Midnight Train to Prague

by Carol Windley

  * * *

  That was how it came true: her dream of driving very fast in an open car. Not all that fast, though, because once they left the paved streets in Keszthely, the dirt roads and dust prohibited speed. Natalia’s hat wouldn’t stay on her head, so she held it on her lap and let the wind blow her hair around. After a while, the count asked how she was doing. She smiled, not trusting herself to speak. She felt the kind of happiness that had dark edges and slipped too easily out of her grasp and was instantly replaced by the fear that she had no right to it. She was glad when the count stopped at a village, where they spent a pleasant hour at a tearoom and then strolled around, stretching their legs. In a small park she stood at his side while he paid his respects to a bronzed statue of a Hungarian poet, a native son who had, according to the inscription the count read to her, married, fathered eight children, and died in this village a quarter of a century earlier, in 1902. Count Andorján said while the poet had never traveled, and his education had consisted of a few years at a small seminary, his writing conveyed a profound understanding of human nature, and his themes were universal.

  They got back into the car, and an hour or so later the count slowed and pointed out Kastély Andorján in the distance. She thought it resembled a French château or one of the grand villas on the Grosser Wannsee more than a castle, with turrets and spires and drawbridges, like Schloss Neuschwanstein, for example. It did, however, dominate the landscape, up there on its hill, and it had, on one side, a tower with a circular copper roof that glinted fiercely in the sun. She clasped her hands tightly in her lap. The count did not speak again until he slowed the car as they entered the village of Németújvár. His father, he said, had sworn that the village, with a population of two hundred souls, was the geographical center of Europe, which annoyed his mother, who claimed that her village, in the northwest, had that distinction. “Neither of them was correct,” he said.

  Németújvár resembled all the villages they’d driven through that day, and yet, because it was the count’s village, Natalia thought, it seemed to have something the others lacked. The houses glowed in the strong sunlight; chickens scrabbled in the dirt; washing billowed on clotheslines. There were a few shops, a store with a gas pump, a restaurant. The count waved as he passed some people on the road, but he did not stop. Beyond the village he turned left onto a long and narrow drive bordered on either side by linden trees. He drove over a stone bridge and came to a circular gravel drive in front of the castle. A woman stood in the portico. A servant, Natalia assumed by her dress. Her iron-gray hair hung in a thin, whiplike braid over one shoulder. But the count went directly to this woman and bent to kiss her cheek. Natalia, standing beside the car, heard her say, “Two visits in one month. I am honored. You’ve brought someone with you, I see.”

  “Mother,” the count said. “I’d like you to meet Fräulein Faber, from Berlin. She’ll be our guest for a few days, while her mother is in Dubrovnik.”

  “Fräulein Faber,” the countess said. “Come here, let me look at you.” She held Natalia’s hands firmly for a moment. Then they went through the open doorway into a vast hall. Natalia had an impression of crossed swords and heraldic plaques high on the walls. Mounted stags’ heads. Oil portraits in gilded frames. Sunlight streamed down from a clerestory window, but the air held an arctic chill. The countess said, “Do you ride, Fräulein Faber? Do you hunt? The Russian girl my son brought here could hunt, I’ll say that for her.”

  “No, I don’t hunt,” Natalia said. “I don’t ride, I’m afraid.”

  “You can learn,” the countess said, linking arms with her. “I will teach you.”

  They proceeded down a long hall with closed doors on either side and came at last to a kitchen. Freshly baked loaves of bread were cooling on wire racks; bunches of dried herbs hung from the ceiling, scenting the air. “Katya, put the kettle on,” the countess said to a girl standing at a worktable peeling potatoes.

  “This is Fräulein—what is it? Fräulein Faber, from Berlin,” the countess said. “She is to be our guest.” Katya wiped her hands and curtsied. The countess continued her interrogation: Fräulein Faber lived in Berlin? She was very young; had she finished school? She didn’t look seventeen. The countess pinched Natalia’s arm. “Skinny,” she said. “We will put some meat on your bones.” Then she asked: Was she Roman Catholic?

  “Mother,” the count said. “There’s no need to grill our guest.”

  “I’m interested,” the countess said. “It is unusual for us to have such a lovely young guest, isn’t it, Katya?” The countess touched Natalia’s arm and gazed at her hungrily. Natalia lowered her eyes. She felt almost faint under the intensity of the countess’s gaze. When the countess learned her first name she wanted to know if she could address her as Natalia. “We are not formal here, are we, Miklós?” she said.

  She turned to her son and said, “You know that Trajan has been lame for some time now? Vladimír insists it’s not serious, but I know horses. I know Trajan, and I suspect Vladimír is keeping something from me. Miklós, are you listening to me? I want you to have a word with Vladimír.”

  “Today?”

  “Yes, when else?” the countess said. To Natalia she said, “Vladimír is my groom. He is a Sinti, and like many Sinti, he has a sixth sense with horses, but even so, he is not infallible. He’ll listen to you, Miklós. Go now, while Vladimír is in the stables.” Then she said, “Don’t gulp your coffee, you’ll get heartburn.”

  The count emptied his cup in the sink and went out the kitchen door.

  “So, your mother is in Dubrovnik?” Countess Andorján said to Natalia. “Years ago, my late husband owned a part interest in a stone quarry in Dubrovnik. I would go with him when he had meetings with the other investors. It was a good enterprise, profitable, and then my husband sold his share of the business, and we had no reason to make those trips to Dubrovnik. Tonight, my child, we will put you in the Green Room. It faces west; the morning sun will not wake you. If, in the night, you need anything, knock on my door. I am a light sleeper, and my room is across the hall.”

  One night in this castle, one night, and in the morning, I will leave, Natalia thought.

  “Throw that pest outside,” the countess said, when an orange cat strolled in through the open door and stretched out on the floor. Katya gave him a saucer of milk. The count returned, stepped over the cat, and stood leaning against a sideboard, arms crossed. He said that he and Vladimír had agreed that by any measurement of time you cared to use, horse years, human years, Trajan was a good age and he wasn’t going to recover from an injury as quickly as he had when young. The horse would come to no harm if they waited and watched.

  “I hope you and Vladimír are right, ” the countess said. “I am still worried. No one feels what that horse feels. But I do.”

  * * *

  In the morning, when Natalia walked into the kitchen, the count was again immersed in the pages of a Berlin newspaper. He looked up and asked if she’d slept well, and she said, yes, she had. She was being polite. In truth, she’d lain awake for hours, listening to wolves howling in the distance, dogs barking, clocks striking the hours from somewhere deep within the castle. In the moonlight the furniture had cast malevolent shapes on the walls, and these shapes had seemed to move, had moved, she was convinced, and for a time she’d thought she heard footsteps pausing outside her door. She had fallen asleep only after she made a promise to herself that she would leave the castle with the count in the morning.

  Now, in the kitchen, she knelt and petted the cat. She tickled him under his chin, and he rolled over so that she could scratch his tummy. His name, the count told her, was Monte.

  A woman came in, tying an apron around her waist. “Magdolna,” said the count. “This is Fräulein Faber.”

  Magdolna smiled. “Would you like porridge? And watch that cat. He bites.”

  A few minutes later the countess came in from outside and hung her sweater on a hook by the door and said she had been to
the horse barn. Perhaps Vladimír was right and Trajan was on the mend. Later, she would see that the horse had some gentle exercise. She flicked a finger against the newspaper her son was reading. “Are you listening to me? You’re very inhospitable, burying your face in a newspaper. What will our guest think of you?”

  The count looked at Natalia and smiled. Magdolna placed a bowl of porridge and a poached egg on toast in front of her.

  The countess poured herself coffee, sat at the table beside Natalia, and asked her son: Should she hire more workers for the harvest?

  “If they’re needed, then certainly hire them,” the count said.

  “My brother tells me that he employs seasonal workers from Slovenia. They are good laborers, reliable, steady, and will work for nothing, for beans.”

  “You must pay your workers a decent wage, Mother.” He turned a page in the newspaper and laughed and said, “Here’s something. Aleksandr Kerensky is in New York on a lecture tour. He has pronounced the Russian Revolution an abject failure. Communism, he says, will occur on Mars before it does in America.”

  “You call that news?” the countess said, spooning marmalade on her toast. Magdolna wanted to know if there was something wrong with the porridge. Had it gone cold? Would Natalia like more milk? “No, thank you, everything is lovely,” Natalia said, placing her spoon in the bowl. The countess tapped a finger on the table. “You eat that,” she said. “A young girl needs nourishment.”

  Katya had arrived. She nodded in the direction of the table and tied an apron around her waist before refilling the count’s coffee cup. He thanked her; she stood for a moment, smiling at him, and asked if she could get him anything else. “No, thank you,” he said. How fine he looked this morning, Natalia thought, with his rumpled hair and his newspaper and blue serge shirt open at the neck.

  When, after breakfast, she encountered him in the hall, she said she appreciated the countess’s hospitality, but she would like to go to Dubrovnik. “It occurred to me,” she said, “that while you drive, I could watch for my mother and Fräulein Kuznetsova. Even in a crowd I’d be able to pick my mother out. And I know the sort of hotels where she’d be likely to stay and the shops and restaurants that would appeal to her.”

  “Thank you, Fräulein Faber. But this will be a rushed, unpleasant trip. You’ll be better off here. As soon as I locate your mother and Zita, I’ll telephone or send a wire.”

  She nodded, said she understood, but couldn’t hide her disappointment. He went on to say something about the car not having room on the return journey, with suitcases and so on, and then he said there would be the matter of hotels and traveling without a chaperone. At first, she didn’t understand why there was a need for a chaperone, and then she did and refused to blush. Did he think she was afraid to be alone with him? It was his mother she feared. The countess was a Medusa, a Gorgon, with her dark, probing looks and personal questions. If the count wouldn’t take her with him, she’d find a way home to Zehlendorf by herself. In the village there would be a telegraph office. She’d send a wire to Hildegard, who by now should be back from Hamburg, to say she was coming home. Later, she asked Katya if there was a bank in the village. The Hungarian National Bank had a small branch beside the shoemaker’s, Katya said, but the manager was a little potentate who opened the doors when it suited him. Natalia nodded; she would walk to the village and stand outside the bank all day, if necessary, waiting for the potentate-manager. There was, Katya said, a telegraph operator in the post office who kept more reliable hours than the bank official.

  Katya gave her bread and honey and strawberries for lunch. The bread was fresh, the butter sweet, and the tea flavored with cardamom. She finished everything and rinsed the plate and teacup at the sink. Katya told her the countess always ate lunch in her room and then slept for an hour. In the Green Room, Natalia combed her hair and put on the jacket she’d worn on the train from Berlin. If she left the house now, no one would see her going. She walked down the hall to the grand staircase and descended to the central hall, where only a day ago she had met the countess. Time passed very slowly in this place, it seemed. Instead of going outside, she turned left and walked along a wide corridor. Only a houseguest with terrible manners and no sense of decorum would do what she was about to do, but she thought she had a right to know something of this place where she had been abandoned. She turned away from the hall that led to the kitchen and went down a wide corridor to the left. At random she opened doors and looked in at rooms with high paneled walls and gilded plaster trim. The rooms were furnished in what she thought a rococo style, with ornate trim and heavy carved chests against the walls and desks and tables and chairs upholstered in white satin and pink velvet. In the bedrooms the beds had satin coverlets and lots of pillows with fancy covers. A shame, she thought, that no one occupied these rooms. She turned and walked back toward the central hall. On the way, she stopped to open tall double doors painted glossy white, the kind of doors that were hinged in the middle and could be folded out of the way against the walls to accommodate large gatherings. This room, she realized, was the library. It was both very grand and very inviting. She went in and sat on a tufted oxblood leather chair and then tried a red velvet sofa, where she sat facing an immense stone fireplace with a black wrought-iron grill and brass fireplace tools on a stand beside it. Kindling had been set on the hearth, ready for a fire. She got up and opened the glass doors of a tall bookcase and ran her fingers over the gilt lettering on the spines of leather-bound volumes in German, Hungarian, and Latin. Then she went to the windows, which were symmetrically placed along one wall. She looked out at the gravel drive, hoping she would see the count driving up in his car, having decided that Natalia could travel with him to Dubrovnik. But he would not come back; she would go home alone to Berlin as soon as she got her hands on some money and could purchase a train ticket.

  She could see sunlight glinting on the surface of the river. Across the river was the village, where, Katya had told her, her uncle owned a restaurant. Her father worked on the count’s estate. Magdolna’s family raised cattle, as they had for generations.

  She picked up a framed photograph of two small boys in blouses and short pants, shoes with buckles. They stood on either side of a man in a hunting cap, with a rifle under his arm and a spaniel at his side. The younger boy had a fringe of dark hair, a mischievous smile. His older brother was taller and fairer. The boys looked like their father, not their mother, but then it was impossible for Natalia to picture the countess as a young mother and wife.

  That evening at dinner, however, she found herself gazing at a portrait on the wall of a young woman with small white flowers scattered like stars in her upswept hair. The young woman’s skin was luminous. She wore a gown with a filmy, gossamer overlay that pooled around her feet, mimicking the rosy hints of color in low clouds in an otherwise blue sky. The woman’s dark eyes shone with candor, happiness, intelligence. She was beautiful, formidable, intelligent, Natalia thought, and then realized with a small start that the young woman was the countess.

  “You look surprised,” the countess said. “I was a beauty, wasn’t I? My husband commissioned the portrait in the first year of our marriage. I was eighteen. My father said I was too young to marry, too young to leave home. I was right not to listen to him. It is true, what the poets say about time. It passes too quickly.”

  She was born, she said, in the county of Veszprém, to the north of Lake Balaton. Her father, Zoltan, Count Nemeskurty, grew the finest grapes in the region; his ancestral home was much grander than Kastély Andorján and had a more illustrious history. Her mother, the daughter of a Polish prince, gave birth to eleven children, ten of whom survived, and those children now had children and grandchildren and, in the case of the countess’s oldest sister, a great-grandchild. And what did she have? One son remaining to her. One son, whose responsibility it was to carry on the family name. And did Natalia know what this son told her? He said he couldn’t live in Hungary under Miklós Horthy. />
  “I tell him the regent of the Kingdom of Hungary is unlikely to trouble us in our backwater. I say to him, give me a gentleman like Horthy any day over a rascal like Béla Kun, who would have carved my land up like a leg of lamb and distributed it to the people. I would like to know: Who are the people? I will tell you: I am the people.”

  She passed Natalia a serving dish of potatoes whipped in heavy cream. She said, “How did it come about that your mother has flown the coop with Zita Kuznetsova?”

  “She likes traveling.”

  “Mehetnék. Vándorlasi kedv. Wanderlust, itchy feet. I am not one of the afflicted. I have always been happiest here, at home.” She put down her fork and sat back. “If you were my daughter,” she said, “I would not leave you. Not for all the tea in China.”

  She rang a bell for Katya to clear away the first course and serve the fish course, and after that came bread pudding with raisins and ginger sauce, and Natalia wished there was a dog under the table eager for a few scraps.

  * * *

  On the third morning of her stay at Kastély Andorján, Natalia found the countess in the kitchen, dressed in a smock buttoned to her throat, the sleeves rolled up, with a meat cleaver in her hand and two freshly skinned and eviscerated rabbits on the table in front of her. She’d gone hunting, she said, with evident relish, and look what she’d bagged. She wrapped the entrails in newspaper and dropped them in a bucket near the door. She would, she said, teach Natalia to make rabbit stew in the proper Hungarian fashion. Katya wiped the table clean with vinegar and water and set a place for Natalia. She managed a spoonful of oatmeal and gave up and wiped her mouth on her napkin. The rabbit meat, browned in hot oil and tipped into a stockpot, exuded the feral smell of itself alive. The stew must be simmered gently for three days, the countess said. No less, no more. Salt, pepper, caraway, sweet paprika were to be added at intervals sparingly, so as not to overwhelm the flavor of the meat. “Too much attention can be worse than not enough.” Then she said, “Magdolna, I am taking Natalia to the paddock, to see the horses.”