Clara

by Kurt Palka

  ALSO BY KURT PALKA

  Rosegarden

  The Chaperon

  Equinox

  Scorpio Moon

  Copyright © 2012 by Kurt Palka

  Originally published under the title Patient Number 7

  by McClelland and Stewart in 2012.

  Emblem edition published 2014.

  Emblem is an imprint of McClelland and Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  Emblem and colophon are a registered trademark of Random House of Canada Limited

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher — or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency — is an infringement of the copyright law.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Palka, Kurt, 1941-

  Clara / Kurt Palka.

  eISBN: 978-0-7710-7130-0

  I. Title.

  PS8581.A49P37 2012 C813’.54 C2011-904434-X

  Translations from works by Hermann Hesse and Rainer Maria Rilke are by the author.

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  One Toronto Street

  Suite 300

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5C 2V6

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  For Heather

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Acknowledgements

  “The important thing, Madame, is not to be cured,

  but to live with one’s ailments.”

  — Abbé Ferdinando Galiani (1728–1787)

  to Mme Louise d’Épinay (1726–1783)

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I’D BEEN COLLECTING MATERIAL to write Patient Number 7 for years. I had drawers full of notes on conversations with people living in Vienna and New York and London and Tel Aviv. The oldest man I spoke with had seen Emperor Franz Joseph strolling in a Vienna park in 1904. Others had fought in the First World War and seen the end of the Dual Monarchy, and many remembered the Great Depression and what came after: the street battles in Vienna of the early 1930s, the years that finally gave way to National Socialism.

  One by one these people passed away and took their stories with them, and I still didn’t know what to do with what they’d given me. What I felt I needed was the thick folder of documents that I knew existed in my own family. I’d seen it and we’d talked about it: letters handwritten in the old style and giving a flavour of social and private life; photographs and documents from the key years between 1930 and 1950; official forms full of personal questions and threats; Gestapo documents signed and sealed Heil Hitler; birth and death certificates; Work Passes and Marriage Permits; Certificates of Racial Purity. All this documentation rubber-stamped with eagles and swastikas, without which you were nothing.

  The way men once planted trees so that their grandchildren might one day enjoy their shade, various family members over two generations had assembled these papers into a kind of Lest We Forget Archive for those to follow. Over the years the folder became more mythical than real, and when I needed it for my research I could not find it. Then the house was sold and an era was clearly at its end.

  For periods in 2006–7 I lived in Austria on a teaching contract with the Institute for Economic Development. I rented an apartment in a small city with a long history, and from there I travelled by train and road to my seminars.

  The apartment was in a castle that had served as a defensive position during the peasant uprisings and the wars of religion of the 1600s and before. Parts of the walls and burial tablets in them dated back to the Romans. The best thing about it was the view, which was of an eighth-century stone church right across the street. That church and creative elements relating to it are in the story.

  To furnish the place I used some Biedermeier pieces I’d inherited, and while I was cleaning out drawers and compartments I found the document folder. It sat back on a lower shelf, three inches thick, bound with bits of frayed string. Like a nod from fate. A gift, really.

  I spent months checking my own material against the documents for historical accuracy, and I experimented with form and voice and the dramatic arc of the work I was planning. I was dealing with a generation that had experienced so much: the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the First World War, the Great Depression, the rise of Nazism, and the Second World War and its aftermath.

  Eventually I created as the main character for my story a young woman I named Clara Eugenie Herzog, a student at Vienna University in 1932. I would use her stubborn and true love for a man whom everybody in her family disapproved of as the mainspring, and her intellectual, professional, and moral development as the backbone of the novel. Once I’d made those framing decisions, it became quite naturally Clara’s story and the material began to flow.

  Patient Number 7 is a novel inspired by actual events set against a background of recorded history and documented fact. Nevertheless, it is a work of the imagination, and except for persons known to history, the names and incidents in the story are either imaginary or are used fictitiously.

  K. P.

  Summer 2011

  ONE

  THE DAY SHE BURIED her husband, nearly a hundred mourners filled the Benedictine chapel. She had wanted just family and friends but then her daughters had taken over, and the list had grown. Now it included people from the museum and from city hall, and the defence minister and military attachés from a number of embassies were there as well. Even Guido Malfatti was there, the motorcycle dealer who had been shot in the knee in Russia and had sawed off his own leg with a shell fragment, and in 1945 her husband had saved his life by taking him to Italy.

  There was an intense smell from the lilies in the chapel, and when the doors swung open and the coffin was carried out you could smell the horses too. Two black Belgians they were, beautiful horses in leather and brass tackle, unshod for the occasion as was traditional. When the coffin approached, they tossed their heads and their breath steamed in the cold air, and when the coffin was set down onto the cartbed and pushed forward, wood on wood through the thin layer of snow, the springs gave way with the gritty sound of rust.

  She stood at the tailgate dressed in bla
ck from hat to button shoes. She wore one of her mother’s formal coats of black gabardine from the late 1800s, heavy and long, with wide lapels and black velvet cuffs. It weighed her down and bent her at shoulders and back, and when she reached out and placed a bare hand on the coffin none of the mourners could see her face for the veil. But how they stared at her and ate it up, this timeless scene.

  When her husband had been alive, few of these mourners had shown much love for him. After all, he’d been famous, and famous men have few friends. In his later years many had admired him, but certainly there were those who’d whispered about his past, even though they had not the faintest idea of the man he had been and of the time he’d lived through. Only she knew, because she’d lived it with him from the beginning.

  That day at the cemetery, when she removed her hand from his coffin and the coachman shook the reins and clucked his tongue and said, “Go, girls! Go!” and those enormous horses leaned into the traces and raised the first polished hoof to take him away, at that moment and from that moment on she stood alone.

  She stood like the last person in a house already emptied and dark on moving day, and she looked after coffin and cart and horses leaving, and she stood like this for a long time. Finally she stirred. She took a tissue from her cuff and used it behind the veil, and she turned her narrow back in that black coat on all of them and walked away, down the cemetery lane, past nuns’ graves and monks’ graves, a sea of black cast-iron crosses each one just like the other.

  The previous night it had snowed, and now the air was crisp and clean and it smelled of more snow coming. The high mountains around the valley and the glacier were white, but the pine forests climbing the slopes were still green.

  She heard steps on the gravel path behind her and then her two daughters were walking wordlessly by her side; Emma, the gentle and studious one, and Willa, never married and a bit wild like her father had been, with her arm still in a cast from when a birthing camel had kicked her weeks ago on a farm in Queensland.

  Eventually they steered her around and walked her to the parking lot. On the way there and without looking up she said, “Please thank the Pachmayrs for me. For the horses.” And by her side Emma said, “We will, Mom. Of course we will.”

  The defence minister and the military attachés and their lieutenants stood by her car, waiting, and they held their hats in bare hands and they inclined their heads and murmured their condolences. They drove off in gleaming black Mercedes limousines with diplomatic licence plates, and the car tires ground on the gravel drive and brown oak leaves swirled and settled, and they were gone.

  At the funeral meal she sat next to his empty chair and his placesetting with fork and knife crossed on his plate. Her friend Mitzi Friedmann sat at her other side. There was a picture of him, of her Albert before the illness, looking the way she’d loved him all her life, bold and grinning and that cowlick in his hair, and his chin up high.

  She noticed she was beginning to pay attention to detail again. She made mental notes of how much she disliked the commotion in the room; the priest, Father Hofstätter, being benevolent and jolly with everyone, and all these relatives like excited carrion birds who hovered and ate and drank and watched her, and looked away when she caught them watching. Some came up and said a few words in praise of Albert, which was nice. Dr. Kessler, the physician who’d taken over Dr. Mannheim’s practice and who’d helped Albert greatly during his final days, came up too and bowed and held her hand. “I’ve lost a friend,” he said. “You lost that and so much more.”

  After the meal Willa and Emma took her to the stone house near the bridge where the river Inn flowed through this old city of St. Töllden, home to her family for generations.

  There was tension again between her daughters. She felt it but did not want to deal with it, and so she sent them away. In her bedroom she moved the small hinged silver frame with her two favourite photographs closer to the edge of the night table so she could see it from the pillow. One of the photos was of Albert and the girls, perhaps nine and twelve years old, walking side by side on a sunny fall day with leaves on the ground. The girls were skipping alongside their father on the path by the river, Emma in pigtails and Willa with a single ponytail off-centre high on her head. The picture showed them from behind in skirts bouncing and in sweaters she had knitted and whose patterns she remembered still. Albert’s hands were on their shoulders, holding them close to either side of him.

  The other picture was of him as a young man before they were married, grinning and confident in full uniform, photographed at the officers’ training course in the spring of 1937, before the famous general had called him to his team of field commanders.

  She grieved like this for two days, during which she refused to see anyone or speak to anyone other than Mitzi. She spoke not even to Willa, who as usual on these visits from faraway was staying in her childhood room on the lower floor of the house.

  When Mitzi arrived she leaned her canes within reach against the dresser and sat a bit crooked in the blue upholstered chair by the bedside. They spoke not very much while the sunlight moved from the south window to the west where it flashed on the river and lit up the yellow front of the house opposite and filled the room with warm light before it faded altogether.

  Two days later she bathed and dressed carefully in everyday clothes but with a black mourning band on the left upper sleeve of her blouse. The girl from Mitzi’s salon came and washed and blow-dried her hair, and left again. She made coffee, and while it dripped she made toast on the old metal toastersheet atop the gas flame.

  She ate breakfast in the kitchen and began to think about what she would write, then carried her third cup of coffee into her study. When she was a little girl, it had been Bernhard’s room, the younger of her two stepbrothers. There were shelves all along one wall and good light from windows on two sides. She walked around the stack of boxes for the archives, lowered the tablet on the secretary, and sat down on the chair. Writing had always saved her. It would do so again.

  A DAY LATER the traditional afternoon visiting began. People sat in the formal living room around the porcelain stove and under the various family portraits and watercolours. The visitors said nothing helpful, but what helpful thing was there to say.

  Out the parlour window on these late-fall afternoons you could see the church not far away. You could see the play of sunlight on its stone folds and in its stained pitch chutes and musket slits. At this time of year, every day between four and four-thirty, the sun reflected off the large steeple-cross made of bronze forged from abandoned French cannons and placed there by citizens some time after Napoleon’s hordes had come and sacked the city. According to family documents they’d hung the commander of the garrison, Major Ambrosius Herzog, a brother of her great-great-grandfather, by his thumbs from wires above the market square where he died in stoic silence and was left hanging there until his thumbs rotted off and he fell down.

  In the living room the visitors sat in their loden mountain clothes and in their city finery. The men turned their hats in their hands and the women turned their rings while she carried the conversation in her strong and formal way. She offered Marsala wine and Cinzano and Earl Grey tea in the good Dresden pot with the butterfly pattern, and she offered biscotti and coconut kisses that tasted of the doillied tins she stored them in.

  By the end of that customary week of visiting these same people had stolen all of her husband’s war decorations. Gone were his two Iron Crosses, the War Merit Cross, and the various Close Combat and Wound Badges; even his Knight’s Cross was gone, the one that the famous general had presented to him in person. They’d also stolen the tank badge from the Afrika Korps, and the silver Edelweiss from the First Alpine Division. They had not seen the Walther pistol because she kept it locked away, but they’d taken his officer’s dress sidearm, the foot-long dagger with the ivory handle and silver tassel.

  With some of them she’d left the room on a pretence and then watched through the
crack between door and frame to see them rise on tiptoes and grin at their wives and put a finger to their lips. They’d opened the glass front of the bookcase and reached in to unpin the piece they coveted, these boy-men from his own family.

  She understood that they were after his courage and his eventful life, as if by stealing these bits of tin they could make what they stood for their own, these people who had never done a thing more dangerous than eat with knife and fork. It was interesting to her that those who had snickered at him the most during his life had also stolen the highest decorations.

  She thought of it as his final test of them, their chance at redemption, and she kept track of it all not only in her journal, but also in the letters she left for him on his pillow: pages written in blue ink and folded around dried leaves of lavender from the pouches in her linen drawer. On the outside of the sealed envelopes she wrote, “For you, my Love. Clara.” At first she wrote him a letter nearly every day. As time went by she wrote less often, but never less than twice a week. Her daughters collected the letters like discreet mail carriers and put them away unopened in a shoebox.

  Eventually Willa’s time was up. The cast on her arm had been removed at the clinic, and she had to fly back to her camels in Australia. On the morning of her departure there was a freezing rain falling, and to see Willa off Clara put on a coat and the black hat with the wide brim. Emma had come, and the three of them walked down the stairs and then slowly on the slippery ground around the house to the front where the taxi stood waiting. The rear door was frozen shut and the driver came around and yanked it open.

  “There,” he said and stepped back. Willa kissed her mother and Emma, and she wiped her own cheeks with the inside of her wrist, still the same motion she’d made as a little girl.

  “Come back soon,” said Clara to her. “When do you think we’ll see you again?”

  “Not sure. I’ll do my best. There’s often a conference somewhere in Europe or East Africa.”