Clara (34 page)

LONG BEFORE THEN
, and for months on end in the winter of 1945 after the bomb and into spring and summer, she had stayed up nights and wandered the shattered house, looked in on the children, sat in their darkened room, sat with Mitzi and Sissy in the kitchen. She read to them from Eliot’s
Wasteland
. It seemed almost kind and warm now, almost hopeful in a human, accepting way. Like the words of a friend who understood about hope, that April indeed was perhaps the cruellest month, breeding lilacs like hope out of the dead land.

Anna had grown old and vague, but she still did the cooking and the cleaning. One evening after saying good night she walked down the stairs to her room with the cracked walls, and in her room sat on a chair and died as quietly as she had lived.

Clara and everyone else had to submit to the denazification
routine. She sat before the Truth Commission in the dining room at the Golden Goose, and she knew not one person on the board. Some were locals, but most were brought in for the process. They had her file and they kept passing it up and down the long table, whispering.

The chairman of the commission was an American major with grey hair and a trim moustache who had been a lawyer before the war. It was difficult to explain the Gold Party Pin, the Blood Order, and the Civilian Medal of Honour, impossible to explain them out of context. And so into the exceptional silence in the room she told her story from the beginning, and she told the truth about the death of the SS man, Bönninghaus, in her bedroom. The American major made detailed notes and asked questions as to specifics.

It took all morning. She had Mitzi there as a witness already cleared, and she had signatures on her questionnaire from the head archaeologist and the priest. The commission broke for lunch and ate the roast of venison with gravy and rice and sweet peas, and a dessert of California tinned peaches that was on the menu that day. She and Mitzi were served at the scrubbed cook’s table in the kitchen. It was the best meal they’d had in years.

After lunch the major dismissed Mitzi and he made Clara repeat her story from the beginning while he compared painstakingly what she was saying now with what she had said before.

Afterwards he sent her into the other room while the commission debated her case. It took forty-eight minutes
by her watch. At times she heard raised voices, but in the end when they called her back into the room she was exonerated.

With the document she applied at Innsbruck University and was asked by the rector to prepare a sample first-year curriculum and four lesson plans in English Literature. They searched for her paper on
Moments of Faith and Power
, and fortunately found the copy at Geneva University.

While she waited for them to decide, she applied for an interpreter position at the district commander’s office. St. Töllden was on the border between the British and the French occupation zone, and district command was held by the British, supported by Canadians.

Of Albert, she knew nothing. He might be dead. She knew only what Guido Malfatti had told her about the fighting in Russia and then in Italy. And she’d read the five letters from Albert that the boy had brought. She was reading them for weeks, again and again. She took them to bed and read a paragraph a night before going to sleep so as to have his words as the last thought of that day.

She and Guido had sat at the back of the house one day in June 1945, on the big smooth rock there, the boy with his peg leg straight out and a chip of iron at the end of the peg like a small horseshoe. A boy maybe fourteen, with bright eyes and dirt streaks on his face. She had found some bread and cheese for him, and milk, and he ate and drank with enormous gratitude while he told how Albert had taken him on as a mechanic’s apprentice in
Russia and later filled out papers for the transfer to Italy.

He asked about the Norton, and she showed it to him, in the garage. There was rubble on it, and a dent in the tank, but no other visible damage. He ran his finger through the dust on the seat and asked if he could clean it. He knew about motorcycles, he said. Two-stroke and four-stroke engines. A few weeks later he’d found work as a mechanic with the British.

ONE OTHER GOOD THING
that occurred in those months was that Sissy met a nice young Canadian officer, the lieutenant in charge of the Film and Propaganda Unit. She met him at a viewing of the film made at the Mauthausen concentration camp. Sissy was there with five-year-old Caroline. There were perhaps twenty women in the Canadian Armed Forces tent that day, the younger ones in their good dresses, with their hair pinned back on the side with combs, some with small children on their laps.

All were there because in order to receive ration cards and the prerequisite rubberstamp in their ration book they had to sit through these films on a regular basis. In case they missed the point, a finger uncurled from a big fist onscreen, and the finger pointed at them while a man’s voice told them that the atrocities they were about to see were all their fault.

The Canadian lieutenant watched Sissy, and when the film was over and the tentflaps had been rolled up, he
came up to her and gave her two Hershey chocolate bars.

“One for yourself and one for the little girl,” he said. “Is she yours? What’s her name?”

Sissy already looked much like her mother, Cecilia, beautiful, proud, and contained. Most of her clothes had been her mother’s, and with some adjustments here and there they fit not too badly. More importantly she knew how to carry herself, and she spoke English.

“Yes, she’s mine,” she said. “Her name is Caroline. Caroline Gottschalk.”

Sissy and Caroline came home with chocolate on their breath, and Clara waved Sissy into her study and closed the door. “We saved some for you and Mitzi,” said Sissy, and Clara told her that was not the point.

That same afternoon she and Sissy with Emma, Willa, and Caroline in tow marched to the town hall to speak to the military district commander. He was Captain Hamilton, and she knew him because he had interviewed her before counter-signing the denazification document made out by the Truth Commission.

“Not our children,” she said to the captain once they were in his office. They stood there, all of them, the children embarrassed and Sissy worried Clara might say the wrong thing.

He shook his head. “What? Don’t I know you?”

“You do. That is why I feel I can make this request. We would have brought our mothers too, but they were killed in the bombing.”

“Were they?” he said. “Sit down.” He stepped to the door and called for more chairs. To her he said, “Write down your name on this piece of paper.”

He sat behind his desk and looked at her name. On a coathook hung his belt and canvas holster with his pistol. He was a nice-looking man her own age, with brown eyes that looked at you straight and steady.

“Back up, if you would,” he said. “What’s this all about?”

Behind her Sissy poked her and hissed, “Don’t. Clara. Let’s go.”

He looked from her to Sissy and the children, scrubbed and bright-eyed all of them and with decent haircuts thanks to Mitzi, but in clothes handed down again and again, and Emma’s blue wool jacket overlarge and bare to the weave except in the creases.

“Well?” he said.

She said it was completely unacceptable for children, these children for instance, four, five, and seven years old, to have to sit through these films on the death-camps, however terrible, terrible no doubt, the facts were. But to accuse these children and any and all children of those atrocities was completely wrong. It was insane, she said angrily.

He stared at her. He said, “The orders are no food stamps without seeing the films. Orders. It is not for me …” He stopped.

“But can you see how unacceptable that is for a mother?”

“These are orders from the top. From the Psychological Warfare Division. All civilians and military alike are to be held responsible for the actions of the Nazi regime. For the war and for the atrocities.”

“I understand that, even though it is ridiculous. One of the cleverest tricks of the Christian Church was the idea of the Original Sin. That everyone is born guilty. So devious. The never-ending burden, the unredeemable debt.”

He sat watching her. He pulled the paper close and studied it, tapped her name with his finger, a clean finger with the nail cut short and slightly rounded.

“Your degree is in Theology? Or Divinity?”

“No, it’s not,” she said. “Captain, if you want justification for having dropped all those bombs on us, find another way. Not by pretending our children are criminals.”

He said nothing for some time. He looked down at her name on the piece of paper and back up at her.

“I think you should go,” he said then.

“All I am asking is, not the children, Captain Hamilton.”

“Under the age of one they can be on the mother’s card and they don’t have to watch the films.”

“You need to stop and think about a sentence like that. I’d rather feed my children twigs and leaves. I’d rather … I’ll dig latrine ditches for blackmarket money. I will. But I won’t have them accused and burdened like this.”

He looked away from her eyes. He sat back in his chair. Beyond the closed door they could hear voices. They could hear a typewriter. Out the window the sun was
shining on the old house fronts opposite. A truck went by.

“You should go,” he said. “Thank you.”

The next time Sissy saw the Canadian lieutenant he told her that children under twelve could now get food stamps without having to sit through the films. It was an experiment, he said. The age cut-off was now up to district commanders. He was glad about it. He put his finger to his lips and said that Captain Hamilton and three others including two Americans had travelled to Frankfurt and made their case.

By early winter the screening program, food-for-blame as it was commonly called, was abandoned altogether, except in parts of the Russian and French zones.

But that was how it began for Sissy and her lieutenant from the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia. The way they got around the fraternization ban was that he hired her as the official interpreter for the unit.

UNTIL CLARA HAD
her university post in Innsbruck, she too worked as an interpreter for the Allies. For weeks in the fall of 1945 she would go around with two Canadians, the one a lieutenant, the other a corporal. They would go from house to house, the Canadians in their sharply ironed uniforms and she in her print dress with the puffed sleeves and her one good pair of shoes, low black heels they were, and ring the bell.

“Are there any guns in this house?” she would ask them, mostly women and a few men on crutches or missing an
arm. “You have to hand them over,” she would say. “Any kind of gun.”

The people would hesitate, and she would say, “Come on now. In the French and Russian zones they are shooting people for it. So just give it to the lieutenant.”

This was a hunting community with a fine gunsmithing tradition, and so in every other house there would be a rifle or shotgun, and the lieutenant would weigh it in his hand. If it was nothing special he would pass it to the corporal, who would stick it muzzle-first into the nearest sewer grill and lean on it hard and stomp it until the barrel kinked and the stock snapped off. If the shotgun or rifle was a good piece handmade in Ferlach or in Steyr, the lieutenant would write a receipt for it by type and serial number, and the corporal would put it in the cart he was pulling and they’d move on to the next house.

ONE NIGHT
in the spring of 1946, when the moment of David Koren’s return from Sweden was only weeks away, Erika in Mitzi’s battered old Steyr was driving through Vienna on a Red Cross assignment. She was turning a corner onto Burgring when she was stopped by drunken Russian soldiers. They shot her dead and dragged her out and left her there on the pavement. They took the car for a joyride and crashed it.

Clara found out only four months later, from Daniela. Two civilians had witnessed the shooting and reported it it the Red Cross.

NEAR THEIR END
, she knew, Blake and Rilke, Nietzsche and Goethe, Eliot and Schopenhauer, and probably all who had spent their lives examining and summing up had come to the conclusion that it was important to question, yes, but that in the end it was just as important simply to accept.

With Mitzi gone she felt lonely. Or not
lonely
, she decided, but alone in a final way; different than she had felt in her youth when she had used her aloneness to hone her strength, the way an athlete uses weights for her muscles and stamina. The discipline of living successfully in one room and in one mind while building forward. She still had that discipline, even if it was infused now with a sense not of loss but of closure, and she used the discipline to finish the translation and to review it and then to pick through it word for word, and through each
sentence and paragraph echo for echo. Again and again. Hours and days and weeks at her desk, pushing herself: a writer’s chosen life.