Clara (36 page)

On the way back to the train station, already near the small supermarket, she tripped over something and fell to one knee. A young tourist couple helped her up.

“Take a hold,” said the girl. “Are you all right? Is your knee okay?”

For a moment of confusion she thought this might be Willa home from Australia, but of course she was not. This one was blond and quite young. She had a small stars-and-stripes pin on her windbreaker.

Clara thanked her. The young man was unwrapping a chocolate bar and he peeled back the silver foil and held out the chocolate to her. “Have some,” he said. “It’s very good.”

On the train back she felt cold. She felt close to tears much of the time but did not want to probe the reason why. The mountains moved past, their peaks orange in the setting sun. Flocks of crows rising and settling, and in the distance the great steel cross already flashing on its peak.

In St. Töllden, on the way home from the train station Father Hofstätter saw her and he crossed the street. Wordlessly he offered his arm and walked her home.

“Too cold to be out, Doctor Herzog,” he said near her house. “The damp from the river.”

He waited until she had unlocked the gate and gone in, then he raised his hat and nodded a greeting. He turned back the way they’d come.

Upstairs she switched on the computer, loaded Skype, and put on the headset. She called Willa. There was only the answering machine.

“Call me back, dear,” she said. “Soon. Call any time.”

That night she dreamed of Romans in togas and tooled leather breastplates, some of them with laurel wreaths like crowns, poking through the remains of a fire, some enormous conflagration it must have been, and they were going through it, spearing things and holding them up, giving them due consideration and talking to each other and shaking their Roman heads. And in her dream she finally understood what they were looking for: they were looking for
clues to themselves, trying to understand what it was that had made them who they were. In some places there was smoke still rising, in tall thin columns widening near the top as if to hold up the pale eternal sky.

Willa called in the dark of night. She picked up the bedside telephone. She dropped the receiver. She fumbled and found it and pulled it up by its cord. She felt hot, she shivered. She felt on fire herself.

“Mom? What is it? Are you all right?”

“Can you come home, Willa?”

“What is the matter? Has something happened?”

“No. Just come home, dear,” she said. “Come soon.”

“Mom, what is it?”

“Just come home now.”

She woke to the first pale light and made herself get up and put on slippers and robe, and then holding on to the rail with both hands she descended to the basement one step at a time.

She dragged the two boxes with the red labels from where they sat on the cement floor into the old laundry room and she pulled up the washer bench to the firebox under the laundry cauldron. She balled up the first few pages and set fire to them. The flue had not seen warm air rising in years and there was a great deal of smoke, but eventually the flames caught. They flared and rolled out of the firebox and were sucked back inside.

She sat on the bench with her hair wild from the pillow, sat with her elbows resting on her knees and fed her notes
to herself into the flames. Hers and hers alone. She felt the heat on her face and eyes, and on her bare shins and hands. Two banker’s boxes full of paper. It took a long time.

AT MIDMORNING
that day Caroline Gottschalk looked at Emma and motioned her out of the room.

“I think your mother has pneumonia,” she said in the kitchen. “A temperature of forty-one and a half. We’ll have to see whether it’s viral or bacterial. Keep her cool with damp cloths and change the sheets often. I’ll get her into the hospital.”

“She probably won’t want to go. She hasn’t seen a doctor in, I don’t know how long.”

Dr. Gottschalk shrugged. “She needs chest X-rays, maybe infusions of antibiotics. A cardio monitor. A number of things. You talk to her. When did she call you?”

“Just this morning. I came over and found her like this.”

“Stay with her. I’ll take the blood sample to the lab and get them to run it.”

“Why so suddenly? How did she get it?”

“It would have started a day or two ago,” Dr. Gottschalk said. “Like a cold. Maybe a sniffle, then it hits you in the night. Your mother is old, Emma. I have to go, but call my cell if you need to.”

OF COURSE SHE REFUSED
to go into the hospital. Her fever peaked at forty-two degrees Celsius, and she nearly died then. It seemed to Emma that Dr. Gottschalk was more angry at being ignored than she was sad for her mother.

At the height of her delirium Clara saw her parents standing at the foot of her bed, beckoning for her to get up and come along. They looked carefree and relaxed, her mother for once not in greys and blacks but in a nice sky-blue dress with long sleeves and lace at collar and wrists, and her father in a fine suit and with the kind of upturned moustache he’d worn when he met her mother. They looked better and happier than she had ever seen them.

She said so to Emma when she woke up. Emma in short sleeves was leaning over her with sponge and basin, wiping her brow.

“Could be the fever,” said Emma. “Remember what Willa said with Dad.”

“Willa?” she sat up. “Did Willa come? Where is she?”

Emma put the sponge in the basin. “Mom. I’m the one that’s here. Look at me.”

“Emma-dear. Of course. God, I’m hot.” She fanned herself.

Emma put basin and sponge on the floor, stood up, and pushed them under the bed with her toe.

“Lie back. Sleep,” she said. “Caroline says that if the fever comes back, you will have to go into the hospital. She can get you into the small one, the Catholic sisters, the what’s-it-called.”

“It’s called the Merciful Heart.” She lay watching Emma. “Sit down. First prop up my pillow and then sit down. Not on the bed. In that chair so I can see you better. And cheer up. I am so very grateful for everything you’ve done. You do feel that. I know you do.”

Emma sat back in the chair. She stood up and put on the cardigan.

“Emma, your father loved you very much. He loved you just the same as Willa. We all did.”

“I never doubted that.” Emma sat in the chair with her elbows held close and her hands making fists in her lap.

“Be happy, dear Emma. Please let me see you being happy. You don’t depend on anyone else for that. I think your husband is a good man, but he needs to get a bit of an edge. Take action. Something.”

“What about the museum?”

“Yes. The museum. I did speak to Mr. Hofer a few days ago and I mentioned Tom. He can call. I have no idea how that’ll go. He really should retrain for something. Tell him I have some money. I’d help.”

“You would?”

“Yes, I would. I’ve thought about it. Be happy, my dear Emma. That’s what a mother wants most of all, for her children to be happy. For her children finally to understand that their happiness is up to them. Life becomes so much easier once you accept that.”

“Dad never liked the kids much, did he?”

“Oh dear. Not true, Emma. He loved them. For the longest time. We both did, but as they got older, instead of growing up, they became opinionated and rude. Disrespectful. Especially – you know who. I won’t name names.”

“Because he called you Nazis? Was that why?”

“Well, no. That was just ignorance. Anger. All your dad and I ever expected were decent manners. And that Nazi word has become so misused as to be meaningless. Some day take them to the archives. The facts are all there now if they care to know them. But, Emma … the pages I wrote for you and Willa when you were small, the ones I gave you years ago? That was something special. That was between you and me, and it came straight and pure from our lives in those times. Don’t let anyone spoil it.”

“I won’t.”

For a while they were silent. In the street, the ten o’clock bus went by, and then the old man who was still grinding knives rang his bell. The sound came from the distance, passed in the street, and faded again. The day then was so still they could hear the river, which was running high from the glaciers and snowfields.

“I’m hot,” she said.

Emma reached for the sponge, soaked and squeezed it, and wiped her brow.

“I loved your dad. So much.”

“I know you did.”

“And it was so very easy, Emma.”

Emma said nothing. She stood up and went to the window. She used a tissue and stood looking out for some moments.

“There’s something else,” said Clara. “Come and sit down again. The angry boy we were talking about. Man, I guess. He stole the Knight’s Cross. He of all people. Isn’t that interesting? I saw him holding it up to his collar and grinning at what’s her name. His wife.”

“Katrin, Mom. You should really know their names by now.”

“Oh for God’s sake. I
do
know her name. I just couldn’t remember it. Anyway, Willa wants it back.”

“Why didn’t you say something sooner? He may have sold it.”

“He’d better not.”

“Why can’t he have it?”

“Because he doesn’t
deserve
it. It stands for something. A famous general recommended your father for it, a man he admired, and so it has a soul. Willa reminded me of that and she is right. He has to give it back. I have decided. The rest of the medals – you and Willa can work it out. It’s all yours anyway, split straight down the middle. Now don’t … listen to me. Don’t fight over one single thing. It is not worth it. Never, ever. You are sisters.”

Emma sat looking at the small silver-framed pictures on the bedside table.

“Emma-dear,” said Clara. “Look at me.” She waited.

“What?”

“When you were born in that cottage in Burgenland, you’ve seen the photo album. It was such a lovely warm summer, and Mitzi and Daniela and Cecilia and Erika, they would all come out some weekends, and when your dad came home, from Africa it was. When he came home he was so very happy with you, Emma. He was only there a week I think, but he’d have you on his lap, you looking at him with your big eyes, and so serious. There were moments, Emma …”

Emma was sitting very still. “Go on.”

“And later,” she said. “The weekend hikes we would go on. Backpacks with blankets and food and stuff, and we’d sleep in some mountain cabin and in the mornings we’d make a breakfast of pancakes on the alcohol burner. Do you remember that?”

“Of course I do.”

“Good. But enough of all that. Come give your mother a hug. I love you.”

Later that day Dr. Gottschalk came by. She listened to Clara’s heart and lungs. She took temperature and blood pressure. She inserted a feed into a vein in the back of Clara’s hand and taped down the vial there.

In the kitchen she said to Emma, “I am getting a bit worried. She has viral pneumonia, and it’s far from over. It progresses in waves. I’ve put her on antivirals now. Sometimes they help.”

“But she seems fine now. We had a long talk.”

Dr. Gottschalk nodded. “Good. You have your talks. Is Willa coming?”

“Why? Is she that sick?”

“Yes. At the very least I want her in the Merciful Heart. They have good nurses there. Work on her, Emma. Do what you can.”

In the other room, Clara lay in bed, weak but the calmest she had been in a long time. She felt at peace and lucid, and in this mood she lay remembering. She could see Albert’s face so clearly before her. His eyes, his smile for her. She could see the girls when they were small. Easter bonnets on them. Willa on a horse. She could see Professor Emmerich sitting on the desk, and Martin Heidegger lost on that park bench. She could see Freud poking the air with his cigar.

She tried to decide which had been the most helpful thing she had ever read or heard, and that was hard because there had been so much of it.

Which? she thought, and the words that came were Rilke’s:

She called out for Emma, and Emma came to her side.

“Sit with me,” she said. “Is it very hot in here? Can we open the window?”

Emma opened the window and cool evening air blew in, the scent of the cold river water, the scent of wet earth, the scent of the mountains, pine and wet rock.

That night, the fever came back, and Emma called an ambulance. While she waited, she packed a small bag of toilet essentials. She folded the little hinged picture from her mother’s night table and put that in too.

Clara was dimly aware of being on fire, and that fire she thought must have been caused by the embers she had been sheltering in her cupped hands much of her life, carrying them as her secret flame wherever she had gone.

She was aware of being taken down the stairs by men in uniforms, and then being loaded into a van. She saw her parents again, she saw Willa; she saw Albert, she saw dear Mitzi and Erika.

Later she was dimly aware of people standing and sitting by her bedside in an unfamiliar room. There was nothing she could do for them. Women in blue and white hats
like small wings wiped her brow and tried to feed her, but she kept her lips closed and turned away.