“A ghost in the mountains, Mother? Is that what you call the truth? When you told the girls at the convent about your governess, I remember, you said she had gone home to Swabia.”
“A happy ending, I gave poor Fräulein. But no, she did not go home to Swabia. That wasn’t what happened. For two years she was my governess. We were always together. Inga Hoffman had the palest eyes, translucent eyelashes, blond hair pulled back in a governessy bun. Her pedagogical methods were unusual. Eccentric. I thrived under her tutelage. I couldn’t sit still for two minutes, and Fräulein Hoffman had only disdain for desks and books. It was true, what I told you and the other girls. We did go on the train to Montevideo and Rosario, and we did trek out into wild places, where, I came to believe, not even Amerigo Vespucci and Pedro de Mendoza had ventured. We brought specimens home with us to a laboratory Fräulein Hoffman had set up in the library. She anesthetized the frogs and lizards with something—chloral hydrate. If not quite dead, they at least seemed mercifully unconscious when she picked up a scalpel and made the first incision. ‘Do you know, Natalia, that after excision a lizard’s heart continues to beat, or appears to beat?’ Fräulein Hoffman showed me small white scars on her fingertips, where she had burned herself on the hearts of those poor dismembered amphibians.
“I called her a witch. She slapped my face. ‘Behave like a witch and you are one,’ I said. It was true. She bewitched everyone, even my father, who blushed like a boy when he saw her. We were happy, my governess and I, and then she met someone at the German Friendship Club in Buenos Aires. His name was Johannes Winkler. He came with us when we went on our rambles. When he was with us, Fräulein Hoffman would send me off alone to search for specimens. I couldn’t wait to show her what I’d found. I ran back with a leaf, a snail still chewing on it, and there was Herr Winkler kneeling on the ground, kissing my governess’s bare legs—she’d thrown her stockings on the grass—and she was standing with her head thrown back, her eyes closed in ecstasy. I ran away. I waited and returned and found them on the grass, in the open, carrying on. I knew what they were doing. I had seen bulls mounting cows. I had seen dogs copulating in the street. I ran at them, shouting, ‘Get up, get up!’ My governess pushed Herr Winkler off and scrambled to her feet. Her small breasts looked like apricots blanched in boiling water. Her pale hair was slipping out of its pins. I kicked her and hit her with my fists and screamed: ‘Adulteress! Slut! Whore!’ Words I’d heard the cook and maids using, gossiping among themselves, when they thought I wasn’t listening.”
She saw Herr Winkler naked; she saw everything and laughed, pointing, and said she was going to tell her parents, and Fräulein Hoffman would be dismissed, and no one would employ her as a governess. Fräulein Hoffman pleaded with her, begged on her knees, and finally Beatriz relented and said she would keep quiet if Fräulein Hoffman promised never to see Herr Winkler again. Fräulein Hoffman wept, her eyes and nose streamed, she made herself pitiable. A lady would not be so blatant in her sorrow, Beatriz had thought coldly. Her father had asked: What has happened to upset your governess, Beatriz? Nothing, she said. Fräulein Hoffman grew thinner and, if possible, paler. She lost interest in collecting specimens, and sometimes fell asleep while teaching Latin or reading Faust to her. Faust!
Fräulein Hoffman never saw her homeland again. She did not return to Swabia, as Beatriz had told the girls at the convent. No, Inga Hoffman contracted yellow fever and died, at age twenty-four. At the graveside, Beatriz’s father gave her a handful of dirt to throw on the coffin, and the dry rattle of small stones on the wood made her stomach rise into her throat. But her governess was not in the coffin; she was in heaven, with the angels. The God who created beetles and lizards and frogs must Himself be very mysterious and, well—radical. He would not condemn Fräulein Hoffman for loving Johannes Winkler. Still, Beatriz felt no remorse. In her mind, Fräulein Hoffman had betrayed her and deserved to be punished.
Beatriz refused to have another governess or to attend school. She occupied her time drawing beautiful women in sumptuous gowns. She read her way through her parents’ library of travelogues from the 1800s, tedious memoirs of Wilhelmine childhoods, the lives of the saints. At thirteen, she was browsing bookshops for more stimulating material: romance novels, adventure stories, practical guides on astronomy, beekeeping, and bookkeeping, which fascinated her. She taught herself double-entry bookkeeping and began helping in the office of her parents’ exporting and wholesale business. Numbers existed as inky symbols on a page and at the same time as actual commodities mined from the earth or grown in the soil or taken to a slaughterhouse and butchered, packed in tins, and shipped across the ocean to Europe. As these commodities increased in value on the open market, the figures in her ledgers grew correspondingly bold and fat, like the biblical ears of corn. It was possible to predict how the numbers were likely to behave in the future, both on the page and in the world, she explained to her parents, who ran their fingers down the immaculate columns in the ledgers and demanded: Who taught you this? How did you come to know this?
She thought she’d made herself indispensable to them, and yet they shipped her off to Berlin, to Fritz and Liesel.
“Why are you telling me this?” Natalia said.
Did Natalia not understand? Beatriz demanded. The truth, the whole truth, was that Alfred was the only one who had ever loved her—imperfectly, but still, he had loved her. And now he was gone.
She got off the bed, letting the wet compress fall onto the rug. Natalia picked it up and took it to the sink, and when she turned, her mother came and pressed her damp cheek to Natalia’s and said she wouldn’t change anything, because she had Natalia, they had each other.
Natalia moved away.
She ran a hot bath for her mother and unpacked her nightgown, robe, and slippers, her toiletries; she remade the bed, smoothing the pillows and folding down the covers. She closed the shutters on the windows. Then she went to her own room and did not sleep all night.
* * *
Lake Hévíz, circular, sapphire blue, ringed by green lawns and birch groves, delighted Beatriz. Her room at the Hotel Magnolia had a view of the lake, a bed with a firm mattress, a bathtub she could soak in, and a vanity table that held her makeup and hairbrushes and the mask she wore at night over her eyes. There was a connecting door Natalia tried to keep closed, but Beatriz threw it open so they could talk to each other as she got dressed in the morning. She told Natalia her schedule: at nine o’clock every morning she had an appointment at the spa’s hydrotherapy pool, followed by a session with a Polish masseuse, and then, at eleven, she and the other spa patients sat on the pier and waiters rolled out tea trolleys and served herbal infusions and mineral water—stimulants like coffee and tea weren’t exactly forbidden, but they were discouraged. After lunch, she could dabble in watercolors or weave a straw basket at the craft house, if she had the patience, which she did not. She preferred to take a dip in the lake, although she was allowed only ten minutes in the water. Then she had to shower and dry off with one of the spa’s fluffy white towels. These precautions were due to the lake’s radioactive properties, which, while therapeutic, carried a minuscule risk of harm. The Vienna-trained spa doctor, Joachim Heilbronn, told her he had not personally seen any ill effects from bathing in the lake; it would do her nothing but good. Dr. Heilbronn recommended that she practice Émile Coué’s method of auto-suggestion, silently repeating, at fixed intervals, Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better. A surprisingly effective nostrum, Beatriz said. Her nerves were steadier, the headaches less severe, and she was sleeping for eight or nine hours every night. When she spoke to anyone, she referred to herself as a widow.
In the dining room at the Hotel Magnolia, Natalia and her mother shared a table with a young woman from Berlin, Frau Brüning, who wore her hair in an Eton bob and was only a few years older than Natalia. She said her doctors in Berlin had diagnosed a shadow on her lung and had ordered a rest cure of at least twelve months at a Swiss sanatorium.
But how could she endure a year away from home? And then there was the expense to consider. Her husband, Herr Brüning, owned a stationery store in Berlin, on Unter den Linden, and when one of his customers recommended Dr. Heilbronn’s clinic at Lake Hévíz, her husband had arranged everything, and here she was. “I’m determined to get well, for his sake, but every day the nurse weighs me, and I don’t seem to have gained an ounce.”
“You could try eating your breakfast,” Beatriz said, pointing her fork at Frau Brüning’s potato pancakes and sausages. “In thirty minutes,” she went on, “I have an appointment at the hydrotherapy pool, for my subaqualis tractis treatment. They suspend you in warm water, to relieve the pressure on your spine. It makes you a tiny bit taller, they tell me, although I’m as tall as I want to be. Too much height in a woman can be a detriment. Tomorrow afternoon I’m booked for a mud bath. They slather mud from the lake on you from head to toe and wrap you in wet cloths and you sit, immobilized and sweating like a pig, for forty minutes. There are also . . . ,” Beatriz said, leaning closer to Frau Brüning, “there are also internal mud treatments. They put the mud you-know-where. For gynecological purposes.”
“Oh my goodness,” Frau Brüning said.
“So far I, myself, haven’t had this . . . application—but it might be interesting to try.”
Frau Brüning stared at her uneaten breakfast for a moment. She asked whether Frau Faber and Fräulein Faber would like to walk with her one day. It would have to be in the morning, before it got hot, though, she added, and Beatriz said she also found the heat debilitating and suggested Frau Brüning might enjoy swimming. “The water would do you good, even if you just splashed around. Although I seem to spend all my time in water, and it’s very hard on the hands.”
“I’ve been told swimming would be too strenuous,” Frau Brüning said. “And my husband, Herr Brüning, made me promise not to exert myself.”
“Natalia goes for a walk every day while I’m having my treatments. Why don’t you two go together?”
“I would like that,” Frau Brüning said. “Perhaps tomorrow?”
Several days passed before Frau Brüning felt well enough to join Natalia on a stroll along a flower-lined path, past the rear of the Hotel Meunier, where they saw a man unloading wooden crates from a horse-drawn van, while a cook in an apron stood with his hands on his hips and shouted at him to watch what he was doing, four dozen cracked eggs were of no use to him. Natalia looked at Frau Brüning, and they laughed. Frau Brüning linked her arm with Natalia’s as they crossed the road to a footpath that led to a tennis court, where a fast, competitive game was going on between a man and a woman. The woman was a better player than the man, Frau Brüning said. He kept having to retrieve the ball when he missed a serve, and the woman stood with one hand on her hip, waiting for him to throw the ball back to her side of the court. Frau Brüning said he reminded her of someone, but she couldn’t think whom. When they resumed their walk, she suddenly began to run. She stopped and bent over, pressing a hand to her ribs, and said she had a pain that came and went and meant nothing but was a nuisance while it lasted. “You would never believe it,” she said, “but I used to be good at sports, especially tennis. I loved tennis.”
“You will play tennis again, Frau Brüning,” Natalia said. “I’m sure of it. But for now, let’s get out of the sun.” She could see the Hotel Meunier through the trees and suggested they have tea at the restaurant.
They were given a table beside the glass wall of a conservatory filled with lush green plants and darting, brightly colored birds. Frau Brüning shivered and said she did not like to see birds in captivity. Her grandmother had kept cats and caged birds in the same household, and as a child she had lived in terror of seeing a murder take place. This had never occurred, or if it had, she had not witnessed it, but she still couldn’t bear to be in an enclosed space with a bird. Even a little bird, a budgerigar. Her father was a Lutheran pastor, her mother taught piano, and she had an older brother, a schoolteacher in Charlottenburg. She and Heinrich lived near her family. When she was seven, she said, her parents had given her a puppy that had a bad habit of chewing on the furniture. Her father had said, let the little rascal eat the table, if it makes him happy; of what importance is a table, in the scheme of things? Her husband, Heinrich, was a good man, but as far as he was concerned, if a dog chewed the furniture, the dog would have to go. She and Heinrich had been married for two years. They wanted a family. Heinrich had borrowed money to finance her stay at Lake Hévíz; the loan would have to be repaid, whether her health improved or not. Sometimes she thought it would be better for everyone if she just wasn’t here.
“You mustn’t say that.” Natalia touched her hand.
“I can’t help thinking it, though.” She smiled. “Tell me about your family,” she said. “Did you have a grandmother who kept birds?”
“No, I never had a grandmother who kept birds, Frau Brüning,” Natalia said.
“Call me Julia, won’t you?”
“Julia.” Natalia smiled. She could see that two people had entered the conservatory and were wandering around amid the plants. The tennis players. The woman tried to entice a bird to perch on her finger. Her dark hair hung down her back in a long braid. Her companion placed a hand on the side of her face; she leaned against him and smiled up at him. This tender scene was visible to everyone in the dining room, which made Natalia blush for them.
A waiter served Natalia and Julia with iced water, tea, and croissants filled with chocolate. Julia squeezed lemon into her tea. Just when she’d felt despondent and homesick, alone at Lake Hévíz, she said, Frau Faber and her daughter had arrived. She smiled. They had done more to lift her spirits than all the doctors and nurses put together. “I’m glad,” Natalia said, and when she saw Julia’s eyes brim with tears, she said she must try the croissant. “They are deliciously chocolaty inside,” she said. “And messy.” She licked a finger and then sat up straighter. It had not occurred to her until this moment that, since she hadn’t expected to need money on the walk, she had left her purse on the bureau in her hotel room. “A calamity,” Julia said, and put her hands in her dress pockets and said she didn’t have so much as a pfennig on her. “Will we have to wash dishes until our debt is discharged?” she said, laughing, but seeing the look on Natalia’s face, she added, “I’m sorry, but it is funny, isn’t it?”
Natalia went to find their waiter, who looked at her coldly and summoned his superior, a stout man with oiled hair and a gold tooth, like a villain in the movie Dr. Mabuse the Gambler. “Oh, you young ladies,” he said. “You never think, do you?” This once, but only this once, tea was on the house, he said.
In the lobby, as they were leaving, she and Julia encountered the tennis players, who had just come out of the conservatory. Julia stopped and said, “Oh, but I do know you, don’t I? What a wonderful coincidence. You remember me, don’t you? I’m Frau Brüning. My husband owns the stationery store on Unter den Linden.” She turned to Natalia and said, “Natalia, I’d like you to meet two of my husband’s most loyal customers, Fräulein Kuznetsova and Count Andorján. This is Fräulein Faber, who is also from Berlin.”
Count Andorján smiled and bowed. Fräulein Kuznetsova said, “Miklós, did you leave the conservatory door open? Because, look, a bird has got out.”
“You were the last to leave,” Count Andorján said.
“No, it was you.” The bird flew frantically around the lobby and then perched on a picture frame before flying into the dining room. Fräulein Kuznetsova remained with Julia in the lobby, while Natalia followed the count into the dining room. He stood on a chair, trying to reach the bird. The restaurant’s manager gave Natalia a disapproving look, as if to say: “What? You again?” The bird fluttered around the blades of a ceiling fan before flinging itself at a high window and tumbling to the floor at Natalia’s feet. She bent and gently held it in her hands. Two people got up from their tables to examine the bird and give advice. Take it outside, it will reco
ver in the warm sun, said one, and the other said it had broken bones and no doubt internal injuries, better to dispatch it mercifully. Fräulein Kuznetsova came in from the lobby, stroked the bird’s head, and said it was a sweet little thing, but was that a speck of blood on its beak? Natalia carried it in her cupped hands to the conservatory. She could feel the warmth of the bird’s body, and then the small weight became limp. She opened her hands. “If I’d caught it before it flew into the window,” Count Andorján said, coming in and shutting the door behind him, “it might have had a chance.”
“It’s a finch,” Natalia said. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes, a finch,” the count said. “A linnet.”
The count took the bird from her while she dug a small cavity in a fig tree’s clay pot. When they’d buried the bird, the count brushed dirt from her fingers. “I’m sorry that happened,” he said. She took her hand back and wiped it on her dress. They stood in silence for a moment. She was aware of the exotic foliage exuding pungent vapors, the smell of damp earth, sunlight falling through the glass roof. The count said, “Rest in peace, little bird.” They went out to the lobby, where Fräulein Kuznetsova and Julia were seated on a couch near a potted palm. Fräulein Kuznetsova stood and said, “It didn’t survive? Songbirds like that, their hearts are not strong.” She said how nice it was to have met Frau Brüning and Fräulein. The count said, yes, it had been a pleasure. He shook Frau Brüning’s hand and asked that she remember him to Herr Brüning. They all wished one another well, spoke of perhaps meeting again, and Natalia and Julia walked out of the hotel into a day languid with heat, dazzling with light.
* * *
Natalia asked her mother if they could, in any way, help Julia.
“We can pray for her,” Beatriz said absently, not looking up from the postcard she was addressing to Herr Saltzman.
Midnight Train to Prague Page 6
