Read Motherland for Free Online

cigarettes, wishing guiltily for the war to end before he had to cut into men.
    Boots clacked down the hall outside his room. Frank hid the rucksack under the coverlet.
    The steps grew louder. Then a whistle. It was Captain Schnell tweedling a popular song. The lyrics bubbled through Frank’s mind: “Es ist so schön Soldat zu sein, Rosemarie . . . Nicht jeder Tag bringt Sonnenschein, Rosemarie.” It’s so nice to be a soldier, Rosemarie. Not every day brings sunshine, Rosemarie . Susi had always hated it ( Don’t make me Rosemarie! ), and so sometimes he’d sung it to tease her. Frank felt his face go heavy, remembering.
    Schnell’s head poked through the doorway. “Taking a break?” he said. “They’ll be delousing for quite a while.”
    Frank raised his hands, wrists parallel, like a prisoner. “Linden sent me away. To rest.”
    Dr. Linden, Frank’s anesthesiologist, had nicknamed the captain der Schnellwachsener for the hair that continually grew from his ears and nose. But hair wasn’t really Schnell’s main feature. It wasn’t weight, either, though Schnell had the same barrel figure as Göring. It was the color of his cheeks: so pink they were almost garish. It looked as if he rubbed his face in beet juice every morning.
    Schnell was a Party fanatic, the sort Frank had spent most of his spa years avoiding, infuriating Susi. You could be a Gauleiter by now, if you’d just try to fit in . Fitting in didn’t mean Frank had to agree withall the rhetoric and flag-waving. It just meant being pleasant at the right times. If pleasantness had had a Party, Susi would have been its Führerin . No one had ever been able to refuse her warm smile, and she didn’t care who succumbed to her, as long as they increased her social power. Susi could butter up the most rabid of Frank’s patients, a Dachau colonel known for publically beating an insolent waiter, and remain completely apolitical. It was a fact that still fascinated and troubled Frank.
    “Won’t help, though. I can’t sleep,” Frank added.
    The captain’s eyes flickered over Frank’s fingers, as if he suspected the surgeon was exaggerating the pain. “Yes,” he said. “Well. A delivery came for you today.”
    Frank forced himself not to wince. In Liesl’s last letter, she’d hinted at sending a package containing money and a map. As Schnell clacked across the threshold, the room tightened and shrank to a tiny cell. Frank focused on the rusty joints of his cot.
    The captain held out a thin slip of paper. A telegram. The swastika had been wrinkled by someone’s thumb.
    “Take it,” said Schnell. “You’re a lucky man.”
    The paper slid into Frank’s shaking palm.
    “The OKW has summoned you to Berlin,” said Schnell. He was pink all the way up to his ears.
    Frank kept his face blank as he read the orders: Report to the Schwester Theresa Krankenhaus in Berlin by February 10. He had never heard of the Schwester Theresa Krankenhaus, but the deployment was a ticket to hell. Berlin was under constant bombardment: the Americans by day, the British at night. If the Russians crossed the Oder ( when they crossed the Oder), they would join the party with their howitzers.
    Frank stared at the paper, trying to compose himself. February 10 was six weeks away. The stiff straps of the rucksack bulged into the back of his thigh.
    “From what I hear from Dr. Braun, they’re consolidating several reconstructive teams to Berlin,” said Schnell. “The whole hospital will be devoted to patients like yours.”
    Dr. Braun had hastily trained Frank when he’d first arrived in October and then moved on. Frank hadn’t thought he’d made much of an impression on the brusque, gray-headed surgeon—but he must have been following Frank’s cases, which, Frank had to admit, had been mostly successful. A whole hospital! To work with more skilled surgeons, to finally have the right equipment, to teach each other as the British had done at Sidcup in the last war.