Making History

MAKING FREE

The eagle has landed

‘Push, woman! Push! Her fourth you say?’

Alois nodded and looked down with disgust.

‘Listen to me Klara…listen to me!’

Klara could not listen.

‘Klara!’ Alois leaned over her and spoke in his sternest voice.

But she was miles from that place. Swooping from the hills, soaring over the lakes and the villages, perching on the church tops, clasping for a moment the bright gold onion domes in her claws before launching herself into the wind again, climbing ever higher and higher.

The doctor came alongside Alois. ‘If she has laboured three times before there should not be this pain, even without such a copious dosage of laudanum.’

That remark did penetrate Klara’s opiate clouded mind. Pain? There is no pain, she laughed to herself. There is no pain, there is only ecstasy! Joy! Pure free flying joy.

Another huge contraction sent her spinning higher even than the highest mountain. All Europe lay below her. Without customs posts, without borders or frontiers: all the animals running free. High up as she was, the movement of the smallest vole or butterfly was clear to her, she could hear the scrabble of earth as a rabbit left its burrow twelve miles beneath, focus on a single drop of dew trembling on one tiny blade of grass. Master of time and space, lord of all. She let out a high shrill cry of joy, as she wheeled from east to west, from north to south, the lands racing beneath her vast wings in pure, unbounded freedom.

‘My God, Schenck, the blood! She never bled like this before! What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing, sir. Nothing, I assure you. The head is large, a little tearing of the hymeneal muscle, no more.’

The beak of the eaglet pecking with fierce will at the walls of its egg. This one will live! I can feel her strength. The iron of her will. My daughter eagle, whom I will raise to set me free.

‘Klara! For heaven’s sake! Such noise! Are you sure you gave her enough?’

‘It was a huge dose to begin with. Any more, sir, and she would be knocked out. Ah, here it comes. Yes, here it comes! One more push, Klara.’

She is free! She is in the world! Free! Listen to her lusty cries! The strength! The will! The lifewill, the lifelust. She will live strong and I will love her more than ever daughter was loved by any living thing.

‘Ha, ha!’ Alois laughing. He never laughed, but now he was laughing. He felt it too. Recognised the greatness of the moment.

Doctor Schenck’s hand smoothed back the sweat-soaked locks, smearing a thumb-thick line of blood along her brow.

‘Congratulations, my dear. Your child. Healthy as an oak.’

‘Liebling! Klara! Mein Schatz!’

‘She is sleeping now, sir.’

‘Sleeping?’

‘Really, it was a huge dose. She was in a dream. She will awaken and feel refreshed. She will remember nothing of the pain. In that way Nature is kind.’

Alois leaned down to kiss her blooded forehead. ‘Look at him, you clever girl. Look at him! There he is! My boy! My wonderful boy!’