Midnight Train to Prague

by Carol Windley

  This morning Zita took Miklós to her office at a publishing house and to have lunch with friends of hers: journalists and newspapermen and other writers. Natalia worries that Miklós will overtire himself. He needs to conserve his strength, and to do that, she thinks, he should not immerse himself in the political discussions Zita and her colleagues engage in for hours at a time. Natalia knows; she’s been to one of these lunches. She understands, sympathizes with people who feel they’re under siege. In fact, they are under siege, as Perón attacks newspapers, publishing houses.

  “It doesn’t matter what hemisphere you’re in, what country,” Zita says, “it begins with censorship of the press, doesn’t it?” Perón admired Mussolini and Hitler and had allowed Nazi war criminals to find refuge in Argentina. Sometimes, in a shop or on the street, Natalia hears someone speaking German and stares, wondering whether the man buying a bag of apples or walking with his wife is one of them. Whether he held a gun, ordered men, women, children into cattle cars, slammed and bolted doors, authorized executions, beat people to death. It sickens her. But that’s how it is. That’s the world she lives in. All she wants to do is go home. She misses Rozalia, and so does her son, who a few days ago collapsed in a tearful rage on the living room floor and cried, “Wo ist meine Oma Rozzi?” Where is she? he kept saying. He can’t pronounce Rozalia; it comes out “Rozzi,” and so that’s what Natalia and Miklós call his mother too.

  Franz’s tears upset Beatriz, who likes to think she’s his favorite grandmother. He has no trouble saying my name, she says. She comforts him with a dish of ice cream, bribes him with promises of playgrounds, shopping, the cinema. Stay a while longer, she says to Natalia and Miklós.

  One day, at the lunch table, Beatriz says, “Zita and I are thinking of going back to Germany. We have a good life here, but times change, don’t they? Then there’s inflation. Land values go up and down, mostly down; you can’t possibly second-guess Argentina’s economy. Or any economy,” she added, helping herself to a triangular crabmeat sandwich from a plate Desirée places in front of her. “The villa needs repairs,” Beatriz says. “It’s falling down around us.”

  “It will last for centuries,” Zita says.

  “Why not stay an extra week or two?” Zita says to Miklós.

  Miklós thanks her and says they’d like to, very much, but can’t leave his mother alone any longer.

  “She has Hildegard,” Beatriz says.

  Hildegard survived the Allied bombing of Hamburg and came back to Zehlendorf to help Natalia with Franz, and now it’s Rozalia she’s looking after. Trudy is in Poland with her husband and children. During the war, Erich Saltzman went into hiding in the home of a wealthy widow, and now he and the widow are married.

  Natalia sees that her mother is on the edge of tears.

  “We’ll come to see you soon, then,” Beatriz says, wiping her nose on her table napkin. “Zita still has a phobia about crossing the Atlantic by ship, but she enjoyed our flight to New York last year, didn’t you, Zita? I think it’s irrational to feel safer flying than on a ship. If a ship goes down, there are at least lifeboats.”

  Natalia thought being in the Americas would mean she could fly to Seattle, but a travel agent told her the distance is six thousand nautical miles, over eleven thousand kilometers, and would take almost two days each way. It would be better to fly to New York from Berlin and then fly to Seattle, the way Anna did in 1945. She would love to see Anna. She mailed her father’s art portfolio to her. She remembers the house in the Golden Lane, the tarot cards; every day, and this is true, every day she remembers Dr. Schaefferová.

  “Come, sit with Tante Zita,” Zita says, holding out her arms. This is after lunch. Beatriz is in the kitchen, talking to Maria about dinner. Zita sits Franz on her knee and reads Curious George books to him.

  A few days ago, Zita said to Natalia, “Franz looks so much like Krisztián. The resemblance startles me sometimes.”

  Her words hurt Natalia, who had looked away. “Yes,” she had said. She got up and walked out into the garden, where Desirée was just coming back through the iron gate in the garden wall, carrying a tray covered with a napkin, the remains of Professor Dray’s midday meal.

  Franz has his father’s dark hair and gold-flecked brown eyes. He has her pale skin and dislikes the sun hat she makes him wear. She keeps squashing it down firmly on his head, and he keeps pulling it off and throwing it on the ground. Only if she tells him it makes him look like an explorer will he acquiesce and then only for a limited time. He is interested in insects and in the solar system. When they first arrived in Buenos Aires, Miklós showed him the Río de la Plata, the widest river in the world. “It shines like silver,” Miklós said, “and that is why it is named the Río de la Plata.” Franz was interested to know that his Oma’s cook, Maria, sometimes cooks for them fish that used to swim in the Río de la Plata. Natalia tells him about the carp his namesake, Franz Schaeffer, caught in the Vltava. And how Magdolna cooked trout caught fresh daily in Lake Balaton. She tells him the Danube is the longest river in Europe, flowing from its source in Bavaria through Hungary to the Black Sea. A tributary of the Danube runs past the house where he was born. She tells him how mountain streams in the Erzgebirge can turn into dangerous torrents and how his father once saved Tante Zita’s life when she almost drowned.

  “Zita drowned?” Franz says.

  “No. Your papa saved her,” Natalia says.

  On that day, Natalia thinks but does not say, on that same day, Franz’s grandfather died on the train to Prague. Miklós says she must tell Franz; she owes it to her son not to conceal the truth. The truth, strangely, is that here in Argentina she often thinks of Alfred Faber. In the bedroom where she and Miklós are sleeping, she woke and saw someone standing beside the bed, staring at her. She gasped and sat up, waking Miklós, who said no one was there, she was dreaming.

  In bright sun the villa casts a deep, precisely outlined shadow over the garden. As Natalia walks into this shadow to get out of the bright sun, a figure seems to appear on the balcony above her. Slim, delicate, inquisitive Fräulein Hoffman. Natalia feels as if she knew her, grew up with her, listened to her lessons on anatomy and taxonomy. In the library, Beatriz showed her the governess’s writing table, collecting jars, scalpels, spirit lamp. The governess’s resentment at this intrusion casts a small fiery light on the wall, stirs cold ashes in the fireplace.

  Beatriz is sitting on the edge of the fountain, watching Franz sail a toy boat. Beatriz gave him the boat. She spoils him and says she is really spoiling herself, because she loves buying him things. Toys, clothes, anything, everything. “Franz,” she says, holding out her arms. “Give Oma a kiss.” The boat bumps against the fountain’s stone rim, and Franz gives it a gentle push to safety. The water splashes; the toy boat rocks unsteadily, nearly capsizes, but settles on the water as if it were sailing on the broad surface of the Río de la Plata.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  What Anna learned was this: her memories were part of her, rooted and immutable, like her eye color, the shape of her hands, her predilection for dark chocolate and piano music. It would happen like this: at a grocery store while picking up a quart of milk and a loaf of bread, in the lab preparing plant material for microscopy, on a corner waiting for a bus, she would see a face, an apparition startling in its clarity, all sharp angles, skin paper-thin, parchment-colored, and she’d think: I know you. I am you.

  Sometimes she dreamed she was at home, in Malá Strana, and the fortune-teller appeared, her pale hair shining in the moonlight. Rain glistened on the cobblestones. A cat ran past, a rat in its jaws. Lines of washing hung, damp, motionless, already grimy with coal dust. Broken windows, shards of glass on the street. Ragged children tossed a ball back and forth.

  Life begins and ends in rivers, the fortune-teller said. There are gods that do not love us, she said.

  Anna remembers those dreams. When she first came to Seattle to live with the Grants, she had the same dream night after ni
ght, and often she would wake feeling lethargic, numb. She forgot where she was and walked into walls, tripped, dropped glasses on the kitchen floor, and Mrs. Grant said not to worry and cleaned up the pieces. She would go to her room and shut the door, to avoid Mr. and Mrs. Grant’s concern, their desire to help. She must talk, they said, she mustn’t keep things bottled up inside. Would she consider seeing a doctor? A psychiatrist, they meant. But she didn’t want to talk if it meant relinquishing her memories, because without them, she was nothing.

  She remembers her mother playing the piano and singing. Včernym lese ptaček zpiva. “In the black wood a little bird is singing.” Anna loved that song and always asked for another one. She asked her mother to sing “The Maiden and the Grass.” A maiden is gathering grass in a field. She fills her arms with grass because it is so fresh and green and sweet-smelling. I can’t stop myself, she cries, half laughing, to her lover.

  In her head, Anna hears Dvořák’s Mnĕ zdálo se, zes umřela. “I dreamed last night that you were dead.” The song goes on, in her mother’s beautiful, soft voice. In my dreams you were dead, and I heard the death bells. Anna wants to listen, but she is going to die from this song. In the last verse, she remembers, a stone speaks from a grave.

  Saxa loquuntur: the stones speak. The stones speak, but Anna is silent.

  * * *

  After the war, Anna’s aunt Vivian wrote to her in America. She saved the letters, a year’s worth, and when she felt she could at last reply without being overwhelmed by her emotions, she wrote back. She apologized for not replying sooner and said the letters were wonderful, they were a lifeline. She meant it. She tried to give the impression she was not unhappy, which was true. In time, she found the courage to ask whether her house had survived the war and what it looked like now. Aunt Vivian replied that, yes, her house was there, although following the election of the Communists in 1948, it had been divided into apartments. A factory foreman and his wife and their two children lived there, and a young couple, both teachers in the music faculty at the university. A Communist Party functionary occupied a suite of rooms on the second floor. A librarian lived on the third floor with two dachshunds left behind by their former owner, a German dentist, when he’d fled Prague.

  On her way home from her millinery shop, Aunt Vivian wrote, she often met the librarian out walking the dentist’s sausage dogs. The librarian, who looked scarcely out of her teens, wore a shapeless wool coat and lace-up shoes. Her eyes were red-rimmed from the cold weather. Or from loneliness. Who didn’t suffer from it these days? The librarian had a litany of complaints: the music teachers played their piano late at night, with no consideration for anyone; the factory foreman let his children rampage on the staircase; a smell of cooking came from an open window: boiled fish, scorched potatoes; and worst of all, the party functionary, the official, whatever he was, had a grudge against her because dachshunds were a German breed of dog. Wasn’t that crazy? What did a little dog know of war?

  The lovely old chestnut tree in the front garden had been cut down, Aunt Vivian regretted having to say, leaving a strange, empty place without shadows, without softness, if Anna knew what she meant.

  The onionskin paper her aunt wrote on carried the scent of Prague: lilacs, factory smoke, river water in summer. If only you were here, Aunt Vivian wrote, I would be happy.

  Come to America, Anna suggested in a letter to Aunt Vivian, who was not her aunt but her great-aunt and had been born in Chicago; why shouldn’t she come back?

  Dearest child, Aunt Vivian replied, her life was in Prague. All her memories were there and her friends and her shop. Besides, at her age, how could she start over?

  Even now, in her seventies, Aunt Vivian kept her millinery shop open. Under Communism, she said, she designed plainer, more serviceable hats of fabric tough as asbestos, and they sold surprisingly well to the wives of Soviet officials.

  Anna, who rarely wore a hat, wished she owned at least one of her aunt’s creations. Something dashing, pre-Communist, in velvet, with a little dotted veil.

  Why had the tree been cut down? She had loved that tree. Every autumn she had gathered the chestnuts that fell to the ground and carried a basketful to the kitchen, and Sora made the Italian cake and sometimes marron glacé, which Anna’s mother loved.

  Anna considered writing to Natalia, but she didn’t have an address, and so she bought school exercise books at a drugstore and wrote in those. When she’d filled every page of one book, she began another. They were for her, these books; more than for Natalia, even if it was Natalia she addressed. She wrote:

  Are you “happy,” Natalia? I hope you are. I think I am, sometimes. In America, happiness exists; it is a constitutional right or perhaps more of an obligation.

  I study, read, take piano lessons from Mr. Grant’s sister, who teaches piano in her living room. I’m learning to roller-skate.

  Natalia, when I left that camp near Hanover, I flew on a USAF plane to New York City, and from there I flew across the continent to Seattle. It was July 9, 1945, and in America on that day there was a solar eclipse. It became cold and dark; I waited for bombs to explode, for the sound of antiaircraft fire, for a rocket to strike the plane. The stewardess cautioned me against looking directly at the sun, but I did look, and I saw the corona like a crown of thorns. Then the plane flew on into a second, dazzling awakening.

  She can write to Natalia now at a new address Aunt Vivian sent. The sight of the address in West Berlin reminds her of the months she lived beside the Kleiner Wannsee with Dr. Haffner, who wasn’t a bad person, and Frau Haffner, who was. She remembers the children. She pictures Jean-Marc in the garden, laboring in the hot sun on a wartime garden so that the Haffner family could enjoy fresh vegetables.

  Next year, she will be there, in Germany, when James takes her to see her father’s parents, her Oma and Opa in Heidelberg. She is a little afraid of the feelings the reunion will evoke, on both sides. But she has a while to prepare herself.

  A letter came from Natalia. She and her husband are well; they have a son named Franz. It gave Anna a painful start, when she saw the name. Then she thought her brother would have liked to know a child was named in his honor.

  Natalia sent Anna a parcel. Like her great-aunt’s letters, she keeps it but doesn’t open it. She knows it contains Dr. Shapiro’s manuscript and her father’s paintings of her as Marica, the resourceful princess who understood that salt could at times be valued higher than gold.

  She and Natalia continue to correspond. You’ll be interested to know, Anna tells her, in a letter, that Reina lives in Waukegan, Illinois, is studying to be a teacher, and is now an American citizen. Her friends from Prague, Ivan and Marta Lazar, live in Chicago. Ivan is working at a restaurant and taking courses at the university, in order to qualify as a teacher there. He and Marta have two children, a boy and a girl. Anna continues:

  Last summer I saw Reina, when she and Ivan and Marta drove all the way to Seattle. I hadn’t seen her since 1942 and that was more than ten years ago. She hasn’t changed, or she has, she has achieved what she wanted, a new life in the United States, and it gives her a look of serenity, of completeness, although she says she is only partly herself without Franz. To be honest, I wanted Reina to be less happy than she was. But why should I begrudge her some happiness? While they were here, James’s parents put on a barbecue for them. We stayed out after dark, with electric lights in paper lanterns and the air scented with those night-blooming flowers, phlox, I think they’re called, and always beneath the lighthearted conversations about books, movies, football, the weather, are the unsaid words of grief, the unspoken names. You know, Natalia. The names you can’t say except when you’re alone, and then only silently, and sparingly, as if you’re taking a tincture of something that could be either healing or harmful in larger doses, and you’re afraid to find out which it is.

  She almost crosses that out but leaves it.

  On the street, after walking to the mailbox, Anna is caught in a brief d
ownpour. Almost as quickly as the rain begins the clouds part, the sun shines, mist rises from the wet street, droplets of rainwater glisten on rhododendron leaves. Her heart lifts. The world is, she thinks. The world is beautiful and good. For this time, this moment, this seems to her a reliable truth. As she reaches the Grants’ house, she sees James parking his car in the driveway. He gets out and sees her. She waves, he waves back, smiling, and then he stands there, waiting.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Iris Tupholme, my editor, whose insight, warmth, and wisdom guided this book to completion. Thank you to Patrick Crean. Thank you, Julia McDowell, Noelle Zitzer, and the entire team at HarperCollins Canada.

  Heartfelt thanks to Amy Hundley at Grove Atlantic. To Savannah Johnston and Corinna Barsan, my appreciation and thanks. Thank you to the copyeditors, for their empathy and skill.

  Thank you, Tara, Mac, Darius, and Naveen, and especially thank you to my partner, Robert, for always being there, without complaint, with fresh coffee, patience, and love.

  I will never forget Ginger Barber’s enthusiasm and encouragement, or her delightful telephone calls, during the early stages of this project. I miss her. I hope that somewhere she knows the novel is, at last, finished.

  About the Author

  CAROL WINDLEY is the author of the novel Breathing Under Water and two story collections: Home Schooling, winner of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize; and Visible Light, which won the Bumbershoot/Weyerhaeuser Prize and was nominated for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award. She lives with her husband on Vancouver Island.