Clara by Kurt Palka

found him standing in the bathroom, drying his face and hands. She sat down on the bathtub rim and he hung up the towel and sat down next to her.
    ALBERT’S MILITARY CAREER in Austria was in ruins, but as a horse trainer he had much to offer. He travelled the country by train and on the Norton, applying at stud and horse farms. One of the first places he tried was his old equestrian college where he’d graduated summa cum laude, and when the rector told him there was no position available Albert had set off on long loops into the provinces: to the Eschenbach stud farm, to the Trauttenhoffs, the Wolframs, and to other breeders, stables, and farms. He was gone often for days, at times sleeping like a vagrant in off-road barns, twice stretched out in a church pew, he admitted to her.
    He filled out a dozen applications and left his resumé, but the horse world was exclusive and intimate. News about the judgment against him had travelled fast, and breeders depended on the government for any number of permits and licences. She could see the effect of months of rejection in his face; around his lips stretched and dry, and in his eyes uncertain and quick to look away from her as they had never been.
    In order to lend her support she came along on what would turn out to be the last of these trips. It was to a Lipizzaner feeder farm for the Spanish Riding School in a distant province. To get there they loaded the Norton onto trains and off-loaded it for connections. It was late afternoon on a day in November when they finally continued by road. The sidecar was still bolted to the frame of the motorcycle, but as usual she rode on the pillion seat with her hands in the pockets of his leather coat, holding him like this with her hands not quite meeting under the coat in front, and two fingers poking through a tear in the seam of the right pocket lining. She rode pressing the side of her face against his back, her leather helmet buckled under her chin. She wore brown lace-up boots, a lined jacket he’d bought for her at a motoring supply shop in Vienna, and she wore her dark-brown tweed outfit with the skirt tucked up under her knees so as not to get it caught in spokes or chain.
    There was no snow yet, but the sky was grey everywhere and trees were bare and black. To the south oncein a while they could see clouds like vast sails and shipwrecks sliding down mountainsides to the valley floor. Winter lightning trembled high above them where the peaks might be.
    To talk to each other they would shout, and he would half turn his head to hear. When he shouted she could feel his voice in her hands flat on his chest at the same time as the wind tore the words from his mouth and whipped them over his shoulder.
    Under her, somewhere on the black machine something metallic had begun to rattle and slap.
    “What’s that,” she shouted. “That noise?”
    “Chain needs tightening.”
    “Tightening?”
    “The wheel gets moved back,” he shouted. “There are frame spacers both sides of the rear axle. I’ll get around to it.”
    She sat and burrowed her face into his coat again. She could smell the leather, old as the thing was.
    This ride, so far down their common path already. She and Albert, now. So different from the early days in Vienna, the laughter, the excitement, the faith come what may.
    She squeezed her eyes shut against the icy wind. Moments later they were nearly run off the road by a lumber truck that came fast around a bend and veered sideways when the driver saw them. The rear of the truck and the harsh breath of exhaust and wheelspin barely missed them and the Norton skidded and died.She could just free her hands from his pockets when he climbed off and stomped over to where the truck had slowed and the driver was now grinding the gears in his hurry to get away.
    Albert stood looking after him. He raised a fist, comical on this dark and winding road, a man in goggles and helmet cursing after a truck long gone.
    “Albert!”