Read Online Motherland by Maria Hummel - Free Book Online Page A

dirty feeling, not an itch exactly, and not a chill. Frank had felt it several times since arriving in Weimar, and at first he suspected lice, but he was careful with his clothes and no amount of hygiene made it go away. It crawled down his shoulders and up to his temples, and down to his gut and up to his brow, and in the cracks of skin around his knees and groin. Sitting down, lying down did nothing to help it. It coated his whole exhausted torso, shifting its clammy grip.
    He didn’t know anything about the prison camp, except that its prisoners mostly worked in local munitions factories. A different set of doctors staffed KZs. Until October, until he’d left Hannesburg, such places seemed very far away. The problem of the enemy’s captured soldiers an abstraction. The problem of dangerous native foreigners, Jews, Gypsies, also an abstraction. Frank didn’t know any “foreigners” except the two Jews who had been his medical school professors. He doubted they were communists, but one had left the country; the other moved to the ghetto with his family and had subsequently fallen out of contact.
    In Hannesburg, Frank had assuaged his regret over doing nothing to resist the crackdown on non-Germans by reminding himself that he didn’t “fit in,” as Susi had wanted. He had never voted for the Nazi Party. He’d hung no pictures of Hitler. He spent minimal time at the spa, hurrying home to his wife and sons. He kept his father’s book collection intact, knowing dozens of banned volumes were scattered throughout it, and neglected to inform Susi of a conversation with his father, a month before his death, hinting that the elder Herr Kappus had given money to help an old colleague’s family after the synagogue had burned. They’d managed to get visas out of Germany. I’m an old man. I have nothing to lose ,his father had said, waving away Frank’s offer to assist him. But his face had looked gaunt, as if something had frightened him. Weeks later, he was dead of a stroke.
    Frank took a breath, but the disgusting sensation only deepened. An orderly pushed a giant tub past him on a cart. Frank put his hand on his shoulder.
    “Give me that,” he said.
    “But Herr Doktor,” protested the orderly. Frank brushed past him and began emptying bedpans, pouring the sluice of piss and excrement into the tub on top of the soiled bandages. His skin shuddered inside his clothes. He gripped the cart handle harder, shoved it out the door.
    A soft gust of paraffin followed him, and then cold air smacked him in the face. The edges of his eyelids tightened. Sweat on the back of his neck froze into tiny icicles. He blinked, pushing toward the incinerator, the cistern beyond. A squat brick oven and a concrete hole—they were the only structures in the flat field before the pine woods. They inhabited the desolate space like a pair of unlikely friends. Smoke rose from the incinerator. It took in flesh and bandages and gave out cinders and ash. The cistern received, a rapidly filling pit behind a low lip of gray wall.
    The cart lodged in the snow. Frank shoved. The liquid sloshed again, a drop slapping Frank under the eye and freezing there. He wiped it away with a curse.
    Bundt stepped out from the other side of the oven and watched him, unmoving. His stolid form balanced between the ruts, his hand trailing a cart behind him. Frank’s eyes fell to Bundt’s dainty feet, tiny parcels wrapped in wool and strapped to wood.
    Ani’s shoes would fit Bundt.
    Frank wiped his brow and pushed again at the cart.
    There was a crunching sound as the Pole began to walk toward Frank, a smirk creeping across his flat, moon face. “Pull,” he said.
    “Pull what?” said Frank.
    “Pull,” repeated Bundt, advancing until the stench of his coat and hair clogged Frank’s nose. His forehead and cheeks wore tiny freckles of ash. “Can’t push in snow,” he said softly. “Pull.”
    “Look, I have something—” Frank started to say about the