Midnight Train to Prague

by Carol Windley

“No, Anna. Listen to me. It is not your fault.” Natalia held Anna’s hand. She stayed with her until Sora came, and then she went and sat in the dark in the living room. The next day, Anna wanted to see her mother’s rose garden. Natalia went outside with her. Anna picked dead leaves off the rose bushes and crushed them in her hands. Natalia watered the roses, and she and Anna began pulling weeds out from around the roots of the rose bushes. Anna knocked over the pail of water, and it soaked Natalia’s shoes, and seeing this, Anna sank to the ground and buried her face in her arms and sobbed. But it’s nothing, Natalia said, kneeling beside her. Anna got up and ran to the house. Natalia followed, carrying her wet shoes inside. Sora loaned her a pair of shoes, brown, with thick rubber soles, like the serviceable shoes Rozalia had the cobbler make for her. Natalia looked at her skinny bare legs and her feet in these shoes, and she and Sora laughed and then stared at each other in dismay, horrified at their levity.

  * * *

  Reina had placed votive candles on the credenza, in front of a photograph of her and Franz on their wedding day. Beside it, there was a studio portrait of Franz on his eighteenth birthday. Another photograph, of Magdalena and Julius, had been taken on the Ringstrasse in Vienna. There was a photograph of a young woman in a long pinafore dress standing in a garden. Natalia thought it was Reina. Sora told her the woman in the photograph was Dr. Schaefferová’s stepmother, Eva Svetlová. Doesn’t Reina look like her, though? Sora said. Eva died when Reina’s mother was born. Dr. Schaefferová had lost her own mother, and it was hard on her to lose Eva too.

  “She has a beautiful smile,” Natalia said.

  “Dr. Schaefferová thought the world of her. She was a botanist. Before she married Mr. Svetla, she worked at the horticultural institute in Troya with her brother, who was also a scientist, an agronomist, I think Magdalena said.”

  Natalia became very still. “Do you know his name?” she asked.

  “Eva’s brother? Let me think. Yes, his name was Nagy. Maximilian Nagy. Dr. Schaefferová’s uncle Max.”

  Why had Mr. Nagy not said anything? Silence, these days, was a protective strategy. Protective on both sides. She knew that. Even now, she did not reveal to Sora that she and Mr. Nagy were acquainted. But what a secret! Then she thought about how Franz had helped Max Nagy without knowing the man was his mother’s uncle. And yet, in their brief meeting, they had right away liked each other and Max, who was so wary of everyone, had put his trust completely in Franz.

  In the evening, Reina fiddled with the radio dial, tuning in the BBC’s Overseas Service broadcasting in Czech. They sat very close to the set, with the sound down low, crackly with static. The Red Army was retreating from German forces in the Crimea; the German U-boat offensive against British and American ships in the Atlantic continued unchecked; the Luftwaffe had attacked the Black Sea Fleet. The Wehrmacht had taken Sevastopol; Germany’s Panzer army was advancing on Stalingrad; in the Pacific the Allies were sustaining heavy losses. Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel had captured Tobruk and was in striking distance of Alexandria. None of the news was good, although there were carefully worded reports of Allied bombing raids on the German cities of Cologne, Essen, and Bremen, and on the cities of Lübeck and Rostock in the north.

  Reina said the Allies would win the war. It couldn’t be any other way; their suffering, the suffering of the world, had to mean something, didn’t it? Franz used to quote Schopenhauer: For the power of truth is incredibly great and of unspeakable endurance.

  Natalia wondered how much truth could be endured. A little? This much? And then this additional notch, another turn of the screw?

  * * *

  One evening Emil Svetla stood in the Schaeffers’ living room and, first touching his handkerchief to his upper lip, said he had something very unpleasant to say and they must prepare themselves. This house, their house, had been confiscated by the Reich and was to become the property of an SS officer. An hour ago, he had received this information.

  “No one is taking my home from me,” Reina said. Franz’s home; her husband’s home.

  “Reina and I won’t go,” Anna said.

  “When?” Reina said.

  “Soon. You have five days.” Emil said he would leave now and give Anna and Reina time to come to terms with the situation.

  “Now he will wash his hands, like Pontius Pilate,” Reina said.

  “It’s not his fault,” Anna said.

  Natalia could see that Anna was fighting to control herself, her hands tightly clutched together, her thumbnail gouging at the skin on her finger. Reina said, Not this, not this, and she said she hated God, she hated everyone. Sora went to put on the kettle. Natalia saw her stirring Veronal into Anna’s tea, and then she stirred a few grains into the other cups as well.

  At six the next morning, Reina left for work at the printing press. Later, Anna went downstairs to her father’s studio and came back with an art portfolio of gray cardboard. She knelt on the living room floor, opened the portfolio, and took out a typed manuscript, which she gave to Natalia. It belonged to a man who had been sent to Theresienstadt, Anna said. Her father had been working on illustrations for the manuscript. “Read it,” Anna said. “Then I’ll show you the paintings.”

  The story was a moral fable, familiar to Natalia from her childhood. Salt had more worth than gold; love exceeded both in value. Generations of children cut their teeth on this fable, believed in its lesson, and yet spent their lives acting as if the opposite were true.

  The portfolio held the watercolor sketches Anna’s father had been doing to illustrate the story; Anna had posed for him as the Princess Marica. In the paintings, she was wearing the white dress she’d worn when she’d come to Zlatá Ulička with Reina for a tarot card reading. Her hair was loose and crinkled from her braids. She wore sandals on her bare feet. The paintings were beautiful, but Natalia hated to see Anna depicted lost in a forest, cast out of her home, foraging for food as the shadowy forms of wolves and bears lurked in the trees. The paintings were a father’s last images of his beloved daughter and simultaneously a daughter’s last memories of her beloved father.

  Anna took the paintings from Natalia and placed them with the manuscript in the portfolio, which she closed and tied shut with red strings. She had started assembling in the entrance hall downstairs a collection of items: her mother’s framed medical degrees and her microscope and stethoscope, her grandfather’s onyx pen stand and his Bible. An illustrated magazine from before the turn of the century featuring an article on Anna’s grandmother, “the first expert woman skier in Western Bohemia.” A tortoiseshell box her mother had used for her hairpins and her gold hair combs. Her parents’ rings and watches. Several half-completed canvases, notebooks, sketch pads. Franz’s philosophy books. A play by Karel Čapek, heavily marked up by Franz in red ink.

  Anna asked her uncle Emil whether the piano could be moved to his house. “My darling child, it is not possible,” Emil said.

  “We can’t leave my mother’s piano for them to play. I won’t leave the piano.” She turned and fled upstairs.

  “None of us will get over this,” Emil said to Natalia. “Little Jan has nightmares; my daughter, Elena, refuses to go to Mass. How do you respond to a child of ten who says she will believe in God when God believes in her?”

  He picked up Vicki Baum’s novel Grand Hotel and said now anything written before 1939 was like a message from a vanished civilization. He wondered how his sister’s library had escaped confiscation by the Nazis. His voice broke. How could he go on living without Magdalena and Julius and Franz?

  That night Natalia wrote to Miklós. Dearest, when you read this, you will be at home. If it happens that we don’t find each other again, will you, for my sake, remember how happy we were, how happy you made me? I have many memories and they are all of you, of your smile, your tenderness. My darling, you are my life. Ich liebe dich.

  She wrote a note to Rozalia and placed it with the letter in an envelope and addressed it.

  I
n the living room, Reina raised a wineglass to her. “Don’t look at me like that, Frau Faber,” she said. “They’re not getting the liquor. When this is gone, there’s beer in the pantry. There’s sherry, liqueurs, cognac in the credenza. Let me get you a glass of something. Wine? Red or white?”

  “Red, please,” Natalia said. Reina poured the wine, gave Natalia a glass, and sat on the sofa with her feet up on the coffee table. She abhorred her own instinct for survival, she said. The way she kept breathing, eating, sleeping disgusted her. She was no different from the sheep on her parents’ farm.

  “Didn’t you say you had a farm, Frau Faber?” she asked. “I know so little about you. Only that you tell fortunes that miss the mark. Franz and Magdalena talked about meeting you on a train. I was quite jealous of you. I told Franz and Aunt Magdalena you’d be old and ugly by now, but you are beautiful, just as they said.”

  She got up and tried to uncork another bottle of wine and dropped the corkscrew on the floor.

  Natalia picked it up and uncorked the wine bottle, saying that her mother-in-law had taught her the knack.

  “I propose a toast to your mother-in-law. Here’s to her good health.” Reina took a drink.

  She talked about the summers when Franz had stayed at the farm in Zürau. They would go outside at night and lie on the grass looking up at the sky. Franz knew the names of the constellations. When she was fifteen, she told him they would marry one day. It is written in the stars, she said. Oh, is it? he had said, laughing at her.

  “Le cousinage est un dangereux voisinage. So I read in a Tolstoy novel.” She spilled her glass of Cointreau on the rug. “I’m not cleaning it up,” she said. “And neither are you. Anyway, I don’t think I like Cointreau.”

  “My mother-in-law is fond of an herbal liqueur that tastes of wet moss and aniseed,” Natalia said. “She claims it’s medicinal.”

  “Do you have a husband, Frau Faber, as well as a mother-in-law?”

  “Yes,” Natalia said.

  “Where is he? Not in Prague, I assume. In Russia? A German soldier? I hope not, Frau Faber.”

  “My husband is a journalist. He went to Russia to talk to the soldiers on the front lines.”

  Reina stared at her. She filled two clean wineglasses and gave one to Natalia.

  Sora made scones for breakfast. Reina took an analgesic tablet for the headache she had from drinking too much the night before. Natalia helped Sora pack food from the refrigerator and cupboards into a hamper, and they went around the house looking for things to take with them. They lined up suitcases in front of the door. Anna picked hers up and started going upstairs with it.

  “Anna, this is a time for pragmatism,” Reina said as she left for work. “You are just going to have to do what we think is best for you.” She bent to kiss Anna’s cheek.

  “Your breath stinks,” Anna said.

  Vivian Svetlová arrived and said they were coming with her, to her apartment. Emil had telephoned to tell her his wife, Adriana, was ill, not seriously, but she needed quiet, apparently, and he’d asked that Anna and Reina stay overnight with her, which, to her, was a pleasure, she said. Natalia and Sora, too; they were very welcome.

  The SS officer arrived. He took the door key from Sora. He looked at the portfolio in Anna’s arms and said it seemed a large object for a small girl “What is it you have there?”

  “My drawings, from school,” Anna said, not raising her eyes.

  “I have a sister about your age. She, too, likes to draw and paint.”

  Natalia’s eyelid twitched. My God, we look guilty, she thought. The door opened and a woman she presumed was the SS officer’s wife came in. She stared at Natalia with her little bright sparrow’s eyes and said, “Oh, look, Karl-Heinz, it is the fortune-teller.” Karl-Heinz and the sparrow would live in the Schaeffers’ house, Natalia realized. They would use the furniture and the utensils and sleep in the beds, and even though it was an atrocity and a blasphemy, nothing would stop them from doing this. You will receive good news, the tarot had predicted, Natalia remembered. Not the tarot; she was the one who had thoughtlessly made that prediction, she told herself, and felt hot blood rush to her face. Aunt Vivian took the portfolio from Anna and held it under her arm and said good day to the SS officer and his wife, who had gone past them up the stairs and could be heard in the kitchen, clattering around in her high-heeled shoes. Aunt Vivian had the bearing of an empress. She stood very straight and smiled at the SS officer as if they were meeting at a social event, a garden party, maybe, and at the same time she conveyed her disgust, as if the SS officer, with his scrubbed-clean face and immaculate uniform, stank, as if he were a pile of fresh manure deposited on the street by a cart horse.

  At Vivian Svetlová’s apartment, they drank tea, ate biscuits, and chose neutral topics of conversation, such as Vivian’s hat designs, the fabric she had managed to buy in spite of shortages, and, of course, the weather, which they observed from the windows. Natalia felt safe there. Then, after a few days, she remembered that she had left Zlatá Ulička without telling Mr. Aslan, and she owed him the last month’s rent. She couldn’t pay him, but she could at least explain. On her way to his shop, a car pulled over; a man in a civilian suit and another in a Gestapo uniform got out, and the Gestapo officer took hold of her arm and opened the car and said, “Get in, Frau Andorján.”

  * * *

  They brought her to the old bank vaults in the cellars of Petschek Palace. A Gestapo agent tapped his pen on a manila folder. He glanced at her and opened the folder and went through a few pages of a report she supposed was on her. She was told to sit on a chair in front of this man’s desk, and a lamp was positioned to shine in her eyes. The man at the desk blew cigarette smoke in her face. There was a kind of humming noise in the air, possibly from a ventilation system. Another man came in, letting a door swing shut with a clang behind him.

  This second man placed a hand on the back of the chair she was seated in and leaned over her. “Well, Countess Andorján,” he said. “We are interested in why you are here in Prague instead of in Hungary. Why are you telling fortunes? Isn’t that an odd occupation for a countess? But then, you aren’t just a countess, are you? You are the wife of a traitor. Isn’t that so? We know that Count Andorján is a Communist. We know he is a traitor to Germany.”

  “My husband is not a Communist. He never was.”

  They knew her name, her date of birth, her birthplace, the date of her marriage. It wasn’t information they wanted, she knew that. They liked to break people, destroy their minds first and then their bodies. She was taken to a cell and left for several days. Then she was taken out and interrogated again. They kept repeating that her husband was a spy. A Communist, a Bolshevik, a traitor. Karl-Heinz came in and sat across from her at a plain wooden table. The other man came back. Or was this someone new? This is the fortune-teller, Karl-Heinz said. This is the woman who sits in the Golden Lane and tells lies for money, so don’t expect to get the truth from her. The other man said, let me see your hands, Countess Andorján. Or should I say Frau Faber? Do you prefer one name over another? He held her by the wrist. “Open your fingers,” he said.

  This was what she learned about pain: it made you unknowable to yourself. The soul receded, grew less, gazed dismissively on the body. She saw the fever in the torturer’s eyes; the longing, almost erotic. Another SS officer came in. An appreciative audience, she could see. The second man spoke with Karl-Heinz at the far end of the room. A uniformed Gestapo agent took her out of the room, to the prison, where she remained for several weeks. The cuts on her hands healed at different rates, leaving scars. Then she was transferred to a prison camp in Germany, a camp for women, not far from Berlin. When she got to the camp, she was classified as a political prisoner and had to stitch a red triangle to her sleeve.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was night and dark and Anna thought the train was taking her to Theresienstadt, where she would be a prisoner and she would die, there or at another camp.
But the journey continued to the border with Germany and then went on to Dresden and finally to Berlin. She was one of many Czech girls and young women being sent to Germany, at the end of 1942, as domestic servants or to live with German families, who would instruct Slav girls who had what the Nazis called Aryan racial characteristics to behave and think like true Germans. At the Potsdamer Bahnhof, in Berlin, a man came forward and introduced himself as Dr. Haffner. He was slight, wearing a tightly belted greatcoat, a fedora. He sneezed and apologized, saying he had a cold. By a small miracle, he said, he had managed to buy enough petrol for the drive to his home. It had started snowing again. He lived on the banks of the Kleiner Wannsee. He told her the villa had belonged to his wife’s parents. Anna watched the wipers clearing snow off the windows. She had nothing to say. When Dr. Haffner reached his house, he got out to open the gates to the drive. The snow made it bright enough to see the villa’s asymmetrical façade, a sort of curlicue roofline. Dr. Haffner closed the gates and drove to the front of the villa, and they got out.

  Frau Haffner scolded her husband for being late. “You’re letting in cold air,” she said, at the door, and then, accusingly, “You’re sick.”

  Dr. Haffner rubbed his hands together to warm them. “This is Fräulein Schaeffer,” he said.

  The Haffner family ate in the dining room; Anna had a bowl of soup in the kitchen. Dr. and Frau Haffner were the parents of six children, she learned. Like Joseph and Magda Goebbels, Frau Haffner proudly pointed out. The eldest Haffner son, Baldur, was fifteen and wore a Hitlerjugend uniform and bragged that he had been trained as a sharpshooter and owned a pistol. He did not see how Anna could be “Germanized,” since she was a Slav, and it was not possible even to domesticate a Slav. Weren’t they basically Picts? he said. The Picts were ancient Scots, not Slavs, Anna said, and he said, Well wasn’t she the genius, and it amounted to the same thing.

  The daughters were twins, thirteen years old, and played with dolls and laughed at Anna behind their hands. Their names were Bettina and Vera; they had small, sharp features, like ferrets. Heinrich was eight, Josef was four, and the baby, Paul, was ten months old. The children caught their father’s cold, and Frau Haffner asked Anna to take their meals to them in their bedrooms and to rub liniment on the younger children’s chests. Where are your own mother and father? the twins asked. Why don’t you live with them?