Clara

by Kurt Palka

  “Clara,” he said. “Please. You can write whatever you want, and I know it’s important for you to keep notes and journals. But.”

  “But what? This is the one thing I can do. I mean do, rather than just sit and watch.”

  “I know. But for now please don’t let anyone read it and don’t ever put it in the mail. Just keep your thoughts to yourself. For now.”

  EARLY IN 1939 she received a letter from the party directorate in Vienna. In it they said that the office had become aware of the fact that the family had been awarded the Blood Order for the death of Theodor. In light of that, they said, her application for party membership was being granted, and the university would be looking favourably on her application as assistant professor. Signed and stamped Heil Hitler, with several eagles clutching swastikas.

  That night she showed the letter to Albert.

  “I never applied,” she said when he looked up. “For party membership. You know that. I only asked about a teaching job.”

  “When you had the interview, could they have misunderstood?”

  “I don’t see how. I remember him saying that even if I were accepted, I might at best get a secretarial job. I told you all that. And he said there was a mark next to my name, and you said not to worry, there were marks next to everyone’s name.”

  “I know. The question is, do you want to teach there? Under the new administration? This is as good as a solid job offer.”

  She rose and stepped to the window. Darkness out there, just her own reflection in the glass. “I was trying to imagine Professor Emmerich with a Nazi pin,” she said without turning around. “You know how much I admired him. He taught us about intellectual honesty. Integrity. About trusting ourselves. I was trying to imagine him limiting his lectures to what they would allow him to say, and I couldn’t.”

  She lowered the blinds and turned to him. He looked tired to her in the lamplight and she told him so.

  “What is happening to us, Albert? I am close to weeping half the time. I can’t talk to people. I can’t write to my friends. I can’t work. We can’t be truthful about anything. It wasn’t supposed to be like that. We are a young family just starting out.”

  “We are. This was not … things will change. They’ll get better when we can see more clearly.”

  “Will we ever? And does this mean they have a file on me now?”

  “Yes. They have a file on every one of us. You, me, your parents. All the senior officers. One of the jobs of the SS is to keep the regular army generals in line.”

  “I could take a few days and go to Vienna. I don’t want to just sit and wait and hide like a rabbit. I could talk to the new rector, meet the faculty, see what the new rules actually are. We could hire that nurse again.”

  She walked toward the kitchen for a glass of water and on the way passed behind him and touched his cheek.

  “We could,” he said. He rose and followed her. “But they think they’re honouring you with this. So be careful.”

  “Careful. You see, that’s what I mean. Careful really means fearful.”

  “No. It means understand and respect reality.”

  She stood at the sink, ran water, and filled two glasses.

  They stood in the dark kitchen, sipping water. Somewhere a truck engine fired. They heard voices and the truck driving off. The challenge at the gate, sharp and loud in the night. A dog somewhere.

  “I hate this,” she said.

  Later, looking back and trying to define the moment her problems with the party and the Gestapo began, she would always come back to this moment in the dark kitchen and to the letter out there in the lamplight on the table.

  TWENTY

  IN VIENNA she sat waiting in the rector’s front office. The secretary was no longer Mrs. Holbenstern but a pale young man who wore not only the party pin but, in case someone missed that, he wore the swastika sleeve band as well. Behind the rector’s door she heard laughter, then the sound of a telephone receiver being replaced. The buzzer on the secretary’s desk sounded, and the young man rose and stepped into the inner office. On the wall above the door the picture of the grandfatherly president of the republic had been replaced by one of Hitler, a frontal shot so that his black eyes followed you around the room.

  The secretary came back, shaking his head. He waved a pale hand at the door.

  “Wouldn’t even see me,” she told her friends at the apartment. “But I’ll go back tomorrow and I’ll sit there all day if I have to.”

  They were in the kitchen, since in the living room a Swedish soprano was warming up for a session with Cecilia.

  “You seem surprised,” said Mitzi. “But David Koren kept talking about little else. And here it is.” She turned off the tap and tipped her combs and brushes head-first into a glass jar full of green germicidal solution. She turned to face them.

  “Here is what?” said Erika.

  “The Nazis, doing whatever they want. Like Koren said. For example that day on the café terrace, think back. You weren’t listening because you thought you had nothing to fear, be honest. And you had your heads in your books. You might as well admit it.”

  Mitzi picked up a towel and stood drying her hands. It was one of her business towels, with Mitzi embroidered on it in large letters. “Right?” she said.

  “We were listening,” said Clara.

  “Not as closely as I. I knew what he was talking about.”

  “I think Clara and I did too,” said Erika.

  They heard the living-room door and Cecilia came into the kitchen. “We’re starting,” she said. She was dressed for work in a long black skirt and a white blouse with a high lace collar, and she already wore that focused, no-nonsense expression they knew well by now.

  “Remember the rules,” she said. “Stay in here, or go out that door to the servants’ hallway. Don’t be seen through the connecting door, and no noise whatsoever. She’s doing Richard Strauss and she’s nervous enough as is.”

  Cecilia turned the back of her head to Mitzi, and Mitzi reached and took out the combs one by one, caught a few errant strands, and slipped the combs back in.

  When Cecilia had left, Mitzi said, “What I meant was not that you had nothing to worry about. Just not that. You’re not Jewish.” She took the brushes and combs from the jar and rinsed them and put them on another towel on the counter. She dried her hands again.

  “You’re right,” said Clara. She looked at Erika and said, “She’s right.”

  “Of course she is.”

  In the living room Cecilia struck a note repeatedly and said, “In the centre, in the centre, not off to the side and then sliding. Just this note now.” The singer tried to hit the note dead-centre. She tried several times and finally made it.

  “I almost quit,” said Erika after a silence. “The dissertation. But then I decided to continue. I have to play by their rules, but they’re not going to deny me my degree.”

  “Is Professor Emmerich back, or Ferdinand?”

  Erika shook her head. “Oh no. I hear Emmerich moved to America. Freud is in England. Ferdinand, I don’t know.”

  IN THE MORNING she was back at the university with a more aggressive plan. She strode to the secretary’s desk and put the letter from the directorate in front of him. “I was here yesterday,” she said firmly. “You show him this letter.”

  The secretary scanned the letter and sat up straight. “Well,” he said. “Doctor Herzog. Why didn’t you say so?”

  “Just show him this.”

  “Of course. Please wait just a moment.” He entered the director’s office and was quickly back. He waved her in.

  And so she saw how things worked. It was astonishing.

  “The Blood Order,” said the new rector. “Congratulations. You have a hero in your family. Someone who gave his life for the cause. Please, by all means. Sit down.” He half rose and pointed at the chair in front of his desk; a man with a square face and reddish hair parted on the side, wearing a jacket with the pin in
the brown cloth of the lapel.

  “A hero,” he said with admiration. “Well.” He reached into a drawer and pushed a sheet of paper and a pencil across the desk. “Write down what you would like to teach, Doctor Herzog. English or philosophy. I’ll speak to the department heads.”

  “What I would like to teach? As an assistant?”

  “Well,” he said. “Just write down where you think your competence lies. Perhaps a professorship. We shall see.”

  She wrote, and while she wrote she heard him crack his knuckles. She heard his stomach. Nothing about him fit the surroundings. The fine panelling, the tall curved windows. In the ante-room the secretary spoke and laughed on the telephone.

  She pushed her list across the desk. The rector read and as he did so he blindly reached to his right and picked up a red pen. He began crossing out names and topics, and in the room the mood changed. He looked up.

  “I am surprised,” he said. “Disappointed. For someone from a family with the Blood Order you don’t seem to be aware of the new guidelines.”

  “The new guidelines?”

  He stared at her. “Perhaps you think you’re above them.”

  “I don’t know what the new guidelines are. Feel free to tell me.”

  He shook his head. “I’ll keep this paper for your file,” he said.

  On the train back to Albert and Willa, her thoughts kept returning to Professor Emmerich. Who, too, had packed his bags. She remembered him speaking of the Up-way, never the Down; of being calm inside and judging issues for oneself. As he had done by leaving. Would he be wearing bicycle clips in America? In the land of moral courage and of We the People. Of large and comfortable cars. Probably not. In the land of Hemingway and Steinbeck and Fitzgerald and Cather and Eliot. In the land of peanut butter and drive-in cinemas and affordable lipstick and nylon stockings? Would Emmerich be sitting on the desk during lectures? Probably, and spin out his ideas and insights with full confidence, with his hard and generous brilliance that lifted you up and showed you things in a new light so bright and clear you forgot to breathe.

  The train home travelled across rivers as the sun went down and it travelled through mountains and through forests of evergreens still covered in snow. It travelled from day to night, and at times she could see the engine up front, its yellow light probing the rails ahead but never reaching very far into the darkness.

  IN AUGUST that year Albert’s tank battalion was ordered to relocate to Burgenland in Austria, near the border with Hungary. Clara packed up the house and packed up little Willa, who was by then nearly one year old. She put her typewriter and her files and notes into separate boxes and insisted they be placed in her own compartment. Corporal Fuchs came and fetched the Norton.

  The tanks, motorized cannon, and support vehicles were entrained and covered with camouflage tarpaulin, flatcar after flatcar, dozens of them, on two long trains with a steam locomotive each in front to pull and one at the rear to push.

  The trains travelled the long way south and east, along the Danube, past vineyards and past fields in tall grain once more, and without stopping through industrial cities where tall chimneys smoked and cranes in factory yards lifted enormous rolls of shining steel.

  Several times Albert came from the staff compartment next to hers and sat with her and Willa, but every few minutes then one of his lieutenants would knock on the door and bring papers for him to read.

  “Not now,” he said sharply at one time. “Put it on my desk. I’ll be back there in a few minutes.”

  “You are very quiet,” he said to her when the door was closed. “I think I know why, and I can understand how you feel.”

  “It’s this,” she said. “Coming back to this.” She pointed out the window, which was open just then and warm air came in, and the smell of coalsmoke and steam mixed with that of grain and grass warm in the sun. Along the way people in fields and meadows lowered scythes and rakes and unshouldered panniers, and they turned to stare at the trains full of heavy weaponry under tarpaulin but plain to see. She’d waved once or twice the way she’d done as a child, but now no one waved back. Most stared in silence but some craned their necks and shouted to each other. War was coming.

  He said nothing, and what could he have said to help her with this? With the fact that she was riding back to her home country on this conquering train full of weaponry, tanks and field pieces, and large-calibre barrels like brutal noses poking from cover.

  “You’ll like the house,” he said. “You’ll have peace there. You can write and read. Write for later. One day this will all be over, Clara. There is a garden and the train station is close by. Your friends can visit, and you and Willa can travel home and to Vienna.”

  She closed her eyes and nodded and said nothing.

  When he was next door in conferences she could hear the men through the thin wall talking. She could hear their boots on the wood floor and hear chairs being shifted. Someone laughed.

  She closed the window and pulled down the blinds. She raised the blinds and opened the window again, and changed seats to be out of the draft.

  She sat in silence against the seatback and she wiped angrily at her tears. Willa sat on her knees looking earnestly up at her face.

  “Oh sweetheart,” she said thickly.

  The land became dry and flat, and soon she saw that the storks were back from Africa. Young storks were getting flying lessons, taking off from chimney roosts. On the wide and shallow Lake Neusiedel birds had built nests by the tens of thousands among reeds in the shallows, and the air was filled with a high chirring sound and it was stirred by countless small wings.

  She went with Willa to the toilet and held her as the little girl sat on the wooden rim. Someone knocked repeatedly on the door and sharply over her shoulder she told them to stop knocking and go away. She washed her own and Willa’s hands at the basin and returned to the compartment.

  Willa fell asleep on the seat next to her, and for a while she held on to Clara’s finger in her sleep, then she let go.

  THE BATALLION COMMANDER’S house was a neat cottage with thick white walls and a thatched roof. It stood on a dusty street of other houses just like it in the village next to the base. Tomatoes grew in the kitchen garden, and cucumbers and peas grew on small trellises and on string nets between sticks poked into the soil. There was a maid called Anna, an old woman on swollen and unsteady feet, who looked after house and garden and slept in the lean-to, off the kitchen.

  The land was flat in all directions. Small white and blue flowers bloomed in the dry grass and were stirred by the constant warm wind that also stirred up the dust in the road and drove spinning dust devils up and down. Every morning for the remainder of that August, enormous clouds in black and grey layers formed towering structures in the distance. Lighting flashed among the clouds, and far to the east she could see grey curtains of rain falling, but never here.

  The provincial capital was not far away, and it was at the railroad station there that on the last Friday in August she met Erika, Mitzi, and Cecilia, and she brought them home for the weekend. The two days that followed were wonderful and carefree. They took baby Willa on picnics and on boatrides in a flat-bottomed rowpunt on the lake, and around them the warm air was filled with bird sounds. The last of milkweed drifted low across the lake, and the air was fragrant with drying hay and with the scent of roses from the perfume factory on the south shore. Storks and herons stalked the reeds in search of frogs and small fish, and they clattered their long beaks.

  On Sunday noon the women like a gypsy bridal party in bright dresses and ribboned hats rowed among the willows and pulled the boat ashore, and they spread out two blankets and a tablecloth for their picnic. They unpacked hampers of sandwiches and containers of cider and milk and cereal for the baby, and on a fine day like this and united as friends they could laugh and joke about their lives, none of which was turning out as planned.

  “But literature is full of that,” said Erika. “Isn’t it, Clara?”r />
  “Full of what?”

  They were sitting on the blankets holding blades of grass between their thumbs, trying to see who could make the loudest honking noise.

  “Full of the illusion of control. Best-laid plans going nowhere. In fact it seems to me that’s where most good stories begin.”

  “Some,” she said.

  Cecilia put her lips to her thumbs and produced a loud wailing honk, the best so far. Willa laughed and clapped her hands. Cecilia tickled her, then leaned over the grass to find a fresh blade.

  “The wide ones are best,” she said to Willa. “Like this one.” She plucked a blade and smoothed it. She blew into it fiercely but it only squeaked and frayed. They were on hands and knees chatting and searching for good grasses.

  They lay on their backs and looked up through the cracks between their fingers at the sky, and they saw young storks practising what they’d learned and circling above the warm fields with no discernible wing movement whatsoever.

  On the way back in the boat, Mitzi sat rowing next to Clara, and she mentioned for the first time that the forger was blackmailing her now with her real identity. So far she had been able to pay what he was asking, she said. She hoped he would never ask for more than she could give.

  They tied up the boat and picked up baby and baskets. As they came closer to the cottage they could see the Mercedes with the 14th Armoured Battalion sign on its fender, and they saw Albert standing in the yard, looking at his wristwatch. He saw them and waved. He was standing next to the tomatoes red and ripe on the vines and the peapods filled to bursting. Behind him the cottage lay in the evening sun, and the sun shone warmly on its roof of golden straw and on the green shutters thrown open against white walls.

  But the image of home and safety was all wrong because he was dressed for war in full combat uniform: pistol belt, boots, and the leather coat and dust goggles around his neck. Clara’s heart was beating fiercely. She could see his driver and one of his lieutenants waiting in the staff car with the top down. Albert’s batman came out of the cottage, carrying his field kit. Down the street, neighbours stood in doorways to watch.