Clara (15 page)

He saw her disappointment. “What?” he said. “It’s standard academic procedure, Miss Herzog. To avoid any conflict of interest and too narrow an approach.”

She sat with the cast in her lap, taking this in. She would miss him, miss these informal talks. “But on other topics,” she said. “Like on the new material now?”

“Of course. But not on your dissertation.” He nodded at the cast. “It must get in the way. Does it make it hard to type? Or even sit at a desk properly?”

“It’s impossible to type. Much too slow, and I can’t type capital letters. I tried. So I’m writing everything by hand. You’ve seen my papers.”

He smiled. “Miss Herzog, when you are ready for an adviser just tell the office.”

AT THE APARTMENT
Mitzi had looked at Erika’s ear, at the stitches coarse as in some homemade soccer ball, and she had given her a new asymmetrical hairstyle that swung forward to her jawline on that side and covered much of the damage. Women stopped Erika in the street and asked who did her hair, and soon Mitzi had a half-dozen more clients who wanted a hairdo just like that. She’d picked up her new papers in the name of Anna Susanne Toplitz, and she kept them in a safe place in her
apartment. The identity card and driver’s licence a surprisingly good photo of herself.

Mitzi always dressed well in clean white smocks over black blouses and knee-length skirts that showed her good legs in silk stockings. She was focused on her work, making house calls only in bright daylight and in good parts of town. The in-colour for youngish women who could afford it that year was jet-black, with bangs nearly to the eyebrows or no bangs at all but straight and parted in the middle. Rich older women, and Vienna had many of those, liked a perm and a little blonding or purpling, depending on their natural colour. Rich older women also had regular manicures and pedicures. They had hairs plucked from their chins, and vigorous facials with hot cloths and French salves to stimulate blood flow and make the skin look alive and pink. Rich older women could have anything they wanted; they never haggled over price and they tipped generously on top of that. Mitzi was doing well.

IN NOVEMBER
1936, the officers’ academy granted its students one week’s leave. Albert put on civilian clothes and with his forged passport crossed into Austria. He travelled by night train from Munich to Vienna, sitting in a corner seat by the window. The only other people in his compartment were a couple perhaps in their seventies who sat at times holding hands. They’d said good evening, and nodded and smiled, and that had been it. At the border near Salzburg the train stopped and whistles sounded. He
let down the window on its leather strap and looked out, and saw teams of armed police boarding the train at either end. They had dogs, and that worried him.

He could hear the policemen sliding open compartment doors one by one, coming closer. Soon they were in this car; he could hear their voices. One German, one Austrian. Out the window the station lay in poor light from overhead lamps, and the engine stood not far away, puffing steam.

They yanked open the compartment door and one of them said, “Passport control” and held out his hand. The old man and the woman handed over their passports, and he too reached into his jacket pocket and took his out. The woman looked terrified, but the dog paid no attention to her. It was looking at him. Watching him closely.

Do not make eye contact with the dog, he told himself. Do not. A large, shaggy Alsatian. He nodded at the policemen and they appraised him: his suit, his military haircut. The Austrian one opened his passport to the picture page and passed it on to his colleague, who did the same and handed it back. The dog came closer. A male. He could smell its rankness. The German policeman lengthened the dog’s leash and waited a moment. He said something to the dog and yanked it back, and they moved on to the next compartment.

He stood by the open window to calm himself. He looked out and eventually saw the policemen climbing down, four men and two dogs. The watering-funnel swung
away from the engine and a whistle sounded. The train jerked and stopped, and moved off. Coal smoke and steam came in the window and he closed it.

AT CLARA’S BUILDING
the concierge pulled the door-latch for him on her long string and then watched him from her spy window. She craned her neck at him.

“We’re winning,” she said.

He stopped and looked down the dark stairwell. “Who is?”

The concierge stared at him. She slapped shut her window.

On this leave, he and Clara went out only once, to visit his mother. He did not want to risk being seen, and so they spent the rest of the time at the apartment. Erika moved upstairs with Mitzi, and at lunch the first day they all came together and made bacon and tomato omelettes and they drank real coffee that Albert had brought from the school kitchen. They talked and laughed and the women pretended they were not afraid of developments out there; of the frequent sound of gunshots; of running footsteps in the street by night.

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.

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.