Clara

by Kurt Palka

  “Mom? What is it? Are you all right?”

  “Can you come home, Willa?”

  “What is the matter? Has something happened?”

  “No. Just come home, dear,” she said. “Come soon.”

  “Mom, what is it?”

  “Just come home now.”

  She woke to the first pale light and made herself get up and put on slippers and robe, and then holding on to the rail with both hands she descended to the basement one step at a time.

  She dragged the two boxes with the red labels from where they sat on the cement floor into the old laundry room and she pulled up the washer bench to the firebox under the laundry cauldron. She balled up the first few pages and set fire to them. The flue had not seen warm air rising in years and there was a great deal of smoke, but eventually the flames caught. They flared and rolled out of the firebox and were sucked back inside.

  She sat on the bench with her hair wild from the pillow, sat with her elbows resting on her knees and fed her notes to herself into the flames. Hers and hers alone. She felt the heat on her face and eyes, and on her bare shins and hands. Two banker’s boxes full of paper. It took a long time.

  AT MIDMORNING that day Caroline Gottschalk looked at Emma and motioned her out of the room.

  “I think your mother has pneumonia,” she said in the kitchen. “A temperature of forty-one and a half. We’ll have to see whether it’s viral or bacterial. Keep her cool with damp cloths and change the sheets often. I’ll get her into the hospital.”

  “She probably won’t want to go. She hasn’t seen a doctor in, I don’t know how long.”

  Dr. Gottschalk shrugged. “She needs chest X-rays, maybe infusions of antibiotics. A cardio monitor. A number of things. You talk to her. When did she call you?”

  “Just this morning. I came over and found her like this.”

  “Stay with her. I’ll take the blood sample to the lab and get them to run it.”

  “Why so suddenly? How did she get it?”

  “It would have started a day or two ago,” Dr. Gottschalk said. “Like a cold. Maybe a sniffle, then it hits you in the night. Your mother is old, Emma. I have to go, but call my cell if you need to.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  OF COURSE SHE REFUSED to go into the hospital. Her fever peaked at forty-two degrees Celsius, and she nearly died then. It seemed to Emma that Dr. Gottschalk was more angry at being ignored than she was sad for her mother.

  At the height of her delirium Clara saw her parents standing at the foot of her bed, beckoning for her to get up and come along. They looked carefree and relaxed, her mother for once not in greys and blacks but in a nice sky-blue dress with long sleeves and lace at collar and wrists, and her father in a fine suit and with the kind of upturned moustache he’d worn when he met her mother. They looked better and happier than she had ever seen them.

  She said so to Emma when she woke up. Emma in short sleeves was leaning over her with sponge and basin, wiping her brow.

  “Could be the fever,” said Emma. “Remember what Willa said with Dad.”

  “Willa?” she sat up. “Did Willa come? Where is she?”

  Emma put the sponge in the basin. “Mom. I’m the one that’s here. Look at me.”

  “Emma-dear. Of course. God, I’m hot.” She fanned herself.

  Emma put basin and sponge on the floor, stood up, and pushed them under the bed with her toe.

  “Lie back. Sleep,” she said. “Caroline says that if the fever comes back, you will have to go into the hospital. She can get you into the small one, the Catholic sisters, the what’s-it-called.”

  “It’s called the Merciful Heart.” She lay watching Emma. “Sit down. First prop up my pillow and then sit down. Not on the bed. In that chair so I can see you better. And cheer up. I am so very grateful for everything you’ve done. You do feel that. I know you do.”

  Emma sat back in the chair. She stood up and put on the cardigan.

  “Emma, your father loved you very much. He loved you just the same as Willa. We all did.”

  “I never doubted that.” Emma sat in the chair with her elbows held close and her hands making fists in her lap.

  “Be happy, dear Emma. Please let me see you being happy. You don’t depend on anyone else for that. I think your husband is a good man, but he needs to get a bit of an edge. Take action. Something.”

  “What about the museum?”

  “Yes. The museum. I did speak to Mr. Hofer a few days ago and I mentioned Tom. He can call. I have no idea how that’ll go. He really should retrain for something. Tell him I have some money. I’d help.”

  “You would?”

  “Yes, I would. I’ve thought about it. Be happy, my dear Emma. That’s what a mother wants most of all, for her children to be happy. For her children finally to understand that their happiness is up to them. Life becomes so much easier once you accept that.”

  “Dad never liked the kids much, did he?”

  “Oh dear. Not true, Emma. He loved them. For the longest time. We both did, but as they got older, instead of growing up, they became opinionated and rude. Disrespectful. Especially – you know who. I won’t name names.”

  “Because he called you Nazis? Was that why?”

  “Well, no. That was just ignorance. Anger. All your dad and I ever expected were decent manners. And that Nazi word has become so misused as to be meaningless. Some day take them to the archives. The facts are all there now if they care to know them. But, Emma … the pages I wrote for you and Willa when you were small, the ones I gave you years ago? That was something special. That was between you and me, and it came straight and pure from our lives in those times. Don’t let anyone spoil it.”

  “I won’t.”

  For a while they were silent. In the street, the ten o’clock bus went by, and then the old man who was still grinding knives rang his bell. The sound came from the distance, passed in the street, and faded again. The day then was so still they could hear the river, which was running high from the glaciers and snowfields.

  “I’m hot,” she said.

  Emma reached for the sponge, soaked and squeezed it, and wiped her brow.

  “I loved your dad. So much.”

  “I know you did.”

  “And it was so very easy, Emma.”

  Emma said nothing. She stood up and went to the window. She used a tissue and stood looking out for some moments.

  “There’s something else,” said Clara. “Come and sit down again. The angry boy we were talking about. Man, I guess. He stole the Knight’s Cross. He of all people. Isn’t that interesting? I saw him holding it up to his collar and grinning at what’s her name. His wife.”

  “Katrin, Mom. You should really know their names by now.”

  “Oh for God’s sake. I do know her name. I just couldn’t remember it. Anyway, Willa wants it back.”

  “Why didn’t you say something sooner? He may have sold it.”

  “He’d better not.”

  “Why can’t he have it?”

  “Because he doesn’t deserve it. It stands for something. A famous general recommended your father for it, a man he admired, and so it has a soul. Willa reminded me of that and she is right. He has to give it back. I have decided. The rest of the medals – you and Willa can work it out. It’s all yours anyway, split straight down the middle. Now don’t … listen to me. Don’t fight over one single thing. It is not worth it. Never, ever. You are sisters.”

  Emma sat looking at the small silver-framed pictures on the bedside table.

  “Emma-dear,” said Clara. “Look at me.” She waited.

  “What?”

  “When you were born in that cottage in Burgenland, you’ve seen the photo album. It was such a lovely warm summer, and Mitzi and Daniela and Cecilia and Erika, they would all come out some weekends, and when your dad came home, from Africa it was. When he came home he was so very happy with you, Emma. He was only there a week I think, but he’d have you on his lap, you looking at h
im with your big eyes, and so serious. There were moments, Emma …”

  Emma was sitting very still. “Go on.”

  “And later,” she said. “The weekend hikes we would go on. Backpacks with blankets and food and stuff, and we’d sleep in some mountain cabin and in the mornings we’d make a breakfast of pancakes on the alcohol burner. Do you remember that?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Good. But enough of all that. Come give your mother a hug. I love you.”

  Later that day Dr. Gottschalk came by. She listened to Clara’s heart and lungs. She took temperature and blood pressure. She inserted a feed into a vein in the back of Clara’s hand and taped down the vial there.

  In the kitchen she said to Emma, “I am getting a bit worried. She has viral pneumonia, and it’s far from over. It progresses in waves. I’ve put her on antivirals now. Sometimes they help.”

  “But she seems fine now. We had a long talk.”

  Dr. Gottschalk nodded. “Good. You have your talks. Is Willa coming?”

  “Why? Is she that sick?”

  “Yes. At the very least I want her in the Merciful Heart. They have good nurses there. Work on her, Emma. Do what you can.”

  In the other room, Clara lay in bed, weak but the calmest she had been in a long time. She felt at peace and lucid, and in this mood she lay remembering. She could see Albert’s face so clearly before her. His eyes, his smile for her. She could see the girls when they were small. Easter bonnets on them. Willa on a horse. She could see Professor Emmerich sitting on the desk, and Martin Heidegger lost on that park bench. She could see Freud poking the air with his cigar.

  She tried to decide which had been the most helpful thing she had ever read or heard, and that was hard because there had been so much of it.

  Which? she thought, and the words that came were Rilke’s:

  Lord, it is time,

  The summer was immense.

  She called out for Emma, and Emma came to her side.

  “Sit with me,” she said. “Is it very hot in here? Can we open the window?”

  Emma opened the window and cool evening air blew in, the scent of the cold river water, the scent of wet earth, the scent of the mountains, pine and wet rock.

  That night, the fever came back, and Emma called an ambulance. While she waited, she packed a small bag of toilet essentials. She folded the little hinged picture from her mother’s night table and put that in too.

  Clara was dimly aware of being on fire, and that fire she thought must have been caused by the embers she had been sheltering in her cupped hands much of her life, carrying them as her secret flame wherever she had gone.

  She was aware of being taken down the stairs by men in uniforms, and then being loaded into a van. She saw her parents again, she saw Willa; she saw Albert, she saw dear Mitzi and Erika.

  Later she was dimly aware of people standing and sitting by her bedside in an unfamiliar room. There was nothing she could do for them. Women in blue and white hats like small wings wiped her brow and tried to feed her, but she kept her lips closed and turned away.

  Perhaps the next night or the one thereafter she spoke with Albert and he told her happily that he had bought a new motorcycle for them. A new Norton, he said. And on it they could ride through the hills again, together again, just the two of them, she snuggling up to him with her arms around his middle. He was waiting for her, he said.

  She wanted to kiss him and hold him, but he was moving away.

  Wait! she called out. Wait for me. I want to be with you.

  WILLA ARRIVED AT NOON by taxi from Innsbruck airport. She was tired from the interminable flights and the lineups, but she was also excited. She was pleased because she had been able to find the quote her mother had been looking for.

  It was from a collection of letters literary friends had written to one Mme Louise d’Épinay in the mid-eighteenth century. The quote was from Abbé Ferdinando Galiani: “The important thing, Madame,” the abbé had written, “is not to be cured, but to live with one’s ailments.”

  She arrived at the house and used her key. She hurried up the stairs, opened the door and called out. “Mom! Where are you?”

  The door to the bedroom opened and there was Emma, pulling sheets off the bed. She was weeping.

  Later at the Catholic hospital, Willa stood at the open door and looked into the empty room. She had needed to see, to help her understand.

  But there was nothing. Bright daylight on the bare mattress. The glass-topped bedside table. The cheap wooden chair. All empty except for the silver pictureframe still on the table.

  A nun in a blue and white habit came along the hall carrying an armful of laundry. She saw Willa and stopped. Looked at the number on the door and then at Willa.

  “Our patient number seven,” she said. “She was not with us for long. We hardly even knew her name.”

  “She was here only a few days. I missed her. I flew in from Australia as soon as I could.”

  The nun nodded and waited. “That’s a long way,” she said then. “And you are?”

  “Wilhelmina Leonhardt. Her other daughter.”

  “Ah. I see. Your sister was here.”

  “Not when Mom died. None of us was.” Willa wiped her cheek with the inside of her wrist. “I spoke with her just a few days ago.”

  The nun stood watching Willa’s face. After a while she said gently, “The dying often choose their time. It’s as if they came to a place where the dead need them more than the living, and they want to let go. I’ve seen it when they ask people to leave the room so they can die unobserved. They close their eyes. They make the decision. They withdraw.”

  “They do?”

  “They do.”

  The nun stood a moment longer. “Don’t forget that little picture,” she said. She touched Willa’s arm lightly and walked away.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  MY SPECIAL THANKS for support and encouragement with Clara go out to Heather, to Aunt Thea in London, and to Laverne Barnes in Vancouver. Thanks also to Michael Tait in Toronto, and a big Thank You to Ellen Seligman, my publisher, and to Lara Hinchberger, my editor on this novel. All the people who over two generations have added documents and photographs to the file mentioned in the Author’s Note at the beginning of this book have now passed on; I am indebted to them all.