Clara (2 page)

That day at the cemetery, when she removed her hand from his coffin and the coachman shook the reins and clucked his tongue and said, “Go, girls! Go!” and those enormous horses leaned into the traces and raised the first polished hoof to take him away, at that moment and from that moment on she stood alone.

She stood like the last person in a house already emptied and dark on moving day, and she looked after coffin
and cart and horses leaving, and she stood like this for a long time. Finally she stirred. She took a tissue from her cuff and used it behind the veil, and she turned her narrow back in that black coat on all of them and walked away, down the cemetery lane, past nuns’ graves and monks’ graves, a sea of black cast-iron crosses each one just like the other.

The previous night it had snowed, and now the air was crisp and clean and it smelled of more snow coming. The high mountains around the valley and the glacier were white, but the pine forests climbing the slopes were still green.

She heard steps on the gravel path behind her and then her two daughters were walking wordlessly by her side; Emma, the gentle and studious one, and Willa, never married and a bit wild like her father had been, with her arm still in a cast from when a birthing camel had kicked her weeks ago on a farm in Queensland.

Eventually they steered her around and walked her to the parking lot. On the way there and without looking up she said, “Please thank the Pachmayrs for me. For the horses.” And by her side Emma said, “We will, Mom. Of course we will.”

The defence minister and the military attachés and their lieutenants stood by her car, waiting, and they held their hats in bare hands and they inclined their heads and murmured their condolences. They drove off in gleaming black Mercedes limousines with diplomatic licence plates,
and the car tires ground on the gravel drive and brown oak leaves swirled and settled, and they were gone.

At the funeral meal she sat next to his empty chair and his placesetting with fork and knife crossed on his plate. Her friend Mitzi Friedmann sat at her other side. There was a picture of him, of her Albert before the illness, looking the way she’d loved him all her life, bold and grinning and that cowlick in his hair, and his chin up high.

She noticed she was beginning to pay attention to detail again. She made mental notes of how much she disliked the commotion in the room; the priest, Father Hofstätter, being benevolent and jolly with everyone, and all these relatives like excited carrion birds who hovered and ate and drank and watched her, and looked away when she caught them watching. Some came up and said a few words in praise of Albert, which was nice. Dr. Kessler, the physician who’d taken over Dr. Mannheim’s practice and who’d helped Albert greatly during his final days, came up too and bowed and held her hand. “I’ve lost a friend,” he said. “You lost that and so much more.”

After the meal Willa and Emma took her to the stone house near the bridge where the river Inn flowed through this old city of St. Töllden, home to her family for generations.

There was tension again between her daughters. She felt it but did not want to deal with it, and so she sent them away. In her bedroom she moved the small hinged silver frame with her two favourite photographs closer to
the edge of the night table so she could see it from the pillow. One of the photos was of Albert and the girls, perhaps nine and twelve years old, walking side by side on a sunny fall day with leaves on the ground. The girls were skipping alongside their father on the path by the river, Emma in pigtails and Willa with a single ponytail off-centre high on her head. The picture showed them from behind in skirts bouncing and in sweaters she had knitted and whose patterns she remembered still. Albert’s hands were on their shoulders, holding them close to either side of him.

The other picture was of him as a young man before they were married, grinning and confident in full uniform, photographed at the officers’ training course in the spring of 1937, before the famous general had called him to his team of field commanders.

She grieved like this for two days, during which she refused to see anyone or speak to anyone other than Mitzi. She spoke not even to Willa, who as usual on these visits from faraway was staying in her childhood room on the lower floor of the house.

When Mitzi arrived she leaned her canes within reach against the dresser and sat a bit crooked in the blue upholstered chair by the bedside. They spoke not very much while the sunlight moved from the south window to the west where it flashed on the river and lit up the yellow front of the house opposite and filled the room with warm light before it faded altogether.

Two days later she bathed and dressed carefully in everyday clothes but with a black mourning band on the left upper sleeve of her blouse. The girl from Mitzi’s salon came and washed and blow-dried her hair, and left again. She made coffee, and while it dripped she made toast on the old metal toastersheet atop the gas flame.

She ate breakfast in the kitchen and began to think about what she would write, then carried her third cup of coffee into her study. When she was a little girl, it had been Bernhard’s room, the younger of her two stepbrothers. There were shelves all along one wall and good light from windows on two sides. She walked around the stack of boxes for the archives, lowered the tablet on the secretary, and sat down on the chair. Writing had always saved her. It would do so again.

A DAY LATER
the traditional afternoon visiting began. People sat in the formal living room around the porcelain stove and under the various family portraits and watercolours. The visitors said nothing helpful, but what helpful thing was there to say.

Out the parlour window on these late-fall afternoons you could see the church not far away. You could see the play of sunlight on its stone folds and in its stained pitch chutes and musket slits. At this time of year, every day between four and four-thirty, the sun reflected off the large steeple-cross made of bronze forged from abandoned French cannons and placed there by citizens some time
after Napoleon’s hordes had come and sacked the city. According to family documents they’d hung the commander of the garrison, Major Ambrosius Herzog, a brother of her great-great-grandfather, by his thumbs from wires above the market square where he died in stoic silence and was left hanging there until his thumbs rotted off and he fell down.

In the living room the visitors sat in their loden mountain clothes and in their city finery. The men turned their hats in their hands and the women turned their rings while she carried the conversation in her strong and formal way. She offered Marsala wine and Cinzano and Earl Grey tea in the good Dresden pot with the butterfly pattern, and she offered biscotti and coconut kisses that tasted of the doillied tins she stored them in.

By the end of that customary week of visiting these same people had stolen all of her husband’s war decorations. Gone were his two Iron Crosses, the War Merit Cross, and the various Close Combat and Wound Badges; even his Knight’s Cross was gone, the one that the famous general had presented to him in person. They’d also stolen the tank badge from the Afrika Korps, and the silver Edelweiss from the First Alpine Division. They had not seen the Walther pistol because she kept it locked away, but they’d taken his officer’s dress sidearm, the foot-long dagger with the ivory handle and silver tassel.

With some of them she’d left the room on a pretence and then watched through the crack between door and
frame to see them rise on tiptoes and grin at their wives and put a finger to their lips. They’d opened the glass front of the bookcase and reached in to unpin the piece they coveted, these boy-men from his own family.

She understood that they were after his courage and his eventful life, as if by stealing these bits of tin they could make what they stood for their own, these people who had never done a thing more dangerous than eat with knife and fork. It was interesting to her that those who had snickered at him the most during his life had also stolen the highest decorations.

She thought of it as his final test of them, their chance at redemption, and she kept track of it all not only in her journal, but also in the letters she left for him on his pillow: pages written in blue ink and folded around dried leaves of lavender from the pouches in her linen drawer. On the outside of the sealed envelopes she wrote,
“For you, my Love. Clara.”
At first she wrote him a letter nearly every day. As time went by she wrote less often, but never less than twice a week. Her daughters collected the letters like discreet mail carriers and put them away unopened in a shoebox.

Eventually Willa’s time was up. The cast on her arm had been removed at the clinic, and she had to fly back to her camels in Australia. On the morning of her departure there was a freezing rain falling, and to see Willa off Clara put on a coat and the black hat with the wide brim. Emma had come, and the three of them walked down the stairs and then slowly on the slippery ground around the house
to the front where the taxi stood waiting. The rear door was frozen shut and the driver came around and yanked it open.

“There,” he said and stepped back. Willa kissed her mother and Emma, and she wiped her own cheeks with the inside of her wrist, still the same motion she’d made as a little girl.

“Come back soon,” said Clara to her. “When do you think we’ll see you again?”

“Not sure. I’ll do my best. There’s often a conference somewhere in Europe or East Africa.”

Emma stood stiffly and Willa studied her for a moment, then she reached out and gave her sister another hug.

Finally there was just the harsh sound of the diesel engine under load and Willa’s face in the rear window as the car pulled away. The freezing rain had begun to turn to snow.

“Mom,” said Emma. “Can I ask? Have you spoken to them, at the museum?”

“About Tom? Not yet. There hasn’t been a good moment.”

“Just to give him a try, that’s all he’s asking.”

“I know.”

Emma stood waiting. “I should go,” she said then. “Mark some papers. I’m filling in this week at the college.”

“Oh good, Emma. That’s good. I know you like that. And thanks for all your help.”

They embraced and she stood for a moment and watched Emma walk away, careful on the slippery ground. Emma looked back over her shoulder once and raised a hand in a small motion, then carried on.

SHE WALKED SLOWLY
back around the side of the house, holding on to the rough wall and to spars of the trellis where the last brown leaves of clematis clung to vines.

She stood for a moment and held out her hand to let snowflakes settle on the glove, on the stitched ridges in the black leather and on her fingers as they moved.

Look, she said to him. Snow. The girls were here. But you know that.

She was going to go upstairs but now changed her mind and continued along the garden path, around the house, past the roses with their heads buried in piles of leaves, past the bare apple trees, the bare gooseberry bushes. The wall of the neighbour’s house showed yellow through the evergreens.
The garden is mourning
, she quoted Hermann Hesse for him.
And golden drips leaf upon leaf down from the tall Acacia tree
.

The day we met, she said. Was there snow then too? I can’t quite remember.

She did not think so, because of the motorcycle and the way they were dressed. She reached and touched a last gooseberry still dangling, and left it there.

I thank you for everything, she said to him. I am so very grateful.

She stood a moment and looked around, then turned back and entered the house and climbed the stone stairs.

On a landing she paused to catch her breath. No, she decided. No snow that night, but quite cold. She remembered that. And Mitzi was along. Evening clothes; she and Mitzi in long gowns, silver opera wraps and peacock feather hats; he in a classic black dinner suit with white tie and stiff stand-up collar. Over it he wore an old leather army coat, a thing cracked with age and split at the seams. Mitzi sat in the motorcycle sidecar that was shaped like a rocket, with her feather hat in her lap, clutching the handrail like a child on a roller coaster. And she herself sat on the pillion seat and held on to him with both hands, her own feather hat wedged against his back. Her teeth were chattering with the noise and the bumpy ride, but she remembered grinning at Mitzi and shouting from sheer wild exuberance.

Late October it was, 1932. In the parks they passed, under monuments to glories and to famous men long gone, the homeless were sleeping in piles of fall leaves, great clusters of leaves, entire families huddled together, lost
voices in the dark. A militia truck cruised with dimmed lights; a gang in the pay of some warlord on the prowl for other gangs of other warlords, pale young men huddling on the truck beds with clubs and iron lances pried from picket fences as their weapons. The motorcycle roared past them, with her and Mitzi in their bright outfits like Valkyries flying through the night, and the militia boys’ faces turned in unison as if pulled on a string.