Clara Read Online Free Page A

in days of darkness. It was a thought that stayed with her and grew even when unattended, the way certain plants grow best in dim light and without tampering.
    “Principles of attitude,” Professor Emmerich said when she mentioned it to him. “Not a bad idea, Miss Herzog. Not altogether new, but with lots of work still to be done.” This was during one of his open-door sessions, and she and he sat in the unravelling wicker chairs in his office and the note was hung from the door lintel telling other students to wait.
    “See where you can take it,” he said. “Let it condense, but stay with it. Support it with first-hand insight and with scenes from literature. Look at Yeats, look at Goethe, definitely look at Hesse. Look at Thoreau. Circle it for a while. Talk to me again in six months or so.”
    The image of Martin Heidegger on his park bench had stayed with her, and eventually she understood it to be telling her that even an existential genius could feel lost at times, could indulge in the sweet sinking feeling, the being-sunk feeling, and that this was all right as long as one had the inner resources to raise oneself up again and climb out of the hole. Like exercising some kind of mental muscle, she wrote in reminders to herself. In any case, oncea person had opened the door to the primary existentialist notions of self-determination, accountability, and the lifeline of As-ifness, that door could never be closed again.
    Fired on by a sense of breakthrough, she enrolled in additional courses in literature. Under Professor Anton Ferdinand she studied the Russian and the American novel for full-blooded characters forced to make difficult choices under pressure. With her friends Mitzi and Erika, and with Albert, she went to readings at the American embassy by authors such as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. And one Sunday in the fall she and Albert took the train all the way to Salzburg to attend a reading by Stefan Zweig. After the reading she stood in line and then asked him to sign a copy of her favourite novel of his,
Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman
. He reached and took the book from her, and he asked her name.
    She told him.
    “You like this?”
    “Very much. It’s so true.”
    “True?” He looked into the distance for a moment, then he bent over the book. She could see the top of his head, his scalp in the straight part in his hair; his neck in the snow-white shirt collar. He ran the blotter over his writing, closed the book, and handed it to her.
    He was smiling. He had kind brown eyes and a moustache, and he looked pale, but there was something else in his smile or perhaps in the way he looked at her and then briefly around at the people in the café; the full tables andthe people lining up for his autograph and a word from him; a sadness, she thought, a solitariness even in the midst of so much admiration; a darkness that she could not forget for the next several days.
    Eventually she did, and when he and his wife killed themselves years later in Brazil the terror was already everywhere and it was unspeakable but nothing could be taken back.
    “For Clara Emilie
,” Stefan Zweig had written.
“We have art in order not to die of the truth (Nietzsche).”
And he had signed his name.

THREE

    IN HIS WILL Albert had left everything to her, to use as she saw fit. There was a bit of money, and she had the bank transfer twenty-five thousand euros to Willa and she wrote a cheque in the same amount for Emma.
    Willa called on Skype from Australia. “You didn’t have to do that,” she said. “Sending the money. But thank you.”
    “You’re welcome. Spend it. Enjoy it.”
    “I will. Now, about the Knight’s Cross. You mentioned it in your email, so tell me. Who took it?”
    “Forget the Knight’s Cross. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
    “I don’t want to forget it. Who took it, Mom? One of Emma’s kids?”
    “Willa. Let it go.”
    “I won’t. Do you know how few of those they