Clara

by Kurt Palka

  SHE RETURNED to the cottage at the base, and it was just three weeks after that Albert came back from Poland. He cried out in the night and she woke him from nightmares. Willa woke and called for her. Anna woke and padded through the kitchen. Those were the days of the drawn curtains and darkened rooms in daytime when he began to talk about the Polish campaign and the screaming horses.

  “It’s not that horses are more important than people,” he said at one time. “I am trying to understand this. It’s not that they deserve more sympathy. But it makes … something. An immorality,” he said. “No. A baseness all the more obvious. Drawing them into this. Noble animals.”

  Sometime later he said he must not allow himself to think that way. He was struggling to work something out.

  Work out what? she said. And could she help?

  She was helping already, he told her. Just being with him. Listening.

  Anna brought them food and drink. Anna looked after Willa, and through their door they could hear the two of them, could hear Anna’s felt slippers on the wooden floor.

  When she told him she was pregnant, he was so moved he turned away and sat like this until she came and touched his shoulder.

  As the days went by, he became his old self again. He slept better and she heard him laughing as he played with Willa. On the morning of the day he went back to the base he stood at the kitchen counter in full uniform with the ribbon of the new Iron Cross II in his tunic, and it was not until then that she mentioned the visit of SS Obersturmführer Bönninghaus.

  His face changed. He set down his coffee cup with great care, and he opened the drawer with the Gold Party Pin slowly as though the thing might explode. He read the document and put it back, and he pulled out the chair and sat down at the table. He sat with his eyes closed for a few seconds, then he stood up.

  “That man will never set foot in this house again,” he said to her. “If this is causing you anxiety, please don’t let it. I will settle this and we’ll never have to speak of it again.”

  Next day she heard from his adjutant, Lieutenant Neumann, what had taken place. Albert had called the obersturmführer to his office, and through the padded double doors the lieutenant and the chief of staff, Major von Rhenold, could hear Albert shouting at the SS man.

  He said that if the obersturmführer ever again dared to just walk into the house and bother his wife, then Albert would see to it that he was court-martialled for insubordination. No! Shut your mouth, he shouted. You have nothing to say to me.

  Lieutenant Neumann told her this, talking sideways to her while keeping an eye on the cottage door, waiting for Albert by the car. He gave her a quick look. “If I were Bönninghaus I’d put in for a transfer.”

  And that was only the beginning.

  Much later she realized that she could have chosen a better time to tell him about the forger. But by then it was too late. She mentioned it over dinner the next evening, and a nice dinner it was, of venison because it was the season, and with vegetables from their own garden. He listened, and only when she was finished did he ask questions.

  “He is threatening me and Mother, and he has been blackmailing Mitzi all along?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she never said anything?”

  “She mentioned it once, but it had been manageable amounts, and she wanted to keep the peace. Now he wants ten thousand Swiss francs. We scraped together three and a half, but he wants the rest before he’ll give her the paper. She can’t continue working like this. If anyone asked to see her Trade Pass, it would all unravel for her.”

  For a while they ate in silence, then he put down knife and fork and said, “Do you know where he lives?”

  “Not exactly. Mitzi and your mother would know. I went along just once.”

  He called the apartment from the telephone on the wall in the kitchen while she sat staring at her uneaten food. She heard him speak to his mother and to Mitzi. When he came back he said, “I’ll go and talk to him.”

  He went to the bedroom and minutes later came back wearing his panzer fatigues, the black-holstered pistol, and lace-up boots.

  “Now? You are going now?”

  “Yes. I’ll be back before morning.” He pulled out the chair next to her and sat down. “The pistol I left with you and Erika in Vienna that day. Where is it?”

  “Why?”

  “I want to see it.”

  She had to think. “In the bedroom,” she said. “Probably still in the same drawer.”

  “Bring it. Please.”

  She brought it and put it on the table, on the white table cloth between dishes and candles. He sat looking at it. He picked it up. “Was it ever fired?”

  “God no.”

  He dropped the magazine into his palm, jacked out the shell in the chamber, and quickly within seconds took the gun apart. It lay in pieces on the table and he examined those one by one and clicked them back together. The shell went into the magazine and the magazine into the grip. He worked the slide and watched through the port as the shell slid into the chamber. He put the pistol back on the table and looked up at Clara standing there.

  “Keep the safety on,” he said. “We’ll have to replace the hammer spring once in a while but the armourer can do that in a minute. With this model the lever has to be down. And keep it loaded like this. If you ever have to use it, just move the safety catch. Up, like this.”

  “You are scaring me.”

  “I am saying if. If. Most likely that will never happen.”

  He left soon after that, in his old leather army coat on the Norton, wearing goggles and helmet. She said to him that he’d not ridden it for some time, but he said nothing to that. He adjusted the goggles and nodded to her and kicked in the gear.

  Eventually she went to bed, but she could not sleep and so stood up again and haunted the house. Anna came in robe and slippers from the lean- to and asked if she needed anything.

  “Dear Anna. No. Go back to bed.”

  “A hot chocolate. It’ll calm you.”

  “No thanks. Oh wait, yes. Thank you.”

  She sat in the living room, sat sideways with her sockfeet on the wooden bench around the ceramic stove and held the mug with both hands. She leaned against the warm tiles.

  “Anything else?” said Anna.

  “No. Thank you, Anna. Go to bed.”

  Gradually the stove cooled and she added more wood. She was careful not to make noise. The clock on the wall ticked. It was a cuckoo clock but the sound was broken and so the bird came out silently and went back in and closed the little door with just the clicking of small cogs and hinges.

  Albert came back at four in the morning. She was asleep on the couch with the blanket on her. She heard the motorcycle in some dream and woke when she heard the door. She sat up and her heart was pounding.

  He was at the dining-room table, taking off the big coat. His hands were blackened and he smelled of something. Smoke. There was a mark on his cheek, a scrape with the blood wiped off. On the table lay a small stack of papers.

  “Albert,” she said. “What happened?”

  He raised a hand. “Don’t come near. Not now. I need a bath.”

  “What did you do?”

  He pointed at the papers. “I brought the documents.”

  “How did you get them? What did you do?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t ask. I brought the papers and none of us needs to worry about him any more.” From another pocket he took a wad of Swiss francs. “Three thousand. It was all I could find. Give it back to Mitzi.”

  “All you could find? What did you do to him? Albert!”

  “Shh. You’ll wake Willa. These are not normal times, Clara.” He turned toward the hall. “I’ll run a bath. Please don’t follow me. Look at the documents. There’s a Trade Pass for Mitzi too.”

  “He made it while you were waiting? How did you get him to do that?”

  “He had no choice. And I asked you not to follow me.” Albert stood in the bathroom
, unbuttoning the fatigue jacket. Behind him the tub was filling, and holster and gunbelt lay coiled on the toilet lid. “I’m closing this door now, Clara,” he said. “There is nothing to worry about. Go look at the documents.”

  “What is that smell, Albert? What did you do to that man?”

  “What man? What smell?”

  “That!” She sniffed.

  “Dear Clara. Please go. We will not be talking about this again.” He closed the door.

  But she stood there, listening. She could hear water running, and behind the steady sound of it she heard the harsh metallic clicks as he was taking apart his gun and putting it back together and reloading it. She would not have recognized the sounds had she not heard them only hours ago in the dining room.

  She stood and leaned and listened. Emotions flooded her, horror and relief and hope, and in none of her feelings did she recognize the woman she had become in so short a time.

  In her bedroom Willa woke and began to cry. It gave her an excuse to step away from the door.

  TWENTY-THREE

  ALL THOSE DOCUMENTS were in her files now, in the boxes for the archives, and they weren’t the only horrific pieces of paper there. At first she had kept them as reminders for history, then for her children. At some point she almost sent them to Geneva along with some research assignments by Dr. Hufnagel for the United Nations; then the offer had come from the provincial archives for her own display section. She thought of them as useful for anyone who cared to find out how small fires ignored became infernos.

  On the morning of the appointment she picked up Mitzi in a taxi and took her to the hospital. It was a new and private hospital in the outskirts of St. Töllden, founded by several specialists who had opted out of Medicare. Here they were providing treatment much more quickly and expensively than the government system, and they were letting rooms and facilities to other specialists such as Dr. Gottschalk and the cardiologist in town.

  Mitzi’s room was ready. It was a private room with one large window that overlooked not the new suburbs but the river and its northern floodplain; it overlooked the meadows rising to the mountains, and the mountains themselves. Bleak and harsh, snow everywhere; snowfields like mirrors in the sun, and snow and ice clinging to fault lines cold and blue on the shadowface of the mountain. Deep snow on meadows, and covered feeding stations stocked with hay and chestnuts for deer and for the stags that came down from the Italian saddle into the valley this hungry time of year.

  Dr. Gottschalk examined Mitzi: heart, lungs, blood pressure, reflexes. She wrote prescriptions for the intravenous, and requested two X-rays. Clara walked alongside the orderly who was dressed in pristine whites from shoes to cap, and Mitzi already in her back-split hospital gown in the wheelchair. The corridor gleamed with light coming off vinyl tiles as off a frozen lake.

  Later she sat in the chair by Mitzi’s bedside. Mitzi had the intravenous in the back of her hand. The veins there were dark in her pale skin, and the one with the needle in it was thicker than the others. Mitzi was smiling. She was getting drowsy. “Dear,” she said. “It’s good of you to be here.”

  “After this,” Clara said. “When they discharge you, and that’ll be in just a few days, maybe a week, I want you to come and stay with me. I’ll get Mrs. Sokol to make up the other room. You’ve seen it. There’s a good bed in it and good light. I want you to come there.”

  “Well,” said Mitzi. “Maybe.”

  “Not maybe. For sure. It’ll be waiting for you.”

  Dr. Gottschalk came by once more. “We just got an OR and we’ll do the procedure tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock. The nurses will get you ready, Mitzi. No more solids, please. Just fluids between now and then. Jell-O tonight. How are you feeling?”

  Mitzi smiled up at her. “Fine. Thank you, Caroline.”

  “Good. Tomorrow, then.” Dr. Gottschalk patted her on the arm and left.

  The sun was behind the mountain now, the sky pink. In the valley trees stood black and solemn against the snow. Deer at one of the feeding stations. She could just make them out: three, four.

  She stayed while Mitzi ate her dinner of green and red Jell-O. She watched her old friend from the side having difficulty spearing small cubes of Jell-O with a plastic fork but eating with grim determination as though it could change anything, as though it mattered.

  Her eyes filled and she turned away. Tears rolled down her cheeks, so many, coming from where she did not know. She dabbed at them fiercely, hoping Mitzi was not looking. God. Lord. Remember. Teach us to care and not to care; Teach us to sit still …

  She stood up and put her forehead to the cold window glass. Out there lights were coming on, yellow in the blue of evening. No leaves on the trees, none on the fields.

  Behind her, Mitzi said, “What can you see out there?”

  “Not much, dear. Evening. It’s getting dark.” She turned back into the room. Mitzi lay against her pillow. The small bowl of Jell-O was empty.

  “I’ll be going soon,” she said. “You rest. I’ll be back in the morning.” She leaned and kissed Mitzi on the forehead. Mitzi found her hand and patted it.

  “Tomorrow,” she said.

  THAT NIGHT, AT HOME, she worked some more on the boxes. They were organized along national and regional topics, with chronological and subject dividers. St. Töllden during the war and during the aftermath figured prominently. Her personal files, her journals and notes to herself over the years, were organized in the two banker’s boxes with the red labels that she’d keep at the house. She had yet to decide what to do about them.

  She found the journal for 1939 and leafed to November. There it was, in ink, in longhand: A. back late at night with the documents. What happened? How to deal with this? And above those words, in pencil, in shorthand: I know the smell of gunpowder. In Landshut it came in the open window from the firing range. Then in the margin, something else in shorthand that had been erased.

  She was about to climb into bed when Willa called: the conference had been moved to Frankfurt, and she could come after all. “Do you want me to? You aren’t too busy with the book right now?”

  “No. And yes, of course I want you to come.”

  “All right then. In a few days. Is everything all right?”

  “Everything is fine. Mitzi is in the hospital. They’re doing her hip. Tomorrow.”

  “Give her my love. Tell her a hip is nothing. We are experimenting with doing them on expensive breeders.”

  “On camels?”

  “Yes. It’s a congenital thing with some of them. If we can get a few more calves out of her, why not. Camels, people. It’s all much the same bones and connective tissue. Even similar muscles.”

  “Well, I’ll mention it.”

  In the morning she was back at the hospital, equipped with several pages of manuscript, writing pad and pen, prepared for a long wait. There was still time to sit with Mitzi before they came with the gurney and lifted her onto it to take her to the prep room.

  Clara walked alongside as far as the sliding milk-glass door. “I’ll be here,” she said, and Mitzi craned her neck to see her until the door slid shut.

  She waited at one of the white round tables in the coffee shop. Doctors and nurses came and went. She waited. She had completed five pages of manuscript in draft translation when Caroline Gottschalk came into the coffee shop and stood at the table.

  “Everything’s gone well,” she said. She looked tired. She stepped out of one of her white hospital clogs and briefly set her stockingfoot on the tiles. “She’s in recovery now. We’ll keep her for a few days, and then she can go into home-care. By then she can put some very light weight on it.”

  “She’ll be fine?”

  “Good as new. Eventually.”

  Four days later Willa arrived at the Innsbruck airport, just in time to help bring Mitzi to the house. Her plane had descended into the valley through a snowstorm and it was still snowing when they took a taxi to the hospital. They came back with Mitzi in an am
bulance. Two strong orderlies helped her up the stairs, and helped put her to bed. There was a walker, and they left it standing by the bedside.

  “My,” said Mitzi and studied the walker. “Who would have thought.”

  Willa, decisive and capable, sat at Mitzi’s bedside and took her pulse. It was weak and irregular. She said so in the living room to Clara. “She’ll need lots of rest and good food. A bit of protein for healing. Soft scrambled eggs, vegetables, salads, a bit of beef stew. An open window once in a while and a bit of weight-bearing. More and more each day.”

  “She can have all that.”

  “What happens, Mom,” said Willa. “Healing and aging, the whole thing about cell renewal is like making copies of copies of copies. Cells forget what they looked like when they started out. The original is long gone, and so the information gets less and less distinct. Eventually it’s nearly illegible. And when on top of that some tiny code misfires, that’s how we die, Mom. Like Dad. Doctor Kessler did the best he could.”

  “I always thought so.”

  Emma came over for dinner, and Willa entertained them with events on the camel farm. They were closer to a solution for the fetal necrosis syndrome; it might have to do with rare beetle larvae going around the world now, ingested by the mother with certain kinds of feed. Good news was also that there was success with a new crossbreed with pure Mongolians that thrived in the harshest conditions.

  “Much better than four-wheel drive cars,” she said. It was a joke, but nobody got it.

  Emma said, “I’m teaching again, Willa. Part-time at the college. History. Sixteenth Century, right now. The English Reformation.”

  “Oh good. I’m glad for you. Speaking of history. I’m sorry, but I need to ask. Which of them took the Knight’s Cross, Mom? I want to know.”

  “I asked you not to do that, Willa. Let it go.”

  “What’s that?” said Emma.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Ignore her.”

  After Emma had left and they had gotten ready for bed, they met by the bathroom door in their long nightgowns like two ghosts in shrouds, and Willa said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you hadn’t told her.”