THE EMERGENCY CONTINUED but it lost its novelty. In June that year Communists and Nazis had been outlawed, but they thrived underground and the militia was soon back in the streets. Robberies and holdups became common events. In their nighttime shelters in parks and under bridges the homeless had to fear organized gangs swarming them to steal their clothes. Since the bank failures, men in suits and women in good dresses and coats were among the homeless, and always there were those who had even less.
She knew about these developments from Erika. Erika was studying for a degree in Social Sciences, and for an extra credit she worked the streets for the Red Cross by night in a small grey Steyr motorcar that she would borrow from Mitzi and then return in the morning.
Because people’s hair keeps growing in times good or bad, Mitzi’s business was doing well; she had given up the shop so as to save the rent money and now she was making house calls. In the evenings the baskets with the collapsible dryer hood and dyes and combs and clippers and towels were replaced with baskets of sandwiches and containers of drinking water, and with first-aid bandages and small brown bottles of iodine all from the Red Cross depot at Hütteldorf.
To help out and to see for herself, Clara on many nights would cruise the streets with Erika. They’d bring cotton blankets and food to families living under bridges; they’d patch wounds and brush iodine on lacerations. One night in early December they came upon two bodies on a sidewalk not far from their own building; a man and a woman, both old and their blood still spreading on the pavement. Moments earlier a delivery van had squealed away into the night.
“Are they dead?” she said.
Erika knelt and put her fingers to the woman’s throat. She held her wrist. She let it go. “Try him.”
Clara felt for the man’s pulse. She put her ear to his chest but all she could hear was her own heart pounding. “I think he’s dead. My God, look at the eyes.”
The old people lay in the skimming headlights of the car that stood with two wheels on the sidewalk. The doors still hung open. There was hardly any traffic, and no one stopped.
“What do we do?” said Erika.
“We should call the police. You go and I’ll stay.”
She stood back in the house entrance, hugging herself against the cold. She leaned and peered around the corner. Her first dead. The woman’s shop apron and skirt had slid up, and the veined white thighs above the stockings looked vulnerable even in death. The couple lay on the sidewalk in front of the smashed shop window, the tossed brick still in there and plain to see, and the glass raked away probably with iron bars. Empty racks showed. Second-hand clothing had been carried away through the window; a shred of something white still clung to a corner of broken glass.
They were Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg. She could not think of the woman’s first name now, but she had known them, had bought clothes in there, and sold some of her own. Mr. Rosenberg still had a small tack hammer in his hand, had probably come out swinging it, with his wife right behind him ready to poke the thieves with the spike for receipts that lay nearby.
The police car was turning the corner when she took a few steps and reached and pulled down Mrs. Rosenberg’s skirt. Marianne, that was her name.
They drove on through the night, the two of them in Mitzi’s little Steyr with the broken heater, shocked by what they had seen and now not knowing how to deal with it.
“We knew them,” said Erika.
“We did. I bought my black suit there and the yellow summer dress.”
With strips of bandages she kept wiping the windshield where their breath kept condensing. A spot was hardly wiped when it fogged up again. A line from T. S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday came to her and offered help. Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still. Her hands were shaking and she felt cold. “Where are we going?” she said.
Erika looked in the rear-view mirror and pulled over. “Did you see the side of her face? Mrs. Rosenberg’s? The poor woman. And she could hardly walk anyway.”
Erika took her hands off the wheel and with her teeth pulled off the knitted gloves, dropped them in her lap, and blew on her fingers. She spat wool fibres and pulled some off her lower lip. “Maybe we can’t do this tonight. Can we?”
“We could try at least one bridge. It might help snap us out of this.”
They drove on and after they’d done one bridge and handed out food and water, they decided to keep going and do a park.
NOT LONG THEREAFTER, it must have been a Friday because Friday nights were Communist nights, she and Erika and Mitzi met David Koren. Half-way through the meeting at a private home in upper-class Hietzing, a woman student stood up and introduced him as a writer and journalist, and asked him to speak.
“You’re just back from a trip to Moscow,” the woman said. “Tell us about it.”
Koren stood up. He was tall, well dressed in a grey three-piece suit, a solid man with a pale face and dark hair parted on the side.
“It’s David Ira Koren,” he said. “I am Jewish. I was born in Hungary and I grew up here in Vienna. Now I live in Berlin. I know that Communism and National Socialism are the new dreams, but I listen to you speak of Communism, and it’s like a fairy tale, this entire roomful of young people in this fine old villa that was probably worked for and paid for by someone’s great-grandparents and handed down through generations of privilege. Let me tell you, you have no idea of what you’re talking about.”
He paused, then went on to tell them about Moscow. What he had seen was most discouraging, he said. The power games and the greed games were in full swing, and in the name of party loyalty the secret police were killing anyone they pleased. The dream of a better and more dignified life for all was just that, a dream. In the meantime, millions were starving to death on account of the famine caused by Stalin’s agricultural reforms.
“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.