Clara

by Kurt Palka

  “You need to stop and think about a sentence like that. I’d rather feed my children twigs and leaves. I’d rather … I’ll dig latrine ditches for blackmarket money. I will. But I won’t have them accused and burdened like this.”

  He looked away from her eyes. He sat back in his chair. Beyond the closed door they could hear voices. They could hear a typewriter. Out the window the sun was shining on the old house fronts opposite. A truck went by.

  “You should go,” he said. “Thank you.”

  The next time Sissy saw the Canadian lieutenant he told her that children under twelve could now get food stamps without having to sit through the films. It was an experiment, he said. The age cut-off was now up to district commanders. He was glad about it. He put his finger to his lips and said that Captain Hamilton and three others including two Americans had travelled to Frankfurt and made their case.

  By early winter the screening program, food-for-blame as it was commonly called, was abandoned altogether, except in parts of the Russian and French zones.

  But that was how it began for Sissy and her lieutenant from the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia. The way they got around the fraternization ban was that he hired her as the official interpreter for the unit.

  UNTIL CLARA HAD her university post in Innsbruck, she too worked as an interpreter for the Allies. For weeks in the fall of 1945 she would go around with two Canadians, the one a lieutenant, the other a corporal. They would go from house to house, the Canadians in their sharply ironed uniforms and she in her print dress with the puffed sleeves and her one good pair of shoes, low black heels they were, and ring the bell.

  “Are there any guns in this house?” she would ask them, mostly women and a few men on crutches or missing an arm. “You have to hand them over,” she would say. “Any kind of gun.”

  The people would hesitate, and she would say, “Come on now. In the French and Russian zones they are shooting people for it. So just give it to the lieutenant.”

  This was a hunting community with a fine gunsmithing tradition, and so in every other house there would be a rifle or shotgun, and the lieutenant would weigh it in his hand. If it was nothing special he would pass it to the corporal, who would stick it muzzle-first into the nearest sewer grill and lean on it hard and stomp it until the barrel kinked and the stock snapped off. If the shotgun or rifle was a good piece handmade in Ferlach or in Steyr, the lieutenant would write a receipt for it by type and serial number, and the corporal would put it in the cart he was pulling and they’d move on to the next house.

  ONE NIGHT in the spring of 1946, when the moment of David Koren’s return from Sweden was only weeks away, Erika in Mitzi’s battered old Steyr was driving through Vienna on a Red Cross assignment. She was turning a corner onto Burgring when she was stopped by drunken Russian soldiers. They shot her dead and dragged her out and left her there on the pavement. They took the car for a joyride and crashed it.

  Clara found out only four months later, from Daniela. Two civilians had witnessed the shooting and reported it it the Red Cross.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  NEAR THEIR END, she knew, Blake and Rilke, Nietzsche and Goethe, Eliot and Schopenhauer, and probably all who had spent their lives examining and summing up had come to the conclusion that it was important to question, yes, but that in the end it was just as important simply to accept.

  With Mitzi gone she felt lonely. Or not lonely, she decided, but alone in a final way; different than she had felt in her youth when she had used her aloneness to hone her strength, the way an athlete uses weights for her muscles and stamina. The discipline of living successfully in one room and in one mind while building forward. She still had that discipline, even if it was infused now with a sense not of loss but of closure, and she used the discipline to finish the translation and to review it and then to pick through it word for word, and through each sentence and paragraph echo for echo. Again and again. Hours and days and weeks at her desk, pushing herself: a writer’s chosen life.

  “It’s what helps us through,” Martin Heidegger had said to her. “The discipline. Putting the mind in harness and staying with the load.”

  This had been after he had come back into acceptance and then even into fame in France and Germany, years after the war. She had spoken to the rector, and they had invited Heidegger for guest lectures in Vienna, long after her years in Innsbruck, and he had come. Older, wiser, slower, but with even more steel in his thought. Yes, he had been of the opinion that the early National Socialists had some good ideas. But then of course … one knew now what came after.

  At the time of his guest lectures he had been able to foresee the social and cultural pendulum swinging toward some new kind of socialism. All noble intentions, he’d said, very democratic, but bringing with it a continuous lowering of standards in order to be ever-more inclusive and accepting. It too would pass because it would run out of energy and money. It would swing back and forth, he had predicted, always in search of some humane and economic centre.

  None of it really mattered, he said, and it did not alter the fact that one had to get through one’s life somehow and build courage and structure within oneself. That took work, but there was no other way.

  WHEN ALBERT came back from the war he was not able to walk very well because of his leg injury and because of his weakness due to malnutrition. But the latter was no different for any of the returning POWS. For months and months they came home from all over the continent, from the camps in France and England where the more fortunate ones had been allowed to work on farms. They were lucky to come home at all, since of those overrun by the Russians few did; no one knew exactly how many had died in the Russian camps. Hundreds of thousands. More than a million, said one statistic.

  Albert too had to go through denazification, and there the only thing that was held against him were his brother’s politics. By then denazification was done in civil courts, and in Albert’s case the foreman was a one-time monarchist who stood his ground against the board and refused to exonerate Albert. The best he would agree to was the classification of “Less Incriminated.”

  The five classifications were:

  1) Major Offenders (most of whom were hanged)

  2) Activists, Militants, Profiteers, and Incriminated Persons (many of whom were hanged)

  3) Less Incriminated

  4) Followers

  5) Exonerated

  As a Less Incriminated person, Albert did not have to go to jail or, worse, to Nuremberg, but as a punishment he was not allowed to make his living at anything other than manual labour for one year.

  Guido Malfatti had serviced the Norton and he’d been able to find some petrol. And so on his motorcycle like in the old days Albert drove looking for work, but this time, perhaps because the war had changed things and half the men were dead, he was quickly successful. A farmer, Mr. Richard Pachmayr in the next valley, wanted to start raising horses. Not saddle horses, he said, but coldbloods. Black Belgians. Albert said they weren’t his specialty, but a horse was a horse.

  Mr. Pachmayr hired Albert for room and board and a small wage, and Albert slept in the groom bunk there and ate in the kitchen. He exercised his leg daily by climbing the hayloft stairs, faster and faster each day. He had limited movement in his left shoulder from the French bullet, but he learned to live with that. She and the children often went by train to visit him. At cider-pressing time the girls helped with picking apples and pears, and they were allowed to sit on the big workhorses. They’d be nearly lying on the broad backs, hanging on wide-armed to the horses’ necks. Once, when they were allowed to assist at a foaling, Emma became afraid and ran away when the vet had to reach into the mare and arrange things and pull, but Willa stayed to watch and help. Afterwards she helped rinse the foal with warm water and then rub it dry with hay. It was coal-black and rough-coated, and it soon stood on wobbly legs and took milk from its mother. Willa and Emma were allowed that night to sleep in the hay in the stall next to the foal.


  In the spring of 1948, Mr. Pachmayr was hauling logs when a load slipped and crushed him. He left a wife and a fifteen-year-old son, and after the funeral the widow offered Albert a substantial raise and she asked him to help prepare the boy for his coming responsibilities as the owner and breeder.

  For weeks during those summers the girls lived on the farm. They slept in the hay and helped with chores. Albert taught them horseback riding on the one saddle horse there, and he took them trout-fishing. He would kneel behind them and hold the rods with them, and let them swing back the line and count one, two, three, and let them bring the rod forward just so far for the fly to settle gently on the flat water of the millpond. And in May and June when the bark was soft and the sap fresh, he showed them how to make flutes now with six fingerholes out of willow branches.

  In the end his love of horses found no lasting echo in Emma, but it did in Willa who in later years, halfway through her studies, decided to backtrack and sign up for Science and then for Veterinary Medicine while Emma was studying for her teacher’s degree.

  ONCE THE NEUTRALITY PACT was signed, Austria was permitted to develop a small army. Albert was offered reinstatement at full rank and a post in the defence ministry. He spoke with Mrs. Pachmayr and the son; the farm had earned itself a good name for its black Belgians, and the son was twenty-three by then and a good worker. Albert said it was time for him to take over. He would move on, but he’d be glad to help and advise whenever they needed him.

  At the ministry, Albert was put in charge of rearmament, and for the next several years he and his team travelled all over Europe buying American surplus equipment, from helmets to GMC trucks and Sherman tanks.

  The main infantry weapon he commissioned was the Belgian-made FN/SG assault rifle; a revolutionary design, he said, and he described it to her. A switch for single-fire or full automatic, a gas port and a clever piston return system.

  Later he was promoted and put in charge of the army in the western provinces. From then on he was both a soldier again and a horse trainer much in demand by private owners.

  By then, Guido Malfatti had passed the exam as a master mechanic. Albert had lent him the money for a jointed prosthesis, and young Dr. Kessler measured him for it. The thing arrived six months later in a wooden box all the way from America, from a factory in Seattle. It was perfect. With it Guido could not only ride motorcycles, he even began to race them. And when he started his own dealership, Albert asked her if it were all right with her if he donated the Norton. As a showpiece, he said. A classic. She agreed. Guido gave the Norton pride of place in his showroom, among red and gleaming Ducatis and Yamahas and BMWS. He even had an electrician install a spotlight that shone down on its deep black and chrome, and on the leather seats and the bulbous rubber horn on the handlebar.

  In St. Töllden all the old-timers knew Albert. Early on some had rumoured about his past, but after a while few knew exactly any more what that had been. He had a certain aura, and he never lost his military bearing. People respected him, and many, when they saw him in uniform walking home from the train station, nodded and said General.

  But not the young people in his own family; Emma’s kids and Tom’s kids, or their friends for that matter. They made fun of Albert behind his back; of his military history, of his attempts to teach them things; of his old-fashioned values. They viewed him with a mixture of grudging respect and condescension born of ignorance. In the end they rejected him, and he, them. Her, they treated much the same way; Oma, with her endless scribbling and her boxes full of files. With her tiresome reminders to think before speaking; with her stale cookies in doillied tins and moths flying in and out of her cupboards. She knew all that, and she did not mind. It made no difference to her whatsoever.

  WHEN SHE HAD FINISHED the translation, she sent it off to the editor and waited for the confirmation of receipt from Mrs. Neumann’s assistant. She shut down the computer and sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes closed.

  Now what? she said to him. Tell me.

  It was late evening, and for the next half-hour she wandered through rooms, opening armoires and drawers, making mental lists. She shivered and put on a cardigan. She thought she might eventually do some housecleaning, hire someone with a truck to take away things to the various recycling depots. So the girls wouldn’t have to wade through all this some day.

  In Mitzi’s room she opened the drawer in the bedside table and took out the small black-and-white photograph of the pale blond Polish prisoner. So young. Just a boy. Erika had taken it, with her Agfa-Click. She put it back and closed the drawer. The leather couch was still in the study, and the matching chair. Count Torben’s sword was gone, his duelling blade. Gone for a bit of flour in 1944, to some travelling black-marketeer.

  She remembered the boxes with the red labels marked Personal in the basement. The notes to herself over the years. What to do about them now?

  The next morning she was tempted simply to stay in bed, but mindful of As-ifness she did not. Instead that day she fetched the pistol from its hiding place and she unwrapped the pieces and put them loosely into her purse. She took the noon train into the side valley and from the station walked to the waterfall.

  When she had still been at high school and Peter a junior partner with a law firm in Innsbruck, he would come home on weekends in the summer and fall and in his black Citroën motorcar would take her into the mountains as far as they could drive, and with their rods and satchels they would hike to one of the rivers, water that came rocketing down from the glaciers, fast and ice cold. Water so clear you could look down from high rocks and in the shallow parts see trout, brook and rainbow, facing the current, slow ripples of fins to stand still, then a lightning dash for food.

  They were using his English dry flies with the barbs pinched flat according to sporting rules, so that the hook could be removed without much injury to the fish. That day he tied on a brown fly and with it hooked a rainbow that leapt four feet in the air and ran with the reel screaming, and it leapt again and again. It took him fifty yards or more downriver and it forced him into fast currents where he tripped and fell and floated for a while, but he managed to keep the rod up and the line tight. In the end he was back in the shallows and he called to her for a hand with the net.

  That rainbow was the biggest she’d ever seen. They agreed it was much too beautiful to kill, and so they let it go. Afterwards they lay in the sun to dry their clothes. They lay on the white gravel bank by the falls, both of them basking in the warmth that struck down from the sun and up from the clean white riverstones. Her ears and her entire body were filled with the ceaseless roaring of the falls.

  She could look upriver now and see those falls from the footbridge that the Alpine Club had built some years ago, to go with the new trails. There had not been a railroad into this valley until long after the war.

  She turned and looked carefully to both sides, but there was no one about. A wet spring day, the river high; not yet weather for hiking.

  She snapped open her purse, and one by one she took out the pistol pieces and threw them into the deepest part of the river below her, into the pools dark green and full of air bubbles and turbulence. The barrel, the grip, the magazine, the slide. The box of shells. They sailed out in a flat arc through the cold air and sank without a trace. Gone. She felt nothing. No guilt, no relief, no regret.

  She looked down at the river, downstream to the rocks. For a moment she saw tall Peter balancing there, casting the line with a looping sideways motion, because of the trees behind him. He’d learned that rollcast from a river guide in Scotland in the 1920s.

  On the way back to the train station, already near the small supermarket, she tripped over something and fell to one knee. A young tourist couple helped her up.

  “Take a hold,” said the girl. “Are you all right? Is your knee okay?”

  For a moment of confusion she thought this might be Willa home from Australia, but of course she was not. This one was blond and quite yo
ung. She had a small stars-and-stripes pin on her windbreaker.

  Clara thanked her. The young man was unwrapping a chocolate bar and he peeled back the silver foil and held out the chocolate to her. “Have some,” he said. “It’s very good.”

  On the train back she felt cold. She felt close to tears much of the time but did not want to probe the reason why. The mountains moved past, their peaks orange in the setting sun. Flocks of crows rising and settling, and in the distance the great steel cross already flashing on its peak.

  In St. Töllden, on the way home from the train station Father Hofstätter saw her and he crossed the street. Wordlessly he offered his arm and walked her home.

  “Too cold to be out, Doctor Herzog,” he said near her house. “The damp from the river.”

  He waited until she had unlocked the gate and gone in, then he raised his hat and nodded a greeting. He turned back the way they’d come.

  Upstairs she switched on the computer, loaded Skype, and put on the headset. She called Willa. There was only the answering machine.

  “Call me back, dear,” she said. “Soon. Call any time.”

  That night she dreamed of Romans in togas and tooled leather breastplates, some of them with laurel wreaths like crowns, poking through the remains of a fire, some enormous conflagration it must have been, and they were going through it, spearing things and holding them up, giving them due consideration and talking to each other and shaking their Roman heads. And in her dream she finally understood what they were looking for: they were looking for clues to themselves, trying to understand what it was that had made them who they were. In some places there was smoke still rising, in tall thin columns widening near the top as if to hold up the pale eternal sky.

  Willa called in the dark of night. She picked up the bedside telephone. She dropped the receiver. She fumbled and found it and pulled it up by its cord. She felt hot, she shivered. She felt on fire herself.