Motherland by Maria Hummel Page B

how his cousin mastered the American English accents by ladling a teaspoon of water into his mouth and trying not to spill a drop as he spoke a sentence.
    “Good. Day,” said Frau Reiner in English.
    “No, no,” said the doctor. “They’d shoot at you for that. The words to greet people are ‘How Dee.’”
    “How Dee,” Frau Reiner mimicked with great seriousness, her eyebrows rising. “How Dee, sir?”
    Her voice sounded so pinched everyone laughed again. Only Bundt, the Pole who operated the hospital incinerator, shook his head and stared at the stollen. A sickly smell emanated from him. The incinerator was a poorly built brick oven out in the field behind the hospital. Its engineer had been called away for duty elsewhere before he’d finished it. The incinerator leaked smoke and took too much fuel, but Bundt stuffed it daily with infected linens, trash, amputated limbs, and sometimes the unidentified dead. Then he dumped the ash into a nearby cistern, an open, concrete-lined pit that had been the barracks’ latrine before indoor plumbing. The cistern’s frozen sluice would smell unbearable in the summer, but no one expected the hospital to last that long.
    Frank began to cut.
    “The surgeon begins his delicate work,” said Frau Reiner.
    “Who wants an end piece?” Frank said. To his surprise, it felt pleasant to be slicing bread in the cold, barely heated room, surrounded by his countrymen. Christmas had hardly happened at the hospital and Frank missed the year-end traditions. A spicy fragrance rose from the sweet loaf. His mouth watered.
    “I’ll take the end,” growled Linden.
    He handed the crust to Linden and kept cutting. Crumbs fell onto the wooden table, on the graffiti carved by the soldiers who had once trained here. The golden bits dribbled across a deeply gouged swastika, a scrap of lyrics from the “Horst Wessel Song,” Der Tag für Freiheit und für Brot bumsen bricht an! The day for freedom and bread fucking is coming!
    A crumb of the stollen made its way to Frank’s mouth and he paused for a moment, letting its sweetness spread over his tongue. It was then that he looked down and saw what Bundt was looking at.
    It could have been a fig, but the color and texture were wrong. It was black and shiny and it protruded from the open bread ever so slightly inthe bottom right corner. Liesl had baked a film canister into the stollen. No doubt it held the money and map. The sight of the smooth, dark case made his ribs tighten. There it was, a little black egg, ready to hatch: the promise he’d made to her to run. As soon as the time was right.
    Linden was biting into his slice, his jaw working. “Excellent,” he pronounced with a full mouth. A crumb fell on Frau Reiner’s sleeve. She stared at it a moment before brushing it away.
    “I’ll take a middle piece,” said Bundt. He had not moved a muscle, but it felt to Frank as if the Pole had taken three steps closer, was looming right over the table. His eyes were the color of a wet pelt.
    Frank frowned at the stollen and sliced hard at the end, making the bread vault off the table and into his lap, then put on a show of trying to catch it, and let it tumble to the floor. It hit the dirty boards with a thud. His companions cried out.
    “No matter,” Frank called and dove down, quickly breaking off the hunk with the film canister and stuffing it into his sock. The floor smelled like mud. Bundt’s tiny feet did not move, and Frank noticed how his shoes were nothing more than strips of leather sewn to socks and bits of blackened board. He had to look close to see their counterfeit nature, to guess how cold it must be to walk outside every day and shovel trash into an oven, to perform this thankless task and know there was no reward but not being sent to a prison camp.
    Frank rose with the bread held high. Lint and dust smeared the white flour. He whacked it off. “Good as new,” he said, slicing furiously. He felt the others exchanging