Clara (26 page)

WHEN ALBERT CAME HOME
on leave from France he arrived unannounced by train, he and one of his lieutenants. From the station he came home in a taxi, and he climbed out and stood paying the driver through the open window. The taxi with the lieutenant in the back moved off, and Albert turned. She saw him from the living-room window and did not recognize him until he had walked most of the garden path to the front door.

They sat on the couch holding hands and holding each other for long minutes without speaking. She stroked his cheek. His forehead. The powderburns and scars around the outlines of the dust goggles worn for weeks. She touched his arm.

“It’ll be fine,” he said to her. “They just fixed it in place. It doesn’t hurt much any more.”

Willa came tottering in from the kitchen, watching
him shyly. Behind her in the doorway stood Anna. She bent and whispered to Willa and then let go of the toddler’s hand and gave her a small push in Albert’s direction. He slipped off the couch to his knees and held out his good arm.

They had five days. There was so much to talk about it had to be done in considered sessions, in topics, small strokes leading up to the full picture.

She had yet to see a doctor, she admitted. There was none at the base, and in the village Anna was as good a midwife and doula as any. Clara insisted she was fine. She was so much in need of love and kindness she never left his side all those days he was home. Anna like a den mother looked after them again with food and drink and whatever else they wanted. Anna also did the basement work during the day, sweeping and carrying the latrine buckets to the pit in the field behind the house.

In the early mornings two grey trucks with tarpaulin covers would drive around the house to the basement entrance, and SS men in field grey would unlock the hatch from outside and watchs the prisoners climb on board. Some would guard them while one with a submachine gun stepped down into the basement and made sure it was empty. After sundown the prisoners would be brought back, fed from a container on the back of the trucks, and locked up again.

She and Albert could hear them at night under the floor planks, talking, murmuring, stirring on their strawbeds.
In the far corner of the house, by the fire place in the living room, they could hear at times the sound of a harmonica. Once in a while, before they were herded below at the end of the day, one of the SS men would turn on the hose at the back and the men would be allowed to strip and wash with a block of lye soap under the stream of water from the well pump. The Polish prisoners were white and gaunt and bearded. Two had grey hair, and one of them wore horn-rimmed glasses that he took off and set carefully on the stone sill before lining up for the hose.

Albert had asked her if she minded, and she’d said, No, she did not, even if it was a clear attempt by the obersturmführer to get back at her and Albert.

Not only did she not mind, she said, but the men were company for her, a human presence she was sheltering. They were an opportunity to make good for something that she did not quite understand, and they were certainly safer in her basement than in a
POW
camp.

On the sixth day the lieutenant came to pick up Albert in a taxi. She left Willa with Anna while she came along to the railroad station, holding hands with Albert all the way there. The car sped along the gravel road through fields long and wide to either side; vanishing lines, row after row, of potatoes and cabbage, and of mountains of sugar beets to be chopped up and boiled down in enormous vats for their sweetness. In the fields hundreds of prisoners of war were doing labour for the farmers while armed guards watched from raised platforms like hunters
in the fall with the buttplates of their rifles resting on their thighs.

Back at the cottage the radio in the living room reported that on the previous day Hitler had made the French sign the articles of surrender in the very railroad car where Germany had been forced to sign the treaty terms of 1919. Immediately following the ceremony, the German army razed the area around the railroad car. The only thing left standing was the statue of the French Marshal Foch, the announcer said, so that the marshal from up high might witness the final outcome of his act of humiliation.

LATE IN JULY
Albert’s father suffered a heart attack in the bathroom of the Vienna apartment. He fell down shaving and by the time Cecilia found him he lay dead on the tile floor.

There was a funeral that Clara could not attend because on orders from the SS District Office she had to care for two prisoners who had fallen ill. The guards had notified the office and Obersturmführer Bönninghaus had come to the house to see for himself. He inspected the back door and he strode into the kitchen to see the door leading down to the basement from there. He found the light switch and clicked it on, and walked down the creaking stairs. She followed.

The two men lay weak and white as candlewax on their strawbeds. One was young, and the other was the older
one with the glasses. Sweat beaded on his forehead and she reached out to feel his temperature, but Bönninghaus told her sharply not to.

“There is no need to touch them,” he said. “They have a fever and in most cases it passes in a week. Give them water and once or twice during the day simple food such as a broth.”

“Why not get them a doctor?”

“We will, if they are not better in a week. Until then just give them liquids several times a day.”

Back upstairs in the kitchen he studied the lock on the basement door. It was old and heavy of hammered iron with a large key in the hole.

“Good,” he said. “Leave it locked at all times, unless you or the maid are down there cleaning up during the day. Do not talk to them, do not ask questions. Any kind of fraternization is strictly prohibited. Do you understand?”

She nodded her head, and he stood looking her up and down. “I said do you understand?”

“I do.”

“Good. I hear your husband was awarded his Iron Cross First Class. Where is he now?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

When he was gone she carried down a pitcher of water and two glasses. The men drank thirstily, sitting up in their foul strawbeds. The one with grey hair reached for the spectacles by his side and put them on. He looked up
at her. He said something in Polish, then he said, “Thank you” in English.

She had Anna boil soup bones and vegetables, and she fed them the broth and gave them slices of dark bread. She pressed apples and fed them the juice. One night near the end of the first week she put on a dark coat and in the co-operative orchard at the end of the street she filled her pockets with apples that lay on the ground and took them down into the cellar. The prisoners bit into them gingerly because their teeth were loose in their jawbones.

And the two that had been ill did get better. The fever lifted and before long they departed in the mornings with the rest and came back at night.

But she kept giving them fruit, sweet plums and apples, all of which she collected by stealth at night. When she took down her gifts, Willa stood at the open basement door with her hair parted and tied in two little side plaits and watched.

The one with grey hair and glasses told her he had been an English high-school teacher in Warsaw. As if to prove it he said,
“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dream and endeavours to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

He stood proudly in the cellar under a bare light bulb quoting this, a gaunt man with glasses and a wild beard. He stepped back.

“Henry David Thoreau,” she said. She handed him an apple.

One other night he said to her, “What is a loon?”

“A loan?”

“Yes,” he said. “I quote:
In the fall the loon came, as usual, to moult and bathe in the pond, making the woods ring with his wild laughter before I had risen
.”

“Ah. A
loon
. It’s a North American kind of duck with a black-and-white spotted back and a very pointy beak. Its eyes are nearly red, and it makes a sound like no other bird. It laughs like a crazy person, which is perhaps where the expression
loony
comes from. It may also come from
luna
, the moon.”

“Loony,” he said, and tasted the word.
“Loony.”

The others spoke to her through the professor. Some weeks later, one of them asked for a knife. “You don’t have to,” said the professor. “But he is a good boy.” He pulled down his lower eyelid with his forefinger. “I will watch.”

She let them have the paring knife, even if Anna’s eyes were round and still when Clara took it downstairs. Three nights later, when she went down into the cellar, the man spoke to the professor and the professor replied. They were all standing on the dirt floor in their cracked shoes and torn clothes, looking on expectantly, and the man reached under his strawbed and handed her something.

It was a small duck carved in wood. It had wheels turning on wooden dowels and an optimistic upturned beak. Individual feathers had been carved into tail and folded wings. Under the body, set into the spinning dowel, was a
small tongue of wood that made a clacking sound when the wheels turned.

The man said something and pointed at the door at the top of the stairs, and the professor said, “He says it’s for the little girl. He hopes she’ll like it.”

THEY BECAME
the nearest thing to friends, and when any of them got sick again, she and Anna made them well. She put plasters on their cuts, she gave them fruit for their teeth, and she let them have Albert’s razor. The guards saw them clean-shaven but made no comment to her.

September passed, and October. The days were sunny and warm, and the harvest that year of 1940 was the best in years. The grapes were sweet and heavy, and when the first nightfrost came it concentrated the sugar in the grapes still on vines, and the warmth of midday and early afternoons turned them rich and golden. Ice-wine was made from them, and a local Tokay, and the golden Burgenländer in brown bottles that travelled from there by rail and in the holds of ships to London and New York and Sydney, war or not.

By then she already knew that she was pregnant again. She had spoken to Anna, who had handed her a glass jar to urinate into. Anna had taken the jar to a woman in the village who kept cages of certain kinds of rabbits just for that purpose. Within days Clara knew.

And as soon as she knew, she became still inside, and happy. Her mind and her body both understood and knew,
and they prepared for the event. She smiled more often, and she moved more slowly and was more careful on steps. And since the rabbit woman knew, so did the neighbours. The women came to the door in their kerchiefs and their long skirts and wooden mudshoes, and they smiled with embarrassment as they offered reed baskets with eggs and garden tomatoes and golden grapes, heavy and sweet.

One morning, as she sat at the sunlit table, the grapes in the bowl and the time of year and her very mood reminded her of something, and she looked up Rilke, and there it was:
Autumn Day
.

AND AS SHE CALMED
, she rediscovered her love of reading, writing, and thinking. She described the men in the basement and what they meant to her, and she typed
the pages with carbon copies and she placed them into files she was keeping for Willa and for the new baby. She updated her journal, and she began making notes for future essays and of ideas for poetry, even a longer work of fiction that she might tackle when all this was over. She knew she was preparing the ground for creative work to come; not for the present, because all her love and energy in those weeks went into Willa and into the new life inside her; it went into every thought of Albert, and it went to the men housed in her cellar who were so strong a human presence and responsibility in her life. It went to Anna, and into every passing moment of every day.

One weekend her friends came to visit, all of them, Mitzi, Erika, Cecilia, and Daniela. It was November, but still sunny and not too cold during the day. They went for walks and exchanged news, and she told them of the prisoners and her illicit help for them. On Saturday they prepared a fine harvest lunch in the garden, a long trestle table and wooden benches, and she invited all her neighbours and everyone brought something to share: wine and cider, meat and casseroles of chicken stew and roast pheasant and venison, bread still warm with wood ashes stuck to the crust, and bowls of fruit. Whatever food was left over they put away and when the prisoners were home and the trucks had left she and her friends carried it down to them in the basement.

On Sunday evening she took the women to the train station in a taxi, and on the way home she felt a sudden
sharp pain in her abdomen. In an instant the day was no longer fine, the fields as they passed no longer rich with black soil. She sat still and afraid in the backseat of the car, and at home she went straight to the bathroom. She locked the door and pulled down her underpants and immediately in the cotton fabric saw the smear of bright-red blood.