Clara

ALSO BY KURT PALKA

Rosegarden
The Chaperon
Equinox
Scorpio Moon

I’D BEEN COLLECTING MATERIAL
to write
Patient Number 7
for years. I had drawers full of notes on conversations with people living in Vienna and New York and London and Tel Aviv. The oldest man I spoke with had seen Emperor Franz Joseph strolling in a Vienna park in 1904. Others had fought in the First World War and seen the end of the Dual Monarchy, and many remembered the Great Depression and what came after: the street battles in Vienna of the early 1930s, the years that finally gave way to National Socialism.

One by one these people passed away and took their stories with them, and I still didn’t know what to do with what they’d given me. What I felt I needed was the thick folder of documents that I knew existed in my own family. I’d seen it and we’d talked about it: letters handwritten in the old style and giving a flavour of social and private life; photographs and documents from the key years between 1930 and 1950; official forms full of personal questions and threats; Gestapo documents signed and sealed
Heil Hitler
; birth and death certificates; Work Passes and Marriage Permits; Certificates of Racial Purity. All this documentation rubber-stamped with eagles and swastikas, without which you were nothing.

The way men once planted trees so that their grandchildren might one day enjoy their shade, various family members over two generations had assembled these papers into a kind of Lest We Forget Archive for those to follow. Over the years the folder became more mythical than real, and when I needed it for my research I could not find it. Then the house was sold and an era was clearly at its end.

For periods in 2006–7 I lived in Austria on a teaching contract with the Institute for Economic Development. I rented an apartment in a small city with a long history, and from there I travelled by train and road to my seminars.

The apartment was in a castle that had served as a defensive position during the peasant uprisings and the wars of religion of the 1600s and before. Parts of the walls and burial tablets in them dated back to the Romans. The best thing about it was the view, which was of an eighth-century stone church right across the street. That church and creative elements relating to it are in the story.

To furnish the place I used some Biedermeier pieces I’d inherited, and while I was cleaning out drawers and compartments I found the document folder. It sat back on a lower shelf, three inches thick, bound with bits of frayed string. Like a nod from fate. A gift, really.

I spent months checking my own material against the documents for historical accuracy, and I experimented with form and voice and the dramatic arc of the work I was planning. I was dealing with a generation that had experienced so much: the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the First World War, the Great Depression, the rise of Nazism, and the Second World War and its aftermath.

Eventually I created as the main character for my story a young woman I named Clara Eugenie Herzog, a student at Vienna University in 1932. I would use her stubborn and true love for a man whom everybody in her family disapproved of as the mainspring, and her intellectual, professional, and moral development as the backbone of the novel. Once I’d made those framing decisions, it became quite naturally Clara’s story and the material began to flow.

Patient Number 7
is a novel inspired by actual events set against a background of recorded history and documented fact. Nevertheless, it is a work of the imagination, and except for persons known to history, the names and incidents in the story are either imaginary or are used fictitiously.

K. P.
Summer 2011

THE DAY SHE BURIED
her husband, nearly a hundred mourners filled the Benedictine chapel. She had wanted just family and friends but then her daughters had taken over, and the list had grown. Now it included people from the museum and from city hall, and the defence minister and military attachés from a number of embassies were there as well. Even Guido Malfatti was there, the motorcycle dealer who had been shot in the knee in Russia and had sawed off his own leg with a shell fragment, and in 1945 her husband had saved his life by taking him to Italy.

There was an intense smell from the lilies in the chapel, and when the doors swung open and the coffin was carried out you could smell the horses too. Two black Belgians they were, beautiful horses in leather and brass tackle, unshod for the occasion as was traditional. When the coffin approached, they tossed their heads and their breath
steamed in the cold air, and when the coffin was set down onto the cartbed and pushed forward, wood on wood through the thin layer of snow, the springs gave way with the gritty sound of rust.

She stood at the tailgate dressed in black from hat to button shoes. She wore one of her mother’s formal coats of black gabardine from the late 1800s, heavy and long, with wide lapels and black velvet cuffs. It weighed her down and bent her at shoulders and back, and when she reached out and placed a bare hand on the coffin none of the mourners could see her face for the veil. But how they stared at her and ate it up, this timeless scene.

When her husband had been alive, few of these mourners had shown much love for him. After all, he’d been famous, and famous men have few friends. In his later years many had admired him, but certainly there were those who’d whispered about his past, even though they had not the faintest idea of the man he had been and of the time he’d lived through. Only she knew, because she’d lived it with him from the beginning.