Midnight Train to Prague

by Carol Windley

  The horses were descendants of purebred Carthusians, the noblest of the Spanish Andalusians, the countess told Natalia. “I’ll tell you what. Just look into their eyes. Look at this one’s eyes, so pale, like water. See the depth of his chest, his height. This is Trajan’s son. It pains me to think it, but this stallion will be Trajan’s last progeny.”

  People paid whatever she asked for her horses. In the stables, she had an office where she interviewed prospective buyers. She had them fill out a form and provide character references. She turned down as many applicants as she approved.

  In the horse barn, Natalia was introduced to Vladimír, the groom, and Herkus, one of the stable boys. The countess dug an apple slice out of her pocket for Natalia to feed Trajan. “He likes you,” the countess said, stroking the horse’s nose and whispering endearments in Hungarian. When they left the stables, Vladimír’s dogs padded after them, two jet-black hunters, lean, sinuous, one named Dani, the other Mokány. The countess shouted at them to go back; they paid no attention and walked at Natalia’s side as far as the kitchen door, and then they turned and trotted away.

  The count returned from Dubrovnik late at night, and Natalia didn’t see him until morning, when she climbed the circular staircase to the tower room with a cup of coffee. One hundred forty-seven steps, winding up and up to the sun-struck copper roof that was, Natalia imagined, like a beacon, a fabulous glinting light the villagers would look to as if for guidance. When she reached the count’s study, he took the coffee cup from her. The room, with its curved stark white walls, looked out in all four directions of the compass, a dizzying prospect that made her feel as if she were about to take flight. She remembered Zita’s story of the monk who left his body and drifted among the clouds like an angel. Between the windows were rough plank bookshelves filled with books, books piled on books, sheaves of papers, manila folders leaning haphazardly against books.

  “Didn’t you bring coffee for yourself?” the count said, clearing newspapers from a chair for her. A breeze came in the window and ruffled the edges of papers on the desk. The sunlight in the room was very bright and constant. She saw a cot with a rumpled blanket on it and a table with a tray left on it from a meal. The count was trying to give her his cup of coffee.

  “Thank you, but no,” she said. “It’s for you.”

  “Next time, be sure to bring one for yourself.”

  “Yes, thank you,” she said.

  He apologized for not having better news. “Believe me, I searched. I inquired not only at hotels and pensions but at hospitals and police stations, where I was assured it was a case of no news being good news. They counseled me to go home and wait. I keep reminding myself that Zita is very capable, and while I can’t say she is being sensible, I know she wouldn’t let any harm come to your mother. In a week, I’m going to the International Press Conference in Geneva, but I’ll be heading first to Berlin. I can take you home then. Is that all right? You were comfortable here, I hope?”

  “The countess is teaching me to make rabbit stew.”

  He laughed. He was writing an article for a Budapest newspaper having to do with the end, this month, of seven years of military rule over Hungary by the Entente powers. “Good news, on the face of it, but the fact is, the Treaty of Trianon robbed Hungary of its only port city and its industrial base and good portions of its land, and how can a country go forward with an economy based only on agriculture? Rabbit stew notwithstanding.”

  * * *

  On the morning Natalia was to leave for Berlin, the countess went out riding in a rainstorm. Her riding boots were wet, and on her return she slipped and fell on the flagstones outside the kitchen door. Katya went to her and then ran up to the tower room to get the count, who came down and carried his mother to her bedroom. Natalia and Katya helped her out of her wet riding habit and into a nightgown. Dr. Urbán was summoned; he examined the countess and diagnosed a strained back and bruised ribs. The countess would need time to recover, but fortunately nothing was broken. He turned to Miklós and said the countess should not be alone at night. The count said he would hire a girl from the village to sleep at the castle when he was away. The countess objected. Katya would stay, she said. Or Fräulein Faber. Yes, she said; Natalia would stay. God sent Natalia to her for a reason, and she would remain a while longer, out of the kindness of her heart. Isn’t that so, my child? She pressed a hand to her ribs. Pleurisy, she said; she knew the signs.

  “You don’t have pleurisy, you have bruised ribs,” the count reminded her.

  Clearly, Natalia could not leave the countess in this state. She promised to stay at least another week.

  “You’re so good to me,” the countess murmured. “You are like a daughter to me.”

  Natalia remained at the castle with the countess not one week but two weeks. At the end of that time, the count returned. He came into the kitchen and took a postcard out of his pocket and put it on the table, where Natalia could see it. She picked it up. It was postmarked August 2, Dubrovnik. She read the message on the back. Zita and Beatriz were guests at a former leprosarium overlooking the Neretva Valley, a hundred kilometers from Dubrovnik. The leprosarium, constructed in 1905, at a time when the dread disease appeared in Croatia before disappearing back to wherever it came from, now offered hospitality to wayfarers like her and Beatriz. So Zita wrote, in very small handwriting. A Franciscan priest cooked for them, and they dined on a terrace overlooking the valley. Miklós, do you remember the sunflowers? Beatriz and I are like that, clinging to the good earth, the seasons. We are like moss on a stone in the shadow of a sheltering tree.

  A leprosarium, Natalia thought. How like Beatriz to choose for herself the rarest, most unusual experience available. “At least they’re alive,” she said, and put the postcard on the table, beside a dollop of honey in which a satiated housefly crawled. The count swatted the fly with a rolled-up newspaper. Natalia asked him if Zita had given a telephone number or address where she and Beatriz could be reached. “No, that would be much too considerate,” he said.

  This was how it was: She would be in the kitchen with Magdolna and Katya, and she would hear the Bugatti on the gravel drive and act as if she hadn’t heard it, or had but without any particular interest. “Ah, Natalia, there you are,” he would say, coming in with an armload of books and newspapers. She would be stirring soup, sweeping the floor, or petting the cat, as she was on this occasion. She sneezed. “Look at the fur flying around,” the count said. “That cat is making you allergic.”

  “I’m not allergic to cats,” she said.

  “Perhaps it’s dust on the floor,” he said.

  “It’s certainly not dust,” Magdolna said.

  One day, and this was in September, Natalia walked with the count on the path beside the river. Leaves like gold coins littered the path; the air smelled of woodsmoke. Geese flew in a long, straggling V overhead. An egret stood sunning itself at the edge of the marsh. How beautiful everything is, she said. Even as a boy, he said, after a moment, he’d wondered why his family possessed acres of arable land, forests full of roe deer and quail, a river teeming with carp and trout, while so many lived in sometimes quite desperate poverty. It had to change, he said. It couldn’t go on.

  Even his guilt felt selfish to him, he said.

  She wanted to tell him about her mother, whose parents had emigrated to Argentina, built up an exporting business, instilled in their only child respect for work and money, or at least for money. Would the poor benefit if Beatriz gave up her wealth? Would anyone benefit if the count did not own this land?

  Vladimír’s dogs bounded through the trees toward them. Mokány—or was this Dani?—jumped up with its muddy paws on her skirt. Miklós threw a stick into the woods and Dani retrieved it and trotted back with it in his mouth. “Good dog,” she said, laughing, and held her hand flat, to indicate he was to sit, and he obeyed, surprising her and the dog equally, she thought.

  Miklós—she was to call him Miklós, he said—told her to make
use of his study while he was away. The books, the typewriter were hers. She would have a few moments to herself up there, he said.

  After several false starts, in which she got halfway up the tower stairs and then turned back, afraid that, no matter what Miklós had said, she would be trespassing on his privacy, she made it all the way to his study. She stood in the center of the room, taking a moment to acclimate herself to the altitude and the sensation of being airborne. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do here. She went to the bookshelves and selected a copy of The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It was the German edition published in 1892. “A Communist Confession of Faith” took the form of the Catholic catechism, which disconcerted her at the start. She read a phrase here and there. Private property ought to be eliminated. Individuals had the right to strive for happiness. The proletariat owned no asset other than their capacity for work, but this was everything, since it was by their labor that wealth was created. The proletariat must join forces in revolution to bring about a classless society. She couldn’t disagree, although at the same time she found it difficult to envision such a society.

  She read a few pages of Louise Bryant’s Six Red Months in Russia. John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World. Suddenly, by common impulse, we found ourselves on our feet, beginning in smooth lifting unison the Internationale.

  Zita would understand these books. She had been in Russia when the revolution began. Zita, in a fur-trimmed coat, like Anna Karenina, her hands concealed in a fur muff, stepping up into a troika, giving orders to the driver. Natalia was imagining this; she did not know where Zita had been in 1917. But she suspected that when the dust had settled, when the Bolsheviks had ousted the established order of generals and landowners, and the counterrevolutionaries and insurgents had gone to wage war in the east, Zita would have reappeared to help build a new society, a new order.

  How wonderful, if everything could work out for the best, for everyone. Natalia pictured the countess’s workers cooking communal meals in the castle’s spotless kitchen. Children scampering up and down the halls. Sinti families roasting wild boar on spits in the fireplaces, singing exuberantly. The countess would be scandalized, although perhaps less so than Beatriz, if she were forced to share her immaculate villa in Zehlendorf with anyone, high or low born.

  In a corner of the tower room there was the narrow, rumpled bed where Miklós slept if he worked late. She smoothed the blankets and picked up the pillow and buried her face in it and then put it on the bed. She sat at the desk and surveyed the four-cornered world outside the windows. In order to practice typing, she had started writing about her days at the castle, helping the countess with the school, learning to cook complicated dishes that involved a great deal of butchering. The countess wanted to teach her to use a gun. She refused to hunt; she couldn’t kill anything. From the desk she could see clouds racing past in the sky and wet, messy snow falling with the rain. Winter, and she was still here.

  Miklós had left his copy of The Castle on the desk. Natalia opened it. A piece of paper fluttered out, and when she unfolded it, she read her own name, as she’d typed it at the Hotel Meunier. She could see, faintly, where Miklós had erased the error she’d made, changing her name from Natalia to Natalie. She slipped the paper into the book and placed the book on a shelf.

  Chapter Eight

  In the village the countess had the shoemaker measure Natalia’s foot for riding boots and a pair of what she called serviceable walking shoes. A few doors away, the tailor was sewing a riding habit of fawn-colored jodhpurs and a dark brown fitted jacket with a velvet collar. She went behind a screen to try it on, and then the tailor stabbed pins into it, and the countess pulled at the waistband and said Natalia was like a willow wand, and it would have to be taken in again. Later, in the café across the street, the countess told her the tailor had been a Communist, a supporter of Béla Kun, and she had refused to speak to him for years. The shoemaker had three marriages to his name, each wife having succumbed to some insignificant illness—delicate as flowers, he liked them.

  “Countess, I want to reimburse you for the boots and shoes and the riding habit,” Natalia said. The countess waved a hand in the air; it was a pleasure to do this for Natalia. She and Vladimír had chosen a mare for her. Ilka was a docile, pretty horse, but she would be insulted if Natalia didn’t have the proper accoutrements for riding. The countess eyed the plate of petits gâteaux and chose a confection of chocolate and almond paste. “Have one,” she said. “They’re very nice.” Two women came in and greeted the countess, who introduced Natalia as a distant relative visiting from Berlin. When the women had gone, she said, “Those old gossips. They don’t need to know everything.”

  * * *

  In the fall, the countess opened her nursery school in an untenanted worker’s cottage near the river. It was a single room, heated with a round tiled stove. On the wall there was an enormous portrait of the wedding of the last king of Hungary, Karl IV, and his consort, Queen Zita. Every morning, before prayers, the countess instructed the children to bow their heads to this portrait. As many as fifteen children attended, sometimes only five or six, depending on the weather and how many Sinti children arrived at the door accompanied by a parent or grandparent. Natalia hung the children’s coats on a row of hooks and handed out slates and chalk. She taught the children to count, using dried beans from the kitchen and chestnuts and acorns she collected from beneath the trees. Eins, zwei, drei, she said, in German, and the children made her repeat it in Hungarian: egy, kettő, három. The countess arranged beans on a sheet of white paper in the shape of a face with two eyes and an upturned mouth and said, This is me, and the children became giddy with delight. At eleven o’clock, Katya came to the door with buttered bread or cookies and a flask of milk for the children. While the children ate, Natalia made up stories, or retold old stories, to amuse them.

  Once there was a farmer who had a chicken that laid golden eggs, so that he wanted for nothing. But a robber began stealing these golden eggs, and no matter how early the farmer got up, or how late into the night he kept watch, he could not catch the thief. Then one day a stranger came and said, if the farmer gave him three golden eggs, the thievery would cease at once. And it did stop. The stranger took his booty and ran away and was seen no more. Once again, the farmer found golden eggs nestled among the brown eggs in the henhouse, and he and his wife prospered all their long lives.

  Or, a young wife who desired a child of her own sewed a cloth doll with button eyes, and a witch came to the open window of her workroom and said she could cast a spell to turn the doll into a real, living infant. But there was a price to pay: this infant would vanish unless the wife promised never again to speak a word. The wife agreed to the witch’s terms, and at once the doll became a rosy-cheeked infant with eyes as black and merry as the doll’s button eyes. The young wife tricked the witch by singing to her child in a voice of such purity that the witch, secretly listening, was beguiled and undid her evil spell. The infant grew to be a fine young man and often said his mother’s voice was the sweetest sound in the world.

  The countess, who tried not to let the children see her using a cane, held on to Natalia’s arm as they walked from the school back to the castle. She said it would please her to be called by her given name, Rozalia. “Since my husband died, no one uses my name, and it’s a pretty name, it means rose. The rose that blooms in summer and when autumn comes is devoured by worms.” She laughed. “Natalia, tell me, is there a young man, a sweetheart, waiting for you in Berlin?”

  “No,” she said. “No one is waiting.”

  “Good,” the countess said. “You have no reason to hurry home, then.” Frankly, she had never cared for Berlin. Munich she could tolerate, it had substance, a distinct flavor, like a robust stew, and Dresden was cultured, refined. But as for Berlin—Berliners took themselves too seriously; Germans she thought emotional and easily offended. “Hungarians, thanks be to God, have a native sense of prop
riety tempered with good humor. You will not find a Hungarian who does not enjoy his own society.”

  “I am German,” Natalia pointed out.

  “Ah, Natalia,” she said. “All young girls belong to their own glorious principality.”

  * * *

  The first castle built on the estate had burned to the ground a century ago, leaving only a cellar of unknown provenance, Rozalia told Natalia. It was, she said, impossible to describe and Natalia must see it for herself. When they had descended a narrow and steep flight of stone steps and had arrived, via a long corridor, at a cellar with an uneven stone floor and fire-blackened oak beams, Rozalia gave Natalia a candle to hold and removed an iron key from a hook in the wall. She unlocked a low, arched door that swung open on creaking hinges, exactly like a prop in a Fritz Lang film. Rozalia made Natalia go in ahead of her. Natalia knew what she was seeing, and yet it shocked her to know the castle’s foundations contained human remains. Arm bones; finger bones that seemed to move, to beckon; skulls with gaping mouths and dark eyeholes. She stood with her back to the wall, near the door. The candle sputtered. To be left in darkness, Natalia thought. She would die. Perhaps the countess wanted that. Wanted to inter her with the bones. She breathed through her mouth, trying not to smell the rats, the decay.

  Rozalia brushed dust off her hands and said she had discovered the ossuary when she first came to the castle as a bride. Her husband had been furious. It was the first time he was angry with her, and the last. Can’t you keep out of anything? he’d said. Must you go looking for trouble? He’d wanted to have the skeletons taken away and buried in a communal grave dug in the forest, but Rozalia said the dead were the spirits of the house and had a right to rest in peace.