Motherland by Maria Hummel

machine-like, inhuman. Hartmann’s neighbors glanced at him and then away.
    Frank leaned forward and dabbed at Hartmann’s blood with some gauze. He felt the gray-blue eyes fall on him, then back to the soup.Hartmann took three more spoonfuls. Hiss, suck. Then he offered Frank the bowl.
    “You should eat it all,” Frank said before he remembered the patient was deaf. He took the bowl and gestured at Hartmann to finish, but the flap sucked inward against the teeth and the man pulled his scarf back over his face.
    Frank set the soup on the window ledge, found a pen and paper. You need more nourishment in order to heal .
    The eyes read it. The shoulders shrugged slightly, as if to say, What else is new?
    Are you in pain? How intense?
    The response came quickly: How intense is drowning?
    Do you want morphine? Frank wrote, grateful he did not have to utter the word aloud, in earshot of other patients. Not everyone was offered relief.
    Not yet , wrote Hartmann.
    You don’t have to suffer .
    Hartmann read the sentence and leaned back, looping his hands over his knees. He seemed to be studying some spot in the air above the other patients’ beds. He shook his head slightly, as if amused by the statement, as if he now owned pain the way he’d once owned knowledge.
    Frank took a breath and scrawled. How is your mother? Would you like me to write to her?
    There was a hesitation, and then the hand took the pen. I really don’t remember you .
    Hartmann’s blue eyes were hard and cold, but the corners glistened. Frank held the message for a moment. The scarf rippled with the patient’s breath. Frank wondered if Hartmann’s nerves still sent pure signals up his skull about the pain of his stretched lips. Or was their communication as broken and fragmented as the flesh? Could the neural paths be restored by surgery; could the wounded man feelwhole again? He’d pondered this question with every patient, but less so each time.
    Alliner had told him, It feels like a sharp mask is inside my skin. Like I got two faces. Only one is made of glass and it doesn’t move , and that night Frank had dreamed he was on stage, his own face heavy and split by a second face. He’d woken gurgling and pulling at his throat, and decided not to ask again. In a few short months, he’d learned to force his mind away from whatever he could not accomplish. Contemplation led to horror, and horror made it impossible to see the small gains of his incisions and grafts.
    But Hartmann. He couldn’t look at Hartmann without seeing memory itself. Every day at their elementary school’s end, all the boys had burst up from their desks except the star, who’d stared at his cloudy, sponged-off slate. No one had ever walked home with him but the occasional brainy girl.
    Excuse me again , Frank wrote. Mistaken identity . He picked up the soup bowl and spoon. “Let’s have some more, shall we?” he said aloud, scooping some broth.
    Hartmann gestured for the pen again and put the pad by his side as he wrote another message.
    Nothing wrong with my hands. I can feed myself .

 

    Writing letters home was a strain. Frank didn’t know how to explain about the glassy-eyed patients who arrived with centimeter-deep pools of lice on their sunken bellies. Or how the wards sounded at night, full of groans and foul, rattling coughs. He didn’t want to pain Liesl, so he mostly stuck to comments about the weather and responses to news of his sons. He didn’t know how to tell Liesl that he loved her, either. Some nights he just held the pendant he’d bought for her until it warmed in his palm. Other nights, he looked at her picture, trying to memorize her features. She wasn’t classically pretty like Susi. Her nose was too large, her thick red hair didn’t obey hats or combs, but the snapshot had caught the catlike arch of her brows, her winsome, radiant smile.
    Yet the night after Frank met Hartmann, he wrote to Liesl about the transfer to Berlin, and this time the