Clara (8 page)

He called them young misses. “If the young misses are ready,” he said. “Hurry a bit. The army is blocking some of the streets.”

In the Daimler the glass to the driver’s compartment was slid shut but the windows in the back were open wide. They rode with warm air blowing in and out, stirring their hair and clothes. They saw a column of military trucks, and twice they saw a line of soldiers combing a field. Once, they were stopped but the chauffeur showed papers and they were waved on.

ON THE ESTATE
grain stood high and golden in the sun. In the long sheds down by the river saws were ripping the first pine logs of the summer, and everywhere the air was warm and filled with the crackle of things drying and with the lazy buzz of bees and flies.

Servants in green aprons showed them to their rooms in the guest wing. Doors and windows stood wide open, and from across the yard they could hear a piano. The playing stopped abruptly and they heard Albert’s mother, Cecilia, speaking to someone in her regal way, then a door slammed and a radio was turned on somewhere. They could hear that clearly because even though the yard was large, perhaps thirty metres across, the air lay heavy and still.

For lunch they were five at the table, with one more place set but the chair empty. They were served panfried trout and vegetables and small summer potatoes in a dill cream sauce. Servants passed bowls and platters, but no one ate much. In the kitchen the radio was on, and Cecilia told the maid to turn on the apparatus in the living room also.

The announcer was speaking excitedly about confrontations across the country. Police and army were winning everywhere.

Cecilia instructed the maid to keep Theodor’s lunch warm. He might be home any time.

“Where is he?” said Mitzi. Cecilia glared at Maximilian, and Maximilian shook his head at Mitzi.

By mid-afternoon that day the parents had sent servants off in all directions to search for Theodor. Cecilia in her buttoned and laced city dress swept into Clara’s room, where she sat studying at the desk by the window.

She slipped a pencil between the pages and stood up
from the chair. Cecilia stood by her side, looking at the book cover.

“Schopenhauer,” she said. “
Almost all our sorrows come from our relations with other people
. So true. Motherhood and marriage would be good examples there. What else? Something about fleeing to solitude, away from the stings and flies in the marketplace. Meaning the sheer annoyance of other people, of course. But you probably know all that.”

Clara stood looking at her. The last quotation had been Nietzsche, not Schopenhauer, but she said nothing. The woman had been crying but had worked at repairing the damage to her face. Cecilia stood proud and erect, her chin up, but her eyes red.

“How can I help?” she said.

“Albert likes you a great deal, Clara. He speaks of your sense of purpose, your pride. In a good way.”

“Thank you for saying that.”

“Come with us. With me. Max is getting the car.”

There was no chauffeur. Maximilian himself was at the wheel, and when the car doors were closed he headed the Daimler out the main gate, along the estate road, and through fields and forests toward the village. Grain stood rich and golden to either side. Far ahead they saw dust rising from some vehicles driving away.

They did not speak one word in the car. She sat in the back, and Cecilia in the passenger seat, holding on with white fingers to the handle on the dash. Cecilia wore no
jewellery other than her wedding ring and a small gold watch on a black strap. Her dark-brown hair with the first signs of grey in it was pinned up with tortoiseshell combs, and strands of it had fallen to the lace collar of the blouse. She looked back once over her shoulder at Clara, but she never spoke.

In a far field they saw people in a great patch of grain beaten down as if by hail, but there had not been any hail. Maximilian veered off the road and drove along the tractor lane into the field. There were men and women there, some of the women crying. More men and women stood farther out in the field.

Maximilian stopped the car and climbed out. The men took off their hats and one of them came up and said something to him. Maximilian turned to the open window. He said, “Wait here,” and he walked away with the man.

The people gave them looks and turned away. Grain crackled in the heat and cicadas rasped.

“Excuse me. You, in the blue jacket!” called Cecilia out the window. “What is going on?”

The man came up and he turned and pointed. “The soldiers,” he said. “They came with trucks and they …” He stopped when he saw Maximilian coming back.

She and Cecilia met him less than halfway and he took Cecilia’s hand, and moments later they stood looking down at Theodor. He lay with his legs twisted and his arms flung out, as if he had fallen from some great height. His eyes were wide open and his lips pulled back. His front
teeth were broken and bloody and bared in a grimace, a horror face that she could not look at but that she still must have seen, because it would later stare at her some nights and it would stare at her from Hemingway’s writing, when he said that in battle men died like animals. That they plunged in an instant from peaks of intensity and vibrant aliveness down to wholly unexpected horror.

There was blood also on Theodor’s shirt and trousers, and blood had pooled under him. Flies were on him already, and Cecilia reached out to shoo them away. She looked down at the boy, and she turned away and then looked at Clara with a helpless, a terrible plea. Finally she fell to her knees by his side and leaned over and held him.

At some point Maximilian left. He walked to the Daimler, started it up, and brought it close. He lifted Theodor up, held him in his arms, and carried him to the backseat.

Years later, but not so many years, Cecilia would say that her husband began dying the moment he had to carry his dead boy like this. Broad-shouldered and strong though he was, she could see it in his face. Those few staggering steps to the car and the grief and humiliations that followed were what killed him, she’d say, and not the heart attack listed in the document.

At the estate they put the body on a wooden trestle table in the hallway. They closed his eyes and lips. They washed his face and combed his hair with water, and they covered the rest of him with a white sheet. They put
candles in stone niches in the walls, and staff came and went on tiptoes and bowed in silence to the parents sitting there.

The date was July 27, 1934, and that evening in her nightgown at the desk in her room she began to write.

IN HER FILES
for the years leading up to the war she had the examiner’s handwritten death certificate. It gave Theodor’s age as seventeen, and it said he had died from three 9mm bullets through mouth, lung, and spine.

With the Nazi rebellion put down, police came to the estate in several cars, and there was much door-banging and shouting and noise of police boots in the wooden stairways of the building. They performed a search that lasted several hours. Simultaneously police also searched the apartment in Vienna and various other buildings that Maximilian as the managing director of the estate was in charge of.

They found nothing to connect him personally to the forbidden Nazis, but Theodor had been a minor and by law his father was held accountable for his actions. In a quick judgment by the travelling court he was sentenced to two years in prison; after his release he would be barred from practising his profession for two further years.

Albert, too, was held at least morally accountable. The judge in the black stole of his office said that as the older brother and as an officer Albert ought to have influenced Theodor and steered him onto a better path. Albert was handed a dishonourable discharge from the military and
given a notation in his police file for moral wrongdoing bordering on the criminal.

That day in court as the entire family stood accused of having neglected the youngest son, Cecilia requested to be allowed to speak. She stood up and asked the judge if he had children.

“An inapproprium,” said the judge, an old man in an Imperial beard not seen much any more. “But I will answer it. I do have two sons. And I provided them with much stricter discipline to their benefit than you appear to have done. Your son was a—” he glanced at the documents before him. “Your son was a mere boy, not even finished with his baccalaureate. Boys that age need the rod and a very short leash.”

He frowned at her, and when she opened her mouth to speak again he waved a hand and looked away from her at the court gendarme.

“Next,” he said.

Lawyers acting for the count in faraway America gave the family just three days to remove their personal belongings from the estate and to hand over all keys and records.

They loaded their things onto a truck. She had ridden out there that moving day with Albert on the motorcycle, and she stood by as Breck handed him his riding boots and hefted the English hunter saddle into the sidecar.

“A bad thing, Master Albert,” said Breck, and he nodded at her and said, “Young miss.”

FOR THE DAY
of Theodor’s funeral Maximilian was allowed out of prison. The family walked behind the two-wheeled horse cart that carried the coffin through the small Mariahilf cemetery in Vienna. From beyond the brick walls they could hear trains at the station. Cecilia’s face was hidden behind a black veil, and Maximilian in a black suit and black tie supported her with one hand under her elbow. Albert walked by Cecilia’s other side, and young Sissy, his sister, walked behind them. Sissy had on a sailor dress, black stockings, and new black patent leather shoes. She walked looking down at the path in order to avoid the horse droppings. Behind the family came Erika, and Mitzi, and Clara, followed by a handful of friends of the family and of Theodor.

A hole had been dug, and the diggers with fresh mud on their shoes stood back leaning on their shovels among some apple trees in fruit. A chair had been provided at graveside for Cecilia, and there she sat, with Maximilian behind her and his fingers on her shoulders.

The priest said something about there being no political parties in heaven, and forgiveness at hand for all who repented even in the last moments of their lives on this earth.

He took the censor from the ministrant and waved it at the coffin.

The diggers took this as their sign and they came forward and took hold of the ropes, and down went the coffin
into the black hole. The ornamental lip caught at one corner, and they had to raise the coffin again and one digger passed his rope to someone else to hold while he chopped at grass and soil with the edge of his shovel and then levered the coffin away from the edge to help it on its way down.

ON CHRISTMAS EVE
she was in the kitchen, basting the goose, when she heard Mitzi in the hall. She opened the door and said, “Why don’t you ever ring the bell? I’d have come down to help.”

“Because I don’t want help.”

“But it’s slippery around the house and I’d much prefer it if you rang so I can come down.”

Mitzi shook her head. “You’ve put down sand, so there’s no problem.” She raised her nose. “Smells good.”

Clara wiped her hands on a towel and said, “Come. I want to show you something.”

In her study she pointed at the row of banker’s boxes against one wall. “These are the ones they’ll be picking up any day now. Mr. Heller at the archives knows about it and he’ll be sending someone. But not those two with the red labels.” She pointed. “See? They’re marked
personal
.
They are staying here.”

Mitzi gave her a look and said, “All right. And why are you telling me?”

“Because I want you to know. Someone besides me should know.”

Back in the kitchen they made coffee and then sat drinking it. A grainmoth fluttered. They sat while the light outside dimmed.

She outlined the new novel she had been sent by a Frankfurt publisher to translate from English into German. It was good, she said. Good story, good writing. She was looking forward to the work. The London publisher was the same house that had distributed her own works in English translation.