Clara (16 page)

At the school dinner to celebrate the silver medal, both generals were at the table and she sat not far from them, close enough to be able to watch them eat and talk, and to be able to study them and think her thoughts. At one point General Rommel stood and pronounced the first toast to horses and humans because of the ancient and noble bond between them.

They drank to that, they drank to Albert, and then all the men rose and stood and drank to her as his fiancée, and they wished them well.

She watched the generals converse and sip wine and eat their meal and touch napkins to their lips, and some years later when Albert told her what Hitler had ordered Rommel to do, she remembered this very dinner and the man’s good face, his unhurried glances of appraisal of her to decide whether Albert had chosen well and whether this union would strengthen or weaken him as a man and as a soldier.

IN FEBRUARY OF THAT YEAR
, after extensive manoeuvres with tanks, dive bombers, and live ammunition on the plains of Lüneburg, Albert graduated. She took the train out to witness the ceremony, and she stayed with him at the same officers’ temporary apartment. They had just two days, then she returned to Vienna.

Field Marshal von Kleist put General Guderian in charge of one of the tank corps, and Albert was assigned to that corps and given command of the newly formed 14th Armoured Battalion Landshut Black. It consisted of nearly a thousand men and seventy-seven Type
IV
and Type
III
panzers, of armoured personnel carriers and trucks and motorized 88mm and 150mm field guns. Landshut Black was classified as an independent battle unit operating in support of the 7th Panzer Division under the command of General Erwin Rommel, and it was stationed not far from the town of Landshut, near the highway to Munich.

IN VIENNA
Professor Emmerich in his workingman’s clothes and bicycle clips was delivering his concluding lectures to her graduating class. He picked up on Nietzsche’s Übermensch, and with clear references to the Nazis began to delineate the opposite notion, that of the Untermensch: a person who had deliberately chosen not the morally high road but the low.

He asked them to consider that if Nietzsche’s ideal in the absence of God had been the light within, might not in the absence of God the temptation be irresistible for some to develop the darkness within? Just as liberating, he said.

“Liberating, especially if there are no consequences to worry about. Liberating. Consider that word
liberating. Setting free
from what? Well, from shame, fear, failure, of course. From self-loathing.”

Liberating from constraints of conventional morality and society, he said. And an embrace of violence instead, to act out the darker emotions. One could see examples of this happening now.

“You understand,” Professor Emmerich said with a thin smile, “that these are merely philosophical exercises. Philosophy empowers us to examine ideas, to pause and examine life. To ask clarifying questions that go to the root of things.”

He had taken to sitting tailor-fashion on the desk, resting his elbows on his knees and leaning forward as he spoke. She would watch him from her usual place in the second row, and she’d realize that it was because of people like Mrs. Allmeier so long ago in high school and Professor Emmerich now that she wanted to be a person living by her mind; this brilliant man sitting cross-legged like a friend on the desk, pulling knowledge and fantastic ways of seeing things from the corners of his mind and offering them up like this, so casually, as if they were nothing.

“Is it also possible, then,” he said, “that this preferred choice to pursue the light is not within all of us? Or to different degrees? Is it possible that nature on average gives birth to monsters as often as it does to saints? The selfless and the selfish? The givers and the takers? Those with morality and those without? The nurturous and the murderous?”

“But we have laws for that,” she called out.

“Ah! Again?” He pointed at her.

“Laws, to govern behaviour.”

He climbed off the desk and picked up a piece of chalk.
LAWS
, he wrote on the blackboard.

“Think about it. To govern behaviour means ruling on what is permissible and what is not. If monstrous behaviour is suddenly permissible by law, encouraged and rewarded even, then what do you think will happen? Which will it encourage, light or darkness? All this in the absence of God and with morality resting in the eye of the beholder.

“We have that already in Plato,” he said. “Where he talks about surmounting oneself. But it requires work, does it not? And it requires the will to perform that work and live in the light, which is Nietzsche.” He picked up the chalk again and drew a fast-ascending curve.

“If you take away just one thing from our time together, then let it be this,” he said. “Well,
two
things. One: always, always, always trust your own mind and think things through for yourself. And two, go up. Up and up. Especially in the absence of God. Always strive to go up, never down.”

BY THE TIME SHE BEGAN WRITING
her dissertation on
Moments of Faith and Power
, she had already spoken to the rector about teaching as an unpaid lecturer, and so working her way into an assistant-professorship and eventually perhaps into a full one. Professors Roland Emmerich and Anton Ferdinand in Vienna, and Ludwig Wittgenstein writing from England, had put in a word for her, and based
on these three references the rector agreed to consider her, depending on the rating of her final work.

The heart of her thesis was to be the attempt, the decision, and the action to seize the bright moment and to carry it through darkness the way Stone Age man carried fire in his hands, had sheltered and fed the precious embers from a lightning strike so as to have fire again another day. She knew that principles of morality and attitude had to do with it. But principles were only the hands, not the fire.

Since she could find few direct references to her core idea in literature, she plowed ahead and built it from her own insights, and for background and structure she referred to hints of approaches in the works of western philosophy and in writers such as Hemingway, Steinbeck, Woolf, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Zweig. She referred to Rilke and to Yeats, his famous scene of inspiration flaring up and dying in a London tea shop.

She sat at her desk at the apartment, and she wrote for weeks and weeks; nine, ten pages a day. She wrote outlines and drafts by hand, she edited and rewrote; she typed them clean. For breaks she did housework and shopped, and she bicycled to the post office to call Albert and her parents. Often, if it was in the early evening, Erika would come along and call Koren, who had by then moved to Stockholm.

Before those calls Erika would change into one of the blouses Koren had liked so much on her, the light blue one or the green one, because they went so well with her black hair and eyes. She would dress as if for a date, even put
on a touch of lipstick. And then at the post office, which smelled of the oiled floor and of stale bread somehow, Clara would watch her through the windows in the booth, and Erika would be sitting on the round stool in there and lean forward and hold her forehead and Clara could hear her even through the glass, saying, No, she could not just pack up and leave and would he please stop saying that. She was developing a career, Erika said. The Red Cross, and she liked being needed. You come when this is over, Erika said, and how much longer can it last?

For some of that time Erika’s ear was under a bandage again. She had found a plastic surgeon who said he could remove the welted scar, and since neither of the women had the money he was asking for, Mitzi had struck a contra deal with the surgeon’s wife for one year of free hair, nails, and face.

MOMENTS
became a work of 285 typed pages, fully referenced and annotated. She submitted it in June 1937 and on September 15 that year she received her Ph.D. She was twenty-six years old. The certificate was handwritten in Latin. It began,
Nos rector universitatis litterarum vindobonensis
– and it listed the faculty, and went on –
promotor rite constitutus, in dominam clarissimam Clara Eugenie Herzog e St. Töllden in Austria, postquam et dissertatione cui inscribur …

On the day of the award ceremony there was gunfire in the streets in some of the districts, and so the convocation took place not in the great hall with its street-facing
windows but in the inner courtyard of the university. Just five doctorates that year in Philology, the recipients being called one by one to the stones around the sundial, and the rector himself in the flowing velvet gown and the black hat of his office presenting the scrolls.

Her parents were there for the occasion, as were Erika and Mitzi, and Cecilia and Maximilian just released from prison. Peter was there with his Daniela, who beamed at her across the courtyard.

Only Albert was not there. In a deal struck with the school office, his penalty for crossing a foreign border illegally had been postponed until after the horse race and his graduation. But now it was in force. At the time, he had been summoned to the office of the general’s aide, Colonel von Heintzman, and the colonel had spoken of principles and of the Officers’ Code of Ethical Conduct. The colonel had confiscated the forged passport and pronounced the cancellation of all leave for one full month.

BY DECEMBER OF THAT YEAR
,
Moments
as a work on applied Existentialism had become something of a hit among university publications in German. The rector’s office agreed to count it as her first academic work for distribution, and to register the points and pay her the usual copyright honorarium once legalities had been worked out.

DR. GOTTSCHALK
had booked Mitzi into the hospital for tests and X-rays before the operation, and they’d marked the day on the calendar in Clara’s kitchen. She and Mitzi were aware of it even if they never spoke of it. But it was on the weekend before the trip to the hospital that Mitzi mentioned the churchbells.

“I hear them all the time,” she said. “I hear them but I’ve never seen them.”

“We should have done that years ago.”

“Well, I didn’t think of it years ago. I’d like to see them.”

“It’s up steep and narrow stairs,” she said. “And you can hardly walk on level ground.”

“Can hardly walk? I beg your pardon. Look at me. I can walk very well with canes. It’ll just take a bit longer.”

She agreed to go with Mitzi to speak to the priest, and Father Hofstätter looked at Mitzi standing there on the
stone floor in the church annex, trying not to lean on her canes.

“Mrs. Friedmann,” he said. He shook his round head. “The problem is the length of time it would take you to climb the stairs. Even just half-way up the tower the bells are very loud.” He brought up his hands and made them tremble close to his ears. “As you know they ring every fifteen minutes. It’s automatic these days, for years now, actually. A radio signal triggers an electric mechanism.” He pointed up. “From space. Imagine.”

“How long would it take me?” Mitzi asked.

“I don’t know. But longer than fifteen minutes. Even I can hardly go up and down within fifteen minutes now. The serviceman from the satellite company can do it, but he is young and fit and he’s used to it.”

“My friend Doctor Herzog here,” said Mitzi. “She saw them when she was young.”

The priest smiled. “So let her tell you about them. Nothing has changed. The beams and the bells are the same, but instead of ropes we have the satellite signal now.”

They walked back to the house. Halfway there the bells rang eleven o’clock. “The first one,” she said. “This one is no bigger than your hat. The vesper bell is even smaller.”

They stood on the sidewalk and a group of kindergarten children led by a young woman swirled around them like a river.

“And this one,” she said. She held up a finger. “Just listen. It’s very big. Bigger than my desk.”

Mitzi stood listening. Her lips moved with the number of bell strikes. “That big,” she said then. “Imagine.”

THE NEXT DAY
she was back in Father Hofstätter’s rectory. He stood up from the chair by the desk and folded his hands in front of his stomach.

“Doctor Herzog,” he said. In St. Töllden everyone had always called her by her maiden name. “So soon again.”

“Father, I realize what I am going to ask for may be inconvenient. It may even cost money for the technician, but I am prepared to pay for the service call.”

He stood waiting. Behind him they were both reflected in the new climate-controlled glass case along the wall that held the leather-bound books with the history of the parish since the early Middle Ages.

“What I am asking,” she said, and she reached into her coat pocket and took out a one-hundred-euro bill and unfolded it for him to see. Father Hofstätter looked at the bill. He looked back up at her.

“I’m wondering,” she said. “Father, would you mind calling the technician and asking him to shut down the bells for as long as it takes Mrs. Friedmann to climb the stairs and come down again? Is that possible?” She offered the bill. “For the service call.”