Clara (30 page)

There was a light snow falling and the fields were white and black. The mountains when they reached them later that day stood nearly blue with ice, with frozen runoff like sculptures showing between trees and rock, hanging from granite lips in enormous creations.

IT WAS REMARKABLE
, the speed with which Mitzi was recovering. Some days she had pain in that hip and at the back of her thigh, but Dr. Gottschalk said it was natural that some tissue would have been offended during the procedure. The pain would disappear in time.

Three weeks after the operation she was able to walk with only one cane, and on that Sunday Clara took time away from the manuscript and she and Mitzi rode the cable car to the restaurant at the top of the mountain. They had coffee and pastry, and they sat and looked out the picture windows at the valley below with the afternoon sun low and orange skimming the faces of mountains as far as they could see.

From a cliff to the left of the restaurant, hang gliders were jumping off, young men and women laughing and kidding each other, dressed in ski clothing and helmets and
goggles and gloves. They clung to the frames of their brightly coloured wings and took running starts at the cliff, and they leapt and sailed away in slow spirals and long ellipses descending to the valley floor a thousand metres below. On the sunside slopes some of them caught the updrafts and climbed to begin all over again.

“Look at those two,” said Mitzi. She pointed at a couple in bright clothing kissing and touching barehanded before they put on gloves to leap off the mountain.

“Were you ever in love?” said Clara abruptly. “Forgive me. I’m not sure what I’m asking.”

Mitzi turned and studied her. “What a question. What brought that on?”

“I find myself thinking back a fair bit these days. Don’t you?”

“I try not to. You know I was in love. That blond little Pole. Don’t you remember?”

“I do. What I meant to ask was,
how much
in love? What kind of love.”

“Enough and in different ways. A few men. Cecilia, what a fine woman. Erika. Your brother Peter, that noble man. Danni. You. Does that count? Albert, of course.”

“It all counts,” she said.

She was remembering that when she was young and had little past, she could not wait to leap forward into the future, leap off just like these young people with the full confidence she would be able to control and shape her life; now when she looked into the mirror and accepted what
she saw, she knew that her past was all she had. And how was it? How did it feel?

She knew of old people who were terribly plagued by their past, by what they had done to others, or not done for them. Mistakes made, wrong turns, and no way back. Old people in homes, their lips moving all the time, explaining, justifying, remaking conversations and actions. Looking back all day long through the merciless and warped telescope of hindsight.

She thought about this all the way down the mountain, and later that day she finally understood in her heart the genesis of a core Christian idea. A myth like most, but what a useful one.

And something relating precisely to that, something from literature, cutting right to the heart of it.

Late that night, she calculated the time difference and at one o’clock in the morning she called Willa on her camel farm in Australia and gave her the gist of it. Willa, an English major before starting all over again to become a vet, Willa knew it.

“William Butler Yeats,” she said. “Look it up. It’s got to be in his
Purgatory
.”

She looked it up that very night, and there it was. Nailed down, perfect:

SHE GOT SOME SLEEP
that night, not much. She kept thinking that as a child she’d been simply able to confess sins; speak them into that patient ear behind the grille. Then go to the altar, rattle off her penance, and walk away, go skipping home, feeling free and relieved. What magic. What simple pleasure, that lightness.

But there was also something else, something quite to the contrary. It would come to her; not now perhaps. It was some mature thing, bone-hard and far beyond the simple lightness of a myth.

Next day the van came from the provincial archives, and a young man in jeans and a T-shirt and windbreaker carried down the file boxes.

“Just those six,” she told him. “Not the ones with the red labels. They should go down to the basement, if you wouldn’t mind. I’d be grateful. Just set them down by the door and I’ll put them away later.” She slipped him a ten-euro bill.

He looked at it and nodded. “Mr. Hofer said he’d call you later today or tomorrow morning to discuss things.”

“Fine,” she said.

By noon she was back at the computer, at the manuscript. Just another hundred pages to go. Then the revisions, the word-for-word checking. Some rewriting, and finally sending it off to Frankfurt.

OVER CHRISTMAS OF
1942 she and her mother would leave the children with Anna while they went to see the newsreels at the small movie house at the back of the post office in St. Töllden. She never caught another glimpse of Albert and she had no idea where he was now, but on the screen it was always good news on all fronts. Their soldiers were gaining ground everywhere and liberated people were welcoming them and tossing flowers at their tanks. The war would be won any day now, the announcers said.

“I know a man that’s hiding on a farm,” whispered Mrs. Dorfer, the milkwoman. “He walked away from the eastern front, imagine, all that way and he says the war in Russia is going very badly. He says the entire sixth army is surrounded. No medical supplies and no food. They don’t even have fuel for their tanks, he says.”

The radio reported that a student organization called White Rose had been secretly distributing anti-government leaflets. A brother-and-sister team had been behind this act of treason. The Gestapo had found them all and executed them. Nearly a hundred students in their early twenties, said the radio.

In June 1943, she recorded in her notes that banks had to report all private money, and unless one was well connected to the party, all money was confiscated in exchange for War Bonds. Food was scarce, even with stamps, and all manufactured goods were of ersatz quality. Bread came blended with sawdust, coffee was made from dried figs and acorns, clothing was of the poorest cotton mixed with wood fibres, buttons were of pressed cardboard. Glass, steel, wood, and metal were unavailable.

In St. Töllden two men came to the house, showed official papers, and said that everyone had to hand over whatever gold they owned for the war effort.

“Your wedding bands,” they said. In exchange they gave them small iron rings with an inscription that said,
I gave gold for iron
.

Two days a week she toured on her bicycle from farm to farm to trade cigarette stamps for goat milk and goat cheese and for the rare piece of meat, mostly rabbit.

In Italy, in June, Mussolini was deposed by the Fascist Grand Council. He was arrested and taken as a prisoner to the Gran Sasso Hotel in the Abruzzi Mountains.

“The Italians at least have the sense to get rid of these
people,” said her mother. “Why can’t we do the same?”

But no sooner was Mussolini locked up than he was rescued by German paratroopers and taken to northern Italy to live in hiding.

The Allies landed in Italy in September, and Italy capitulated. The radio said that unemployed Italian soldiers had formed gangs of partisans and were fighting their former allies from the rear. Those same partisans later found and arrested Mussolini near his hiding place at Lake Como. They killed him along with his mistress, and they hung them from their heels like game in a market square in Milan. The public spat at the corpses and threw rocks at them.

The Americans built bomber bases in Italy, and from March 1944 on the raids came regularly. Oil refineries were hit, and railroad points, and factories of any kind.

For the St. Töllden file she noted that in the beginning it seemed that homes were not being bombed on purpose, only by mistake. But six months later smaller urban centres too were set afire in planned raids, day and night.

On March 23, 1944, the cardboard tube factory in Burgenland was hit. Also hit in that same daylight raid were Albert’s former base, and three of the cottages in the village, including the one she and her family had lived in. The munitions depot and buried gasoline tanks exploded and not much was left of any part of the compound. The cardboard tube factory, it turned out, had been making rocket parts, and it burned to the ground. The Polish
prisoners there all died; the ones working in the fields, including the professor and the thin blond one who had played the harmonica, survived and were taken that night to another basement in the area.

IN JULY
1944, the generals’ plot against Hitler became the sixth known attempt on his life. People learned the name of Colonel Stauffenberg along an underground chain of rumours and whispers.

“A hero,” Mrs. Dorfer said, leaning on her bicycle. “Finally. Thank God.” She put her finger across her lips. “What a brave man. And did you hear? Blind in one eye and one arm gone.”

But the thing had failed, and in its wake perhaps a thousand army officers and their families were killed by the SS.

“Shot, hanged, stabbed, garrotted, their heads hacked off,” the announcer said firmly on the radio, and she wrote it down word for word, for what it said about the spirit of that time.

When in later years the assignments from Dr. Hufnagel in Geneva gave her access to Nuremberg files, she spent weeks at the warehouse where the files were stored. She sat at one of the small desks in the research room and went through box after box of records and sworn depositions that gave a clear picture of the event.

Stauffenberg had placed his explosive briefcase under the conference table at Rastenburg and had left the room. Someone kicked the briefcase over, and the bomb went off
but the heavy table acted as a shield and Hitler suffered barely a scratch.

Many officers had been involved in the planning of the plot and of the subsequent surrender to the Allies and the running of the country. The more famous ones were Generals Speidel, Fromm, Olbrecht, von Witzleben, von Böck, Höpner, and a dozen more. Even Field Marshal Rommel was accused of having known of it. General Fromm, who was the one coward and the weak link, switched sides when the bomb did not kill Hitler. He betrayed the plotters to the SS.

All the generals involved were killed, as were many of their subordinate officers, and in many cases their wives and children and parents also. Stauffenberg on Fromm’s orders was shot dead in the ministry yard. In his punishment of the men whose acceptance he had always craved but never received, Hitler ordered some generals to be beheaded. He brought back the broadaxe for that purpose, and the hooded axeman dressed in black.

“A block of wood from some mythical five-hundred-year oak,” said the sworn deposition. “In a basement room, with tiered benches for those who were ordered to watch.”

Rommel, because of his fame and popularity, was promised that his family would not be touched, and he was given the choice between a pistol and poison. He swallowed cyanide, did so in the passenger seat of the staff car, not far from his house.

Other officers chose the handgun, the standard Walther P38 9mm parabellum. A pistol like Albert’s. They filled their mouths with water and stuck the barrel in there, and the bullet and gas expansion combined with the hydrostatic pressure left almost nothing of their heads for Hitler’s deputies to ridicule.

And Albert, because he had been one of Field Marshal Rommel’s favourite officers, was sent from Yugoslavia straight to the Russian front, where the average survival rate for newly arrived officers was one day and a half.