Clara

by Kurt Palka

  On the journey home the chancellor told them the threat had been that unless he signed the agreement on the table right there the invasion would begin within the hour. He believed it, the chancellor said. The agreement committed him among other things to appoint the leader of Austria’s Nazi Party as minister of security. In charge of police, the chancellor said.

  Peter asked if he had considered refusing.

  Of course he had, the chancellor said. But then he had looked into the man’s eyes and he had absolutely believed the threats of burning things to the ground, to nothing.

  A FEW DAYS LATER at the apartment Clara heard Hitler’s unmistakeable voice on the radio. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and he was making a speech, saying that he was no longer willing to tolerate the suppression of millions of fellow countrymen across the border. He now wanted a full union with Austria. For our combined strength, he shouted. Our prosperity.

  She packed a lunch of two nice ham sandwiches with mustard and sliced pickles and on her bicycle rode to see Peter at his office.

  “A full union,” he said to her. “I have no idea where that is suddenly coming from.”

  She sat in a chair by his desk with her feet on the lower rail of the other chair, unwrapping their lunch. She pushed his across. In the office, doors stood open and telephones were ringing. He told her she could stay, but he was expecting someone and had no time to eat. But he took one big bite of his sandwich, chewed, and took another bite.

  “Not bad,” he said. “Where do you find real ham these days?”

  “In the officers’ kitchen at the Landshut base.”

  “Of course. Where else.” He kept eating. When he was finished he wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. He balled up the sandwich wrapper and tossed it into the wastepaper basket. He grinned at her.

  The telephone on his desk rang and he picked it up and spoke into it. He hung up. “That’s him. He’s at the reception. If you put all that away and wipe your hands and sit like a lady, I’ll introduce you, sister-dear. You never know when you might need a friend in Switzerland. Especially you.”

  The receptionist showed him in, a man Peter’s age in a good dark suit and rimless glasses with a trenchcoat over his arm. Peter shook hands with him while she swept breadcrumbs off her skirt.

  “My sister, Doctor Herzog,” said Peter. “Doctor Hufnagel is the chief diplomat at our office in Geneva. My sister is a lecturer and a writer.”

  Hufnagel said it was a pleasure. While he searched his pockets for a business card he said, “A writer. Indeed! Interesting times, are they not? But what is it the Chinese say about interesting times?”

  “They say may you not be living in them.”

  “Ha! And yet.” He handed her a card and smiled at her. To Peter he said, “Washington is thinking about it, by the way.”

  “Are they?” said Peter. “And London?”

  “Well,” said Dr. Hufnagel. “They haven’t said no. But it’s the Americans who are now beginning to say that the Versailles Treaty was perhaps flawed. The first journalists are saying that, not the politicians.”

  She was about to open her mouth, but Peter looked at her and shook his head ever so slightly. He said, “Let’s stop blaming the treaty. It’s a distraction. Hitler did not need any excuse.”

  When she left, Dr. Hufnagel said again that it had been a pleasure and he hoped to see her again. Peter showed her out. At the office entrance he said he was glad she’d kept her mouth shut about Versailles. None of that sort of talk was helpful now, he said. Urgent appeals had gone out to the other members of the League of Nations to come to Austria’s help, and the issue was tabled for the next Assembly in Geneva, but that was months away.

  “So frustrating,” he said. “Always so slow. This need for consensus among so many.”

  At the elevator she pushed the bell and then leaned and gave him a peck on the cheek. “Thanks for the beautiful crystal bowl,” she said. “Danni brought it and we unpacked it. It’s on the sideboard. Maybe in the summer I’ll put fruit in it. I’m living in the house on the base now. It’s a bit small but I think I can make it nice.”

  He stood looking pale and worried.

  “Dear Peter,” she said and patted his cheek. “Go back inside to Mr. Hufnagel. Sort out this crisis. I’m in Vienna all week and maybe we can have coffee. Give my love to Danni. And if this elevator takes much longer I think I’ll walk.”

  She waited until the door was closed and then walked down the stairs, her heels loud on the stone steps. There was something else she was thinking about. She felt she knew, but she’d wait another week or so and then take the train to St. Töllden and see Dr. Mannheim.

  NEXT DAY Chancellor Schuschnigg in his own speech on the radio said that Austria did not want a union with Germany. No Anschluss, he said. He proposed a plebiscite to make certain.

  Hitler angrily forbade a plebiscite, threatening invasion again, within the hour.

  Schuschnigg backed down once more, and this time Hitler went over his head and demanded from the Austrian president that the chancellor who had suddenly, so unexpectedly, stood up to him be fired and the new minister of security, the Nazi Seyss-Inquart, be appointed in his place.

  On March 11 Schuschnigg resigned his post. In the name of peace, he said, and the president, Dr. Wilhelm Miklas, accepted the resignation.

  Hitler promptly broke his promises not to invade, and German troops poured into Austria. At many points along their route they were met by jubilant crowds.

  She was not in Vienna that day, but Peter said they could see much of it from the office windows. The office had a staff of six and they all crowded the windows overlooking Mariahilferstrasse and parts of the Ring, and they all knew they’d soon be out of work. The motorcade rolled past with Hitler standing like royalty in his fine yellow-and-chrome Mercedes convertible, holding on with one hand to a handrail there and saluting with the other.

  Later he posed in front of the parliament building. By his side stood Mr. Seyss-Inquart in a long black coat, slicked-back hair, and round glasses. The newspaper had a picture of them shaking hands.

  Schuschnigg was placed under house arrest and then kept in solitary confinement in the cellars at Gestapo headquarters. A year later she learned that he’d been taken to the concentration camp at Dachau and then to Sachsenhausen.

  EIGHTEEN

  THE NEXT TIME she arrived at the university administration building she was not allowed through the police line. The policemen looked different somehow and their uniforms seemed to fit in a new way, more filled out from within, as from some new important office that had swelled their collective breast.

  She walked through the inner city, and it looked different too. Libraries and bookstores closed, Nazi flags on public buildings. Strangers with swastika party pins everywhere. New arrivals from Germany, Erika said at the apartment. They had come for the jobs because so many teachers and civil servants and elected officials were being fired and replaced by Nazis.

  Next day she returned to the university, and this time she was allowed in. Men with party pins in their lapels were everywhere. In the libraries they were going through the stacks, pulling books and tossing them into carts. In the rector’s office and in the department offices men unknown to her were sitting behind desks, going through papers and interviewing professors.

  One of the pin-men asked her to sit down. He wore black shiny sleeve protectors fixed with elastics between wrist and elbow. He searched the files and found her name.

  “A teaching assistant,” he said. “I don’t think so. But come back in a few days if you like.”

  It was astonishing. She walked the halls as smoke drifted in from the fires in the courtyard; she thought of Professor Roland Emmerich sitting cross-legged on the desk, talking about the deep irrelevance of passing social phenomena. She thought of Professor Ferdinand reciting E. C. Dowson’s “Vitae Summa Brevis”:

  They are not long, the days of wine and roses

  Out of a misty
dream

  Our path emerges for a while, then closes

  Within a dream

  The pin-men would not see her for three days. By then her professors and most of the faculty had been sacked and replaced. Word was that, were they to apply for party membership, they might be able to come back, but that was by no means certain because party membership now had to be earned, and the department chairs and teaching positions were taken by people who had been quicker to join the new order.

  Much of the material that had been taught in Vienna was now suspect and in need of review. Many books in the library had been thrown out the courtyard windows, and down there they smouldered in fires from which dense smoke and ashes rose to the roof. Erika had heard that early on even Nietzsche had been questionable, until someone in Berlin decided that thanks to his Superman idea his works might have merit after all.

  She did not see Professors Ferdinand and Emmerich again, and she hoped they’d be all right. Emmerich had been her very favourite; it was impossible to imagine him with a Nazi pin in his lapel, and so she knew he would not be back. He would withdraw from the current madness, she thought. Define it for himself, step back and wait it out. He, a man who could probably spend the rest of his life sitting in one chair while the light in the room changed from day to night and to day again, and he could survive on his inner resources that would forever be renewing themselves with thoughts as yet unexplored.

  This was the fabulous thing about good and disciplined thinking; it was something he had tried to hammer into them, that good thinking was always fresh and progressive and one insight would lead to another.

  Good thinking, he had told them, was what got you through life in an interesting way. Good thinking helped you live, and it would help you die.

  In the end her pin-man with the sleeve protectors informed her that her services would not be required. He said the mark next to her name was a problem, but if she applied for party membership, she might eventually be able to work as a secretary.

  “A secretary,” she said. “I have no interest in working as a secretary. And what mark? For what?”

  He ignored that. “Mind you,” he said. “Party membership is a privilege and a fairly exclusive one. You may not qualify.”

  “A mark for what?” she said. “And given by whom? Surely not by the university. Is it political?”

  He closed her file. As to teaching at university levels, he said, few women were able to get that far. Perhaps as assistants. Off the top of his head he could not think of one.

  “But what about the new roles for women?” she said. “The promises in your election platform? Rewarding work beyond home and family. Recognition, emancipation.”

  “What election? There was no election.”

  “But there were promises that gained you supporters.”

  He shrugged. He raised his fingers off the desk and let them tap down thickly one by one. He looked over her shoulder and nodded at the next person in line.

  AT THE LEONHARDT APARTMENT, Maximilian and Cecilia sat at the table under the yellow lamp in the dining room. “These,” Cecilia said to him. “And these.” She picked up some papers and squared the edges. “That would be a great help. Thank you so much, Maxi.”

  He took them and stood up. He smiled at Clara and headed for the other room. His face was grey, his hair white, his shoulders thin and rounded now. He seemed to have difficulties opening the door. Clara rose to help but Cecilia reached and held her back and gave a quick shake of her head. They watched Max changing his hands on the papers and then holding them with his chin against his chest and using both hands on the doorhandle. The door closed.

  “He’s not well,” said Clara. “What is it?”

  “The doctor says he doesn’t know. But I do. It’s since the jail, since Theo’s death. And he’s getting worse. He is helping me copy music notations, and his handwriting is still good. Never mind. It’s lovely to see you. Tell me about your new life. And Albert, how is he?”

  She talked for long minutes. She talked about the house, which needed paint and a woman’s touch, about life on the base and the small town nearby. About her parents having finally come to terms with her choice. Things were much better now, since the wedding.

  Max came back and Cecilia gave him more papers and he shuffled off again. Cecilia poured tea and at some point she said, “Child, you look happy. I’m so glad for you. You look … I won’t say it. You would tell me, would you not?”

  “Tell you what?”

  Cecilia put a hand on hers and smiled. “It’s in your eyes, my dear. Have you seen your doctor?”

  She blushed deeply. “I’m planning to.”

  “Good. You’ll let me know, won’t you.”

  Clara helped with the tea things, and in the kitchen described her encounter with the pin-man at university. Cecilia listened. Her business was changing too, she said. At the opera and the conservatory coaches had been enlisted from the ranks of Nazis, and it was only because of her reputation among Italian and Scandinavian and American performers that she had any operatic work at all.

  “There’s something you might want to think about,” she said. “With Albert away and Theo dead it’s just Max and I in the apartment. Two full-sized bedrooms and the smaller one aren’t being used. I was thinking that you and Erika and Mitzi could use those rooms. For a fraction of the money you must be paying now. It would help us all.”

  “You mean live here with you?”

  “Well, yes. The place is big enough. Then again, from what you just told me, you may not want to bother with an apartment in Vienna at all. It’d be a shame, but I’d understand that.”

  “Oh no. I’ll always want to keep a place here. Things will change again.”

  That evening she mentioned it to Erika and Mitzi. They had seen the rooms, old-fashioned with high ceilings and tall windows and built-in bookshelves. They discussed the money and by the end of the next day an agreement was reached with Cecilia. They gave notice at their flats on Beatrixgasse.

  IN ST. TÖLLDEN Dr. Mannheim examined her and asked questions about dates and symptoms such as nausea. Some mornings, she told him. Yes. She got dressed and then sat at his desk while he was making notes in her file. Two months, he said. Two and a half. Based on what he could see and the dates she’d given him. All seemed well. But he wanted her to come more often now. “This is good news, I hope.”

  “Very good news.” She smiled. “The best in days.”

  She called Albert, not from her parents’ house but from the post office on the town square. She waited while someone at the base went to find him, sat in the familiar telephone booth, so very happy, holding the receiver and leaning back against the panelling. The booth still smelled of newly sharpened pencils, that odd smell it had always had. The postmistress was new. She wore a Nazi pin and gave her suspicious looks through the window. Clara smiled at her because she felt like being generous.

  She knew what he would say. They had talked about the possibility and he’d been so very pleased. At the other end she heard footsteps and someone picked up the receiver and said the colonel could not be contacted right now. He was in Munich, and was there a message or could she call back? She said, Never mind, and two hours later she was on the train to Landshut to tell him in person and to see his expression when she did so.

  IN JUNE she and Erika and Mitzi moved in with the Leonhardts. As they lugged things in and out, neither the concierge at the old building nor the doorman at the new stirred a finger to help. Whereas once they had flung open doors and greeted tenants, even carried shopping bags and held umbrellas, they just stared now. The doorman too was growing a small Hitler moustache and he had taken to wearing a party pin among the golden frogs on his jacket.

  SINCE ALBERT WAS BUSY with manoeuvres and frequent trips to Berlin, she spent most of that summer in St. Töllden. She put on a smock and helped out at the Roman excavation site, soaking and brushing dirt off fragments. In the evenings she translated the archaeologists’ re
ports into English for the American museum that had bought co-publication rights for the dig.

  Earlier that year her father had discovered caves in the mountain that showed signs of having been used as Christian hiding places and as places of secret worship. Existing caves with animals drawn on walls had been enlarged, and worship niches had been hewn with hand tools. On cave walls the fish symbol and the cross were drawn with paints of metal oxides, mingling with images of horses and stags and beasts with enormous tusks drawn in clay and vegetable paint ten thousand years earlier.

  Her father was told to apply for party membership and when he declined he nearly lost the museum. To qualify for continued funds for the dig he had to fill out many applications with eagles and swastikas on them in triplicate and take them to the municipal office where the clerks behind the wickets now wore pins too. They took his forms and whereas once they would have smiled at him and chatted, they now raised their eyebrows and asked questions before stamping the papers with more eagles and swastikas and tossing them into the tray.

  In August two men and one woman from the American museum came to visit the site. The men wore bow ties and linen suits with knickerbockers and knee socks, the woman a long skirt, linen jacket, and brown hiking shoes. She was tall and friendly. She carried peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches with the crusts cut away in a linen shoulder bag of many pockets, and most days she offered some to Clara. For the baby, she would say. She had lively eyes and freckles and she wore her hair up, the way Cecilia did.

  In what appeared to have been the children’s room at the Roman villa, archaeologists had found figures or dolls seven inches tall, cast hollow from native copper, with fine detailing of faces and hands, the dolls wearing clothing of fur, and one doll holding a broken spear in one raised hand. With all dolls the sprues had been nicely filed off and the cast lines dressed.