In the Claws of the Eagle (11 page)

Erich hadn’t been thinking in terms of a solution, but he was stirred by Klaus’s words. He
would
excel! He’d show Grandpa Veit that Austria wasn’t dead; he’d be like Father that night at the fire before he’d collapsed. He’d tame Mother’s disturbing pictures into something worthy of the great masters! Yes, he was stirred. Thanks to Klaus he had decided on a career for himself. He didn’t give two hoots about the Jews, though when he thought about it, they indeed were everywhere.

Erich took the long way home, a loop that brought him several kilometres into the forest and then back, to cross over the high multi-arched railway bridge above the town. While he walked, daylight gradually invaded the forest, enriching it with more and more colour. Time and again he had the sensation of walking through the frame of a picture, just as he used to ‘walk into’ the pictures he pasted on his walls at home, only this time it was real. He stopped, fascinated by a chest-high layer of mist that filled a hollow on his path; it looked liquid, like cream in a bowl. He plunged through it, laughing, his arms above his head like a swimmer dashing into the sea. Then he ran on, enjoying the feeling of speed that running in the half-light gives.

Later, he froze while a doe, followed by her two fawns, picked their way through the mist-laden spiders’ webs beside the track and disappeared into the forest. Each new experience felt like a new beginning. Finally he rested, panting, with his arms on the parapet of the bridge and looked out over the roofs and spires of the town to a horizon where the planes of
Hungary
began. Life seemed to stretch in front of him to infinity. Everything seemed more hopeful; he pictured how it would be: Father’s health would get better, Mother would be happy
and her pictures would be like her singing, pure and beautiful. He would show Grandpa Veit that he had become a man.

It had really started with Klaus, hadn’t it: this liberation? He could smell the wood smoke from Klaus’s fire on his sleeves, and thought of the past night. It was Klaus who had asked the question he had never asked himself: ‘What do you want to do with your life?’ Erich smiled. Fortunately he hadn’t had time to think, or he would have thought of something much more macho to impress his new leader. That’s really what Klaus was to him, wasn’t it, not just a friend, but a leader, some one to live up to? He thought of Grandpa Veit with a slight shudder. He realised that he had been trying to impress the old man all his life, but now he had a hero of his own: Klaus Steinman.

But he was secretely proud of the way he had stood up to Klaus over the Jew, Abrahams. It had been generous of Klaus to accept that the baiting was not worthy of him. Sometime Erich would try to understand this Jewish conspiracy business, but just now he was happy to have a friend he could look up to, and aspire to. He crossed the bridge and ran down the path towards home.

Veit was standing outside the back door, as he usually did in summer, shaving into an enamel basin, his mirror hanging on a nail in the wall. He used a cutthroat razor that he would strop on his old army belt. He didn’t hear Erich until he saw him in his mirror. Good God, the lad’s turned into a young man
without
me realising! he thought. After years of brutalising young recruits, his automatic reaction was to face about, razor to cheek, and demand, ‘Where have you bee–’

‘Morning Grandpa.’ Erich stepped past him and went in, ignoring his demand. The old man’s jaw dropped, he turned back to his mirror and found himself looking into a toothless
chasm. He snapped it shut. A trickle of blood was spreading through the foam from a nick on his cheek.

‘Now look what you’ve made me do!’ he grumbled, but Erich was gone.

Having had a hurried splash in the bathroom to clean the soot and sweat from his face, Erich went into the kitchen, where they usually had breakfast. He noticed the changed atmosphere the moment he entered. Father was leaning back in his chair, beaming. Mother was reading a letter. On the table was an opened envelope bearing the familiar rubber stamp of
Solomons’ Wood Yard
.

‘What is it, Father?’ Erich asked.

‘Solomons, he’s keeping me on,’ he said.

‘Charity!’ said Veit from the door, holding a towel to his cheek.

‘No, Father.’ Erich’s father said. ‘I’m to supervise the summer tree felling in the company forest in the Lake District. It will be two years at least before the re-building here is begun, let alone finished. But he says there will be office work for me here in winter.’

‘Summer in Altaussee … the Salzkammergut,’ Mother was saying dreamily, clasping the letter to her bosom.

‘And who’ll look after me?’ asked Veit, examining his towel.

‘You could come too,’ Mother said, while Erich prayed, no … oh no.

‘Not on your life,’ snapped the old man. ‘Anyway, I’m wounded, isn’t anyone going to do anything about it?’

While Mother tended the cut, Erich was able to quiz Father about the proposal. The summer holidays were half over, but still the prospect of spending the rest of the summer up in the mountains seemed like heaven. The delay in re-building the yard was because someone had said that the fire wasn’t an accident, and there would have to be an investigation before
the insurance would pay up. It was on the tip of his tongue to confess what he knew about the burning of the wood yard, but something stopped him; he wasn’t ready to betray Klaus.

The turmoil of the last two days had subsided; their family belongings selected, tamed and finally strapped down, were now safely contained in two large trunks. Only the tip of one of Father’s belts showed like a tail. No one dared re-open that trunk in case they couldn’t close it again; it would have to stay. Their ‘Chalet’ had been described as having all the necessities for a self-catering holiday, but the Hoffman family, Grandpa not included, would be there for close on a month.

Erich, keen to see Klaus before they left, was following directions to his home. It was a neat house on the far side of the town centre. Someone was playing the piano, running up and down scales at the speed of light. He would have to risk interrupting. He knocked on the door. The piano stopped and a few minutes later a girl of about his own age, with bright blue eyes and a tousled flood of fair hair opened the door. She looked at him, did a double take, then laughed. Erich smiled back.

‘Is Klaus in?’ he asked.

‘I’ll see–’ she began but was interrupted by a man’s voice calling from behind her.

‘If that’s one of Klaus’s scouts let him wait outside.’ The girl looked embarrassed.

‘If you don’t mind…I’ll look for him.’ She only partly closed the door and Erich heard her say, ‘He doesn’t look like a scout, more like Klaus’s double.’

‘Another damned Nazi!’ came the rejoinder. Erich rather hoped the girl would re-appear, but it was Klaus who came out, jerking his head back to the voice behind him.

‘My stepfather! As you can hear, this prophet is not welcome in his own country.’ The scales started again, a cascade of sound. ‘Bloody piano! Let’s walk.’

‘I’ve only got a few minutes,’ Erich explained. ‘We’re going away. It will be for a whole month. I just wanted to ask you for your address in Germany.’

‘I’m off too, duty to Mother done. There’s a big rally in the autumn which I’d like to be at. I’d like your address too.’ He fished in his pocket for a notebook and a pencil; they exchanged addresses. ‘At least they want me in Germany, I’m
persona non grata
here.’ He pocketed his notebook. ‘So you’re off,’ he gave Erich a friendly fist on the chest. ‘Remember what I said, Erich, we want men of steel. Good luck with your art. I’d give you the Nazi salute but people here aren’t ready for it yet. Heil Hitler!’

Somehow Erich’s tongue couldn’t find its way to return this.

‘
Auf Wiedersehen. Klaus
.’

On the train journey from Mödling to Altaussee, Erich spent the entire time walking from window to window as the train wound its way up through the Semmering Pass, and deeper and deeper into the mountains. One minute he would be
looking
at rock rising sheer above him, next he would be gazing down into a foaming river, or into neat fields where miniature tractors, far below, were cutting the last of the corn. They were sharing their compartment with a family from Vienna. After a bit, however, Mother’s excitement and little cries of joy
embarrassed
him so much that he had to flee the compartment and stand at the end of the coach where he could move from side to side, even leaning out to watch the two engines belching smoke and steam as the long train snaked dutifully behind them. They had to change trains – trunks and all – to a branch
line for Bad Ausee, a station close to Altaussee from where the felling was organised.

When they were met at the station, Erich was delighted to find not a car, but a forestry truck ready to take them and their luggage to their new home. As there was no room for him inside, he had to stand in the back, his feet spread, looking out over the cab. His feet stuck to the fresh resin that had bled from the timber that the lorry usually carried. For a while they followed the foaming Traun River. Then they turned up into smaller roads that led them eventually to the chalet that would be their home for the rest of the summer.

When they arrived they stood looking down in wonder at the little alpine village below, wrapped about the end of the bluest lake that Erich had ever seen; even Mother’s
exclamations
of delight seemed inadequate. It was then that he turned and looked up…and up…and there it was, their own private alpine peak, the Kleinkogel, the driver called it. From here it looked every bit as high as Loser Mountain that rose straight up from the other side of the little blue lake, and Erich
immediately
decided he would climb it tomorrow.

The mountain was still calling him when he woke at first light the following morning, so he set out without even a bar of chocolate, following a path that the forester had pointed out to him. It curved around the bottom of the hill above the little lake, inky black now; only a single V-shaped ripple from some water bird broke its mirror surface. After a bit the path began to rise steeply, heading straight towards a vertical wall of rock. He had heard of people who climbed rock faces for fun, but this seemed too sheer for anybody. But the path looked well worn, so, despite a flutter in his stomach, he kept going. When it reached the foot of the crag, to his relief the path turned sharply left and followed the foot of the rock face. He stopped; a splash of paint and an arrow seemed to be pointing directly
up the cliff. Erich examined it with alarm and then noticed a narrow shelf that climbed diagonally up the face. Scratch marks showed where other people had put their feet.

To begin with, he leaned in towards the wall and had the horrible sensation that the rock was trying to push him out into space. After a bit, however, he learned to stand up straight; miraculously his feet did not to slip. When he arrived at the top of the cliff he was panting, but more out of excitement than exertion. He felt as if he could conquer the world. Another half hour of climbing through trees and there was it was, the summit of his very first mountain peak, a crag rising above the trees.

He draped his shirt on a bush for the sweat to dry, and took out a map that he had found in the chalet. He lay down on his stomach, turning the map until the lake and the village were in their correct positions, and began to identify the peaks and
valleys
ahead. That was the Loser directly ahead, 1,838m high. There was the village; he could identify the church and the
valleys
radiating out from it. The forester who had driven them up had said that there were salt mines in the valley to the left of the Loser, and that deep under the mountains there were huge caverns, connected by miles of tunnels, where, over the ages, miners had dug rock salt out of the living rock. He said there was even a chapel down there dedicated to Saint Barbara, the patron saint of miners.