Clara (19 page)

“A mark for what?” she said. “And given by whom? Surely not by the university. Is it political?”

He closed her file. As to teaching at university levels, he said, few women were able to get that far. Perhaps as assistants. Off the top of his head he could not think of one.

“But what about the new roles for women?” she said. “The promises in your election platform? Rewarding work beyond home and family. Recognition, emancipation.”

“What election? There was no election.”

“But there were promises that gained you supporters.”

He shrugged. He raised his fingers off the desk and let them tap down thickly one by one. He looked over her shoulder and nodded at the next person in line.

AT THE LEONHARDT APARTMENT
, Maximilian and Cecilia sat at the table under the yellow lamp in the dining room. “These,” Cecilia said to him. “And these.” She picked
up some papers and squared the edges. “That would be a great help. Thank you so much, Maxi.”

He took them and stood up. He smiled at Clara and headed for the other room. His face was grey, his hair white, his shoulders thin and rounded now. He seemed to have difficulties opening the door. Clara rose to help but Cecilia reached and held her back and gave a quick shake of her head. They watched Max changing his hands on the papers and then holding them with his chin against his chest and using both hands on the doorhandle. The door closed.

“He’s not well,” said Clara. “What is it?”

“The doctor says he doesn’t know. But I do. It’s since the jail, since Theo’s death. And he’s getting worse. He is helping me copy music notations, and his handwriting is still good. Never mind. It’s lovely to see you. Tell me about your new life. And Albert, how is he?”

She talked for long minutes. She talked about the house, which needed paint and a woman’s touch, about life on the base and the small town nearby. About her parents having finally come to terms with her choice. Things were much better now, since the wedding.

Max came back and Cecilia gave him more papers and he shuffled off again. Cecilia poured tea and at some point she said, “Child, you look happy. I’m so glad for you. You look … I won’t say it. You would tell me, would you not?”

“Tell you what?”

Cecilia put a hand on hers and smiled. “It’s in your eyes, my dear. Have you seen your doctor?”

She blushed deeply. “I’m planning to.”

“Good. You’ll let me know, won’t you.”

Clara helped with the tea things, and in the kitchen described her encounter with the pin-man at university. Cecilia listened. Her business was changing too, she said. At the opera and the conservatory coaches had been enlisted from the ranks of Nazis, and it was only because of her reputation among Italian and Scandinavian and American performers that she had any operatic work at all.

“There’s something you might want to think about,” she said. “With Albert away and Theo dead it’s just Max and I in the apartment. Two full-sized bedrooms and the smaller one aren’t being used. I was thinking that you and Erika and Mitzi could use those rooms. For a fraction of the money you must be paying now. It would help us all.”

“You mean live here with you?”

“Well, yes. The place is big enough. Then again, from what you just told me, you may not want to bother with an apartment in Vienna at all. It’d be a shame, but I’d understand that.”

“Oh no. I’ll always want to keep a place here. Things will change again.”

That evening she mentioned it to Erika and Mitzi. They had seen the rooms, old-fashioned with high ceilings and tall windows and built-in bookshelves. They discussed the
money and by the end of the next day an agreement was reached with Cecilia. They gave notice at their flats on Beatrixgasse.

IN ST. TÖLLDEN
Dr. Mannheim examined her and asked questions about dates and symptoms such as nausea. Some mornings, she told him. Yes. She got dressed and then sat at his desk while he was making notes in her file. Two months, he said. Two and a half. Based on what he could see and the dates she’d given him. All seemed well. But he wanted her to come more often now. “This is good news, I hope.”

“Very good news.” She smiled. “The best in days.”

She called Albert, not from her parents’ house but from the post office on the town square. She waited while someone at the base went to find him, sat in the familiar telephone booth, so very happy, holding the receiver and leaning back against the panelling. The booth still smelled of newly sharpened pencils, that odd smell it had always had. The postmistress was new. She wore a Nazi pin and gave her suspicious looks through the window. Clara smiled at her because she felt like being generous.

She knew what he would say. They had talked about the possibility and he’d been so very pleased. At the other end she heard footsteps and someone picked up the receiver and said the colonel could not be contacted right now. He was in Munich, and was there a message or could she call back? She said, Never mind, and two hours later she was
on the train to Landshut to tell him in person and to see his expression when she did so.

IN JUNE
she and Erika and Mitzi moved in with the Leonhardts. As they lugged things in and out, neither the concierge at the old building nor the doorman at the new stirred a finger to help. Whereas once they had flung open doors and greeted tenants, even carried shopping bags and held umbrellas, they just stared now. The doorman too was growing a small Hitler moustache and he had taken to wearing a party pin among the golden frogs on his jacket.

SINCE ALBERT WAS BUSY
with manoeuvres and frequent trips to Berlin, she spent most of that summer in St. Töllden. She put on a smock and helped out at the Roman excavation site, soaking and brushing dirt off fragments. In the evenings she translated the archaeologists’ reports into English for the American museum that had bought co-publication rights for the dig.

Earlier that year her father had discovered caves in the mountain that showed signs of having been used as Christian hiding places and as places of secret worship. Existing caves with animals drawn on walls had been enlarged, and worship niches had been hewn with hand tools. On cave walls the fish symbol and the cross were drawn with paints of metal oxides, mingling with images of horses and stags and beasts with enormous tusks drawn
in clay and vegetable paint ten thousand years earlier.

Her father was told to apply for party membership and when he declined he nearly lost the museum. To qualify for continued funds for the dig he had to fill out many applications with eagles and swastikas on them in triplicate and take them to the municipal office where the clerks behind the wickets now wore pins too. They took his forms and whereas once they would have smiled at him and chatted, they now raised their eyebrows and asked questions before stamping the papers with more eagles and swastikas and tossing them into the tray.

In August two men and one woman from the American museum came to visit the site. The men wore bow ties and linen suits with knickerbockers and knee socks, the woman a long skirt, linen jacket, and brown hiking shoes. She was tall and friendly. She carried peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches with the crusts cut away in a linen shoulder bag of many pockets, and most days she offered some to Clara. For the baby, she would say. She had lively eyes and freckles and she wore her hair up, the way Cecilia did.

In what appeared to have been the children’s room at the Roman villa, archaeologists had found figures or dolls seven inches tall, cast hollow from native copper, with fine detailing of faces and hands, the dolls wearing clothing of fur, and one doll holding a broken spear in one raised hand. With all dolls the sprues had been nicely filed off and the cast lines dressed.

Roman, her father had said; a fantastic find. Teaching-toys for children, based on finds from much earlier ages, connecting children across millennia.

The Americans were refreshingly outgoing and appreciative. In their explorers’ linen clothes and on hands and buttocks they clambered over rocks and down strata cuts. They held out helping hands to each other and talked excitedly, and they called one another Doctor Small and Doctor Henry and Doctor Isling, the woman. They took many photographs. In the end they renewed the contract with the museum for three years with the option to renew it further. The day the Americans left, Dr. Isling patted Clara’s stomach and hugged her, and then she gave her a jar of peanut butter still half full and the linen bag of many pockets as a present.

AND SO WILLA
was born in St. Töllden, at the small hospital there. Albert arrived in time; he came on the night train, wearing basic field grey. Before the delivery he sat by her bedside as long as the nurses would allow, then he waited in the lounge. Willa took her time. Late at night a nurse woke Albert where he was asleep in a chair and told him to go home. There was no telling how much longer it would take. But he stayed. Willa was born at four o’clock that morning.

Clara was allowed to have visitors only at the end of that first day, and only one person at a time. The baby could be viewed through the picture window of the
maternity ward, one of a half-dozen wicker baskets with a small white bundle in it, and in Willa’s case a bundle with a full head of black hair that had been rinsed and dried and now stood straight up. At that window like at a peephole to the future stood her father and mother, stood waving and smiling like changed people now in the presence of this grandchild. At other times Peter or Albert stood looking in. Her other brother Bernhard had sent a telegram from Salzburg.

The first time she held Willa in her arms and nursed her, looking down on the tiny perfect person taking nourishment from her breast she began to weep, whether tears of joy or sorrow she could not decide, but tears of a profound experience that none of her studies had prepared her for.

Later Albert sat with her, then her parents, and finally Peter.

“You be nice to Albert,” she told him. “Will you? No arguments, no manly jousting over nothing?”

“I promise,” said Peter.

“Have you spoken to him? Try him.”

“We’re fine. We spoke in the waiting room. About horses. I might actually get to like him. His uniform impresses people, but it scares me.”

She said nothing to that.

“I told him I hoped he brought his marching boots. He’ll be needing them soon.”

“Marching boots?”

“Yes.”

“If he does, so will you, don’t you think? They’d draft you, wouldn’t they?”

“Before I go to war for the corporal, I’d rather—” He leaned forward, made a gun with his hand, and put it to his temple. He sat back in the chair.

“No you wouldn’t, Peter,” she said. “Because there’s Danni. And Mom and I. I haven’t seen much of you. Where have you been?”

“In Geneva, mostly. We had to close the Vienna office and they wanted us to destroy all the files. Now we’re allowed to send them to Switzerland. We sent them to Doctor Hufnagel. You remember him.”

“I do. They let you send all the files?”

“All except the ones on minority rights. They took those away.” He paused. “And you?”

“I spent a lot of time on trains. The base, Vienna, here. They fired the old faculty, you’ll have heard. And I’m not there any more.”

“That’s too bad.” He sat there on the wooden chair against the wall. He managed a smile.

“And how is Danni?”

“She is fine. She could have gone to Switzerland, but she didn’t want to go without me. They took my passport.”

“They did?”

“Yes. I am not allowed to leave. And I really do think there’s a war coming, Clara. There’s talk of closing the border. I mean, from the inside. By our new colonial masters.”

She was leaning against the pillow, half-sitting and uncomfortably so because of the pad for the stitches and the bleeding. She was not keen to hear dark predictions.

He was watching her. “Are you in pain?”

“
Am I in pain
. Brother-dear.”

“Want me to call the nurse?”

“God, no. She’d stop all the visiting right away. It’s really the nurses who run this place.” She paused. “What’s that about war, Peter?”

“Things I hear. I asked your Albert, but even if he knew he wouldn’t say anything. I think he knows.”

A FEW DAYS LATER
Neville Chamberlain met Hitler, and for a promise of peace Great Britain agreed not to interfere in the German invasion of Sudetenland. She sat listening to the news on the radio in the dayroom with just two other patients in the room, one of them asleep in his chair. Later that day the radio said Mr. Chamberlain had flown home to a hero’s welcome at the airport.

“
Peace for our time
,” the British prime minister called out on the crackling radio. People could be heard cheering. The date was September 30, 1938.

Next day there was a picture of him in the newspaper: smiling, a likeable and distinguished-looking gentleman waving a piece of paper.

“Where is your Albert?” said Peter to her that afternoon. They were sitting in the dayroom, just he and she, with the radio on. He had brought her a thermos of coffee
made by her mother just the way she liked it, with milk and sugar.

“He went to Vienna to see his parents. He’ll be back in a few days.”

The radio was talking about the invasion of Sudetenland. It had begun that morning and was already completed.

“There goes your Treaty of Versailles,” said Peter. “Guilt clauses and all. Torn up, tossed out. Remember? How did you put it? Standing up for ourselves, being wild for once? Not exactly what you had in mind, is it?”

“You know it isn’t.” She sat on the couch in her own worn terrycloth robe and bedroom slippers. “I want to get out of here,” she said.

“You will. Isn’t it just a few more days?” He crossed to the radio, raised his hand to the knob, and looked at her over his shoulder. “Enough of that?”

She nodded.

That evening Peter took the train back to Vienna. She never saw him again.

WHEN ALBERT WAS BACK
, the head nurse made an exception and allowed him to be in the room with mother and baby. He had to be far away, on a chair by the window, and he sat on that chair in the windowlight like a moody painting of war coming. She looked at him, and she looked away. It was in his face and in his uniform. It was in that quality of late light with the sun down and the light above the rooftops orange at first, then silver. Now shades of
grey filled the room. Grey walls, grey floor, grey uniform. He looked tired and he needed a shave. He had become thinner, leaner, and nearly hard-looking in the face, and there was something else that was new around his mouth and eyes, a bitterness, she thought.