Clara by Kurt Palka Page A

she said. “Let’s go! Let’s find a place for the night. Get some food and rest. Come.”
    She felt a stab of pity for him then, for the first time. Or perhaps it was not actual pity but sorrow, empathy for a loved one who is trying so very hard. Helpless and hopeless he seemed to her at that moment, a man at a wholly unexpected lowpoint in his life.
    “Albert.” She walked there and reached for his arm. “Come. Let’s go.”
    They spent that night in an inn where they cleaned up and ate dinner in a low-ceilinged room with wooden beams and wooden tables and a large green tile stove with iron rails for wet clothing above.
    Out the window of their room they could see the white lines of paddock fences, and they saw the dark shapes of horses as they moved and drew together near the open stable gate. At some point that night she felt him leave the bed, and he sat on the bedside and put on his shoes. She pretended to be asleep, but she saw him put his coat over his pyjama shoulders and walk on tiptoes out of the room.
    She heard him outside then, and she swung her legs out of the bed and stepped to the window. There he was ducking between paddock rails and then he stood, and the horses with slow steps and heads hanging came to him through the grass in the cold moonlit night, and steam rose from his mouth as he spoke to them and stroked their long necks. She watched as he bent down and tapped the foreleg of one, and it raised that leg and he bent to examine the underhoof and with his fingernail he pried out something, perhaps a small stone. He slipped it into his pocket out of the way.
    In the morning after breakfast they drove the remaining twenty kilometres to the estate. It lay in the flat November light like a Kafkaesque castle, it seemed to her; elevated, walled, and self-important in this countryside, tile roofs and copper turrets, the enormous wooden gate shuttered.
    “Monarchists!” he shouted over his shoulder. “Very condescending. They think they’re God’s gift to the horse world. But I have to try.”
    He stopped the motorcycle at the gate, knocked, and someone slid open the spy window. They saw a rolling eye and a nose.
    Albert explained and a voice said, “All right. It’s almost opening time anyway.” There was the clacking of wooden drawbeams and the carriage gate swung open. He drove the Norton into the inner yard as wide as a marketplace and cobbled most of it in blocks of cedar as in the Middle Ages to save the horses’ hooves. Administration buildingsand stables surrounded the yard, all timbered structures painted ochre and forest green, the old imperial colours. Bare trees stood tall, and under them men in boots and linen stable jackets were walking horses, some snow white, others, the younger ones, no longer in their foal black but ash grey. Albert shut off the engine and asked a man leading a young horse in a rope halter for the manager.
    “The Rittmeister,” the man corrected him.
    “If you say so. Where is he?”
    The horse handler pointed at a group of men across the yard. “There,” he said. “In the uniform.”
    That man was looking their way now. He waved his arms and shouted, “That’s far enough on that motor-machine.” He turned his back on the men with him and came crossing the yard.
    He had on the two-cornered hat worn sideways in the old imperial fashion meant to make an officer’s head look more impressive and also to protect his ears and neck from sabre cuts. He wore dark-blue breeches with leather seat and inner thighs, and a tight uniform tunic with gold buttons. The hat from corner to corner was nearly as wide as his shoulders. His riding boots gleamed, and they made hardly a sound on the wooden cobble blocks. With each step he slapped a braided quirt against his right leg.
    “What?” he shouted. “Who are you?”
    “Just look at him,” said Albert under his breath to her. He stepped away from the Norton and began walking toward the Rittmeister. They met some