Midnight Train to Prague

by Carol Windley

  “Some would call that revolutionary,” Miklós said.

  “Yes. First you would need to eliminate the egoists and the ideologues.”

  One year, he said, when Zita was small, he had taken her on vacation to the Crimea. They walked in a citrus grove at dawn. He picked oranges off a tree for her. He cooked fish over an open flame on the beach in front of their dacha. He read Russian folktales to her.

  His hair lay in a damp fringe around his face, which had a coppery, masklike sheen. He quoted Solan, the Athenian, who had said: “No one can be called happy till he is dead and buried.” The hour of his own death was known to him, Leo told Miklós, and he named a date. He was nearly right, almost to the day.

  Miklós found him in his bed, as if asleep. His reaction surprised him; he fell to his knees, tears came to his eyes. He bowed his head and remained like that, as if waiting for Leo to awaken, his dark eyes glittering, and say, What, did you think I was dead?

  It was evening. Zita was not at the number she’d given him. He asked the long-distance operator to keep trying. He sat beside Leo’s bed. What was he to do about the body? In the morning, he at last spoke to Zita. She returned immediately from Oxford. On the phone, her grief had seemed restrained, but she broke down completely when she saw him. He didn’t know how to comfort her. Without her father she had no one, she kept saying. Manifestly untrue, Miklós had said. He was there, he would take care of her. “I’m not a child,” she retorted. “I’m not an invalid.” Then she said, “Miklós, please hold me.”

  Several months passed before he broached the subject of marriage, which seemed to him an obvious solution and a very happy one. Zita said marriage was an institution devised by the state to keep women silent and subservient. Marriage was a linchpin—was that the word she wanted?—in the capitalist system. It would be more honest, she said, if they lived together. She moved into his third-floor apartment in the Tiergarten borough. It was a small apartment, gemütlich, cozy. They owned one desk, a table, two typewriters, many books. Two editions of Das Kapital; two of The Communist Manifesto; duplicates of Emma Goldman’s My Disillusionment in Russia; and Ten Days That Shook the World, by John Reed. Several copies of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Maxim Gorky. Gogol. Pushkin. Turgenev. Several books on Russian civil and criminal law, the property of Leo Kuznetsov, with his annotations in the margins. Zita’s leather-bound set of Dickens’s novels, which she requested to have buried with her, saying that at least in the grave she would be able to read in peace. At night Miklós stayed up late working on a novel. The clatter of typewriter keys disturbed Zita; his cigarette smoke made her throat raw. He tidied up, took the sheets and pillowcases to a laundry, cooked supper; he became proficient at housewifery and enjoyed it. You could clean and think, cook and be at peace with yourself. Zita propped a book on a loaf of bread and read while she ate. She was a mistress of abstraction; she had the émigré’s permanent sadness. Even when she was beside him, in bed, he sometimes felt she was far away, in Russia, in a birch forest, a pale being in eternally falling snow. He trudged after her, in the bitter cold, calling her name.

  Zita was employed at Ullstein Verlag. She was editing a book on domestic life in Prussia at the time of the 1870 Franco-Prussian war. Later, when the book had gone to press, she told Miklós she and the author, a professor of history at the University of Cologne, had become lovers. That was not the right word, she said, because she did not love him. She liked him, respected his erudition. She spoke earnestly, choosing her words with obvious care, with intent, as if Miklós were deficient in understanding. Which, in fact, he was, since he at first refused to believe her and then thought he was going mad. He remembered how they’d argued and how, one night, Zita had run outside in her nightgown, and he had run after her and had brought her back to the apartment so that they could go on fighting, throwing things, smashing plates. Zita took an apartment near Alexanderplatz. He moved to the Adlon. There were other women. He felt something for them, some affection, perhaps, but they were not Zita. He ordered the Bugatti: another distraction. Back in Berlin, he saw Zita at the newspaper. She gravely handed him a note, in which she’d written, “You must know that what happened had nothing to do with you and me. I was fond of that professor from Cologne, he’s a good man, a fine person. I love you, Miklós. Do you get it?”

  She quoted Lenin, who had written to his lover, Inessa Armand, “Fleeting intimacy and passion, too, may be dirty and may be clean.”

  What was that supposed to mean?

  He and Zita met, by custom and happenstance, at work, at restaurants, at the theater, alone and in the company of others. Zita remained his editor at Ullstein Verlag.

  Then, in June, she came to his rooms at the Adlon and presented him with a brochure from Ullstein’s in-house travel bureau. She had been working too much; she couldn’t endure another summer in Berlin, and there was this place in Hungary, beside a thermal lake, in serene countryside.

  Miklós knew the Hotel Meunier. He had stayed there as a child, with his brother and their parents. Always in winter, when his parents were not occupied with running the estate. He remembered sleigh rides, snow melting on the surface of the lake, which was always warm, always thirty-five degrees Celsius. Swans floating in clouds of mist. The scenes in the brochure were all of summer. On a pier outside the hotel, men and women, radiant in white, stood gazing at crimson water lilies floating on cerulean-blue water.

  Zita worried that she wouldn’t fit in, a woman alone. Who would she talk to? What would she do all day? “Come with me. We would travel as friends, naturally, book separate rooms, share expenses.”

  How long would that last, he and Zita as nothing more than friends? Her use of the plural pronoun disarmed him: We would travel. We would go on vacation.

  He had said: “I will drive you there, in my motorcar. I’d like a chance to take it for a longish run.”

  And they had set out, on a clear summer day, after a night of floods and storms, and there had been that moment when he had understood clearly that everything had changed, they had changed. A second chance.

  He could not sleep. He got his jacket, his cigarettes and lighter, and opened the door. There, in the hall, was Zita, in a long white nightgown and bare feet. She’d had a bad dream, she said, and went past him and lay down on the bed and appeared to fall asleep. Or perhaps she had never woken properly. Tenderly, he covered her with a blanket. He left a lamp on and went out, walking as far as the Charles Bridge, where he stood staring down at the Vltava, its surface mottled, iridescent, like the skin of a fish. The statue of Saint John of Nepomuk regarded him with beneficence. The saint had been martyred by drowning in this river. As children, he and his brother, László, had believed they could see John of Nepomuk’s crown of stars glimmering in the water. László was devout, as a boy and as a man; he loved the church, his country, his family, and the Andorján land. It was what he was born to. And yet he’d encouraged Miklós to pursue his dream of working as a journalist, because, he’d said, life was too precious to be wasted.

  László, his beloved brother, dead in a Serbian field hospital hours after the cessation of hostilities in 1918. He had to lean against the balustrade. He felt on the edge of breaking down. Tomorrow he could be back in Berlin, things still unresolved between him and Zita. He looked at the Vltava shining in the dawn light and saw the other river, swollen, bursting its banks. He saw Zita, her hair streaming water, pale and shaking, coughing up water. The dead laid out on the village high street.

  People were crossing the bridge; the day was beginning.

  He returned to the hotel, trying to enter the room without a sound, but Zita was awake. Where had he been, she wanted to know. And what was the time?

  “I went for a walk. It’s early, half six. Did you sleep well?”

  “Yes, I think so,” she said. “At first, when I woke up, I didn’t know where I was.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed. She looked at him for a long moment. Then she put her arms around h
is neck and drew him to her and kissed him. “You’re cold,” she said, her hand on the side of his face. “Here, lie down.”

  He hesitated. He lay down. She rested her head on his chest. She slid a hand inside his shirt. He buried his face in her warm hair, tucked a strand behind her ear, so that he could see her eyes, her lovely eyes. I love you, he began to say, and she placed her hand over his mouth. I belong to you, he wanted to say. An hour, two hours later, she retrieved her nightgown from the floor and slipped it over her head. He held out his hand; she smiled and went away. When he woke, she was standing beside the bed, dressed in Frau Kappel’s blouse and skirt. She showed him the borrowed clogs on her feet and said they gave her a nice sense of sobriety and stability. That morning they had breakfast at a café in the Old Town. Zita no longer had any desire to return to Berlin. “Once you have set your mind on something,” she said, “it is better to see it through, isn’t it?” This, he said, was also his belief.

  They finished breakfast and went to the Bugatti. Zita put on dark glasses and a wide-brimmed hat she tied under her chin. Somewhere, she said, she must try to find a scarf to replace the one she’d lost on the road near Leipzig.

  Chapter Five

  Natalia wrung out a towel in the handbasin in Beatriz’s hotel room and placed it on her mother’s forehead. She shook a tablet from a vial and held it out on her palm. Beatriz swallowed, grimaced, and said it left a bad taste in her mouth. Natalia got her a glass of water. She moved a chair beside the bed and sat down where Beatriz could see her. She said, after a moment, that she would like to hear the truth about the man on the train.

  “Natalia, wanting to be happy is not a sin. As for the truth, I have been honest with you. Alfred Faber is not ‘the man on the train.’ He is your father. We met when I was seventeen and Alfred was in his late twenties. He came to my uncle Fritz’s house early in the morning along with several other men, friends of my uncle’s, who were leaving to hunt chamois in the Austrian Littoral. I remember how, when we were introduced, Alfred and I simply stood there staring at one another. Love can happen like that, and when it does, it’s the most profound experience. Nothing equals it. Alfred wasn’t handsome; he wasn’t the man I’d imagined falling in love with. He had the kind of fair complexion that ages prematurely, and he was nervous. He kept smoothing his hair, touching his mouth, adjusting his necktie, as if to reassure himself of his own existence. Weeks after we met, I received a note from him suggesting we lunch together at the Imperial Hotel. Soon, we began to see each other regularly, whenever he was in Berlin. He happened to be in the same business as my parents, which gave us something to talk about. He admired my knowledge of finance and trade. After a few weeks, we went to his apartment, because, he said, he wanted to avoid chance encounters with my aunt and uncle. I told him I didn’t give a damn who saw us together. Alfred promised we would announce our engagement on my eighteenth birthday. When that day arrived, he poured a glass of brandy, told me to drink it down, and then bluntly informed me he had a wife and three sons, one of whom was an invalid. How could he leave his wife, Klara, who had dedicated her life to caring for this boy?

  “I told him I had news for him, too: I was going to have a child. I was angry, frightened, and he kept saying he would divorce Klara—he would petition the church for an annulment; he would take whatever measures were necessary. Don’t cry, he said, like an idiot, because I wasn’t crying, I never cry. When, inevitably, my aunt noticed my condition, she was furious, and Onkel Fritz had a sort of seizure that affected his speech, and Tante Liesel blamed me and ordered me out of her house. I stayed at Alfred’s apartment until you were a year old. You were the most beautiful baby, Natalia. Alfred adored you. As you got older, he chose to keep his distance; I think it hurt him too much to part from you. Whenever I met him, he would ask, ‘Is the child in good health? Is she doing well at school?’ Every year I had your portrait taken for him, and he gave me gifts for you: Byzantine icons, Russian nesting dolls, books, a fur muff. Sometimes I let you have these gifts, sometimes not. How could I say: Here is a little something from the father you don’t have? The situation was unfeasible—you can see that, I think—and yet it went on. Then, this year, in March, I met Alfred at the Café Kranzler. We were sitting outside. It started to rain lightly, and the air smelled of violets. I said you had left the convent. He was annoyed and said your education was important. I was lonely, I told him, and needed to have my daughter near me. He placed his hand on mine and said, Things cannot go on like this any longer. He intended to begin divorce proceedings. And what about Klara? I said. His wife would be well taken care of, the boys were devoted to their mother. He was under no illusions; it would be difficult for all of them at first. Perhaps, he said, with a sideways glance, we could start again in Buenos Aires, as a family, with our daughter. With you, Natalia. I thought this such a reasonable proposal, such a courageous and obvious solution to our problems, that I agreed at once.”

  She sat up against her pillows and gazed out the window.

  “What are their names?” Natalia said.

  “Who?”

  “His sons. What are their names?”

  “They are grown men now. Leopold, the eldest, is an optician. Roland is a dentist, I believe. The youngest, Richard, lives at home, and Klara still looks after him by herself, and I know she must be a lovely person. I’ve never wished her ill.” After a moment she said, “I suppose the nuns taught you to despise people like me?”

  The nuns had taught her to be virtuous, Natalia said.

  Beatriz laughed. “You are a funny little thing, Natalia. God help you, you have his nose and his eyes and his temperament.” She sat up, holding the compress to her head. “The last time I saw him, before today, was in June, in the Harz Mountains. Does that surprise you?”

  “I’m afraid it does not,” Natalia said in a sharp tone she almost didn’t recognize as her own. At the time, she remembered, she’d thought her mother’s sudden passion for hiking in the Harz Mountains had been motivated only by a desire to outfit herself and Natalia in feathered Alpine hats and snug braided jackets and hiking shoes of gleaming leather. Natalia’s shoes had rubbed her heels raw the first time she wore them. A woman in the Wanderverein gave her sticking plasters, which helped, but still she couldn’t keep up with Beatriz, who seemed indefatigable. On the third morning, a cold, wet fog descended on the mountain, and all but the most determined and hardy walkers turned back. By six o’clock everyone had returned to the Gasthaus except for Beatriz. At eight, the guests sat down to eat without her. At ten, the police were notified, and a search party was organized.

  “I wasn’t lost,” Beatriz said. “Alfred had sent me a map, showing where I was to wait for him on a path beside a small waterfall. From then on, nothing went as I had hoped. Alfred arrived late, complained about the damp, unseasonable weather, and was silent for most of the walk to the inn where he was staying. The landlady had set a table for us. Alfred drank a glass of schnapps and then told me he could not proceed with a divorce. Klara’s health was precarious, her nerves weak, and his son Leopold and his wife were expecting a child. A first grandchild. His life was complicated, he said.

  “‘For a coward like you,’ I said, ‘everything is complicated.’ I reached across the table and slapped his face, and the landlady bustled over and said, ‘We can’t have this, Frau, you must leave.’ I informed her the bread was stale, the meat pies rancid—was she trying to poison her guests? I made sure everyone in the dining room heard me. Then I ran outside and began to walk back down the mountain. Any other man, I told myself, any decent man, would have seen me at least halfway back safely, but not Alfred. The fog was closing in again, and night falls early in the mountains. I went around in circles, unsure of my direction or what path I was on. At last, I reached the waterfall and sat on a rock to rest. Out of the mist a figure emerged. A rescuer? No. Do you know that word for the light just before dawn, when the darkness is speckled and uneven? There’s a word for it: Eigengrau. The gray l
ight of the mind. Out of this light a figure appeared. My childhood governess, Fräulein Hoffman. She walked three times around the rock I sat on. ‘Now you know,’ she said, ‘what it feels like to lose the person dearest to you in all the world. The pain makes you want to die, doesn’t it?’ Her eyes glowed; her hair hung in rat’s tails. She had been so pretty, and death had made her repulsive. I thought: I should at least feel pity for her.

  “I got up and ran down the mountain path. The sky began to grow light, and I heard voices. The searchers. They carried me to the inn on a stretcher. Do you remember, Natalia?”

  Yes, she remembered the landlady running a hot bath for Beatriz, and she remembered helping her mother to put on her nightgown and get into bed. Beatriz slept for a day and a night and woke the next morning seemingly unaffected by her ordeal. Then, back home in Zehlendorf, she began to say that her fingers hurt, her wrists ached, and the migraines she’d suffered all her life became more frequent, more severe. Natalia learned to prepare hot compresses—but not too hot, in case they scalded—to apply to Beatriz’s painful, swollen joints. Hildegard cooked easily digestible meals to tempt her appetite: coddled eggs; thin, dry toast; clear soup. There were liniments to rub on the skin, herbal infusions, tablets for sleeping, tablets for pain. Beatriz went back and forth from being an invalid to being well. It was, she said, the nature of the malady, whatever the malady was. Her doctors recommended a rest cure at a health spa.

  Now, at the hotel in Prague, Beatriz said: Was she intrinsically unlovable? Unworthy? Alfred had loved his family in Leipzig more than he’d loved her. Her parents had scarcely acknowledged her existence. Fritz and Liesel had never forgiven her, but she hadn’t forgiven them, either. Perhaps Fräulein Hoffman had loved her. Perhaps she had.