Motherland Read Online Free PDF Page B

Liesl now wore.

 

    For Hans, he had a book. For baby Jürgen, he had a rattle that he’d carved from a pine branch with one of the hospital scalpels. For Ani, he had a pair of shoes. They were good leather shoes, not the wooden clogs that most kids wore, not the shabby paper sandals of the poorest families, but shoes that smelled of hide, of the days before the war when schoolboys kicked real footballs into real nets. What a sound—that gasp of rope, that swish of victory. Frank had not heard it in years.
    The shoes’ former owner had cracked a few wrinkles in the leather uppers. They jagged and branched like lightning. Brightness scuffed the soles. But shoes this well made could last Ani for years, the toes stuffed with newsprint, and then with his growing feet. Ani could run in them. He could balance atop a stone wall and hop from one garden to another.
    Frank had hidden his sons’ gifts alongside an amber pendant the color of Liesl’s eyes. He had bought it off a nurse. He had paid too much, but he’d wanted something special for her. Together, all his presents nestled under a loose plank, next to the cans of lard and bouillon cubes that Liesl had sent him, ten packs of Junos, a bundle of reichsmark, and a needle and thread to darn the socks he would rip to shreds covering the two hundred fifty kilometers back to his hometown. The gifts and supplies gathered dust in the darkness. Frank sat a few feet above them on the bed, his cramped hands curled on top of an empty rucksack. Inhis mind, he packed it. He stuffed the shoes in the rucksack first, then the necklace, the rattle, and the book.
    He felt bad about the book. It wasn’t a good gift like the shoes. He could already sense his eldest son’s somber eyes on him, interpreting the gesture. New shoes for Ani. A book about horses for Hans. Hans didn’t like horses. He liked tanks. He would be ten by the time Frank returned, and Ani halfway to seven. They would be taller and thinner, and they wouldn’t run to him the way they once had, blond heads cupped under his chin.
    Frank imagined their future shyness, even their anger. He recalled his words to Hans, I was six years old when my own father left to serve our country , his voice brimming until it broke. His emotion had embarrassed him and he’d gripped Hans by his thin shoulders until the boy’s eyes popped. I had to be the man around here, understand?
    It was not what he’d meant to say.
    Frank slumped lower, jarring his arms. Jolts of pain shot up his wrists. After spending six hours trying to reconstruct a young Rhinelander’s severed nose, Frank’s fingers had curled into a clutch. He tried to stretch them flat, but they ached and stabbed.
    To shake off the pain, he tried to imagine standing now and sliding the rucksack onto his back. It didn’t feel right. The corner of the book would jab his spine.
    A siren whined. Out the window, Frank saw a string of ambulances bumping into the rutted hospital yard from the east. To the west lay the road to Weimar, the cultural capital, where the country’s greatest poet had lived and died.
    It was the third influx that day. They had radioed ahead and Frank had been ordered to rest through it.
    “You couldn’t cut a straight line through a loaf of bread,” the scrub nurse had said, herding him out.
    Frank averted his eyes from the pane. He tried not to listen to the sound of doors opening, the orderlies calling out directions toward thedelousing chambers. He kept mentally shoving things into the rucksack. It was a nightly habit, indulging in a dark fantasy of the Russians closing in from the east, Warsaw, Poznan, then his escape and flight. He had been plotting it since the October day he’d arrived, a rusty reconstructive surgeon expected to repair the limbs and faces of men blown apart in battle. And while the soldiers’ skin healed until they were ready for the surgeries he wasn’t sure he could accomplish, he’d found the rucksack and added the