Clara

by Kurt Palka

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “But it does.”

  “Then pick a better time. Right now there are problems with one of Tom’s kids. The older one. He was arrested a few weeks ago.”

  “Arrested. For what?”

  “Don’t ask. I shouldn’t say anything. You can ask her, but be gentle. You know what I mean, and maybe while you’re here, spend some more time with her. Just the two of you.”

  “We’re planning to.”

  On the day before she had to fly back, Willa said she wanted to put a candle on her father’s grave.

  They walked to the cemetery, she and her daughters, bought a candle at a stand, and put it in the lantern by the stone. Vandals had been in the cemetery and spray-painted looping graffiti on headstones and Roman burial tablets set into crypt walls two thousand years old, dayglo symbols or words in a foreign language no one understood. The stone angel had black paint on her wings and hands. At some headstones old people were rubbing at the graffiti with brushes.

  “Turpentine doesn’t work,” called one man from a few graves down. “At least yours is not over inscriptions.”

  “No, but it’s white stone and it’s porous,” said Willa. “Just look at this. How could anyone.”

  “Try the stonemason,” said the man. “Maybe he can do something.”

  Back at the house Clara opened a drawer and took something out. “There,” she said. “One for each of you. Both the same. You and your dad.”

  “The one from your night table,” said Willa. “In the silver frame.”

  “My favourite picture of the three of you, yes. I had it copied.”

  After Willa had left for the airport and Emma had gone home, she sat in Mitzi’s room. She brought a floor lamp and sat in the chair with her reading glasses on and manuscript pages in her lap.

  “Siblings,” said Mitzi. “Old jealousies, I’d say.”

  “Maybe.”

  “It’s good Emma’s teaching again. Keeps her busy.”

  “It’s more than that. She’s good at it. She’s substituting at the college where she was when she found that French pilot.”

  “The pilot. Yes. What was that about the Knight’s Cross?”

  Clara waved a hand. “One of the kids took it. Don’t ask. Willa wants it back, but they can work that out.”

  She shifted the papers in her lap and began to read. For a while there were no sounds at all in the room. She looked up.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Mitzi-dear,” she said. “Stay as long as you want. Even when you’re all better. Stay here.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THE POLISH CAMPAIGN had taken less than five weeks. At the end of combat operations, Waffen-SS and regular SS took over from the military. They began to organize the occupation of Poland and the construction of labour and concentration camps. To make their job easier, they built walls and created the Warsaw ghetto. And the Russians in their part of Poland, as the world would discover years later, murdered twenty thousand Polish officers and academics and scientists and leading politicians in a forest place called Katyn.

  But long before then Albert had returned. The curtains at the cottage had been thrown back and the lights turned on again, and on the rare evenings when Albert was home before dark they played with Willa on the swing next to the house. He whittled the first of many willow flutes and worked with spanners and rags on the Norton.

  He had made an inner decision, he said to her. In time he would tell her about it. He wanted her to know that.

  Then her parents received news that Bernhard was dead. The letter stamped with eagle and swastika said he had died a hero for his country and that the Führer appreciated his sacrifice. No personal effects could be sent.

  Albert made inquiries and learned that Bernhard had been assigned to a team of sappers, and while they were disarming a Stuka fragmentation bomb, it detonated. Of the three soldiers just the feet in boots were found. The dog tags were gone, but one of the men, his commanding officer said, would have been Bernhard von Waldstein.

  There was a memorial service at the Benedictine chapel in St. Töllden, and because it coincided with Christmas it was doubly sad. She was home for part of the holidays, and Albert came along. He brought the full dress uniform. He stood in it tall and straight, and in the church the few men among the mourners looked at him and they nodded and said Colonel.

  Near the end of the service, her mother and father stood before the congregation; he stone-faced, all in black; she all in black from shoes to veil, in her formal coat of black gabardine, heavy and long as had been the fashion in her day, with wide lapels and black velvet cuffs. When the priest spoke the words about the honourable death for cause and country she straightened, and when she reached out and laid a bare hand on the steel helmet they put on the bible stand for these services, everyone in the chapel could see the candlelight reflected on her streaming cheeks behind the veil.

  There were twenty-nine people present and every one of them loved her, and they loved her all the more that day because they understood the unspoken and unspeakable lie that underlay all this.

  SHE AND ALBERT spent New Year’s Eve and the first day of 1940 at the apartment in Vienna. There was a great deal of snow in the streets and avalanches slid from the roofs of houses. Albert’s young sister, Sissy, was there, and Daniela. Peter was in Norway, or maybe Finland, Daniela said. Sissy had finished boarding school and had received her teacher’s certificate. Clara had hardly seen her since Theo’s funeral.

  At midnight they set off firecrackers on the balcony that sailed out and exploded in a shower of blue and orange wheels that sizzled and died on their way to the ground. They danced to the traditional Blue Danube Waltz that played on the radio at midnight, and they worked at being lively at least, if not cheerful. She felt well, and the baby was beginning to show. Cecilia came up once and winked and said, “When?” and she smiled and told her.

  On the balcony, looking out over the sea of lights and other people’s firecrackers, Erika told her that more and more reports were coming into the Red Cross office now about people suddenly missing. Abandoned businesses. Empty apartments and houses with everything left behind, but never empty for long before someone else moved in.

  In a way Sissy was the one bright note that New Year’s Eve; she who was young and lovely, and she still looked out at the world from trusting eyes. Eyes so black the pupil could not easily be seen within the iris, like in belladonna eyes two generations or more before. At some point Cecilia whispered to Clara and to Mitzi that one reason why Sissy was so happy was that she had recently met someone, a young doctor just finished with his internship, and that she was very much in love.

  Cecilia sighed, saying this, and she looked sideways at young Sissy laughing with Erika and sipping champagne, this young woman who was carrying the light and the promise for all of them at the apartment that night.

  THREE MONTHS LATER, Sissy’s young doctor, whose name was Oskar Gottschalk, was ordered to report for his military duties. There were hurried preparations for the wedding, not the least of which was the short Ahnenpass certifying three generations of pure Aryan blood on both sides. Only then could they apply for the marriage licence.

  The wedding took place at the municipal office in their district, and they signed their names in the large black book that lay on a table there, under the photograph of Hitler staring at them and at everyone in the room.

  The new and rosy-faced husband, Dr. Oskar Gottschalk, received cursory basic training, was sent to Norway as a field surgeon, and within two weeks he was dead; machine-gunned through chest and abdomen, the death certificate said. It arrived at the apartment in the same envelope as the official death notice from his company commander. By then Sissy knew already that she was expecting, and so by the end of April 1940 she was a pregnant widow not twenty years old.

  There was a modest memorial service in a side chapel at St. Stephen’s Cathedral, and as incense swirled and singing voices came from another
part of the church, Sissy stood small and lost with her hand on yet another steel helmet. Maximilian and Cecilia and the dead doctor’s parents stood behind her.

  “Act as though thou hast faith,” said the priest. “And faith shall be given onto you.”

  One month and two more willow flutes later, the last one quite ambitious with three fingerholes that actually worked, Albert received orders to entrain his battalion for the marshalling grounds near Cologne and there to report to the command of General Erwin Rommel.

  She saw him off, crouching next to Willa under an umbrella as they stood in the rain among other wives and girlfriends and parents as the brass band played and the tanks rolled out the gates. Armageddon machines they were with heads in leather helmets like soft knobs poking out of hatches, loud and clumsy machines on the wet street; the very notion of them ridiculous, she wrote in notes to herself that night, if you allowed yourself to think about them well and clearly.

  Armoured field pieces followed, and then came truck after truck, helmeted soldiers under the tarpaulins with their pale faces and anxious eyes searching for their loved ones while being carted away to a place and fate they could not imagine.

  Albert stood in the command car as they headed out, in his field uniform, boots, and gunbelt, and the greatcoat over it, all wet in the rain, rain jumping off the cap visor and off his bare hand there saluting his officers as they went by.

  She caught one last glance from him, a smile for her, before he spoke to his major, who in turn spoke to the driver. Albert sat down and the engine started and the car drove off.

  In the crowd also stood SS Obersturmführer Bönninghaus. From Albert she knew that the man had in fact at the time asked for a transfer. He had been called to Berlin to make a report, and then had been sent straight back to Burgenland with new powers and responsibilities as the political district commander.

  She did not notice him until the crowd began to thin, but there he stood in his black raincoat streaming wet, watching her.

  THE OBERSTURMFÜHRER came to her house the very next morning. He knocked, and knocked again. When she opened, there he stood in his silver-accented blacks, with his driver waiting by the car. The rain had stopped, and he stood among the rich fragrance of spring and earth, with the garden greening behind him.

  “Mrs. Leonhardt,” he said. “This house has a full basement with an exterior entrance, does it not? Most houses in the area do.”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “May I see it?”

  She walked around the house with him, to the other side where the basement door lay hinged on two stone sills and steps led down into the cellar, stone-walled all around, with bins on the dirt floor for potatoes and root vegetables for the winter. She turned the switch and two bare light bulbs came on.

  “Good,” he said. “I’ve come to inform you that we’ve assigned twenty prisoners of war to this house. They will be working in the local agriculture. You are to house them but not to feed them. They will be picked up in the morning and brought back at night.” He turned and looked at the open cellar door. “They’ll enter here and they’ll leave here. They are not to have access to the upstairs or to tools or matches. Straw pallets will be provided. Is that understood?”

  “Do you have Colonel Leonhardt’s permission for that?”

  “We do not need your husband’s permission for anything, Mrs. Leonhardt. This has nothing to do with his command.”

  That night in bed she began bleeding massively, and she crawled to the bathroom and on the way there she lost the baby. She lay on the wood floor in the hall, crouched on the boards as in supreme supplication before this cramping horror her body was committing, and the baby came out, nearly fully formed, too large already for one hand.

  Anna heard the screams and she came to find her sitting in blood holding this baby and with her finger wiping blood and mucus from the tiny, tiny monkey face, a creature dead and alien as if fallen from some distant star.

  Anna turned and left, and she came back quickly with a basin of hot water from the stove and with the sharp paring knife and bedsheets fresh and clean from the linen shelf.

  SHE WROTE TO HIM, but the letters never arrived. So ferocious was the assault in the west that Holland, Belgium, and France all fell within weeks. At Dunkirk the tanks and the Stukas turned away from the retreating British and French forces and kept moving south with such speed and relentlessness that Berlin became worried and issued orders for them to slow down.

  Near the end of the campaign he was injured by a bullet. He was standing next to the heavy machine gun in the tracked command car in dust goggles and helmet, speaking into the microphone to his driver, waving his arms and pointing, he said, when the bullet struck high in his left side and knocked him down.

  At the rolling field hospital the surgeon stitched him up and they taped his arm in place so that he could carry on while the injury healed.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  WHEN ALBERT CAME HOME on leave from France he arrived unannounced by train, he and one of his lieutenants. From the station he came home in a taxi, and he climbed out and stood paying the driver through the open window. The taxi with the lieutenant in the back moved off, and Albert turned. She saw him from the living-room window and did not recognize him until he had walked most of the garden path to the front door.

  They sat on the couch holding hands and holding each other for long minutes without speaking. She stroked his cheek. His forehead. The powderburns and scars around the outlines of the dust goggles worn for weeks. She touched his arm.

  “It’ll be fine,” he said to her. “They just fixed it in place. It doesn’t hurt much any more.”

  Willa came tottering in from the kitchen, watching him shyly. Behind her in the doorway stood Anna. She bent and whispered to Willa and then let go of the toddler’s hand and gave her a small push in Albert’s direction. He slipped off the couch to his knees and held out his good arm.

  They had five days. There was so much to talk about it had to be done in considered sessions, in topics, small strokes leading up to the full picture.

  She had yet to see a doctor, she admitted. There was none at the base, and in the village Anna was as good a midwife and doula as any. Clara insisted she was fine. She was so much in need of love and kindness she never left his side all those days he was home. Anna like a den mother looked after them again with food and drink and whatever else they wanted. Anna also did the basement work during the day, sweeping and carrying the latrine buckets to the pit in the field behind the house.

  In the early mornings two grey trucks with tarpaulin covers would drive around the house to the basement entrance, and SS men in field grey would unlock the hatch from outside and watchs the prisoners climb on board. Some would guard them while one with a submachine gun stepped down into the basement and made sure it was empty. After sundown the prisoners would be brought back, fed from a container on the back of the trucks, and locked up again.

  She and Albert could hear them at night under the floor planks, talking, murmuring, stirring on their strawbeds. In the far corner of the house, by the fire place in the living room, they could hear at times the sound of a harmonica. Once in a while, before they were herded below at the end of the day, one of the SS men would turn on the hose at the back and the men would be allowed to strip and wash with a block of lye soap under the stream of water from the well pump. The Polish prisoners were white and gaunt and bearded. Two had grey hair, and one of them wore horn-rimmed glasses that he took off and set carefully on the stone sill before lining up for the hose.

  Albert had asked her if she minded, and she’d said, No, she did not, even if it was a clear attempt by the obersturmführer to get back at her and Albert.

  Not only did she not mind, she said, but the men were company for her, a human presence she was sheltering. They were an opportunity to make good for something that she did not quite understand, and they were certainly safer in her basement than in a POW camp.

  On the six
th day the lieutenant came to pick up Albert in a taxi. She left Willa with Anna while she came along to the railroad station, holding hands with Albert all the way there. The car sped along the gravel road through fields long and wide to either side; vanishing lines, row after row, of potatoes and cabbage, and of mountains of sugar beets to be chopped up and boiled down in enormous vats for their sweetness. In the fields hundreds of prisoners of war were doing labour for the farmers while armed guards watched from raised platforms like hunters in the fall with the buttplates of their rifles resting on their thighs.

  Back at the cottage the radio in the living room reported that on the previous day Hitler had made the French sign the articles of surrender in the very railroad car where Germany had been forced to sign the treaty terms of 1919. Immediately following the ceremony, the German army razed the area around the railroad car. The only thing left standing was the statue of the French Marshal Foch, the announcer said, so that the marshal from up high might witness the final outcome of his act of humiliation.

  LATE IN JULY Albert’s father suffered a heart attack in the bathroom of the Vienna apartment. He fell down shaving and by the time Cecilia found him he lay dead on the tile floor.

  There was a funeral that Clara could not attend because on orders from the SS District Office she had to care for two prisoners who had fallen ill. The guards had notified the office and Obersturmführer Bönninghaus had come to the house to see for himself. He inspected the back door and he strode into the kitchen to see the door leading down to the basement from there. He found the light switch and clicked it on, and walked down the creaking stairs. She followed.

  The two men lay weak and white as candlewax on their strawbeds. One was young, and the other was the older one with the glasses. Sweat beaded on his forehead and she reached out to feel his temperature, but Bönninghaus told her sharply not to.