Clara

by Kurt Palka

  On the credenza stood a copy of that picture of him as a young man on his laughing horse, in his uniform at the end of the First World War. Proud and dashing. His lieutenant’s star, the braid, the lanyard, the sabre.

  Peter died the day the Russians took Vienna. Not that there was much left to take. The city lay in ruins and there were no soldiers, no defences, hardly any men. The shelling and the bombing was over, but the raping and casual murdering by Russian soldiers was only just beginning, and it increased and multiplied as if becoming crazed on its own scent and its absolute and triumphant lawlessness. To get rid of the bodies, mass graves were dug all over the city and people carted their dead there and dumped them. Lime was shovelled on them in white and dusty layers.

  “Rats this big,” said Daniela and held out her hands to show her. “They tunnelled among the dead. And dogs running mad-eyed and snarling in the streets.”

  Daniela spent two days in the apartment with Peter dead on the couch. Against the smell she said she sprinkled kerosene on a handkerchief and held that to her nose. But no mass grave for him, she had decided, and so during the second night she rolled him into a rug and dragged him down flights of stairs in the dark. She hoisted him crosswise onto a wheelbarrow and pushed him to the place she had chosen in daylight, a small park around a few corners from the apartment, the flowerbeds full of soft soil. She dug a hole there and she rolled him into it, and covered him up and tamped down the soil to discourage the dogs.

  She would go there often during the next few years to plant flowers or just sit in the grass and read or smoke a cigarette.

  Ten years later when the Russian occupation finally ended, she had his remains dug up. She put his bones in a bag and brought them on the train to St. Töllden. The stonemason made a small box of slate for them, and Daniela borrowed a shovel and dug a hole in the ground in the monarchist grave with the plumed helmet.

  There was no official memorial service at the chapel that day, just Daniela, Mitzi, and Clara. They lit a candle and sat remembering. No incense for him, no old words in Latin, but a funeral just the same.

  WITHIN A MONTH after the Russian invasion of Vienna, the war in Europe was over. The Allies had come from three sides and met in the middle, and the Nuremberg documents and depositions from survivors made accurate and shocking pictures of what happened then.

  She sat reading them in that research room partitioned off at the warehouse with the oiled floor and the plywood walls, sat for days at the desk as if in a trance, walked to the hotel to sleep, and came back the next morning. Each time they checked her personal identification and the documents issued by Dr. Hufnagel under the distinctive blue United Nations letterhead.

  Some days there were American and British journalists in that research room with her, but most days it was just her and a younger woman. Her name was Faith Stinson, and she was a postgraduate student from Cambridge University, a redhead with freckles and a bright, spontaneous smile.

  “The only reason they’re letting me in here,” said Miss Stinson, “is that my father is a colonel and he was on some of the panels. He fought in Italy.” She was working on a degree in political science, she said. Something on the self-destructive nature of dictatorships. The other big topic was Communism. But there were too many people doing work on that already, she said.

  “Communism is back?”

  “Well,” said Miss Stinson. “Socialism, kind of. Embracing the common fate of humanity. Helping those who cannot help themselves. Welfare. All that.”

  They read in silence. They moved papers and made notes.

  “And you?” said Miss Stinson on another day.

  “I’m doing research for one of the UN archives, the Human Rights section in New York. What used to be the League of Nations.”

  “Interesting. On what exactly?”

  They were just the two of them in the room that day, with the door closed to the photocopy room and the counter with index files, long metal boxes one after the other. There was an elderly female clerk with rhinestone glasses in there who did the copying at the light table and the actual search in the stacks.

  “Specific topics,” she said. “They want abstracts, condensed seven-page versions of a topic. Like the July coup, or the end in the bunker. Or denazification.”

  “I’ve done the July coup,” said Miss Stinson. “The bomb and the aftermath. All those generals. Rommel slumped dead in the front seat of his car, with his cap slipped into his face. My father says he would have liked to know him.”

  “Many would. But forget that image, him dead from poison. I can give you better ways to see him.”

  And over soup and sandwich in a place just up the street she told Miss Stinson about that dinner after the horse race so long ago. She described Rommel raising his glass to horses and humans, and his calm face across the table, studying her.

  “My God,” said Miss Stinson. “You go back to all that? That’s so interesting. Tell me more.”

  “Some day, perhaps.”

  Back at the document warehouse, once they were past the security checks and back at their desks in the research room, Miss Stinson said, “But it’s also such dark and terrible stuff. Don’t you think? I’m just doing the bunker file. How they all killed themselves. Shot, poisoned. Can you explain the dead Goebbels children? The marks on the older girl’s face.”

  “No. There is no explaining those things. An explanation would come close to a justification, but there must never be one. We can try to reconstruct their thinking with mythology and madness, but do we need to?”

  “And him and Eva Braun in the end. And she, just married.”

  “Yes. I’ve done that box.”

  To ashes! Hitler had ordered. Not one bone left of me! Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  The fate of Mussolini and his mistress had terrified Hitler, strung up by their heels and spat at in death, so utterly despised that he had ordered his chauffeur to have enough gasoline on hand to burn their bodies beyond recognition.

  And on the last day, while all the country was on fire, SS on Himmler’s orders went through the many Gestapo cells in Berlin and shot dead every last person in them, a thousand and more civilians vaguely accused of words or actions not in the interest of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

  Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, seventy-five million and more dead. Among them millions of Jews across Europe, and in the end by Red Cross and League of Nations estimates easily twice as many civilians as soldiers.

  In some ways for women and children the first years of peace were worse than the war had been. Allied Command had issued a directive that the entire civilian population should be made to feel guilty not just for the war but for Nazi atrocities as well. It was called The Doctrine of Collective Guilt, and posters were printed and displayed everywhere of the death camps that read, You Are Guilty of This! These Atrocities: Your Fault!

  Women and children were at gunpoint marched through death camps, and one day in September 1945 Erika and Daniela on trucks with many others were carted east by Russian soldiers to an SS Einsatzgruppen death pit and forced to drag up the dead and lay them out for viewing, and then to take them down again and bury them.

  But among those accused and caught in the net of retribution were also most of the actual criminals that had thrived in Hitler’s shadow, and most of them were hanged.

  “You’ve seen this one?” said Miss Stinson one day at her desk. “It should be cross-referenced in the Generals’ Plot file. I don’t think it is.”

  “What?”

  It was a page on the fate of General Fromm, the one weak link and traitor among the plotting generals. It turned out that even though he had tried desperately to show loyalty to Hitler by having Colonel Stauffenberg shot, the Gestapo arrested him too. They tortured him and tried him before a mock People’s Court, and then hanged him at Brandenburg prison on March 19, 1945. Hanged by the neck until dead, the document said.

  Faith Stinson had been fini
shed with her work one week before her. The day she left to take the train to Frankfurt and then from there to fly back to England, Clara had walked with her to the guard house at the main gate. They hugged.

  “Maybe I’ll do something on Communism after all,” said Miss Stinson. “Socialism as the new hope. Human kindness. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Oh, I do.”

  Miss Stinson stepped back and studied her face. “You mean it?”

  “I do. Hope of any kind. Old, new.”

  Miss Stinson wore a trenchcoat and a fashionable black beret that day. Her lips were full and red, and she looked young and lovely. “Keep in touch,” she said. “Come and visit. We have a big house with peacocks in the garden. And quince bushes. Do you like quince jelly?”

  “I’ve never tasted it. You have my address.”

  She had stood hugging her arms because she felt cold even though it was June. Miss Stinson had rolled down the window and smiled and waved as the taxi drove away.

  She waved back, then stood, missing her children.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  LONG BEFORE THEN, and for months on end in the winter of 1945 after the bomb and into spring and summer, she had stayed up nights and wandered the shattered house, looked in on the children, sat in their darkened room, sat with Mitzi and Sissy in the kitchen. She read to them from Eliot’s Wasteland. It seemed almost kind and warm now, almost hopeful in a human, accepting way. Like the words of a friend who understood about hope, that April indeed was perhaps the cruellest month, breeding lilacs like hope out of the dead land.

  Anna had grown old and vague, but she still did the cooking and the cleaning. One evening after saying good night she walked down the stairs to her room with the cracked walls, and in her room sat on a chair and died as quietly as she had lived.

  Clara and everyone else had to submit to the denazification routine. She sat before the Truth Commission in the dining room at the Golden Goose, and she knew not one person on the board. Some were locals, but most were brought in for the process. They had her file and they kept passing it up and down the long table, whispering.

  The chairman of the commission was an American major with grey hair and a trim moustache who had been a lawyer before the war. It was difficult to explain the Gold Party Pin, the Blood Order, and the Civilian Medal of Honour, impossible to explain them out of context. And so into the exceptional silence in the room she told her story from the beginning, and she told the truth about the death of the SS man, Bönninghaus, in her bedroom. The American major made detailed notes and asked questions as to specifics.

  It took all morning. She had Mitzi there as a witness already cleared, and she had signatures on her questionnaire from the head archaeologist and the priest. The commission broke for lunch and ate the roast of venison with gravy and rice and sweet peas, and a dessert of California tinned peaches that was on the menu that day. She and Mitzi were served at the scrubbed cook’s table in the kitchen. It was the best meal they’d had in years.

  After lunch the major dismissed Mitzi and he made Clara repeat her story from the beginning while he compared painstakingly what she was saying now with what she had said before.

  Afterwards he sent her into the other room while the commission debated her case. It took forty-eight minutes by her watch. At times she heard raised voices, but in the end when they called her back into the room she was exonerated.

  With the document she applied at Innsbruck University and was asked by the rector to prepare a sample first-year curriculum and four lesson plans in English Literature. They searched for her paper on Moments of Faith and Power, and fortunately found the copy at Geneva University.

  While she waited for them to decide, she applied for an interpreter position at the district commander’s office. St. Töllden was on the border between the British and the French occupation zone, and district command was held by the British, supported by Canadians.

  Of Albert, she knew nothing. He might be dead. She knew only what Guido Malfatti had told her about the fighting in Russia and then in Italy. And she’d read the five letters from Albert that the boy had brought. She was reading them for weeks, again and again. She took them to bed and read a paragraph a night before going to sleep so as to have his words as the last thought of that day.

  She and Guido had sat at the back of the house one day in June 1945, on the big smooth rock there, the boy with his peg leg straight out and a chip of iron at the end of the peg like a small horseshoe. A boy maybe fourteen, with bright eyes and dirt streaks on his face. She had found some bread and cheese for him, and milk, and he ate and drank with enormous gratitude while he told how Albert had taken him on as a mechanic’s apprentice in Russia and later filled out papers for the transfer to Italy.

  He asked about the Norton, and she showed it to him, in the garage. There was rubble on it, and a dent in the tank, but no other visible damage. He ran his finger through the dust on the seat and asked if he could clean it. He knew about motorcycles, he said. Two-stroke and four-stroke engines. A few weeks later he’d found work as a mechanic with the British.

  ONE OTHER GOOD THING that occurred in those months was that Sissy met a nice young Canadian officer, the lieutenant in charge of the Film and Propaganda Unit. She met him at a viewing of the film made at the Mauthausen concentration camp. Sissy was there with five-year-old Caroline. There were perhaps twenty women in the Canadian Armed Forces tent that day, the younger ones in their good dresses, with their hair pinned back on the side with combs, some with small children on their laps.

  All were there because in order to receive ration cards and the prerequisite rubberstamp in their ration book they had to sit through these films on a regular basis. In case they missed the point, a finger uncurled from a big fist onscreen, and the finger pointed at them while a man’s voice told them that the atrocities they were about to see were all their fault.

  The Canadian lieutenant watched Sissy, and when the film was over and the tentflaps had been rolled up, he came up to her and gave her two Hershey chocolate bars.

  “One for yourself and one for the little girl,” he said. “Is she yours? What’s her name?”

  Sissy already looked much like her mother, Cecilia, beautiful, proud, and contained. Most of her clothes had been her mother’s, and with some adjustments here and there they fit not too badly. More importantly she knew how to carry herself, and she spoke English.

  “Yes, she’s mine,” she said. “Her name is Caroline. Caroline Gottschalk.”

  Sissy and Caroline came home with chocolate on their breath, and Clara waved Sissy into her study and closed the door. “We saved some for you and Mitzi,” said Sissy, and Clara told her that was not the point.

  That same afternoon she and Sissy with Emma, Willa, and Caroline in tow marched to the town hall to speak to the military district commander. He was Captain Hamilton, and she knew him because he had interviewed her before counter-signing the denazification document made out by the Truth Commission.

  “Not our children,” she said to the captain once they were in his office. They stood there, all of them, the children embarrassed and Sissy worried Clara might say the wrong thing.

  He shook his head. “What? Don’t I know you?”

  “You do. That is why I feel I can make this request. We would have brought our mothers too, but they were killed in the bombing.”

  “Were they?” he said. “Sit down.” He stepped to the door and called for more chairs. To her he said, “Write down your name on this piece of paper.”

  He sat behind his desk and looked at her name. On a coathook hung his belt and canvas holster with his pistol. He was a nice-looking man her own age, with brown eyes that looked at you straight and steady.

  “Back up, if you would,” he said. “What’s this all about?”

  Behind her Sissy poked her and hissed, “Don’t. Clara. Let’s go.”

  He looked from her to Sissy and the children, scrubbed and bright-eyed all of them and with decent ha
ircuts thanks to Mitzi, but in clothes handed down again and again, and Emma’s blue wool jacket overlarge and bare to the weave except in the creases.

  “Well?” he said.

  She said it was completely unacceptable for children, these children for instance, four, five, and seven years old, to have to sit through these films on the death-camps, however terrible, terrible no doubt, the facts were. But to accuse these children and any and all children of those atrocities was completely wrong. It was insane, she said angrily.

  He stared at her. He said, “The orders are no food stamps without seeing the films. Orders. It is not for me …” He stopped.

  “But can you see how unacceptable that is for a mother?”

  “These are orders from the top. From the Psychological Warfare Division. All civilians and military alike are to be held responsible for the actions of the Nazi regime. For the war and for the atrocities.”

  “I understand that, even though it is ridiculous. One of the cleverest tricks of the Christian Church was the idea of the Original Sin. That everyone is born guilty. So devious. The never-ending burden, the unredeemable debt.”

  He sat watching her. He pulled the paper close and studied it, tapped her name with his finger, a clean finger with the nail cut short and slightly rounded.

  “Your degree is in Theology? Or Divinity?”

  “No, it’s not,” she said. “Captain, if you want justification for having dropped all those bombs on us, find another way. Not by pretending our children are criminals.”

  He said nothing for some time. He looked down at her name on the piece of paper and back up at her.

  “I think you should go,” he said then.

  “All I am asking is, not the children, Captain Hamilton.”

  “Under the age of one they can be on the mother’s card and they don’t have to watch the films.”