Making History

MAKING THREATS

School report: I

Klara, despite herself, touched Alois’ arm in urgent appeal.

‘You’ll be kind? You won’t be angry?’

‘Let go of me, woman! Just send him in.’ She dipped her head sadly and left the room. As she closed the double-doors on Alois, she saw him take up his pipe. Klara bit her lip sadly: the pipe was reserved for stern, fatherly moments.

Out in the hallway Anna was dusting a glass dome under which, their wings frozen in triumphant splay, two goldfinches peered brightly out. Klara nodded to her shyly and climbed the stairs, the tight, black, shining oak cackling like a hag beneath her feet.

He was on the bed, lying on his stomach reading, hands pressed over ears. In spite of the creak of boards he had not heard her, so she watched for a while in love. He read at tremendous speed, turning the pages and talking to himself all the while, little laughs and gasps and snorts of disgust accompanying every paragraph. She supposed it was another history book. At the birthday party of a school friend recently he had impressed the Linz librarian by talking with detailed knowledge about the Roman Empire while the other children danced and tumbled over each other to piano music. ‘Gibbon is quite wrong,’ she had heard him say reprovingly, at which the librarian had laughed and patted him on the shoulder. He had writhed and glowered under this treatment and complained about it bitterly on the walk home. ‘Why must they treat me as a child?’

‘Well, darling, you are a child in his eyes. People believe that children should behave as children and grown-ups as grown-ups.’

‘What nonsense! The truth is the truth whether spoken by a ten-year-old country boy or an ancient professor in Vienna. What possible difference can it make how old I am?’

He was quite right. After all, had not Our Lord as a child argued with the priests in the temple? And did He not say, Suffer the little children to come unto me? She did not tell him this, however. It would only encourage him to say something arrogant to antagonise Alois.

As she watched him now, he suddenly stopped turning the pages and raised his head.

‘Mutti,’ he said matter of factly, without looking round.

She laughed. ‘How did you know?’

He turned to face her. ‘Violets,’ he said. ‘You come to me on the air, you know.’ He winked at her and sat up on the bed.

‘Oh, Dolfi!’ she said with reproach, noticing a rip in his lederhosen and grazes on his knee. ‘You’ve been fighting.’

‘It was nothing, Mutti. Besides, I won. An older, bigger boy too.’

‘Well, you must clean yourself up. Your father wants to see you.’

She laid out one of Alois Junior’s cast-off suits for him while he washed in the bathroom. A little too big for him perhaps, but he looked very smart and serious in it. She picked up the book he had been reading and was surprised to see that it was the children’s story Treasure Island, all about pirates and parrots and rum.

He came back from the bathroom, a towel round his waist. He frowned when he saw her holding the book. ‘I have to get changed now,’ he said, without moving. She sighed and withdrew. A year ago he would let her bath him, and now he could not even dress in her presence. His voice was breaking too and every day he became more secretive and private; that was the trouble with boys, they grew away from you. She went slowly downstairs and into the kitchen. Anna was there, preparing little Paula’s tea. Klara decided to go outside and tend to the garden. There was, conveniently, a flower bed outside Alois’ study that needed weeding.

‘Come in, please!’ Alois was wearing his icily polite customs officer’s voice. Klara knelt below the open window, her hand around a tendril of convolvulus, and heard the study door open and close.

A long silence followed. His childish trick of pretending to read, while poor Dolfi stood there, marooned on the carpet.

‘Are your shoes dirty?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Then why do you polish them against your trousers? Stand on both legs, boy! You aren’t a stork, are you?’

‘No, sir. I am not a stork.’

‘And you can take that impertinent tone out of your voice at once!’

Silence again, broken by a theatrical rustling of papers and the dry clearing of a throat as Alois began to read.

‘ “Some brain, but he lacks self-discipline…cantankerous, wilful, arrogant and bad-tempered. He has clear difficulty in fitting in at the school. He adopts enthusiasms with a zealous energy which evaporates the moment he realises that thought, application and study are required. He reacts, moreover, with ill-concealed hostility to any advice or reproof. A thoroughly unsatisfactory term’s work.” Well? What have you to say to that?’

‘Doctor Humer. That’s Doctor Humer’s report, isn’t it? He hates me.’

‘Never you mind whose report it is! Have you any idea how much the Realschule charges me for the dubious honour of teaching you? And this is how you repay me? “Nor can his influence on the other boys be said to be healthy. He seems to demand unqualified subservience from them, fancying himself in the role of leader.” Leader? You couldn’t lead a kindergarten paperchase, boy!’

‘What about Doctor Potsch? What does he say?’

‘Potsch? He says you have talent and enthusiasm.’

‘There!’

‘But he also accuses you of indiscipline and laziness.’

‘I don’t believe you! He wouldn’t say any such thing. Doctor Potsch understands me. You’ve made that up.’

‘How dare you! Come here. Come herd’

Tears filled Klara’s eyes as she heard the whip swish through the air and smack flatly on the tight cloth of Alois Junior’s old suit. And Dolfi shouting, shouting, shouting, ‘I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!’ Why could he not learn to submit as she did? Did he not understand that the more he protested the more the Bastard liked it?

‘Go to your room and stay there until you learn to apologise!’

‘Very well,’ Dolfi’s cracked half-child half-man voice did not waver. Only the sound of liquid bubbling from his nose defiantly sniffed back betrayed his fury and his pain. ‘Then I shall stay up there until you are dead.’

‘No, no, darling!’ Klara whispered, hugging herself in distress, terrified that Alois might raise up Pnina again.

Instead she was surprised to hear him give a queer little laugh. ‘Your mother may spoil you and flatter your disgusting vanity, but believe me, Adolf, I shall break you yet. Oh yes. Now get out.’

‘Don’t you…dare…’ she could hear a tremble in Dolfi’s voice as he fought back the tears, ‘don’t you dare touch her. I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you!’

Open sobbing now.

Alois laughed again. ‘Oh run along, little boy, before your snot dribbles onto the carpet.’