Midnight Train to Prague

by Carol Windley

  “Yes, more or less. None of it is in the least true, or not very true.”

  “She is me, though, isn’t she? Inessa is me. There I am, languishing in your ossuary with one candle—one miserable candle—to keep the ghosts and rats at bay. The ossuary is real, I saw it myself. Your mother took me down to the cellars beneath the castle and trapped us both in that charnel house with one little candle and the grinning skulls and the stench of rats. It was a cruel thing for your mother to do. But never mind, she did free me, in the end. Miklós, look over there, at those sunflowers. Look at the size of them! They are like scrawny, big-headed people, all nodding in our direction, beseeching us.”

  “Beseeching us for what, do you think?”

  “Who knows,” Zita said. “For a kind word, maybe, or a smile.”

  The sunflowers resembled a small, hopeful tribe of people, he thought. They would live like that, rooted to their scrap of earth, until the autumn frosts came along and demolished them.

  He yearned to hold Zita. He wanted to know that their lovemaking in Prague had been the beginning of a reconciliation and more: marriage, a life together. He needed to say this to her. But once again the moment seemed to slip away. They gathered up the picnic hamper and rug and clambered back up the embankment to the Bugatti.

  * * *

  In the hotel’s dining room he breakfasted on coffee and toast while reading The Castle. How strangely Kafka’s story resonated with him: the absent nobleman, who had absconded out of apathy or fear or negligence, or all three, leaving his castle exposed to the malign curiosity of the villagers. Not that the villagers of Némétújvár were malign, or not generally so, but they were certainly curious. He knew that. The unspoken question he got from them was: How long do we have to put up with an absent aristocrat, a useless, do-nothing Count Westwest like you?

  Zita came into the dining room. “Don’t get up,” she said. His car was parked in the way of a delivery van; if he gave her the ignition key, she’d move it. “It’s only a matter of a few meters,” she said. He handed her the key and went back to reading. A waiter refilled his cup with coffee. On a shelf above a fireplace, a row of sailing ships constructed of seashells from the Adriatic, or so the hotel manager had told him, seemed to sail through the air around him. He thought: How could the Bugatti be in the way of anything? He had parked nowhere near the hotel’s service entrance. He signed the chit for his breakfast and went out a side door to the street. His car was nowhere in evidence. What a clever trick. Zita had absconded with his car. He thought of accidents, breakdowns, the car running out of petrol. Rock-throwing youths. A woman alone, lost. He lit a cigarette. He watched the empty road, willing the Bugatti to appear.

  Fräulein Faber was walking toward him. “Frau Brüning is ill,” she said. “She is very ill and has asked to see my mother, but at the spa I was told my mother keeps missing her appointments. I thought perhaps I’d find her here, with Fräulein Kuznetsova.”

  “I’m sorry, I haven’t seen your mother. Is Frau Brüning alone?”

  “Dr. Heilbronn sent a nurse to her.”

  “Good. And has anyone contacted Herr Brüning?”

  “No. Not yet, but Dr. Heilbronn will telephone him today.”

  “Frau Faber may have gone on a drive with Zita,” he said. “But perhaps she is somewhere here. Shall we walk around the hotel grounds and see if we can spot her? First, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to run this book up to my room.”

  Not once on the way up the stairs did it occur to him that it was inappropriate to take the Fräulein to his room, nor did he realize, until he’d opened the door, that he had left his suitcase open on the floor, its contents spilling out on the rug, and had piled books and newspapers on the coffee table. The little desk he was working at was covered with folded newspapers and writing paper. He saw Fräulein Faber looking at the typewriter and asked whether she knew how to type. No, she did not, she said, but she would like to learn one day. “It’s an excellent skill to have. Here, come and sit down,” he said. He wound a sheet of paper onto the platen and showed her how to position her fingers on the keys. Just type your name, he said. Tentatively, she depressed a key. “Don’t worry,” he said, “you can’t damage it.”

  She made a single error, changing Natalia to Natalie. He rubbed it out with a little eraser on a wheel and brushed the paper clean. She corrected the mistake and said it looked strange, her name on a page like that.

  “It does indeed. Seeing my own name on the page never fails to alarm me.”

  “But at least it is your name,” she said. He looked at her, mystified. He asked her what she liked to read. She thought a moment before saying she had just finished reading a story by Thomas Mann called “A Man and His Dog.”

  “I know the story. Mann is good. He has a devilish turn of phrase, doesn’t he? I’m reading Franz Kafka, a Czech writer, not yet well known. It’s only in the last two years that his books have been published in Germany. He’s unlike anyone else. Here, try this and tell me what you think.” He pulled his copy of The Trial out of the pile on the corner of the desk and gave it to her. My God, he thought, what are you doing, Miklós? Was The Trial suitable reading material for a girl of seventeen or eighteen? But if she read Thomas Mann, she should be quite at ease with Franz Kafka.

  They rode the lift to the lobby and walked across the lawn to the lake. On the pier, a man was playing a tárogató. Miklós and his brother used to play a tárogató. They took lessons from the wife of a worker on the estate but never learned how to make real music, only noise that gave their mother a headache. “She was always threatening to run away with the queen of the Gypsies. She meant her friend, a wealthy Sinti woman who lived part of the year on the estate. We were gullible children; we believed her,” he told Natalia.

  “When I was a child,” he went on, “my family stayed here in winter. The lake never freezes. No matter how bitter the weather, the water is warm enough for bathing. I remember sleigh rides in the snow and white swans on the water, in clouds of mist. I asked my mother if the swans were real. She said they were real enough to make a good dinner.”

  Natalia laughed. “Zita said your home is not far from here.”

  “Not far. I was there recently, two days ago, in fact.” He asked if she would like an iced drink. From the hotel veranda they’d have a good view of the pier and the hotel grounds. They could watch for her mother.

  “Thank you, but I don’t think my mother is here. And thank you for lending me this book. I can read it while I sit with Frau Brüning.”

  He watched her walking away in her blue dress and white hat. Then he wandered across the lawn, found a vacant bench from which he could see the road behind the hotel, and sat down. He opened his notebook and wrote:

  Here at Lake Hévíz, you drink six or seven glasses of eau fraiche a day. You dine on steamed trout and stewed prunes, take an evening constitutional, and in the morning exercise, play tennis, swim in the therapeutically radioactive water. You see people nervously checking their pulse, and at dinner you overhear these same people discussing their digestion and other bodily functions you’d prefer to know nothing about. You are not like them. Not yet, anyway. You close your eyes against the light of the sun, which shines with more intensity in Hungary than anywhere else in all of Europe, and what you see, in a dazzling afterimage, is a beautiful girl dancing at the water’s edge, at dusk, in a cloud of fireflies.

  Chapter Seven

  Dr. Heilbronn had diagnosed a hemoptysis, a slight coughing up of blood that could have many causes, some quite benign. “He was trying to ease my mind,” Julia said. “Everyone is so good to me. Do you know, your mother gave me a charm to say: ‘Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.’ Tous les jours, à tous points de vue, je vais mieux en mieux. In French it sounds less dogmatic, don’t you think? Or more so?”

  Natalia refilled Julia’s glass with water from a pitcher on her bedside table and smoothed her pillows. She bent to kiss her good night. Julia av
erted her face. “I don’t mind about germs,” Natalia said, holding Julia’s hand. “Go,” Julia said, laughing. “Go and enjoy the rest of the evening.”

  She sat on the grass near the lake and opened the book the count had lent her. Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested. The pages smelled of the count’s tobacco. After the sun had set, and there was not enough light for reading, she went up to her room. Just after midnight Beatriz summoned her by tapping on the wall between their rooms. When Natalia opened the connecting door, Beatriz was sitting on the edge of her bed, a long filmy scarf, a new scarf, around her neck. She was stroking it as if it were alive, and indeed, it clung to her hands like a treasured pet, a fragile, radiant creature of amethyst, gold, and silver.

  “Natalia, I have had such a wonderful day. First, we drove to Lake Balaton, but it was windy, and we’d seen all the shops, so we came back to Hévíz. We bought peaches at a greengrocery and ate them in a park. While we were rinsing peach juice off our hands at a village pump, Zita spotted a house with a sign in the window, and when we got closer, we saw that the sign advertised handmade garments. A woman let us in and showed us her handiwork: dresses, skirts, blouses, men’s shirts, Hungarian national costume, hats. I bought Zita a skirt and a blouse, to repay her for the petrol we’d used, and we each picked out a scarf. Zita’s is like mine but rose-colored and embroidered with astrological symbols. The proprietor, Olga, invited us to her kitchen and served us dishes of raspberries with cream and cake, a surfeit after the peaches, but today everything was a surfeit. Olga has fourteen children. Her husband is a cabinetmaker. My God, such lives people have! Why do we get only one life? It isn’t fair, is it?”

  “Mother, Julia is not well,” Natalia said. “Dr. Heilbronn is very concerned. He sent a nurse to be with her.”

  “Dr. Heilbronn will know what’s best, I’m sure. Hand me my robe, darling. And be an angel and run me a bath, would you?”

  “Isn’t it too late for a bath?”

  “No. And add some bath crystals, would you, please,” she said.

  Watching the tub fill, Natalia wondered if it was possible to very much dislike your own mother. She didn’t add bath crystals to the water. In her own room she lay awake and then slept and dreamed of being in the count’s car, in the back seat, behind Zita and her mother. They were traveling along a country road. Mirages appeared in the sky. Phantom villages, little wooden houses painted in bright primary colors. Masses of flowers colonized the sky. Ghost horses galloped over the plains. The image reversed itself and became like a reflection in water, a phenomenon observed, it was said, only in high summer and only in Hungary. The dream must have been trying to tell her something. In the morning, she went to her mother’s room and found the bed not slept in, the wardrobe empty, except for a satin peignoir with marabou trim. In her mother’s steamer trunk were a mohair sweater-coat and a pair of shoes with a broken strap. She checked with the hotel desk, but Beatriz had left no messages, and none arrived during the day. Should she telephone Herr Saltzman or Sophie Brecht? Ask the hotel to call the police? But wasn’t this the same as Beatriz’s disappearance in the Harz Mountains? Beatriz could take care of herself. And at least she wasn’t alone, she was with Zita Kuznetsova. In the end, Natalia did nothing.

  That evening, when she was in the dining room, the count came to her table with a telegram. It read: ON PILGRIMAGE TO ANCIENT CITY OF RAGUSA NOW DUBROVNIK ON THE COAST OF DALMATIA WITH FRAU FABER YOUR MOTORCAR UNHARMED ALBEIT FUEL DEPLETED AT THIS ADDRESS IN KESZTHELY NATALIA TO RETURN HOME REGARDS ZITA.

  “What does it mean?” she said.

  “I suppose it means what it says.” He took the telegram back and folded it in half. As soon as he got the telegram, he’d gone to Keszthely and located the garage, paid the owner for storing the Bugatti overnight, filled the petrol tank, and driven the car back to Lake Hévíz.

  “Why would my mother want me to go home to Berlin?” He ran his hand through his hair. “You can’t stay here alone,” he said. “I’m surrounded by people,” she said. “And Frau Brüning would be alone if I left. She needs me.” “It’s not good for you to be with her too much,” he said. “There is a risk of contagion, isn’t there? No, you must do as your mother says and take the train.” He would drive her to Berlin, he said, but tomorrow he intended to drive south to Dubrovnik and look for Frau Faber and Zita. If Natalia liked, he said, he could see her to the train station in Keszthely. The train for Prague left every morning at ten o’clock. From Prague, she could board a train to Berlin. “Can you be ready by half past eight?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  The desk clerk told her Frau Faber had settled the bill and had given instructions for her trunk to be shipped to Berlin.

  Before she went to bed, Natalia packed a suitcase, unpacked it, and then put everything she’d taken out in again. Beneath the window, in the pavilion, the orchestra was tuning up. They began to play something beautiful, plangent, sorrowful, and Natalia went to the window to listen. Why should she obey a directive from a woman she scarcely knew? She was free, wasn’t she? Free to do whatever she wanted. She could stay at Lake Hévíz, return to Zehlendorf, get a job in an office, do anything. The problem was that freedom and indecision began to feel very much alike.

  To her surprise she slept well and woke early. She bathed, washed and dried her hair, dressed in the blue skirt and lawn blouse she’d worn on the trip to Prague, and wished she did not look quite so much like a schoolgirl. A bellhop came to collect her suitcase. She went to Julia’s room on the second floor and slipped a note under the door, letting her know she’d had to leave unexpectedly.

  In the lobby, while she waited for the count, she picked up a Berlin newspaper and read that the floods in the Erzgebirge on July 9 had claimed more than two hundred lives, and property losses had exceeded seventy million marks. Commander Byrd, returning to the coastal village of Ver-sur-Mer in France, had been greeted as a hero. The villagers had presented him with charts and flight records recovered from his plane. He had kissed every baby in the village, as well as one woman in her eighties. Natalia flipped over the newspaper and saw an article with the byline Miklós Andorján, a story about Russian Jewish émigré families that had settled in Kreuzberg after the revolution. The count came in, and she placed the newspaper on a coffee table. He carried her suitcase to the car and held the door for her. At the train station in Keszthely, he handed her a list of telephone numbers where he could be reached and asked her to let him know when she’d arrived in Zehlendorf. She boarded the train and sat near a window. The coach was hot and smelled of coal dust and stale tobacco and perspiration from countless travelers. Beatriz had told her the trains in Hungary were relics of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The once-luxurious velvet seats and curtains and the braided-gold pull cords were worn and dusty, the gilt trim tarnished, the opulence spoiled and forgotten. She waited, feeling hot and uncertain. She wiped the palms of her hands on her skirt. If the train didn’t start to move soon, she would get off. If it didn’t start in thirty seconds, twenty seconds, ten seconds, she would leave, and she did; she got out and went to where the count was standing on the platform.

  “My mother would want me to wait for her,” she said. They both knew this wasn’t true. Count Andorján asked the stationmaster to retrieve Natalia’s suitcase from the train. Then they got into the car and he drove to a café not far from Lake Balaton with a view of the water and sailboats with their sails furled. The count asked for coffee and biscuits filled with bacon and cheese. Natalia hadn’t eaten breakfast and realized she was actually ravenous. She spread lashings of sweet butter on a warm biscuit. The coffee was phenomenally strong; it made her ears ring. The count lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. He tore a leaf off a spindly lime tree in a terra-cotta pot beside the table and twisted it by the stem, let it fall to the ground.

  “I should have stayed on the train,” she said.

  “There are
always more trains,” he said

  A woman was walking past. She bore a superficial resemblance to Beatriz—blond, wavy hair, slender figure, pretty but nothing as pretty as Beatriz. Tears came to Natalia’s eyes. The count looked at her. “It’s nothing, a little grit from the wind,” she said.

  “I blame myself,” he said. “I knew, or should have, that Zita suffered some residual effects from what happened in the Erzgebirge. Did she tell you? She nearly drowned, you know, and one does not easily recover from an event like that.”

  She had not known. The floods in the Erzgebirge happened on July 9 and 10; she and Beatriz had left Berlin on July 10. So Zita Kuznetsova had almost drowned on the same day that Alfred had died. Perhaps at the same hour. She looked at the lake, narrowing her eyes at its brilliance in the sunlight, and thought it was as if fate had caught them all in a net and pulled the threads tight.

  “I could stay here tonight and take the train to Prague in the morning,” she said.

  “You could, if that’s what you want. I have an alternative idea. Why not stay at my home, as my mother’s guest, while I drive to Dubrovnik. Chances are, I’ll track Zita and Frau Faber down within a day or so. Then you and your mother can travel home together. But the decision is yours.”

  “I don’t want to impose on your mother.”

  “She would be delighted.” He placed a few coins on the table. As they walked to the car, she thought: Maybe fate is what happens when you cease to resist, when you make up your mind to trust life.