Clara

by Kurt Palka

  She sat down on the bench in the hall, under the wall-mounted telephone box there.

  “What order?”

  “The Blood Order,” the boy said proudly. “It’s an award, like a medal.” He unbuckled the briefcase and reached inside. “This,” he said.

  He took out a sheet of paper and held it for her to take. He stood in the light of the ceiling lamp with his keen boy-eyes glinting and the shadow of his nose cast down on his mouth and chin. He shook the paper at her.

  She reached but then lowered her hand.

  “Take it! That noise,” he said irritably. “Can’t you stop it?”

  “No.”

  She could see black printing on that paper, some Gothic calligraphy, the prominent heading, BLOOD ORDER, awarded to …

  She shook her head.

  “Read it.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Theodor gave his life for our cause. Take this in his honour. There is also an actual medal, but we don’t have it yet.”

  “He didn’t give his life,” she said. She stood up and walked to the door and opened it. “What pompous nonsense. He was simply gunned down in some field.”

  “He was not the only one that day,” said the boy. “Take it. Take it for Theodor. These first editions have been signed by the Führer’s undersecretary in person.”

  In the end she took it, and the next time she visited Maximilian in jail she told him about it. Whispered it to him, she said to Clara; to him, a decorated war veteran himself.

  “Romantic nonsense,” he whispered back. He glanced at the guard who stood not far away leaning against a wall. This took place in the visiting room made of poured concrete. They were one of three couples, all on iron benches bolted down, at iron tables bolted down also.

  “I’ll burn it if you think I should,” whispered Cecilia. “I took it only because I thought it might be useful one day.”

  “Well. Keep it. You never know.”

  “No whispering,” said the guard.

  Cecilia said that Maximilian had aged greatly. His hair was white and he looked dead tired. He was much thinner.

  He was getting used to it, he had told her during an earlier visit. But eight people they were in the cell now, one whose feet had been crushed with iron bars by the police. They had a tin plate and a wooden spoon each for food, and a covered bucket for shitting, which he could no longer do now without bleeding. Steel beds cantilevered from the wall, roll-up mattresses on them and a blanket. He tried to make a joke of it. “Other than that, it’s not bad,” he said.

  For a few weeks Cecilia kept the document on a shelf in the living room, and Clara and Erika and Mitzi all saw it there: the black ink, the Nazi seal. Then one day Cecilia took it away and put it out of sight.

  IN MUNICH Albert had adjusted quickly to his new life. A tailor had come and measured him for his uniforms, with an assistant to take notes while the tailor snapped his tape and crouched and measured and called out numbers. The uniforms when they arrived were snug and sharp with excellent needlework; fully six sets for everything from the parade ground to panzer blacks, to horseback riding, to small dress and full dress. The shirts were fitted, even the track and field outfit was, and the pyjamas.

  Albert was assigned a batman and an adjutant to be shared with two other officers. The plan was that in a seamless series of long days stretching over nearly two years, he would learn everything about tank warfare and strategy and leadership in battle the school could teach.

  Field Marshal Paul von Kleist was in charge of building the tank army of the German military, and he listened closely to the ideas of General Heinz Guderian about lightning warfare. Guderian had been behind the school’s program, and he often came there to observe exercises with the panzer models II and III, and the prototype of the new panzer IV that was in production now. Gunnery was practised with the 37mm turret guns, the 75mm howitzers, the 88mm, and the new 50mm. They also practised with 150mm armoured cannons that fired shells that on incoming roared like freight trains. They knew this, Albert said, because as part of their training they had to endure incoming live fire in a trench.

  On several occasions General Guderian brought General Erwin Rommel along to observe exercises in landscape boxes the size of four and eight billiard tables, with artificial hills and rivers, and trees and houses and valleys to cross. To move their unit symbols, they used long rakes or they sent aides on stockingfeet into the toy landscape.

  “Speed and absolute relentlessness,” Guderian said. “Tanks are the iron fist to punch through defences and they never stop moving forward. Stuka dive bombers and Messerschmitts provide cover and support from above, and infantry on trucks and apcs follows closely and cleans up the conquered areas.”

  To make their cannons more effective, Krupp had produced a new armour-piercing projectile with an improved charge. If it struck a tank, it blasted just a small hole through the armour, but the compression and heat and the needle-thin steel fragments killed every living thing inside. Since the enemy was expected to have a similar charge, the Type IV panzers were equipped with a new kind of armour with air spaces between plates set at a greater degree of slope.

  In addition chemists were developing a revolutionary type of gunpowder, Albert said. He explained to her that the only way to drive a projectile faster with a given charge was to have a propellant where every single grain fired at the very same instant. Unlike traditional powders, he said, some of which burned so slowly that grains still came out as sparks when the shot had already left the muzzle.

  Apart from the tanks, new weaponry kept arriving at the school for the students to integrate and deploy. There were night exercises and brutal marches with full gear and mortar base plates just to show them what their men would have to endure, and to gain leadership experience he and his fellow officers were posted as seconds-in-command to ever larger units across the country. He spent weeks near Hamburg, near Cologne, near Berlin. Back on the base, days were filled with more classroom instruction on anything from new tank technology and refinements of existing materials and mechanisms to military history, strategy, and psychology.

  “Men respect other men only if they see qualities in them that they want for themselves,” the psychology instructor told them. “They’ll respect you if they want to be like you in some way. Men respect moral and physical courage and strength. They want leadership, but leadership they can look up to. We are talking about things that are felt, not seen,” he said. “We see people only for the first few seconds. Then we feel them. Even if we are looking at them, our eyes are really only probing them to inform our intuition. We feel things like courage, decisiveness, moral fibre, and honesty. And fear, absolutely. Never show fear. Never.”

  The weeks and months went by quickly, for him and for her. They spoke on the telephone, he from the school office or from other postings with his back to the clerks, and she from the post office or from the Leonhardt apartment, sitting on that bench in the hall staring at coats on the rack opposite.

  He had also been issued a good horse, he told her, a strong and wilful mare. He was riding her most days.

  “You love it,” she said to him. “The whole experience.”

  “I do, absolutely. But I miss you.”

  “I miss you too.”

  She said Emmerich was working them as hard as ever, and so was Professor Ferdinand. But it was going well. She was also still doing the parks with Erika. Sometimes the depot was out of supplies and then all they could do was drive around and talk to people and bring drinking water. The other day they’d taken a girl and her mother to the hospital.

  “Come and visit,” she said.

  “Come and visit. How?”

  “What about the other passport?” she said. “You know. The one the forger made for you. You said it was good.”

  THIRTEEN

  IN VIENNA the murdered Chancellor Dollfuss had been succeeded by Dr. Kurt von Schuschnigg, the former education minister. The newspapers praised his diplo
matic skills; they said he had been working to secure an alliance with Italy and Hungary against Hitler, but then those countries saw more advantage in siding with Berlin, and they abandoned him.

  She saw a picture of Mussolini and Hitler striding side by side, Mussolini like an opera diva wearing a large-brimmed hat with pheasant feathers in the band. March of the Fascists, the caption said.

  Soon after that the papers reported that Chancellor Schuschnigg had signed his own peace agreement with Hitler; in exchange for not being invaded by Germany, he’d had to give the Austrian Nazi Party legal status and accept Nazis into his cabinet.

  “You realize what that means,” said Peter. “It’s the infamous thin edge of the wedge.” He said it was not what the chancellor had wanted to do. He knew that for a fact.

  One night in August she and Erika were helping some injured people in an underpass when the trucks came back. They could hear the engines in low gear and already it was too late to run and hide. From the truck beds handheld searchlights found them, then men jumped off the trucks swinging steel bars and wooden clubs.

  They broke her left arm with one blow and nearly tore off Erika’s ear with another. A young man stood there, lit from behind by the truck headlights with his face in darkness and his ears like a bat’s sticking out pink.

  “Next time we find you helping them we’ll set fire to you and your car,” he said. “We’ll kill you.”

  “But we work for the Red Cross,” Erika screamed. “This is what we do. We help, you idiot. Unlike you.” She stood with her hand pressed to her ear. Blood was running between her fingers, down her wrist, and into her sleeve.

  He stared at her. He raised his stick and poked her hard in the breast. “Don’t help any one side. Don’t interfere. Let the strongest win.”

  The men ran back to their truck, talking and laughing.

  At the Red Cross station Erika’s ear received eight stitches and Clara’s arm was put in a cast. There was no X-ray machine, but the nurse said the arm looked straight and she did not think it needed resetting.

  At first she did not tell her parents, so as not to worry them. She hoped that by the time she saw them again the cast might be off. But she did tell Albert on the telephone, and they spoke for a long time that Sunday while she sat pale and subdued in Cecilia’s hall.

  “The entire arm?” he said on the telephone. “Sweetheart. How terrible.”

  “Just about,” she said. She felt better talking to him. “From wrist to shoulder, bent at the elbow. It’s in a sling but it’s still heavy. Like carrying a suitcase around.”

  Eventually she told her parents too. They wanted her to come and see Dr. Mannheim, but she said the cast was fine and she was very busy right now. She stood and looked at herself in the mirror and resolved to get on with her life regardless of all the turmoil. To live above events and not be at their mercy, Professor Emmerich had said.

  Peter was rarely in Vienna, but when he was, she tried to get information from him. One Sunday he told her he had been in Rome with a delegation from the League of Nations to protest once again against the Italian massacres in Ethiopia, but they had been sent home. A flunkey in a white suit had come to tell them everyone was busy with more important issues.

  The League was not successful in creating true alliances, he admitted. There were too many conflicting interests, and the League had no real power to enforce anything.

  She made notes for later, for something she thought of as Life in One Room, in One Mind. She began it after the attack, which if anything after the first few days had made her more determined. It had driven her back into herself and forced her to examine what was important to her, and what was not.

  She was no saint, this she knew. And no selfless battler against evil and stupidity. If she could ever contribute in any way, she decided, it would be through her studies, through what she was learning there. Things she could do with her mind.

  She also began to plan her dissertation; it would be inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke, she thought. Something departing from his writings about inspiration. Moments of Faith and Power, perhaps, as a working title.

  It resonated with her own view of philosophical structure as a house to inhabit, and to see the world through its windows. When Rilke spoke of faith, she did not think he was referring to religious faith but to faith in one’s inner power and will to create meaning and purpose.

  There was more, she felt, and it would have to do with the survival of soul and spirit in dark moments. The writers and poets she admired most were men and women who examined and observed and noticed, and thought for themselves. They might have wished they could simply believe, but that was not the same thing. And in any case, had their faith been blindly religious, their lives might have been easier but they would have been much less interesting as writers.

  She spoke again to Professor Emmerich, and he sat and listened. He nodded and said, Good, and that he wished her luck. From this point on she should not consult with him about her idea any more, he said. She should talk to her Ph.D. adviser.

  He saw her disappointment. “What?” he said. “It’s standard academic procedure, Miss Herzog. To avoid any conflict of interest and too narrow an approach.”

  She sat with the cast in her lap, taking this in. She would miss him, miss these informal talks. “But on other topics,” she said. “Like on the new material now?”

  “Of course. But not on your dissertation.” He nodded at the cast. “It must get in the way. Does it make it hard to type? Or even sit at a desk properly?”

  “It’s impossible to type. Much too slow, and I can’t type capital letters. I tried. So I’m writing everything by hand. You’ve seen my papers.”

  He smiled. “Miss Herzog, when you are ready for an adviser just tell the office.”

  AT THE APARTMENT Mitzi had looked at Erika’s ear, at the stitches coarse as in some homemade soccer ball, and she had given her a new asymmetrical hairstyle that swung forward to her jawline on that side and covered much of the damage. Women stopped Erika in the street and asked who did her hair, and soon Mitzi had a half-dozen more clients who wanted a hairdo just like that. She’d picked up her new papers in the name of Anna Susanne Toplitz, and she kept them in a safe place in her apartment. The identity card and driver’s licence a surprisingly good photo of herself.

  Mitzi always dressed well in clean white smocks over black blouses and knee-length skirts that showed her good legs in silk stockings. She was focused on her work, making house calls only in bright daylight and in good parts of town. The in-colour for youngish women who could afford it that year was jet-black, with bangs nearly to the eyebrows or no bangs at all but straight and parted in the middle. Rich older women, and Vienna had many of those, liked a perm and a little blonding or purpling, depending on their natural colour. Rich older women also had regular manicures and pedicures. They had hairs plucked from their chins, and vigorous facials with hot cloths and French salves to stimulate blood flow and make the skin look alive and pink. Rich older women could have anything they wanted; they never haggled over price and they tipped generously on top of that. Mitzi was doing well.

  IN NOVEMBER 1936, the officers’ academy granted its students one week’s leave. Albert put on civilian clothes and with his forged passport crossed into Austria. He travelled by night train from Munich to Vienna, sitting in a corner seat by the window. The only other people in his compartment were a couple perhaps in their seventies who sat at times holding hands. They’d said good evening, and nodded and smiled, and that had been it. At the border near Salzburg the train stopped and whistles sounded. He let down the window on its leather strap and looked out, and saw teams of armed police boarding the train at either end. They had dogs, and that worried him.

  He could hear the policemen sliding open compartment doors one by one, coming closer. Soon they were in this car; he could hear their voices. One German, one Austrian. Out the window the station lay in poor light from overhead lamps, and the engine stood n
ot far away, puffing steam.

  They yanked open the compartment door and one of them said, “Passport control” and held out his hand. The old man and the woman handed over their passports, and he too reached into his jacket pocket and took his out. The woman looked terrified, but the dog paid no attention to her. It was looking at him. Watching him closely.

  Do not make eye contact with the dog, he told himself. Do not. A large, shaggy Alsatian. He nodded at the policemen and they appraised him: his suit, his military haircut. The Austrian one opened his passport to the picture page and passed it on to his colleague, who did the same and handed it back. The dog came closer. A male. He could smell its rankness. The German policeman lengthened the dog’s leash and waited a moment. He said something to the dog and yanked it back, and they moved on to the next compartment.

  He stood by the open window to calm himself. He looked out and eventually saw the policemen climbing down, four men and two dogs. The watering-funnel swung away from the engine and a whistle sounded. The train jerked and stopped, and moved off. Coal smoke and steam came in the window and he closed it.

  AT CLARA’S BUILDING the concierge pulled the door-latch for him on her long string and then watched him from her spy window. She craned her neck at him.

  “We’re winning,” she said.

  He stopped and looked down the dark stairwell. “Who is?”

  The concierge stared at him. She slapped shut her window.

  On this leave, he and Clara went out only once, to visit his mother. He did not want to risk being seen, and so they spent the rest of the time at the apartment. Erika moved upstairs with Mitzi, and at lunch the first day they all came together and made bacon and tomato omelettes and they drank real coffee that Albert had brought from the school kitchen. They talked and laughed and the women pretended they were not afraid of developments out there; of the frequent sound of gunshots; of running footsteps in the street by night.