Clara (6 page)

“Millions,” said Koren. “Seven, eight, nine million. How Communist is that?”

He said he had not yet made up his mind, but the same dreamy support of an ideal was probably also true for the Zionist Jews and the National Socialists. Certainly the Nazis were doing well economically, but they were also anti-Semitic and anti-Communist. Perhaps it was just human nature, all this fear and greed, and in the end the
true divisions were not along the lines of -isms but between people with or without heart and substance.

He sat down.

Erika stood up and told him he was not saying anything helpful. She said they were coming to these meetings even though it was dangerous, but she needed information to help her decide whom to support, the Communists or the Nazis. The Nazis, she said, had interesting ideas on dignity through work and the role of women, and the Communist ideas of equality and human rights were also attractive.

“But you’re not addressing that,” she told him across the room. “If all you can offer are half-baked generalizations, then come back when you know more. We are still idealists, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We believe in some of those ideas and we are searching for solutions. Look around. What else is there?”

There was a stunned silence, which then quickly led to a heated discussion of the core ideas of Communism and how to protect them against corruption and abuse. As tempers cooled, Koren and Erika ended up sitting side by side on a couch, arguing fiercely at first but eventually arriving at some kind of agreement.

“At least, he’s interesting,” said Erika to her at some point during the evening. “And he has nice eyes, did you notice?”

Koren was staying at a hotel on Thaliastrasse, and the women went out of their way to drive him there. He sat hunched in the back next to Erika, cracking jokes about
holding his breath because of the fumes of iodine and hair chemicals in the car.

“Well, would you rather be walking, Mr. Foreign Correspondent?” Erika said to him.

Koren said he would not.

“Just as well,” said Mitzi at the wheel. “Might lose your suit and those good shoes and have to walk home in socks. Or are they taking socks too now?”

Koren laughed at that.

They were nearly there when his side of the seat caved in and the steel springs made contact with the battery terminals under the seat. Mitzi pulled over, and they all leapt out, slapping at the harsh smoke in the car. Koren reached in and pried up the seat. There was a smouldering fire among the horsehair stuffing, and they puffed and slapped it out and stood on the sidewalk while the seat cushion lay there smoking. Eventually they wedged it back in and continued with him sitting in front.

After this Koren came to Vienna several times a month. He liked Erika and she liked him. She would pick him up at the railroad station, and within a few more visits Clara made room for them in the flat while she moved up to Mitzi’s and slept on the couch there.

Koren saw Clara’s desk and the Adler typewriter and all the paper, and one day when she was moving out and he was moving in he said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you. Are you writing?”

“Well. Just notes, for now.” She was pleased to see him
nod as if accepting her into a brotherhood that she very much wanted to belong to.

Koren would arrive from places such as Berlin, Palestine, and Budapest, always with the same brown leather suitcase and a small black Olympia typewriter in a fitted box covered in oilcloth. Like Albert and Peter he liked dressing in suits, sharply ironed shirts, and good English shoes.

She and Erika would go double-dating to nightclubs with Albert and Koren. She’d wear the black suit from Rosenbergs’, narrowed at the waist and the skirt down to mid-calf. They’d wear small hats and high heels, and the men wore dark-blue double-breasted suits with wide lapels and striped ties. When Koren got tipsy he’d take off his jacket and roll up his sleeves and slap his big hands together and dance like that, like some bear in vest and shirtsleeves, grinning happily.

In her files there was a picture of them, taken at Mademoiselle in the second district, the four of them sitting close together at a small round table; a champagne bucket on it and the tall flutes, the women’s purses and a silver table lamp. Smiles on their faces. Erika with her wavy black hair and those large steady eyes.

Here in each other’s company they found a sense of completeness that was similar to the feeling she had riding the Norton with him; riding its rude noise and pounding through dark uncertain strets but together, and with an understood direction of their own.

THE FIRST TIME
she saw Albert’s horse farm the day was rich with the colours and aromas of autumn. They’d motored there from Vienna and then stopped and climbed off the motorcycle by the white fence for the military pasture. The estate buildings were just a short distance away; barns and stables with horses poking their heads out over half-doors, all looking their way over the chewed and hard-worn sills, looking and tossing their heads with manes and halters snapping. There was a fenced-off arena at one corner of the pasture, and they walked there in the late sunlight, their shadows long before them on the orange dirt road. In roadside grasses soldierbirds trilled and flew up.

Men in stable jackets and riding boots were exercising horses in that arena, blacks and chestnuts on lunge lines, and the horses stepped precisely and rhythmically. Dust
rose in small orange puffs and settled, and horses blew and high-stepped and obeyed minute motions on the line, the turn of a hand, the lowering and raising of the line.

“Would you ride one for me?” she said to him impulsively. “Please, Albert. I have yet to see you on a horse.”

“Now?”

“Yes. Why not? It’s beautiful out.”

Albert surveyed the horses. He waved to one of the handlers, and the man came up to them, leading a black horse.

“Master Albert,” he said.

“Mr. Breck, this is Miss Herzog. Mr. Breck is our stableboss.”

“Young miss,” said Breck and gave hardly a nod. He had short grey hair, a suntanned face with clear blue eyes, and one silver earring.

Albert ducked between the fence rails and reached for the line. “I’ve got her. Take the Norton, Breck, and bring us a saddle. Bring my own, the English hunter. And reins and my boots.”

Albert stood close to the horse and held the line not far from the bit ring. He put his other hand on its neck.

“This is a fine horse,” he said. “You won’t often see a better one. She’ll be shipped off to North Carolina soon. Just look at her!”

“What am I looking for?”

“Ah.” He lengthened his hold, stepped back, and considered. He pointed. “Strong quarters, a deep chest and
level back. She’s fine-boned yet strong, tall with good proportions, a very good neck and legs. See the long face. She has Arab blood.” Albert offered her the line. “Want to hold her? She’d love some of that clover by the ditch there.”

Clara took a fistful of clover and ducked through the fence. The horse stepped and raised its head.

“Talk to her. Move very slowly and talk to her.”

She did, and the horse calmed and soon it stood cropping the clover from her hand. Soft velvet lips brushing her skin, the eyes large and deep brown, nearly black at their depth but filled with sunlight on the surface and with her own reflection and with the vanishing line of the white fence.

The motorcycle came back and they put on saddle and reins, and unclipped the line. She held the horse while Albert pulled on the boots. He was up in the saddle in one fluid motion and moved his hands and heels just a touch and the horse turned and walked off. It quickened its pace.

“Look at him,” said Breck. He glanced sideways at her and shook his head and grinned. “He can ride, the young master. See him sit that horse, and she still a bit saddle-shy.” He stood holding the coiled lunge line, held it in both hands halfway up as though he’d forgotten it. She saw he had the middle finger missing on his left hand.

She watched Albert and tried to see what Breck was talking about.

“What am I looking for, Mr. Breck?”

“Just watch him sit, that’s the first thing you do, young miss. Watch his back. His thighs and knees and elbows. Then watch the horse and see what he’s makin’ her do and try and figger out how he did that. And you won’t see him move hardly at all, like she’s readin’ his mind. Or he hers. See how high she’s holdin’ her head? That’s a proud horse now.”

ON THE WEEKEND
before Christmas 1933 she was there again, this time with Erika and Mitzi, and with David Koren. Albert’s younger brother, Theodor, was there as well, but their parents were not.

There was snow on the ground and high drifts of snow lay on east-facing roofs. Men were clambering up and down those roofs, roped to chimneys, calling out, “Careful below!” and pushing off snow with long-handled wooden hay rakes.

Breck saw her and nodded. “Cold weather, young miss. Need to wear a hat.”

Theodor drove the overland car out of the garage and folded back the top. He waved, and then like some sleigh party of nobility long gone they sat under blankets while he drove them on chained and studded wheels into the hills to the north field, and then down the slope and through windbreaks of trees toward the leeside paddock where the military horses were.

On the way they sipped mulled wine and schnapps from cold stone bottles, and they joked and laughed and ate
open-faced sandwiches of smoked boar ham and breast of duck prepared by the kitchen staff.

Theodor looked much like Albert and he carried himself much the same way. He was wrapped in a quilted coat over jacket and leather-seated breeches, and he wore black riding boots. When the coat parted you could see he was carrying a belt knife in a leather sheath.

In the paddocks the snow had been cleared, and the horses were there, chestnuts and blacks working on lunge lines high-stepping and trotting. Theo stopped the car and pointed.

“See those two blacks over there? In the red gaiters. The third Arabian is already gone and these two will be shipped to England in a month or two. Somebody guess what they’re worth.”

“More than a cow,” said Koren. “I have no idea.”

“More than a cow is right,” said Theodor. “Look at the long bone in the faces. See how they move. This is one of the few places in Europe that breeds them. The count can charge for them whatever he wants.” He put the car in gear.

“What count?” said Koren.

“The count who owns it all. Some old monarchist who lives in exile in New York. In a wheelchair.”

“It’s too good to last,” said Koren. “With what’s happening in Europe now. You live like Russian nobility here, before the Bolsheviks.”

“And we just work here,” said Albert from the backseat.

“The Bolsheviks,” said Theodor. He turned to glance at his brother.

They drove on. The car raced through snow up to the running boards while at the edge of the wood deer stood like cut-outs and watched them. Later it began to snow again. In sheepskin coats and yardhats they walked out to stock the deer-feeding stations with chestnuts and grain and hay.

Breck saw them and he waved from the barn door. He stomped snow from his boots and called, “More snow comin’, Master Albert!” He pointed at the dark skies.

“I see that,” said Albert. “So let’s cut back on the oat feed and get the shovellers lined up for tomorrow. I want the main paths and all access to buildings kept clear around the clock. And tell the men to use the red lifter and dump the snow behind the north shed where it’ll run off downhill.”

THAT SUNDAY NIGHT
they took the Daimler to a Nazi meeting at a house in the outskirts of Vienna. Theo had guaranteed that there would be no police, and that he could get them in. It was a special meeting. Very interesting, he said. A woman speaker from Germany.

Grim-faced security men stood at both ends of the street, and more patted them down for concealed weapons before they were allowed in.

The meeting took place in the living room and adjoining dining room of a large home. People stood on the stairs
and on the landing and craned their necks to see. A slight young woman in a long black skirt and white blouse was in charge. On her blouse, like a brooch, she wore the round party pin with the swastika. She stood against a glassfronted bookcase, and she gave a report on the economic and social progress across the border in Germany.

While in Austria the government was unable to do anything other than cling to power with force, she told them, the jobs created in Germany were in the millions now; in road construction, in hydro-electric power generation, in home construction, in agriculture, in cars and machinery, and in armaments.

Especially now, with the Communists there defeated, she said, the economy would be improving ever more rapidly. She spoke of a new pride to wipe out the insult of Versailles. And she spoke of a new and important role for women to help form a kinder society. A society where family values came first, where social insurance and health care were available to all. She spoke of hope and dignity; of change, and of a fair distribution of resources and work among men and women; and of financial well-being.