Clara

by Kurt Palka

  Roman, her father had said; a fantastic find. Teaching-toys for children, based on finds from much earlier ages, connecting children across millennia.

  The Americans were refreshingly outgoing and appreciative. In their explorers’ linen clothes and on hands and buttocks they clambered over rocks and down strata cuts. They held out helping hands to each other and talked excitedly, and they called one another Doctor Small and Doctor Henry and Doctor Isling, the woman. They took many photographs. In the end they renewed the contract with the museum for three years with the option to renew it further. The day the Americans left, Dr. Isling patted Clara’s stomach and hugged her, and then she gave her a jar of peanut butter still half full and the linen bag of many pockets as a present.

  AND SO WILLA was born in St. Töllden, at the small hospital there. Albert arrived in time; he came on the night train, wearing basic field grey. Before the delivery he sat by her bedside as long as the nurses would allow, then he waited in the lounge. Willa took her time. Late at night a nurse woke Albert where he was asleep in a chair and told him to go home. There was no telling how much longer it would take. But he stayed. Willa was born at four o’clock that morning.

  Clara was allowed to have visitors only at the end of that first day, and only one person at a time. The baby could be viewed through the picture window of the maternity ward, one of a half-dozen wicker baskets with a small white bundle in it, and in Willa’s case a bundle with a full head of black hair that had been rinsed and dried and now stood straight up. At that window like at a peephole to the future stood her father and mother, stood waving and smiling like changed people now in the presence of this grandchild. At other times Peter or Albert stood looking in. Her other brother Bernhard had sent a telegram from Salzburg.

  The first time she held Willa in her arms and nursed her, looking down on the tiny perfect person taking nourishment from her breast she began to weep, whether tears of joy or sorrow she could not decide, but tears of a profound experience that none of her studies had prepared her for.

  Later Albert sat with her, then her parents, and finally Peter.

  “You be nice to Albert,” she told him. “Will you? No arguments, no manly jousting over nothing?”

  “I promise,” said Peter.

  “Have you spoken to him? Try him.”

  “We’re fine. We spoke in the waiting room. About horses. I might actually get to like him. His uniform impresses people, but it scares me.”

  She said nothing to that.

  “I told him I hoped he brought his marching boots. He’ll be needing them soon.”

  “Marching boots?”

  “Yes.”

  “If he does, so will you, don’t you think? They’d draft you, wouldn’t they?”

  “Before I go to war for the corporal, I’d rather—” He leaned forward, made a gun with his hand, and put it to his temple. He sat back in the chair.

  “No you wouldn’t, Peter,” she said. “Because there’s Danni. And Mom and I. I haven’t seen much of you. Where have you been?”

  “In Geneva, mostly. We had to close the Vienna office and they wanted us to destroy all the files. Now we’re allowed to send them to Switzerland. We sent them to Doctor Hufnagel. You remember him.”

  “I do. They let you send all the files?”

  “All except the ones on minority rights. They took those away.” He paused. “And you?”

  “I spent a lot of time on trains. The base, Vienna, here. They fired the old faculty, you’ll have heard. And I’m not there any more.”

  “That’s too bad.” He sat there on the wooden chair against the wall. He managed a smile.

  “And how is Danni?”

  “She is fine. She could have gone to Switzerland, but she didn’t want to go without me. They took my passport.”

  “They did?”

  “Yes. I am not allowed to leave. And I really do think there’s a war coming, Clara. There’s talk of closing the border. I mean, from the inside. By our new colonial masters.”

  She was leaning against the pillow, half-sitting and uncomfortably so because of the pad for the stitches and the bleeding. She was not keen to hear dark predictions.

  He was watching her. “Are you in pain?”

  “Am I in pain. Brother-dear.”

  “Want me to call the nurse?”

  “God, no. She’d stop all the visiting right away. It’s really the nurses who run this place.” She paused. “What’s that about war, Peter?”

  “Things I hear. I asked your Albert, but even if he knew he wouldn’t say anything. I think he knows.”

  A FEW DAYS LATER Neville Chamberlain met Hitler, and for a promise of peace Great Britain agreed not to interfere in the German invasion of Sudetenland. She sat listening to the news on the radio in the dayroom with just two other patients in the room, one of them asleep in his chair. Later that day the radio said Mr. Chamberlain had flown home to a hero’s welcome at the airport.

  “Peace for our time,” the British prime minister called out on the crackling radio. People could be heard cheering. The date was September 30, 1938.

  Next day there was a picture of him in the newspaper: smiling, a likeable and distinguished-looking gentleman waving a piece of paper.

  “Where is your Albert?” said Peter to her that afternoon. They were sitting in the dayroom, just he and she, with the radio on. He had brought her a thermos of coffee made by her mother just the way she liked it, with milk and sugar.

  “He went to Vienna to see his parents. He’ll be back in a few days.”

  The radio was talking about the invasion of Sudetenland. It had begun that morning and was already completed.

  “There goes your Treaty of Versailles,” said Peter. “Guilt clauses and all. Torn up, tossed out. Remember? How did you put it? Standing up for ourselves, being wild for once? Not exactly what you had in mind, is it?”

  “You know it isn’t.” She sat on the couch in her own worn terrycloth robe and bedroom slippers. “I want to get out of here,” she said.

  “You will. Isn’t it just a few more days?” He crossed to the radio, raised his hand to the knob, and looked at her over his shoulder. “Enough of that?”

  She nodded.

  That evening Peter took the train back to Vienna. She never saw him again.

  WHEN ALBERT WAS BACK, the head nurse made an exception and allowed him to be in the room with mother and baby. He had to be far away, on a chair by the window, and he sat on that chair in the windowlight like a moody painting of war coming. She looked at him, and she looked away. It was in his face and in his uniform. It was in that quality of late light with the sun down and the light above the rooftops orange at first, then silver. Now shades of grey filled the room. Grey walls, grey floor, grey uniform. He looked tired and he needed a shave. He had become thinner, leaner, and nearly hard-looking in the face, and there was something else that was new around his mouth and eyes, a bitterness, she thought.

  “What is it?” she said. “You must be tired.”

  He looked at her and she knew his mind had been somewhere else altogether.

  “Albert? Is everything all right?”

  “Sweetheart, everything is all right. I’m sorry. I was just … I am very happy.”

  “Are you? You were travelling all day. Ask Mama to give you my room at the house. The bed in it is very good.”

  She saw him take a deep breath and let it out. “I’ll have to leave again in a few hours, Clara. My driver is standing by.”

  “In a few hours? But you only just came back. Where do you have to go?”

  “To the base. We may be moving out.”

  “Moving out? We’re leaving the house? To go where?”

  “Not you. Please don’t … I don’t have the transport order yet. Just the readiness. I’ll call you here, or I can call your parents.”

  “Albert. Look at me, Albert. What is happening?”

  “You won’t have to leave,” he said. “The unit may be ordered
east. It may be. Temporarily.”

  She looked away from him down at tiny Willa and she told herself to be calm and that she had everything a reasonable woman could wish for: her health and a loving husband, the promise of her own career when all this was over, and this perfect child now. And yet at nearly the same moment, like a curtain drawn to reveal the stage for the next act, it felt to her like some enormous truth coming, the truth that all light and warmth and all safety had been illusions and that the reality was horror.

  Albert saw her face and instantly he was at her side. He touched her cheek, then leaned and reached and opened the door, and he called for the nurse. He stood in the open doorway in his uniform and boots and gunbelt, waving his arms and shouting into the hallway, and two nurses came running.

  NINETEEN

  SHE SPENT the next few weeks at home, not only because her mother’s help with the baby was a comfort, but also because she did not like the idea of the empty house on the base. The terrors came back several more times, especially in the early hours of the morning. Dr. Mannheim spoke of post-partum phenomena as yet poorly understood; he was prepared to give her a low dose of bromides to calm her, but she was breastfeeding and did not want to take medication of any kind.

  Instead she pumped and bottled breast milk, and the next day she left baby and milk with her mother, and she boarded the train to Zürich. There in the university library she looked up Dr. Freud and found his notes on panic attacks from an address he had given in 1936 in Sweden.

  Premonitions of Death, he had called them. Essentially they had to do with loss of control over one’s life, not the actual loss, but a fear of it so real it became a kind of foretelling.

  He said the attacks appeared to be coming out of nowhere, but they were always triggered by associations made in the unconscious; often they came in daydreams and in the small hours of the morning. The low threshold hours, the psychiatric profession called them, when in shallow sleep or in daydreams the intellectual defence mechanism was weak and fears washed like effluent over the depressed threshold into the safe-room of the psyche.

  The bad news was, Dr. Freud said, that the fears were usually correct, and the panic attacks justified. The unconscious saw the signs of a darkness coming; it added them up, and emotional terror was the result.

  Reading him in the profound stillness of the library, she could see Freud stepping about on the dais, waving his cold cigar and using his free hand for motions to indicate the heart, the stomach, the forehead. Angstzustände, she heard him say. Rapid pulse, difficulty breathing, heat rising, a faintness like a profound emptying-out. She could see his lips nearly blue within the precisely carved beard pronouncing the diagnosis of justified premonitions of death not necessarily of the body but certainly of the soul. He would pause, listen for the trailing-out of that sentence as if he might want to reel it back in and edit it. But he let it stand, and the cigar would stab the air for emphasis and a period.

  By the time she sat reading his Stockholm transcript in Zürich, in the nearest university where his publications had not been destroyed, Dr. Freud had already turned his back on Vienna, had rejected what it had become and was safe in England.

  THE KRISTALLNACHT POGROM at the end of November changed everything. It made it impossible to go on hoping and pretending. She was back on the Landshut military base by then, and the base was much quieter with half the battalion moved east to an undisclosed location. She was alone in the house with baby Willa, struggling to make a home of the place with curtains and fresh paint. A home for how long she had no idea.

  When she heard of the pogrom she put the baby in the carriage and walked into town. There had been no incidents in Landshut, but at the grocers people were whispering about Munich, the broken shopwindows there and at least three people killed.

  She hurried back home, and there on the radio the announcer was blaming the attacks on the murder of a German diplomat by a Jew. The news kept coming in all day, and by the end of it countless shop windows had been smashed, ninety people murdered, unknown numbers arrested and taken away. Disappeared in night and fog, the newspaper said the next day. As if they’d lost their way and fallen off a cliff through some inattention of their own.

  She put paint and sewing machine aside and with her fountain pen kept track of daily events. Pen and typewriter were her weapons. Her means of sorting and defining. She decided that in the Kristallnacht phenomenon one could see clearly all the signs of mob hysteria and its shrewd channelling by those in charge. It was fear and hatred of life itself. It was the scapegoat phenomenon already mentioned in the Bible. Heap your sins and fears and your own inadequacies upon the chosen goat and banish it. Chase it far out into the desert to be forgotten. Better still: kill it, so it can’t come back. It’s all the goat’s fault, ergo kill the goat.

  She wrote while baby Willa was asleep in her tiny room with the half-hung wallpaper of balloons and clouds, and she wrote while Willa lay in the crib nearby and played with fingers and toes.

  Albert’s unit came back from the east. She cooked dinners and sat with him, lay with him at night, wanted to feel close to him. She wanted him to volunteer information she could understand, that would help her make sense of developments. He said he knew almost nothing of the longer goals, and so nothing he could tell her would add up to a true picture of what was coming.

  There were whisperings, he said. About further invasions. About Hitler. About what the SS and Gestapo were up to. Things he could not talk to her about without risking their lives.

  By day the tanks rolled like thunder, and out the windows men marched one-two-three on the parade ground, and in torn and muddy fields motorized guns roared back and forth firing 50mm cannons. The noises were harsh and abrupt. They vibrated windows and dishes in the cupboards. At first they made Willa cry.

  She held her on her lap and talked to her. At times she found herself writing notes not to herself, but to her child. It was much the same process, a recording of events and insights so that they might be available for later. Dear Willa, on this day the radio reported … and then you and I looked out the window and we saw … Long-distance messages for the child and for the woman the child would one day be. A girl and then a young woman growing older and perhaps wanting to know and understand.

  She spent a week at home in St. Töllden and learned that on the day after the pogrom, the mayor had written an open letter in the daily paper condemning the attacks as cowardly and completely unacceptable. The culprits would be brought to justice, he had promised, and within days he and his wife and their two children had disappeared. A new mayor was appointed by the directorate, a pin-man and his family from some other province sleeping in the vanished people’s beds, and with their knives and forks eating the food in their larder from their plates.

  Mrs. Dorfer, the milkwoman, whispered that the new mayor’s children had been seen wearing the vanished children’s clothes to school. She shook her head and climbed on her bicycle that was hitched via a curved shaft to her milk cart.

  Kristallnacht, she wrote in a letter to Erika, left no doubt as to how the game would be played, and absolutely so, with spying and reporting on thy neighbour to save thy own cherished hide, and with terror and disappearances, and with no hope of justice whatsoever.

  “So write about it,” Erika wrote back. “You’re good at that, and I don’t think anyone on the outside really knows what is going on here. Send it to a newspaper. In France and England. In Switzerland. Tell the world.”

  Fired on like this she worked on it for days, collecting reports and writing and rewriting. Relating what the newspapers and the radio were saying to what was in fact happening. What people like Mrs. Dorfer were whispering. Perhaps Erika was right, and she could publish it somewhere. In America ideally, perhaps through the people at the museum.

  When she mentioned it to Albert over dinner a change came over his face and he stopped eating. He put down knife and fork and he wiped his lips with the napkin. He sat very still with
his hands on the table.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “Clara, did you mention this to anybody? For example to any of the other wives, or to someone in town?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “To anybody at all? A newspaper? Have you written a letter to anybody about it? Does anybody know about this idea of yours?”

  “No. I wanted to talk to you about it first.”

  “I’m glad. Let me show you something.” He reached into a side pocket and took out an envelope. “I opened it, but look at this, this tear in the flap, the way the edges overlap.” He held it out for her to take. “What do you think caused that?”

  She turned over the envelope. It was a letter from his father in Vienna.

  “What do you think, Clara?”

  She studied the flap edges, the fine creases.

  “It’s been steamed open and resealed,” he said. “I think they are watching him for fear he may agitate against them now; after Theo’s death, after the jail. As if he had the energy. You saw him. I’ll have to tell him not to write to us any more. They can read our mail, they can listen in on telephones. Some of the people in town are certainly informants, and you know that SS Obersturmführer Bönninghaus is the official political observer. Every unit has one of those. Don’t ever trust him with anything.”

  He paused. “What is it?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing. No, wait. I wrote to Erika and she wrote back. Not in detail.”

  “Did you mail it on the base or in town?”

  “In St. Töllden. When I was home.”

  “Were you alone? Did anyone follow you?”

  “Follow me? I can’t say. I didn’t look.”

  “And she wrote back to you in St. Töllden?”

  “No. Here.”

  “Show me the letter. The envelope.” She brought it and he held it close to the light, studied the glueline along the flap edges. He handed it back to her.