Clara (24 page)

“Dear Anna. No. Go back to bed.”

“A hot chocolate. It’ll calm you.”

“No thanks. Oh wait, yes. Thank you.”

She sat in the living room, sat sideways with her sockfeet on the wooden bench around the ceramic stove and held the mug with both hands. She leaned against the warm tiles.

“Anything else?” said Anna.

“No. Thank you, Anna. Go to bed.”

Gradually the stove cooled and she added more wood. She was careful not to make noise. The clock on the wall ticked. It was a cuckoo clock but the sound was broken and so the bird came out silently and went back in and closed the little door with just the clicking of small cogs and hinges.

Albert came back at four in the morning. She was asleep on the couch with the blanket on her. She heard the motorcycle in some dream and woke when she heard the door. She sat up and her heart was pounding.

He was at the dining-room table, taking off the big coat. His hands were blackened and he smelled of something. Smoke. There was a mark on his cheek, a scrape with the blood wiped off. On the table lay a small stack of papers.

“Albert,” she said. “What happened?”

He raised a hand. “Don’t come near. Not now. I need a bath.”

“What did you do?”

He pointed at the papers. “I brought the documents.”

“How did you get them? What did you do?”

He shook his head. “Don’t ask. I brought the papers and none of us needs to worry about him any more.” From another pocket he took a wad of Swiss francs. “Three thousand. It was all I could find. Give it back to Mitzi.”

“All you
could find
? What did you do to him? Albert!”

“Shh. You’ll wake Willa. These are not normal times, Clara.” He turned toward the hall. “I’ll run a bath. Please don’t follow me. Look at the documents. There’s a Trade Pass for Mitzi too.”

“He made it while you were waiting? How did you get him to do that?”

“He had no choice. And I asked you not to follow me.” Albert stood in the bathroom, unbuttoning the fatigue jacket. Behind him the tub was filling, and holster and gunbelt lay coiled on the toilet lid. “I’m closing this door now, Clara,” he said. “There is nothing to worry about. Go look at the documents.”

“What is that smell, Albert? What did you do to that man?”

“What man? What smell?”

“That!” She sniffed.

“Dear Clara. Please go. We will not be talking about this again.” He closed the door.

But she stood there, listening. She could hear water running, and behind the steady sound of it she heard the harsh metallic clicks as he was taking apart his gun and putting it back together and reloading it. She would not have recognized the sounds had she not heard them only hours ago in the dining room.

She stood and leaned and listened. Emotions flooded her, horror and relief and hope, and in none of her feelings did she recognize the woman she had become in so short a time.

In her bedroom Willa woke and began to cry. It gave her an excuse to step away from the door.

ALL THOSE DOCUMENTS
were in her files now, in the boxes for the archives, and they weren’t the only horrific pieces of paper there. At first she had kept them as reminders for history, then for her children. At some point she almost sent them to Geneva along with some research assignments by Dr. Hufnagel for the United Nations; then the offer had come from the provincial archives for her own display section. She thought of them as useful for anyone who cared to find out how small fires ignored became infernos.

On the morning of the appointment she picked up Mitzi in a taxi and took her to the hospital. It was a new and private hospital in the outskirts of St. Töllden, founded by several specialists who had opted out of Medicare. Here they were providing treatment much more quickly and expensively than the government system, and
they were letting rooms and facilities to other specialists such as Dr. Gottschalk and the cardiologist in town.

Mitzi’s room was ready. It was a private room with one large window that overlooked not the new suburbs but the river and its northern floodplain; it overlooked the meadows rising to the mountains, and the mountains themselves. Bleak and harsh, snow everywhere; snowfields like mirrors in the sun, and snow and ice clinging to fault lines cold and blue on the shadowface of the mountain. Deep snow on meadows, and covered feeding stations stocked with hay and chestnuts for deer and for the stags that came down from the Italian saddle into the valley this hungry time of year.

Dr. Gottschalk examined Mitzi: heart, lungs, blood pressure, reflexes. She wrote prescriptions for the intravenous, and requested two X-rays. Clara walked alongside the orderly who was dressed in pristine whites from shoes to cap, and Mitzi already in her back-split hospital gown in the wheelchair. The corridor gleamed with light coming off vinyl tiles as off a frozen lake.

Later she sat in the chair by Mitzi’s bedside. Mitzi had the intravenous in the back of her hand. The veins there were dark in her pale skin, and the one with the needle in it was thicker than the others. Mitzi was smiling. She was getting drowsy. “Dear,” she said. “It’s good of you to be here.”

“After this,” Clara said. “When they discharge you, and that’ll be in just a few days, maybe a week, I want you to
come and stay with me. I’ll get Mrs. Sokol to make up the other room. You’ve seen it. There’s a good bed in it and good light. I want you to come there.”

“Well,” said Mitzi. “Maybe.”

“Not maybe. For sure. It’ll be waiting for you.”

Dr. Gottschalk came by once more. “We just got an
OR
and we’ll do the procedure tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock. The nurses will get you ready, Mitzi. No more solids, please. Just fluids between now and then. Jell-O tonight. How are you feeling?”

Mitzi smiled up at her. “Fine. Thank you, Caroline.”

“Good. Tomorrow, then.” Dr. Gottschalk patted her on the arm and left.

The sun was behind the mountain now, the sky pink. In the valley trees stood black and solemn against the snow. Deer at one of the feeding stations. She could just make them out: three, four.

She stayed while Mitzi ate her dinner of green and red Jell-O. She watched her old friend from the side having difficulty spearing small cubes of Jell-O with a plastic fork but eating with grim determination as though it could change anything, as though it mattered.

Her eyes filled and she turned away. Tears rolled down her cheeks, so many, coming from where she did not know. She dabbed at them fiercely, hoping Mitzi was not looking.
God. Lord. Remember. Teach us to care and not to care; Teach us to sit still …

She stood up and put her forehead to the cold window
glass. Out there lights were coming on, yellow in the blue of evening. No leaves on the trees, none on the fields.

Behind her, Mitzi said, “What can you see out there?”

“Not much, dear. Evening. It’s getting dark.” She turned back into the room. Mitzi lay against her pillow. The small bowl of Jell-O was empty.

“I’ll be going soon,” she said. “You rest. I’ll be back in the morning.” She leaned and kissed Mitzi on the forehead. Mitzi found her hand and patted it.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

THAT NIGHT, AT HOME
, she worked some more on the boxes. They were organized along national and regional topics, with chronological and subject dividers. St. Töllden during the war and during the aftermath figured prominently. Her personal files, her journals and notes to herself over the years, were organized in the two banker’s boxes with the red labels that she’d keep at the house. She had yet to decide what to do about them.

She found the journal for 1939 and leafed to November. There it was, in ink, in longhand:
A. back late at night with the documents. What happened? How to deal with this?
And above those words, in pencil, in shorthand:
I know the smell of gunpowder. In Landshut it came in the open window from the firing range
. Then in the margin, something else in shorthand that had been erased.

She was about to climb into bed when Willa called: the conference had been moved to Frankfurt, and she could
come after all. “Do you want me to? You aren’t too busy with the book right now?”

“No. And yes, of course I want you to come.”

“All right then. In a few days. Is everything all right?”

“Everything is fine. Mitzi is in the hospital. They’re doing her hip. Tomorrow.”

“Give her my love. Tell her a hip is nothing. We are experimenting with doing them on expensive breeders.”

“On camels?”

“Yes. It’s a congenital thing with some of them. If we can get a few more calves out of her, why not. Camels, people. It’s all much the same bones and connective tissue. Even similar muscles.”

“Well, I’ll mention it.”

In the morning she was back at the hospital, equipped with several pages of manuscript, writing pad and pen, prepared for a long wait. There was still time to sit with Mitzi before they came with the gurney and lifted her onto it to take her to the prep room.

Clara walked alongside as far as the sliding milk-glass door. “I’ll be here,” she said, and Mitzi craned her neck to see her until the door slid shut.

She waited at one of the white round tables in the coffee shop. Doctors and nurses came and went. She waited. She had completed five pages of manuscript in draft translation when Caroline Gottschalk came into the coffee shop and stood at the table.

“Everything’s gone well,” she said. She looked tired. She
stepped out of one of her white hospital clogs and briefly set her stockingfoot on the tiles. “She’s in recovery now. We’ll keep her for a few days, and then she can go into home-care. By then she can put some very light weight on it.”

“She’ll be fine?”

“Good as new. Eventually.”

Four days later Willa arrived at the Innsbruck airport, just in time to help bring Mitzi to the house. Her plane had descended into the valley through a snowstorm and it was still snowing when they took a taxi to the hospital. They came back with Mitzi in an ambulance. Two strong orderlies helped her up the stairs, and helped put her to bed. There was a walker, and they left it standing by the bedside.

“My,” said Mitzi and studied the walker. “Who would have thought.”

Willa, decisive and capable, sat at Mitzi’s bedside and took her pulse. It was weak and irregular. She said so in the living room to Clara. “She’ll need lots of rest and good food. A bit of protein for healing. Soft scrambled eggs, vegetables, salads, a bit of beef stew. An open window once in a while and a bit of weight-bearing. More and more each day.”

“She can have all that.”

“What happens, Mom,” said Willa. “Healing and aging, the whole thing about cell renewal is like making copies of copies of copies. Cells forget what they looked like when they started out. The original is long gone, and so
the information gets less and less distinct. Eventually it’s nearly illegible. And when on top of that some tiny code misfires, that’s how we die, Mom. Like Dad. Doctor Kessler did the best he could.”

“I always thought so.”

Emma came over for dinner, and Willa entertained them with events on the camel farm. They were closer to a solution for the fetal necrosis syndrome; it might have to do with rare beetle larvae going around the world now, ingested by the mother with certain kinds of feed. Good news was also that there was success with a new crossbreed with pure Mongolians that thrived in the harshest conditions.

“Much better than four-wheel drive cars,” she said. It was a joke, but nobody got it.

Emma said, “I’m teaching again, Willa. Part-time at the college. History. Sixteenth Century, right now. The English Reformation.”

“Oh good. I’m glad for you. Speaking of history. I’m sorry, but I need to ask. Which of them took the Knight’s Cross, Mom? I want to know.”

“I asked you not to do that, Willa. Let it go.”

“What’s that?” said Emma.

“Nothing,” she said. “Ignore her.”

After Emma had left and they had gotten ready for bed, they met by the bathroom door in their long nightgowns like two ghosts in shrouds, and Willa said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you hadn’t told her.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“But it does.”

“Then pick a better time. Right now there are problems with one of Tom’s kids. The older one. He was arrested a few weeks ago.”

“Arrested. For what?”

“Don’t ask. I shouldn’t say anything. You can ask her, but be gentle. You know what I mean, and maybe while you’re here, spend some more time with her. Just the two of you.”

“We’re planning to.”

On the day before she had to fly back, Willa said she wanted to put a candle on her father’s grave.

They walked to the cemetery, she and her daughters, bought a candle at a stand, and put it in the lantern by the stone. Vandals had been in the cemetery and spray-painted looping graffiti on headstones and Roman burial tablets set into crypt walls two thousand years old, dayglo symbols or words in a foreign language no one understood. The stone angel had black paint on her wings and hands. At some headstones old people were rubbing at the graffiti with brushes.