Midnight Train to Prague
Page 4
“No, he’s not sleeping,” the doctor said.
“Only an hour or so ago we were talking, and he was fine, in good health, he said so himself. He did complain of some discomfort, right here, in his chest—something he ate went down the wrong way. He was never sick, never. Isn’t there something you can give him? An injection? A stimulant?”
“It was very quick, Frau. I’m certain Herr Faber won’t have suffered.”
“Herr Faber?” Natalia said.
“I will bring you a glass of water, Frau,” said the assistant conductor.
“We can’t leave him, like this, alone. I will stay with him.”
“Are you a relative, Frau?” the assistant conductor asked.
“No, not a relative. But we are very close, very dear friends. He would want me to stay with him,” Beatriz said. She requested that the assistant conductor send for a priest. “Alfred would want a priest,” she said.
Chapter Four
July 9, 1927. Flash floods following a cloudburst in the Erzgebirge transformed the tranquil Müglitz and Gottleuba rivers into furious torrents during the night, inflicting severe damage on homes, shops, factories, and farms. Train travel in the immediate area has been indefinitely suspended. There is no word on when telephone and telegraph communication will be restored. Herr Manfred Schirrmeister, mayor of B____, on the banks of the Gottleuba, estimated the death toll there alone at thirty, and this could rise, as there are people still unaccounted for. Had he not gone door-to-door at midnight raising the alarm, Herr Schirrmeister said, the number of fatalities would have been higher. The Reichswehr and local police forces continue to carry out rescue operations. They have set up temporary shelters and are providing hot meals to the villagers. By early afternoon, the floodwaters began to recede. No further storms have been forecast for the region in the coming days.
From a telephone kiosk in the hotel lobby, Miklós dictated this report to the night desk at the newspaper and then went to the dining room, where Zita was waiting for him. They ordered dinner but were too tired and overwrought to eat. He lit a thin Egyptian cigarette. Zita was wearing an embroidered Chinese silk jacket with wide sleeves. She told him that when she went under the water, she’d had a sort of vision, like a film projected on her mind. She was transported back to a day in 1917, when Aleksandr Kerensky had become prime minister and was giving her and her father a private tour of the Winter Palace. “Kerensky wanted to show us that the Romanovs’ exclusive property now belonged to the people, to the peasants and soldiers and even, I suppose, to me and my father. But mostly, we could see, it belonged to Aleksandr Kerensky, who was conducting the affairs of the provisional government at the desk of Alexander the Second and sleeping in Tsar Nicholas’s bed and eating off the tsar’s fine china. Some called Kerensky ‘our new emperor.’ Alexander the Fourth, they said of him, and the epithet was not unwarranted. Still, he had my respect. My father and I truly believed he could save Russia. Poor Kerensky. Poor everyone, in fact. Russian soldiers were fighting Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they were dying, thousands had died that winter. In Petrograd, malnourished children and women were fighting over a moldy onion, a scrap of bread. And there I was, a proper little grand duchess, drinking coffee in the Malachite Room with the head of the provisional government. I was willing to die for Kerensky. I had no fear of death. But today, I was afraid. I told myself, well, Zita Kuznetsova, you’ve had a good life; who needs to live forever? But drowning—that is not the death I would have chosen.”
He would not have let her drown, Miklós said.
“So many drowned,” she said. “That poor child. I can’t stop seeing her. She was just a baby.”
He added a splash of brandy to their coffee.
“If we leave now,” Zita said, “we can be in Berlin in three hours.”
“In the morning you might feel differently.”
“I won’t,” she said. “A vacation, what a crazy, bourgeois idea. What an indulgence. I dislike vacations intensely.”
“Yes, we both do, don’t we?” Miklós said, and Zita drew back and said she didn’t know what he liked or disliked. A young man came into the dining room, went to the piano, and began playing one of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies. Rippling notes, highly emotive crescendos.
Zita narrowed her eyes. “I can’t take Liszt tonight. I’m ex-hausted. I have to get to sleep.”
They said good night at the door to Zita’s room. Miklós went down the hall to his own room, where he stood at the window watching stars appearing in the sky over Prague. He could not stop seeing Zita carried away in the floodwater. He had nearly lost her once; today he could have lost her forever, and it would have been his fault. A drowning victim saw scenes from the past, visions that made death seem inevitable, desirable, consolatory. Aleksandr Kerensky, the Winter Palace, the war: he hadn’t known her then. They had met for the first time two years later, in March 1919, at the Eighth Congress of the Russian Communist Party.
* * *
He had arrived at the Finland Station in Petrograd suffering what he thought was typhus but turned out to be food poisoning. It had taken him days to recover his strength, and then he’d had to make his way to Moscow. The temperature never went above zero degrees Celsius, and the Hotel Lux, on Tverskaya Street, where the foreign press was quartered, was unheated except for two hours in the evening. From his hotel, it was a short walk to the Hotel Metropol, which had been nationalized by the Bolsheviks and renamed the Second House of Soviets. There, in the great hall, he had seen Bolsheviks with earnest, furrowed brows and threadbare garments the color of dust milling around like, well, he didn’t know what they were like. Industrious ants, maybe. In the crowd he’d seen the philosopher Peter Kropotkin; the English writer Arthur Ransome; the recently installed president of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Béla Kun; Maxim Gorky; Joseph Stalin; Nicolay Bukharin, editor of Pravda; Vyacheslav Molotov; Feliks Dzerzhinsky, chief of the newly formed security police, the Cheka. He saw Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, by then known as Lenin, with his entourage. As Lenin made his way to the front of the hall the crowd shifted, allowing Miklós to see a young woman seated at a table in an area reserved for the party’s inner circle. She smiled and gestured to him, and he crossed the floor. She held out her hand and said, “Comrade Kuznetsova. Zita Kuznetsova.”
She invited him to sit with her. The astrakhan collar of her coat framed her face, which was heart-shaped, delicate. Her almond-shaped eyes were violet blue. She kept taking out the tortoiseshell combs in her hair and replacing them more securely. She asked: Where was he from, what paper did he represent? Had he known Professor Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht?
He had, in fact, once interviewed Karl Liebknecht; apart from that, no, he did not know them.
They were murdered in cold blood, she said. The German president, Friedrich Ebert, ordered their execution. “Socialists killing Communists, it was an atrocity,” she said. “I adored Professor Luxemburg. My dream was to meet her.” She placed a hand on her breast, smiling wryly, as if to simultaneously confess and renounce this sentiment.
There were 301 registered voting delegates at the Eighth Congress and 100 nonvoting; she was a nonvoting delegate. She took a small green tablet from her coat pocket and, after picking off the lint, swallowed it, grimacing. For pain, she said; she had a toothache and a bit of fever. He offered to help her find a dentist. To be honest, she said, she preferred toothache to dentistry. “You don’t need to suffer,” he said. She smiled, her gaze warm, confiding, and he was lost. He heard indistinctly, as in an echo chamber, the speech of Vladimir Lenin, which began with the mantra of the revolution: Peace, Bread, and Land. Russia was shipping grain to Germany, Lenin announced, to feed unemployed German workers and their families. Worldwide Communism, a solidarity of workers, an end to the exploitation of the working class by capitalists and landowners: this Lenin predicted.
Miklós took notes in his self-taught version of Gabelsberger shorthand. Zita watched, amused. She moved her c
hair closer to his in order to observe more closely. She supplemented his rudimentary Russian, translating key points of Lenin’s speech. Lenin began identifying people in the hall for special recognition. He identified the chief of police, Dzerzhinsky, while, Miklós noticed, avoiding any mention of the newly formed Cheka, with its power to arrest, imprison, and carry out executions. Miklós had heard credible reports of torture, hanging, people being thrown into pits and buried alive. Even as the Eighth Congress convened, these horrors were being unleashed. In March, in Kharkov, a thousand people had been executed.
Lenin said: You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.
The next speaker, the commissar for education and enlightenment, spoke about an increase in the number of free libraries in Moscow from thirteen to eighty. Cultural opportunities previously reserved for the ruling classes were being made available at no cost to all comrades. Institutions of higher learning had been ordered to open their doors to factory workers and peasants.
Zita nudged his arm. “He is my father. The commissar is my father. Leonid Kuznetsov.”
Impossible, Miklós thought, that this dry stick of a man was Zita’s father. She, however, regarded the man fondly and kept looking at Miklós and once even nudged his arm to make sure he was appreciating Commissar Kuznetsov’s brilliance. Russia could no longer rely on foreign trade for essential commodities, Commissar Kuznetsov pronounced. Russia must ensure a reliable domestic supply of coal for power generation and trains, turf for hearth fires, gold for monetary stability, sulfur for matches. Salt, a substance vital to life, from now on would be mined by Russian workers in quantities sufficient to meet the needs of the Soviet Republic.
To hell with Russia’s enemies, he said. Russia needs no one.
He received a standing ovation. He stood with his head bowed, and then he composed himself, this thin, plain, unremarkable-looking man, and made his way to the table where his daughter was sitting. He gave Miklós a cold, incurious stare. Zita said how nice it had been to meet Miklós. She gathered up her things and went with her father to the hotel lobby. Miklós followed behind them, discreetly, and watched as they went out onto the pavement and got into a waiting limousine. In Moscow there was no gas for streetlamps, supplies of coal and wood were in short supply, and yet the Kuznetsovs traveled in a chauffeur-driven German car.
At the Hotel Lux, Miklós asked around: Could anyone tell him where he might find Commissar Kuznetsov and Comrade Kuznetsova? Everyone warned him to stay away from the Kuznetsovs, who had a reputation for being one day this kind of socialist, the next another kind of socialist altogether. The pair of them, père et fille, could fall into a Moscow latrine and come up smelling of attar of roses. Anyway, if it was the daughter he was interested in, he was told, Kuznetsov allowed no one near her.
At the First House of Soviets—in the temporarily repurposed National Hotel, the seat of government while the Kremlin was under repair from damage sustained in the war—he presented his press card. He would like an appointment to interview Commissar Kuznetsov. This was denied. He walked on Prechistensky Bulvar, where, he’d heard, Kuznetsov had an apartment, hoping he’d see Zita. But nothing, no sign of them. Had they left Moscow? Should he look for Zita in Petrograd? Then, when he had reached a feverish pitch of longing to see her, even from a distance, just to know that she was all right, she came into the lobby of the Hotel Lux. She was wearing the astrakhan coat and carried a satchel over her shoulder, and her head was uncovered, the tips of her ears red from the cold. He had been talking to another journalist and broke off in the middle of a sentence when he saw her. She told him her father had taken her to a dentist, who had yanked out the rotten tooth with pliers. It was not pleasant, but here she was. She had two tickets to a performance of King Lear at the Moscow Art Theater, and since her father had been called to an emergency meeting of the war cabinet, she wondered if Comrade Andorján would care to accompany her.
That evening they joined an audience of factory workers, schoolteachers, and minor bureaucrats, all smoking cheap tobacco and reeking of damp wool and unwashed flesh. Even if not everyone in the audience was familiar with Shakespeare’s play, they recognized the brutality, enmity, intrigue. When Gloucester was blinded, Zita reached for Miklós’s hand.
He thought: I will live in Moscow, to be near her. Or I will bring her with me to Berlin.
But the cold, gray light, the darkness, the shifting late-winter ice on the Moskva River seemed purposively manufactured by the Bolsheviks to conceal and confound. Again, Zita disappeared. His temporary visa was running out; he could not get an extension and had no choice but to return to Berlin, where he wrote to her at the First House of Soviets. His letters went undelivered, were lost in the mail, or Zita Kuznetsova chose not to reply.
Three years later, in March 1922, he saw her on Unter den Linden. He knew her at once and sprinted across the street to speak to her before she disappeared, as she had in Moscow. Her face was wet with rain; her shoes were soaked. “Fräulein Kuznetsova,” he said. “Do you not remember me?” “Should I?” she said, staring at him. “I wrote to you,” he said. “You didn’t get my letters?” She shrugged slightly. “I got them,” she said. He tried to hide his dismay at her pallor, the shadows under her eyes, her thinness. She let him take her satchel, heavy with books, and agreed to have coffee with him. He took her to a café where a faulty coal stove was poisoning the air with fumes. He ordered strudel filled with meat and potato. She finished everything on the plate. “How long have you been in Berlin?” he asked.
“Not long. Five months.”
“You left Russia?” he said.
“Yes, obviously, since I’m here,” she said. “No one is in Russia if they can help it. Lenin’s ‘transitional phase’ of pure capitalism is killing Russia. Gangsterism is rampant, and the black market flourishes; people are burning chairs and tables to keep warm. You know Lenin requisitioned the entire grain harvest for export? The last time my father and I saw a play at the Moscow Art Theater, the actors were so weak from malnutrition they could only whisper their lines. My father said, ‘Commissar Lenin, you need to understand something. People require a thousand calories every day to stay alive and more if you want to get any work out of them.’ No response from the great man. The next day, Lenin had my father detained at the Butyrka prison—not the worst prison in Russia; he was allowed books, paper and ink, medical attention. When he was released, Lenin embraced him like a brother. Lenin,” she said, and paused. “Lenin has grown paranoid, unpredictable,” she said. “Do you know what the great man says, these days? He says intellectuals are shit, the nation’s excrement. Can you imagine?”
They were living, Zita and her father, in a district of Berlin where thousands of Russian émigrés had settled: Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, Whites, Leninists, Trotskyites, all of whom had brought the old animosities and grievances with them. It was worse than Moscow, she said. Her father had wanted to settle in Paris, in Russian Montparnasse, where he planned to contact Aleksandr Kerensky, but then he remembered Kerensky despised him, and instead they had remained in Berlin. She told Miklós she was finishing a degree at the Berlin University. She had written a monograph on Rosa Luxemburg, published in a socialist magazine. “Did I tell you I want to write her biography one day? I am beginning work on it. It is to be factual and poetic at the same time.” She picked up crumbs from the table and licked them off her fingers. He got a waiter to bring her a piece of raisin cake. She wrapped it in a handkerchief to take to her father. He gazed at her bent head, his eyes filling with tears. How could he part with her? He longed to take her in his arms. He wanted to see her to her apartment, but she said it was not far and he must have other things to do. No, he said, nothing. Dear, immovable, stubborn Zita Kuznetsova. But he, too, could be stubborn. He waited with her at a tram stop. She told him she was going to England, to study at Oxford. It meant leaving her father, and she worried about him; he was frail, he had a heart condition. Would Miklós look in on him while she was away?