Clara

by Kurt Palka

  “Yes. And was killed at the same time, probably with a similar one.”

  “How? Where was he cut?”

  “He was run through the chest. Both were. It was unusual but it did happen. There is a move called pas d’honneur. It’s when a duellist fears he may lose and so he stops defending and he attacks and charges the blade and at the same time sinks his own.”

  “Sounds desperate.”

  “It’s hard to relate to today. For an officer then it would have been unthinkable to lose a duel. Absolutely dishonourable. His life would not have been – it was unthinkable.”

  Peter took the sword from her, wiped it with a cloth he had hanging on the tie rack, and slipped it back into the sheath. “My father did not lose that duel.”

  She heard the note of pride in that, and it moved her strangely. “But he was dead, Peter. Was that better?”

  “Than losing a duel? He would have said so. Yes.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Did you see him? The body?”

  “I did. I was nine years old, Bernhard four. The seconds brought him on a blanket and put him down in the entrance hall. Blood came though the blanket and the entire tunic was soaked. He had cuts on his arms and in his face too. I saw him first, then Mama came running from the parlour.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t really remember much after that. The noises. We were sent upstairs. We could hear her screaming. The doctor came in a carriage. We could see him from the upstairs window, getting down from the carriage and putting his hat back on. It was fall, I remember that. The linden trees. We could hear mother and the doctor downstairs, and other noises. Her crying. Out the window the coachman was putting a feedbag around the horse’s neck. It was so normal. I remember that too.”

  AT THE END OF THAT DAY they all went for a walk. Where the path was wide enough, she walked between her parents, one arm each around their middles. There was snow on the ground and the air was crisp and clean. She could smell the ice-cold river.

  Her father took them to the new Roman excavation site that he was in charge of. There was a temporary wooden roof over it all to keep off the snow while the digging went on. Now, over the holiday, the site was deserted. On large worktables within their drawn outlines lay surprisingly modest tools: small shovels, soup spoons, uniquely curved picks like large dentist tools, sieves, sable brushes, toothbrushes, and paint scrapers.

  The strata were clearly visible, layers of clay and limestone and gravel. Within the perimeter, the rooms were nearly all laid bare; the tile stove that had conducted heat along clay pipes to other rooms, the kitchen, the steam bath, and the lead pipes for bringing water down from the mountain.

  Years earlier, on the shores of the lake not far from St. Töllden, other sites had been found. Dwellings from the Bronze Age and earlier, her father had said. Tools and cooking pots, and weapons. The shoulder blades of goats carved into combs. Bows with tendons and charred stems for fire-making. Shoes of salt-cured leather with fur on the inside, six thousand years old, seven thousand, and more.

  All those artifacts were now on exhibition in the museum that her father was in charge of. His digs were funded in part by the provincial government and in part by an American museum. He said the Romans had found those sites too, and others from the Iron Age. They had searched them for metals and flint.

  The Romans had also mined salt in the mountains nearby. They’d done it by boring deep holes and piping water into them, siphoning off the salt solution and then boiling away the water. Over time the boreholes became large underground caves with walls and ceilings of salt. Salt had been like money, her father said. It was currency. They had paid their soldiers with it, hence the term. The root word sold meant salt, he said, and the expression to be worth one’s salt came from that time also.

  That night in her childhood bed, snug under the duvet and with the curtains making the familiar rustling sound as cold air stirred them through the half-open window, she imagined the Romans, two thousand years ago. Perhaps men in togas, or men and women in fine purple silks and tooled and gold-embossed leathers, poking through the remains of that earlier primitive civilization of people who wore animal furs, but who had nevertheless known how to build homes on stilts, how to make fire and melt iron from rock in small furnaces to cast tools and weapons.

  To think of their lives then flooded by rising waters, crushed and buried by rockslides. Gone, but unearthed again and again, and marvelled at.

  That night also in some dream an image came to her of two men duelling far away, with the first light of morning skimming low through trees, flashing in drops of dew on tree branches and on their swords. The image stayed with her until she left the bed and in her flannel nightgown and bare feet padded to the bathroom. She sat on the toilet and drank water bending over the tap, and by the time she was back in bed, the image had left.

  In the morning over breakfast would have been the right time to put their minds at ease, to say something about not rushing into anything, perhaps even about postponing commitments. But there was nothing to say. The best she could do was to let them see how confident and happy she was. At some point she said, “Dad. Mom. Peter and I had a good long talk yesterday. You can ask him. Please do.”

  SHE HAD PHOTOGRAPHS of herself as a baby, and then at one and two years, and older. Photographs of family outings. Sunday hikes to guesthouses in the country. In one picture the adults were sitting on plankboard benches around plankboard tables under trees. Food was on the table, farmer’s bread and cold meats and jugs of cider. Her father sat holding her on his lap, and he was absolutely beaming at her, adjusting her knitted cap with one hand. So much love for her. Such warmth and safety. He would have been fifty then, but a youthful-looking man with an upturned moustache, short-cropped hair, and bold eyes. And her mother thirty-nine but looking older.

  In another picture she was already a teenager. Her father now white-haired sat with her in a photographer’s studio, in a prop like a small ship and they were both at the helm. And other pictures, she in her lyceum uniform looking overly serious, and one of herself and Erika and Mitzi on ice skates, the ones you fixed onto boots with a small crank. In the picture they were holding hands and practising skating in a chorus line with one leg up like in a French nightclub. Ski pants tucked into socks rolled over at the ankles, and those clumsy boots and skates, and woollen mitts and hats with stars on them, and dangling pompons. She remembered they were laughing so hard posing for that picture they kept falling down.

  BACK IN VIENNA Albert was getting ready to leave. The German embassy sent a truck with diplomatic licence plates. He ran the Norton up a ramp onto the bed and lashed it down, then the truck left. He packed his suitcase over Christmas and she spent most of her time with him at the Leonhardt apartment.

  On the day of Epiphany the truck came back and it stood in the street with its engine running and exhaust smoke rising white in the cold air. They looked down on it from the balcony, all of them: she, Albert and Cecilia, and Erika and Mitzi, who had come to say goodbye. He carried down the suitcases, then came back for the English hunter saddle. He set it down on the floor and they kissed while the women turned their backs. He did not want anyone to walk downstairs with him.

  And so they stood watching from the balcony, the driver coming out and saluting Albert and helping with the saddle, and then Albert climbing up to the cab. For a moment he stood on the footrest and craned his neck and looked up. He waved. She waved back.

  “Child,” said Cecilia to her afterwards. “Go wash your face. Straighten up and get on with it.”

  TWELVE

  WITH ALBERT AWAY she threw herself fully into her studies. 1935 would bring her sixth year at university. Dr. Freud had withdrawn to his medical practice and to write, but in the spring the increasing numbers of book burnings in Germany prompted her and Erika to initiate a petition asking him to come and examine the issue. Freud agreed.

  He came and stood
on the dais and held up his three most recent books: The Ego and the Id, The Future of an Illusion, and Civilization and Its Discontents.

  “You want me to talk about the book burnings,” he said. “In truth, they don’t deserve talking about. Some forms of denial are so transparent as to be childish. Burning books to deny what’s in them. Think about it. In time they may move on to burning the authors also, as they did in Spanish Inquisition, the witch hunts. We shall see.”

  He said it was possible Europe was entering another era much like those dark centuries, where power was given not to those who had earned it and would use it to the benefit of society, but to those ready to support the self-serving intentions of their masters.

  “Will it come to its senses and end soon? Probably not. Will it come here too? Probably. We shall have to see. For now it does not deserve any kind of serious investigation. You might say we refuse to stoop to that.” He put the books down on the desk. “Let’s instead move on to something much more interesting.”

  He said the office had asked him to consider delivering one more set of lectures. He could do that, he said, but he would be practising his English on them and if theirs was better than his, they were welcome to help out; he said he would also be recording the lectures for his own purposes. Later it became clear that he had used the occasion to practise his ideas in English for the day when he would leave Vienna.

  The series he began that day consisted of six lectures on what he called Practical Psychology for Everyday Life. There was the usual informality about them that worked well, and they were interesting. She filled three notebooks, one for each topic. After the first session, word of the event spread among students, and for the second lecture the auditorium was filled, seats and standing room. The doors were opened and students pressed in from the hallways to hear.

  The lectures were on women’s relationships with other women, then on men’s relationships with other men, and finally on men’s and women’s relationships with each other.

  As usual, Freud spoke off the top of his head, without notes. He stopped frequently, turned away and coughed into his handkerchief. He took a few deep breaths and continued. On occasion he asked if there was a better English word or phrase for what he had just said, and if one was offered, he would look around for consensus and then write it on the blackboard.

  Essentially he said that women’s relationships with each other turned on common experience as the co-endurer, and on the intuitive feminine; on likeness and recognition, and on empathy rather than competition, at least as long as there was a common fate and there was not much at stake beyond a sharing of experience. But if women were in competition with each other for anything – the love of a man, for example, or interesting work and recognition – then it was tooth and nail, the fiercest struggle of all.

  The relationships of men, he said, turned on competition and power. If a man smelled fear in another, or weakness, or an eagerness to be accepted, then that man was already as good as dead, or at least discounted. Respect and honour once lost could hardly ever be regained because a truth had been glimpsed, if only for a moment, like a door opening and closing. Trust and true friendship among men, because they were about admitting weaknesses, took a long time to develop. It was about strength. About dominance and submission, as among wild animals, he said. Throughout history, how many men had killed the competitor; how many fathers had killed the son, how many sons the father?

  With men and women, he said, it was much more complicated. He challenged the class to define the words liking and loving, and to carve out the line between them. Then he added sex to the discussion, and asked them to define sexual love. He asked them to think about what it was women wanted from men, and men from women.

  A sea of hands went up, and words flew out: Love, Sex, Money, Children, Family. He stood by the desk, never far from his microphone and bulky tape recorder, and he rocked back and forth on his Oxford brogues.

  “Yes,” he said, and, “Yes, yes. All of that. But what else? Let’s do this the Socratic way. You will have studied Edmund Husserl. What does he say?”

  “Ask what is the thing in itself,” someone shouted.

  “Ah,” Dr. Freud said. “Close. And have you done that?”

  He told them to look at his book, The Interpretation of Dreams, switched off the tape recorder, and left for that day.

  For the sixth and final lecture, university staff placed a second microphone on his desk and ran wires to loudspeakers out in the halls.

  Dr. Freud stood there as usual in suit and tie and fobbed watch chain, and he began by saying that one had to accept the fact that humans were in most ways no different from animals; in fact, they were animals enfeebled by morality and social influences.

  But creatures of deep nature, humans were, he said, and nature cared only about one thing. And that thing was More. More trees and more flowers with a billion seeds drifting on the air and perhaps one of them falling on good soil; more monkeys, more whales, more human babies, even if they starved to death in desert lands, and drowned to death in flood zones, and were strangled by their parents because they kept on coming.

  Nature was a blind multiplying machine, he said. And nowhere did the notion of human happiness let alone dignity enter into her gears. Nature’s job was quantity, not quality, even though quality might once in a while be the accidental by-product of quantity. And so, as to the question what did men want from women, and women from men, and how could they live happily together, one might apply Husserl, he said; but one had better not. It would be too sobering.

  “Sexual tension,” he said. “The push for more, at all ages and in all situations. The added tension of the unavailable, the luring, the romance. But behind it all, the blind and ruthless and single-minded sex drive. A woman in her mature years looking on her flock of children, six, seven, eight of them, all forever with their beaks open. And she, wondering where her plans for her own person had gotten lost in all that procreating. I see them every week in my practice.”

  He looked at the class, gave a rare smile, and added, “However wonderful and exciting at your age you may feel sexual tension is. I don’t wish to take that away from you.”

  There was not a stir in the auditorium, and none in the hallways. In his pauses one could hear the echo from the loudspeakers out there in marble corners and ceiling vaults of this ancient university.

  “As to the basic question you have been pondering,” he said. “All answers are fine, but not even the sum of them is adequate. Not adequate because of the X-factor. We’ll come to that later.”

  In one way, what men wanted from women were kind breasts, he said. They wanted nurture and warmth, kindness, even sweetness and understanding. They wanted neither competition nor argument nor challenge, of which they had plenty from other men. They wanted sex.

  And likewise in one way, what women wanted from men was security and containment; it was being desired and valued and understood. Beyond that of course it was about having a sexual mate who provided and protected, and on close inspection all of it, absolutely all of it, had to do with nature’s More.

  He put his hands together and said, “Well. So it is Husserl in essence, but that essence is enormously overshadowed by our complicated psyches.”

  He gave examples of sexual desires and sexual acts in direct contradiction to natural and moral laws, perversions always rooted in childhood, he said, which in turn set up great inner tensions and misdeeds and unhappiness later in life.

  “So,” he said. “Where does that leave us with our question of what men want from women and vice versa?” He stood and looked around at the class, from front row to doorway and standing room at the back.

  “Where indeed?” he said. “I invite you to continue the exercise with your boyfriend and girlfriend. Ask her or him to put into words what it is he or she wants from you. If they think long enough and are honest, they will discover that what they want from you is a feeling that is in turn the result of something that
is rather more difficult to define, but that stems directly from their own individual psyche, be it healthy or sick. Why are they with you? They are with you because being with you makes them feel a certain way. And why are they leaving you? They are leaving you because, be they psychologically healthy or sick, they are not feeling the way they want to feel. And that one phrase”—he paused and looked at his enormous class—“that one phrase, psychologically healthy or sick, is always the great unknown. It is the X-factor in the formula of human relations.”

  He bent over his tape machine and took his time searching for the right button. He punched it and picked up his cold cigar that had been lying on the desk. He coughed and wiped his lips.

  “So,” he said. “I refer you to my books Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and On Narcissism. If you can find them. Are there any questions?”

  ONE DAY AROUND THAT TIME there came a knock on the door of the Leonhardt apartment in Vienna. Cecilia was about to go into a coaching session, but she opened and looked out the crack. When she told the story later to Clara she said that all she could see was the doorman standing there in his admiral’s uniform and behind him a young man, a tall boy.

  “He insisted,” the doorman said to her, and he stepped aside.

  A tenor was warming up in the bathroom, but she had a moment. The boy was carrying a brand-new leather briefcase. He was dressed in long trousers baggy at the knees and a suit jacket. In his lapel she saw the Red Cross button some of them were wearing now since the swastika was banned.

  The boy stepped forward and said he had been a friend of Theodor’s and he was bringing something for her. She unlatched the chain and let him in.

  As soon as he was inside, he leaned and peered around the doorway to the living room. “What is that noise?”

  “A singer. Carry on.”

  He said he was from Mr. Seyss-Inquart’s office and he had come to present her with the Blood Order in recognition of Theodor’s sacrifice for the cause.