Midnight Train to Prague

by Carol Windley

Sora said she must apologize for the dumplings, which she’d concocted of millet flour and starch, in lieu of potatoes. “The brown sauce is a disguise and a panacea rather than a sauce.”

  When Franz repeated what he’d heard on the BBC news—that in the Winter War, as it was known, Finns equipped with nothing more than snowshoes and rifles were decimating the heavily armed Soviet forces—Uncle Tomáš interrupted. He continued to be employed as an accountant in the Reich Protectorate Office at the Hradčany, he said, but as a Czech his position was precarious. He had learned it was wiser not to discuss politics or the war. There followed a silence, and Anna’s father laughed and said, it would be a quiet evening then, since they’d lost the ability to talk about anything else.

  Franz and Ivan began to discuss a play they had acted in, Karel Čapek’s R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots. They’d had minor roles, as two of the robots. Ivan’s mother had kept his costume, he said. Franz said he’d returned his costume to the drama department at the university and regretted not having taken photographs. Anna remembered his costume of gold and silver foil, his face and his hands painted gold. The play was about a scientist, Dr. Rossum, who had engineered the production of robots from vats of blood cells and nerve fibers. The robots were biologically similar to humans and intended as an endless supply of cheap labor. The robots, however, continued to evolve, becoming in time ever more human, autonomous beings, who, in the end, killed their human masters and established a new society in which there were no masters and slaves, but only equal and free people.

  A warning and a prophecy, Franz said. Čapek had written the play in 1920. Thirteen years later, the Nazis began imprisoning their own people in concentration camps at Dachau, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen. The Nazis did not hide what they were doing. The industrialists in Germany were pleased to have a source of free labor. Čapek had lived long enough to know what was going on.

  “I think we are back to discussing politics,” Magdalena said. “My favorite of Čapek’s works is Talks with T. G. Masaryk. I would have liked more in those talks about his meeting with Charlotte Garrigue in Leipzig. It all happens in a few paragraphs, and then suddenly she returns home to America, and he sails after her. They are married and return to live in Prague. Dr. Masaryk said his wife was American, but she became ‘morally and politically Czech.’”

  “It is the same for me,” Aunt Vivian said. “I think of myself as completely Czech.”

  “Charlotte Masaryk is my hero,” Reina said.

  The play R.U.R. made him think, Anna’s father said, of Heinrich von Kleist’s essay on the marionette theater. “Didn’t Kleist propose that puppets embodied more grace than humans?”

  “Yes,” Franz said. “Kleist suggested that since a puppet’s grace is mechanical, not moral, puppets never experience self-doubt, while humans have to think before they act, and then it’s too late, the appropriate moment for action has been lost. You know how it is. You lie awake at night worrying: Did I make the right decision? And at three in the morning, you know it was completely the wrong decision. Marionettes are never indecisive; they simply exist, while our humanity undermines us, in a sense.”

  “I don’t think you can talk about marionettes and robots in the same breath as human beings,” Anna’s mother said. “We have a choice; they don’t. Listen to me—now I’m talking as if they were real.”

  “Yes, but in a way they are real,” Franz said. “They are what we project on them, don’t you think?”

  “May I interrupt to ask a simple, not at all intellectual question?” Aunt Vivian said. “Marta, tell me, have you decided on an outfit for your wedding day?”

  “Yes, I think so. A blue tweed suit and a cape in the same fabric, because it’s cold in February.”

  “Don’t you want a wedding dress?” Reina said. “With flowers and a veil? I would, if I were getting married.”

  “Yes, but this will be more practical, I think,” Marta said. “Besides, the way things are these days . . .”

  “Do you have a hat? I’ll make you one,” Aunt Vivian said. “Bring your wedding suit to my shop, so that I can match it with a nice fabric. Do you have pearls? Pearls look good with tweed. They set it off. I can lend you a pearl necklace and earrings.”

  “Your turn next,” Ivan said to Franz.

  “Oh, I don’t think so. I’m not old like you, my friend,” Franz said.

  “Time goes quickly.”

  “Franz gave his heart away when he was a child,” Anna’s mother said, smiling.

  “Not this old story again,” Franz said.

  “We were on the train from Berlin to Prague,” Anna’s mother said. “We had visited Julius’s parents in Heidelberg, and I had been at a conference at the Berlin University. Anyway, on the train a passenger was taken ill, and while I couldn’t have been the only medical doctor on board, I was the one who was asked to examine him. A young woman looked after Franz for me. Was her name Natasha, Franz? Do you remember?”

  “Natalia, I think.”

  “He talked about her for weeks,” Aunt Vivian said. “He would watch for her from the window.”

  “She talked about boats and fishing and cats,” Franz said.

  “Whoever she was, she’ll be old and ugly by now and the mother of ten children,” Reina said.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Anna’s mother said. “She’d be twenty-nine, or thirty at the most, which isn’t old.”

  “It’s not young,” Reina said.

  * * *

  On Saint Valentine’s Day, Ivan Lazar and Marta Hempel were married. After the ceremony, the wedding guests walked behind the bride and groom across the Charles Bridge to the apartment where Marta lived with her father. Sora had set out plates of bread and real butter, obtained on the black market, and sausages and cheese.

  Reina read a few lines of a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer: “For this was Valentine’s Day, when every bird cometh there to choose his mate.” She said the poem had been written to commemorate the marriage of Anne, daughter of Charles IV, king of Bohemia, to Richard II of England. She held out her wineglass to be refilled.

  “Are you drunk?” Franz said.

  “On happiness only,” Reina said sourly.

  Ivan’s mother had brought with her from Český Krumlov a china plate, which, at the appropriate moment, she smashed on the floor, and Marta had to kneel and pick up the pieces, to demonstrate her willingness to be an industrious and thrifty wife. Reina poured herself another glass of wine.

  “You don’t want to go back to work drunk, do you?” Franz said.

  “Maybe,” Reina said.

  Everyone over the age of sixteen had to work sixty hours a week for the Nazi war effort. Franz worked at the armament factory on the other side of the Vltava, where, he said, the workers drew turtles on the walls in green ink, a reminder to go slow on the production line, as a way of sabotaging Germany’s war machine. Reina had continued working at the bookshop until last summer, when the Nazis had assigned her to a printing press operated by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. She said she’d drawn a turtle on the wall too. “I didn’t care if I was caught, but I did mind that everyone said my turtle looked like an insect. ‘Your bug is dead,’ they kept saying. ‘Your bug is dead.’”

  After the reception, Anna and her father walked across the bridge to his atelier, which was on a narrow, curved street in Malá Strana. He lit a fire in the tiled stove. He showed her a portrait he was finishing of a brother and sister, three and five years old. The portrait had been commissioned by the children’s father, a merchant who had moved with his family to Zürich to escape the Nazis. Anna’s father didn’t know whether the portrait and its owner would ever be united, he said, but he intended to get it completed, nevertheless.

  While her father worked, Anna sketched the wedding guests with a stick of charcoal. She drew her mother and father arm in arm, and Franz and Reina, and Aunt Vivian and Uncle Tomáš. The farmer from Zürau, who’d delivered the farm goods to her house, was in
her drawing too, if not in life, standing at the side of the bridge in his greatcoat; she labored over the folds of the coat, trying to suggest the straightness of the back, the length of arm. Ivan she sketched beside Marta. He was better-looking in real life, it was true. She drew a strand of pearls around Marta’s neck. She drew herself, her braided hair, winter coat, stockings, and patent leather shoes.

  Her father said that years from now, she would look at her drawing and remember the marriage, the reception, the taste of the food, bits of conversation. It would all come back to her; she would live it again, in her memory. Art, he said, made life not only more human but, in a sense, eternal.

  * * *

  September of 1941 began hot and sultry; in the afternoons, clouds built up in the sky over Western Bohemia, and by evening, lightning flashed in the distance and the sound of thunder could be heard. But, as Sora said, it wasn’t the weather that made everyone feel like quarreling with their own fingernails. It was seeing Gestapo and SS officers on the streets, swastika flags flying from Prague Castle, machine-gun emplacements on street corners, edicts from Reich protector Baron von Neurath’s office on lampposts, in shop windows. The Reich protector had been recalled to Berlin, and another high-ranking Nazi was to take his place, but still for a time the edicts continued to be signed by Neurath. Lists of people who’d been arrested and those who’d been executed appeared in columns in newspapers or were read out on Radio Prague.

  At the end of September, on the feast day of Saint Wenceslas, Anna attended Mass at Saint Vitus Cathedral with her parents. Then they stood on the street outside the cathedral and watched the ecclesiastical procession that conveyed the saint’s relics over the Charles Bridge to Wenceslas Square. The Czech police ordered people to get back and stop talking, to shut up, but the crowd had started singing the Czech national anthem, which was forbidden by the Nazis. “This is a beautiful country, the Czech country, my homeland,” they sang. The police formed a cordon and forced the crowd back against a wall. Anna nearly fell when someone pushed her, not intentionally, she was sure. Someone else was shoved to the pavement, a man, who immediately stood, embarrassed, and brushed off his jacket, retrieved his hat. She hated seeing people lose their dignity; it made her want to fight back, but that was impossible. Her mother took her arm, and they started walking home and met up with Anna’s father and her uncle Emil, who had his two-year-old son, Jan, on his shoulders. Franz and Reina arrived almost at the same time, and Franz said he and Reina had seen a man accosted by the security police and beaten with batons and called a dirty Bolshevik, a filthy Jew. This happened, Reina said, in front of the man’s wife and two children. She lit a cigarette and leaned against the trunk of the chestnut tree and wouldn’t come into the house, where everyone gathered at the kitchen table and talked about the war.

  “Will England bomb us?” Reina said. She stood for a moment in the door and then came in and sat beside Franz at the table.

  “No, President Beneš is in London; the English are on our side,” Emil said.

  Anna’s mother lifted Jan onto her knee and wiped his sticky hands and mouth with her handkerchief. Franz said he should have gone to England with Sora’s son, Jiri, and joined the Czech army-in-exile. When the Czech army returned to Prague, as they would, Franz said, he would fight with them. He quoted Jan Masaryk, the former president’s son and a minister in the Czech government-in-exile, who’d said it would be better for Czechs to be the hammer than the anvil.

  “It’s easier to advocate resistance when you are in England,” Anna’s father said.

  “So for us, we play the anvil and get hammered, is that it?” Franz said.

  “We endure,” Anna’s father said. “We wait them out.”

  “We let ourselves be enslaved, you mean.”

  Anna’s mother set Jan down. He leaned on Anna’s knee, and she picked him up and took him to the living room, and they played a tune on the piano. Rather, Jan banged his fists on the keys and laughed. Reina shouted from the living room door that no one appreciated the racket they were making, and Jan burst into tears. Uncle Emil came in and picked up his son and took him home.

  That night, Anna dreamed her parents and Franz had been arrested and were imprisoned beneath the Petschek Palace, a former bank that had been taken over by the Gestapo. In the dream, she knew this. She knew the bank vaults in the basement were being used as cells. People were interrogated and tortured. The Gestapo had a guillotine. All this was true in life as well as in the nightmare. Her parents and her brother were themselves but not themselves, and when they looked at her from behind the bars of a cell, they seemed not to know her, and she kept saying, “I am your child, I am your daughter, Anna.”

  Chapter Twelve

  In February 1942, Anna’s family traveled to Western Bohemia, where they went every year to ski. This was their first winter vacation since the occupation began. The previous owners of the inn were Czech and had been expelled by the Germans after the Munich Agreement, which had given the Sudetenland to Germany. The new owner met them at the train station. He called himself Herr Winter, he said, he who made den Schnee und den Frost. His name was not, in fact, Winter but Schulte. His leather coat creaked when he moved, like tree branches burdened with frost, and his breath, also rather creaky, clouded the air around his head, and so perhaps, in a way, he was Herr Winter. He drove them to the inn. On the way he said that they would find the inn unchanged; he and Frau Schulte had not made any alterations. As soon as he opened the door, though, Anna saw that the new owners had made a change. They had hung a large portrait of the Führer on the wall in the vestibule, so it was the first thing they saw. Herr Schulte took their coats and gave them sheepskin-lined knitted slippers to wear. He would bring in the luggage, he said, and told them to go and sit in the lounge, where there was a fire in the fireplace.

  Anna’s mother went to the Bechstein piano and ran her fingers over the keys and said, “Julius, do you remember when Mrs. Stanek and I played duets on this piano?”

  Anna remembered lying on the rug on the floor in front of the fireplace with Martina Stanek, who was three years older than Anna was. She half expected Martina still to be there. Herr Winter, or Herr Schulte, or whoever he was, had got one thing right: nothing in this room had changed since the last time Anna and her parents—and Franz—had stayed there. The rose-colored sofas and maroon velvet armchairs stood where they always had, in front of the stone fireplace. Over the fireplace there was a stag’s head. A chess set, the pieces carved from walrus tusk, was set out on a small table. Glass-fronted cabinets held Bohemian crystal and china, and one tall, narrow cabinet housed a collection of antique firearms.

  “What would they think,” Anna’s mother said, “if they could see us here?”

  “The Staneks? They would understand,” her father said.

  “They would despise us,” her mother said. “We should not have come.” She sat on the sofa beside Anna. Frau Schulte came in with a tray of coffee and cake. “We are quiet at the moment, as you can see,” she said. “Several parties have canceled due to the weather.”

  “If there’s no snow, they don’t like it,” said Herr Schulte, appearing from the hall, rubbing his hands together. “And if there’s too much snow, they complain even louder. I took your suitcases upstairs to your rooms.”

  “The cake is best warm,” Frau Schulte said. She poured the coffee. For Anna she had a cup of cocoa, frothy on top, with a tiny silver spoon left in the cup, to stir it with.

  A girl with a high, round forehead and small glittering eyes like Herr Schulte’s came into the sitting room. “Here is my Irmgard,” Herr Schulte said.

  Irmgard wore a cardigan over a checked dress, brown wool stockings. One of her shoes had a built-up sole, and she limped. Frau Schulte said she was to go upstairs and light the fires in the bedrooms for their guests.

  Irmgard said she would finish setting the table first. “Did I say at your convenience?” Frau Schulte said.

  “Listen to your mother,
Irmgard,” Herr Schulte said.

  At seven that evening, dinner was served. The first course was chicken soup, followed by roasted pork and noodles, boiled carrots, and cabbage with sour cream and caraway seeds. The only other guests that evening were a couple from Berlin, Herr Doktor Voss and Frau Voss and their baby. Dr. Voss cut his food into small pieces and regarded it suspiciously before putting it in his mouth. Frau Voss mashed carrots and spoon-fed them to her baby, who promptly spit up on her. Frau Voss moistened an edge of her table napkin in her water glass and sponged at her dress.

  “He’s a lovely baby,” Anna’s mother said, smiling at Frau Voss.

  “He is mischief incarnate,” Dr. Voss said.

  After dinner Herr Schulte carried a tray of brandy and coffee into the sitting room. For Anna, he had another cup of hot cocoa, which seemed to her like one cup too many. Frau Voss walked around the room with the baby, who began to scream and push at his mother’s neck. Shush, shush, Frau Voss crooned. The baby was Friedrich, she said. “Our little Fritzi,” Dr. Voss said, adding that little Fritzi was eight months old and cutting another tooth, which meant sleepless nights for his poor, beleaguered parents.

  Usually they vacationed in Saxony, Frau Voss said, but what with the war and the baby, they had decided this would be quieter.

  “And it is quiet, isn’t it?” Dr. Voss said. “Another storm is on the way, I fear, because I have the most appalling headache.”

  Anna’s father said he was sorry to hear that. Dr. Voss shrugged. “How are you in Prague?” he said. “In Berlin food rationing is a nuisance and the blackout even more so, and when you need a taxi, there are none. Damage has been inflicted by British planes, it is true, but nothing we can’t cope with. You know, the English never wanted this war; Churchill pushed them into it. The Americans do not want war either, but President Roosevelt is determined to get involved.” He tamped down the tobacco in the bowl of his pipe and took a book of matches out of his pocket.

  Anna’s father began to talk conversationally about skiing, when he was young, in Bavaria, with his brother and sister. His family did also, Dr. Voss said, every December. “My goodness, it just came to me,” he said, slapping his forehead. “I know you, Frau Schaefferová, do I not? Frau Doktor Schaefferová, I should say. We met at a medical conference in Prague. In July 1937, I believe. Please tell me I am correct. Otherwise, I will have disgraced myself doubly. It is Dr. Schaefferová, isn’t it?”