Midnight Train to Prague

by Carol Windley

  After leaving the North Sea resort, she and Beatriz went to Bad Schandau, where they met Beatriz’s friend Sophie Brecht. A week later, Sophie drove them through Bavaria in her open Daimler-Benz. At restaurants along the way they compensated for the spa’s meager diet with Spätzle and lamb chops, roast beef with sauerkraut, strudel, potatoes in cream, brioche, custard-filled pastries, while men in lederhosen and women in dirndls sang folk tunes and played the zither and the hurdy-gurdy. In the evenings, in their rooms at a Gasthaus or a hotel, Sophie, who had three sons, liked to comb out Natalia’s braids. So fine, so silky, she said, scrunching Natalia’s hair into bunches on either side of her head and calling Beatriz to look. “See how pretty she looks with short hair? It emphasizes her eyes and her delicate bone structure, don’t you think?”

  “What are you doing to my daughter?” Beatriz said. “You’re making her grow up too fast.”

  “She will grow up,” Sophie said. “Whether you like it or not.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Beatriz said.

  The next day, her mother and Sophie took her to a beauty salon. Natalia saw her severed braids coiled on a glass tray and almost wept, but then, when her hair was shampooed, dried, and brushed, she began to like it, the way it fell against her face, the lightness.

  * * *

  Since March, she and Beatriz had been to Paris, where it rained every day, and to Vienna, and last month they’d gone on a walking tour to the Harz Mountains that had almost ended in disaster. Natalia learned to book hotel rooms, exchange foreign currency, rinse out clothes in hotel handbasins. Beatriz traveled with an extensive wardrobe. For her, every trip began at the exclusive little dress shops on Kurfürstendamm and Leipziger Strasse, where salesclerks greeted them effusively and said what everyone said: Frau Faber, how is it possible you have a grown daughter? They were invited to sit on Louis Quinze chairs while models paraded past in gowns with airy handkerchief hems, bias-cut jersey afternoon dresses, afternoon dresses in Chinese silk, cobweb-fine lace shawls. The models were disdainful and thin as paper dolls from living on nothing but black coffee and cigarettes. A form of penance? More a necessity of survival, Natalia imagined. The nuns at the convent fasted on holy days and sometimes in class felt faint and weak, and once Sister Monica had fainted while writing on the chalkboard, and a nursing sister had come with the cook’s helper and carried her out of the room. In the season of Lent, Natalia too had skipped lunch and had eaten only a little soup for supper. Alone in the dormitory washroom, she had bitten her arm hard enough to leave teeth marks but not hard enough to draw blood. The pain, although slight, brought her closer to the saints, she believed. It interested her for a short time, this practice, and then she gave it up, just as she’d given up the sour little candies that she remembered the nuns doling out as a treat on Sunday afternoons.

  * * *

  Today they were departing for Lake Hévíz, in Hungary, where Beatriz would undergo treatments at a health spa, after which she hoped to spend a few days in Budapest before heading south to the Dalmatian coast. Benno had been taken to Erich Saltzman’s apartment in Grunewald. Hildegard and Trudy had prepared the villa for their absence, closing the shutters on the downstairs windows, draping the sofas in dust sheets, and disposing of all the perishable food in the kitchen. Yesterday Hildegard had taken the train to Hamburg, where she was to stay with a sister, and Trudy was already in Poland, visiting family. No one remained to press Natalia against a starched apron front and say: Auf Wiedersehen, viel Glück!

  Beatriz came downstairs and went to the mirror over the Biedermeier console table. She adjusted her cloche hat on her pale blond hair. She was wearing a new lilac traveling suit and a blouse with a jabot at the neck. Was the blouse too fussy for a train journey? she asked Natalia. What did she think? The jabot was perfect, Natalia said. Yes, her mother’s medications were in her purse, and no, she had not forgotten their passports or money for incidental expenses. Precisely at eight, as he had promised, Herr Saltzman arrived to drive them to the Anhalter Bahnhof. Natalia helped him carry their suitcases out to his car. In the night, a rainstorm had flooded parts of Berlin, and traffic was congested. Herr Saltzman, although a new and rather nervous driver, managed to get them to the station early, with plenty of time, he said, to cross the street to the Hotel Excelsior for coffee and a bite to eat.

  “Oh, Erich, that’s a lovely idea,” Beatriz said. “But you know me. I like to settle in at the station before boarding the train.”

  On the pavement a violinist was playing Beethoven’s “Ode an die Freude.” Beatriz held her hat against a sudden gust of wind and sang: Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt! This kiss is for the whole world!

  “Write to me, Beatriz,” Erich Saltzman said, tipping the porter who came to take the luggage from him. “Write every day. Do you promise?”

  “Yes, Erich, not every day, but I’ll drop you a line when I can.”

  Erich Saltzman, his eyes moist, said, “Natalia, you’re a sensible girl; take good care of your mother for me, won’t you?”

  Yes, she would, she promised. Uncle Erich, she had been taught to say, when she was younger. Be good to Benno, Natalia wanted to remind him, but he had turned away and was walking, very stolid and upright, back to his automobile.

  On any given day, a newspaper had once enthusiastically reported, half of Europe moved through the Anhalter Bahnhof, and every six minutes a train departed from the glass-roofed train shed in a cloud of black smoke. Beatriz stood inside the station, entranced, watching as people greeted friends or relatives, or bid them farewell, sometimes tearfully. Parents could be heard chiding fractious children. Luggage got lost and reclaimed; the heels of clerks and porters rang with authority on the marble floors. Then there was the drawing-room elegance of the Anhalter: oil paintings, potted palms, crystal chandeliers. Beatriz impulsively bought a sprig of lily of the valley from a flower seller and asked Natalia to pin it to her lapel, and somehow, between that moment and the next, Beatriz vanished. Natalia couldn’t go looking for her, in case they missed each other. When at last her mother emerged out of the crowds, she explained breathlessly that she’d seen someone she knew, but it turned out to be someone else, a stranger. But then, she said, people en masse always tended to resemble other people, didn’t they? The scent of lily of the valley was giving her a headache, she said, and Natalia unpinned the flower from her mother’s collar and dropped it in a waste bin. Their train was delayed by an hour, and then they had to search through several coaches before finding a compartment with two empty seats. A young man stood and offered his window seat to Beatriz. She thanked him with such a radiant smile he blushed. He sat beside Beatriz and read, or pretended to read, while glancing surreptitiously at her. Not unaware of this attention, Beatriz slowly removed her gloves and hat and ran her fingers rather sensuously through her hair.

  Natalia sat across from the young man, between a stout woman in a mustard-colored wool-flannel dress and a gentleman who was reading the Berliner Morgenpost. The front page, she could see, was devoted to coverage of Commander Byrd’s arrival in Paris, where he had been honored by the president of the Third Republic, whose name she couldn’t remember. There it was, beneath his photograph: Gaston Doumergue. He had a nice smile, she thought. Charles Lindbergh had won the transatlantic race in May, flying the Spirit of St. Louis solo from New York City to Paris in thirty hours. His rival Commander Byrd ran out of petrol and had to ditch his aircraft in the sea off the coast of France. He and his crew were fished out of the water, the newspapers said, by the villagers of Ver-sur-Mer.

  Near Leipzig, Natalia caught sight of an open motorcar racing along on the road beside the tracks. Sunlight glinted off the dazzling paintwork and silver wheel spokes. The car was as blue as the blue sky over the green fields of Saxony. She leaned forward for a better look. The driver wore a tan jacket and a blue shirt. He steered with one hand and rested an arm casually on the door. The passenger, a woman, turned to him, laughing, her scarf fluttering in the wind like a banner.
How happy they looked, those two!

  The motorcar disappeared behind a hedgerow. She sat back, feeling as if it had taken part of her away with it. She understood why aviators risked their lives crossing an ocean in a flimsy aircraft. Imagine the freedom up there, alone in the clouds. Or here on earth, in a motorcar like that one.

  The train rattled on, past fields in which pools of water left by the storm reflected the summer sky. Villages, house roofs, groves of trees.

  “It’s very close in here,” the man beside her grumbled. He folded his newspaper and got up and opened the window as far as it would go. Before he sat down again, he managed to step not only on her neighbor’s foot but on Natalia’s as well. Her mother looked amused. She traveled second-class on principle, having been tipped off by Herr Saltzman that the Reichsbahn overpriced first-class tickets and underpriced second-class.

  * * *

  Soon after departing from Dresden the train came to a stop at a station near Pirna. Not a breath of air came in the open window. Have patience, the assistant conductor advised, when he poked his head in the compartment to announce that they were waiting for debris to be cleared from a branch line up ahead. Beatriz said she was going to walk in the corridor to try to get a breath of air. Time passed, and she didn’t return. The young man across from Natalia left the compartment and came back a few minutes later to inform her that her mother was unwell. “You should go to her, I think,” he said.

  Beatriz was in the next carriage, leaning against a window. Her eyes were dark; she looked very pale and complained of feeling faint. Natalia guided her to a lavatory and ran cold water on her wrists, which did nothing, Beatriz said, except get her sleeves wet. Later, in the corridor, she spoke of unexpectedly encountering an old and very dear friend, someone she hadn’t seen for a long time. She thought she’d seen him at the Anhalter, and now here he was, on the train. It was a shock; her heart was still racing like mad. Natalia suggested going to their compartment, where Beatriz could rest and perhaps take one of the tablets the doctor had prescribed. “No, everyone will stare at me,” Beatriz said. “And it’s too hot in there. I think a good strong cup of coffee would settle my nerves better than anything. Shall we go and see if the dining car is open?”

  Chapter Two

  This, for Miklós, Count Andorján, was the inaugural run of his Bugatti Grand Sport Type 43, shipped to him three weeks earlier from Automobiles E. Bugatti in Molsheim, Alsace. The 2.3-liter in-line eight-cylinder engine generated 120 horsepower. Zero to ninety-seven kilometers per hour in twelve seconds. The fields and pine forests of Saxony slipped past. Somewhere between Leipzig and Dresden he opened it up, racing a train to a crossing, winning easily, with a little room to spare.

  “What are you trying to do, kill us?” Zita said, laughing. The wind caught her scarf; it floated away, snagging on a tree at the edge of a field. Should he turn back? No, she said; what was gone, was gone.

  The Bugatti’s wheels spun, slipped, gripped the road. Already his investment had yielded a good return; he felt young again, and happy.

  * * *

  Earlier, he’d called at his office on Kochstrasse, where he’d glanced at reports coming in on the teletype: overnight a cloudburst high in the Erzgebirge had sent torrents of water roaring down the Gottleuba and Müglitz Rivers, inundating villages, sweeping homes right off their foundations. You can’t go, the news chief, Paul Eisner, said, when Miklós reminded him he was leaving on vacation. He had one correspondent in Vienna, Eisner said, another in Palestine; he had sent a reporter to Spain to write something on Primo de Rivera’s reforms. In a few weeks, the damned Nazis were staging a rally in Nuremburg, and he’d have to send someone to cover it. What else? Half of Berlin was underwater, and transportation was at a standstill; distribution of the day’s papers threatened to turn into a nightmare.

  Miklós offered to detour into the Erzgebirge on his way to Prague and send back a story. Eisner’s secretary came in with the news that the Tempelhof airfield, near the building housing the new Ullstein printing press, was underwater. “You could sail a boat on it,” she said. Eisner looked at Miklós and said, “All right, yes, go there, send me a report.” Meaning a report from the Erzgebirge, Miklós understood, not from the flooded airfield.

  * * *

  As they neared Pirna, he and Zita noticed signs warning that the macadamized road running along the Gottleuba and Müglitz Rivers had been washed out. Miklós took his foot off the accelerator pedal, letting the car slow. He was undecided: Should he turn back, since they would be unable to get to the scene of the disaster by motorcar, or should he keep his promise to Eisner? They came to a village, and he parked the Bugatti in front of the Rathaus. Children were running around, shrieking, kicking a ball back and forth. As soon as his back was turned, he knew, they’d be all over his car with their dirty feet and sticky hands. “It’s only a machine,” Zita said, and he said, yes, but it was new and didn’t have a mark on it. She licked her thumb and wiped it across the hood. “Now it has a mark,” she said. “Do you feel better?”

  “Not much,” he said, and laughed.

  A dog barked; the Rathaus clock struck the hour; a goat tethered on a patch of grass lifted its head and stared at them. He got his camera case and his jacket out of the Bugatti, and after asking directions from a woman sweeping her garden path, he and Zita set off on a trail leading up through a pine forest. It was a steady uphill march in the heat. Zita wiped sweat off her forehead and said, “Miklós, are we lost?” He thought it possible. “Listen,” she said. Somewhere up ahead, quite close, there were motorized vehicles, and when they walked out of the forest, they were passed by a convoy of army trucks en route to the disaster. Miklós flagged down the last truck, showed his press card to a Reichswehr corporal, and they were invited to hop in. They sat on a bench in the back of the truck with two young soldiers and piles of sandbags, tarpaulins, and shovels. They stopped at a village on the banks of the Gottleuba River, a peaceful mountain stream transformed overnight into a torrent that had inundated the village. The saturated air had a green tinge, and the roar of water was deafening. The floodwater carried along house doors, window shutters, furniture, an overturned farm wagon, uprooted trees. The carcass of a cow. An infant’s cradle. Soldiers were carrying the bodies of drowning victims on stretchers from the river to higher ground. A young woman’s arm had been torn off at the shoulder, exposing a knob of bone and gristle. A man appeared to have been flayed alive. A little girl of about three, hair streaming water, feet bare beneath the hem of her nightgown, seemed carved of wax. Zita took a step back. Miklós could see that she was shaken. And this was Zita, who liked to think she could maintain an almost inhuman coolness and reserve in any emergency. He put his arm around her. Everything seemed unstable, shifting, in a way that reminded him of the war, when he had seen villages reduced to rubble, people displaced from their homes. She shook her head, her eyes filled with tears. “I’m going to see what I can do to help,” she said.

  He changed the lens on his camera, framed the scene, pressed the shutter, advanced the film. A man in a plaid jacket and a peaked cap came over and introduced himself as Richard Houghton, a journalist with the New York Times. He was working on a feature on the Erzgebirge region of Saxony for the travel section of his paper. Yesterday he’d photographed centuries-old stone houses, and in the night those houses had been swept off their foundations. This morning he’d talked to a man whose five daughters had been asleep in their beds when the water rose, flooding the first floor of their house. “Not one of his daughters survived. What do you say to a man who tells you something like that?”

  Richard tried to light a damp cigarette with wet hands. Miklós offered him one of his and lit it for him. Zita had been helping clear debris off the high street and when she saw Miklós talking to Richard Houghton she came over, wiping her hands on her skirt, and introduced herself. As they began talking, they had to stand aside to let members of a paramilitary organization, der Stahlhelm, pass. They were young
recruits, arrogant, loud. Other paramilitary organizations were in evidence, Miklós could see, but it was the Stahlhelm, an armed unit attached to a right-wing political party, that Zita despised. “They have no shame,” she said. “What are they doing here, in any case? They are exploiting a disaster. Don’t you think so, Miklós? This is nothing but an opportunity to rehabilitate their unsavory reputation for shooting unarmed factory workers in the back and beating up Jews on the streets of Berlin.” She stared at them. “I’ve seen it,” she said. “I’ve seen them in action.” She went back to helping the villagers clear the street, and Richard Houghton said he was going to talk to a Reichswehr corporal about getting a ride back to Pirna. The flood had cut communications with the rest of the country, and he needed to file a report to his paper.

  A woman in a nightgown and muddy boots, her hair loose down her back, asked Miklós if he had seen her husband. Herr Eck, she said. He had gone out in the night, and where was he now? A man took the woman’s arm. “Put the damned camera away, would you?” he said to Miklós. Had he no respect for people? After the man had led the woman away, Miklós got a shot of two small children crouched together on the cobblestones. They were barefoot, drenched, lost. A woman stopped and knelt and spoke to them comfortingly. He took a picture. He was familiar with the anger people felt at the sight of a photographer at a disaster scene. But the photographs formed an important part of the historical record. Images touched people, left an impression. And that was why he was doing his job. He photographed an uprooted tree lodged in a doorway, sunlight trembling in the leaves.

  Later, he and Zita went with Richard Houghton to the Gasthof, where the innkeeper was serving coffee. Richard had been able to arrange a ride down the mountain in a Wehrmacht truck and was going to collect his belongings from his room, having spent two nights at the Gasthof. In 1918, he said, he’d been a young, inexperienced war correspondent in France. One of his intentions in taking an assignment in Germany was to make peace with his memories.