Clara (22 page)

On Sunday noon the women like a gypsy bridal party in bright dresses and ribboned hats rowed among the willows and pulled the boat ashore, and they spread out two
blankets and a tablecloth for their picnic. They unpacked hampers of sandwiches and containers of cider and milk and cereal for the baby, and on a fine day like this and united as friends they could laugh and joke about their lives, none of which was turning out as planned.

“But literature is full of that,” said Erika. “Isn’t it, Clara?”

“Full of what?”

They were sitting on the blankets holding blades of grass between their thumbs, trying to see who could make the loudest honking noise.

“Full of the illusion of control. Best-laid plans going nowhere. In fact it seems to me that’s where most good stories begin.”

“Some,” she said.

Cecilia put her lips to her thumbs and produced a loud wailing honk, the best so far. Willa laughed and clapped her hands. Cecilia tickled her, then leaned over the grass to find a fresh blade.

“The wide ones are best,” she said to Willa. “Like this one.” She plucked a blade and smoothed it. She blew into it fiercely but it only squeaked and frayed. They were on hands and knees chatting and searching for good grasses.

They lay on their backs and looked up through the cracks between their fingers at the sky, and they saw young storks practising what they’d learned and circling above the warm fields with no discernible wing movement whatsoever.

On the way back in the boat, Mitzi sat rowing next to Clara, and she mentioned for the first time that the forger was blackmailing her now with her real identity. So far she had been able to pay what he was asking, she said. She hoped he would never ask for more than she could give.

They tied up the boat and picked up baby and baskets. As they came closer to the cottage they could see the Mercedes with the 14th Armoured Battalion sign on its fender, and they saw Albert standing in the yard, looking at his wristwatch. He saw them and waved. He was standing next to the tomatoes red and ripe on the vines and the peapods filled to bursting. Behind him the cottage lay in the evening sun, and the sun shone warmly on its roof of golden straw and on the green shutters thrown open against white walls.

But the image of home and safety was all wrong because he was dressed for war in full combat uniform: pistol belt, boots, and the leather coat and dust goggles around his neck. Clara’s heart was beating fiercely. She could see his driver and one of his lieutenants waiting in the staff car with the top down. Albert’s batman came out of the cottage, carrying his field kit. Down the street, neighbours stood in doorways to watch.

Albert called to her. He waved urgently and he turned and spoke to the driver. In the house he waited until she had put Willa on the couch. She turned to him. She was shaking.

He held her and explained that his unit was entraining. By nightfall he had left, and by midnight his battalion was already rolling north and east toward the Polish border.

The date was August 28, 1939.

LATER HE NEVER
talked about the war because the war changed him, but right after Poland he still did. He described to her how they could see nothing but fire at either side to the horizon, fire and explosions as the tanks roared forward, firing 50mm and heavy machine guns on the run. They stopped only to aim and fire the main turret gun. The Polish tanks were no match, he said. And most Polish field cannons were still mounted on horse-drawn limbers and slow to move. Polish soldiers in proud uniforms rode the wheel horses and stood in the stirrups to fire cavalry pistols at tanks. Horses reared and flailed and tried to crawl away on shattered legs. Horses everywhere screaming, with blue coils of intestines trailing, other horses tripping over them. He had never imagined they’d still be relying so heavily on horses.

It was terrible, he said, and she sat listening with her
eyes wide and her hands clamped over her mouth, sat in the darkened living room at the cottage because for a week or more afterwards he never wanted to turn on the lights and by daytime he told Anna to close the curtains and keep out the sun.

From above, he said, they could hear Stukas howling and diving and dropping bombs a hundred metres in front of the tanks, they could hear the Messerschmitt fighters. A fearsome push forward with maximum fire power, he said. They drove the Polish forces relentlessly on a wide front toward Russia, which by then was invading from the east to occupy the rest of the country. Pens of barbwire full of prisoners dotted their route.

Two days into the attack, on September 3, France and Britain had kept their pledge to Poland and declared war. It had come to her world on the radio and in the newspapers. “WAR!” the headlines shouted, and in the village it was the one word on everyone’s lips.

In her notes for the Poland file she later added that war then had been not about bodycount but about territorial gain. This might be hard to grasp now, fifty or more years on, she wrote, but at the time the colonial spirit was not completely dead, and essentially that was what colonialism had been: the theft of entire countries simply by invading them and planting flags.

ONE MONTH INTO THE
Polish campaign, SS Obersturmführer Bönninghaus, the political officer attached to
Landshut Black, came to the cottage and knocked on the door. Anna was on her knees in the kitchen garden, harvesting peas, and she turned and looked at him between the vines over her shoulder. Even without his armband she knew who he was; everyone did. She watched him knock and wait. She watched his broad back, his cap at a rakish angle. She could tell him that Clara had gone to the store, but she did not. Only when he simply pushed open the door and walked in did she get up heavily off her knees and come after him.

“They’re not in,” she said.

“Where are they?” He had progressed as far as the living room already, was standing by the radio listening. He clicked it off and turned around. He was a heavy man with a strong face and a scar through one of his eyebrows. He was dressed in tunic, breeches, and boots, and in the dim light from the window half covered by ivy he stood with one hand still on the radio knob and with the other slapping his grey deerskin gloves idly against his thigh.

“Shopping,” Anna said.

“In town, on the bicycle?”

“Yes.”

“So they’ll be back soon,” he said. “I’ll wait. Go back outside. Go!” He waved her away.

When Clara returned with Willa, Anna was sitting on a low stool by the front door shelling peas. She looked up at Clara and put her finger to her lips. She beckoned. “The obersturmführer is inside waiting for you,” she whispered.

“What does he want? Did you let him in?”

Anna shook her head.

She entered with Willa in one arm and the shopping bag in the other. He was not in the kitchen and not in the living room. He was in the bedroom, standing well inside the open door. He turned when she said, “What are you doing? Who said you could just walk in?”

“I thought I’d wait for you. You weren’t gone very long.” He took another look at the bedroom, turned, and came her way through the hallway. “Let me help you with this.” He reached for Willa.

“No, don’t. I don’t need help.” She put the shopping bag on the floor and carried Willa to the playpen in the living room.

“Obersturmführer, I don’t want you just walking in here,” she said. “You could have come back. What do you want?”

“I have something for you.” He followed her into the kitchen, where she stood setting groceries on the table. “This,” he said and held out his hand in a loose fist.

“What is it?”

“Take it.”

“Put it on the counter.”

“Take it.” He laughed. “It’s not a frog or anything.”

She held out her hand and he dropped a shiny metallic ornament into it. She turned it in the light. “I don’t want it,” she said without thinking. She held it out again for him to take back.

He did not move. “The Gold Party Pin,” he said. “You have been awarded a high honour, and you refuse it?”

“It’s nothing personal. I never applied. It’s a misunderstanding.”

She put the pin on the counter, gold-rimmed in a wreath of oak leaves, the words
National-Sozialistische DAP
around the swastika in a white field.

“I never applied,” she said again. “I’m honoured, but it’s a mistake. Tell them I don’t deserve it.”

“And you may not,” he said. “But it can’t be taken back. You must have applied, and because of the Blood Order in your family you were found worthy.”

“Worthy. Obersturmführer, I am not political. I’m honoured but I’m so unworthy.” She listened to the sound of that and found it nearly funny. She tried a smile. “Take it away, please.”

A strange light came into his eyes then. A sense of triumph, she would realize later. A victory. “This will go into your file,” he said. “I advise you to accept it and to say no more and be thankful.”

“I am thankful. But it must be a mistake.”

He reached into his tunic pocket and took out a folded piece of paper. “Here is the document to go with it,” he said. He put the paper on the counter next to the pin. He reached and unfolded it, glanced at it and put it back. “We have you as Doctor Phil. Clara Herzog Leonhardt, is that correct? Two last names?”

“Yes.”

“You
are
married, are you not?”

“I am. We are. For academic reasons I like using my maiden name as well. Please take those things away. Someone made a mistake.”

He stepped back. “Mrs. Leonhardt,” he said. “You would be wise to consult with your husband first. With the lieutenant colonel when he comes back. If he comes back. Heil Hitler.”

His boot heels echoed in the hall. He stopped, and she heard him call, “Mrs. Leonhardt! You have a great deal of room here, for one small family.”

She held her breath, listening.

“Did you hear me?”

“I did.”

“And something else. Your radio is tuned to an illegal station. The radio itself is illegal.”

“I did not know that.”

“You did not know that. Get a
Volksempfänger
. It receives only the approved station.”

The floorboards in the hall squeaked. But he said nothing more, and after a few seconds she heard his footsteps moving away. The door opened and fell closed.

She hid the party pin and document in a kitchen drawer, left Anna in charge of the house, packed up Willa, and took the train to Vienna.

What she did on the train was to reason with her fears, try to look at them calmly and to stop her mind from racing. She sat with her eyes closed and with Willa on her
lap, and she searched for solace in what she had learned and what she believed; she imagined herself being calm and in control inside the house that was the structure of her mind. In control, even as the outside world was breaking more than her windows. This was the real test, she knew, and it was so much more than words and ideas.

THAT AFTERNOON
, Mitzi and Cecilia had gone to the forger once again. He had moved to a garage-type workshop, they said when they described the encounter. A place with a bed-sitting room behind a curtain at the rear. They sat primly on metal chairs next to a small printing press. The room was dirty, with various kinds of equipment and desks, and with lightshades hanging from patched wiring.

“It is finished,” the forger said to Mitzi. He wore a pilled sweater that day and old corduroy trousers. His fingers were stained and on his forehead he wore a green shade. “It’s done. Come and look,” he said. He switched on a desklamp and stood back.

There it was, the document Mitzi would need under the new rules to be able to apply for a Trade Pass, and anyone practising a trade now needed such a pass. They were closing in, closing the loopholes at all levels and all walks of life; every week there were more regulations and forms required.

But here was her salvation now, in her new name; the short Aryan Certificate of Racial Origin, the
Kleine Ahnenpass
; patronizing, demeaning.

Printed front and back on the proper green-and-white document stock, six fields with lines for names and detailed vital statistics going back to the grandparents on both sides. Six fields, forty-eight lines, and every one an insult.

Result of Examination
, it said about her, about Anna Susanne Toplitz: ARYAN. There, halfway across the watermark of the eagle’s talons.

The forger stood close, watching her, judging her hunger. “You can have it as soon as you bring me the money,” he said.

“But so much,” said Mitzi. “Ten thousand. Can’t you make an exception? And all the money I’ve been giving you. I need this. I’ll give you free haircuts for as long as you live.”

He thought she was joking, and he cracked a smile. He said he did not have enough hair left for that. What hair he had, he could snip off himself, in a mirror.

He waved a hand at Cecilia, who had not spoken one word, had sat upright with her hand folded in her lap, touching as little as possible in this filthy place.

“Perhaps Madame can help out,” he said. “If she does, then perhaps I’ll give her back the document we created for the estate. Horses, I think. Certain customs forms. Yes?”