Clara (28 page)

She thought of Professor Freud’s X-factor in the human equation, psychological health or sickness, and who was to say which was which, by whose rule and by whose morality. Aristotle with his good for the many before the good for the few, or Nietzsche. Hard and factual. Godless, accountable to none but himself, but still fully accountable.

Over the next several weeks the obersturmführer came many more times, often late in the evening, and each time she felt more afraid. It was as if he were building momentum to do something, gathering his recklessness.

She wrote letters to Albert, not knowing that they never arrived because all mail was routed through the district office where it was steamed open, read, and censored, or more often simply discarded. Nor did eight of the nine letters that Albert wrote in those weeks arrive, in their case because of sinkings in the Mediterranean where the Royal Navy was more and more in control. The one letter she did receive had lines crossed out with heavy black ink, but she carried it with her everywhere and read it over and over again, like a child, savouring the comfort it brought.

Defiantly she kept giving apples to the prisoners, and some evenings she invited the professor up into the kitchen and she spoke English with him, discussed American and English writers at the table there; their boldness, the absence of fear or caution in their language. The clarity of their characters. Once in a while, and one by one, she allowed the men to come up the basement stairs and use the bathroom, use the soap and shower there.

Anna saw all this and shook her head in disapproval. But Anna cleaned, Anna found food where food was increasingly hard to find, Anna helped with Willa. Anna spoke Hungarian to Willa, and Willa for nearly three years heard German, English, and Hungarian.

Clara told the professor of her fears with the obersturmführer, and he listened and thought about it, and then he told her not to lock the basement door.

“What if he checks?”

“We know he did the first few times. Has he checked lately?”

“No.”

“So risk it,” said the professor. “If you need help, scream.”

She delayed going to bed so as not to be in her nightgown when his knock came. Even when she was fully dressed he stared at her stomach, and once when Willa came out of her room, barefoot and in her nightgown and rubbing her eyes, he stared at the child in a way that froze her blood. She stepped between him and Willa and without turning around she said, “Willa-dear, please go back to your room. I’ll be there in a minute.”

He leaned to see past her.

“Willa, now. Back to your room.”

They heard the door click shut, and he said, “Maybe next time I’ll bring some candy.” He smiled and put on his cap and walked out.

That night she stood at the chest of drawers, and she opened the second one, reached under the stack of Albert’s shirts and took out the pistol.

Sitting on the edge of her bed, she wept as she held the gun with two hands and studied it. She put it down, dried her eyes, and picked it up again. The safety catch. She could not remember what Albert had said: should the safety be up or down?

She pushed the gun under the pillow. Then she remembered. Of course: he had stored it with the safety on, and had told her simply to shift the lever and the gun would
be ready. She took it out, slipped the lever up, and put the gun back under the pillow. She held up her hands in the fading light and willed them to stop shaking.

During the nights that followed she dreamt she found Freud in her house, in his spats and vested suits and gold fob, researching a book on Women Cloaked in Madness, he said. She dreamt that Dr. Mannheim was in her living room, holding forth on glandular activities and their effects as yet poorly understood. And she saw dear Anna standing at the stove, shaking her head, and stirring a large pot of chicken paprikash with the steam rising and condensing in her grey old hair.

And early one morning in a terror dream she glimpsed Albert’s face under a helmet at the very moment something fast and hard struck him from behind. The helmet slipped and his head fell forward, out of the picture. Only a landscape of sand dunes remained, sand blowing off the crest like spume torn from ocean waves.

She woke and sat up. Her heart was pounding.

She rose, padded heavily into Willa’s room, and bent over her bed. The girl was asleep on her side, her two little hands close to her face as if they were holding something. She turned and left, and had almost reached her own bedroom when there was the familiar pounding at the door.

MUCH LATER
, when she had calmed and could see things clearly again, she would eventually understand that there had been all the signs and the veerings of paths
to this hour. A bending of fatelines to this point by energy fields, of which perhaps one might be controlled, or two, but never all.

In some way her body understood this, or some snake-brain part of her did, and when she opened the door it was already nearly all decided, it was written if not done. But he pushed his way in, locked the door and turned, and this time there was something new in his face: violence, she felt, and the fixed stare of the goat in heat, the cloven-hoofed thing.

He snatched her wrist and pulled her toward her bedroom. He put his finger to his lips. “Not one sound,” he hissed. “We don’t want to wake the little girl, do we?”

With the door closed and by the light of the bedside lamp he said, “Take off your nightgown. Stand there and let it drop.” He stood with his legs apart in black breeches and boots, the flap of the pistol holster unfastened with the holed strip of leather curling away.

“Now,” he said, and he took off his cap. He let it sail playfully onto the bed and reached up to smooth his blond, thin hair.

“But …” she said. In supporting her belly her hand was tightening the material of the nightgown. Her belly was round and enormous.

“But nothing. Let’s see.”

“I’m eight and a half months pregnant.” If there was another way out, she prayed it would show itself soon. She would remember this later; she actually prayed, reverted
to her childhood and appealed to some well-meaning power to come to her aid.

He grinned. “I know. How exciting. Let’s see.”

“See what?”

“Don’t talk. Take it off.”

And something did come to help her then. Some strength or inspiration she would never know, but it showed her a way and it gave her courage.

“You just want to see,” she said.

“Yes. Stop talking. Take it off.”

“You won’t hurt us?”

“
Us?
How quaint.” He shook his head. “Don’t be afraid. Take it off.”

“So go sit on that chair,” she said, and there it was, that help from somewhere. “Sit over there.” She waved him away, moved past him to the lamp.

He squinted at her, suspicious for a moment. He opened the bedside table drawer, stirred the few contents with his hand, and closed it again. He backed away and sat on the chair.

“Go ahead,” he said.

She slipped out of herself then, and from some safe distance could watch herself unbutton the gown at throat and breasts, taking it off like an open shirt, shoulders, arms, and lowering it to her waist now and slipping it down over this enormous belly to drop and pool on the floor.

He sat staring, with his face flushed, his mouth open. He licked his lips.

“Turn,” he said.

And she turned like an artist’s model in the yellow light, looked down, and saw the shifting shadows of her heavy breasts, her nipples large and dark, her stomach with the uneven bumps of the baby, perhaps an arm here, the bottom there. She moved her thighs and belly, the breasts sideways now, a monstrous shadow game, at the tips of her nipples the tiniest droplets catching the light. She watched his face, his greed. She felt advantage and became hopeful.

Until he moved abruptly, as though he were shaking something off, and he stood up and said, “Lie on that bed. On your back.”

When she hesitated he gave her a shove that sent her backwards heavily onto the bed with her belly swaying. “Don’t move,” he said and raised his hand at her. He took off his tunic and unbuckled the gun belt. The trousers then, his fingers fumbling with the fly.

Coldly she shifted and moved over, inched her hand under the pillow. The moment his fingers forced their way between her legs and his staring face came down she brought out her hand, put the gun to the side of his head, and squeezed the trigger. It was not difficult at all. She felt a wild and reckless satisfaction.

In the noise and flash she saw his head jerk sideways while the other side exploded. He sagged on top of her and now she screamed and struggled out from under him.

She slapped at the blood and gore on her face and body.

She was holding her nightgown in front of her with one hand, the gun still in the other, when the prisoners came running. She dropped the gun on the bed, and the men spoke rapidly among themselves.

“Is this your pistol?” said the professor.

She nodded.

“Put something on,” he said. “Just the nightgown, or a robe. Don’t wipe his blood off.”

Anna came and stared, and in her bedroom Willa was calling out. “Go look after Willa,” she told Anna. “Keep her door closed.”

The professor handed her pistol to one of the men. They found the empty shell and the man hurried away with both. The hole in the mortar on the stone wall was surrounded by specks of blood and pale matter, and they talked about it. One of the men ran down into the basement, and the professor tapped the floor in the corner by the armoire. The man came back up and nodded, and they shifted the heavy armoire aside. They took the obersturmführer’s gun from its holster and the professor stood close in the corner and covered his face with one hand while he fired the gun into the very corner of the wood floor there. He picked up the shell and wiped it, and they moved the armoire back where it had been. The professor calculated the way the shell might have been ejected and tossed it onto the bed.

He took the dead man’s hand, pressed his gun into it, and folded the fingers firmly around the butt. The hand
fell to the bedsheet and the fingers relaxed and let loosely go. The obersturmführer’s pants were undone, his fly open. Pale flesh and hair showed there.

“He killed himself,” the professor said urgently to her. “Look at me. Listen!” He shook her by the shoulders. “He killed himself. He was trying to rape you, and perhaps he became ashamed. Or something. You don’t have to understand his reason. Do not wash your face or anything.” He let her go. “All right? We’re going back down. Talk to Anna and Willa. No one has seen us. We weren’t here. Do you understand? Say yes.”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“When we are back downstairs, lock the basement door, and call the police. Your gun is buried in the cellar. No one will ever find it.”

THE POLICE CAME
, and because this was an SS officer they were afraid and called the district office. By then it was early morning. An SD major came, and Gestapo drove down from Vienna. They stood in her bedroom in their boots and bulky coats and looked at everything. They stepped here and there and examined the blood and the dead man. They whispered among themselves. A photographer took pictures of the scene, and the popping of his flashbulbs was loud in the room: the bed, the SS man’s state of undress, the gun in his hand, the blood on her face and body as much as the nightgown allowed. No one closed the man’s fly.

The SD major allowed her to bathe and get dressed, then he sat her down in the living room for a more detailed account. She tried not to stray from what she had said earlier.

He listened. He made notes. “I have your file here, Doctor Leonhardt,” he said and held up a folder. “The Gold Party Pin, the Blood Order in your family. Your husband a decorated colonel at the front.”

“Yes?” she said. “Please understand that I never applied for—”

He waited. He sat watching her. “Applied for what?”

“Never mind. Go ahead.” She hid her face behind her hands for a moment. “This has been – you understand.”

“Of course,” he said. “And the Motherhood Cross for what you had to endure for your unborn child seems inadequate for this. I will put your name forward for the Civilian Medal of Honour.”

And so it went. In time she would have to explain all this and it would be nearly impossible.

But eventually that day the house was hers again. Anna came with bucket and brush and scrubbed the bedroom. She filled the bullet hole with toothpaste, washed the blood off the wall, stripped the bed, and did the laundry. All the while Clara sat with Willa, and held her and talked to her.

Later that day Anna made the rounds among neighbours. She came back with a bulging bag and in the late afternoon she made a large pot of chicken paprikash.

It would always be one of Clara’s favourite memories, how that night they fed the men in the cellar, using every cup and plate they had, and how she and Anna and Willa then sat on the lower steps of the basement stairs and watched them eat.

TWO WEEKS LATER
she gave birth to Emma, right there in her bedroom, with Anna more capable than anyone else she might have had by her side. Emma was fine and healthy, and soon she even slept through the night. Clara wrote regularly to Albert, even if she heard back only once more. The battles of Tobruk, Gazala, and Mersa Matruh were reported on the radio and in the newsreels, and on many Saturdays when the previous week’s newsreel reached the cinemas she took Willa and later Emma too on the train to Vienna and they sat in the dark movie house, hoping to see news from Africa. Once for a few thrilling seconds they saw Albert on the screen in a
Welt im Bild
newsreel, walking with General Rommel around a destroyed tank all blackened with jagged metal sticking up.