Midnight Train to Prague

by Carol Windley

  “We could give her money for a rest cure at a sanatorium.”

  “Natalia, here’s the thing. Money isn’t like eggs, where you can give your neighbor three out of your dozen, so she can bake a cake. It is more like the Eiffel Tower, which can rise a long way into the air only because of a solid foundation. If the last few years have taught me anything, it is to build a carefully structured edifice out of secure investments and then leave it alone.”

  “How is money real,” Natalia said, “if it can’t be made use of?”

  “Believe me, it’s real.” Beatriz handed Natalia the postcard and asked her to run it downstairs to the front desk. “In any case, you’re helping Julia by going for walks with her, and I helped her by arranging a consultation with Dr. Heilbronn. He listened to her chest and took an X-ray. ‘It is not asthma or bronchitis,’ he said. ‘It is pulmonary tuberculosis, at a more advanced stage than the doctors in Berlin led you to believe, Frau Brüning.’ He said a year at a sanatorium at Davos or somewhere like that was indeed the best treatment, but whether Julia takes his advice or not is, frankly, up to her. She and her husband are not destitute. It is a matter of priorities, isn’t it?”

  “What about our priorities?” Natalia said. Beatriz did not reply. On her way through the lobby, Natalia gave the clerk at the front desk the postcard and a letter she’d written to Margot Brückner, who was her closest, and perhaps only, friend in Zehlendorf. As soon as she was outside, walking beside the lake, she wanted to go back and retrieve the letter from the clerk. Lake Hévíz is lovely, she had written,

  but to be honest, I wish I were spending the summer at home and going sailing with you and Hermann on the Grosser Wannsee. It is beautiful here, but everyone seems to be convalescing from some nervous or physical disorder and taking life very slow. I have made friends with someone, but she is quite ill with consumption and needs to rest a lot. Margot, something strange has happened to me. I saw my father on the train to Prague. I mean, I really did see him, after believing he’d died when I was an infant. He passed away on the train, of a heart attack, I believe. The kind of thing that happens only on the screen or in novels happened to me in real life. I’m still trying to understand, but I will never understand. Margot, you will have to keep this news to yourself. I hope you’re well. I miss you and I am sending you my blessings and also please give my regards to your parents and your brother.

  She walked as far as a birch grove and threw the sweater she’d brought with her on the grass and kicked off her shoes. She was Odette, in Swan Lake, dancing beside a lake formed by her mother’s tears; she was Odile, the witch, pirouetting, which was not easy on uneven ground. Someone was standing on the lakeshore, maybe thirty-five meters away. He was watching her. Even in the indistinct light she recognized Count Andorján. A match flared as he lit a cigarette. She stepped back, into the trees. Had he seen her? Like a detective in one of Beatriz’s favorite mystery novels, she had put two and two together and had come up with a not implausible theory. First, Count Andorján was the owner of a motorcar. This was not mere speculation. She had seen him parking it on the road behind the Hotel Meunier. It was blue, low-slung, with racy lines, tall silver wheels, and identical to the one she’d glimpsed from the train, near Leipzig. The second clue was that the count and Fräulein Kuznetsova very much resembled the car’s occupants. Why should she be surprised? Natalia thought. Since leaving Berlin, nothing in her life seemed to make sense.

  The count was smoking a cigarette and contemplating the path of moonlight on the water. She gathered up her shoes and sweater and ran to the hotel and up to her room, where she flung open the window and leaned out, the air cool on her face. She could hear the orchestra members in the pavilion talking as they gathered up their instruments.

  The girls at the convent would think Count Andorján handsome; they would have crushes on him. He was handsome, undeniably, but he looked as if he never slept, his hair straggled over his collar, and his teeth were stained from smoking. Still, he had such a nice nose, a beautiful mouth, and when they were alone in the conservatory, she had seen lovely, mysterious glints of gold in his brown eyes. His gaze was warm, sympathetic. He wrote novels, and wrote for newspapers and knew everything that was going in the world. Perhaps he was as famous as Joseph Roth, whose feuilletons she had read in the Neue Berliner Zeitung and in the Frankfurter Zeitung, when she came across that paper. Last year she’d read a feuilleton by Joseph Roth in which he’d captured a newspaper reader’s personality completely by describing his eyes as being, for a moment, shy and mouselike. She had never forgotten that. Count Andorján was nearly as well-known as Joseph Roth; he was an intellectual and would not have taken any notice of her dancing beside the lake, and if he had, he’d think nothing of it. Anyway, she told herself, it was unlikely they’d meet again, at Lake Hévíz or anywhere else.

  Then, several days later, on a Sunday morning, after she and her mother had been to an early Mass in Hévíz, Beatriz mentioned having sent Count Andorján and Fräulein Kuznetsova an invitation to dinner at their hotel next Friday evening.

  “We don’t know them,” Natalia protested.

  “You’ve met them, Julia knows them, and Herr Doktor Heilbronn says he’s read every one of Count Andorján’s books. Besides, they are the most interesting people here, and I would like to meet them.”

  That afternoon, Fräulein Kuznetsova left a telephone message at the front desk, saying she and Count Andorján would be delighted to join Frau Faber and her daughter at dinner.

  Beatriz reserved a table near a window and ordered fresh flowers for the centerpiece. When the evening arrived, she sat for ages at the dressing table in her room, trying to fix a Cartier bandeau to her hair to her satisfaction, and they were late going down to the lobby, where Fräulein Kuznetsova and Count Andorján were waiting. Natalia introduced her mother to the count and Fräulein Kuznetsova, who kissed Beatriz’s cheek and said, “What a pleasure to meet you, and what a delectable gown, Frau Faber.” “Coco Chanel,” Beatriz said, turning around to demonstrate the genius of a gown composed of two panels of light blue silk falling straight from her shoulders. Fräulein Kuznetsova’s dress, a wisp of ecru-colored silk, had rows of smocking on the elbow-length sleeves. Her dark hair was piled up on her head; her only jewelry was small crystal earrings. Natalia hated her childish pink silk nothing of a dress, which had a wide silk sash that kept coming untied. In the dining room, Fräulein Kuznetsova suggested they dispense with Teutonic formality and use first names. Beatriz agreed happily. The waiter filled their wine glasses. Beatriz and Count Andorján decided on the roasted game hen; Fräulein Kuznetsova chose a mushroom pilaf, and Natalia asked for chicken with asparagus.

  Miklós was teaching her to drive, Zita said. “Men want you to believe it’s difficult, driving a car, but it’s not. I’m learning fast, aren’t I, Miklós? Every woman should learn.”

  “As long as there are trains, and they can take me where I want to go, I am happy to travel on them,” Beatriz said. “I read in a newspaper that an English airliner now serves a complete dinner to its passengers. A strong stomach would be an asset, if not a prerequisite, don’t you think? And they’re predicting that in a few years’ time there will be regular commercial flights between Europe and America. It really is a new age, isn’t it?”

  “It is, but haven’t we always dreamt of taking to the skies? When I was a child,” Zita said, “I saw paintings with an unusual perspective, as if the artist were sitting on a cloud. Fields of flowering flax, the tips of Siberian spruce, rivers winding through the steppe, tiny babushkas in headscarves holding children by their hands, children with their mouths hanging open, every detail miniaturized and yet precisely captured. These paintings were the work of a monk whose spirit left his body and flew around the sky. When he returned to his body, he painted what he’d seen on small blocks of wood. To possess one of his paintings brought happiness and a long life. So it was believed.”

  “An enchanting story,” Beatriz said.


  “In Russia—this is another Russian story, also concerning levitation,” the count said. “In Russia, animals and inanimate objects were so infected with revolutionary fervor they became unanchored from the ground. Entire buildings, churches, factories, apartment blocks. You could see them hovering above the frozen Moskva River. Empty overcoats and walking sticks and pet dogs flew about like birds. This phenomenon lasted for months, throughout the winter of 1917 and well into the spring of 1918.”

  “It had nothing to do with the tsar’s liberated wine cellars, I’m sure,” Beatriz said, laughing.

  Natalia said, “The revolution wasn’t really like that, though, was it? Not for everyone. People suffered, didn’t they? The tsar and tsarina and their children were murdered.”

  “Yes,” Count Andorján said. “The murders were an act of brutality.”

  “The revolution was ruthless,” Zita said. “But it was necessary. It was mandated by history.”

  “My late husband’s family was Russian, on his mother’s side,” Beatriz said. “I was born in the Argentine and one day, it is my hope, I will return there. As I get older, I believe more and more that it’s important to rediscover your origins, in order to know who you are.”

  “I can never go back to Petrograd,” Zita said. “Stalin would have me thrown into a labor camp.”

  Later, in her room, Beatriz removed her Cartier bandeau and rubbed at the mark it had left on her forehead. Count Andorján obviously adored Zita Kuznetsova, but she did not feel the same way about him, she said. “What makes you think that?” Natalia said. “People give themselves away,” Beatriz said. “The expression in the eyes, the way the mouth is held, the shoulders, the hands, everything reveals a person’s true inner thoughts.”

  Chapter Six

  On a narrow dirt road south of Hévíz, Miklós stopped the Bugatti and changed places with Zita. He cautioned her that the engine was powerful, and the car had a tendency to oversteer. This, he said, is the speedometer, this is the oil pressure gauge, this adjusts the idling speed, this is for the carburetor jets. She waved him away, saying that a child could manage this machine. “I have found my métier, Miklós,” she said. “I want never to stop driving. Like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we’ll girdle the earth in forty minutes. What do you say, Miklós?”

  “I say, keep your eyes on the road.” If he asked her to slow down, she sped up. If he said turn right, she veered left. He gripped the passenger-side door and held on. The wind brought tears to his eyes; the Bugatti’s motor coughed and missed a beat or two, then settled down. They passed a roadside religious shrine and a scattering of cottages. Three boys ran out of a yard and began throwing rocks at the Bugatti. Miklós half-stood and shouted at them. “This is not the time to slow down,” he said to Zita. She stepped on the accelerator. “No harm done, Miklós, they’re just boys. It’s a game to them, nothing personal. Sit down, would you, before you get hurt.”

  A few kilometers on, she stopped the car and pulled over to the side of the road. This, she said, was where they would have lunch, in this pretty place, so pristine, the sky a silk canopy. She laughed. “I’m joking, it’s just a field some landowner has forgotten he owns and let go wild.”

  They climbed down a shallow embankment, and he trampled the grass smooth before spreading out the plaid rug he’d brought from the car. Zita knelt and undid the leather straps on the picnic hamper the hotel kitchen had prepared for them. She took out plates, utensils, vacuum jars of cold chicken and cucumber in sour cream, chilled butter, olives, a loaf of bread. He uncorked the wine. “To vacations,” Zita said, raising her glass.

  He had returned late the previous night from two days spent with his mother. Within an hour of his arrival, he told Zita, his mother had ordered two horses saddled up, so that they could ride around the estate. She had pointed out recent improvements, including a new artesian well, an expansion to the vineyard, a refurbished horse barn. From memory she gave him the annual net proceeds from the sale of milk and butter, mutton, field crops, grapes, and the sale of two of her prize Andalusian horses. She reminded him that the estate was not a trivial enterprise; it required constant oversight. At her age, she couldn’t carry on alone indefinitely. Did he want his land to fall into disrepair, end up on the auction block? Not only the people they employed, but the entire village, depended on him, she had said, jabbing his arm with the handle of her riding crop.

  “She is blackmailing you,” Zita said.

  “No, no, she’s entitled to think of me as a disappointment.”

  His mother had prepared his favorite meal for dinner: spicy gulyás, and fogas, which the fishmonger in the village had guaranteed had been caught that morning in Lake Balaton. With the fish, they had noodles, floury potato scones, asparagus in cheese sauce. And after, dessert: mákos guba, bread pudding with crème anglaise and poppy seeds. Every ingredient, with the exception of the poppy seeds, which were supplied by the greengrocer in the village, and the Lake Balaton fogas, had been grown or produced on their land, his mother emphasized, as she refilled their wineglasses with wine made from grapes picked in their own vineyard. She uncorked a new bottle. When it was empty, she produced a decanter of plum brandy. She outdrank him and remained lucid and sober. At this, Zita laughed. He did not repeat the exchange that had followed between him and his mother, who had said, “You are still with that Russian woman?”

  “Her name is Zita,” he had replied.

  “I know her name. She has the same name as our Empress Zita. That should mean something to her.”

  “I’m not sure it does.”

  “Nevertheless,” his mother said, “I will pray for her.”

  The kitchen had smelled of beeswax, wild thyme, and something else. Vanilla beans, dried rosemary. The scents of his childhood.

  Before he went to bed that night, his mother had asked him to look at a damp patch on the wall in the second-floor hall. “What I can’t understand is why the dampness should be here and not nearer the floor or the ceiling. It’s odd, isn’t it?” She had pressed her fingers to the wall. “Feel it yourself. It’s soft, like clay.”

  He had scratched the spot with his thumbnail and had felt something, or nothing. He would hire a carpenter to come in and inspect it, he said, and she had demanded to know when that would be. Soon, he said. This summer, his mother said, before the harvest. And you will need to be here, she said. You cannot hire a carpenter and oversee the work from Berlin.

  “That was what she said, then, and later, when I was getting ready to leave.”

  “You are a journalist, not a house builder,” Zita said.

  He closed his eyes and saw an afterimage of brilliant green sky and red grass. He dug his fingers into the soil, the soil of Hungary.

  In 1925, he remembered, he had taken Zita to meet his mother for the first and, as it turned out, the only time. It was autumn, the days clear and cold. His mother had arranged a hunt, inviting the village doctor and his wife to take part, along with Vladimír, his mother’s groom, and a count and countess who lived in Budapest but were also local landowners. On the hunt Zita had shot an eight-point stag that stood transfixed as she took aim, as if it understood the inevitability of its demise. The stag was removed from the forest on a pallet pulled by a team of dogs. That was how his mother did things: in the manner of her father and his father before him. The village butcher arrived on horseback, bringing his knives and whetstones. On the last night they had dined on venison. In the dining hall, the table lit by tall white candles in ornate silver and pewter candelabra, Zita and his mother discussed horses and farming and village life. Then his mother said, So, Miss Kuznetsova, I understand you are a Communist. And are you also an atheist? Zita had replied that she remained committed to reform. Radical reform, she had added, smiling sweetly. As an infant she had been baptized in the Orthodox Church, she said, although it was some time since her last confession. He had hoped his lover and his mother would like each other. But there was something between them—not jus
t a lack of sympathy but outright antipathy. A mismatch of personalities. He had told himself this would change, and if not, if he had to make a choice between them, it would be Zita. What he hadn’t realized then, was that Zita would never ask him to choose.

  When they had finished lunch, Zita dusted crumbs off her hands, took a last swallow of wine, and said she’d read the manuscript of his new novel, which she had brought with her to Lake Hévíz. “It’s very autobiographical, isn’t it?”

  “Not at all,” he said. “It is entirely fictitious.”

  “Well, whatever it is, it will do. Every woman will see herself as the heroine, Inessa. Did you name her for Lenin’s lover, Inessa Armand?”

  “No. I don’t think so. Does it matter?” He loosened his collar. While he was at the castle, Zita had had her hair cut. It fell in glossy curls around her face. The new look suited her—it made her eyes seem even more extraordinarily blue and lively. But he missed her messy chignon and the tortoiseshell combs that kept it precariously in place. He loved this woman. He loved her; he adored her mind, body and spirit. He delighted in her presence. He moved to embrace her; she drew away. “Wait, Miklós,” she said. “I’m talking. In your novel, a Hungarian nobleman goes to Russia in 1919, meets a Russian girl, a comrade, and kidnaps her, with minimal resistance on her part. This girl, Inessa, gets taken by the nobleman to his castle in Hungary, where he imprisons her in a crypt, an ossuary filled with the bones of the dead. Frightened, alone, with only one candle for light, she believes the skulls are gabbling to her in their diverse languages. After a few days and nights of this, she fears for her sanity. Her jailer brings her food and water. Why is she being so difficult? he keeps asking, when she know he wants only to marry her and make her happy. Meanwhile, his archrival, a young Hungarian Communist who, correct me if I’m wrong, bears a strong resemblance to Comrade Béla Kun, has tracked him down and challenged him to a duel, as a result of which our hero suffers a flesh wound in his arm. Weakened by blood loss, he is helped to the castle by his opponent, who, having salvaged his pride, rides off on his horse. Inessa, released from the dungeon, bandages our hero’s arm with a poultice of dock leaves and mustard. When he recovers, he sees her not as an obstinate girl who must be subdued but as his equal. And his life appears to him as less durable and robust than he had believed, but precious and of great value. And there is a wedding. Isn’t that how it goes?”