Read Online Motherland by Maria Hummel - Free Book Online

glances; they had all been in surgery with him, had seen the quick precision of his movements. He heard their thoughts, Is this one cracking up, too?
    “Clean as new,” Frank said again, handing around the pieces. The doctors and technicians took them reluctantly, examining the bread for dirt. Only Bundt ate his without even looking at it. His brown eyes bored into Frank’s as he chewed.
    “You haven’t even tasted yours—are you trying to poison us?” said Frau Reiner, smiling.
    The film canister dug into Frank’s shin. He used his other boot to try to shove it deeper into the sock as he took a bite of the bread. He chewed the dry sweet slice, then swallowed. “I’m trying to make it last,” he said.

 

    One afternoon, Frank’s rounds ended with a gastrointestinal mystery case in the smaller ward where they housed the patients with infectious diseases. He didn’t like visiting this ward because his own cases were so vulnerable to contagion, but another doctor wanted him to examine the open sores on the patient’s face. The patient had worked as a guard at the criminal camp on the west side of Weimar. The doctors there had given up on him.
    Frank wound his way through the beds. The patient was easy to find. He did not look like the others. He did not look like a soldier at all: His cheeks were too pale and soft, and he did not shift his legs restlessly like the men who had foot trouble from marching. He hunched away from them, his blanket drawn high. Around his mouth, ulcers spread away like a trail of thick red ants.
    Frank sat down on a stool beside the bed, pressing a knuckle into his tired back. He’d already read the notes, but he introduced himself and asked the man the same questions again. The soldier insisted he hadn’t swallowed anything strange, and he ate little more than bread and soup, but he couldn’t keep anything in, and what came out was bloody. His malaise increased daily. “I don’t need surgery,” the man said, fluttering his fingertips over the sores. “If that’s what you’re here for.”
    “No, you don’t,” said Frank. He pressed the man’s belly. It felt firm and springy. The man’s heartbeat was normal. His breath was even, his green eyes clear.
    “No pain?” said Frank.
    The man stared at him as if he didn’t understand the question.
    “Are you feeling any pain? In your stomach, or . . . ?”
    “Some,” the soldier said. “When I go.”
    “Have you ever bled like this before?”
    The soldier shook his shaved head.
    “How about the sores?”
    Another shake.
    Gastrointestinal hemorrhaging was not uncommon among the infantry, but its causes were hard to pinpoint. Since it was the soldier’s first experience with the condition, Frank suspected a parasite, but he couldn’t figure how the bug had not infected the rest of the POW camp. Pathology wasn’t his specialty, but he decided to ask anyway: “Are the prisoners sick?”
    The soldier shrugged. “If doctors get to them,” he added with a harsh little laugh.
    “What do you mean?”
    The soldier mumbled that he’d heard that the doctors at the camp were injecting live subjects with infected typhus blood. To perfect a vaccine.
    Frank’s tongue felt heavy as he asked the soldier to speak up. His own hospital’s typhus patients were kept in a private, darkened room, a row of mumbling bodies splitting with fevers and bloody rashes. A third of them would die.
    Just then a black uniform drifted by. One of Schnell’s underlings. The patient turned his head to the side and pursed his lips. Frank waited. The patient blinked, his lashes thick as a child’s.
    “Anything else you want to tell me?” Frank said.
    “I’m weak,” said the man. “I can’t walk thirty meters.”
    Frank reiterated the other doctor’s prescription: Atebrin, rest, and broth. “If you’re still passing blood in a week, they’ll reevaluate.”
    As he left the soldier’s bedside, a strange sensation crept over Frank. It was a wet