Clara

by Kurt Palka

  Her arm was still in the cast, but it no longer hurt as much. Erika’s ear was healing, more or less, but the scar was thick and ragged because of the poor stitching. She showed it to Albert and pretended not to care, but in truth she did. She was teaching herself to get past it with personality, and most of the time she succeeded. The hairstyle helped.

  At night, in her room, they talked for hours. She told him it was only now that she realized how much she’d missed him. Just being with him. Talking, listening. Being together.

  School was going well, she said. She had a Ph.D. adviser now, another professor from the philosophy department. A younger man. Not as good as Emmerich, but all right. And you? she said.

  He talked about his horse. About the generals. Rommel and Guderian. So bold, these men. So clear in what they wanted.

  Nights at times, talking like this, they sat up tailor-fashion, facing each other on the bed, she resting her plaster cast on a pillow on her knee. She would reach out and touch his face in the dim light of the streetlamps. She would open his pyjama buttons and feel his chest with her eyes closed, his muscles and ribs there, feel his words as he spoke. She lay in his arms with her cast sticking up like strange and massive rigging on some ghostship sailing through the night.

  When it was time to leave, he knew he would not take the risk to cross with a forged passport a second time. He had other plans, and he discussed them with her. And on the morning of that day they said goodbye and kissed, and she went downstairs with him to the taxi and saw him off.

  He told the driver to take him to the German embassy, and there he walked up the wide stone steps under the Nazi flags and the black eagles, past the armed guards. At reception he gave the woman his name and asked for the military attaché. Within minutes then he sat in the major’s office and confessed his situation.

  SHE SPENT THE FOUR DAYS of Christmas at home with her parents and brothers, and with Daniela. There was snow on the ground and snow all the way down the mountains. Ski slopes were busy, and hotels and restaurants were filled with English and American tourists.

  Dr. Mannheim, the family doctor, said the cast should come off. He wanted to see the arm under it and he wanted an X-ray picture taken. The picture showed that the humerus had knitted at a slight offset.

  “You have a choice,” said Dr. Mannheim. “You can leave it, or we can break it again and reset it. I’d leave it and start exercising the arm.”

  The arm was noticeably thinner than the other, but it looked straight enough to her. She left it, and Peter showed her how to exercise the biceps by curling a bucket filled with an increasing volume of water, and the triceps by doing push-ups first against a wall and eventually on the floor.

  Her mother suggested a visit to the church, and they agreed as they did every year at Christmas. They walked nave, transept and aisles, all empty between services, the stones cold, and the woodwork soaked in incense these hundreds of years; the carved and gilded altars, the Romanesque art, the Gothic windows.

  At the base of the tower they watched the sexton in his black robe and hobnailed boots standing among the bell ropes, sorting them. He wrapped a thin one around his left wrist and a thicker one around his right. He closed his eyes and dropped nearly to his knees and rose again, and he began pulling the ropes, standing there solidly now with his arms going up and down and up and down.

  On the way home her mother slowed to walk by her side behind the others. Clara knew what was coming.

  “It’s been two days now and you haven’t mentioned Albert,” her mother said. “We were concerned about your arm, but now I need to ask you what your plans are. Have they changed?”

  “No, they haven’t. And I don’t think they will, Mama. At the moment Albert is busy with his courses and I am busy getting ready for the finals and for my dissertation.”

  “I see. Do you remember the letter I wrote to you after you brought him here?”

  “Of course. I wrote back to you. Thanking you.”

  They walked in uneasy silence and she waited for her mother to say more, but she did not.

  FOURTEEN

  DURING READING WEEK she travelled to Munich to see him ride a military cross-country tournament. A reckless undertaking, it turned out to be, on horses rough-shod for frozen ground and with natural barriers nearly as high as a man; with snow on fields deeply chewed up by tank tracks, and half-frozen rivers to be forded. She watched him at the starting line, in military cap and tunic, as he kept leaning forward to talk to his horse, a nervous high-stepping thing with its head up high and eyes wild at the sound of his voice.

  At the viewing area Clara stood with his adjutant, Lieutenant Bahr, and other observers, some generals with red lapels and braided shoulder boards. They could see much of the course except for stretches through trees and across low marshland and down into a gully. On a steep incline the horn sounded for the first accident, but the race went on.

  They watched the riders now far away, black against the snow, flying past tank targets on tow rigs, but she could not make him out at this distance. Minutes later they passed in front of the stand in a cloud of snow and pounding hooves, the field already stretched out. He was two horses behind the leader. The riders were lying nearly flat on their horses’ necks for the long jump across a frozen river, and down they plunged into the gully and immediately after that came a steep climb through trees and bushes for a flat-out run at a high fieldstone fence. The horn sounded for another accident, but the race went on for seven more laps. Ice and mud coated the horses’ flanks and ice from their breath clung to their manes.

  Albert won silver for the school; gold went to a tank unit in Berlin. He had a gash on his forehead and his horse stood mad-eyed and shaking and covered in frost from its breath. Three riders were in hospital and one horse had to be shot.

  “Crazy,” she told him, and she did not much care who else heard her. “What for? I am actually very angry. This was so needlessly dangerous.” Some officers nearby turned to look at her, but all she could think of was her mother’s Torben dead in the hall and Mother running from the living room to see what the commotion was.

  “How can I be trusting you?” she said, and Lieutenant Bahr raised his eyebrows and said, “Shh.” He moved to block the view of her toward the generals.

  “How? Albert? You tell me that.”

  “But it was nothing. I had a good horse. Didn’t you see?” Albert stood crestfallen. “And I won silver. It’s good! I don’t understand.”

  “You won silver but at what price? You might be dead now, or crippled for life. And for what? For silver? How much silver? And I thought you loved horses.”

  “I do. But not as pets to be coddled. Once in a while they need to be stretched close to their limits. It builds their confidence.”

  “And if it had been you that crashed into that stone wall? And you in hospital now? Maybe crippled.”

  “Well, it isn’t. And it couldn’t be. Stop it, Clara. What is the matter with you?”

  She stomped away angrily to where mess orderlies in white jackets were serving mulled wine and rum toddies, while a medic cleaned Albert’s wound and put in four stitches right there and then without freezing.

  She asked for two toddies and took them back to where the medic was finishing up with a last knot and gauze taped over the cut. “Done,” said the medic.

  Albert turned to her, still looking crestfallen and puzzled. But she had forgiven him already, and thinking back years later she would come to see that it was at the moment when he turned to her with that white thing on his forehead and his brown eyes so worried that she finally knew she would marry this man.

  She stayed there for three days, in the visiting officers’ apartment the school had provided. They played house and talked, and they went out for dinners at restaurants. They heard Bach performed at the cathedral, and they snuggled up in bed and made love and walked arm in arm through the old town and kissed in dark doorways.

  At the school dinner to celebrate the
silver medal, both generals were at the table and she sat not far from them, close enough to be able to watch them eat and talk, and to be able to study them and think her thoughts. At one point General Rommel stood and pronounced the first toast to horses and humans because of the ancient and noble bond between them.

  They drank to that, they drank to Albert, and then all the men rose and stood and drank to her as his fiancée, and they wished them well.

  She watched the generals converse and sip wine and eat their meal and touch napkins to their lips, and some years later when Albert told her what Hitler had ordered Rommel to do, she remembered this very dinner and the man’s good face, his unhurried glances of appraisal of her to decide whether Albert had chosen well and whether this union would strengthen or weaken him as a man and as a soldier.

  IN FEBRUARY OF THAT YEAR, after extensive manoeuvres with tanks, dive bombers, and live ammunition on the plains of Lüneburg, Albert graduated. She took the train out to witness the ceremony, and she stayed with him at the same officers’ temporary apartment. They had just two days, then she returned to Vienna.

  Field Marshal von Kleist put General Guderian in charge of one of the tank corps, and Albert was assigned to that corps and given command of the newly formed 14th Armoured Battalion Landshut Black. It consisted of nearly a thousand men and seventy-seven Type IV and Type III panzers, of armoured personnel carriers and trucks and motorized 88mm and 150mm field guns. Landshut Black was classified as an independent battle unit operating in support of the 7th Panzer Division under the command of General Erwin Rommel, and it was stationed not far from the town of Landshut, near the highway to Munich.

  IN VIENNA Professor Emmerich in his workingman’s clothes and bicycle clips was delivering his concluding lectures to her graduating class. He picked up on Nietzsche’s Übermensch, and with clear references to the Nazis began to delineate the opposite notion, that of the Untermensch: a person who had deliberately chosen not the morally high road but the low.

  He asked them to consider that if Nietzsche’s ideal in the absence of God had been the light within, might not in the absence of God the temptation be irresistible for some to develop the darkness within? Just as liberating, he said.

  “Liberating, especially if there are no consequences to worry about. Liberating. Consider that word liberating. Setting free from what? Well, from shame, fear, failure, of course. From self-loathing.”

  Liberating from constraints of conventional morality and society, he said. And an embrace of violence instead, to act out the darker emotions. One could see examples of this happening now.

  “You understand,” Professor Emmerich said with a thin smile, “that these are merely philosophical exercises. Philosophy empowers us to examine ideas, to pause and examine life. To ask clarifying questions that go to the root of things.”

  He had taken to sitting tailor-fashion on the desk, resting his elbows on his knees and leaning forward as he spoke. She would watch him from her usual place in the second row, and she’d realize that it was because of people like Mrs. Allmeier so long ago in high school and Professor Emmerich now that she wanted to be a person living by her mind; this brilliant man sitting cross-legged like a friend on the desk, pulling knowledge and fantastic ways of seeing things from the corners of his mind and offering them up like this, so casually, as if they were nothing.

  “Is it also possible, then,” he said, “that this preferred choice to pursue the light is not within all of us? Or to different degrees? Is it possible that nature on average gives birth to monsters as often as it does to saints? The selfless and the selfish? The givers and the takers? Those with morality and those without? The nurturous and the murderous?”

  “But we have laws for that,” she called out.

  “Ah! Again?” He pointed at her.

  “Laws, to govern behaviour.”

  He climbed off the desk and picked up a piece of chalk. LAWS, he wrote on the blackboard.

  “Think about it. To govern behaviour means ruling on what is permissible and what is not. If monstrous behaviour is suddenly permissible by law, encouraged and rewarded even, then what do you think will happen? Which will it encourage, light or darkness? All this in the absence of God and with morality resting in the eye of the beholder.

  “We have that already in Plato,” he said. “Where he talks about surmounting oneself. But it requires work, does it not? And it requires the will to perform that work and live in the light, which is Nietzsche.” He picked up the chalk again and drew a fast-ascending curve.

  “If you take away just one thing from our time together, then let it be this,” he said. “Well, two things. One: always, always, always trust your own mind and think things through for yourself. And two, go up. Up and up. Especially in the absence of God. Always strive to go up, never down.”

  BY THE TIME SHE BEGAN WRITING her dissertation on Moments of Faith and Power, she had already spoken to the rector about teaching as an unpaid lecturer, and so working her way into an assistant-professorship and eventually perhaps into a full one. Professors Roland Emmerich and Anton Ferdinand in Vienna, and Ludwig Wittgenstein writing from England, had put in a word for her, and based on these three references the rector agreed to consider her, depending on the rating of her final work.

  The heart of her thesis was to be the attempt, the decision, and the action to seize the bright moment and to carry it through darkness the way Stone Age man carried fire in his hands, had sheltered and fed the precious embers from a lightning strike so as to have fire again another day. She knew that principles of morality and attitude had to do with it. But principles were only the hands, not the fire.

  Since she could find few direct references to her core idea in literature, she plowed ahead and built it from her own insights, and for background and structure she referred to hints of approaches in the works of western philosophy and in writers such as Hemingway, Steinbeck, Woolf, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Zweig. She referred to Rilke and to Yeats, his famous scene of inspiration flaring up and dying in a London tea shop.

  She sat at her desk at the apartment, and she wrote for weeks and weeks; nine, ten pages a day. She wrote outlines and drafts by hand, she edited and rewrote; she typed them clean. For breaks she did housework and shopped, and she bicycled to the post office to call Albert and her parents. Often, if it was in the early evening, Erika would come along and call Koren, who had by then moved to Stockholm.

  Before those calls Erika would change into one of the blouses Koren had liked so much on her, the light blue one or the green one, because they went so well with her black hair and eyes. She would dress as if for a date, even put on a touch of lipstick. And then at the post office, which smelled of the oiled floor and of stale bread somehow, Clara would watch her through the windows in the booth, and Erika would be sitting on the round stool in there and lean forward and hold her forehead and Clara could hear her even through the glass, saying, No, she could not just pack up and leave and would he please stop saying that. She was developing a career, Erika said. The Red Cross, and she liked being needed. You come when this is over, Erika said, and how much longer can it last?

  For some of that time Erika’s ear was under a bandage again. She had found a plastic surgeon who said he could remove the welted scar, and since neither of the women had the money he was asking for, Mitzi had struck a contra deal with the surgeon’s wife for one year of free hair, nails, and face.

  MOMENTS became a work of 285 typed pages, fully referenced and annotated. She submitted it in June 1937 and on September 15 that year she received her Ph.D. She was twenty-six years old. The certificate was handwritten in Latin. It began, Nos rector universitatis litterarum vindobonensis – and it listed the faculty, and went on – promotor rite constitutus, in dominam clarissimam Clara Eugenie Herzog e St. Töllden in Austria, postquam et dissertatione cui inscribur …

  On the day of the award ceremony there was gunfire in the streets in some of the districts, and so the convocation took
place not in the great hall with its street-facing windows but in the inner courtyard of the university. Just five doctorates that year in Philology, the recipients being called one by one to the stones around the sundial, and the rector himself in the flowing velvet gown and the black hat of his office presenting the scrolls.

  Her parents were there for the occasion, as were Erika and Mitzi, and Cecilia and Maximilian just released from prison. Peter was there with his Daniela, who beamed at her across the courtyard.

  Only Albert was not there. In a deal struck with the school office, his penalty for crossing a foreign border illegally had been postponed until after the horse race and his graduation. But now it was in force. At the time, he had been summoned to the office of the general’s aide, Colonel von Heintzman, and the colonel had spoken of principles and of the Officers’ Code of Ethical Conduct. The colonel had confiscated the forged passport and pronounced the cancellation of all leave for one full month.

  BY DECEMBER OF THAT YEAR, Moments as a work on applied Existentialism had become something of a hit among university publications in German. The rector’s office agreed to count it as her first academic work for distribution, and to register the points and pay her the usual copyright honorarium once legalities had been worked out.

  FIFTEEN

  DR. GOTTSCHALK had booked Mitzi into the hospital for tests and X-rays before the operation, and they’d marked the day on the calendar in Clara’s kitchen. She and Mitzi were aware of it even if they never spoke of it. But it was on the weekend before the trip to the hospital that Mitzi mentioned the churchbells.

  “I hear them all the time,” she said. “I hear them but I’ve never seen them.”

  “We should have done that years ago.”

  “Well, I didn’t think of it years ago. I’d like to see them.”

  “It’s up steep and narrow stairs,” she said. “And you can hardly walk on level ground.”