Clara

by Kurt Palka

  “That fast,” he said and nodded.

  And one night in January 1945, one such bomb smashed through the top of the house and exploded at the rear. It killed her mother and Cecilia with flying bricks and bomb fragments the size of axe heads, and it killed three more old women and the invalid man. That day there were no fire bombs, and no third wave.

  THERE WERE PICTURES of the bomb damage in the St. Töllden files, and pictures of women all over town dressed like men in boots and baggy men’s pants cinched tight with ropes. They were called the rubble women, and while Anna looked after the children, Mitzi, Sissy, and Clara joined their brigades, cleaned bricks, and stacked them for reuse.

  With a crosscut saw they’d found in some ruin they cut down two of the pine trees in the garden and they stripped them and used the trunks to shore up the housewall; they even made a sill beam from a heavy piece of lumber to go between the bricks and the shores. Over time they were able to scavenge enough boards and other materials to patch the worst of the other damage, but all that winter and spring the women and children lived like ghosts in the damaged house, grey, empty-eyed people with dust on their faces and broken fingernails tapping on the table. They fetched water in buckets from the river, and they took whatever food they found in other ruins, and they traded the last of Cecilia’s brooches for a scrawny goat that they kept in the basement. Anna took charge of the goat, and several times a day she led it outside so it could scratch for grass and twigs from the hazelnut bush. The milk from that goat was drunk mostly by the children.

  And still writing like a gift was saving her. She would sit daily at the kitchen table and write in her journals and on loose pages for her folders of notes to herself and to Willa and Emma, describing the essence of these days. She could feel herself slowing down then, could observe herself taking control, sorting ideas and problems, putting them in perspective. A fine clarity came to her in those moments, and an ability to step back and see things in a light she could understand and accept.

  Without much hope that the letters would reach them, she wrote to Albert and to Erika in Vienna.

  Once, she received a letter from Erika describing her own life. She said that David Koren was well and still living in Sweden. He was writing for an English paper, and she was in touch with him through the Red Cross courier. When the war was over, he would come to Vienna, and they’d be together again. Erika wrote she was still using Mitzi’s little car and some of the wider streets were passable again.

  They had painted red crosses on it, on roof and doors, and for gasoline she was able to access the Red Cross emergency depot that was guarded day and night.

  And she was seeing Daniela quite regularly, Erika wrote. Peter had been home on a short leave from somewhere. He was at the eastern front now, Daniela had no idea where. Not in Russia, they hoped.

  THIRTY-TWO

  LATE IN MARCH as the snow was melting even on the shade side of the garden wall, and as white and sky-blue crocuses were coming out and the first green pokes of gladioli, Mitzi had another appointment with Dr. Gottschalk. In the early afternoon on that day she and Clara sat in the waiting room, and through the connecting door they could hear the doctor talking to someone in her office.

  “No,” they heard her say. “I want you to take two of these in the morning …” and she lowered her voice. It was like listening to Cecilia taking charge and making things very clear so that there could be no misunderstanding.

  “Sissy never spoke like that to people,” Mitzi said to her. “Did she?”

  “Maybe she did as she got older. Maybe it skipped a generation.”

  When it was Mitzi’s turn, Dr. Gottschalk said to Clara, “You could wait out here,” but Mitzi said she wanted her to come along.

  In the inner office she sat and heard Dr. Gottschalk’s instructions to Mitzi behind the examination screen. “Take off your skirt, and lie down on your front,” she said. “Where is the pain?”

  “That whole right side sometimes,” said Mitzi. “Yes, down along there.”

  Silence, then. Rustling noises.

  “And this?”

  “That’s fine.”

  “All right. You can get dressed now.”

  Then Dr. Gottschalk stood next to her. “And you? You look pale. Is everything all right?”

  “I’m fine. Maybe the long winter.”

  “Maybe. Come and see me sometime. Or are you seeing Dr. Kessler?”

  “I’m not seeing anyone as long as I can help it.”

  Dr. Gottschalk took her wrist, found the pulse, and looked at her watch.

  “How are your parents, Caroline? Where are they now?”

  The doctor shook her head and kept counting. “In Florida,” she said then. “You knew that? Sold the house in Nova Scotia and retired down there.”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t know that. I haven’t heard from Sissy in years.”

  “We talk on the phone,” said Dr. Gottschalk and offered nothing further.

  Mitzi joined them. Dr. Gottschalk reassured her and spoke of exercise and a low-salt and low-sugar diet. She wrote a prescription.

  Out in the street, Mitzi said, “I’m sure she’s a good doctor.”

  “What else did she tell you?”

  “You heard her. Nothing too useful. To keep moving.”

  “But the pain?”

  “It’s not there all the time.”

  “We could get a second opinion from Dr. Kessler.”

  Mitzi shook her head. They walked home, and in the mid-afternoon they sat in deckchairs with their faces turned up like wrinkled heliotropes. They sat in their coats and gloves and hats feeling warm and peaceful.

  “Like at a ski chalet,” said Mitzi with her eyes closed. “All we need is the smell of that lotion, what was it called?”

  “A coconut smell,” she said.

  “Coconut, yes.”

  THE NEXT DAY WAS SATURDAY, and as usual they walked to the Golden Goose for lunch. They sat at a table for two by the leaded window where the light came in golden and bright on china and cutlery, and they enjoyed their meal.

  On the way home Mitzi stumbled and her knees gave way crossing the street. She knelt and reached up for Clara’s hand but then fell forward onto the asphalt and slumped on her side. Cars stopped and people rushed to help. Someone with a cellphone called an ambulance.

  At the clinic she sat waiting in one of the chairs by the milk-glass door, and eventually Dr. Gottschalk came and sat down by her side.

  “A heart attack, I think,” she said gently. “Maybe a thrombosis. We can do a postmortem and find out, if you want to.”

  “Don’t. Could it have been caused by the operation? Maybe a blood clot breaking free?”

  “It’s not impossible. Even though I’d put her on blood thinners. We’ll never know. I’m calling it a heart attack.” They sat in silence with the door puffing open and closed and people in white walking past and looking at them and then quickly away.

  “Sorry,” said Dr. Gottschalk after a while. “I loved her too.”

  For the memorial service the Benedictine chapel was full, pews and standing room, even along the walls with the stations of the cross. The air was dense with cold and incense, and out the ancient sandglass windows you could see the mountains still covered in snow, and the blue riverrun where the glaciers were melting in the warm days and freezing again stone-hard at night.

  The coffin sat sideways in the small apse before the altar, and candles burned in great candelabra of brass and silver. Her white roses lay on the black wood.

  When they had sung the hymn, Father Hofstätter took the censer from the ministrant and he swung it in cruciform above the coffin. He said what she had asked him to say, which were the Latin words her mother had chosen for her father, about human beings and ashes: “Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.”

  The ministrant was the very girl who not so long ago had taken them up the stairs into the bell tower. She stood clear-eyed and young with
her hands folded in front of the red surplice over jeans and running shoes, and she found Clara in the first pew and smiled at her. It was only then that she began to weep.

  SHE CALLED EMMA and spoke with her, and she called Willa on Skype. She used many tissues, which she balled up and stashed in the plastic shopping bag hung from the pull in the desk drawer.

  “If you were to get a call,” she said to Willa. “Say you had to come quickly, how long would it take?”

  “Mom. What are you saying?”

  “How long, dear?”

  “A few days, I’d say. Four or five at the most. Why? Do you want me to come now? Are you all right?”

  “I’ll be fine. Don’t worry. There was something else. The lawyer, you know him, Doctor Haas, he has all my stuff. The will, the insurance.”

  “Mom. What are you talking about? What is this?”

  “Just let me. Oh yes. Maybe, when you have a moment … A quote, I do think it’s a man speaking, and he says something about enduring rather than curing.”

  “Enduring rather than curing. The rhyme is yours?”

  “Probably. It may not be those words, just the sentiment.”

  “The sentiment. Where do you think I would even begin with something this vague?”

  “You’re good at it,” she said. “You’ll find it.”

  She told Willa she loved her, always had, and Willa in faraway Australia over airwaves and satellites impossible to see said that she loved her too.

  FOR DAYS AFTER MITZI’S FUNERAL she was puzzled by the degree of comfort the ceremony had given her. After all these years. The very puzzlement opened up a new field of research and study for her. She could begin all over again with Rilke’s famous and towering line of dennoch preisen. These poor two words, no more than a fragment of an idea, and yet enormous in what they opened up, especially when read in the context of the reminder to be just that preceded them. They had been studied and interpreted by countless scholars and translators, but to her mind none had gotten them right. The word dennoch was part of a transitive phrase, and like the English word regardless it needed something more. It needed both a target and the bow that had launched it. To praise what, regardless of what, was the great question here.

  She had been there before, at university as a student, and later as a professor of literature, but now she went deeper.

  Probably the thing needed not understanding but feeling, not a frontal but a sideways approach. As she had once told her students, the work itself was the answer. “And yet,” she’d said to them. “Let’s say to praise life regardless of … Begin with that notion and then go deeper.” Dennoch preisen, she’d said, was a cut diamond that sparkled differently depending on the light you shone on it.

  One night in bed she remembered primary school, the catechism class when Protestants and Jews had to sit out the hour in the hallway, banished there to wait until the rest would include them again. She saw little girls sitting on low wooden benches painted and scratched and painted many times, bright blue in her days. Little girls in dresses and sandals, with barrettes in their hair, playing hopscotch or penny-to-the-wall until some teacher poked her head out a classroom door and glared at them.

  And later, at university, the joy at being free from all that, being absolutely in charge of her life and fully accountable and responsible for anything that might happen to her, and for any meaning whatsoever her life might have, fully accountable only to herself and to her conscience.

  Many years after the war Professor Emmerich had come back as a guest lecturer, and he had recognized her. This had been in the hallway at the end of their lectures, and they had gone downstairs for a coffee.

  “How did the war go for you?” he said. He still looked much the same, except that his shirt now had a collar, an American button-down collar at that, and the bicycle clips were gone. His brown eyes were untroubled and clear, and he still looked as though he might be able to sit in this very chair with one cup of coffee and spend a lifetime pursuing only the thoughts he chose.

  “It could have been worse,” she said. “I began teaching soon after the war. First in Innsbruck, then here.”

  “I know. I looked up the register.”

  “I married, I had two children. Have two children.”

  “You were here all this time? In Vienna?”

  “More or less. A few years in Burgenland, then in St. Töllden, and in Innsbruck. And you?”

  “England,” he said. “The United States. On lecturing contracts.” He sat watching her. “You published. Seven, eight works, I believe.”

  “Nine. The first paper was banned here, but we found a copy in Geneva in the archives. They burned it in 1938 along with many others. Too many references to Jewish writers, as I found out later. They burned yours too, probably.” She pointed. “Right out there in the courtyard. It made me proud to think I was among the ones they burned.”

  “It did?”

  “It did. Like belonging to something important.”

  “Was that the one on moments of faith and power?”

  She smiled. “You remembered.”

  “It’s on the required reading list for my second-year students. It’s good. A bit raw in places, but good.”

  It had been the most cherished acceptance anyone had ever shown her, and they became friends after that. Sometimes in the summer and in the fabulous falls, Professor Roland Emmerich would come to St. Töllden by train and stay in a bed-and-breakfast there. Albert and he got along well, and often they’d all go hiking up into the Italian saddle or along the river. They’d watch ibex and chamois through binoculars, and on Sunday evening or Monday morning Professor Emmerich would take the train back to Vienna.

  THIRTY-THREE

  IN RUSSIA Albert had been in command of a division that shrank from nine hundred tanks to just sixty-five. There was one battle, he told her one day long afterwards, one single battle that alone had cost the Germans some three hundred thousand dead and wounded. There were no words to describe the fighting, he’d said to her. Biblical proportions. He’d seen none like it before. Even if you survived it, it murdered your soul. People went crazy on both sides. They climbed out of tanks and ran and were shot down.

  The Russian T34 tank had better armour and bigger guns, he said. And the waves of men that surged behind them were endless. Soldiers as far as you could see. Then came Kursk, which was even worse, and Stalingrad was worse still with maybe eight hundred fifty thousand dead all told. You cannot imagine, he’d said.

  In January 1945, he was replaced in Russia by an eager Waffen-SS colonel. Because of his alpine experience, he was sent to Italy to command an infantry division in the Apennines that was battling the U.S. 10th Mountain Division. He had not yet reached his destination when the SS colonel who’d replaced him was already dead, shot by a sniper.

  That spring in Italy, Albert’s division fought American, British, Canadian, and Polish troops, and Italian partisans. The Germans were on the run, he said. The Allies had more airplanes, artillery, tanks, and troops than he had ever thought possible. And his men, while they had machine guns capable of firing nine hundred rounds per minute, were by then counting their shells.

  Albert summoned Guido Malfatti, the boy on his peg leg, and he gave him some letters for her and a few supplies. He made out a Laissez Passer and a request for transportation, and he sent him north toward Austria.

  On April 19, 1945, when the situation had become hopeless for his unit, he took it upon himself to sign honourable discharge papers for his commanders, who then did the same for their men. He shook the hands of his officers, and that evening he was taken prisoner by a young captain from the U.S. 5th Army. The captain climbed down from the jeep, saluted, and said what he had to say. Behind him two soldiers were at the Browning machine gun on its post in the jeep, and the windshield lay folded forward for clear fire.

  Two days previously Albert had been injured in his left thigh, and at an American field hospital they looked to the wound, bandaged him
up, and returned him to his captor.

  On April 29, 1945, General Heinrich von Vietinghoff signed the articles of surrender, and the war in Italy was over. By then Albert was in a vast pow pen near Bolzano, he and several thousand officers and men.

  IN VIENNA Peter had somehow made his way home from Romania. He’d received two field promotions and was a captain now. But he’d taken a grenade fragment in the arm, and it had shattered the bone and torn out muscle. They’d patched him up and, with his arm in a sling, he fled the camp on a truck going west and he kept going, showing written orders he’d issued himself. By the time he reached the apartment in Vienna he was delirious.

  His beloved Daniela was there; she had been there most of the war, waiting for him, somehow surviving the bombs and the shortages. Part of the building was gone, and with it the bedroom wall of her flat. She put him in her bed on the living-room couch, and then ran through the streets to find Erika and to plead with her to send a nurse. Daniela told her all this later, how they’d driven through the ruined city in Mitzi’s little car, the three of them: Daniela, Erika, and the nurse in her blue coat and white cap with the small red cross in front.

  The nurse swabbed the malodorous wound with iodine and she sprinkled Salvarsan powder. She applied a fresh bandage. Peter had lost consciousness.

  “Water,” said the nurse. “When he wakes up. We don’t want his kidneys to fail. Sugar, if you have any. Dissolve it in warm water for the glucose in it. About the infection, we’ll just have to wait. Maybe we can catch it.”

  For the next six nights, Daniela slept on the floor by the couch, curled up there on a blanket like a faithful dog. During the day she sat for hours with his head in her lap, wiping his brow and spoon-feeding him a broth she’d made on her camping stove with potatoes and tomatoes from her corner patch in the garden.