows. She’d had to feel her way then, wincing at every crunch of glass or gravel.

The entire journey—less than a kilometer—had taken her two hours.

The way back with Hans seemed easier, but it went no faster. They picked their way lightly through the rubble, hardly stepping down. The boy understood to be quiet and motioned when he needed to point out a shard of twisted pipe in their path, a sudden hole. They hid together when they heard someone shout, “RLB! Who’s there?” and Hans’s breath made a damp patch on her waist.

When they reached their street, Hans paused. Liesl watched him gaze on the downed sticks and leaves, the rash of black soot on all the walls and the blinded windows, but every one of the houses whole and entire. Then he spoke. “I didn’t mean to hurt Frieda,” he said in a small tight voice, and then he burst into tears again.

Liesl did not put her arms around him this time, although she wanted to. She watched him weep, watched until his shoulders stopped shaking and he wiped his eyes. “Then apologize to her and her mother,” she said in a calm voice.

The boy held back.

“Come on,” she said.

“Is Vati dead?” he said.

How had he guessed her fear? She staggered and caught herself. A stone rolled away from her feet. “I don’t know,” she said.

They walked forward in silence. When they were just a few houses away, she tripped again. This time a muscle wrenched in her ankle. She cried out.

The boy grabbed her arm, steadying her. A ray of moonlight illuminated his face, and in that moment he looked so much like Frank she almost gasped. She leaned into Hans, suddenly exhausted, and felt him lean back at her. They held each other all the way to the gate.

Jürgen was asleep in Berte’s arms when they returned. In fact, both boys appeared to have been dozing, Jürgen on Berte’s lap and Ani lying against her side.

“You made it,” Berte said weakly.

Two of the Winter boys had also returned to claim some free space, their lanky limbs stretched on the bare earth. But the others still crowded in the Geiss cellar. Light and whispers trickled through the hole.

Liesl spoke into it. “He’s been found,” she said. “Our Hans. He’s safe.”

There was a silence and then Herr Geiss spoke. “Glad news,” he said.

She felt Hans step forward beside her, saw the contrite expression on his face. She saw his mouth working on the apology he had to utter to Frieda and Fran Dillman.

“Where’s my parrot?” Ani’s voice rose. “Did you give it the seeds?”

Beyond the hole, Frau Dillman whispered something and her daughters giggled.

Liesl gripped Hans’s arm and pulled him back. He could apologize to the girl later if he wanted, but she wasn’t going to give that woman—or any of them—the satisfaction of hearing him now. Not when they’d left her alone with a baby and a burning child.

Hans seemed confused, but then he shrugged and slumped down beside his brother.

“Where is it?” Ani said again.

“I gave it the seeds and it flew away before the raid,” Hans said after a moment. “You were right. It wanted to go back to the jungle.” He looked at his brother’s arm, bandaged in strips of one of Frank’s old shirts. “Does it hurt?”

Ani turned his hollow gaze on Liesl. “It’s going to die,” he whispered.

“You don’t know that,” said Liesl.

“It’s too far to the jungle,” said Ani.

Liesl looked to Hans for help, but he sank down on the cellar floor and pulled a blanket up into a hood, cloaking his face. “I’m tired,” he muttered.

“In the morning we can find everything,” Berte said in a strained voice. “We just all need to sleep.”

“Sleep would be nice,” said Herr Geiss from the other side of the cellar, and Liesl heard Frau Dillman titter again. A wave of loathing swept through her. She hated them all: the ones who’d ignored her son’s fists on the shelter door, the ones who’d left her alone with Ani burning. The one who’d let her best friend go, the one who’d let Ani sicken.

She took Jürgen from Berte and settled against the wall.

Berte leaned forward on her arms and began to cry softly into her knees. Liesl touched her hair but the girl shook her off.

“I’m all right,” she said, sniffing. “I’m all right. Get some sleep.”

But Liesl couldn’t sleep. She just kept checking her sons—Hans, Jürgen, then Ani. Hans and the baby slept. Ani stared into the darkness, holding his burned arm. He hardly blinked or moved his head. His wet eyeballs caught the light. Sometimes he reached up a hand and ran it over his own face, his fingers probing his nose, his lips, as if he had never felt them before.

Late in the night, more explosions.

After it ended, there was no answering rat-tat of anti-aircraft fire, Liesl realized with a fresh dread. The flak towers were down, the Luftwaffe gone. There was no one to protect them now.

The morning drew a halo at the top of the stairs. It pulsed and beckoned.
New world, new world
, it seemed to say, as if they had all voyaged somewhere strange and dangerous.

The hole flooded with traffic. The Winter boys darted from the Geiss cellar into Liesl’s and ran upstairs, followed by the Dillman girls. Hans sprinted after them. Herr Geiss barged through to look at Ani’s burn. He pronounced it minor, but he looked at the boy thoughtfully for a long time, and his heavy chin fell to his chest.

Liesl wanted to talk with him, but the mothers were needed in the kitchen to mete out food. Liesl avoided Frau Dillman’s eyes as they made a hasty congress to discuss their collective stores: a few loaves of bread, some potatoes, a smidge of lard, horseradish, rutabagas, cabbage, a tiny chunk of salted ham. Gas and water were off. Firewood and coal were low. They could smell the burning from the city’s center. The stench was greasy and sharp, as if someone had roasted rubber. Frau Winter hailed a boy passing in the street, who told them the post office had received a direct hit. Probably fifty dead there alone.

Fifty dead in one place. Such a small number, after all the tallies from the battlefields. Yet the boy’s words nailed Liesl’s feet into the floor.

“Where will all our letters go?” asked Ani.

“They’ll find them,” said Hans, standing by the stairs. “They’ll deliver them.”

Frieda Dillman came bounding up the steps behind him. At the sight of Hans, a shadow crossed the girl’s pretty features, and she tried to turn around.

“Frieda,” said Hans.

“Don’t you dare go near her!” Frau Dillman called out as her daughter descended underground again. The look on Hans’s face was that of a beaten dog.

Liesl was about to retort when she felt Berte Geiss’s hand on her shoulder.

“We’ll cook it in shifts and take it downstairs,” Berte said. “Liesl and I will take the first shift. There’s no telling if there’ll be another raid today.”

But there wasn’t. Instead the skies cleared, and a light rain fell overnight, soaking the debris and making it all the heavier. The next morning, the families returned to their upstairs rooms, but the house remained at war. Hans did not apologize to Frieda, and no one apologized to Liesl. Doors slammed. Voices rang.

Later Liesl was fetching vinegar from the cellar when Herr Geiss emerged through the cleft. He had been out all day with the air raid committee, tallying damages. Instead of exhausting him, the burden energized him. He seemed younger, and handsome in a sea-captainish way.

He cleared his throat and watched Liesl move the earthenware lid.

“The boy,” Herr Geiss said. “He belongs in a safe place. Where people can care for him.”

“I care for him,” said Liesl.

“Your husband requested that I watch over his house,” Herr Geiss said. “I’d like to take Anselm to a doctor.”

Liesl straightened carefully. “He’s been to a doctor,” she said, looking Herr Geiss in the eye. “The doctor thinks the air raids unnerve him. He recommended I send Ani to the country.”