Clara (14 page)

In the end she took it, and the next time she visited Maximilian in jail she told him about it.
Whispered
it to
him, she said to Clara; to him, a decorated war veteran himself.

“Romantic nonsense,” he whispered back. He glanced at the guard who stood not far away leaning against a wall. This took place in the visiting room made of poured concrete. They were one of three couples, all on iron benches bolted down, at iron tables bolted down also.

“I’ll burn it if you think I should,” whispered Cecilia. “I took it only because I thought it might be useful one day.”

“Well. Keep it. You never know.”

“No whispering,” said the guard.

Cecilia said that Maximilian had aged greatly. His hair was white and he looked dead tired. He was much thinner.

He was getting used to it, he had told her during an earlier visit. But eight people they were in the cell now, one whose feet had been crushed with iron bars by the police. They had a tin plate and a wooden spoon each for food, and a covered bucket for shitting, which he could no longer do now without bleeding. Steel beds cantilevered from the wall, roll-up mattresses on them and a blanket. He tried to make a joke of it. “Other than that, it’s not bad,” he said.

For a few weeks Cecilia kept the document on a shelf in the living room, and Clara and Erika and Mitzi all saw it there: the black ink, the Nazi seal. Then one day Cecilia took it away and put it out of sight.

IN MUNICH
Albert had adjusted quickly to his new life. A tailor had come and measured him for his uniforms, with an assistant to take notes while the tailor snapped his tape and crouched and measured and called out numbers. The uniforms when they arrived were snug and sharp with excellent needlework; fully six sets for everything from the parade ground to panzer blacks, to horseback riding, to small dress and full dress. The shirts were fitted, even the track and field outfit was, and the pyjamas.

Albert was assigned a batman and an adjutant to be shared with two other officers. The plan was that in a seamless series of long days stretching over nearly two years, he would learn everything about tank warfare and strategy and leadership in battle the school could teach.

Field Marshal Paul von Kleist was in charge of building the tank army of the German military, and he listened closely to the ideas of General Heinz Guderian about lightning warfare. Guderian had been behind the school’s program, and he often came there to observe exercises with the panzer models
II
and
III
, and the prototype of the new panzer
IV
that was in production now. Gunnery was practised with the 37mm turret guns, the 75mm howitzers, the 88mm, and the new 50mm. They also practised with 150mm armoured cannons that fired shells that on incoming roared like freight trains. They knew this, Albert said, because as part of their training they had to endure incoming live fire in a trench.

On several occasions General Guderian brought General Erwin Rommel along to observe exercises in landscape boxes the size of four and eight billiard tables, with artificial hills and rivers, and trees and houses and valleys to cross. To move their unit symbols, they used long rakes or they sent aides on stockingfeet into the toy landscape.

“Speed and absolute relentlessness,” Guderian said. “Tanks are the iron fist to punch through defences and they never stop moving forward. Stuka dive bombers and Messerschmitts provide cover and support from above, and infantry on trucks and apcs follows closely and cleans up the conquered areas.”

To make their cannons more effective, Krupp had produced a new armour-piercing projectile with an improved charge. If it struck a tank, it blasted just a small hole through the armour, but the compression and heat and the needle-thin steel fragments killed every living thing inside. Since the enemy was expected to have a similar charge, the Type IV panzers were equipped with a new kind of armour with air spaces between plates set at a greater degree of slope.

In addition chemists were developing a revolutionary type of gunpowder, Albert said. He explained to her that the only way to drive a projectile faster with a given charge was to have a propellant where every single grain fired at the very same instant. Unlike traditional powders, he said, some of which burned so slowly that grains still came
out as sparks when the shot had already left the muzzle.

Apart from the tanks, new weaponry kept arriving at the school for the students to integrate and deploy. There were night exercises and brutal marches with full gear and mortar base plates just to show them what their men would have to endure, and to gain leadership experience he and his fellow officers were posted as seconds-in-command to ever larger units across the country. He spent weeks near Hamburg, near Cologne, near Berlin. Back on the base, days were filled with more classroom instruction on anything from new tank technology and refinements of existing materials and mechanisms to military history, strategy, and psychology.

“Men respect other men only if they see qualities in them that they want for themselves,” the psychology instructor told them. “They’ll respect you if they want to be like you in some way. Men respect moral and physical courage and strength. They want leadership, but leadership they can look up to. We are talking about things that are felt, not seen,” he said. “We
see
people only for the first few seconds. Then we
feel
them. Even if we are looking at them, our eyes are really only probing them to inform our intuition. We
feel
things like courage, decisiveness, moral fibre, and honesty. And fear, absolutely. Never show fear. Never.”

The weeks and months went by quickly, for him and for her. They spoke on the telephone, he from the school office or from other postings with his back to the clerks,
and she from the post office or from the Leonhardt apartment, sitting on that bench in the hall staring at coats on the rack opposite.

He had also been issued a good horse, he told her, a strong and wilful mare. He was riding her most days.

“You love it,” she said to him. “The whole experience.”

“I do, absolutely. But I miss you.”

“I miss you too.”

She said Emmerich was working them as hard as ever, and so was Professor Ferdinand. But it was going well. She was also still doing the parks with Erika. Sometimes the depot was out of supplies and then all they could do was drive around and talk to people and bring drinking water. The other day they’d taken a girl and her mother to the hospital.

“Come and visit,” she said.

“Come and visit. How?”

“What about the other passport?” she said. “You know. The one the forger made for you. You said it was good.”

IN VIENNA
the murdered Chancellor Dollfuss had been succeeded by Dr. Kurt von Schuschnigg, the former education minister. The newspapers praised his diplomatic skills; they said he had been working to secure an alliance with Italy and Hungary against Hitler, but then those countries saw more advantage in siding with Berlin, and they abandoned him.

She saw a picture of Mussolini and Hitler striding side by side, Mussolini like an opera diva wearing a large-brimmed hat with pheasant feathers in the band.
March of the Fascists
, the caption said.

Soon after that the papers reported that Chancellor Schuschnigg had signed his own peace agreement with Hitler; in exchange for not being invaded by Germany, he’d had to give the Austrian Nazi Party legal status and accept Nazis into his cabinet.

“You realize what that means,” said Peter. “It’s the infamous thin edge of the wedge.” He said it was not what the chancellor had wanted to do. He knew that for a fact.

One night in August she and Erika were helping some injured people in an underpass when the trucks came back. They could hear the engines in low gear and already it was too late to run and hide. From the truck beds handheld searchlights found them, then men jumped off the trucks swinging steel bars and wooden clubs.

They broke her left arm with one blow and nearly tore off Erika’s ear with another. A young man stood there, lit from behind by the truck headlights with his face in darkness and his ears like a bat’s sticking out pink.

“Next time we find you helping them we’ll set fire to you and your car,” he said. “We’ll kill you.”

“But we work for the Red Cross,” Erika screamed. “This is what we do. We help, you idiot. Unlike you.” She stood with her hand pressed to her ear. Blood was running between her fingers, down her wrist, and into her sleeve.

He stared at her. He raised his stick and poked her hard in the breast. “Don’t help any one side. Don’t interfere. Let the strongest win.”

The men ran back to their truck, talking and laughing.

At the Red Cross station Erika’s ear received eight stitches and Clara’s arm was put in a cast. There was no X-ray machine, but the nurse said the arm looked straight and she did not think it needed resetting.

At first she did not tell her parents, so as not to worry
them. She hoped that by the time she saw them again the cast might be off. But she did tell Albert on the telephone, and they spoke for a long time that Sunday while she sat pale and subdued in Cecilia’s hall.

“The entire arm?” he said on the telephone. “Sweetheart. How terrible.”

“Just about,” she said. She felt better talking to him. “From wrist to shoulder, bent at the elbow. It’s in a sling but it’s still heavy. Like carrying a suitcase around.”

Eventually she told her parents too. They wanted her to come and see Dr. Mannheim, but she said the cast was fine and she was very busy right now. She stood and looked at herself in the mirror and resolved to get on with her life regardless of all the turmoil. To live above events and not be at their mercy, Professor Emmerich had said.

Peter was rarely in Vienna, but when he was, she tried to get information from him. One Sunday he told her he had been in Rome with a delegation from the League of Nations to protest once again against the Italian massacres in Ethiopia, but they had been sent home. A flunkey in a white suit had come to tell them everyone was busy with more important issues.

The League was not successful in creating true alliances, he admitted. There were too many conflicting interests, and the League had no real power to enforce anything.

She made notes for later, for something she thought of as
Life in One Room, in One Mind
. She began it after the
attack, which if anything after the first few days had made her more determined. It had driven her back into herself and forced her to examine what was important to her, and what was not.

She was no saint, this she knew. And no selfless battler against evil and stupidity. If she could ever contribute in any way, she decided, it would be through her studies, through what she was learning there. Things she could do with her mind.

She also began to plan her dissertation; it would be inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke, she thought. Something departing from his writings about inspiration.
Moments of Faith and Power
, perhaps, as a working title.

It resonated with her own view of philosophical structure as a house to inhabit, and to see the world through its windows. When Rilke spoke of faith, she did not think he was referring to religious faith but to faith in one’s inner power and will to create meaning and purpose.

There was more, she felt, and it would have to do with the survival of soul and spirit in dark moments. The writers and poets she admired most were men and women who examined and observed and noticed, and thought for themselves. They might have wished they could simply believe, but that was not the same thing. And in any case, had their faith been blindly religious, their lives might have been easier but they would have been much less interesting as writers.

She spoke again to Professor Emmerich, and he sat and
listened. He nodded and said, Good, and that he wished her luck. From this point on she should not consult with him about her idea any more, he said. She should talk to her Ph.D. adviser.