Making History

MAKING LOVE

Feathers and claws and fur

Klara lay underneath him and thought of daisies. Daisies, cowbells, milk-yokes, hay, the Mondsee choir at Easter Mass, anything, anything but the stink and weight and grunt of the Bastard wallowing above her.

His previous two wives must have been able to bear it, just as they had been able to bear him babies that lived. Perhaps this will be the one, she thought. This time. Not like poor Frieda Braun who had miscarried just that afternoon after pumping the water from the cistern and smelling that awful stench and seeing a torrent of maggots stream into her pail. Poor Frieda. And now the cistern was emptied and they must borrow water from the people across the street, like peasants. Poor Frieda. She too had so wanted a child.

A little girl, Klara prayed. A sweet little girl, Lilli, whom she would teach secretly to love the mountains and the fields and to despise the hateful stuffy towns; The Bastard had said this evening that he wanted to move the family soon to Linz. Linz which was huge compared to Brunau. Linz, which made Klara think of feathers and claws and fur. The feathers in women’s hats, the bright blue ostrich feathers in vases in the coloured tile hallways, the feathers fanned in stained-glass above the front doors and the feathers of the stuffed birds in clear domes on the black oak sideboards in the dining-rooms. Feathers and claws and fur. Deer claws with jewels set in them for brooches. Fox fur around the necks of the dowager-humped women; not just fox fur but the whole fox, the complete animal: feet, head, eyes, teeth, the V-shaped jaw bared in a grin, the entire beast flattened and dried like salted cod, like paper that can’t be torn.

They bring the country into the town, she thought. They kill the animals to wear them or to keep them in glass domes or they skin them into shiny town-shoes and tan luggage. The horses they make pull buses through the towns all their lives before they boil them into glue or flay them into sofa stuffing and violin bows. The trees are thrown into furnaces to drive the machines and overheat the houses or they are carved into oak-leaf clusters, with acorns and nuts and briar, then stained all dark and brooding and dead. The flowers are dried and dyed and set in sprays on the pianos on squares of fringed silk. The whole wide, light countryside itself is oiled onto canvas as dark thundering mountains, misty booming ravines and tumultuous heavy clouds and then hung on the walls of gloomy passageways lit by dull hissing gas-mantles to frighten children into a permanent terror of the world outside the city. How can anybody bear the town? Blood and iron and gas. Daisies. Think of daisies. But daisies are goose-flowers. Goose-flowers, goose-flesh. Flesh that crawls and prickles under his wet touch.

She had known this would be a love-night, as he called them. Liebesnacht. She had known, because he had not beaten her or looked like beating her, even after she had spilled soup into his lap at dinner. Not a glance towards Pnina on the wall, just a ghastly smile and a playful slap on the hand accompanied by the word ‘naughty!’, mockingly, in the falsetto of a governess. Such a vile smirk, as if he knew that his love was infinitely more terrible to her than his brutal fists.

How long he took about it! Klara remembered her sister joking of her husband Hermann and his impossible and wholly unsatisfactory speed.

‘Out before he was in!’

Then Hermann was a country boy who only drank on saint’s days and holidays, not a man of fifty — heavens! Fifty-one. Alois was fifty-one last month — whose joke was that he only drank on Wednesdays or days with a letter G in them. Montag, Dienstag, Mittwoch, Donnerstag, Freitag, Samstag, Sontag.

Klara arched back her neck and gazed with longing at the Virgin on the wall above the headboard. Alois, after slithering out seven or eight times and swearing like a carter, seemed, at long last, to be getting there. She recognised the more frantic rhythms and waited for the final animal plunges.

Sky, she thought. Sky, lakes, forests, rabbits and eagles. Yes, a huge eagle to swoop down from his lair in the mountains and snatch away this squealing pig. A great soaring, all-powerful, all-seeing, all-conquering eagle with piercing eyes and mighty wings and talons that dripped with the blood of the pig!