Clara (9 page)

They finished their coffee and then Mitzi passed the cups and she rinsed them and put them upside down on the drainboard. She checked on the goose once more and turned down the heat and looked up at the wall clock.

There was snow on the ground and on tree branches and as the taxi crossed the bridge, steam rose from the cold river into air even colder. Mallard ducks sat on islands of skim ice around rocks.

At the cemetery they bought candles and matches from one of the vendors at the gate. Inside it was already busy, shapes of people moving along paths, standing before graves, striking matches for candles.

High above, the icefield shone like silver and the mountain stood black against the sky. Small yellow lights
glowed in houses along the mountain road and the Christmas fire burned on the Tölldner peak. The flames sawed in the wind and when they leaned west they shone onto the enormous cross of polished steel up there, and onto the trusses that anchored it to rock.

First they went to the family grave of the monarchists from her mother’s first marriage, a corner plot with evergreens and Japanese maples, and with memorial tablets set into the wall. The monarchists were Count Torben and his family and her own two stepbrothers, Peter and Bernhard. Peter’s wife, Daniela, was buried there too; utterly loyal Daniela, who had doted on Peter and loved Clara like a sister. How proud the monarchists had been of their history, of the title and the heraldic family emblem.

“But if you half-close your eyes,” Daniela had once whispered to Clara. “If you squint a bit, then that thing might also be a plucked chicken with just a few feathers left. Rather than a plumed helmet.”

They lit candles and put them into small wrought-iron lanterns by the list of names in black marble. After a few moments of silence they walked to the other grave, the one of her mother and father and her mother’s side of the family. Albert would be resting here too, once his urn was installed and his name carved on the tablet. If the stonemason ever came back from his holiday. They lit candles at the foot of the angel with its wings chiselled in great detail and the face turned away and hidden
behind the hands. In silence they stood close together in the dark for a minute, and left.

LATER EMMA AND TOMAS
came to the house to exchange small gifts. They did not stay long. As he was buttoning his coat, Tom asked in a low voice if there was any news from the museum and she just shook her head. Then he asked if they might perhaps take Albert’s wall clock. Emma would love to have it, he said.

Clara looked at Emma, who was already standing by the door, waiting for him.

“Emma?” she said. “Is that right? You want that clock?”

“I’d love it, Mom. It would look nice in the living room.”

“Fine. It’s yours.”

The clock was the four-day Silverbell Napoleon that Cecilia had rescued from the bombed Vienna apartment. If Emma wanted it, she should have it. It would go to her anyway. Or to Willa. She wondered briefly if she should be more specific in her will as to who should get what.

They left with the clock wrapped in a blanket, the two of them bent over and stepping carefully while carrying it downstairs to the car. Emma called another Merry Christmas from around the corner in the stairway. The lights went out and Clara pushed the button for them.

She and Mitzi enjoyed the roast goose with potatoes and peas and a small green salad, and they shared a bottle of wine. There was no tree, just a small Advent wreath
of evergreen on the table, with the four candles burning in it. By Mitzi’s place setting, Clara had put a purple cashmere shawl in a paisley pattern, nicely wrapped, and Mitzi had given her a small plate of home-baked cookies including almond crescents and vanilla kisses covered in cellophane.

At eleven o’clock, when the bells rang at the stone church, they gave each other a hug. They were family to each other, now more than ever. Mitzi’s own parents were long dead and buried some place she did not even know, maybe in what used to be East Prussia, maybe in Poland, but she thought of them often and now in her old age she met them in her dreams, two people in shtetl clothes sitting side by side on a wooden bench. Mitzi had never been to a shtetl, but it was one of the many Yiddish words that came to her lately. In her dreams her parents sat close together on that bench but far enough apart to also suggest a certain self-reliance so as not to lean too much on the other, as they would have said in the marriage vows of old. Behind them was the wall of a small clapboard house, a
heusele
with fine scrollsaw work around windows and eaves.

EARLY IN THE NEW YEAR
, Mitzi had another appointment with Dr. Caroline Gottschalk about her hip. Clara came along.

“We’d better do it sooner than later,” Dr. Gottschalk said to Mitzi. She looked much like her grandmother, slim
and fine-featured like Cecilia had been, and those same black and steady eyes and resolute ways.

“Give me those canes and stand for me.” She held out her hand and looked at Mitzi over her glasses. “No. Let go of the bed. Let me see you stand on your own.”

Mitzi stood, or tried to.

“Now, take a step,” said Dr. Gottschalk. “Mitzi-dear. Look at you. How much longer do you want to wait? And wait for what?”

IN OCTOBER
1934, three months after Theodor’s funeral, Mitzi had finally asked Cecilia for the name of the forger. She was washing Cecilia’s hair at the time, putting in a chestnut rinse because of all that grey suddenly.

“What forger?” said Cecilia without opening her eyes. They were in the bathroom of the Leonhardt apartment, with Cecilia sitting on a chair and leaning back into the handwash basin.

“Albert said you knew one. From the estate. Something about customs documents that he could … you know.”

“Albert said that?”

“He did. Lift up a bit and turn this way.”

And so it began, Mitzi’s quest for a safe personal history. What she wanted was a new name, she said to Cecilia. And an
ID
card and a driver’s licence. Getting them might take
a while and she wanted to be ready, for the day that everyone was whispering about.

“Why?” said Cecilia. “This is not … what’s your real name?”

Her name was Naomi Friedmann, she said. German Jews, her parents, both long dead. Raised by an aunt, she’d been; one Mitzi Schuster, from whom she’d learned her trade and taken over the business name. And David Koren had said that if the present government were to lose to the National Socialists and she wanted to stay here, she would need another identity.

“You’re Jewish,” said Cecilia. She wiped away foam and squinted up with one eye. “Child, half the gifted world is: musicians, writers, composers, you have no idea. That’s why you’re so good at what you’re doing. You’re an artist at this, with an eye for the three-dimensional.”

“Thanks,” said Mitzi. “Will you help me?”

Cecilia said of course she would, and later that day she and Mitzi took a taxi to call on the forger. He lived in an apartment in Hietzing, on a narrow street not far from the little church there and from the palm house and Schönbrunn zoo, where peacocks screeched and monkeys threw peanuts at children.

The forger took his time inspecting them through the spy lens in the door. He let them in, glanced past them down the stairway, then closed the door quickly behind them. He was a small red-haired man with unusual glasses that had layers of extra lenses attached. He led them into
the living room, which was filled with shelves of papers and books, and tables with special lamps and presses and photographic equipment.

Cecilia came straight to the point and told him what Mitzi needed: a birth certificate, a certificate of baptism, an identity card, and a driver’s licence.

“And all in a name that has a clear history,” she said. “A pedigree, Mr. Binder.” She spoke to him the way she had spoken to the staff at the estate, clearly and firmly. She sat forward on the wooden chair, her feet in high heels tucked back and close together, her shoulders straight, her chin up.

“But I don’t do those, Madame Leonhardt,” said the forger.

“Of course you do, Mr. Binder. What is your fee?”

“My fee,” he said and looked at Mitzi with his pale eyes, with all those strange lenses trembling. “What Madame Leonhardt is asking is illegal,” he said. “We would all be risking jail.”

“Nonsense,” said Cecilia. “Look at me, Mr. Binder. What is the fee?”

He sighed and moved and consulted a list in a folder that lay so conveniently close by on his desk that it was clear theirs was not an unusual request. He adjusted one of the lenses and read out a few names, looking up after each one.

They agreed on Anna Susanne Toplitz, the real one dead and buried in faraway Maria Zell eight years ago, but the name according to his research cleared to 1867.

“And the fee?” said Cecilia. “Considering our past business dealings.”

“Ah,” he said. “The fee is one thousand Swiss francs for each document. Half up front, the rest on delivery.”

“Four thousand Swiss francs,” said Cecilia. “A fortune. Perhaps she won’t ever need those papers.”

The forger looked at Mitzi and from Mitzi to Cecilia. He took off all his glasses and put them down. “Oh, she will,” he said. “The way things are going.”

And he wanted Swiss francs, he said, suddenly very businesslike. In cash. Definitely not schillings. He could take the photograph right now. He sat waiting. “Oh,” he said. “One more thing.” And he mentioned a currency smuggler in the sixth district who would sell them Swiss francs at a good rate.

Mitzi had savings and she could pay for nearly half of that; Cecilia said she would lend her the rest in good faith.

SINCE THEODOR’S DEATH
and the arrest of Maximilian the trio of women – Clara, Erika, and Mitzi – had become friends with Cecilia. They respected her mourning and her anger. They admired her strength and courage to push on.

Cecilia was the sole breadwinner among the Leonhardts now, and she’d plunged into commitments, taking on students from the conservatory on top of her coaching. While Albert was out looking for work, she coached full-time and the apartment in Vienna was filled with music all day long, with singers male and female warming up in bedrooms and
bathrooms, full-throated intonations of the scales up and down, and loud rasping throat-clearings in between. It was hard to take at times, even for Cecilia, but there was good money coming in.

For the first two months Theodor’s photograph had been sitting on the piano, with a black ribbon across the top right-hand corner; then Cecilia moved it to the dresser in her bedroom.

“I hope you do understand what this has done to us,” she said at one time to them over dinner. They were sitting around the table at the apartment, just the women. Albert was out of town; they were expecting him, but they did not know when.

“Theo dead and Max in jail,” said Cecilia. “And I the only one who did not know what the boy was up to. Albert knew and Max knew. At least he suspected, and all of you, you knew too.”

They avoided one another’s guilty faces.

“Well say something.”

“Of course we understand that,” Clara said then. “And we have no excuses, only explanations. It seemed harmless. It really did. We would probably have said something to you otherwise. Or Albert would have. We thought it was just one of those student causes.”

“Harmless. You’ve said that before and I can’t hear that word any more. They had been outlawed, so it was not
harmless
. It was illegal.”

“So are the Communists and even the Social Democrats
now. Lots of things are illegal and nobody cares. It’s terrible, what happened, but be fair, Cecilia. No one could have guessed this outcome.”

They ate in silence until they heard the door and Albert said hello from the hall.

Cecilia turned her head. “Any luck?” she called.

“Don’t ask. When I have good news you’ll be the first to know. All of you.”

They heard him in the bathroom running water, and Clara put down fork and knife and rose. “Is his dinner in the warming oven?”

“Yes,” said Cecilia. “Go and talk to him.”

She found him standing in the bathroom, drying his face and hands. She sat down on the bathtub rim and he hung up the towel and sat down next to her.

ALBERT’S MILITARY CAREER
in Austria was in ruins, but as a horse trainer he had much to offer. He travelled the country by train and on the Norton, applying at stud and horse farms. One of the first places he tried was his old equestrian college where he’d graduated summa cum laude, and when the rector told him there was no position available Albert had set off on long loops into the provinces: to the Eschenbach stud farm, to the Trauttenhoffs, the Wolframs, and to other breeders, stables, and farms. He was gone often for days, at times sleeping like a vagrant in off-road barns, twice stretched out in a church pew, he admitted to her.

He filled out a dozen applications and left his resumé, but the horse world was exclusive and intimate. News about the judgment against him had travelled fast, and breeders depended on the government for any number of permits and licences. She could see the effect of months of rejection in his face; around his lips stretched and dry, and in his eyes uncertain and quick to look away from her as they had never been.