Clara (35 page)

“It’s what helps us through,” Martin Heidegger had said to her. “The discipline. Putting the mind in harness and staying with the load.”

This had been after he had come back into acceptance and then even into fame in France and Germany, years after the war. She had spoken to the rector, and they had invited Heidegger for guest lectures in Vienna, long after her years in Innsbruck, and he had come. Older, wiser, slower, but with even more steel in his thought. Yes, he had been of the opinion that the early National Socialists had some good ideas. But then of course … one knew now what came after.

At the time of his guest lectures he had been able to foresee the social and cultural pendulum swinging toward some new kind of socialism. All noble intentions, he’d said, very democratic, but bringing with it a continuous lowering of standards in order to be ever-more inclusive and accepting. It too would pass because it would run out of energy and money. It would swing back and forth, he had predicted, always in search of some humane and economic centre.

None of it really mattered, he said, and it did not alter the fact that one had to get through one’s life somehow and build courage and structure within oneself. That took work, but there was no other way.

WHEN ALBERT
came back from the war he was not able to walk very well because of his leg injury and because of his weakness due to malnutrition. But the latter was no different for any of the returning
POWS
. For months and months they came home from all over the continent, from the camps in France and England where the more fortunate ones had been allowed to work on farms. They were lucky to come home at all, since of those overrun by the Russians few did; no one knew exactly how many had died in the Russian camps. Hundreds of thousands. More than a million, said one statistic.

Albert too had to go through denazification, and there the only thing that was held against him were his brother’s politics. By then denazification was done in civil courts, and in Albert’s case the foreman was a one-time monarchist who stood his ground against the board and refused to exonerate Albert. The best he would agree to was the classification of “Less Incriminated.”

The five classifications were:

As a Less Incriminated person, Albert did not have to go to jail or, worse, to Nuremberg, but as a punishment he was not allowed to make his living at anything other than manual labour for one year.

Guido Malfatti had serviced the Norton and he’d been able to find some petrol. And so on his motorcycle like in the old days Albert drove looking for work, but this time, perhaps because the war had changed things and half the men were dead, he was quickly successful. A farmer, Mr. Richard Pachmayr in the next valley, wanted to start raising horses. Not saddle horses, he said, but coldbloods. Black Belgians. Albert said they weren’t his specialty, but a horse was a horse.

Mr. Pachmayr hired Albert for room and board and a small wage, and Albert slept in the groom bunk there and ate in the kitchen. He exercised his leg daily by climbing the hayloft stairs, faster and faster each day. He had limited movement in his left shoulder from the French bullet, but he learned to live with that. She and the children often went by train to visit him. At cider-pressing time the girls helped with picking apples and pears, and they were allowed to sit on the big workhorses. They’d be nearly lying on the broad backs, hanging on wide-armed to the horses’ necks. Once, when they were allowed to assist at a foaling, Emma became afraid and ran away when the vet had to reach into the mare and arrange things and pull, but Willa stayed to watch and help. Afterwards she helped rinse the foal with warm water and then rub it dry with
hay. It was coal-black and rough-coated, and it soon stood on wobbly legs and took milk from its mother. Willa and Emma were allowed that night to sleep in the hay in the stall next to the foal.

In the spring of 1948, Mr. Pachmayr was hauling logs when a load slipped and crushed him. He left a wife and a fifteen-year-old son, and after the funeral the widow offered Albert a substantial raise and she asked him to help prepare the boy for his coming responsibilities as the owner and breeder.

For weeks during those summers the girls lived on the farm. They slept in the hay and helped with chores. Albert taught them horseback riding on the one saddle horse there, and he took them trout-fishing. He would kneel behind them and hold the rods with them, and let them swing back the line and count one, two, three, and let them bring the rod forward just so far for the fly to settle gently on the flat water of the millpond. And in May and June when the bark was soft and the sap fresh, he showed them how to make flutes now with six fingerholes out of willow branches.

In the end his love of horses found no lasting echo in Emma, but it did in Willa who in later years, halfway through her studies, decided to backtrack and sign up for Science and then for Veterinary Medicine while Emma was studying for her teacher’s degree.

ONCE THE NEUTRALITY PACT
was signed, Austria was permitted to develop a small army. Albert was offered
reinstatement at full rank and a post in the defence ministry. He spoke with Mrs. Pachmayr and the son; the farm had earned itself a good name for its black Belgians, and the son was twenty-three by then and a good worker. Albert said it was time for him to take over. He would move on, but he’d be glad to help and advise whenever they needed him.

At the ministry, Albert was put in charge of rearmament, and for the next several years he and his team travelled all over Europe buying American surplus equipment, from helmets to
GMC
trucks and Sherman tanks.

The main infantry weapon he commissioned was the Belgian-made
FN/SG
assault rifle; a revolutionary design, he said, and he described it to her. A switch for single-fire or full automatic, a gas port and a clever piston return system.

Later he was promoted and put in charge of the army in the western provinces. From then on he was both a soldier again and a horse trainer much in demand by private owners.

By then, Guido Malfatti had passed the exam as a master mechanic. Albert had lent him the money for a jointed prosthesis, and young Dr. Kessler measured him for it. The thing arrived six months later in a wooden box all the way from America, from a factory in Seattle. It was perfect. With it Guido could not only ride motorcycles, he even began to race them. And when he started his own dealership, Albert asked her if it were all right with her if
he donated the Norton. As a showpiece, he said. A classic. She agreed. Guido gave the Norton pride of place in his showroom, among red and gleaming Ducatis and Yamahas and
BMWS
. He even had an electrician install a spotlight that shone down on its deep black and chrome, and on the leather seats and the bulbous rubber horn on the handlebar.

In St. Töllden all the old-timers knew Albert. Early on some had rumoured about his past, but after a while few knew exactly any more what that had been. He had a certain aura, and he never lost his military bearing. People respected him, and many, when they saw him in uniform walking home from the train station, nodded and said General.

But not the young people in his own family; Emma’s kids and Tom’s kids, or their friends for that matter. They made fun of Albert behind his back; of his military history, of his attempts to teach them things; of his old-fashioned values. They viewed him with a mixture of grudging respect and condescension born of ignorance. In the end they rejected him, and he, them. Her, they treated much the same way; Oma, with her endless scribbling and her boxes full of files. With her tiresome reminders to think before speaking; with her stale cookies in doillied tins and moths flying in and out of her cupboards. She knew all that, and she did not mind. It made no difference to her whatsoever.

WHEN SHE HAD FINISHED
the translation, she sent it off to the editor and waited for the confirmation of receipt from Mrs. Neumann’s assistant. She shut down the computer and sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes closed.

Now what? she said to him. Tell me.

It was late evening, and for the next half-hour she wandered through rooms, opening armoires and drawers, making mental lists. She shivered and put on a cardigan. She thought she might eventually do some housecleaning, hire someone with a truck to take away things to the various recycling depots. So the girls wouldn’t have to wade through all this some day.

In Mitzi’s room she opened the drawer in the bedside table and took out the small black-and-white photograph of the pale blond Polish prisoner. So young. Just a boy. Erika had taken it, with her Agfa-Click. She put it back and closed the drawer. The leather couch was still in the study, and the matching chair. Count Torben’s sword was gone, his duelling blade. Gone for a bit of flour in 1944, to some travelling black-marketeer.

She remembered the boxes with the red labels marked
Personal
in the basement. The notes to herself over the years. What to do about them now?

The next morning she was tempted simply to stay in bed, but mindful of As-ifness she did not. Instead that day she fetched the pistol from its hiding place and she unwrapped the pieces and put them loosely into her purse. She took the noon train into the side valley and
from the station walked to the waterfall.

When she had still been at high school and Peter a junior partner with a law firm in Innsbruck, he would come home on weekends in the summer and fall and in his black Citroën motorcar would take her into the mountains as far as they could drive, and with their rods and satchels they would hike to one of the rivers, water that came rocketing down from the glaciers, fast and ice cold. Water so clear you could look down from high rocks and in the shallow parts see trout, brook and rainbow, facing the current, slow ripples of fins to stand still, then a lightning dash for food.

They were using his English dry flies with the barbs pinched flat according to sporting rules, so that the hook could be removed without much injury to the fish. That day he tied on a brown fly and with it hooked a rainbow that leapt four feet in the air and ran with the reel screaming, and it leapt again and again. It took him fifty yards or more downriver and it forced him into fast currents where he tripped and fell and floated for a while, but he managed to keep the rod up and the line tight. In the end he was back in the shallows and he called to her for a hand with the net.

That rainbow was the biggest she’d ever seen. They agreed it was much too beautiful to kill, and so they let it go. Afterwards they lay in the sun to dry their clothes. They lay on the white gravel bank by the falls, both of them basking in the warmth that struck down from the sun and up from the clean white riverstones. Her ears and her entire body were filled with the ceaseless roaring of the falls.

She could look upriver now and see those falls from the footbridge that the Alpine Club had built some years ago, to go with the new trails. There had not been a railroad into this valley until long after the war.

She turned and looked carefully to both sides, but there was no one about. A wet spring day, the river high; not yet weather for hiking.

She snapped open her purse, and one by one she took out the pistol pieces and threw them into the deepest part of the river below her, into the pools dark green and full of air bubbles and turbulence. The barrel, the grip, the magazine, the slide. The box of shells. They sailed out in a flat arc through the cold air and sank without a trace. Gone. She felt nothing. No guilt, no relief, no regret.

She looked down at the river, downstream to the rocks. For a moment she saw tall Peter balancing there, casting the line with a looping sideways motion, because of the trees behind him. He’d learned that rollcast from a river guide in Scotland in the 1920s.