Clara

by Kurt Palka

  “Fine,” she said.

  By noon she was back at the computer, at the manuscript. Just another hundred pages to go. Then the revisions, the word-for-word checking. Some rewriting, and finally sending it off to Frankfurt.

  THIRTY

  OVER CHRISTMAS OF 1942 she and her mother would leave the children with Anna while they went to see the newsreels at the small movie house at the back of the post office in St. Töllden. She never caught another glimpse of Albert and she had no idea where he was now, but on the screen it was always good news on all fronts. Their soldiers were gaining ground everywhere and liberated people were welcoming them and tossing flowers at their tanks. The war would be won any day now, the announcers said.

  “I know a man that’s hiding on a farm,” whispered Mrs. Dorfer, the milkwoman. “He walked away from the eastern front, imagine, all that way and he says the war in Russia is going very badly. He says the entire sixth army is surrounded. No medical supplies and no food. They don’t even have fuel for their tanks, he says.”

  The radio reported that a student organization called White Rose had been secretly distributing anti-government leaflets. A brother-and-sister team had been behind this act of treason. The Gestapo had found them all and executed them. Nearly a hundred students in their early twenties, said the radio.

  In June 1943, she recorded in her notes that banks had to report all private money, and unless one was well connected to the party, all money was confiscated in exchange for War Bonds. Food was scarce, even with stamps, and all manufactured goods were of ersatz quality. Bread came blended with sawdust, coffee was made from dried figs and acorns, clothing was of the poorest cotton mixed with wood fibres, buttons were of pressed cardboard. Glass, steel, wood, and metal were unavailable.

  In St. Töllden two men came to the house, showed official papers, and said that everyone had to hand over whatever gold they owned for the war effort.

  “Your wedding bands,” they said. In exchange they gave them small iron rings with an inscription that said, I gave gold for iron.

  Two days a week she toured on her bicycle from farm to farm to trade cigarette stamps for goat milk and goat cheese and for the rare piece of meat, mostly rabbit.

  In Italy, in June, Mussolini was deposed by the Fascist Grand Council. He was arrested and taken as a prisoner to the Gran Sasso Hotel in the Abruzzi Mountains.

  “The Italians at least have the sense to get rid of these people,” said her mother. “Why can’t we do the same?”

  But no sooner was Mussolini locked up than he was rescued by German paratroopers and taken to northern Italy to live in hiding.

  The Allies landed in Italy in September, and Italy capitulated. The radio said that unemployed Italian soldiers had formed gangs of partisans and were fighting their former allies from the rear. Those same partisans later found and arrested Mussolini near his hiding place at Lake Como. They killed him along with his mistress, and they hung them from their heels like game in a market square in Milan. The public spat at the corpses and threw rocks at them.

  The Americans built bomber bases in Italy, and from March 1944 on the raids came regularly. Oil refineries were hit, and railroad points, and factories of any kind.

  For the St. Töllden file she noted that in the beginning it seemed that homes were not being bombed on purpose, only by mistake. But six months later smaller urban centres too were set afire in planned raids, day and night.

  On March 23, 1944, the cardboard tube factory in Burgenland was hit. Also hit in that same daylight raid were Albert’s former base, and three of the cottages in the village, including the one she and her family had lived in. The munitions depot and buried gasoline tanks exploded and not much was left of any part of the compound. The cardboard tube factory, it turned out, had been making rocket parts, and it burned to the ground. The Polish prisoners there all died; the ones working in the fields, including the professor and the thin blond one who had played the harmonica, survived and were taken that night to another basement in the area.

  IN JULY 1944, the generals’ plot against Hitler became the sixth known attempt on his life. People learned the name of Colonel Stauffenberg along an underground chain of rumours and whispers.

  “A hero,” Mrs. Dorfer said, leaning on her bicycle. “Finally. Thank God.” She put her finger across her lips. “What a brave man. And did you hear? Blind in one eye and one arm gone.”

  But the thing had failed, and in its wake perhaps a thousand army officers and their families were killed by the SS.

  “Shot, hanged, stabbed, garrotted, their heads hacked off,” the announcer said firmly on the radio, and she wrote it down word for word, for what it said about the spirit of that time.

  When in later years the assignments from Dr. Hufnagel in Geneva gave her access to Nuremberg files, she spent weeks at the warehouse where the files were stored. She sat at one of the small desks in the research room and went through box after box of records and sworn depositions that gave a clear picture of the event.

  Stauffenberg had placed his explosive briefcase under the conference table at Rastenburg and had left the room. Someone kicked the briefcase over, and the bomb went off but the heavy table acted as a shield and Hitler suffered barely a scratch.

  Many officers had been involved in the planning of the plot and of the subsequent surrender to the Allies and the running of the country. The more famous ones were Generals Speidel, Fromm, Olbrecht, von Witzleben, von Böck, Höpner, and a dozen more. Even Field Marshal Rommel was accused of having known of it. General Fromm, who was the one coward and the weak link, switched sides when the bomb did not kill Hitler. He betrayed the plotters to the SS.

  All the generals involved were killed, as were many of their subordinate officers, and in many cases their wives and children and parents also. Stauffenberg on Fromm’s orders was shot dead in the ministry yard. In his punishment of the men whose acceptance he had always craved but never received, Hitler ordered some generals to be beheaded. He brought back the broadaxe for that purpose, and the hooded axeman dressed in black.

  “A block of wood from some mythical five-hundred-year oak,” said the sworn deposition. “In a basement room, with tiered benches for those who were ordered to watch.”

  Rommel, because of his fame and popularity, was promised that his family would not be touched, and he was given the choice between a pistol and poison. He swallowed cyanide, did so in the passenger seat of the staff car, not far from his house.

  Other officers chose the handgun, the standard Walther P38 9mm parabellum. A pistol like Albert’s. They filled their mouths with water and stuck the barrel in there, and the bullet and gas expansion combined with the hydrostatic pressure left almost nothing of their heads for Hitler’s deputies to ridicule.

  And Albert, because he had been one of Field Marshal Rommel’s favourite officers, was sent from Yugoslavia straight to the Russian front, where the average survival rate for newly arrived officers was one day and a half.

  Such was the year of 1944. By then SS Obergruppenführer Bernhard Heydrich was also dead. He, mastermind of the Final Solution, of the death camps in the East, and of the SS Einsatzgruppen that had murdered Jews in the occupied territories by the hundreds of thousands. He had been killed by Czechoslovakian partisans, and in revenge for his killing the SS had murdered the entire male population of the town of Lidice, men and boys, all.

  She never knew that Albert had been sent to Russia. She had no idea where he was, and never heard from him after they left the base in Burgenland. She wrote to the last field post number she had for him, poured out her heart and sent the letters off like messages in a bottle.

  Writing was still saving her. Even just getting ready to set pen to paper forced her to think clearly. The discipline of following one thought in linear ways past all distractions to its conclusion. The absolutely all-important attitude of As-if.

  But what she thought late one evening in November that year had nothing to do with Heidegger,
Nietzsche, Kant, or Husserl. Nothing to do with any of the poets and writers she had studied and learned so much from, these kings and queens of words and ideas and emotions. It did not even have anything to do with her own notion of philosophy as a mental structure and house to live in.

  What she thought had to do with the churchbells. She realized that all this time they had been faithfully tolling the hour, tolling Vesper, tolling Sanctus, tolling the hours of the healing of souls. And it struck her that somehow from the thousand-year stretch and more when Christian religion had been at the centre of lives in the western world, had been the source of most art and music and morality in western civilization, it had come to this.

  She thought this, sitting in the children’s bedroom, the two of them asleep with the blackout blinds pulled all the way down and pinned to frames and crossbars, and not so very far away the sky was filled with the drone of squadrons of B-17 bombers flying toward the cities in the valley.

  It was too far away to hear the air raid alarms, but before long she could hear the bombs, could feel them more than hear them by the rumbling and trembling of floor and windows.

  THIRTY-ONE

  LUNCH WAS DELIVERED by a caterer whom she paid on a regular basis, and every day she put the white cloth on the kitchen table, and linen napkins. Mitzi spooned the food from the plastic containers onto plates and rinsed the containers and stacked them for the driver to collect the next time.

  They ate and made plans for the afternoon.

  A moth fluttered by and they watched it. It rose up to the pantry and sat on the patterned metal screen. It folded its wings and crawled inside.

  From old habit, perhaps as insurance against those times returning, she kept staples up there; items like flour and rice and beans and sugar in small paper sacks, and dried lentils and peas and breadcrumbs and rolled oats and coffee still in her mother’s little metal tins shaped like mosques. What treasure those things would have been then, along with jars with lids, and plastic bags. Or aluminium foil; unthinkable. For years when it first came out she would iron aluminium foil smooth and refold it to be used again; she would wash out and reuse plastic bags over and over. Hang them upside down on the line to dry.

  Another moth, or perhaps the same one, crawled out, fluttered around the room as if for exercise, and then went back inside, through the stencilled holes shaped like tiny flowers.

  Mitzi said, “Somebody will have to clean all those cupboards out someday. Should we do it?”

  She said nothing to that.

  MITZI HAD COME TO ST. TÖLLDEN in the spring of 1944, after she and the other women were bombed out in Vienna. By then bombing runs on civilian targets were flown in three waves: the first with high explosive bombs to blow up buildings and expose their interiors, the second wave with phosphorous bombs to set fire to structural wood and furniture, and the third with anti-personnel bombs to kill firefighters and people who’d left the shelters too soon.

  One night after one of those attacks on Vienna, the women made their way back from the shelter through dust- and smoke-filled streets to the apartment. When they turned the corner, they saw that much of their building was gone. Floors hanging, rooms with furnishings still on fire. Walls still collapsing in clouds of dust and ashes.

  They spent that night in the archway that had been the entrance to their building. The women and four-year-old Caroline huddled under Cecilia’s coat and a Red Cross blanket of Erika’s, and all night long they heard rats. Once, Sissy felt one walking on her leg, and she leapt up and screamed and snatched Caroline up off the ground. They caught glimpses of looters poking through ruins, filling jute sacks with whatever might be worth money on the black market.

  In the morning they made their way up to the apartment. It was mostly burnt out, with entire walls and some floors gone. The dining room had more or less survived, but looters had taken paintings and the silver and whatever else they’d been able to carry. The four-day Silverbell Napoleon clock was still there, and the upright piano in the small salon. The grand piano had burned and fallen partly through the floor.

  By noon that day Erika had been able to find temporary shelter for them at the Red Cross, and by midafternoon Cecilia and Sissy had located a man with a horse and farmwagon. Somehow with the help of his son they had hoisted the upright piano and the wallclock onto the boards. Sissy said that when they rumbled away, her mother sat defiantly upright on that piano stool in her battered and balding Persian lamb coat and cap and heels, her feet tucked away and crossed at the ankles, while around them there was nothing but smoke and ruins.

  Two blocks away people were hauling sodden bodies from a shelter that had been hit, and where, when firemen had put out the flames, those who had not died from the concussion or from the smoke had drowned.

  Erika remained in Vienna, living in one of a few hundred cubicles behind blankets on ropes in the main system of barracks. Great red crosses on white ground had been painted on roofs and walls. Mitzi’s car had by some miracle survived at the Red Cross garage, and she just left it there for Erika to use if she needed to. The tank was nearly full but most streets had become impassable.

  A week later, Mitzi, Cecilia, and Sissy and Caroline arrived at St. Töllden. There was enough room if some of them doubled up, and it was still safe. The hydroelectric station and the salt processing plant in the valley had been bombed, but St. Töllden itself had so far not been targeted.

  A household of all women now, like most. It was tense at first, especially because the differences between her mother and Cecilia had never been resolved. She sat with them in the kitchen and made them talk about it, would not let up until they did. Mothers with a dead son each, both lost to the same empty cause. What now? As soon as their shoulders softened and the first few words about loss had been spoken, she left the room. Eventually she could see their heads in outline in the etched glass in the kitchen door moving closer together.

  They lined up for ration stamps and bartered with shopkeepers and farmers. She hunted for food on her bicycle, and Mitzi cut hair in exchange for one potato or half a cabbage or ten coffee beans. Sissy sewed and altered clothes, and Cecilia still had a deerskin pouch of 18 carat gold jewellery. In it were necklaces, French brooches, and three diamond rings that she had not given for iron. It was illegal, but nearly everything required for survival was.

  With the frequency of firebombings in the larger cities, the radio gave cheerful advice. “In case of phosphorus bombs,” the German Mother’s Listening Hour said, “quickly pull down all curtains and throw bedding and cushions out the window. Put the children in a bathtub filled with water up to their necks and push them under when needed.”

  The first air raid alarm in St. Töllden was heard on September 15, 1944. The siren was mounted on the roof of the town hall. It looked like a great tin mushroom, and since its installation it had been tested every Saturday precisely at noon. It made an unnerving rising and falling wail, but after a while people got used to it. It made them feel safe, and soon when they heard it they’d look at their watches, pull out the crowns, and set them.

  Since there was no air raid shelter in town, bills had been posted telling people to use the area known as the Christian Caves in case of an alarm. They were the very caves her father had restored and opened up as part of the museum with wooden stairs and platforms.

  It was a good twenty minutes from the house, but at the first alarm they all hurried there: her mother, Cecilia, Anna, Mitzi, Sissy and Caroline, and she with Emma and Willa. Many of the people in St. Töllden were gathered there that night, like at some pilgrims’ place of miracles. The caves were not nearly large enough to hold the entire town, but they held several hundred. The rest huddled against the mountain, behind boulders and slabs of fallen rock.

  In the dark sky they could see nothing since the bombers were blacked out. A few searchlights stabbed up from some distant place that had air defences, but not here. They craned their necks, and people in the caves crowded the stone entrances whil
e those in the back sat covering their ears.

  Those in front and down by the rocks could not see the airplanes, but they could hear them, a drone like a thousand bees and the very air vibrating with engine noise. They could not see the bombs falling, but they saw them exploding, enormous firecrackers in their old town, outlines of buildings momentarily black against the flashes, the church steeple black against an explosion, then darkness again. They stood and stared, and when the airplanes were gone some people left to run home, but a warden in a tin hat shouted at them to wait for the next wave.

  It came within minutes, and this time they saw the containers exploding in midair to scatter their chips of phosphorus, and as soon as these were touched by air they began to burn bright blue and white, and so they rained down on St. Töllden, mid-air explosions scattering tongues of fire that fell on roofs and trees and everywhere, like piñatas scattering gifts for children.

  There was no third wave that night, and the house when they reached it was fine. That fall and winter saw several more attacks, and eventually many of the older women simply took cover in their basements. Anna, Cecilia, and her mother did that, and neighbours came to join them since the house had a good vaulted basement. They sat on the stone floor there by candlelight and listened to the explosions.

  One old man, a World War One artillery major with a medal on his chest and one trouserleg pinned up, for that leg was missing, told them that you never hear the bomb that gets you, since it comes straight for you with no sound at all.

  “Bombs,” he said, and he reached out to touch Cecilia’s coat sleeve in the candlelight. “Listen,” he said. “You’ll find this interesting.”

  Those were two-hundred-kilo bombs with delayed fuses, he told them, and delayed fuses were invented for just this purpose, to allow bombs to penetrate the house from top to bottom, right down to where they were hiding now, before the thing detonated. And bombs, he said, did not come down straight but fell in a lessening arc as gravity slowed their horizontal speed from the moment of release. He leaned to the candle and showed them with his hand pretending it was a bomb. And he told the women whether they wanted to hear this or not, that bomb fragments at the outset travelled nearly at the speed of gas expansion, some eight thousand feet and more per second.