Midnight Train to Prague

by Carol Windley

  “And have you?” Zita said. “Have you succeeded?”

  “When a country has been your enemy, it’s not easy to change how you feel, but yes, I think I’ve had a certain success.” He looked at Zita and said, “You’re Russian, aren’t you?”

  “I was born in Saint Petersburg. That is, Leningrad. My father and I lived for a time in Moscow. We left in 1922.”

  “It is in my mind to see Russia, if possible.”

  “It isn’t very possible at all,” Zita said.

  “I would go as a tourist, not a newspaperman. I’d like to see the Russia of Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy.”

  “We knew Maxim Gorky, didn’t we, Miklós? Have you read Gorky, Mr. Houghton? The founder of Socialist Realism, they say of him.”

  “I read The Mother,” Richard Houghton said.

  “It is the great Russian revolutionary novel, and what’s interesting is that Gorky wrote it when he was living in the Adirondacks,” Zita said. “The Bolsheviks sent him to America to raise money for the revolution. Lenin respected Gorky; they were friends, even when Lenin had no friends, just enemies. My father used to say that if Lenin had a tenth of Gorky’s humanity, the revolution would have retained its integrity. Bitter, that is what the name Gorky means. He chose it for himself, his nom de plume: the Bitter One.” She asked Miklós for a cigarette. “Count Andorján is a writer,” she said. “He writes lovely novels.”

  “Trivialliteratur,” Miklós said.

  “They are not trivial,” Zita said. She held the cigarette, watching the smoke.

  He would make a point of reading the count’s books, Richard Houghton said. He hoped reading German would improve his facility with the language.

  “Your German is good,” Zita said.

  “Well, thanks. It’s getting there. My landlady in Pirna has to ask me to repeat everything I say three times, and even then she looks bewildered.”

  Miklós said that, yes, he and Zita would like to take a ride down the mountain with him, if possible. Before he left, though, he wanted to have a word with the village’s mayor, a Herr Schirrmeister. Miklós found him near the river, directing cleanup operations. His brother lived in Glashütte, the mayor told Miklós, where the scale of the disaster was beyond comprehension. A passenger train had been swept off the station siding into the river; its coaches became uncoupled and were washed up onto the Hauptstrasse, severely injuring a number of people, killing several. Every fifty or hundred years a catastrophic flood occurred, he said, and this was because of the region’s geology: narrow, rocky waterways could not contain the water generated by these summer cloudbursts. In twenty-four hours, more than three hundred millimeters of rain could fall. And this was the result. He broke off. “Look, over there. A woman has fallen in. She was helping another woman, and now she’s gone in herself.”

  The woman was Zita. Herr Schirrmeister picked up a plank of wood and handed it to Miklós, who held it out. Zita grabbed it and was able to pull herself out of the water. But right away she slipped in the mud and went back into the river, and this time the current carried her away. Miklós threw his jacket on the ground and waded into the water. His old adversary, floodwater. Rivers choked with ice, the land a wide sea darkening, spilling out across the pastures to the forest’s edge. Every spring the river that cut through his land in Hungary flooded. In 1912, he remembered, it rose to new heights, flooding tenants’ cottages, chicken coops, hay wagons, pigpens, stranding cows on islands of dry ground. The child of one of the estate’s workers was swept into the water. Miklós and his brother, László, had swum out to her. He reached the little girl first, and then the water closed over his head, and László had to rescue him as well as the child. But they were too late. László had carried her body out of the water to her mother, whose cry of anguish Miklós would never forget.

  When the flood receded, he had seen how the river had carved out a new path for itself. It was no longer the river he had known as a boy.

  But this was a mountain stream in a village in Saxon Switzerland in summer, and he couldn’t let Zita drown in it. He held her head above the water, and somehow they were on solid ground, if mud could be termed solid. Zita bent over, her hands on her knees, and coughed up some water.

  “Good, that’s good,” he said, smoothing her wet hair away from her face.

  “I lost my shoes,” she said.

  “Shoes can be replaced,” a woman said. “We must get you into dry clothes. Look how you are shivering.” Her name was Frau Kappel. Because her house was flooded, more with mud than with water, she took Miklós and Zita and Richard Houghton to the home of her husband’s parents, a distance above the village. Frau Kappel’s father-in-law showed Miklós to an outbuilding behind the house, where he was able to shower off the mud from the river. He got dressed in clean pants, a shirt, socks, and sandals loaned to him by Herr Kappel. In the house, Frau Kappel invited him to sit, to sit and rest. You and the Fräulein were heroes today, she said. She told him the Fräulein was upstairs, having a nice hot bath. The older Frau Kappel had set the table with bread, sausage, and cheese from their dairy, which Miklós was urged to taste. It was very good, he said. Zita came downstairs, dressed in a blouse with gathered sleeves, a skirt cinched in at the waist with a leather belt. He sat beside her at the table. He wanted to embrace her, and in lieu of this he kept turning to regard her with the greatest pleasure. If anything had happened to her, if she had drowned, he could not have gone on living. What madness in him, what idiocy had allowed him to bring her here in the first place?

  When they’d finished eating, Richard Houghton stood and, in his Berlitz School German, gave a speech, thanking the Kappel family for their hospitality and wishing them well, wishing the village a quick recovery from the disaster. Miklós promised to return the borrowed clothes by mail. Frau Kappel’s father-in-law said they must keep them. If they called at his house on their way back to Berlin, he said, their own clothes would be laundered and pressed and ready for them.

  In the truck, on the way down the mountain, Richard produced a flask of rum, which they shared with a young soldier in a mud-splattered uniform. Richard got off at Pirna. Miklós and Zita said they should try to meet again. Yes, we must keep in touch, Richard Houghton said, and produced a business card on which he’d written the phone number of his boardinghouse in Pirna.

  Miklós and Zita rode as far as the village where they’d left the Bugatti, which was completely unharmed, as Zita had predicted it would be. Look at it, thought Miklós, waiting patiently, like a horse with its nose in a feedbag. He saw that everything in the village square had changed. The shadows were longer, the light richer, more forgiving. The goat had gone; the woman sweeping her garden path had vanished. And he and Zita were no longer the same people they’d been that morning. They had been so close to death, they had witnessed grievous loss and raw pain, and yet here they were. It made him catch his breath. He stopped, his hand on the car door, and the strange notion came to him that the river at full flood had swept them out of one life into another. It was like a second baptism. He felt weak, almost, with gratitude and humility. He got Zita settled in the Bugatti and spread a plaid rug over her knees. He sat behind the wheel, started the motor, and engaged the gears. Within ninety minutes, they were in Prague.

  Chapter Three

  Gnädige Frauen.” The young man from their compartment was standing beside the table in the dining car where Natalia and her mother were sitting. He nodded deferentially and cleared his throat and said to Beatriz that the others in their compartment had been most concerned about her. It was the heat; everyone was affected. Had she recovered? Could he be of any help? Natalia looked from the young man to her mother, who smiled and invited him to join them. “Are you sure?” he said. “Yes,” Beatriz said, glancing in amusement at Natalia. He sat beside Natalia and set the book he had brought with him on the table and then transferred it to the floor at his feet. His name was Becker, he said, Martin Becker. He was a law student, living in Berlin.

/>   “Frau Faber,” Beatriz said. “And this is my daughter. So, Herr Becker, you are reading Spengler, I noticed.”

  “Yes, and I can tell you, Frau Faber, it’s true, what they say: Spengler stimulates the mind. Almost overstimulates. As you read, new ideas take possession of you, one after another, like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Spengler’s thesis is that history is not linear but an endless cycle of birth and death. Decay and renewal. We Germans, Spengler proposes, are a Faustian race, striving toward a perfection we cannot attain. Every thousand years we enter a tragic twilight, a gradual dimming of energy and vigor. Then, as the end threatens to close in on us, a cataclysmic event occurs, restoring our native vitality, and the cycle begins anew. Spengler believes that national character is formed in those times when people are tested and tried by adversity.”

  “Only by adversity? Surely a song will do the same, don’t you think?” Beatriz said. “A song everyone sings, a tune everyone whistles, a book everyone reads. I suspect that these days even films and radio programs contribute to the making of national character. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Frau Faber, you are very perceptive. If you haven’t yet read Spengler, I highly recommend him, if only for his poetry. If I may?” He retrieved the book. He flipped through the pages and read aloud: “‘Regard the flowers at eventide as, one after the other, they close to the setting sun.’ And this: ‘Strange is the feeling that then presses in upon you—a feeling of enigmatic fear in the presence of this blind dreamlike earthbound existence.’ But I apologize. I proselytize unnecessarily, I’m sure. I’m afraid I’ve taken to heart Thomas Mann’s dictum that we must all become, in his words, ‘soldiers of ideas.’”

  Natalia thought Herr Becker was not much older than she was. His mustache looked soft, drab, like a moth’s wings, and yet, in contrast, his cheeks were red, his eyes bright blue. He told them he had just completed a year’s clerkship at a law firm in Berlin and was on his way to Prague, where his maternal grandparents owned a jewelry shop in the Staré Mesto, or Old Town. His grandfather, a goldsmith, designed and made jewelry, Herr Becker informed them, holding out his right hand to show Beatriz the garnet ring his grandfather had given him on his twenty-first birthday.

  “Your grandfather is an artist,” Beatriz said.

  “He has a wonderful eye for design, doesn’t he? Frau Faber, I’d consider it an honor if you’d allow me to introduce you to my grandparents and show you and Fräulein Faber around Prague.”

  “How kind of you, Herr Becker, but we’re leaving Prague early tomorrow morning. Another time, perhaps? Natalia, do you think we should order lunch? Will you have something too, Herr Becker?”

  “Yes, why not? A good suggestion, Frau Faber.”

  Beatriz ordered toast and liver pâté, Natalia had a salad, and Herr Becker talked while eating his soup. His father, like Spengler’s father, was a mining engineer. His parents and his brother lived in Blankenburg, another Spengler connection.

  “Natalia and I stayed in Blankenburg this spring,” Beatriz said. “We were on our way to the Harz Mountains on a walking holiday. Except—in the Harz Mountains, I got lost and was alone up there all night, in the cold and dark.”

  “Even in fine weather the mountains can be deadly. You were fortunate, Frau Faber.”

  The train began to move; everyone cheered and then groaned in unison as it halted. Natalia and her mother, accompanied by Herr Becker, returned to their compartment. Natalia’s seatmate lit his pipe. She tolerated the fumes for as long as she could and then went out to the corridor, where, honestly, the air seemed no fresher. “Why in God’s name is this taking so long?” she overheard a man saying. “It can’t have anything to do with the floods, because the Elbe is not flooded. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “The railway, not the weather, is to blame for this. We’d arrive in Prague faster if we walked.”

  “Or crawled on our hands and knees,” someone said.

  “In my day,” a man said, “there was a sense of obligation to people. There was courtesy, and there was efficiency.”

  Natalia bumped into someone. “Excuse me,” she said. “The pleasure is all mine, Fräulein,” the man said, grinning. She hated him and everyone else on the train, without exception, including Herr Becker, who, mopping his face with a handkerchief, appeared at her side. “This is a beautiful area, is it not?” he said, looking at the spindly trees beside the track. Years ago, his father took him and his brother hiking somewhere near the Pravice Gate, on the border between Germany and Czechoslovakia. “As a boy I was overwhelmed by the Elbe Sandstone Mountains. Those monumental, towering rock formations! Once I saw an immense stone figure lean forward, as it were, and beckon to me with a giant hand. I have never told this to another soul, Fräulein Faber. Did you know that a hundred million years ago, those mountains were under a saltwater sea? Eons ago the action of water on sandstone sculpted those stones into the fascinating and terrifying shapes you see now. Can you think of anything stranger?”

  “No, indeed not,” Natalia said, now amused by Herr Becker’s enthusiasm and his flushed, eager expression. She could hear the assistant conductor, who had just entered the coach, asking if anyone present was a doctor. We have a matter of some urgency, he repeated several times, standing on tiptoe, scanning the crowd. A man volunteered to fetch his wife, a trained nurse, and two men began to argue, one believing a certain passenger was a medical doctor, while the other maintained the man in question was a professor and an entomologist, and the study of insects had few, if any, similarities with that of human physiology. A young woman holding a small boy by the hand made her way to the assistant conductor. She was a doctor, she said. Her name was Dr. Schaefferová. “You said it was urgent?”

  Natalia saw the assistant conductor’s confusion. The doctor was very young. She wore a pearl-gray suit and a white blouse with an oval enamel brooch at the collar; her blond hair was arranged in a gleaming coronet of braids. Everyone was looking at the doctor and the assistant conductor, who wiped his round red face with a handkerchief, put it in his pocket, and said there was a situation in which a passenger had experienced some difficulty getting his breath. He had then seemed to fall asleep, but he couldn’t be roused, and his breathing was labored. Likely a simple case of heat prostration, the assistant conductor said, wouldn’t you think, Frau Doktor?

  “Perhaps,” Dr. Schaefferová said. Her husband was several coaches away. Could anyone keep an eye on her son for her? Natalia said she would be pleased to do that. “This is Franz,” Dr. Schaefferová said. “I am Natalia,” Natalia said, smiling at Franz, who clung to his mother’s hand. His lower lip trembled. Natalia told him they would follow along behind his mother.

  In the first-class coach, a porter had remained with the patient, who was slumped over in his seat, his hands limp at his sides, his hunter-green jacket buttoned almost to his chin. His brown leather shoes looked new, scarcely worn, Natalia noticed. His book and eyeglasses and a cellophane bag of peppermints had been set on the seat beside him. Dr. Schaefferová felt for a pulse in the man’s wrist and neck. Natalia hesitated. But she must remove the little boy from this distressing scene. She walked with him to the end of the coach, which had been emptied of passengers. She chatted to Franz about the speed the train would go once it started moving again—as it would soon, she said. He looked hot in his long-sleeved smock. She picked him up, so that he could feel the slight breeze at an open window, and he placed his arm around her neck.

  “Do you see the ducks on the riverbank,” she said. “They’re eating grass, aren’t they? And do you see the boats on the river? There’s a paddle steamer. It’s pretty isn’t it?”

  He frowned; paddle steamers were not pretty, he said; they were boats. Where he lived, there was a river full of fish. It had so many fish they almost jumped out of the water into his father’s fishing basket. At home, Sora cut off the heads with a knife. The fish were completely dead, he said, and Sora put the heads and tails on a plate for their cat.
Natalia said she had a cat called Benno, and he, also, was crazy about fish. She set Franz down on his feet.

  “Where’s my mother?” he said.

  “She’s helping someone. Do you see how, at times, the river appears higher than the road? It’s an optical illusion, I suppose. Isn’t that funny?”

  “Yes,” Franz said. “It is funny.” He had been to Heidelberg, to visit his grandparents. In Heidelberg there was a river called the Neckar, and this river was called the Elbe. His river, the one he and his father fished in, was the Vltava. In German, it was called the Moldau. He hoped one day to fish out at sea in a big boat. He would put a net in the water and catch the most enormous fish in the sea. “Is the train broken?” he asked.

  “No, it will start again soon,” she said.

  “My mother is a doctor. She makes people well.”

  “You’re very lucky to have her for a mother,” Natalia said.

  “Yes, I am,” he said.

  Dr. Schaefferová stepped out into the corridor. She shook her head slightly. “There was nothing we could do, I’m afraid,” she said. She smoothed Franz’s hair and asked if he’d been a good boy. He glanced shyly at Natalia and nodded. Natalia hated to part with him. How wonderful, she thought, to have a child of your own, a little boy like Franz. But it was unseemly—wasn’t it?—to anticipate the future in the presence of death, even if the deceased had nothing to do with her. So she thought, and would have continued to think, had Beatriz not entered the coach at that moment. She was with Herr Becker. As soon as he had told her about a passenger falling ill, she had started to worry that it was someone she knew and had decided there was only one way to put her mind at rest. Before the assistant conductor could stop her, she slid open the compartment door, went in, and knelt and took the man’s hands in hers. “It’s all right, my dear, I am here,” she said, as if he could hear her. She looked at Dr. Schaefferová. “He’s not sleeping, is he?” she said.