Clara (23 page)

“It happened only twice,” said Cecilia. “And only because the government was inventing a new tax every day. In any case, we no longer have anything to do with the estate.”

“Oh, but the authorities,” he said. “They’ll use any excuse for revenge against the privileged.”

“You little man,” said Cecilia. She stood up.

“And I seem to remember something else,” said the forger. “Your son. I still have the file. A military man who needed a neutral passport. How is he? I might give you back his file too.”

AT THE APARTMENT
that evening it was the only topic of conversation. Mitzi was so upset by it she had heart flutters. She was lying on the couch, pale, with a cold compress on her forehead. The other women sat nearby in the living room, with Willa propped in a corner of the stuffed chair. Maximilian was shuffling back and forth serving glasses of cold tea.

“But why would he go to the Gestapo?” said Clara. “Think about it. He’d lose the income from the people he is blackmailing and I’m sure Mitzi is not the only one. So why would he do it?”

“For immunity,” said Erika. “Or maybe he is getting scared and wants to stop. He can probably offer them the files of a few hundred people.”

“Let’s hope he won’t do it as long as there’s a chance to get money from anyone,” she said. “What did you tell him?”

“I said, I’d try,” said Mitzi from the couch. “But I need that piece of paper, and I need a Trade Pass. If anybody checks and I don’t have them, I’ll never work again. If I’m lucky.”

They sat contemplating this in silence.

“How much can we raise if we all chip in?” Clara said then. “Even just a few thousand may be enough for him to wait and hope for the rest.”

They took a count and came up with enough money between them to buy three thousand, five hundred Swiss francs. Two days later all four of them, Cecilia, Erika, Mitzi, and Clara with Willa in her lap, drove there in Mitzi’s little car. They gave the forger the money and promised there would be more.

In the half-light in his garage he stood sucking his teeth. He looked from one to the other, not sure what to make of this united front. He looked at the child.

They wanted the document, they said, but the forger shook his head. He said he needed the rest of the money first.

“How long can you wait?” said Cecilia.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Bring me the money.”

LATE IN OCTOBER
, before Albert was back from Poland, she knew she was pregnant again. Because she did not like the army doctor at the base, she packed up little Willa and took the train west into the mountains to St. Töllden. Dr. Mannheim examined her. She was worried, she told him, because she had been spotting.

Anxiety could do that, he said. He told her to rest as much as possible, to keep calm and to take no medication and no alcohol whatsoever.

“How about …” she said and blushed. “My husband may be coming home soon. I hope he will.”

“Ah,” said Dr. Mannheim. “Gentle sexual intercourse should be no problem. Unless the situation gets worse.”

She stayed at home for several days and relished her parents’ loving attention and their help with Willa while she slept and rested and enjoyed her mother’s cooking. She
had forgotten what it was like to feel safe. The bleeding did not recur.

By then both her brothers had been drafted and sent east. All within four days, her mother said. Called up and dispatched; Peter as an infantry lieutenant, and Bernhard as a mere rifleman with the support company attached to an artillery unit.

“Peter said he’d never go to war for the corporal. In those words,” she said. “He suggested he’d rather shoot himself.”

Her mother waved a hand. “They closed the League of Nations office and took his passport, but you knew that. He said he might have a hard time finding work. Go and talk to Daniela sometime. She is going to be lonely. And Mitzi and Erika, how are they?”

“Fine. Erika is still working on her degree. Mitzi is having problems getting gasoline, even on the black market. Albert thought he might be able to help out with requisition slips, but he can’t. Maybe she can work from the apartment, but she’ll lose clients.”

They had this conversation in her bedroom, she in a flannel nightgown sitting up against the pillows, her mother in her quilted housecoat in the chair next to the bed. Willa was asleep in the white crib that had once been hers. Only the small lamp on the night table was on. Its light came yellow through the straw shade and fell weakly on everything; on the bookshelves and the bed, and on her mother with her hair in curlers under a silk scarf.

“Clara,” said her mother. “Forgive me, but I need to ask. Are you happy in your marriage? Do you really love Albert?”

“With all my heart,” she said without hesitation. “All my heart. It swells when I think of him. Do you know the feeling?”

Her mother looked startled for a moment. “Oh yes,” she said. “I’m glad for you.”

“Most of the time I am very happy.”

“Even though he is away so much?”

“Yes. And he won’t always be. Someday this war will be over. Until then I can take care of things.”

“Good.”

“Mama, I fell in love with him more than any other time on that trip when he was looking for work. Something happened that day, I saw something that – I won’t try to describe it. But I did, and I haven’t doubted him since. Not really. I love Willa, and I’ll love the new baby too. And someday, when all this is over, I will have an interesting career, teaching and writing. I look forward to that. I’ll have a profession, Mama.”

“A profession!”

“Yes. I’m sure of it.”

For a while they sat in silence, then her mother said, “But your Albert. Him, they didn’t even need to draft. He volunteered for this.”

“No. Not for
this
. You know he didn’t. But he took the job, yes. It was exactly what he wanted to do. He saw it
as an honour. You’re going to ask me how I feel about that now.”

“How do you?”

“Unsure. But it’s only hindsight that makes it complicated. It obviously makes no difference any more. Look at Peter and Bernhard.”

Her mother sat back in the dim light with her eyes red and tired. “Well,” she said. “You can’t help but wonder. If we’d all refused, if we’d all stood up and refused, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“If we’d all refused. The entire nation?”

“Something like that.”

Nothing was said for a while. They heard Willa stirring in the crib that would soon be too small for her.

“It helps me to think of it as some sort of natural disaster,” she said then. “An earthquake, and all you can do is hold on until it’s over.”

In the hall they heard her father’s footsteps.

“They cleared out the museum and it’s some kind of party office now,” her mother whispered. “Your father is very unhappy. They loaded everything on trucks, the Roman artifacts. The breastplates, remember? They took them all away. The bronze horse harness.”

“Where to?”

Her mother shrugged. The door opened and he stood looking in. “There you are,” he said. “Let the girls sleep now, Mama. Come to bed.”

Her mother stood up and moved the chair back
against the wall. Her father stood holding out his hand to her.

SHE RETURNED
to the cottage at the base, and it was just three weeks after that Albert came back from Poland. He cried out in the night and she woke him from nightmares. Willa woke and called for her. Anna woke and padded through the kitchen. Those were the days of the drawn curtains and darkened rooms in daytime when he began to talk about the Polish campaign and the screaming horses.

“It’s not that horses are more important than people,” he said at one time. “I am trying to understand this. It’s not that they deserve more sympathy. But it makes … something. An immorality,” he said. “No. A baseness all the more obvious. Drawing them into this. Noble animals.”

Sometime later he said he must not allow himself to think that way. He was struggling to work something out.

Work out what? she said. And could she help?

She was helping already, he told her. Just being with him. Listening.

Anna brought them food and drink. Anna looked after Willa, and through their door they could hear the two of them, could hear Anna’s felt slippers on the wooden floor.

When she told him she was pregnant, he was so moved he turned away and sat like this until she came and touched his shoulder.

As the days went by, he became his old self again. He slept better and she heard him laughing as he played
with Willa. On the morning of the day he went back to the base he stood at the kitchen counter in full uniform with the ribbon of the new Iron Cross
II
in his tunic, and it was not until then that she mentioned the visit of SS Obersturmführer Bönninghaus.

His face changed. He set down his coffee cup with great care, and he opened the drawer with the Gold Party Pin slowly as though the thing might explode. He read the document and put it back, and he pulled out the chair and sat down at the table. He sat with his eyes closed for a few seconds, then he stood up.

“That man will never set foot in this house again,” he said to her. “If this is causing you anxiety, please don’t let it. I will settle this and we’ll never have to speak of it again.”

Next day she heard from his adjutant, Lieutenant Neumann, what had taken place. Albert had called the obersturmführer to his office, and through the padded double doors the lieutenant and the chief of staff, Major von Rhenold, could hear Albert shouting at the SS man.

He said that if the obersturmführer ever again dared to just walk into the house and bother his wife, then Albert would see to it that he was court-martialled for insubordination.
No! Shut your mouth
, he shouted.
You have nothing to say to me
.

Lieutenant Neumann told her this, talking sideways to her while keeping an eye on the cottage door, waiting for Albert by the car. He gave her a quick look. “If I were Bönninghaus I’d put in for a transfer.”

And that was only the beginning.

Much later she realized that she could have chosen a better time to tell him about the forger. But by then it was too late. She mentioned it over dinner the next evening, and a nice dinner it was, of venison because it was the season, and with vegetables from their own garden. He listened, and only when she was finished did he ask questions.

“He is threatening me and Mother, and he has been blackmailing Mitzi all along?”

“Yes.”

“And she never said anything?”

“She mentioned it once, but it had been manageable amounts, and she wanted to keep the peace. Now he wants ten thousand Swiss francs. We scraped together three and a half, but he wants the rest before he’ll give her the paper. She can’t continue working like this. If anyone asked to see her Trade Pass, it would all unravel for her.”

For a while they ate in silence, then he put down knife and fork and said, “Do you know where he lives?”

“Not exactly. Mitzi and your mother would know. I went along just once.”

He called the apartment from the telephone on the wall in the kitchen while she sat staring at her uneaten food. She heard him speak to his mother and to Mitzi. When he came back he said, “I’ll go and talk to him.”

He went to the bedroom and minutes later came back wearing his panzer fatigues, the black-holstered pistol, and lace-up boots.

“Now? You are going now?”

“Yes. I’ll be back before morning.” He pulled out the chair next to her and sat down. “The pistol I left with you and Erika in Vienna that day. Where is it?”

“Why?”

“I want to see it.”

She had to think. “In the bedroom,” she said. “Probably still in the same drawer.”

“Bring it. Please.”

She brought it and put it on the table, on the white table cloth between dishes and candles. He sat looking at it. He picked it up. “Was it ever fired?”

“God no.”

He dropped the magazine into his palm, jacked out the shell in the chamber, and quickly within seconds took the gun apart. It lay in pieces on the table and he examined those one by one and clicked them back together. The shell went into the magazine and the magazine into the grip. He worked the slide and watched through the port as the shell slid into the chamber. He put the pistol back on the table and looked up at Clara standing there.

“Keep the safety on,” he said. “We’ll have to replace the hammer spring once in a while but the armourer can do that in a minute. With this model the lever has to be down. And keep it loaded like this. If you ever have to use it, just move the safety catch. Up, like this.”

“You are scaring me.”

“I am saying if.
If
. Most likely that will never happen.”

He left soon after that, in his old leather army coat on the Norton, wearing goggles and helmet. She said to him that he’d not ridden it for some time, but he said nothing to that. He adjusted the goggles and nodded to her and kicked in the gear.

Eventually she went to bed, but she could not sleep and so stood up again and haunted the house. Anna came in robe and slippers from the lean- to and asked if she needed anything.