by Kurt Palka
My dear Clara, I liked your Albert but I hope you will not be neglecting your studies on account of him, and not be rushing into any sort of commitment. Learning sets us free, Clara. It makes us strong and gives us purpose and self-assurance. In any case we must follow both our hearts and our minds. And even if the heart is usually the winner, we must nevertheless weigh them both carefully. You will do the right thing in this situation, of that I have no doubt. I send you my love. Papa.
She showed the letter to Erika, who had known her parents since public school. This was at the apartment on Beatrixgasse, at the end of a weekday with the sky going dark and lights coming on in the city and the windows wide open to let in the cool air.
Erika handed it back with a smile and a shrug, and returned to the kitchen where she soon rattled around in drawers and began scrambling eggs for dinner.
“Is the wild man coming to eat?” she shouted from there.
“No,” Clara shouted back. “He’s on the horse farm.”
She reread the letter, folded it, and slipped it back into the envelope. She took it to her bedroom and put it away in a drawer.
“Are you going to show it to him?” shouted Erika.
She pretended not to hear.
FIVE
THE EMERGENCY CONTINUED but it lost its novelty. In June that year Communists and Nazis had been outlawed, but they thrived underground and the militia was soon back in the streets. Robberies and holdups became common events. In their nighttime shelters in parks and under bridges the homeless had to fear organized gangs swarming them to steal their clothes. Since the bank failures, men in suits and women in good dresses and coats were among the homeless, and always there were those who had even less.
She knew about these developments from Erika. Erika was studying for a degree in Social Sciences, and for an extra credit she worked the streets for the Red Cross by night in a small grey Steyr motorcar that she would borrow from Mitzi and then return in the morning.
Because people’s hair keeps growing in times good or bad, Mitzi’s business was doing well; she had given up the shop so as to save the rent money and now she was making house calls. In the evenings the baskets with the collapsible dryer hood and dyes and combs and clippers and towels were replaced with baskets of sandwiches and containers of drinking water, and with first-aid bandages and small brown bottles of iodine all from the Red Cross depot at Hütteldorf.
To help out and to see for herself, Clara on many nights would cruise the streets with Erika. They’d bring cotton blankets and food to families living under bridges; they’d patch wounds and brush iodine on lacerations. One night in early December they came upon two bodies on a sidewalk not far from their own building; a man and a woman, both old and their blood still spreading on the pavement. Moments earlier a delivery van had squealed away into the night.
“Are they dead?” she said.
Erika knelt and put her fingers to the woman’s throat. She held her wrist. She let it go. “Try him.”
Clara felt for the man’s pulse. She put her ear to his chest but all she could hear was her own heart pounding. “I think he’s dead. My God, look at the eyes.”
The old people lay in the skimming headlights of the car that stood with two wheels on the sidewalk. The doors still hung open. There was hardly any traffic, and no one stopped.
“What do we do?” said Erika.
“We should call the police. You go and I’ll stay.”
She stood back in the house entrance, hugging herself against the cold. She leaned and peered around the corner. Her first dead. The woman’s shop apron and skirt had slid up, and the veined white thighs above the stockings looked vulnerable even in death. The couple lay on the sidewalk in front of the smashed shop window, the tossed brick still in there and plain to see, and the glass raked away probably with iron bars. Empty racks showed. Second-hand clothing had been carried away through the window; a shred of something white still clung to a corner of broken glass.
They were Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg. She could not think of the woman’s first name now, but she had known them, had bought clothes in there, and sold some of her own. Mr. Rosenberg still had a small tack hammer in his hand, had probably come out swinging it, with his wife right behind him ready to poke the thieves with the spike for receipts that lay nearby.
The police car was turning the corner when she took a few steps and reached and pulled down Mrs. Rosenberg’s skirt. Marianne, that was her name.
They drove on through the night, the two of them in Mitzi’s little Steyr with the broken heater, shocked by what they had seen and now not knowing how to deal with it.
“We knew them,” said Erika.
“We did. I bought my black suit there and the yellow summer dress.”
“I know.”
With strips of bandages she kept wiping the windshield where their breath kept condensing. A spot was hardly wiped when it fogged up again. A line from T. S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday came to her and offered help. Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still. Her hands were shaking and she felt cold. “Where are we going?” she said.
Erika looked in the rear-view mirror and pulled over. “Did you see the side of her face? Mrs. Rosenberg’s? The poor woman. And she could hardly walk anyway.”
Erika took her hands off the wheel and with her teeth pulled off the knitted gloves, dropped them in her lap, and blew on her fingers. She spat wool fibres and pulled some off her lower lip. “Maybe we can’t do this tonight. Can we?”
“We could try at least one bridge. It might help snap us out of this.”
They drove on and after they’d done one bridge and handed out food and water, they decided to keep going and do a park.
NOT LONG THEREAFTER, it must have been a Friday because Friday nights were Communist nights, she and Erika and Mitzi met David Koren. Half-way through the meeting at a private home in upper-class Hietzing, a woman student stood up and introduced him as a writer and journalist, and asked him to speak.
“You’re just back from a trip to Moscow,” the woman said. “Tell us about it.”
Koren stood up. He was tall, well dressed in a grey three-piece suit, a solid man with a pale face and dark hair parted on the side.
“It’s David Ira Koren,” he said. “I am Jewish. I was born in Hungary and I grew up here in Vienna. Now I live in Berlin. I know that Communism and National Socialism are the new dreams, but I listen to you speak of Communism, and it’s like a fairy tale, this entire roomful of young people in this fine old villa that was probably worked for and paid for by someone’s great-grandparents and handed down through generations of privilege. Let me tell you, you have no idea of what you’re talking about.”
He paused, then went on to tell them about Moscow. What he had seen was most discouraging, he said. The power games and the greed games were in full swing, and in the name of party loyalty the secret police were killing anyone they pleased. The dream of a better and more dignified life for all was just that, a dream. In the meantime, millions were starving to death on account of the famine caused by Stalin’s agricultural reforms.
“Millions,” said Koren. “Seven, eight, nine million. How Communist is that?”
He said he had not yet made up his mind, but the same dreamy support of an ideal was probably also true for the Zionist Jews and the National Socialists. Certainly the Nazis were doing well economically, but they were also anti-Semitic and anti-Communist. Perhaps it was just human nature, all this fear and greed, and in the end the true divisions were not along the lines of -isms but between people with or without heart and substance.
He sat down.
Erika stood up and told him he was not saying anything helpful. She said they were coming to these meetings even though it was dangerous, but she needed information to help her decide whom to support, the Communists or the Nazis. The Nazis, she said, had interesting ideas on dignity through work and the role of women, and the Communist ideas of equality and human rights were also attractive.
> “But you’re not addressing that,” she told him across the room. “If all you can offer are half-baked generalizations, then come back when you know more. We are still idealists, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We believe in some of those ideas and we are searching for solutions. Look around. What else is there?”
There was a stunned silence, which then quickly led to a heated discussion of the core ideas of Communism and how to protect them against corruption and abuse. As tempers cooled, Koren and Erika ended up sitting side by side on a couch, arguing fiercely at first but eventually arriving at some kind of agreement.
“At least, he’s interesting,” said Erika to her at some point during the evening. “And he has nice eyes, did you notice?”
Koren was staying at a hotel on Thaliastrasse, and the women went out of their way to drive him there. He sat hunched in the back next to Erika, cracking jokes about holding his breath because of the fumes of iodine and hair chemicals in the car.
“Well, would you rather be walking, Mr. Foreign Correspondent?” Erika said to him.
Koren said he would not.
“Just as well,” said Mitzi at the wheel. “Might lose your suit and those good shoes and have to walk home in socks. Or are they taking socks too now?”
Koren laughed at that.
They were nearly there when his side of the seat caved in and the steel springs made contact with the battery terminals under the seat. Mitzi pulled over, and they all leapt out, slapping at the harsh smoke in the car. Koren reached in and pried up the seat. There was a smouldering fire among the horsehair stuffing, and they puffed and slapped it out and stood on the sidewalk while the seat cushion lay there smoking. Eventually they wedged it back in and continued with him sitting in front.
After this Koren came to Vienna several times a month. He liked Erika and she liked him. She would pick him up at the railroad station, and within a few more visits Clara made room for them in the flat while she moved up to Mitzi’s and slept on the couch there.
Koren saw Clara’s desk and the Adler typewriter and all the paper, and one day when she was moving out and he was moving in he said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you. Are you writing?”
“Well. Just notes, for now.” She was pleased to see him nod as if accepting her into a brotherhood that she very much wanted to belong to.
Koren would arrive from places such as Berlin, Palestine, and Budapest, always with the same brown leather suitcase and a small black Olympia typewriter in a fitted box covered in oilcloth. Like Albert and Peter he liked dressing in suits, sharply ironed shirts, and good English shoes.
She and Erika would go double-dating to nightclubs with Albert and Koren. She’d wear the black suit from Rosenbergs’, narrowed at the waist and the skirt down to mid-calf. They’d wear small hats and high heels, and the men wore dark-blue double-breasted suits with wide lapels and striped ties. When Koren got tipsy he’d take off his jacket and roll up his sleeves and slap his big hands together and dance like that, like some bear in vest and shirtsleeves, grinning happily.
In her files there was a picture of them, taken at Mademoiselle in the second district, the four of them sitting close together at a small round table; a champagne bucket on it and the tall flutes, the women’s purses and a silver table lamp. Smiles on their faces. Erika with her wavy black hair and those large steady eyes.
Here in each other’s company they found a sense of completeness that was similar to the feeling she had riding the Norton with him; riding its rude noise and pounding through dark uncertain strets but together, and with an understood direction of their own.
SIX
THE FIRST TIME she saw Albert’s horse farm the day was rich with the colours and aromas of autumn. They’d motored there from Vienna and then stopped and climbed off the motorcycle by the white fence for the military pasture. The estate buildings were just a short distance away; barns and stables with horses poking their heads out over half-doors, all looking their way over the chewed and hard-worn sills, looking and tossing their heads with manes and halters snapping. There was a fenced-off arena at one corner of the pasture, and they walked there in the late sunlight, their shadows long before them on the orange dirt road. In roadside grasses soldierbirds trilled and flew up.
Men in stable jackets and riding boots were exercising horses in that arena, blacks and chestnuts on lunge lines, and the horses stepped precisely and rhythmically. Dust rose in small orange puffs and settled, and horses blew and high-stepped and obeyed minute motions on the line, the turn of a hand, the lowering and raising of the line.
“Would you ride one for me?” she said to him impulsively. “Please, Albert. I have yet to see you on a horse.”
“Now?”
“Yes. Why not? It’s beautiful out.”
Albert surveyed the horses. He waved to one of the handlers, and the man came up to them, leading a black horse.
“Master Albert,” he said.
“Mr. Breck, this is Miss Herzog. Mr. Breck is our stableboss.”
“Young miss,” said Breck and gave hardly a nod. He had short grey hair, a suntanned face with clear blue eyes, and one silver earring.
Albert ducked between the fence rails and reached for the line. “I’ve got her. Take the Norton, Breck, and bring us a saddle. Bring my own, the English hunter. And reins and my boots.”
Albert stood close to the horse and held the line not far from the bit ring. He put his other hand on its neck.
“This is a fine horse,” he said. “You won’t often see a better one. She’ll be shipped off to North Carolina soon. Just look at her!”
“What am I looking for?”
“Ah.” He lengthened his hold, stepped back, and considered. He pointed. “Strong quarters, a deep chest and level back. She’s fine-boned yet strong, tall with good proportions, a very good neck and legs. See the long face. She has Arab blood.” Albert offered her the line. “Want to hold her? She’d love some of that clover by the ditch there.”
Clara took a fistful of clover and ducked through the fence. The horse stepped and raised its head.
“Talk to her. Move very slowly and talk to her.”
She did, and the horse calmed and soon it stood cropping the clover from her hand. Soft velvet lips brushing her skin, the eyes large and deep brown, nearly black at their depth but filled with sunlight on the surface and with her own reflection and with the vanishing line of the white fence.
The motorcycle came back and they put on saddle and reins, and unclipped the line. She held the horse while Albert pulled on the boots. He was up in the saddle in one fluid motion and moved his hands and heels just a touch and the horse turned and walked off. It quickened its pace.
“Look at him,” said Breck. He glanced sideways at her and shook his head and grinned. “He can ride, the young master. See him sit that horse, and she still a bit saddle-shy.” He stood holding the coiled lunge line, held it in both hands halfway up as though he’d forgotten it. She saw he had the middle finger missing on his left hand.
She watched Albert and tried to see what Breck was talking about.
“What am I looking for, Mr. Breck?”
“Just watch him sit, that’s the first thing you do, young miss. Watch his back. His thighs and knees and elbows. Then watch the horse and see what he’s makin’ her do and try and figger out how he did that. And you won’t see him move hardly at all, like she’s readin’ his mind. Or he hers. See how high she’s holdin’ her head? That’s a proud horse now.”
ON THE WEEKEND before Christmas 1933 she was there again, this time with Erika and Mitzi, and with David Koren. Albert’s younger brother, Theodor, was there as well, but their parents were not.
There was snow on the ground and high drifts of snow lay on east-facing roofs. Men were clambering up and down those roofs, roped to chimneys, calling out, “Careful below!” and pushing off snow with long-handled wooden hay rakes.
Breck saw her and nodded. “Cold weather, young miss. Need to wea
r a hat.”
Theodor drove the overland car out of the garage and folded back the top. He waved, and then like some sleigh party of nobility long gone they sat under blankets while he drove them on chained and studded wheels into the hills to the north field, and then down the slope and through windbreaks of trees toward the leeside paddock where the military horses were.
On the way they sipped mulled wine and schnapps from cold stone bottles, and they joked and laughed and ate open-faced sandwiches of smoked boar ham and breast of duck prepared by the kitchen staff.
Theodor looked much like Albert and he carried himself much the same way. He was wrapped in a quilted coat over jacket and leather-seated breeches, and he wore black riding boots. When the coat parted you could see he was carrying a belt knife in a leather sheath.
In the paddocks the snow had been cleared, and the horses were there, chestnuts and blacks working on lunge lines high-stepping and trotting. Theo stopped the car and pointed.
“See those two blacks over there? In the red gaiters. The third Arabian is already gone and these two will be shipped to England in a month or two. Somebody guess what they’re worth.”
“More than a cow,” said Koren. “I have no idea.”
“More than a cow is right,” said Theodor. “Look at the long bone in the faces. See how they move. This is one of the few places in Europe that breeds them. The count can charge for them whatever he wants.” He put the car in gear.
“What count?” said Koren.
“The count who owns it all. Some old monarchist who lives in exile in New York. In a wheelchair.”
“It’s too good to last,” said Koren. “With what’s happening in Europe now. You live like Russian nobility here, before the Bolsheviks.”
“And we just work here,” said Albert from the backseat.
“The Bolsheviks,” said Theodor. He turned to glance at his brother.
They drove on. The car raced through snow up to the running boards while at the edge of the wood deer stood like cut-outs and watched them. Later it began to snow again. In sheepskin coats and yardhats they walked out to stock the deer-feeding stations with chestnuts and grain and hay.