Clara

by Kurt Palka

  “There is no need to touch them,” he said. “They have a fever and in most cases it passes in a week. Give them water and once or twice during the day simple food such as a broth.”

  “Why not get them a doctor?”

  “We will, if they are not better in a week. Until then just give them liquids several times a day.”

  Back upstairs in the kitchen he studied the lock on the basement door. It was old and heavy of hammered iron with a large key in the hole.

  “Good,” he said. “Leave it locked at all times, unless you or the maid are down there cleaning up during the day. Do not talk to them, do not ask questions. Any kind of fraternization is strictly prohibited. Do you understand?”

  She nodded her head, and he stood looking her up and down. “I said do you understand?”

  “I do.”

  “Good. I hear your husband was awarded his Iron Cross First Class. Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know.”

  When he was gone she carried down a pitcher of water and two glasses. The men drank thirstily, sitting up in their foul strawbeds. The one with grey hair reached for the spectacles by his side and put them on. He looked up at her. He said something in Polish, then he said, “Thank you” in English.

  She had Anna boil soup bones and vegetables, and she fed them the broth and gave them slices of dark bread. She pressed apples and fed them the juice. One night near the end of the first week she put on a dark coat and in the co-operative orchard at the end of the street she filled her pockets with apples that lay on the ground and took them down into the cellar. The prisoners bit into them gingerly because their teeth were loose in their jawbones.

  And the two that had been ill did get better. The fever lifted and before long they departed in the mornings with the rest and came back at night.

  But she kept giving them fruit, sweet plums and apples, all of which she collected by stealth at night. When she took down her gifts, Willa stood at the open basement door with her hair parted and tied in two little side plaits and watched.

  The one with grey hair and glasses told her he had been an English high-school teacher in Warsaw. As if to prove it he said, “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dream and endeavours to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

  He stood proudly in the cellar under a bare light bulb quoting this, a gaunt man with glasses and a wild beard. He stepped back.

  “Henry David Thoreau,” she said. She handed him an apple.

  One other night he said to her, “What is a loon?”

  “A loan?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I quote: In the fall the loon came, as usual, to moult and bathe in the pond, making the woods ring with his wild laughter before I had risen.”

  “Ah. A loon. It’s a North American kind of duck with a black-and-white spotted back and a very pointy beak. Its eyes are nearly red, and it makes a sound like no other bird. It laughs like a crazy person, which is perhaps where the expression loony comes from. It may also come from luna, the moon.”

  “Loony,” he said, and tasted the word. “Loony.”

  The others spoke to her through the professor. Some weeks later, one of them asked for a knife. “You don’t have to,” said the professor. “But he is a good boy.” He pulled down his lower eyelid with his forefinger. “I will watch.”

  She let them have the paring knife, even if Anna’s eyes were round and still when Clara took it downstairs. Three nights later, when she went down into the cellar, the man spoke to the professor and the professor replied. They were all standing on the dirt floor in their cracked shoes and torn clothes, looking on expectantly, and the man reached under his strawbed and handed her something.

  It was a small duck carved in wood. It had wheels turning on wooden dowels and an optimistic upturned beak. Individual feathers had been carved into tail and folded wings. Under the body, set into the spinning dowel, was a small tongue of wood that made a clacking sound when the wheels turned.

  The man said something and pointed at the door at the top of the stairs, and the professor said, “He says it’s for the little girl. He hopes she’ll like it.”

  THEY BECAME the nearest thing to friends, and when any of them got sick again, she and Anna made them well. She put plasters on their cuts, she gave them fruit for their teeth, and she let them have Albert’s razor. The guards saw them clean-shaven but made no comment to her.

  September passed, and October. The days were sunny and warm, and the harvest that year of 1940 was the best in years. The grapes were sweet and heavy, and when the first nightfrost came it concentrated the sugar in the grapes still on vines, and the warmth of midday and early afternoons turned them rich and golden. Ice-wine was made from them, and a local Tokay, and the golden Burgenländer in brown bottles that travelled from there by rail and in the holds of ships to London and New York and Sydney, war or not.

  By then she already knew that she was pregnant again. She had spoken to Anna, who had handed her a glass jar to urinate into. Anna had taken the jar to a woman in the village who kept cages of certain kinds of rabbits just for that purpose. Within days Clara knew.

  And as soon as she knew, she became still inside, and happy. Her mind and her body both understood and knew, and they prepared for the event. She smiled more often, and she moved more slowly and was more careful on steps. And since the rabbit woman knew, so did the neighbours. The women came to the door in their kerchiefs and their long skirts and wooden mudshoes, and they smiled with embarrassment as they offered reed baskets with eggs and garden tomatoes and golden grapes, heavy and sweet.

  One morning, as she sat at the sunlit table, the grapes in the bowl and the time of year and her very mood reminded her of something, and she looked up Rilke, and there it was: Autumn Day.

  Lord, it is time. The summer was immense.

  Lay your shadow on the sundials now

  and in the fields let loose the wind.

  Order the last fruit to be full;

  give it two more southerly days,

  urge it to ripeness, and drive

  the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

  Whosoever has no house now will not build one anymore.

  Whosoever is alone now, will remain so for a long, long time,

  will stay awake, will read and write long letters,

  and walk the tree-lined streets, restlessly back and forth,

  while leaves are blowing.

  AND AS SHE CALMED, she rediscovered her love of reading, writing, and thinking. She described the men in the basement and what they meant to her, and she typed the pages with carbon copies and she placed them into files she was keeping for Willa and for the new baby. She updated her journal, and she began making notes for future essays and of ideas for poetry, even a longer work of fiction that she might tackle when all this was over. She knew she was preparing the ground for creative work to come; not for the present, because all her love and energy in those weeks went into Willa and into the new life inside her; it went into every thought of Albert, and it went to the men housed in her cellar who were so strong a human presence and responsibility in her life. It went to Anna, and into every passing moment of every day.

  One weekend her friends came to visit, all of them, Mitzi, Erika, Cecilia, and Daniela. It was November, but still sunny and not too cold during the day. They went for walks and exchanged news, and she told them of the prisoners and her illicit help for them. On Saturday they prepared a fine harvest lunch in the garden, a long trestle table and wooden benches, and she invited all her neighbours and everyone brought something to share: wine and cider, meat and casseroles of chicken stew and roast pheasant and venison, bread still warm with wood ashes stuck to the crust, and bowls of fruit. Whatever food was left over they put away and when the prisoners were home and the trucks had left she and her friends carried it down to them in the basement.

  On Sunday evening
she took the women to the train station in a taxi, and on the way home she felt a sudden sharp pain in her abdomen. In an instant the day was no longer fine, the fields as they passed no longer rich with black soil. She sat still and afraid in the backseat of the car, and at home she went straight to the bathroom. She locked the door and pulled down her underpants and immediately in the cotton fabric saw the smear of bright-red blood.

  TWENTY-SIX

  ANNA SENT HER straight to bed and there she remained for several days. The bleeding stopped and gradually her hope and confidence returned. Three weeks after that Albert came home to rotate out the garrison crew. He arrived with only forty-five men. The rest of the battalion remained in France, marshalled and rearmed, and still attached to Rommel’s panzer units.

  Within the hour he had commissioned a military ambulance, a medic, and a driver. They headed west at speed, then south into the mountains and along the snowbound valleys on chained wheels toward St. Töllden. They drove all night, and when the sun rose the mountains stood deep orange along their edges against the cloudless sky.

  Dr. Mannheim made a thorough examination, internal and external. He took smears and blood and examined them under a microscope for hostile bacteria. He consulted a colleague in Innsbruck, a specialist, by telephone. Albert sat in the doctor’s office, and he could hear one side of the conversation murmured through the door to the examination room. The telephone was put down and he could hear the doctor speaking to Clara.

  The doctor came into the room. He put his stethoscope on the desk and sat down in the chair. “Clara is getting dressed,” he said to Albert. “Let’s wait until she can join us. You’re just back from France?”

  “I am.”

  “It’s all completely unnecessary, isn’t it?”

  “Unnecessary?”

  The doctor sat and studied Albert’s uniform in the combined light from the desk lamp and the blue window light of morning: the rank insignia of silver stars and oak leaves, the tank badge and the Iron Crosses, the wound badge; the face above the collar, unshaven, gaunt, the skin drawn tight and windburnt.

  “Yes,” said the doctor. “Unnecessary. Even mad. Mad. I was a young surgeon in the first war. I know.”

  Albert moved his head in acknowledgement of that, but he said nothing.

  They sat in silence and when the door opened they stood up as Clara sat down. She glanced at Albert. “Dr. Mannheim says I’m fine.”

  “Not quite,” said the doctor, and he went on to explain that while Clara was organically strong and the bacterial counts were normal, her nervous system was nevertheless attacking her. He said the situation was similar to last time, a weakening of certain functions by anxiety. More research was necessary, but his recommendation was for her to rest as much as possible. Rest, he said; no excitement, good nutrition, and perhaps no sexual intercourse. Just to be on the safe side.

  WHEN THEY ARRIVED back at the base, SS Obersturmführer Bönninghaus had already made a report to his superiors. He was recommending a court-martial for Albert. The charge was going absent without leave and abusing his rank to requisition military transportation for personal use.

  At first it seemed a petty thing, no more. A complaint by a political officer of subordinate rank against a senior military officer. But the problem grew, perhaps because someone in Berlin saw it as an opportunity to damage Rommel. A complaint was launched, and Field Marshal Paul von Kleist told Rommel to fix the problem. Rommel ordered Albert to France by the next-available transportation.

  Eight hours later Albert stood before Rommel’s desk, and the general asked what this complaint was all about.

  Albert explained and Rommel listened without interruption. They were standing in the salon of the small castle that served as Rommel’s headquarters at Toulon. A harpsichord with its legs removed lay in one corner, and on the wall above it hung oil paintings of men in lace and powdered wigs.

  Rommel said that at the very least Albert should have checked with his office. “To protect yourself and me,” he said. “In Berlin the knives are out for all of us, so don’t give openings to the SS.”

  Albert said there had been no time to check with anyone. He said this had been a personal emergency regarding her, and he had made a decision. He gave no apology but he said he regretted having caused problems for the general. He accepted full responsibility.

  Rommel stared at him for a long time. For so long, Albert told her, he grew uneasy.

  “So be it,” Rommel said finally. “Go back to your base now and wait at your office there. You’ll hear from me.”

  Halfway to the door Rommel stopped him. “Colonel,” he said. “Off the record, you did the right thing. Assess, decide, and act. Never hesitate. Now go and accept the consequences.”

  Next day Albert was back at the base in Burgenland. He called her, and she was fine. He called his mother, and Cecilia told him that Sissy had given birth to a girl. He had a tiny niece now, she said. Caroline Gottschalk, seven pounds and a pair of strong lungs.

  In the morning Rommel’s chief of staff called to say the general had been able to convert the court-martial to seven days of brig, beginning immediately. Albert was to hand over pro-forma command to his major, and the major was to submit the proper documentation and to see that Albert was kept behind bars in the jail on the premises.

  It was clear that Rommel must have called in some favours to convert a court-martial to only this. Albert sat behind the bars of the lockup in his own base, and Anna’s home-cooking was brought to him, and blankets and a proper jug, towels, soap, and a washbasin. Out the window from up high he could see all the way to Hungary across the plain covered in snow that swirled and rose and fell and rose and danced in the constant wind.

  She came to visit him every day, driven by Corporal Fuchs. She brought Willa, who played with her duck and with a puzzle of wooden blocks made also by the Polish prisoners. The cell door was open, and they played together, the three of them, on the wooden pallet with the blanket folded away.

  Once, SS Obersturmführer Bönninghaus saw the car on the road and he flagged it, and he looked into the backseat through the window. He shook his head at her and walked around to the driver’s side. He motioned Fuchs to lower the window, and when it was down he said, “Do you have authorized orders to do this, Corporal? Are you a taxi service for civilians now?”

  Fuchs did not know what to say, and Bönninghaus leaned close and stared at him. “I’ll be reporting this,” he said. He straightened and stood back. He waved them on. She saw him from the rear window, his black outline on the white road with his fists on his hips, until the car turned a corner.

  When the sentence was up, Albert returned home feeling rested and relaxed. They had four more fine days together, then he had to return to France. The small complement of men left at the base included Corporal Fuchs, whose job it would be to look after the remaining vehicles.

  She and Willa saw them off at the station, all these soldiers climbing aboard the train, Albert waving from the lowered window, blowing them kisses, leaning out so they could see him for as long as possible.

  In France, General Rommel assigned him additional tanks, among them the new Type IV/G with improved armour and cannon. All ammunition was by then filled with the new type of propellant that drove the heavy 88mm projectiles at unprecedented speeds. As fast as rifle bullets, Albert had told her.

  By January 27, 1941, the main body of the Afrika Korps was ready to go. It was a relatively small force consisting of the 5th Light Panzer Regiment and of various special units, including Albert’s Landshut Black. They entrained, men and equipment, in long transports for the ride south, and at 2300 hours on February 12, on ships under full blackout, they left Sicily for North Africa.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ROMMEL JOINED THE Afrika Korps two days later in his Fieseler Stork airplane, and that night he addressed his men. He stood on the closed turret hatch of one of the wide-tracked desert tanks and told them their job was to stop the British 8th
Army from gaining any more ground in North Africa. He told them it would be hard work because the British were tough soldiers under good leadership, but that was the job.

  As Rommel spoke there was no moon at all, but there was enough starlight, Albert said, so you could see him clearly up there in his baggy old leather coat, talking with his hands in his pockets. The desert sky was more sprayed with stars than any of the men had ever seen. A carpet of light, Albert said, some of the stars bright as searchlights. Albert’s second-in-command, Major von Rhenold, had studied celestial navigation, and he told the men that some of the brightest stars did not even exist any more. That they had died years ago and now it was just their light like a memory that was still travelling for this generation and perhaps many more.

  THE NEXT TIME the obersturmführer came to her house it was two o’clock in the morning. He pounded on the door and when she opened it sleepily, just a crack, he smiled at her with wide thin lips.

  He said, “There is a serious charge against you.” He shoved the door against her body and stepped inside. “Your husband, Colonel Leonhardt, is presently in North Africa, yes?”

  “What?”

  “I know he is.” He studied her breasts and seven-month belly under the night gown. “Nice,” he said. “To think it’s all his.”

  She stood hugging her elbows, then she turned abruptly, went to the bedroom, and put on her robe.

  “I’ll report you,” she said from there. “I don’t think you’re allowed to just walk in here.”

  “I’m allowed to do whatever I consider to be my duty,” he said and followed her. “This is national security. The powers we have, you have no idea. I haven’t called the SD, but when I do they’ll just take you away and no one will ever find out what happened to you. Or the child,” he said from the bedroom door. “I can guarantee that.”

  “Don’t come in here!” She stared at him in his blacks and silvers. At the silly little death’s head on his cap. She hoped Willa would sleep through this in her own room down the hall.