Clara (5 page)
Authors: Kurt Palka
She sat holding the warm cup with both hands, listening and thinking and studying him up close. Scrubbed and neat, her big brother in a dark blazer and striped tie. He was fifteen years older than she and his degrees in international law had earned him an enviable job with the League of Nations. He had never steered her wrong.
“I’ll think about it,” she said. “Keeping notes, I mean. But I’m pretty busy right now.”
They sipped from their cups. She caught the violinist winking at her. Out the windows it was snowing. A police car stopped and men in coats and wide-brimmed hats jumped out and arrested a man and a woman on the sidewalk. The woman was carrying an umbrella and in the struggle it collapsed and broke, and as the policemen were pushing her into the car she beat on them with the wreckage.
“You see?” said Peter. “Even if the Emergency law is contested, they can do whatever they want while it lasts. That’s why they evoke it. Your Albert sounds sensible. What’s his last name? Maybe I know the family.”
“Leonhardt. His father is an estate manager and his mother a pianist. A coach for opera singers.”
“I don’t think I know them. Bring him around for dinner sometime. What does he do?”
“He is a captain in the cavalry.”
“A loyalist. Good. Let’s meet him.”
In the weeks to follow she called Peter on two occasions. Once, his wife, Daniela, picked up and said he was out of the country, the other time the telephone just rang and rang.
THAT SUMMER
Albert competed in a military equestrian event, representing his unit, the 3rd Dragoon Regiment. He won gold in cross-country, ahead of a French major and a German lieutenant. There was a celebration at his parents’ apartment in Vienna, and a day later she took him home to St. Töllden, for the first time.
They travelled by train south past fields of wheat and rye, and past ancient farmhouses with thatched roofs and storks’ nests on high platforms erected for this purpose. Through the open coach window they could smell the ripening grain and the summer heat on grass and earth. They saw flocks of birds swooping in formations that opened up and regrouped and settled and took flight again. The sun felt warm on her face, and warm on the grainy wood of the folding table by the window; it shone on his bare forearms and on his hands. Through the open window they could smell the hot coal smoke of the train engine.
She was so much in love, all she had to do was look at him and a smile came to her face, and wild hope and gratitude to her heart. His hands, his face, the way he was looking at her. He made her feel loved and cherished, and
secure, and of course she took it for granted that her parents would see all that, and accept him and like him too.
But the visit did not go well, and afterwards she would puzzle about it and examine it moment by moment, situation by situation.
“It was so strange,” she said to Erika back in Vienna. “Father tried, he really did. He took us to the new Roman dig and we all had dinner and went for a walk, but something felt wrong the whole time. It was mother. I asked her what was wrong and she said only that she had a migraine.”
“Isn’t that possible?”
“She hasn’t had a migraine in years. Well I don’t know, but I think it was just an excuse. She was so strange with Albert. Even more reserved than usual. Distant with him, with all of us, and that big straw hat she wore on the walk. You should have seen the way she looked at him from under the brim. Watching him. What was she thinking?”
The answer arrived in Vienna only three days later in a letter written in her mother’s hand, the precise and slanted writing the old people called Corinth.
I am sorry if I seemed out of sorts on the weekend, Clara-dear. I’ll try to explain, and I’ll come straight to the point. I can see how much you love this man and I am happy for you. But I look into his eyes and I am afraid. I will say it just this time and then no more
.
Wild men, Clara, bold and dashing men, beware of
them. I know only too well the terrible attraction they can have for a woman. There is something primal about it, something of the cave. A woman sees in his wildness a readiness to defend her and her offspring. She also senses an opportunity through him to go places, and even if they are only places in the heart, they are places she would never tread alone. His wildness makes her feel safe and so very alive; all the more so if the basic man-woman attraction between them is working well, and if his wildness is expressed also in the way in which he desires her. I know you two have this; one can feel it. It is important. It is to a marriage and to a family what a locomotive is to a train, and so I am happy for you
.
Your father would faint if he read this, but I know he won’t. We are grown women and you know what I mean. You probably also know where my fear comes from. It comes from your brothers’ father, of course, my Torben. I know I’ve avoided talking about him, and perhaps one day I will tell you more. Men like these—Clara, their wildness is so very dangerous because even as their love sweeps us away, these men are also prone to excessive risk-taking and most often the possible gain is not worth the risk. It may be to them, just as Russian roulette seems a worthwhile risk to some in the moment of passion, or a duel for nothing more than a slight. Honour, my God! Clara-dear, men can be such children
.
Your Albert; I look at him, I look into his eyes and at his bearing and the tilt of his chin, and I see my
Torben. I recognize what it is that drives these sorts of men. I feel I do, so help me God. But then I can also see and feel your love for each other, and so there is nothing more I’ll to say on this matter, other than that I wish you both well. But please be careful
.
My dear Clara, thank you for your visit. Your father and I are proud that you are doing so well in your studies, and we send our love as always. Mama
.
And on a separate page in the same envelope, her father, whose love for her was the purest certainty in her life, wrote:
My dear Clara, I liked your Albert but I hope you will not be neglecting your studies on account of him, and not be rushing into any sort of commitment. Learning sets us free, Clara. It makes us strong and gives us purpose and self-assurance. In any case we must follow both our hearts and our minds. And even if the heart is usually the winner, we must nevertheless weigh them both carefully. You will do the right thing in this situation, of that I have no doubt. I send you my love. Papa
.
She showed the letter to Erika, who had known her parents since public school. This was at the apartment on Beatrixgasse, at the end of a weekday with the sky going dark and lights coming on in the city and the windows wide open to let in the cool air.
Erika handed it back with a smile and a shrug, and returned to the kitchen where she soon rattled around in drawers and began scrambling eggs for dinner.
“Is the wild man coming to eat?” she shouted from there.
“No,” Clara shouted back. “He’s on the horse farm.”
She reread the letter, folded it, and slipped it back into the envelope. She took it to her bedroom and put it away in a drawer.
“Are you going to show it to him?” shouted Erika.
She pretended not to hear.
THE EMERGENCY CONTINUED
but it lost its novelty. In June that year Communists and Nazis had been outlawed, but they thrived underground and the militia was soon back in the streets. Robberies and holdups became common events. In their nighttime shelters in parks and under bridges the homeless had to fear organized gangs swarming them to steal their clothes. Since the bank failures, men in suits and women in good dresses and coats were among the homeless, and always there were those who had even less.
She knew about these developments from Erika. Erika was studying for a degree in Social Sciences, and for an extra credit she worked the streets for the Red Cross by night in a small grey Steyr motorcar that she would borrow from Mitzi and then return in the morning.
Because people’s hair keeps growing in times good or
bad, Mitzi’s business was doing well; she had given up the shop so as to save the rent money and now she was making house calls. In the evenings the baskets with the collapsible dryer hood and dyes and combs and clippers and towels were replaced with baskets of sandwiches and containers of drinking water, and with first-aid bandages and small brown bottles of iodine all from the Red Cross depot at Hütteldorf.
To help out and to see for herself, Clara on many nights would cruise the streets with Erika. They’d bring cotton blankets and food to families living under bridges; they’d patch wounds and brush iodine on lacerations. One night in early December they came upon two bodies on a sidewalk not far from their own building; a man and a woman, both old and their blood still spreading on the pavement. Moments earlier a delivery van had squealed away into the night.
“Are they dead?” she said.
Erika knelt and put her fingers to the woman’s throat. She held her wrist. She let it go. “Try him.”
Clara felt for the man’s pulse. She put her ear to his chest but all she could hear was her own heart pounding. “I think he’s dead. My God, look at the eyes.”
The old people lay in the skimming headlights of the car that stood with two wheels on the sidewalk. The doors still hung open. There was hardly any traffic, and no one stopped.
“What do we do?” said Erika.
“We should call the police. You go and I’ll stay.”
She stood back in the house entrance, hugging herself against the cold. She leaned and peered around the corner. Her first dead. The woman’s shop apron and skirt had slid up, and the veined white thighs above the stockings looked vulnerable even in death. The couple lay on the sidewalk in front of the smashed shop window, the tossed brick still in there and plain to see, and the glass raked away probably with iron bars. Empty racks showed. Second-hand clothing had been carried away through the window; a shred of something white still clung to a corner of broken glass.
They were Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg. She could not think of the woman’s first name now, but she had known them, had bought clothes in there, and sold some of her own. Mr. Rosenberg still had a small tack hammer in his hand, had probably come out swinging it, with his wife right behind him ready to poke the thieves with the spike for receipts that lay nearby.
The police car was turning the corner when she took a few steps and reached and pulled down Mrs. Rosenberg’s skirt. Marianne, that was her name.
They drove on through the night, the two of them in Mitzi’s little Steyr with the broken heater, shocked by what they had seen and now not knowing how to deal with it.
“We knew them,” said Erika.
“We did. I bought my black suit there and the yellow summer dress.”
“I know.”
With strips of bandages she kept wiping the windshield where their breath kept condensing. A spot was hardly wiped when it fogged up again. A line from T. S. Eliot’s
Ash-Wednesday
came to her and offered help.
Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still
. Her hands were shaking and she felt cold. “Where are we going?” she said.
Erika looked in the rear-view mirror and pulled over. “Did you see the side of her face? Mrs. Rosenberg’s? The poor woman. And she could hardly walk anyway.”
Erika took her hands off the wheel and with her teeth pulled off the knitted gloves, dropped them in her lap, and blew on her fingers. She spat wool fibres and pulled some off her lower lip. “Maybe we can’t do this tonight. Can we?”
“We could try at least one bridge. It might help snap us out of this.”
They drove on and after they’d done one bridge and handed out food and water, they decided to keep going and do a park.
NOT LONG THEREAFTER
, it must have been a Friday because Friday nights were Communist nights, she and Erika and Mitzi met David Koren. Half-way through the meeting at a private home in upper-class Hietzing, a woman student stood up and introduced him as a writer and journalist, and asked him to speak.
“You’re just back from a trip to Moscow,” the woman said. “Tell us about it.”
Koren stood up. He was tall, well dressed in a grey three-piece suit, a solid man with a pale face and dark hair parted on the side.
“It’s David
Ira
Koren,” he said. “I am Jewish. I was born in Hungary and I grew up here in Vienna. Now I live in Berlin. I know that Communism and National Socialism are the new dreams, but I listen to you speak of Communism, and it’s like a fairy tale, this entire roomful of young people in this fine old villa that was probably worked for and paid for by someone’s great-grandparents and handed down through generations of privilege. Let me tell you, you have no idea of what you’re talking about.”
He paused, then went on to tell them about Moscow. What he had seen was most discouraging, he said. The power games and the greed games were in full swing, and in the name of party loyalty the secret police were killing anyone they pleased. The dream of a better and more dignified life for all was just that, a dream. In the meantime, millions were starving to death on account of the famine caused by Stalin’s agricultural reforms.
