Motherland Read Online Free PDF

wanted to scare you.”
    “Why?” His voice was very small.
    “Because he doesn’t want you to be a baby anymore.”
    She said it carelessly, focusing on her feather duster. Ani placed the statue back on the shelf and grabbed the next object, a porcelain figurine of a shepherdess, flowers crowning her hair and spilling from a basket.
    He held up the simpering face to Liesl. “Can I take this home?”
    “No, you may not.” Liesl grabbed the figure from him, setting it back on the grimy wood beside the Führer. “Why don’t you go explore for a while?”
    Ani looked injured. “I was helping.”
    “I know you were.” She bent and touched his cheek. “You’re a fine help.” She took the rag from Ani’s hand and tucked it in her apron pocket. “You were such a good boy, you deserve a break. Go scout for me, all right?”
    Ani gave a gusty sigh and wandered off down the hall. His shoulder strap slid down. He had lost some weight, she decided, with a rush of worry.
    “Come back and tell me what you find,” she called after him. “Just don’t touch anything.”
    The Geisses and the Kappuses had been neighbors for fifty years, since before Frank was born, and the two villas angled toward each other, as if they were meant to be a pair. Now we’re the Siamese twins , Liesl said to herself, thinking of the tunnel. Through one of the living room windows, Herr Geiss had a perfect view of the Kappuses’ front door. Liesl paused at it, watching her new home from the outside: the heap of dachshund turds beside the rusting gate, the stoop marked by the small footprints of the boys. The deep brambles of the garden. An airof waiting hung over everything. It must have been brighter and more orderly when both Frank and Susi lived there. It must have looked like a house full of life, instead of one half empty.
    Yet now that Liesl stood in Herr Geiss’s house, she could feel the weight of his own loneliness, and it was far heavier. The air was almost wet with it, soaking the dark arms of the couches, the bare walls.
    She looked up, startled by her revelation. That was it: All the walls were bare. Not a single painting or mirror hung anywhere.
    Liesl called for Ani three times before setting off to look for him. Her heels clacked through the silent hall. Dust was already beginning to settle again, fuzzing the face of the Führer, the pretty shepherdess.
    “Ani,” she said again. “Where do you always go?”
    Finally she heard his muffled voice from a bedroom down the hall. “In here.”
    “It’s almost time to get the baby and go home,” she said.
    No response.
    “You better not be making any messes,” she warned as she stepped through the doorway.
    Tilted canvases filled the room beyond, some in frames, some loose, their brass staples showing. Some were of laden tables of fruit and game, and others were of women, and one or two looked very old and dusty. An easel stood empty by the window. Light flowed into the room, thick and gold with dust. It clung to the tubes of paints collected in a basket, and the stiff, color-spattered coat that Frau Geiss must have worn as a smock. Ani was sitting in the opposite corner, his legs crossed, looking at an unframed canvas. His small hands clutched it from either side. Liesl saw the smears of grime on his fingers.
    “Ani, that’s not yours,” she said as she strode in. “Put that down, or you’ll get it dirty.”
    He released the painting slowly. It showed a young blond mother in a white dress, holding her baby in a white-walled garden. The woman’slarge pale arms circled the child, who was sitting upright, playing with a wooden boat, its sail striped with red. Tenderness suffused the mother’s face. It was easy to see her resemblance in his upturned nose, his soft square jaw, even the way he touched the sail, with a gentle, pondering finger.
    The child was Ani. Around him and his mother, violets bloomed, their centers black. On the mother’s left hand was the ring that