Clara

by Kurt Palka

  The months following the birth of Emma brought a fine summer and fall, and the fields around the cottages were golden with wheat. Robins and soldierbirds fluttered and trilled, and sunflowers were the size of platters. Birds sat on fences and in berry shrubs; birds clung to sunflower faces, hacking at seeds. The apple and plum trees in the orchards bore more fruit than they had in years, people said. Fruit was rotting on the ground, and in backyard stills the local women made slivovitz and apple brandy and a brandy compote that supposedly did wonders for a man’s desires, to put away for when their men came back. The compote was jarred piping hot and sealed with wax or cellophane and elastics, and with luck it would keep.

  Not far away at the lake the new factory was being commissioned and some of the prisoners in the cellar were taken there to work. The factory made long cardboard tubes that came in three different thicknesses and lengths, and in three different colours. They were made from paper mash that was extruded in tube-shapes by enormous machines, then cut to length, dried, and shipped.

  Her friends came often to see her. A weekend at Clara’s was country bliss for them, and they went for walks and boatrides and they played with Willa and Emma on blankets in the backyard. They tucked flowers into their hatbands and collected small bird feathers they found on the ground. Come evening they’d look out for the prisoners.

  The men would arrive at the end of daylight, and the women would watch behind curtains from the darkened room, watch the trucks and the guards, and when the outer cellar door was locked and the trucks were gone, the prisoners would put on the clean used clothes from Red Cross supplies Erika had brought, and on those nights a kind of salon took place in that dirt basement, with candlelight and sweet apple cider, and the professor would be the Mr. Speaker of conversation, and questions would be directed at him and he would translate them, as in polite society. The men explained to Mitzi what a village in Poland looked like. They spoke of their families.

  One who had been a pastry chef at a hotel in Warsaw described in detail how to make a good chocolate layer cake and pavlovas, which had been his specialty. In overlarge clothes he stood under the light bulb and made all the motions, and he spoke of the great care that had to be taken with batter and temperatures, and with the fillings. He described how to melt chocolate in a double boiler and then how to pour it criss-cross into the form, not too soon and not too late, when thickness and temperature were just right.

  “You test it on the inside of your wrist,” the professor translated. “The way mothers do with baby bottles.”

  The women and men sat on the basement stairs and on a few kitchen chairs brought down, and they sipped cider and nibbled on sun-dried apple slices, and they listened to the fine points of making chocolate cake.

  On her second or third visit there Mitzi fell in love with one of them, a blond, pale young man who had been a journalist in Warsaw. He was the one who played the harmonica, and Mitzi would sit next to him in the dark cellar on those evenings, and once Clara saw them holding hands, like children sharing a secret.

  Erika had her Ph.D. by then, and she was working for the Red Cross full-time. She told of reports from Poland, of camps there that were hopefully holding the people who had disappeared in night and fog so they could be released after the war. This was the official line, and it was still credible then. It was before the Wannsee Conference of July 1943, before Hitler’s decree of the Final Solution.

  DURING ONE VISIT Mitzi reported that there was no gasoline now to be found anywhere in Vienna, and the next day Clara bicycled with Mitzi on the luggage rack to speak to Corporal Fuchs at the base. They found him at work under a truck in the yard, and he would have seen the women’s nice tanned legs there in the sunshine, the hems of their printed dresses and their feet in cork-sole strap sandals.

  He dollied out from under the truck, wiped his hands on a rag and grinned at them, and listened. He said he might be able to spare a jerry can or two, but no more or he’d be in trouble. That week he drove into Vienna in the Mercedes to meet Mitzi where her car was stranded in the Red Cross garage. Fuchs filled her tank and then he put a board under the seat where the battery was, and he hoisted three canisters of gasoline onto her backseat, at twenty litres each.

  “Panzer fuel,” he said to her and grinned. “I hope it’s not too high octane. A type four on the run would burn that much in a few minutes.”

  He said fuel ran into a revving panzer engine like from a hose tap wide open.

  Next Sunday all the women came along to watch Mitzi cut the hair of every last soldier on the base. They lined up and laughed and joked with her and with the other women. It was like a party, with the man whose hair was being cut at the centre, sitting on a steel typing chair with a bedsheet over his shoulders, clearly loving Mitzi’s hands on him and her nice woman’s body nearby. She worked with comb and scissors, then used a razor on their necks, and in the end sprayed scented water from a blue flacon.

  The three jerry cans of petrol and the full tank lasted Mitzi for nearly seven weeks. When it was all gone, she acted on a notion she’d had earlier. She spoke to one of her clients, a Mrs. Schmitt, the wife of an SS sturmbannführer attached to the Gestapo office, and boldly she proposed the kind of a contra deal that had worked so well for the plastic surgery on Erika’s ear.

  The deal would be for free gas for Mitzi in exchange for free hair, face, and nails for Mrs. Schmitt. The woman, who liked her hair and nails just so, spoke to her sturmbannführer husband, and from then on all Mitzi had to do was drive up at the pumps on Himmelpfortgasse and show the official piece of paper. The young men in their service blacks would salute and snap into action. They’d fill her tank and they’d polish and fuss and check her tires and once in a while change the oil and respectfully show her the mark on the dipstick.

  ALBERT NEVER CAME HOME all that time. For the Afrika Korps supply had become the main problem, with their lines stretched so far, at some point nearly all the way to the Suez Canal. The newsreels said the British were making temporary gains; they mentioned the names of Generals Auchinleck, Montgomery, Ritchie, and Morshead. She received no mail from Albert, but she still wrote at least once a week. Because he had yet to meet Emma, she sent pictures Erika had taken with her Agfa-Click.

  In the summer of 1942, when Emma was one year and two months old, the first bombs fell on war-effort sites and railroad points near Vienna. The Ostbahnhof was hit, and near Schwechat a munitions depot kept burning and exploding for a full day and night. Not far from the cottage and the base four bombs barely missed the new factory, causing enormous craters that filled quickly with water and attracted families of ducks. She drove there on the bicycle, with Emma on the handlebar seat and Willa on the luggage rack. They sat in the grass and watched the baby ducks paddling after their mother.

  That August, her father died. She spoke to Anna, packed up the children, and left for St. Töllden.

  There was a small graveside service. Her mother and she and the children stood under umbrellas in the rain, all in black on wooden boards around the wet hole in the ground and the earth piled in mounds at the feet of the angel. The ministrant held an umbrella over the priest, who stood with black robes trailing. He waved the censor and made crosses with his hand and he said, “Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.”

  The memorial service took place not at the Benedictine chapel but at the main church because there were so many mourners. The family sat in the first pew, and her mother never moved, never even stood up or knelt at the liturgical points, only laid one bare hand on the bible rail and crossed herself with the other.

  Peter was not there. From Norway he had been ordered to Holland, and from there someplace east. He had been home only once, for a one-week leave. According to Daniela they’d spent it all in the kitchen and bedroom.

  That night her mother asked if she could possibly move back to St. Töllden. Clara sat on the chair in her parents’ bedroom, in an emptiness so enormous it expanded the room and made
them lower their voices.

  “Move back here,” she said. “I don’t know. It depends on Albert’s situation, I guess. It’s his base there. Mama, I couldn’t just … I can ask him when he comes home on leave. How much longer can it be?”

  Her mother who had lived through one world war already said nothing to that.

  He returned some three months later, a full colonel now, and with the Knight’s Cross under his collar. He had been brought back by High Command along with General Rommel and other senior officers, after the second battle of El Alamein, where after many successes the tide had turned. It was now apparent that the war in the desert could no longer be won, not with the lack of petrol and ammunition and basic supplies that Hitler was refusing to address.

  Once after a morning conference Rommel had told Albert that Hitler had lost interest in rescuing Mussolini’s disappointing armies again and again. He’d lost interest in North Africa and was expecting the final collapse there any month now. Until then, they should do what they could to slow the Allied advance, Hitler had said. If they ran out of artillery shells, they were to use rifles and bayonets.

  Through Rommel, Albert requested permission to bring his 14th Armoured Battalion home to be used elsewhere; to rescue it, essentially, rather than see it wasted, but Hitler refused. Rommel told Albert that he was no exception. Hitler was refusing all such requests for strategic relocation, not even to save an entire division from being destroyed. It was difficult, Rommel said, to listen to the man’s rants on the telephone about not yielding an inch of soil and defending to the last drop of blood.

  One month later, Hitler had ordered Rommel and Albert and other senior officers to hand over to their seconds in command and to return to Berlin. And not long thereafter, the Afrika Korps, outgunned and outsupplied by the Allied Forces there under General Dwight Eisenhower now, was history. More than half the men were dead, the rest were behind barbwire in the desert.

  BACK IN EUROPE Albert was given command of an Alpine battalion of special units and ordered to Yugoslavia. He was home just long enough to enjoy four days’ leave and then to hand over the base to an artillery unit.

  Those days and nights again she never once left his side. It was November 1942, a cold November with early frost and snow that then melted and froze again so that roads and fields became sheets of ice. Again there was so much to tell that for the first few hours they could hardly speak a word. Emma was a year and a half old, and it was the first time that he saw her. The second night, when the children were asleep and the house was quiet, she whispered the truth to him about the SS man, Bönninghaus. He was stunned. He sat up in bed. He asked questions, and he whispered that he was proud of her. She described what had happened afterwards, the professor and the pastry chef and the journalist and all the others who had come to her help, and then the SD major and the medal.

  The next evening, after the guards had left, he put on his full uniform, cap, and boots but not the pistolbelt, and she and the children went down ahead of him into the basement. She was carrying a candle because one of the two light bulbs was burnt out and she’d not been able to find a replacement.

  When they saw him coming down behind her, first his boots then the uniform, the prisoners sat up in their strawbeds and stared. She told them that this was her husband back from Africa, and she indicated the professor and mentioned his name, and then one by one she indicated the other men, their white astonished faces in the gloom, and she mentioned their names. Albert took off his cap and clamped it under his left arm and he walked up to every man and shook his hand and thanked him.

  Two days later he left. She and the girls saw him off at the train station. They embraced and kissed, and he knelt and kissed the girls. In the cold, the steam from the locomotive was low on the ground and white, and there were harsh metallic noises coming from the next track. The girls must have picked up her mood because they were crying.

  THE NEW BASE COMMANDER and his family would be taking over the cottage, and so she had to leave; Anna had the option to stay or to move with her and the children to St. Töllden.

  Anna sat in the lean- to and thought about it. Walking past the half-open door, Clara saw her sitting on the bed, round and sad and looking down into her lap.

  Half an hour later she came out and touched Clara’s sleeve. “I’ll go with you, Frau Doktor,” she said. “I want to help with the children.”

  And so she and Anna packed up their belongings and they took a box of candles and some matches and some apples down to the Polish prisoners to say farewell, and for the boy who had carved the duck and the puzzle she brought the sharp paring knife wrapped in a strip of cloth.

  On the morning of December 15, 1942, they climbed into the grey Mercedes car still with Corporal Fuchs at the wheel. Fuchs touched the horn and the truck carrying their belongings pulled away. They followed. Neighbour women stood outside their cottage doors and waved. Anna wept driving past them, but she tried not to show it. She sat in the front seat in her best clothes, with her grey hair in a tidy bun that day. Clara sat in the back with the girls nestling against her under blankets because the car’s heater was broken.

  There was a light snow falling and the fields were white and black. The mountains when they reached them later that day stood nearly blue with ice, with frozen runoff like sculptures showing between trees and rock, hanging from granite lips in enormous creations.

  TWENTY-NINE

  IT WAS REMARKABLE, the speed with which Mitzi was recovering. Some days she had pain in that hip and at the back of her thigh, but Dr. Gottschalk said it was natural that some tissue would have been offended during the procedure. The pain would disappear in time.

  Three weeks after the operation she was able to walk with only one cane, and on that Sunday Clara took time away from the manuscript and she and Mitzi rode the cable car to the restaurant at the top of the mountain. They had coffee and pastry, and they sat and looked out the picture windows at the valley below with the afternoon sun low and orange skimming the faces of mountains as far as they could see.

  From a cliff to the left of the restaurant, hang gliders were jumping off, young men and women laughing and kidding each other, dressed in ski clothing and helmets and goggles and gloves. They clung to the frames of their brightly coloured wings and took running starts at the cliff, and they leapt and sailed away in slow spirals and long ellipses descending to the valley floor a thousand metres below. On the sunside slopes some of them caught the updrafts and climbed to begin all over again.

  “Look at those two,” said Mitzi. She pointed at a couple in bright clothing kissing and touching barehanded before they put on gloves to leap off the mountain.

  “Were you ever in love?” said Clara abruptly. “Forgive me. I’m not sure what I’m asking.”

  Mitzi turned and studied her. “What a question. What brought that on?”

  “I find myself thinking back a fair bit these days. Don’t you?”

  “I try not to. You know I was in love. That blond little Pole. Don’t you remember?”

  “I do. What I meant to ask was, how much in love? What kind of love.”

  “Enough and in different ways. A few men. Cecilia, what a fine woman. Erika. Your brother Peter, that noble man. Danni. You. Does that count? Albert, of course.”

  “It all counts,” she said.

  She was remembering that when she was young and had little past, she could not wait to leap forward into the future, leap off just like these young people with the full confidence she would be able to control and shape her life; now when she looked into the mirror and accepted what she saw, she knew that her past was all she had. And how was it? How did it feel?

  She knew of old people who were terribly plagued by their past, by what they had done to others, or not done for them. Mistakes made, wrong turns, and no way back. Old people in homes, their lips moving all the time, explaining, justifying, remaking conversations and actions. Looking back all day long through the merciless and warped tel
escope of hindsight.

  She thought about this all the way down the mountain, and later that day she finally understood in her heart the genesis of a core Christian idea. A myth like most, but what a useful one.

  And something relating precisely to that, something from literature, cutting right to the heart of it.

  Late that night, she calculated the time difference and at one o’clock in the morning she called Willa on her camel farm in Australia and gave her the gist of it. Willa, an English major before starting all over again to become a vet, Willa knew it.

  “William Butler Yeats,” she said. “Look it up. It’s got to be in his Purgatory.”

  She looked it up that very night, and there it was. Nailed down, perfect:

  They know at last the consequence of their transgressions, either upon others or upon themselves.

  If upon others, then others may bring help, if upon themselves, there is no help but in themselves and in the mercy of God.

  SHE GOT SOME SLEEP that night, not much. She kept thinking that as a child she’d been simply able to confess sins; speak them into that patient ear behind the grille. Then go to the altar, rattle off her penance, and walk away, go skipping home, feeling free and relieved. What magic. What simple pleasure, that lightness.

  But there was also something else, something quite to the contrary. It would come to her; not now perhaps. It was some mature thing, bone-hard and far beyond the simple lightness of a myth.

  Next day the van came from the provincial archives, and a young man in jeans and a T-shirt and windbreaker carried down the file boxes.

  “Just those six,” she told him. “Not the ones with the red labels. They should go down to the basement, if you wouldn’t mind. I’d be grateful. Just set them down by the door and I’ll put them away later.” She slipped him a ten-euro bill.

  He looked at it and nodded. “Mr. Hofer said he’d call you later today or tomorrow morning to discuss things.”