Motherland by Maria Hummel

Author:Maria Hummel [Hummel, Maria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619023543
Publisher: Counterpoint

Uta stumbled after the younger Kappus kid, loping and hopping ahead, his disintegrating shoes barely touching down on the snowy cobblestone before he lifted them again. “Hans,” Ani called to the shuttered houses, the woolly gray smoke. “Hans, Hans, Hans.”

Every time Uta’s boots slipped, she felt the nausea at her center slide, too. If she fell, it would fall with her. If she halted, it would halt, slosh, spread. Even when she slept, it sank through her dreams, a sea creature squirming through soft seaweeds. She gripped the bracelet on her wrist and soldiered on.

She’d insisted on leading the search, partly to escape the apartment where he had found her, to flee the furniture and walls his eyes had touched, and partly to escape Liesl’s worry and pity. Her friend’s woeful gaze followed her everywhere, and Uta couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t stand Liesl crying over her. If anyone heaped any more worries on Liesl, the poor girl would crack.

Yes, she would have to go back to Berlin, and once she went back, she would be back forever, living in the rubble. Germany would lose the war. Men like him would be destroyed, and their women dragged through the mud. Emmy Göring and all the ladies with their stolen furs and jewels would be paraded in front of the world as bloodthirsty crows who’d fed on the corpses of the murdered. It didn’t matter that Uta hardly knew Emmy Göring, that she herself had refused to accept such gifts. Uta had never lusted for property, only company, only room after room full of elegant people. And she’d been to the right parties. She’d flattered and laughed in public. She would be standing in the edges of photographs, a pale, glowing face.

The Kappus boy led her past the wall where the party posted its slogans: ALLE RÄDER MÜSSEN ROLLEN FÜR DEN SIEG. ALL WHEELS MUST ROLL FOR VICTORY. He was humming a breathless little song to himself and didn’t look up.

Hans would have looked up. He was that kind of boy, always looking at the skies, always reading the signs. Which one was he following now? She didn’t think he was at the brewery, but it was the only clue they had.

Ani led her down the road toward the last open pasture in Hannesburg, now an expanse of lumpy snow and yellow grass. The brewery property divided Liesl’s neighborhood of pleasant modern villas from the Alt Stadt, densely packed apartments where people still lived without cellars or indoor plumbing. The brewery lot was vast for the middle of town: on one side of it stood the rectangular ruins of what must have been a stable once. On the other rose a fence, its black iron gates tipped with white, around an ancient brick edifice with two towers. Whoever owned the building did not maintain it. The windows were cracked or missing; the locks on the gate had rusted. Nevertheless, improvements encroached. Beyond the far side of the building, the town had built a public shelter for families from the Alt Stadt.

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