Clara (31 page)

Such was the year of 1944. By then SS Obergruppenführer Bernhard Heydrich was also dead. He, mastermind of the Final Solution, of the death camps in the East, and of the SS Einsatzgruppen that had murdered Jews in the occupied territories by the hundreds of thousands. He had been killed by Czechoslovakian partisans, and in revenge for his killing the SS had murdered the entire male population of the town of Lidice, men and boys, all.

She never knew that Albert had been sent to Russia. She had no idea where he was, and never heard from him after they left the base in Burgenland. She wrote to the last field post number she had for him, poured out her heart and sent the letters off like messages in a bottle.

Writing was still saving her. Even just getting ready to set pen to paper forced her to think clearly. The discipline of following one thought in linear ways past all distractions to its conclusion. The absolutely all-important attitude of As-if.

But what she thought late one evening in November that year had nothing to do with Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant, or Husserl. Nothing to do with any of the poets and writers she had studied and learned so much from, these kings and queens of words and ideas and emotions. It did not even have anything to do with her own notion of philosophy as a mental structure and house to live in.

What she thought had to do with the churchbells. She realized that all this time they had been faithfully tolling the hour, tolling Vesper, tolling Sanctus, tolling the hours of the healing of souls. And it struck her that somehow from the thousand-year stretch and more when Christian religion had been at the centre of lives in the western world, had been the source of most art and music and morality in western civilization, it had come to this.

She thought this, sitting in the children’s bedroom, the two of them asleep with the blackout blinds pulled all the way down and pinned to frames and crossbars, and not so very far away the sky was filled with the drone of squadrons of B-17 bombers flying toward the cities in the valley.

It was too far away to hear the air raid alarms, but before long she could hear the bombs, could feel them more than hear them by the rumbling and trembling of floor and windows.

LUNCH WAS DELIVERED
by a caterer whom she paid on a regular basis, and every day she put the white cloth on the kitchen table, and linen napkins. Mitzi spooned the food from the plastic containers onto plates and rinsed the containers and stacked them for the driver to collect the next time.

They ate and made plans for the afternoon.

A moth fluttered by and they watched it. It rose up to the pantry and sat on the patterned metal screen. It folded its wings and crawled inside.

From old habit, perhaps as insurance against those times returning, she kept staples up there; items like flour and rice and beans and sugar in small paper sacks, and dried lentils and peas and breadcrumbs and rolled oats and coffee still in her mother’s little metal tins shaped like mosques. What treasure those things would
have been then, along with jars with lids, and plastic bags. Or aluminium foil; unthinkable. For years when it first came out she would iron aluminium foil smooth and refold it to be used again; she would wash out and reuse plastic bags over and over. Hang them upside down on the line to dry.

Another moth, or perhaps the same one, crawled out, fluttered around the room as if for exercise, and then went back inside, through the stencilled holes shaped like tiny flowers.

Mitzi said, “Somebody will have to clean all those cupboards out someday. Should we do it?”

She said nothing to that.

MITZI HAD COME TO ST. TÖLLDEN
in the spring of 1944, after she and the other women were bombed out in Vienna. By then bombing runs on civilian targets were flown in three waves: the first with high explosive bombs to blow up buildings and expose their interiors, the second wave with phosphorous bombs to set fire to structural wood and furniture, and the third with anti-personnel bombs to kill firefighters and people who’d left the shelters too soon.

One night after one of those attacks on Vienna, the women made their way back from the shelter through dust- and smoke-filled streets to the apartment. When they turned the corner, they saw that much of their building was gone. Floors hanging, rooms with furnishings still
on fire. Walls still collapsing in clouds of dust and ashes.

They spent that night in the archway that had been the entrance to their building. The women and four-year-old Caroline huddled under Cecilia’s coat and a Red Cross blanket of Erika’s, and all night long they heard rats. Once, Sissy felt one walking on her leg, and she leapt up and screamed and snatched Caroline up off the ground. They caught glimpses of looters poking through ruins, filling jute sacks with whatever might be worth money on the black market.

In the morning they made their way up to the apartment. It was mostly burnt out, with entire walls and some floors gone. The dining room had more or less survived, but looters had taken paintings and the silver and whatever else they’d been able to carry. The four-day Silverbell Napoleon clock was still there, and the upright piano in the small salon. The grand piano had burned and fallen partly through the floor.

By noon that day Erika had been able to find temporary shelter for them at the Red Cross, and by midafternoon Cecilia and Sissy had located a man with a horse and farmwagon. Somehow with the help of his son they had hoisted the upright piano and the wallclock onto the boards. Sissy said that when they rumbled away, her mother sat defiantly upright on that piano stool in her battered and balding Persian lamb coat and cap and heels, her feet tucked away and crossed at the ankles, while around them there was nothing but smoke and ruins.

Two blocks away people were hauling sodden bodies from a shelter that had been hit, and where, when firemen had put out the flames, those who had not died from the concussion or from the smoke had drowned.

Erika remained in Vienna, living in one of a few hundred cubicles behind blankets on ropes in the main system of barracks. Great red crosses on white ground had been painted on roofs and walls. Mitzi’s car had by some miracle survived at the Red Cross garage, and she just left it there for Erika to use if she needed to. The tank was nearly full but most streets had become impassable.

A week later, Mitzi, Cecilia, and Sissy and Caroline arrived at St. Töllden. There was enough room if some of them doubled up, and it was still safe. The hydroelectric station and the salt processing plant in the valley had been bombed, but St. Töllden itself had so far not been targeted.

A household of all women now, like most. It was tense at first, especially because the differences between her mother and Cecilia had never been resolved. She sat with them in the kitchen and made them talk about it, would not let up until they did. Mothers with a dead son each, both lost to the same empty cause. What now? As soon as their shoulders softened and the first few words about loss had been spoken, she left the room. Eventually she could see their heads in outline in the etched glass in the kitchen door moving closer together.

They lined up for ration stamps and bartered with
shopkeepers and farmers. She hunted for food on her bicycle, and Mitzi cut hair in exchange for one potato or half a cabbage or ten coffee beans. Sissy sewed and altered clothes, and Cecilia still had a deerskin pouch of 18 carat gold jewellery. In it were necklaces, French brooches, and three diamond rings that she had not given for iron. It was illegal, but nearly everything required for survival was.

With the frequency of firebombings in the larger cities, the radio gave cheerful advice. “In case of phosphorus bombs,” the
German Mother’s Listening Hour
said, “quickly pull down all curtains and throw bedding and cushions out the window. Put the children in a bathtub filled with water up to their necks and push them under when needed.”

The first air raid alarm in St. Töllden was heard on September 15, 1944. The siren was mounted on the roof of the town hall. It looked like a great tin mushroom, and since its installation it had been tested every Saturday precisely at noon. It made an unnerving rising and falling wail, but after a while people got used to it. It made them feel safe, and soon when they heard it they’d look at their watches, pull out the crowns, and set them.

Since there was no air raid shelter in town, bills had been posted telling people to use the area known as the Christian Caves in case of an alarm. They were the very caves her father had restored and opened up as part of the museum with wooden stairs and platforms.

It was a good twenty minutes from the house, but at the first alarm they all hurried there: her mother, Cecilia,
Anna, Mitzi, Sissy and Caroline, and she with Emma and Willa. Many of the people in St. Töllden were gathered there that night, like at some pilgrims’ place of miracles. The caves were not nearly large enough to hold the entire town, but they held several hundred. The rest huddled against the mountain, behind boulders and slabs of fallen rock.

In the dark sky they could see nothing since the bombers were blacked out. A few searchlights stabbed up from some distant place that had air defences, but not here. They craned their necks, and people in the caves crowded the stone entrances while those in the back sat covering their ears.

Those in front and down by the rocks could not see the airplanes, but they could hear them, a drone like a thousand bees and the very air vibrating with engine noise. They could not see the bombs falling, but they saw them exploding, enormous firecrackers in their old town, outlines of buildings momentarily black against the flashes, the church steeple black against an explosion, then darkness again. They stood and stared, and when the airplanes were gone some people left to run home, but a warden in a tin hat shouted at them to wait for the next wave.

It came within minutes, and this time they saw the containers exploding in midair to scatter their chips of phosphorus, and as soon as these were touched by air they began to burn bright blue and white, and so they rained down on St. Töllden, mid-air explosions scattering tongues
of fire that fell on roofs and trees and everywhere, like piñatas scattering gifts for children.

There was no third wave that night, and the house when they reached it was fine. That fall and winter saw several more attacks, and eventually many of the older women simply took cover in their basements. Anna, Cecilia, and her mother did that, and neighbours came to join them since the house had a good vaulted basement. They sat on the stone floor there by candlelight and listened to the explosions.

One old man, a World War One artillery major with a medal on his chest and one trouserleg pinned up, for that leg was missing, told them that you never hear the bomb that gets you, since it comes straight for you with no sound at all.

“Bombs,” he said, and he reached out to touch Cecilia’s coat sleeve in the candlelight. “Listen,” he said. “You’ll find this interesting.”

Those were two-hundred-kilo bombs with delayed fuses, he told them, and delayed fuses were invented for just this purpose, to allow bombs to penetrate the house from top to bottom, right down to where they were hiding now, before the thing detonated. And bombs, he said, did not come down straight but fell in a lessening arc as gravity slowed their horizontal speed from the moment of release. He leaned to the candle and showed them with his hand pretending it was a bomb. And he told the women whether they wanted to hear this or not,
that bomb fragments at the outset travelled nearly at the speed of gas expansion, some eight thousand feet and more per second.

“That fast,” he said and nodded.

And one night in January 1945, one such bomb smashed through the top of the house and exploded at the rear. It killed her mother and Cecilia with flying bricks and bomb fragments the size of axe heads, and it killed three more old women and the invalid man. That day there were no fire bombs, and no third wave.

THERE WERE PICTURES
of the bomb damage in the St. Töllden files, and pictures of women all over town dressed like men in boots and baggy men’s pants cinched tight with ropes. They were called the rubble women, and while Anna looked after the children, Mitzi, Sissy, and Clara joined their brigades, cleaned bricks, and stacked them for reuse.

With a crosscut saw they’d found in some ruin they cut down two of the pine trees in the garden and they stripped them and used the trunks to shore up the housewall; they even made a sill beam from a heavy piece of lumber to go between the bricks and the shores. Over time they were able to scavenge enough boards and other materials to patch the worst of the other damage, but all that winter and spring the women and children lived like ghosts in the damaged house, grey, empty-eyed people with dust on their faces and broken fingernails tapping on the table.
They fetched water in buckets from the river, and they took whatever food they found in other ruins, and they traded the last of Cecilia’s brooches for a scrawny goat that they kept in the basement. Anna took charge of the goat, and several times a day she led it outside so it could scratch for grass and twigs from the hazelnut bush. The milk from that goat was drunk mostly by the children.