Making History

MAKING BREAKFAST

The smell of the rats

Alois swung into the saddle, shifted the knapsack over his shoulders and began to pump rhythmically up the hill, the green stripes on his uniform trousers and the golden eagle on his helmet flashing in the sun. Klara, watching him go, wondered why he never stood in the pedals to give himself impetus, as children do. Always with him the same absolutely mechanical, frighteningly regular, purposefully subdued action.

She had risen at five to light the stove and scrub the kitchen table before the maid was awake. She always felt the need to purge the table of wine stains and the sticky pools of schnapps and shards of broken glass. As if hoping perhaps that the sight of a clean table might make Alois forget how much he had drunk the night before. Nor did she ever want the children to see the ruins of their father’s little evenings in’.

When the maid Anna rose at six she had sniffed, as always, at the sight of the clean table and her wrinkled nose had seemed to say to Klara, behind Alois’s back, as he buffed his boots before the stove, ‘I know you. We’re the same. You were a maid too once. Not even a housemaid. Just a kitchen maid. And inside that’s what you still are and always will be.’

Klara, as ever, had watched her husband polish away, envying the love and detail and pride he invested in his uniform. Lulled by the swinging rhythm of brush on leather she had, as ever, wished herself back at Spital with its fields and milk-pails and silage smell, back with her brothers and sisters and their children, away from the respectability, the stiffness, the brutality of Uncle Alois and uniforms and people whose conversations and conventions she could not understand.

Uncle Alois! He had forbidden her ever to call him that again.

‘I am not your Uncle, girl. A cousin by marriage at most. You will not call me uncle. Understood?’ But when talking to herself she could not help it. Uncle Alois he had always been, and Uncle Alois he would always remain.

The night before he had been no more drunk than usual, no more violent, no more abusive, no more insulting. Always with him the same absolutely mechanical, frighteningly regular, purposefully subdued action.

When she was being hurt she never made enough noise to awaken Angela and Little Alois for she could not bear the idea that they knew what their father was doing to her. Klara was not an intelligent woman, but she was sensitive and she understood that her stepchildren would feel not sorrow but only contempt for her if they knew she submitted so spiritlessly to their father’s beatings. She was after all, and what a ridiculous fact it was, closer in age to the children than to Alois. That is why, she supposed, he was so determined to have children by her. He wanted to age her, to turn her from a silly country girl into a Mother. Remove the smell of silage. Get some fat on her, some substance, some respectability. Oh, he loved respectability. But then, he was a bastard. It was the one thing she had over him. She may have been a silly country girl, but at least she knew who her father was. Uncle Alois the Bastard did not. Yet she wanted his children too. How desperately she wanted them.

Three years earlier their son Gustav had died after just a week of blue, coughing life. The next year a little girl was stillborn and just a year ago the baby Josef had struggled, plucky as a game-cock, for a month before he too was taken. That was when the beatings began. Uncle Bastard had bought a hippopotamus whip and hung it on the wall with a terrible smile.

‘This is Pnina,’ he said. ‘Pnina die Putsch. Pnina the Whip, our new child.’

Klara stood now by the door and watched the upright uniformed figure reach the top of the hill. Only Alois could make such a ridiculous machine as a bicycle seem dignified. And how he loved it. Every new development in patent tyres and pedals and chains excited him. Yesterday he had read out excitedly to little Alois from a newspaper. In Mannheim an engineer called Benz had built a three-wheeled machine that travelled at fifteen kilometres an hour without human effort, without horses, without steam.

‘Imagine that, my boy! Like a private little train that needs no tracks! One day we shall have such a self-propelled machine and travel together to Linz or Vienna like princes.’

Klara turned back into the house and watched Anna frying eggs for the children.

‘Let me do that,’ she wanted to say. She knew how to stop herself now, so she moved instead with quick guilt towards the empty pail by the back door, feeling rather than seeing Anna turn at the squeak of the bucket handle.

‘Let me…’ Anna began, but Klara was outside and the kitchen door shut before the whining sentence could be finished.

Klara realised with amusement that she had, as so often, timed her visit to the pump to coincide with the passing of the Innsbruck train. She imagined its earlier progress through meadows and farms and watched, in her mind’s eye, her nephews and nieces in Spital jumping up and down and waving to the driver. She pushed down the handle more quickly and forced the water to plunge into the bucket in just the rhythm of the mighty locomotive as it pushed its imperial white moustaches into the sky.

And then the smell. Oh my God the smell.

Klara clapped a hand to her mouth and nose. But to no avail. Vomit leaked from between her fingers as her body tried to force out the reek, the terrible, terrible stench. Death and corruption filled the air.