Midnight Train to Prague

by Carol Windley

  “Yes,” Anna’s mother said. “Yes, I remember the conference.”

  Dr. Voss stood and bowed and sat down again. “What a great pleasure this is. Just last month I read your monograph on the metabolism of iron and found it brilliant. Lise,” he said, turning to his wife. “Isn’t this wonderful? Dr. Schaefferová is a distinguished member of the medical community. Such a happy accident. A truly great pleasure.”

  A burning log rolled onto the tiled hearth and Frau Voss gave a small shriek. Herr Schulte ran to grab the poker. The clock struck nine. Irmgard came in and gathered up the brandy glasses and the coffee service. The baby began to cry. Frau Voss gave him to her husband and said she was going up to their room.

  * * *

  In the morning, Anna and her mother and father went for a walk in the snow. Her mother said she could not remember meeting Herr Doktor Voss at any conference, in Prague or elsewhere.

  “He is not a memorable character,” Anna’s father said.

  “Julius, what are we doing here?”

  “It’s quiet, the air is fresh; it’s good, Magdalena.”

  They were hiking up a mountain within spitting distance, as her father said, of the farm Anna’s grandfather had once owned, the farm where her mother had lived as a child. Anna’s grandmother, Katharina Svetlová, the first woman skier in Bohemia, had been the subject of a magazine story, and Anna’s mother had kept the magazine, which featured a photograph of Katharina on her skis, ski poles in her hands, wearing a quilted swansdown jacket with a nipped-in waist and puffed sleeves, and an ankle-length skirt. The photograph was taken here, at Waldfrieden.

  From a high, thin cloud, a small shower of dry snowflakes whirled down, ceased, mysteriously filled the air again. An owl flew out of a tree. Anna’s father said they had to keep moving or they’d freeze and turn into statues. Magdalena stamped around, laughing. She said she was not going back to the Gasthaus. She was absolutely not going there. She wanted to know which way was south. Or west. Where was Switzerland from here? How far? “Come with me,” she said, holding her hands out to Anna and Julius and saying they could stay or come with her, and she began walking away.

  “Magdalena,” called Anna’s father. But Magdalena kept plowing her way through the snow. Anna’s father ran after her and brought her back to where Anna was standing. Her mother was laughing.

  “Oh well,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow I’ll try again. The thought of one more night chez Schulte with the Voss family is almost more than I can bear. What do you think we’re having for supper?” she added. “Poison toadstools? Pan-fried newts?”

  As they approached the Gasthaus, they saw that Herr Schulte was driving away in his Mercedes. He rolled down the car window and waved at them and then accelerated up the drive, the wheels slipping on ice and snow. Irmgard, sweeping snow off the front step, said her father was going to pick up new guests at the train station.

  Later, Anna sat by the fireplace reading War and Peace, which she had taken from a shelf in the library across the hall. She used to read Martina’s books in the Nesthäkchen series, by Else Ury, when she was here, but the books were no longer in the library. They were children’s books, too young for her, really, but she wouldn’t mind reading something undemanding. She had started War and Peace three times already. She remembered how she and Martina would curl up on the sofa happily reading about Else Ury’s Annemarie Braun, the “nestling,” the baby of the family, who, like Anna, had blond braids, and whose father, like Anna’s mother, was a doctor.

  She heard Herr Schulte’s car returning from the train station, followed by the slamming of car doors and then voices in the hall. The new guests did not appear, however, until dinner that evening. They were two men in the field-gray uniform of the Waffen-SS. Herr Schulte introduced them. The tall blond man was Hauptsturmführer Karl Kessler. The other man was Untersturmführer Walther Krause. Captain Kessler did not eat but pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette. Frau Voss waved her hand at the captain’s cigarette smoke. Her husband frowned at her. Attempts at conversation faltered, and as soon as the meal was over everyone moved to the living room for coffee. Second Lieutenant Krause asked for wine, and then he said he would maybe prefer a glass of schnapps, while Herr Schulte was at it. The captain went over to the gun cabinet. “Do you have ammunition for these firearms?” he asked. “If the enemy got their hands on these guns, they would shoot your head off your shoulders, Herr Schulte.”

  “The gun collection belonged to the Czechs, as I said. I doubt if those old firearms would work anymore, to be honest.”

  “They’re valuable. They should be cleaned and polished.”

  The inn, Herr Schulte said, as he added wood to the fire, had once been a hunting lodge frequented by the nobility, hence the gun collection. So the stationmaster, who fancied himself an amateur historian, had told him. A Bavarian archduke had shot the stag mounted on the wall. Furthermore, according to the stationmaster, a niece of Marie-Antoinette of France had stayed at Waldfrieden after the queen’s husband went to the guillotine in 1793 and had given birth to an infant that had survived only a day and was buried either near the chalet or in the dirt floor in the wine cellar.

  “How ghastly,” Frau Voss said, her hand at her throat. “I hope it’s not true.”

  “Of course it’s not true,” Herr Doktor Voss said.

  Anna took War and Peace upstairs to her room and read in bed, her feet on a hot-water bottle Irmgard had brought her. Prince Andrei marched to war; Napoleon Bonaparte entered Vienna. As she read she could hear Fritz crying in his parents’ room and thought with a shudder of Marie-Antoinette’s niece’s baby buried in the cellar.

  * * *

  By morning, snow lay in drifts in the yard and against the doors. Herr Schulte went out early to shovel a path for Irmgard, so that she could feed the chickens and the cows. After breakfast, Anna’s mother carried Frau Voss’s baby around the sitting room while his mother slept in a chair. Anna and her father played chess with the carved walrus-tusk pieces. Anna put her father’s king into checkmate. She asked if he had let her win. He said, no, she had played a better game. Then, as he set the pieces back on the board, he told her they were going home earlier than planned. “We are?” she said. He put a finger to his lips. “Yes,” he said. He lowered his voice. “In the morning. If the road is cleared, and we don’t have another snowstorm, God forbid.” She nodded. In the morning they were going to leave, she kept repeating to herself. But that night it snowed heavily, and by morning the road to the station was, Herr Schulte reported, impassable. After breakfast, Anna put on her coat, hat, gloves, and boots, and went outside and tramped up and down on the path Herr Schulte had once again cleared between walls of snow. The cold penetrated her coat, and she started shivering, and when she turned to go back to the inn, she saw Captain Kessler at the window, watching her.

  Dinner that night was roast pork, Spätzle, and sauerkraut, followed by a dessert of stewed winter apples sprinkled with brown sugar. Captain Kessler lit a cigarette and said that winter weather brought back good memories of when he went mountain climbing with his father, who was an Alpine guide. The Jungfrau, the Eiger, Mont Blanc. Up on the peaks, there was no room for a false step. The only sounds were made by ice shifting and cracking, wind scouring the peaks. The higher he climbed, the lonelier it got, and that suited him.

  If his medical practice allowed him time, Dr. Voss said, he would pursue mountain climbing. He skied, though, every winter. Except this one, he supposed.

  The captain turned to Anna’s father. “And what is it you do, Herr Schaeffer?”

  “I am an artist. I teach art.”

  “Interesting. I studied architecture at university.” He brushed a crumb off the tablecloth. “I had a professor who admired your work. You are Julius Schaeffer, is that right? You are a portraitist?”

  “Portraits, yes, and landscapes. And graphic design.”

  “You have painted in the modernist style, I understand.”

  “Yes, so
me of my art is modernistic, as you say.”

  Two conversations were going on at once. Anna heard Frau Voss telling her mother that from the age of four months, little Fritz could grip her fingers and pull himself to a standing position. At the same time, Anna was listening to the SS captain telling her father that good art taught people to value their way of life. “Don’t you think so yourself, Herr Schaeffer?” he said. “More and more, I think offensive artwork by Jews and Bolshevists, and those under their influence, is an attack on German morals and German values. I am referring to artists like Max Ernst, Otto Dix, Käthe Kollwitz, George Grosz. Modern German masters. They’ve had their day. They’re finished.”

  He didn’t know if they were finished or not, Anna’s father said. They would always be an important—an essential—part of history.

  “That kind of history is also finished,” Captain Kessler said. “You know Elk Eber’s painting The Dispatch Courier? That is a fine work.”

  “But perhaps it gives a romanticized view of war,” Anna’s father said. “Otto Dix’s war paintings are painful to look at, but they are honest. I was there, in France, at the Somme, at Verdun, as was Dix. War is destructive, a tragic waste of life. Young men die, innocent noncombatants die. There’s no point in pretending otherwise, is there?”

  “You know so much, Herr Schaeffer,” the captain said coldly. “But like so many, you know nothing.”

  Herr Schulte hovered uneasily with the coffeepot. The lights flickered and went out. Herr Schulte recommended adjourning to the sitting room. “Everyone together in one room,” he said, “that’s the way. Frau Schulte will light candles. We will add wood to the fire. We have no need to worry.” Frau Schulte and Irmgard went around lighting coal-oil lamps. Second Lieutenant Krause leaned back in his chair and rested his right foot on his left knee. “You’ve had it easy in Prague, haven’t you?” he said to Anna’s father. “No bombing raids, no food shortages to speak of. No enemy air attacks, full employment. Living in paradise, I’d say.”

  He began to sing:

  When the Prussians they marched against Prague,

  ’Gainst Prague, the beauteous town,—

  they took up in camp a position,

  They brought with them much ammunition.

  He said his grandfather had taught him that song. “The Czechs lost the Battle of White Mountain; Prussia won. So history repeats itself. When will the Slavs learn, I would like to know?”

  “Now you have woken my son,” Dr. Voss snapped.

  “There’s something wrong with that baby,” Krause said. “He’s always bawling. Is he sick?”

  “No, he is not sick. My son is in the pink of health.”

  “Children need a firm hand,” Krause said. “When I was a nipper my mother read me the poems of Heinrich Hoffmann. Disobedient children get burned alive. Their hands are cut off. No, the thumbs are cut off, I believe. My mother said it could happen to me if I didn’t behave. You Czechs will suffer the same fate, I’m telling you. Baron von Neurath isn’t there now to coddle you. The acting Reich protector, Reinhard Heydrich, will keep you in line. He will cut off your thumbs, if you like.” He stabbed the air with his pocketknife.

  “For Christ’s sake, would you shut up,” the captain said.

  “That’s a hell of a storm out there,” Krause said.

  The captain shielded his eyes. “How long will this last?” he asked Herr Schulte, who said the electricity would get restored soon. Most of the generators were in the Sudetenland and any breakages in the system would get priority treatment.

  The next day, Anna sat reading War and Peace by the light of a coal-oil lamp in the sitting room. Her mother and father were upstairs, getting ready for dinner, as were Herr Doktor Voss and Frau Voss. The baby must have been asleep, and the house was quiet. Captain Kessler came in and sat across from her. Irmgard walked in with a tray of coffee and bread and cheese. She had unpinned her hair and curled the ends and wore lipstick and rouge. The captain closed his eyes. Irmgard asked him: Would he like cream and sugar in his coffee? Yes, he said. He would do it himself. Irmgard put down the sugar tongs. The captain opened his eyes when she had gone. He asked, “How old are you, Anna?”

  “Twelve,” she said. “I will be thirteen in March.”

  “And my age is twenty-two.”

  The same age as Franz, she thought. She got up, holding her book to her chest. He told her to stay where she was and said she looked pretty in the lamplight. He enjoyed her company, in the midst of this tedium, being trapped indoors. The storm, being shut up with that idiot Krause. He was used to being out in the elements. As an Alpine guide, he said, his father spent winters away from home. When he was about Anna’s age, his mother got bored, being left on her own with the children, and she moved to Berlin. “She took my brothers and sister with her, and I lived with my father until I went to university, where I studied, among other things, the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, and I remember being very impressed with something he said. So impressed, in fact, that I committed his words to memory.

  “‘An atmosphere’—this is what Nietzsche wrote—‘an atmosphere of inexhaustible meaningfulness emanates from architecture.’ Perhaps those are not his exact words, but you get the idea, don’t you, Anna? It is my belief our Führer has an innate understanding of this. He has a grand vision, a truly great vision, of Berlin as the world’s preeminent metropolis. Germania, it is to be named. Germania: a city of inexhaustible meaningfulness. When the war ends, and it will, within months, I will go back to architecture school and finish my degree, and I will work on this project, the construction of Germania. First, it seems that I have to walk through a lot of shit. Excuse me, Fräulein. A lot of excrement, shall I say? I honestly can’t think of another way of saying it. I was in Paris, you know, in 1940. Paris is a beautiful, civilized city, and Parisians, by and large, appreciate German culture. They are adaptable people; I got along with most of them. But then I was sent to Poland and the Baltic countries. There, it was swamps and more swamps, and atrocious weather and ruthless Jew partisans.”

  He got up and came around to the back of her chair and placed his hand on her neck. “A shot to the neck precisely here—where the spinal column enters the skull,” he said. “Genickschuss. That is the word. An efficient execution, all down the line. You would think, wouldn’t you, that someone would stop it. But no one does. The orders are given—I give the orders, to be precise—and the action goes ahead, like an assembly line. Bang, bang, bang. But not quite. It is not quite like that. It is chaotic, unsightly. My ears ring from the gunshots. I will go deaf, I fear. And blind, from the things I am forced to witness. They say a woman will instinctively protect her child, but I can tell you that is not always so. People will do anything to survive. Half the time, you can’t think why they bother. The problem is, one is human, after all, and it gets to you. But I tell myself, it is either them or me. They brought it on themselves, the Jews did.”

  He took the book from her hands. “Why are you reading a book by a Russian, when Russia is our enemy? You should know better, even at your age.” He tossed the book on the fire. The pages flared in the heat, turned black on the edges, and then the book was consumed. When she got up to leave the room, he held her by the arm. He said she was not to tell anyone what he’d told her. Did she promise? “You don’t want anything bad to happen to you or your parents, do you?” He let go of her arm. She ran through the door and felt her way up the stairs and down the hall to her room, where she lit a candle and held it up to be certain he had not crept in after her. She sat on the bed, trying to calm herself. Genickschuss. A word she thought she would hear in her head for the rest of her life.

  * * *

  Late the next day electrical power was restored, and the day after that the temperature rose, and icicles dripped from the roof. A plow was clearing the road, Herr Schulte reported. If Herr and Frau Doktor Schaeffer and their daughter wished to leave, he could get them to the train station. Irmgard made sandwiches for them to ta
ke on the train, rye bread and liverwurst, which, in the end, they couldn’t eat, and her father gave them to two boys sitting near them on the train. In Prague, it was snowing. At the station, they were interrogated by the Gestapo, and then they met Uncle Emil, who drove them to his house for a supper of soup and bread and margarine. When they got home, Anna’s mother spent an hour downstairs in the surgery reading messages Elli had left for her. Franz came home, took one look at his father, and said, “What is it? What’s happened?”

  “It was like this,” Anna’s father said. “We spent four days snowbound in a house with two Waffen-SS men and a doctor who was a doppelgänger for Joseph Goebbels. We could not ski, the skis having been requisitioned by the Germans. There was a storm, and no one could get out, and the train wasn’t running.”

  Anna’s mother came in and said it was worse than that. They had broken bread with the enemy, and now their names were known.

  “They already know your names,” Franz said. “In a police state, everything is known.”

  For days Anna distrusted her own eyes. She had to touch things—tables, chairs, the piano—to assure herself of their solidity. Often she sat by herself on the staircase with her shoulders hunched and her arms around her knees. If the doors to the surgery were left open, she could see Elli at the reception desk. Light from the window near the door fell on the marble tiles. A trapezoid of light. In the hand there was a bone called the trapezium. In this world there were such things: circuses, people laughing. There were girls like her who went to school and studied and went to movies with their friends. But not here, not here.