Clara Schultz lying alone in a strange hotel bedroom was suddenly confronted by the most horrible thoughts. For a woman accustomed to the idea that she would live for ever, having lived, it seemed for ever, these thoughts were far from welcome. For instead of being concerned with her immortality they were, without doubt, gravely about her own death.

Perhaps it was the long journey by air. She had travelled from Vienna, several hours in an aeroplane with the clock being altered relentlessly while her own body did not change so easily.

She was on her way to her daughter. She had not seen her since she was a baby and now she was a grown woman, a stranger, married to a farmer.

A man much younger than herself and from a background quite unknown to Clara and so somewhat despised by her. She confided nothing of this thought, rather she boasted of her daughter’s marriage.

“I am going to visit Lisa, my daughter, you know,” she told her neighbour Irma Rosen. Sometimes they stopped to talk on the stairs in the apartment house in the Lehar Strasse and Clara would impress on Irma forcefully.

“My daughter is married to an Australian farmer and expecting her first child. All these years I have only a paper daughter and now my paper children, my daughter and son in law, they want me to come, they have invited me!” And Irma whose smooth face was like a pink sugar cake on the handworked lace collar of her dress nodded and smiled with admiration.

It was only when she was alone Clara despised the farmer husband, she was able to overlook completely that her despising was in reality a kind of fear of him and his piece of land.

“We are in a valley,” Lisa wrote to her mother. Clara tried to imagine the valley. She had in her mind a picture of a narrow green flower splashed place with pine trees on the steep slopes above the clusters of painted wooden houses, like in the Alps, very gay and always in holiday mood. She tried to alter the picture because Lisa described tall trees with white bark and dry leaves which glittered in the bright sunshine, she wrote also of dust and corrugated iron and wire netting and something called weatherboard. Clara found it hard to imagine these things she had never seen.

No one can know when death will come or how. Alone in the hotel, Clara thought what if she should go blind before dying. She thought of her room at home, what if she had to grope in that familiar place unable to find her clothes, unable to see where her books and papers were. She lay with her eyes closed and tried to see her desk and her lamp and her silver inkwell, trying to place things in order in her mind so that she would find her way from one possession to the next.

What if she should go blind now here in this strange room, not knowing any other person here. In a sudden fear she pushed back the bed-clothes and put her small white fat feet out of the bed and stood on the strange floor and groped like a blind person for the light switch.

“Lisa,” she said to her daughter gently so as not to startle the girl. Lisa turned, she had a very white face, she moved awkwardly and her face was small as if she was in pain. She was much younger than her mother expected her to be. Beside her was a little girl of about two years, she had fair hair cut square across a wan little forehead. The child had been crying.

“What a dear little girl,” Clara said as pleasantly as she knew how. “What do you call her?”

“Sharon.”

“Cheri?”

“No. Sharon.”

“Ach! What a pretty name. Come here to Gross Mutti my darlink,” but the little girl hid behind the half open door.

“What a pretty place you have, Lisa,” Clara tried. “Pretty! Pretty!” She waved her short plump arm towards the desolate scene of the neglected hillside, cleared years ago, scraped and never planted; patches of prickly secondary growth littered the spaces between collapsing sheds and the tangles of wire netting where some fowls had lived their lives laying eggs.

The house, in decay, cried out for mercy, it was a place quite uncherished. The rust on the iron roof was like a disease, scabs of it scaled off and marked the verandah as if with an infection. Clara wondered why. Poverty perhaps or was Lisa feckless. Clara had no patience with a feckless woman. If they were poor, well she had money, and she would help Lisa. All the tenderness stored up over the empty years was there to be poured forth, now on her child and her child’s property.

“Have you hurt yourself, Lisa?” Clara tried again, softly, gently as if speaking in a dream. She had not expected a little girl. She knew only that her daughter was pregnant.

“Lisa wants me to be near when she has her baby, my paper children want me,” Clara told Irma on the stairs and Irma nodded her approval. “So I burn up my ships as they say in English and go.” Clara had taken many big steps in her life but never such a final one as this one might be. Australia was such a long way off from Vienna, it almost could not exist it was so remote.

“They have fifty cows and sheeps and chickens.” Such space was not to be imagined on the dark stairs of the apartment. “Such a long way!” Clara said. “But air travel, you know, makes the world so much smaller.”

“Have you hurt yourself, Lisa?” gently she approached the pale young woman who was her unknown daughter.

“Aw, it’s nuthin’,” the girl replied. “He threw me down the other night, I kept tellin’ him ‘You’re hurtin’ my back!’ but he took no notice. ‘You’re hurtin’ my back!’ I shouted at him!” She rubbed the end of her spine.

Clara flinched with a real hurt.

“Pete, this is my mother,” Lisa said as a short, thick-set young man, very sunburned and bullet shaped came round the side of the house. He threw a bucket to his wife. “Mother, this is Pete.”

As they stood together the sun slid quickly into the scrub on the far hillside and long shadows raced one after the other across and along the sad valley. Clara had never seen such a pair of people and in such dreary hopeless surroundings. She felt so strange and so alone in the gathering darkness of the evening.

The little muscular husband shouted something at Lisa and marched off with hardly a look at his new mother in law. Clara couldn’t help remembering the Gestapo and their friend, they thought he was their friend, the one who became a Gauleiter. That was it! Gauleiter Peter Gregory married to her daughter Lisa.

“This man is my father’s friend,” proudly Clara had introduced the friend to her husband only to experience in a very short time a depth of betrayal and cruelty quite beyond her comprehension. Friends became enemies overnight. Lisa’s husband somehow reminded Clara unexpectedly of those times.

“Have you something to put on your back?” Clara asked.

“Like what?” the girl looked partly amused and partly defiant.

“Menthol Camphor or something like that.” Clara felt the remoteness between them, a kind of wandering between experience and dreams. She moved her hand in a circular movement. “Something to massage, you know.”

At first Lisa didn’t understand, perhaps it was the unusual English her mother spoke, Clara repeated the suggestion slowly.

“Aw, no! Had a ray lamp but he dropped it larst night! Threw it down most likely but he said he dropped it. ‘The lamp’s died,’ he said. I thought I’d die laughin’ but I was that mad at him, reely I was!”

“Should we, perhaps, go indoors.” Clara was beginning to feel cold. The Gauleiter was coming back. “I just have these few packages,” Clara indicated her luggage which was an untidy circle about her. But the young couple had gone into the cottage leaving her to deal with her baggage as well as she could.

Trying to hear some sort of sound she heard the voice of Gauleiter Peter Gregory shouting at his wife, her daughter Lisa, and she heard Lisa scream back at her husband. Voices and words she couldn’t hear and understand properly from the doorway of the asbestos porch. She heard the husband push the wife so that she must have stumbled, she heard Lisa fall against a piece of furniture which also fell, a howl of pain from Lisa and the little child, Sharon, began to cry.

Clara entered the airless dishevelled room. Because of all she was carrying it was difficult, so many bundles. “One cannot make such a journey without luggage,” Clara explained to Irma as, buried in packages, she said goodbye to her neighbour. “Goodbye, Irma. Goodbye for ever, dear friend.”

Besides she had presents for Lisa and even something for that husband.

Lisa looked up almost with triumph at her mother.

“I’m seven months gone,” she said, “and he wouldn’t care if he killed me!” The husband’s sunburned face disappeared in the gloom of the dirty room.

“Oh,” Clara said pleasantly, “she is too young to die and far too pretty.”

“Huh! Me pretty!” Lisa scoffed and, awkwardly, because of the pain in her back, she eased herself into a chair.

“Who’s young!” the husband muttered in the dark. Clara didn’t know if he was sitting or standing. “Well, we women must back each other up,” she said, wasting a smile. Whatever could she do about Lisa’s pain.

Clara fumbled with the straps on her bag. “Come Sharon, my pretty little one. See what your Gross Mutti has brought for you all across the world.” The child stood whimpering as far from Clara as possible while the parents watched in silence.

And Clara was quite unable to unfasten the bag.

She had never been frightened of anything in her whole life. Dr. Clara Schultz (she always used an abbreviation of her maiden name), Director of the Clinic for Women (Out Patients’ Department), University Lecturer, wife of the Professor of Islamic Studies, he was also an outstanding scholar of Hebrew. Clara Margarethe Carolina, daughter of a Baroness, nothing frightened her, not even the things that frightened women, thunder and mice and cancer.

Even during the occupation she had been without fear. They were living on the outskirts of the city at that time. One afternoon she returned early from the Clinic intending to prepare a lecture and she noticed there was a strange stillness in the garden. The proud bantam cock they had then was not crowing. He was nowhere in sight. Usually he strutted about, an intelligent brightly coloured little bird, and the afternoons were shattered by his voice as he crowed till dusk as if to keep the darkness of the night from coming too soon. The two hens, Cecilia and Gretchen, stood alone and disconsolate like two little pieces of white linen left by the laundress on the green grass.

Clara looked for the little rooster but was unable to find him. His disappearance was an omen. Calmly Clara transferred money to Switzerland and at once, in spite of difficulties and personal grief, she arranged for her two year old baby daughter to be taken to safety while she remained to do her work.

A few days later she found the bantam cock, he was caught by one little leg in a twisted branch among the junipers and straggling rosemary at the end of the garden. He was hanging upside down dead. Something must have startled him Clara thought to make him fly up suddenly into such a tangled place. When she went indoors, missing her baby’s voice so much, she found her husband hanging dead, in his study. She remained unafraid. She knew her husband was unable to face the horror of persecution and the threat of complete loss of personal freedom. She understood his reasons. And she knew she was yearning over her baby but she went on, unafraid, with her work at the Clinic. Every day, day after day, year after year, in her thick lensed spectacles and her white coat she advised, corrected, comforted and cured and, all the time, she was teaching too, passing on knowledge from experience.

But now, this fearless woman trembled as she tried to unfasten two leather straps because now years later, when all the horror was over for her, she was afraid of her daughter’s marriage.

As Clara woke in the strange bedroom, it was only partly a relief.

There was still this possibility of blindness before death, because of course she would die. Ultimately everyone did. For how long would she be blind, if she became blind. Both her grandmothers had lost their sight.

“But that was cataract.” Clara told herself. “Nowadays one can have operation.”

Again in imagination, she blundered about her room at home trying to find things, the treasures of her life. But alone and old she was unable to manage.

And another thing. What if she should go deaf and not be able to listen to Bach or Beethoven any more. She tried to remember a phrase from the Beethoven A Minor String Quartet. The first phrase, the first notes of caution and melancholy and the cascade of cello. She tried to sing to herself but her voice cracked and she could not remember the phrase. Suppose she should become deaf now at this moment in this ugly hotel with no music near and no voices. If she became deaf now she would never again be able to hear the phrase and all the remaining time of her life be unable to recall it.

Again she put her small fat white feet out of the bed and stood on the strange floor and began like a blind and deaf person to grope for the light switch.

“Travelling does not suit everyone,” she told herself and she put eau de Cologne on her forehead and leaving the light on, she took her book, one she had written herself, “Some Elementary Contributions to Obstetrics and Gynaecology” and began to read.

This time it really was Lisa, with joy in her heart Clara went towards her. The real Lisa was much older and Clara saw at once that the pregnancy was full term. Lisa walked proudly because of the stoutness of carrying the baby. Though Clara knew it was Lisa, she searched her daughter’s face for some family likeness. The white plump face was strange however, framed in dark hair, cut short all round the head. Mother and daughter could not have recognised each other.

“Oh, Lisa, you have a bad bruise on your forehead,” Clara gently put out a hand to soothe the bruise. Supposing this husband is the same as the other one, the thought spoiled the pleasure of the meeting.

“It’s quite clear you are a doctor, Mother,” Lisa laughed, “Really, it’s nothing! I banged my head on the shed door trying to get our cow to go inside.”

“One cow and I thought they had many,” Clara was a little disappointed but she did not show it. Instead she bravely looked at the valley. It was not deep like the wooded ravine in the Alps, not at all, the hills here were hardly hills at all. But the evening sun through the still trees made a changing light and shade of tranquillity, there was a deep rose blue in the evening sky which coloured the white bark and edged the tremulous glittering leaves with quiet mystery. Clara could smell the sharp fragrance of the earth, it was something she had not thought of though now she remembered it from Lisa’s letters. All round them was loneliness.

“Where is your little girl?” Clara asked softly. Lisa’s plain face was quite pleasant when she smiled; she had grey eyes which were full of light in the smile.

“Little girl? Little boy you mean! He’s here,” she patted her apron comfortably. “Not born yet. I wrote you the date. Remember?”

“Oh yes of course,” Clara adjusted her memory. “Everyone at home is so pleased,” she began.

“Here’s Peter,” Lisa said. “Peter, this is my mother,” Lisa said. “Mother, this is Peter.”

The husband came to his mother in law, he was younger than Lisa so much so that Clara was startled. He seemed like a boy, his face quite smooth and it was as if Lisa was old enough to be his mother.

Peter was trying to speak, patiently they waited, but the words when they came were unintelligible. His smile had the innocence of a little child.

“He wants to make you welcome,” Lisa explained. She took her husband’s arm and pointed across the cleared and scraped yard to a small fowl pen made of wire netting. Beside the pen was a deep pit, the earth, freshly dug, heaped up all round it.

“GO AND GET THE EGGS!” she shouted at him. She took a few quick steps still holding his arm and marched him towards the hen house. “QUICK! MARCH!” she shouted. Gauleiter Lisa Gregory. Clara shivered, the evening was cold already. Her own daughter had become a Gauleiter.

“QUICK! MARCH! ONE TWO! ONE TWO!” Lisa was a Führerin. The valley rang with her command. “DIG THE PIT!”

The sun fell into the scrub and the treetops in the middle distance between earth and sky became clusters of trembling blackness, silent offerings held up on thin brittle arms like starved people praying into the rose deep, blue swept sky.

Mother and daughter moved in the shadows to the door of the weatherboard and iron cottage.

“I am very strong, mother,” Lisa said in a whisper and in the dusk Clara could see her strength, she saw too that her mouth was shining and cruel.

In the tiny house there was no light. Clara was tired and she wondered where they could sleep. In a corner a cot stood in readiness for the baby, there seemed no other beds or furniture at all.

“When my sons are born,” Lisa said in a low voice to her mother, “it is to be the survival of the fittest!” She snapped her thick fingers. Clara had no reply. “Only the strong and intelligent shall live,” Lisa said. “I tell my husband to dig the pit. I have to. Perhaps it will be for him, we shall see. Every day he must dig the pit to have it ready. There will be no mercy.”

Clara reflected, in the past she had overlooked all this, she had taken no part in the crimes as they were committed but, ignoring them, she had continued with her work and because her work was essential no one had interfered. Clara reflected too that Lisa had never known real love, taken away to safety she had lost the most precious love of all. Clara took upon herself the burden of Lisa’s cruelty now. She wanted to give Lisa this love, more than anything she wanted to overlook everything and help Lisa and love her. She wanted to open her purse to show Lisa before it was too dark that she had brought plenty of money and could spend whatever was necessary to build up a nice little farm. She wanted to tell Lisa she could buy more cows, electricity, sheds, pay for hired men to work, buy pigs, two hundred pigs if Lisa would like and drains to keep them hygienic. Whatever Lisa wanted she could have. She tried to tell her how much she loved her and how much she wanted to help. She tried to open her purse and Lisa stood very close and watched Clara in severe silence. The cottage was cold and quite bare, Clara longed to be warm and comfortable and she wanted to ask Lisa to unfasten her purse for her but was quite unable to speak, no words came though she moved her mouth as if trying to say something.

She had never been so stupid. Of course she would feel better in the morning. Women like Dr. Clara Schultz simply did not fall ill on a journey. It was just the strange bed in the rather old fashioned hotel. Tomorrow she would take her cold bath as usual and ask for yoghurt at breakfast and all she had to do then was to wait for Lisa and Peter.

The arrangement was that they were driving the two hundred miles to fetch her to their place. Of course it was natural to be a little curious. Lisa was only two years old when she was smuggled out of Vienna. The woman Lisa had become was a complete stranger, and so was the husband. Even their letters were strange, they wrote in English because Lisa had never learned to speak anything else.

Clara knew she would feel better when she had seen them. All these years she had longed to see Lisa, speak with her, hear her voice, touch her and lavish love and gifts on her. She still felt the sad tenderness of the moment when she had had to part with her baby all those years ago.

“Lisa, my bed is damp,” Clara said. “The walls are so thin. I never expected it to be so cold.”

Lisa had been quite unable to imagine what her mother’s visit would be like. In spite of the heat and her advanced pregnancy she cleaned the little room at the side of the house. She washed the louvres and made white muslin curtains. There was scarcely any furniture for the narrow room but Lisa made it as pretty as she could with their best things, her own dressing table and a little white painted chair and Peter fetched a bed from his mother’s place.

Lisa tried to look forward to the visit, she knew so little about her mother, an old lady now after a life of hard work as a doctor. Every year they threw away the battered Christmas parcel which always came late, sewn up in waterproofed calico. There seemed no place in the little farmhouse with its patterned linoleum and plastic lamp shades for an Adventskranz and beeswax candles. And the soggy little biscuits, heart shaped or cut out like stars had no flavour. Besides they ate meat mostly and, though Peter liked sweet things, his choice of pudding was always tinned fruit with ice cream.

The meaningless little green wreath with its tiny red and white plaster mushrooms and gilded pine cones only served to enhance the strangeness between them and this mother who was on her way to them.

Of course her mother was ill as soon as she arrived. She had not expected the nights to be so cold she explained and it was damp in the sleepout.

“My bed is damp,” she said to Lisa. So they moved her into the living room.

“No sooner does your mother arrive and the place is like a ‘C’ Class Hospital,” Peter said. He had to sit for his tea in the kitchen because Clara’s bed took up most of the living room. She had all the pillows in the house and the little table beside her bed was covered with cups and glasses and spoons and bottles and packets of tablets.

“It is only a slight inflammation in my chest,” she assured Lisa. “A few days of rest and warm and I will be quite well, you will see!”

Lisa worried that her mother was ill and unable to sleep. She tried to keep Peter friendly, but always a silent man, he became more so. She stood in the long damp grass outside the cowshed he had built with home made concrete bricks, waiting for him at dusk, she wanted to speak to him alone, but he, knowing she was standing there, slowly went about his work and did not emerge. From inside the asbestos house came Clara’s voice.

“Lisa! Another hot water bottle please, my feet are so cold.”

Lisa could not face the days ahead with her mother there. She seemed suddenly to see all her husband’s faults and the faults in his family. She had never before realised what a stupid woman Peter’s mother, her mother in law, was. She felt she would not be able to endure the life she had. Years of this life lay before her. Fifteen miles to the nearest neighbour, her mother in law, and the small house, too hot in summer and so cold and damp once the rains came, and the drains Peter had made were so slow to soak away she never seemed able to get the sink empty. This baby would be the first of too many. Yet she had been glad, at her age, to find a husband at last and thought she would be proud and happy to bear a farmer a family of sons.

“A spoonful of honey in a glass of hot water is so much better for you!” Clara told them when they were drinking their tea. She disapproved of their meat too. She was a vegetarian herself and prepared salads with her own hands grating carrots and shredding cabbage for them.

Peter picked the dried prunes out of his dinner spoiling the design Clara had made on his plate. “I’m not eating that!” he scraped his chair back on the linoleum and left the table.

“Oh, Peter, please!” Lisa implored, but he went out of the kitchen and Lisa heard him start up the utility with a tremendous roar.

“He will come back!” Clara said knowingly, nodding her head.

“Come eat! Your little one needs for you to eat. After dinner I show you how to make elastic loop on your skirt,” she promised Lisa. “Always I tell my patients ‘an elastic loop, not this ugly pin’,” she tapped the big safety pin which fastened Lisa’s gaping skirt. “After dinner I show you how to make!” Lisa knew her mother was trying to comfort her but she could only listen to Peter driving down the track. He would drive the fifteen miles to his mother and she would, as usual, be standing between the stove and the kitchen table and would fry steak for him and make chips and tea and shake her head over Lisa and that foreign mother of hers.

She listened to the car and could hardly stop herself from crying.

Living, all three together became impossible and, after the birth of the baby, Lisa left Peter and went with her mother to live in town. Clara took a small flat in a suburb and they went for walks with the baby. Two women together in a strange place trying to admire meaningless flowers in other people’s gardens.

Lisa tried to love her mother, she tried to understand something of her mother’s life. She realised too that her mother had given up everything to come to her, but she missed Peter so dreadfully. The cascading voices of the magpies in the early mornings made her think as she woke that she was back on the farm, but instead of Peter’s voice and the lowing of the cows there were cars on the road outside the flat. She missed the cows at milking time and the noise of the fowls. And in the afternoon she longed to be standing at the edge of the paddock where the long slanting rays of the sun lit up the tufted grass and the shadows of the coming evening crept from the edges of the Bush in the distance.

“Oh, Liser! Just look at this rose,” her mother bent over some other person’s fence. “Such a fragrance and a beautiful deep colour. Only smell this rose, Lisa!” And then slowly, carrying the baby, on to the next garden to pause and admire where admiration fell lost on unknown paving stones and into unfamiliar leaves and flowers unpossessed by themselves. The loneliness of unpossession waited for them in the tiny flat where a kind of refugee life slowly unpacked itself, just a few things, the rest would remain for ever packed. Only now and then glimpses of forgotten times came to the surface, an unwanted garment or a photograph or an old letter reminding of the reasons why she had grown up in a strange land cared for by people who were not hers.

In the evenings they shaded the lamp with an old woollen cardigan so that the light should not disturb the baby and they sat together. Lisa listened to the cars passing, in her homelessness she wished that one of the cars would stop, because it was Peter’s. More than anything she wished Peter would come. Tears filled her eyes and she turned her head so that her mother should not see.

“Oh, Peter!” Lisa woke in the car, “I was having such an awful dream!” She sat up close to the warmth of her husband feeling the comfort of his presence and responsibility.

“Oh! It was so awful!”

She loved Peter, she loved him when he was driving, especially at night. She looked at his clear brow and at the strong shape of his chin. He softly dropped a kiss on her hair and the car devoured the dark road.

“You’ll feel better when you actually meet her,” he said. “It’s because you don’t know her. Neither of us do!”

Lisa agreed and sat in safety beside her husband as they continued the long journey.

Clara was able to identify Lisa at once. She had to ask to have the white sheet pulled right down in order to make the identification. Lisa had two tiny deep scars like dimples one on the inside of each thigh.

“She was born with a pyloric stenosis,” Clara explained softly. “Projectile vomiting, you know.” The scars, she explained, were from the insertion of tiny tubes.

“Subcutaneous feeding, it was done often in those days,” she made a little gesture of helplessness, an apology for an old fashioned method.

In the mortuary they were very kind and helpful to the old lady who had travelled so far alone and then had to have this terrible shock.

Apparently the car failed to take a bend and they were plunged two hundred feet off the road into the Bush. Death would have been instantaneous, the bodies were flung far apart, the car rolled. They tried to tell her.

Clara brushed aside the cliches of explanation. She asked her question with a professional directness.

“What time did it happen?” she wanted to know. She had been sitting for some time crouched in a large armchair, for some hours after her yoghurt, wondering if she could leave the appointed meeting place. Outside it was raining.

“Should I make a short rain walk?” she asked herself. And several times she nearly left the chair and then thought, “But no, any moment they come and I am not here!”

A few people came into the vestibule of the hotel and she looked at them through palm fronds and ferns, surreptitiously refreshing herself with eau de Cologne, wondering, hopeful. Every now and then she leaned forward to peer, to see if this was Lisa at last, and every time she sat back as the person went out again. Perhaps she was a little relieved every time she was left alone. She adjusted her wiglet.

Back home in Vienna she was never at a loss as to what to do. Retirement gave her leisure but her time was always filled. She never sat for long hours in an armchair. Back home she could have telephoned her broker or arranged with her dentist to have something expensive done to a tooth.

“Time? It’s hard to say exactly,” they said. “A passing motorist saw the car upside down against a tree at about five o’clock and reported the accident immediately.”

There were only the two bodies in the mortuary. Beneath the white sheets they looked small in death. Dr. Clara Schultz was well acquainted with death, the final diagnosis was the greater part of her life’s work. And wasn’t it after all she herself who, with her own hands, cut the dressing gown cord from her own husband’s neck. She had to put a stool on his desk in order to reach as she was such a short person, and furthermore, his neck had swollen, blue, over the cord making the task more difficult.

They supported the old lady with kind hands and offered her a glass of water as she looked at the two pale strangers lying locked in the discolouration of injury and haemorrhage and the deep stillness of death.

Clara looked at her daughter and at her son in law and was unable to know them. She would never be able to know them now.

“I have a photograph, and I have letters,” she said. “They were my paper children, you know.” She tried to draw from the pocket of her travelling jacket the little leather folder which she took with her everywhere.

In the folder was a photograph of them standing, blurred because of a light leak in the camera, on a track which curved by a tree. And on the tree was nailed a small board with their name on it in white paint. Behind the unknown people and the painted board was a mysterious background of pasture and trees and the light and shade of their land. She pulled at the folder but was unable to pull it from her pocket.

Not being able to speak with them and know them was like being unable ever again to hear the phrase of Beethoven, the cascade of cello. It was like being blind and deaf for the rest of her life and she would not be able to recall anything.

Dr. Clara had never wept about anything but now tears slowly forced themselves from under her eyelids.

“My daughter Lisa, you know, was pregnant,” she managed to say at last. “I see she is bandaged. Does this mean?”

“Yes, yes,” they explained gently. “That is right. Owing to the nature of the accident and the speed with which it was reported they were able to save the baby. A little girl, her condition is satisfactory. It was a miracle.”

Dr. Clara nodded. In spite of the tears she was smiling. As well as knowing about death she understood miracles.

As soon as it was decently possible she would ring for the chambermaid and ask for a glass of hot water. Of course she wasn’t blind or deaf and no one had come in with any news of an accident. She was only a little upset with travelling. Her fear of the failure of her body was only the uneasiness of stomach cramp and the result of bad sleep. She would have her cold bath early and then only a very short time to wait after that. Country people had to consider their stock, that was why they were driving overnight to fetch her. It might be a good idea to start getting up now, it would never do to keep them waiting. She put her fat white feet out of the bed and walked across the strange floor to ring the bell. It was a good idea to get up straight away because the telephone was ringing. Dr. Clara, in the old days was used to the telephone in the night. Often she dressed herself with one hand and listened to the Clinic Sister describing the intervals between the labour pains and the position of the baby’s head. A little breathless, that was all, she sat on the chair beside her telephone, breathless just with getting up too quickly.

“Dr. Clara Schultz,” she said and she thought she heard a faint voice murmur.

“Wait one moment, please. Long distance.” And then a fainter sound like a tiny buzzing as if voices were coming from one remote pole to another across continents and under oceans as if a message was trying to come by invisible wires and cables from the other side of the world. Clara waited holding the silent telephone. “Clara Schultz here,” she said alone in the dark emptiness of her apartment for of course she had sold all her furniture.

“I have burn up my ships,” she told Irma. “Clara Schultz here,” her voice sounded strange and she strained into the silence of the telephone trying to hear the other voice, the message, her heart beat more quickly, the beating of her heart seemed to prevent her listening to the silence of the telephone.

“Lisa!” she said. “Is it you, Lisa?”

But there was no sound in the telephone, for a long time just the silence of nothing from the telephone. “Lisa, speak!” But there was no voice.

Clara longed to hear her daughter’s voice, of course the voice could not be the same now as the laughter and incoherent chatter of a little two year old. Now as an old woman holding a dead telephone she remembered with a kind of bitterness, that she sent away her little girl and continued her work at the Clinic paying no attention to the evil cruelty of war. She knew she was overlooking what was happening to people but chose to concern herself only with the menstrual cycle and the arched white thighs of women in labour.

“It’s a means to an end,” she said softly to her frightened patients when they cried out. “Everything will be all right, it’s a means to an end,” she comforted them.

Clara knew she had neglected to think of the end. Now she wanted, more than anything, to hear Lisa speak. But there was no sound on the telephone. She went slowly out on the dark stairs of the apartment house. On the second landing she met her neighbour.

“Irma, is that you?”

“Clara!”

“Irma, you are quite unchanged.”

Irma’s pink sugar cake face sat smiling on the lace collar which was like a doily. “Why should I change?” Irma asked.

Clara took Irma’s hand, grateful to find her friend. “Only think, Irma,” she said. “I am bringing home my daughter’s baby!” She laughed softly to Irma. “My paper children had a baby daughter,” she said. “I shall call her Lisa.”

When Lisa and Peter arrived at the hotel they were unable to understand how it was that Clara must have been crying and laughing when she died.

Irma Rosen tried to explain to them as well as she could with her little English, and of course she was very tired with making the long journey by air at such short notice.

“When I find her you know, outside my door,” Irma said, “I know, as her friend, I must come to you myself to tell. On her face this lovely smile and her face quite wet as if she cry in her heart! While she is smiling.”

They were as if encapsulated in the strange little meeting in the hotel vestibule. Lisa tried to think of words to say to this neat little old lady, her mother’s friend. But Irma spoke again. “Your mother is my friend,” she said. “Always she speak of you. Her paper children and she so proud to be preparing to come to you. She would want me to tell you. Now I suppose I go back. Your mother says always ‘But air travel, you know, makes the world so much smaller’. Is true of course, but a long way all the same!” She smiled and nodded, pink, on her lace collar. “Sorry my Enklisch iss not good!” she apologised. “Oh, you speak beautifully.” Lisa was glad to be able to say something. “Really your English is very good.” Lisa shouted a little as if to make it easier for Irma to understand her.

The young couple wanted to thank Irma and look after her but as Lisa’s labour pains had started during the long car journey, Peter had to drive her straight to the hospital.

First published in Overland 89—1982