Midnight Train to Prague

by Carol Windley

  “No,” James said. He stopped. “I’m shocked. As far as we knew, she had no relatives living. I don’t know what to say. It’s my fault. I feel horribly negligent.”

  “Anna went through too much and doesn’t know who to trust. If I’m in Prague again, I could give Anna’s relatives your address, if that’s all right.”

  “Yes, please, give them my address. I’ll try to get in touch with Anna’s family in Heidelberg.”

  Something else James Grant did, to help in her search for her husband, was to take her to visit hospital wards set up in requisitioned private homes in Spandau, in Charlottenburg, but she did not see her husband’s name on any hospital lists or in any of the wards. At the Haus des Rundfunks, the broadcasting center on Masurenallee, on the day of a conference held by the Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands, an alliance formed to encourage a cultural revival and a free press in a democratic Germany, she stood near the door and watched. Everyone was there: writers, journalists, playwrights, actors, artists, many of whom had returned from years of self-imposed exile in Switzerland or Britain or the United States. Everyone except Miklós. Her searches seemed futile, but she was not going to give up. She had tried to phone Rozalia, but the phone lines in Hungary were only slowly being repaired, after having been destroyed in the war. Finally, she got through to the postmaster in the village. Yes, he said, yes, of course he remembered her. The army had only a few days earlier got the telephone lines to the village in place; he had just got service back. How are you, Countess? he said. He would be happy to give her message to the dowager countess. No, he had not seen Count Andorján. She gave him the number where she could be reached, so that he could call her if he had any kind of news.

  James Grant called his parents in Seattle. He spoke to them and then handed the phone to Natalia. Anna came on the line.

  “Are you doing well, Natalia? Are you getting stronger now?” Anna said.

  “Yes, thank you,” she said. “How are you, Anna? How is America?” She held the receiver tightly; how good it was to hear Anna’s voice.

  “America is okay,” Anna said. “I’ve really only seen Seattle, but it’s nice.” She had a new bike, red, with white handle-grips and a basket she could carry her books in. But she thought she was obviously too old for a bike like that. She would prefer to walk or take a bus. In America, she would be starting school. They wanted to put her with kids a year younger until her English improved and she got used to doing schoolwork again. She was afraid the other kids would laugh at her, and anyway, she hadn’t forgotten what she’d learned and would just have to show them she belonged in her proper year, with kids her age. After she said goodbye to Anna, Natalia handed the phone to James. She went to the kitchen and begged a cigarette from Gudrun and sat down with a cup of coffee.

  * * *

  Gudrun opened the doors to a wardrobe in the bedroom where she was sleeping and took out a blue silk dress. She held it against herself, smoothing the folds of the skirt.

  “Go on, take it,” Gudrun urged Natalia. “It’s good quality. She had taste, whoever she was.” Gudrun put the dress on the bed and tried on a skirt and a blouse and then a jacket. “Does this jacket go with the skirt?” she asked, doing up the buttons. “Maybe not. Still, I can wear it when I go to England. What do you think, Natalia?”

  “Yes, the color suits you,” Natalia said.

  “It smells of camphor, but never mind,” Gudrun said. “I’ll wear it tonight. We’re going out to a nightclub.”

  “I’m not going,” Natalia said. “What would I do at a nightclub?”

  “Yes, you are. Here’s a dress that should fit you. I’m not going alone.”

  Mike Rose drove them in the lieutenant general’s new car, a supercharged Mercedes coupe “borrowed” from a former Nazi. The nightclub, run by the Americans and called the Rio Grande, was in the cellar of a building that had suffered a lot of bomb damage. It was hot down there and noisy and smoke-filled, and they shared a long table with three GIs. There was a saxophonist and a piano player and a drummer. The lieutenant general offered Gudrun and Natalia cigarettes. Major Stevens brought a plate of food to the table, flat bread, little dry-looking sausages.

  “Horse meat,” one of the Americans said.

  “How do you know that?” someone asked.

  The American shrugged and said, What the hell, and took two sausages. A friend of his came to their table and asked Gudrun for a dance. “Yes, okay,” she said.

  Soon the others got up to dance. George Tanner asked Natalia if he could get her a drink. “No, thank you,” she said. “I’m fine.” He went to the bar and came back with a beer for himself and a glass of white wine for her. She felt annoyed and grateful at the same time. She let the glass sit there, untouched.

  “When my brother and I were young,” he said, “our parents brought us to Europe on vacation. This would have been the summer of 1921 and again in 1923. The first trip, I was thirteen—an impressionable age—and everything I saw impressed me deeply. We stayed in Paris for three weeks and then visited Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. When I finished university, I lived for a year in Paris. I wanted to see Budapest but never got there. Tell me about your life in Hungary.”

  “Well, we live in a castle. Picture a French château. That’s what it looks like. It has a cellar full of bones. Skeletons.”

  “What?” George said, laughing.

  “We grow grapes and wheat and barley and raise horses that are directly descended from the horses of Andalusia kept in the private stables of the Habsburgs in Vienna, according to my mother-in-law. In the spring, when a foal is born, my mother-in-law takes a bottle of plum wine to the stables, and she and the groomsman and the stable hands toast the health of the foal. We have a school on the estate. A kindergarten, really.”

  A fight had broken out on the dance floor. A soldier had punched another soldier in the nose, and there was a lot of blood. A crowd gathered, and men separated the combatants. A janitor with a bucket and mop was summoned to scrub the floor. The dancing went on, and the saxophonist played a solo, something dolorous, smoky, like the atmosphere. Americans held German women in their arms and drew them closer, and they kissed. It was like a film, Natalia thought. One of those Dadaist films she and Martin Becker used to like so well. Soon the camera would follow the couples out into the night. They would find a place, a room somewhere or a sheltered spot beneath a tree, to make love. All over Berlin it was like that.

  “Go on, have a dance,” Gudrun said, leaning over to touch Natalia’s arm. Gudrun was drinking crème de menthe; her mouth was green.

  * * *

  Natalia got permission from the lieutenant general to telephone Beatriz in Buenos Aires. She listened as a Spanish-speaking operator spoke to a woman Natalia didn't know, a servant, perhaps. She had a call for Beatriz Faber, the operator said to this woman, and then Beatriz was on the line.

  “Can you hear me, Mother? It’s Natalia. This is Natalia. Can you hear me?”

  “Don’t shout, please,” her mother said briskly. “Who did you say you were? You aren’t Natalia. My daughter is dead. She’s been dead for three years.”

  “Mother,” Natalia said. “I’m in Dahlem.”

  “Hold on a moment.”

  Natalia heard her mother speaking to someone.

  “Mother, for God’s sake. It’s me, Natalia.”

  “Natalia? Is it you? We thought you were dead. I had Masses said for you. Wait a minute. Zita wants to know if Miklós is with you.”

  “No, he’s not here,” Natalia said. “Mother, I need your help. Can you send me some money? I have nothing, only what I get doing laundry for the Americans.”

  “Listen, you and Miklós must get on a ship to Buenos Aires. Every day Nazis are coming to South America. Did you know that? They get as far as Spain, and someone takes their money and gets them passage on a steamer. The Rat Line. That’s what the newspapers call it.”

  “I can’t leave Berlin, not yet,” Natalia sai
d. “But I still need money.”

  She’d ask at her bank, Beatriz said. The bank would know what to do. She took the address and the telephone number where she could reach Natalia.

  “Is our house still there, in Zehlendorf? Have you seen it?”

  “Yes,” Natalia said. “It’s still there.”

  “Now listen to me. I will send money, but you must use it to come here. You and Miklós. You have to promise me, right now.”

  “Yes, I promise.”

  Beatriz kept her word. She telephoned to let Natalia know she had to open an account at the Deutsche Bank. The Deutsche Bank operated under the authority of the United States Department of the Treasury, and George vouched for her, providing proof of her identity, her address, and employment. When the funds were deposited in the new account, he drove her to the bank and stood at her side as she completed the paperwork.

  She withdrew some cash and later gave some of it, nearly half, to the priest at a bombed church in Berlin.

  * * *

  Natalia was in the laundry room, measuring bleach into the washing machine, her face turned away to avoid the fumes, when Lieutenant General Tanner appeared at the door and said he’d like to speak to her. George, she meant. They had graduated to first-name terms.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Not here. In my office,” he said. He held the door open, waiting. She screwed the top back on the bleach bottle and put it on a shelf. She removed her apron and hung it on a hook near the sink. In his office, the lieutenant general sat on the edge of his desk. He fiddled with the glass skull and then put it down on the papers. Another man came in and was introduced to her as Nigel Thorpe, a British newspaperman with the Manchester Guardian. What is going on here? Natalia thought. She watched as Nigel Thorpe placed a satchel on the floor near the hearth.

  George Tanner cleared his throat. “Frau Andorján,” he said. “Frau Andorján, your husband, Count Andorján, died on or about April 5, as a result of a motor vehicle accident, on a road near a village on the Polish side of the Oder River.”

  Nigel Thorpe picked up his satchel and withdrew from it a bulky envelope. He came over to Natalia and gave it to her. She opened the envelope, which was unsealed. Inside there was a wallet, which she took out and opened. It contained two items: her husband’s press card and a photograph of Natalia.

  Two GIs were clattering down the hall. One said, “Man, it cost me forty bucks and two packs of cigarettes for a bottle of whiskey, can you believe it?”

  Major Stevens closed the door.

  Nigel Thorpe said he’d met a Russian journalist at a café in Berlin. The Russian told him of being in a village in Poland near the Oder River. He’d witnessed an accident. The Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov, had moved in with his unit, and there was a lot of activity. The weather was bad, and a truck skidded on a patch of snow and ice and hit a man walking on the road. He died instantly. He was identified by the press card in his wallet. Some of the villagers buried him. They gave his coat and wallet to a priest, and the priest gave the wallet to the Russian journalist, who was on his way to Berlin, thinking he might meet someone there who knew the owner of the press card.

  Natalia slipped the photograph into her pocket. She left the wallet and the envelope on the desk and walked out of the room. She went through the kitchen and out to the garden. She took the photograph out of her pocket. She was nineteen, in a beaded shawl and long skirt, in Trieste. The city that sheltered us. She refused to cry; the wallet in itself was hardly conclusive. For fifteen years she had been married to a newspaperman. She knew what gave a report veracity, and this report of an accident involving her husband had, she told herself, no veracity.

  Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world. That was Pascal, she thought.

  She wouldn’t let Gudrun or anyone else offer sympathy. She was okay, she kept repeating, until she was sick of the words. She just wanted to get on with the laundry.

  * * *

  When he got home to the States, Mike Rose said, he was going to tune up his Chevrolet and trade it in for a new car, a Buick. Not new, but newer than the Chevy. He talked about his kids, the one who did well in the school, and the one who liked sports better than studying. She knew he was trying to distract her, and she was grateful, because sometimes it worked. They were all very kind to her. George told her they were hiring someone to take over the laundry. She admitted that, yes, she got tired, and she had burned her hand once, clumsily, on the iron, but she would rather do the laundry than sit alone with her thoughts. Did they want her to leave? she asked.

  “No, we don’t want you to leave,” George said. “Of course not. Why would we?” As it happened, he said, he needed an assistant in his office. Would she be interested? He needed someone to proofread and type up articles that were to be translated from English to German, for publication in the U.S. Army’s German-language newspaper, Neue Zeitung. Yes, she would like to type up those articles, she said; she would like to give it a try at least. George smiled and said, when she was ready, they would get started, then.

  * * *

  The new laundress was Martha, a seventeen-year-old with a pallid face and gray eyes, hostile eyes; she never smiled. Martha didn’t like Natalia, and Natalia didn’t care for Martha, but it was almost refreshing to encounter something no more lethal than ordinary human antipathy. The new cook, Helga, was brisk and efficient. Helga’s twenty-year-old son had been killed at Stalingrad in 1943. Her husband had been blinded by a shell explosion at Verdun in 1918.

  Natalia was beginning to learn of events in Hungary during the last year of the war. In October the regent, Miklós Horthy, had tried to negotiate an armistice with the Allies. The Nazis then kidnapped his son, locked Horthy up in Bavaria, where he remained imprisoned, and placed the fascist Arrow Cross Party in control of Hungary. This gave Hitler what he was desperate to get hold of: the oil fields near Lake Balaton. It allowed Eichmann to begin the brutal mass transportation of Hungarian Jews to concentration camps. She heard from the Americans about the siege of Budapest. The Hungarians and the Russians fought the Waffen-SS on the streets of Budapest and the Luftwaffe and the Soviet air force carried on relentless bombing campaigns. The civilian population sought refuge in the caves beneath Buda Castle, which had been equipped with a functional hospital staffed with doctors and nurses. Food became scarce, down there in the caves, by the end, and people were starving. God knows how many died during the siege. She remembered Max Nagy and wondered whether he’d survived.

  She rinsed her teacup in the sink and went to the sitting room, where George was at his desk. He lit a cigarette and handed her a folder full of newspaper articles.

  She sat at the typewriter and got to work, proofreading stories that had been translated from English to German. She recognized propaganda when she read it. George said it was called reeducation, not propaganda. Newspapers, Miklós always said, had an obligation to use their power responsibly, because truth and lies could be equally persuasive in print, if presented with authority. The same message repeated in the newspaper, in the editorial column, and on the front page began to seem true, even if untrue and completely without merit.

  “Germany was a liberal democracy before Hitler, you know,” she said to George Greaves. “Even before the Weimar Republic, Bismarck brought in accident insurance, medical insurance, laws protecting workers’ rights. People here aren’t as uninformed as you think.”

  “They aren’t uninformed, but they’re traumatized,” he said.

  “Not so traumatized they won’t sneer at propaganda,” she said.

  He raised an eyebrow at her.

  On one side there was democracy and on the other communism, he said. Truman and Stalin each had a corner of Germany in his hands, and they were pulling hard in opposing directions.

  “The Americans should feed people, then, instead of starving them,” Natalia said. “The Russians are shipping food to Berlin, meat and grain and vegetables. They bake f
resh bread every day and give it out free. Eisenhower is saying Germans should be punished by going hungry. Do you see the difference? You know what Stalin says? He says dictators like Hitler come and go, but the German people will remain forever. That, frankly, is what people want to hear.”

  Silence from George. And then he said, mildly, “I expect you’re right.”

  She bent over her work. The typewriter was a Mercedes. Miklós owned both a Mercedes typewriter and a Mercedes car, not quite as grand or as new as the one the lieutenant general drove. She liked the Bugatti, but it was old, an old car. It ran sometimes, and sometimes the motor seized up. She was a sedate driver, very cautious. She had to be, because her husband wasn’t a good passenger. Keep your hands on the steering wheel, he kept saying. Don’t go so fast, he said. I’m not, she said. It had been what now, three years since she had driven a car, and that was on the day she left the castle to meet Miklós in Prague. She rested her hands in her lap, remembering.

  “Are you all right?” George said.

  Why did he and everyone else assume she was in mourning? Anxiety, she felt. Worry wore away at her nerves, it was true, but it was not the same as grief. She had no reason to grieve. Every day in Berlin, in Germany, everywhere in Europe, people were climbing out of cellars and attics after years of hiding. Soldiers walked for miles across muddy, ravaged fields, crossing borders obliterated by war. Somehow they survived, and at length, perhaps at the exact moment they were giving up—at that moment—they encountered a cousin, perhaps even a wife, a husband, or their own beloved child among hundreds of children at a refugee camp. The newspaper the Americans published was full of such inspirational accounts. James Grant, who went to the camps, said he’d witnessed these reunions himself.

  George picked up his attaché case. He was going to the officers’ mess at the Grosser Wannsee, he said, and would see her later.