Clara (12 page)

“Oh? And what’s this?” She turned and pointed at a picture on the wall, a photograph of Peter as a thin young man on an enormous horse; Peter in a First World War lieutenant’s uniform – the cap, the braid, the sabre. Tall and straight, looking down his nose at the camera without a smile. But the horse made up for that, for it was curling its lips in a big toothy grin, as if it alone could see the vanity of uniforms and young men’s big ideas. The picture was a family classic.

“Peter,” she said. “Do you love Daniela?”

“Danni? Of course I do. With all my heart.”

“Didn’t Mama think she was beneath you? And Bernhard did too, I seem to remember. A dancer?”

“A former
ballet
dancer. You should have seen her on stage. Bernhard was only jealous. Daniela is wonderful.”

“Of course she is. I like her too. But my point is—”

“There’s no comparison here. Because of this Nazi thing your Albert has a criminal judgment against him that will follow him for years. And now he’s putting on a German uniform. How can you defend that?”

“Defend what? There’s nothing to defend. The Germans were our allies in the war, when you sat on that horse. You fought on their side and they on ours. And I would not have wanted Albert to wait around and be more and more humiliated. He has pride. You can feel that in him. The Germans must have, and they made him a senior officer. It’s an honour. Their
military
, not their politics. He warned me that there’d be those who don’t know the difference.”

“Nonsense. The military goes where the politicians of the day send it. For example, we know that Hitler wants Alsace-Lorraine back. What do you think will happen? And
tanks
? What’s he thinking, your Albert?”

“He says tanks are now what heavy cavalry used to be. In any case he has a horse there too.”

Peter grinned at her. “How sweet. They gave him a pony to lure him across.”

“Don’t make fun of him. He loves horses and he wins all kinds of trophies. You big oaf.” She kicked off her shoes and swung her legs up on the couch. It was of the smoothest leather, buffed and worn thin in places by generations of grown-ups’ bottoms and children’s sockfeet.

“And speaking of it,” she said, “are
you
happy with the guilt clauses? What an insult! In a way you can’t blame the Germans for getting off their knees. Billions of marks.”

“Hundreds of billions, actually. But it’s no excuse for provoking another war.”

“But, Peter. It was bitter everlasting revenge, nothing more. On us too. Making sure we’ll never stand up again. We should rebel against it too. Don’t always be such a reasonable lawyer. For God’s sake, be a wild man once in a while.”

“Clara. That famous treaty … the worst thing about it is not the debt itself, it’s that it enabled a man like Hitler to ride in like a white knight with promises to restore the nation’s honour. And about your Albert, I’m only cautioning you. I want the best for you. We all do.”

“I know that.” She swung down her legs, reached out and patted his knee. “I know you mean well. Thank you. But enough of that. Trust me to work things out for myself.” She took a deep breath. “Can we change the topic now? Count Torben, your father. How did he die? Mother has never really said.”

“Probably because he died in a duel, which most women think is a ridiculous way to go.”

“A duel? Really? With pistols?”

“Swords. He died in some forest clearing. He and a Hungarian captain ran swords through each other. In their full proud uniforms, with their seconds looking on.”

“Both dead?”

He nodded. He sat in the chair, his knees nearly as high as the elbow rests. “I have his sword.”

“You do? Can I see it?” She stood up.

“Drop him, Clara.”

“What? No! Please stop it now. You’re sweet and I thank you for caring. But let it go. Sometimes it’s good to be wild, a bit reckless even. It makes life much more interesting.”

He said nothing to that and she looked at him, sunk in the chair. “Peter,” she said and crouched down in front of him. She took his hand. “Peter. You’ve always been so good to me and helped me and given me useful advice. But in this case, listen, I’m so very happy with him. I feel no need to try to explain him, let alone apologize for him. Look at me. I am so very happy altogether. Can’t you tell? My studies, my career plans. And Albert. I’m happy, Peter.” She waited. She patted his hand and let it go and stood up. “Now, where’s that sword? Show me!”

“Why?”

“Because these things are interesting.” She put a finger to her lips and whispered, “I think Mama still loves him.”

“My father? She loves your dad. She adores him.”

“I know that. But that doesn’t mean she can’t love the memory of her first husband too. Come on now. The sword, Count Peter.”

He sighed and rose, and he crossed to the wall closet and reached behind the clothes there. His hand came back holding a long nickel scabbard. The handguard gleamed golden.

“Be careful. It’s very sharp,” he said. “Hold it there and pull. Don’t touch any metal.”

It came out of the sheath with a whisper of steel, and she held that lethal thing in her hand and turned it in the light.

“Good Lord,” she said.

“Cut and thrust, double-edged with a stiff centre spine. The grip is sharkskin, the guard gold-plated.”

“He killed the Hungarian with this?”

“Yes. And was killed at the same time, probably with a similar one.”

“How? Where was he cut?”

“He was run through the chest. Both were. It was unusual but it did happen. There is a move called
pas d’honneur
. It’s when a duellist fears he may lose and so he stops defending and he attacks and charges the blade and at the same time sinks his own.”

“Sounds desperate.”

“It’s hard to relate to today. For an officer then it would have been unthinkable to lose a duel. Absolutely dishonourable. His life would not have been – it was unthinkable.”

Peter took the sword from her, wiped it with a cloth he had hanging on the tie rack, and slipped it back into the sheath. “My father did not lose that duel.”

She heard the note of pride in that, and it moved her strangely. “But he was dead, Peter. Was that better?”

“Than losing a duel? He would have said so. Yes.”

“You mean that?”

“Absolutely.”

“Did you see him? The body?”

“I did. I was nine years old, Bernhard four. The seconds brought him on a blanket and put him down in the entrance hall. Blood came though the blanket and the entire tunic was soaked. He had cuts on his arms and in his face too. I saw him first, then Mama came running from the parlour.”

“And?”

“I don’t really remember much after that. The noises. We were sent upstairs. We could hear her screaming. The doctor came in a carriage. We could see him from the upstairs window, getting down from the carriage and putting his hat back on. It was fall, I remember that. The linden trees. We could hear mother and the doctor downstairs, and other noises. Her crying. Out the window the coachman was putting a feedbag around the horse’s neck. It was so normal. I remember that too.”

AT THE END OF THAT DAY
they all went for a walk. Where the path was wide enough, she walked between her parents, one arm each around their middles. There was snow on the ground and the air was crisp and clean. She could smell the ice-cold river.

Her father took them to the new Roman excavation site that he was in charge of. There was a temporary wooden roof over it all to keep off the snow while the digging went on. Now, over the holiday, the site was deserted. On large worktables within their drawn outlines lay surprisingly modest tools: small shovels, soup spoons, uniquely curved
picks like large dentist tools, sieves, sable brushes, toothbrushes, and paint scrapers.

The strata were clearly visible, layers of clay and limestone and gravel. Within the perimeter, the rooms were nearly all laid bare; the tile stove that had conducted heat along clay pipes to other rooms, the kitchen, the steam bath, and the lead pipes for bringing water down from the mountain.

Years earlier, on the shores of the lake not far from St. Töllden, other sites had been found. Dwellings from the Bronze Age and earlier, her father had said. Tools and cooking pots, and weapons. The shoulder blades of goats carved into combs. Bows with tendons and charred stems for fire-making. Shoes of salt-cured leather with fur on the inside, six thousand years old, seven thousand, and more.

All those artifacts were now on exhibition in the museum that her father was in charge of. His digs were funded in part by the provincial government and in part by an American museum. He said the Romans had found those sites too, and others from the Iron Age. They had searched them for metals and flint.

The Romans had also mined salt in the mountains nearby. They’d done it by boring deep holes and piping water into them, siphoning off the salt solution and then boiling away the water. Over time the boreholes became large underground caves with walls and ceilings of salt. Salt had been like money, her father said. It was currency. They had paid their soldiers with it, hence the term. The
root word
sold
meant salt, he said, and the expression to be worth one’s salt came from that time also.

That night in her childhood bed, snug under the duvet and with the curtains making the familiar rustling sound as cold air stirred them through the half-open window, she imagined the Romans, two thousand years ago. Perhaps men in togas, or men and women in fine purple silks and tooled and gold-embossed leathers, poking through the remains of that earlier primitive civilization of people who wore animal furs, but who had nevertheless known how to build homes on stilts, how to make fire and melt iron from rock in small furnaces to cast tools and weapons.

To think of their lives then flooded by rising waters, crushed and buried by rockslides. Gone, but unearthed again and again, and marvelled at.

That night also in some dream an image came to her of two men duelling far away, with the first light of morning skimming low through trees, flashing in drops of dew on tree branches and on their swords. The image stayed with her until she left the bed and in her flannel nightgown and bare feet padded to the bathroom. She sat on the toilet and drank water bending over the tap, and by the time she was back in bed, the image had left.

In the morning over breakfast would have been the right time to put their minds at ease, to say something about not rushing into anything, perhaps even about postponing commitments. But there was nothing to say. The best she could do was to let them see how confident and happy she
was. At some point she said, “Dad. Mom. Peter and I had a good long talk yesterday. You can ask him. Please do.”

SHE HAD PHOTOGRAPHS
of herself as a baby, and then at one and two years, and older. Photographs of family outings. Sunday hikes to guesthouses in the country. In one picture the adults were sitting on plankboard benches around plankboard tables under trees. Food was on the table, farmer’s bread and cold meats and jugs of cider. Her father sat holding her on his lap, and he was absolutely beaming at her, adjusting her knitted cap with one hand. So much love for her. Such warmth and safety. He would have been fifty then, but a youthful-looking man with an upturned moustache, short-cropped hair, and bold eyes. And her mother thirty-nine but looking older.

In another picture she was already a teenager. Her father now white-haired sat with her in a photographer’s studio, in a prop like a small ship and they were both at the helm. And other pictures, she in her lyceum uniform looking overly serious, and one of herself and Erika and Mitzi on ice skates, the ones you fixed onto boots with a small crank. In the picture they were holding hands and practising skating in a chorus line with one leg up like in a French nightclub. Ski pants tucked into socks rolled over at the ankles, and those clumsy boots and skates, and woollen mitts and hats with stars on them, and dangling pompons. She remembered they were laughing so hard posing for that picture they kept falling down.

BACK IN VIENNA
Albert was getting ready to leave. The German embassy sent a truck with diplomatic licence plates. He ran the Norton up a ramp onto the bed and lashed it down, then the truck left. He packed his suitcase over Christmas and she spent most of her time with him at the Leonhardt apartment.

On the day of Epiphany the truck came back and it stood in the street with its engine running and exhaust smoke rising white in the cold air. They looked down on it from the balcony, all of them: she, Albert and Cecilia, and Erika and Mitzi, who had come to say goodbye. He carried down the suitcases, then came back for the English hunter saddle. He set it down on the floor and they kissed while the women turned their backs. He did not want anyone to walk downstairs with him.

And so they stood watching from the balcony, the driver coming out and saluting Albert and helping with the saddle, and then Albert climbing up to the cab. For a moment he stood on the footrest and craned his neck and looked up. He waved. She waved back.

“Child,” said Cecilia to her afterwards. “Go wash your face. Straighten up and get on with it.”