Clara (20 page)

“What is it?” she said. “You must be tired.”

He looked at her and she knew his mind had been somewhere else altogether.

“Albert? Is everything all right?”

“Sweetheart, everything is all right. I’m sorry. I was just … I am very happy.”

“Are you? You were travelling all day. Ask Mama to give you my room at the house. The bed in it is very good.”

She saw him take a deep breath and let it out. “I’ll have to leave again in a few hours, Clara. My driver is standing by.”

“In a few hours? But you only just came back. Where do you have to go?”

“To the base. We may be moving out.”

“Moving out? We’re leaving the house? To go where?”

“Not you. Please don’t … I don’t have the transport order yet. Just the readiness. I’ll call you here, or I can call your parents.”

“Albert. Look at me, Albert. What is happening?”

“You won’t have to leave,” he said. “The unit may be ordered east. It
may
be. Temporarily.”

She looked away from him down at tiny Willa and she told herself to be calm and that she had everything a
reasonable woman could wish for: her health and a loving husband, the promise of her own career when all this was over, and this perfect child now. And yet at nearly the same moment, like a curtain drawn to reveal the stage for the next act, it felt to her like some enormous truth coming, the truth that all light and warmth and all safety had been illusions and that the reality was horror.

Albert saw her face and instantly he was at her side. He touched her cheek, then leaned and reached and opened the door, and he called for the nurse. He stood in the open doorway in his uniform and boots and gunbelt, waving his arms and shouting into the hallway, and two nurses came running.

SHE SPENT
the next few weeks at home, not only because her mother’s help with the baby was a comfort, but also because she did not like the idea of the empty house on the base. The terrors came back several more times, especially in the early hours of the morning. Dr. Mannheim spoke of post-partum phenomena as yet poorly understood; he was prepared to give her a low dose of bromides to calm her, but she was breastfeeding and did not want to take medication of any kind.

Instead she pumped and bottled breast milk, and the next day she left baby and milk with her mother, and she boarded the train to Zürich. There in the university library she looked up Dr. Freud and found his notes on panic attacks from an address he had given in 1936 in Sweden.

Premonitions of Death
, he had called them. Essentially they had to do with loss of control over one’s life, not the actual
loss, but a fear of it so real it became a kind of foretelling.

He said the attacks appeared to be coming out of nowhere, but they were always triggered by associations made in the unconscious; often they came in daydreams and in the small hours of the morning. The low threshold hours, the psychiatric profession called them, when in shallow sleep or in daydreams the intellectual defence mechanism was weak and fears washed like effluent over the depressed threshold into the safe-room of the psyche.

The bad news was, Dr. Freud said, that the fears were usually correct, and the panic attacks justified. The unconscious saw the signs of a darkness coming; it added them up, and emotional terror was the result.

Reading him in the profound stillness of the library, she could see Freud stepping about on the dais, waving his cold cigar and using his free hand for motions to indicate the heart, the stomach, the forehead.
Angstzustände
, she heard him say. Rapid pulse, difficulty breathing, heat rising, a faintness like a profound emptying-out. She could see his lips nearly blue within the precisely carved beard pronouncing the diagnosis of justified premonitions of death not necessarily of the body but certainly of the soul. He would pause, listen for the trailing-out of that sentence as if he might want to reel it back in and edit it. But he let it stand, and the cigar would stab the air for emphasis and a period.

By the time she sat reading his Stockholm transcript in Zürich, in the nearest university where his publications
had not been destroyed, Dr. Freud had already turned his back on Vienna, had rejected what it had become and was safe in England.

THE
KRISTALLNACHT
POGROM
at the end of November changed everything. It made it impossible to go on hoping and pretending. She was back on the Landshut military base by then, and the base was much quieter with half the battalion moved east to an undisclosed location. She was alone in the house with baby Willa, struggling to make a home of the place with curtains and fresh paint. A home for how long she had no idea.

When she heard of the pogrom she put the baby in the carriage and walked into town. There had been no incidents in Landshut, but at the grocers people were whispering about Munich, the broken shopwindows there and at least three people killed.

She hurried back home, and there on the radio the announcer was blaming the attacks on the murder of a German diplomat by a Jew. The news kept coming in all day, and by the end of it countless shop windows had been smashed, ninety people murdered, unknown numbers arrested and taken away.
Disappeared in night and fog
, the newspaper said the next day. As if they’d lost their way and fallen off a cliff through some inattention of their own.

She put paint and sewing machine aside and with her fountain pen kept track of daily events. Pen and typewriter were her weapons. Her means of sorting and
defining. She decided that in the
Kristallnacht
phenomenon one could see clearly all the signs of mob hysteria and its shrewd channelling by those in charge. It was fear and hatred of life itself. It was the scapegoat phenomenon already mentioned in the Bible. Heap your sins and fears and your own inadequacies upon the chosen goat and banish it. Chase it far out into the desert to be forgotten. Better still: kill it, so it can’t come back. It’s all the goat’s fault, ergo kill the goat.

She wrote while baby Willa was asleep in her tiny room with the half-hung wallpaper of balloons and clouds, and she wrote while Willa lay in the crib nearby and played with fingers and toes.

Albert’s unit came back from the east. She cooked dinners and sat with him, lay with him at night, wanted to feel close to him. She wanted him to volunteer information she could understand, that would help her make sense of developments. He said he knew almost nothing of the longer goals, and so nothing he could tell her would add up to a true picture of what was coming.

There were whisperings, he said. About further invasions. About Hitler. About what the SS and Gestapo were up to. Things he could not talk to her about without risking their lives.

By day the tanks rolled like thunder, and out the windows men marched one-two-three on the parade ground, and in torn and muddy fields motorized guns roared back and forth firing 50mm cannons. The noises were harsh
and abrupt. They vibrated windows and dishes in the cupboards. At first they made Willa cry.

She held her on her lap and talked to her. At times she found herself writing notes not to herself, but to her child. It was much the same process, a recording of events and insights so that they might be available for later.
Dear Willa, on this day the radio reported … and then you and I looked out the window and we saw …
Long-distance messages for the child and for the woman the child would one day be. A girl and then a young woman growing older and perhaps wanting to know and understand.

She spent a week at home in St. Töllden and learned that on the day after the pogrom, the mayor had written an open letter in the daily paper condemning the attacks as cowardly and completely unacceptable. The culprits would be brought to justice, he had promised, and within days he and his wife and their two children had disappeared. A new mayor was appointed by the directorate, a pin-man and his family from some other province sleeping in the vanished people’s beds, and with their knives and forks eating the food in their larder from their plates.

Mrs. Dorfer, the milkwoman, whispered that the new mayor’s children had been seen wearing the vanished children’s clothes to school. She shook her head and climbed on her bicycle that was hitched via a curved shaft to her milk cart.

Kristallnacht
, she wrote in a letter to Erika, left no doubt as to how the game would be played, and absolutely so,
with spying and reporting on thy neighbour to save thy own cherished hide, and with terror and disappearances, and with no hope of justice whatsoever.

“So write about it,” Erika wrote back. “You’re good at that, and I don’t think anyone on the outside really knows what is going on here. Send it to a newspaper. In France and England. In Switzerland. Tell the world.”

Fired on like this she worked on it for days, collecting reports and writing and rewriting. Relating what the newspapers and the radio were saying to what was in fact happening. What people like Mrs. Dorfer were whispering. Perhaps Erika was right, and she could publish it somewhere. In America ideally, perhaps through the people at the museum.

When she mentioned it to Albert over dinner a change came over his face and he stopped eating. He put down knife and fork and he wiped his lips with the napkin. He sat very still with his hands on the table.

“What is it?” she said.

“Clara, did you mention this to anybody? For example to any of the other wives, or to someone in town?”

“No. Not yet.”

“To anybody at all? A newspaper? Have you written a letter to anybody about it? Does
anybody
know about this idea of yours?”

“No. I wanted to talk to you about it first.”

“I’m glad. Let me show you something.” He reached into a side pocket and took out an envelope. “I opened it, but
look at this, this tear in the flap, the way the edges overlap.” He held it out for her to take. “What do you think caused that?”

She turned over the envelope. It was a letter from his father in Vienna.

“What do you think, Clara?”

She studied the flap edges, the fine creases.

“It’s been steamed open and resealed,” he said. “I think they are watching him for fear he may agitate against them now; after Theo’s death, after the jail. As if he had the energy. You saw him. I’ll have to tell him not to write to us any more. They can read our mail, they can listen in on telephones. Some of the people in town are certainly informants, and you know that SS Obersturmführer Bönninghaus is the official political observer. Every unit has one of those. Don’t ever trust him with anything.”

He paused. “What is it?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. No, wait. I wrote to Erika and she wrote back. Not in detail.”

“Did you mail it on the base or in town?”

“In St. Töllden. When I was home.”

“Were you alone? Did anyone follow you?”

“Follow me? I can’t say. I didn’t look.”

“And she wrote back to you in St. Töllden?”

“No. Here.”

“Show me the letter. The envelope.” She brought it and he held it close to the light, studied the glueline along the flap edges. He handed it back to her.

“Clara,” he said. “Please. You can write whatever you want, and I know it’s important for you to keep notes and journals. But.”

“But what? This is the one thing I
can
do. I mean
do
, rather than just sit and watch.”

“I know. But for now please don’t let anyone read it and don’t ever put it in the mail. Just keep your thoughts to yourself. For now.”

EARLY IN
1939 she received a letter from the party directorate in Vienna. In it they said that the office had become aware of the fact that the family had been awarded the Blood Order for the death of Theodor. In light of that, they said, her application for party membership was being granted, and the university would be looking favourably on her application as assistant professor. Signed and stamped
Heil Hitler
, with several eagles clutching swastikas.

That night she showed the letter to Albert.

“I never applied,” she said when he looked up. “For party membership. You know that. I only asked about a teaching job.”

“When you had the interview, could they have misunderstood?”

“I don’t see how. I remember him saying that even if I were accepted, I might at best get a secretarial job. I told you all that. And he said there was a mark next to my name, and you said not to worry, there were marks next to everyone’s name.”

“I know. The question is, do you want to teach there? Under the new administration? This is as good as a solid job offer.”

She rose and stepped to the window. Darkness out there, just her own reflection in the glass. “I was trying to imagine Professor Emmerich with a Nazi pin,” she said without turning around. “You know how much I admired him. He taught us about intellectual honesty. Integrity. About trusting ourselves. I was trying to imagine him limiting his lectures to what they would allow him to say, and I couldn’t.”

She lowered the blinds and turned to him. He looked tired to her in the lamplight and she told him so.