“They don’t seem dead, do they? You can hear their breathing, if you listen. Some died in the days of the great Magyar ruler King Árpád, or at the time of the blessed Sanctus Stephanus. They died in the civil war and in the Ottoman invasions, when half the population of Hungary perished. They died here, on our land. It says in the Bible, ‘Thy nobles shall dwell in the dust; thy people is scattered upon the mountain, and no man gathereth them.’ But my husband’s ancestors gathered up the bones. Magyar, Turk, Greek, Frenchman, and Italian alike. Men, women, and children. Christian, Jew, and Muslim.”
The candlelight made something macabre of the countess’s face. Natalia looked away. She saw an inscription in Greek on the wall and asked what it meant. The countess interpreted: “The gods cannot count and know nothing of arithmetic. Aristotle. It means you are on your own. You have to be stronger than your enemies. Do what you have to do, because life doesn’t wait around for you.
“I brought that Russian girl, Zita, here,” the countess went on. “Godless though she believed herself to be, she was trembling; she had to lean against the wall, and it was cold and damp, and that unnerved her still more. I said to her, don’t people die in Russia? Don’t Bolsheviks die? She and I did not get along. I will tell you this: if my son thinks she will marry him, he is mistaken.”
They went out of the ossuary. Rozalia turned the key in the lock and hung it on its hook. In the wine cellar she chose wine for dinner and gave the bottle to Natalia to carry up to the kitchen. When Magdolna took the wine from her, she berated the countess for taking Natalia to the ossuary. “Yes, but she wasn’t frightened, were you, Natalia?” the countess said. “She’s a brave girl. Tomorrow I will show her something nice, to atone.”
Atonement took the form of a room along a corridor from the kitchen. A room with white walls and windows that looked out on a garden of neglected topiary and stone urns. At one end of a long pine table there was a stack of accounting ledgers, and against another wall there were three filing cabinets and an escritoire. Rozalia opened a drawer in the escritoire, took out a sandalwood box, set it on the table, and lifted the lid. She removed a deck of cards wrapped in a square of green silk. “Sit,” she said. “I will read the tarot for you.”
Natalia was the querent, she said, and must ask a question of the cards.
Natalia said she was Catholic; she didn’t believe in superstition.
“I am Catholic,” Rozalia said, “and I am superstitious.
“The priest at Saint Stephen’s, Father István, would come every week to visit me. He would consume my plum brandy as if it was spring water, and then he’d fidget a while before asking, as he invariably did, to see the tarot deck. He pretended to have an anthropological or antiquarian interest, but I could see, from the way his hands trembled, that he believed in the cards. You will believe too, Natalia. You were brave in the ossuary; you can’t be frightened of a deck of cards, can you? These cards are agreeable, they wish you well.” She laughed and began placing them on the table in the shape of a cross.
“But it is necromancy,” Natalia protested.
“The tarot is not necromancy,” the countess said. “It is not communicating with the dead. That’s something else altogether. I am very fond of these cards and I will tell you why.”
She was silent and then said, “When he was still a young man, my husband broke his back in a riding accident. All his life he had been an active man, he’d done everything: he’d hunted, worked in the fields, swum in the river, climbed mountains; never was he still for a minute. Then, after the accident, he was confined to a bed or a chair. He did some painting in oils, he listened to music, he read books, but what made life possible for him were his friends, who came here and played tarocchi with him. With this deck of cards. I would sometimes go and stand outside the library doors, just to hear them cursing and laughing, arguing politics, grumbling about a downturn in grain prices. In the end, not even these diversions helped my husband. I have faith that I will see him again; death won’t separate us forever. The tarot assures me of this, and the church holds it as dogma; it must be true. Goethe believed electrical and magnetic impulses reside within each of us. He said the soul puts out feelers and receives signals, like a radio set. And for lovers, Goethe said, these forces are especially acute. One day, Natalia, you’ll know it yourself.”
* * *
In July, Miklós came home, intending to remain while repairs were carried out on the castle. He hired a carpenter, a man named Guido, who came originally from Milan. The countess approved of him. He had given her letters of recommendation, one from an Esterhazy, which impressed her. Guido was of small stature, thin, with long, graying hair he tied back with a shoelace. He didn’t look strong, yet with one hammer blow he smashed a hole in the second-floor wall and after a brief examination told the countess he could see signs of dry rot, mold, rodent infestation. These maladies would not be confined to this one place, he said. By now, they would certainly have infiltrated almost the entire structure. He looked at the countess’s stricken face and said perhaps he was mistaken. In his experience, these Hungarian palaces were built to the exacting standards of gifted Viennese and Italian architects and would be habitable long after their occupants were dust. Rozalia blanched. Miklós took Guido up to the attics, and the carpenter climbed out a window onto the roof and came back to report cracked and missing slate tiles and crumbling mortar in the chimneys, which allowed rain and melting snow to seep down through the walls. They were fortunate the damage was not worse. Still, the work of restoration would be more than one person could handle. He would need to hire plasterers, plumbers, brick masons.
The countess said to her son, “This should have been attended to years ago. You and your newspapers. Do you think you are Joseph Pulitzer, for God’s sake?” She turned to Guido. “Give me your estimates and when you get to work, bring me the receipts,” she said. “I will handle this.”
The sounds of sawing and hammering filled the castle, and the air became gray with plaster dust. Katya and Natalia had to keep wiping the kitchen table with water and white vinegar. Rozalia had taken it upon herself to provide Guido and his crew with a midday meal. Dishes of noodles with caraway seeds and sour cream, roasted chicken, squash mashed with butter, thin pancakes filled with spiced beef, poppy-seed rolls. Viennese pastries, chocolate tarts, and glazed strawberry torte from the bakery in the village. These meals were served in the kitchen. Whatever was left over, Magdolna set aside for the evening meal. Natalia and Miklós and Rozalia ate in the kitchen, and then Rozalia liked to retire to the library for wine or brandy. One evening, she poured out three glasses of herbal liqueur the color of moss. “Drink it,” she said to Miklós. “It will help you sleep.” To Natalia she said, “You too, Natalia. It will make your blood strong.”
The liqueur tasted of angelica, fennel, mint, aniseed, something chocolaty, something bitter. At first it was vile, but Natalia found the taste improved with each sip. Miklós went to the liquor cabinet and poured whiskey into a tumbler. He stood at the window, his back to the room.
“The work is proceeding smoothly, wouldn’t you say, Miklós?” Rozalia said. “Are you listening to me? I think László would be pleased. The castle meant everything to him, as it did to his father. László was the image of his father, Natalia. You can see it in that photograph over there, on the table. Weren’t they alike, Miklós, even in character?”
“Yes, they were,” he said.
Rozalia began to reminisce about vacations they’d taken years before, in Karlsbad, in Prague, in Vienna. Snowshoeing in winter, fishing in summer. Winter sleigh rides at Lake Hévíz. Did Miklós remember?
Miklós turned and smiled at his mother. He said he had been thinking the other day of how he and László used to take their father’s Royal Enfield motorcycle, without permission, and ride through the village.
“Yes, I remember. Hellions, you were. They roared through the countryside, Natalia, like brigands, outlaws. I didn’t know them in those yea
rs. It was a shame, because as infants they were good-natured, lovely boys, but they grew into demons. They played the tárogatá out on the terrace at such a volume, and with such gross ineptitude, that they curdled the cows’ milk in the pasture. I threatened to run away with the Queen of the Gypsies. Do you remember, Miklós? László knew I was bluffing, but you, Miklós, were a credulous child. If I claimed the sky was saffron yellow, you would run outside to look.”
“Sometimes before a storm the sky was yellow,” he said.
“Me, you mean; I was the storm,” the countess said. “But you were the ones who went away. You went away.” She set her glass on a table. Her head nodded. Natalia looked at Miklós. “Come, Mother, before you fall asleep,” Miklós said. He gave Rozalia his hand, helping her out of the chair, and Natalia held her other arm, and the three of them went upstairs. In her room, Rozalia fell asleep on the bed in her clothes, and Natalia covered her with a quilt. In the hall, she and Miklós said good night.
* * *
In the kitchen the next morning, Natalia, helping with the preparations for lunch, let the knife slip as she sliced into a yellow onion and cut herself. Rozalia plunged her hand into a bowl of soapy water. The wound bled; the water turned pink and then red, and Rozalia said she would need stitches to close it. No, she kept saying; she didn’t need stitches. Did she want her hand to turn septic? Miklós said, when he came into the kitchen. He took her to the doctor’s house in the village, where they waited an hour for Dr. Urbán to return from what he described as a difficult confinement, but mother and twin sons were doing well, he said. He put five stitches in Natalia’s hand and told her to keep it elevated and out of water. In a week, the stitches could come out.
Miklós took her to the café and ordered tea, which he said would be better than coffee for shock.
“I’m not in shock,” she said.
“Still, it will calm you,” he said.
“I am calm,” she said. Beneath the calmness, though, she felt shivery and also mortified at having been careless at such a simple task.
The waitress brought two large pieces of chocolate-lavender cake. “Why are you even working in the kitchen?” Miklós said. “You’re our guest. My mother is taking advantage of you.”
“No, she is wonderful to me, truly.”
In a few days, he said, he had to make a trip to Budapest to pick up an order at a bookshop. Would she like to go with him?
Yes, she would like that very much, she said, and she took a forkful of lavender cake and said it did, indeed, taste delicious.
* * *
Three days later, they were in Pest, on the Chain Bridge, looking down at the Danube and the upturned faces of passengers on the deck of a riverboat. It was high summer; people were in a festive mood. She and Miklós walked back across the bridge to a stationery store in Pest, where Miklós bought a bottle of Pelikan Tinte ink and a typewriter ribbon in a round Pelikan tin, and she bought chalk and paper for the school. Then, at the bookshop, Miklós picked up his order: the first German translation, in three volumes, of Ulysses, by James Joyce. Also Margherita Sarfatti’s biography of Benito Mussolini. He remembered that she had been reading Thomas Mann and bought her Buddenbrooks. They lunched at the Café Gerbeaud on thin crêpes filled with meat and mushrooms. She thought they looked very well together, Miklós in a light linen jacket, and she in a blue voile dress with a low waist and slightly flared skirt, which had been sewn for her by the village tailor. It was her favorite dress at this moment. Her bandaged hand made it difficult to eat (Katya had helped her get dressed that morning), and Miklós cut her crêpe into smaller pieces. Later, in a shopping arcade, Natalia went into a jeweler’s shop and chose a small crystal horse for Rozalia and, impulsively, a tiepin set with a tiny garnet for Miklós. At vendors’ stalls in the arcade, she found an embroidered tablecloth for Magdolna and a doll in Hungarian costume for Katya. They drove across the Chain Bridge to Buda and rode the funicular up to Buda Castle and the Royal Palace. They could see the city of Pest across the Danube and in the distance the Great Hungarian Plain. At the Fisherman’s Bastion, a man offered to take their picture. “Put your arm around your sweetheart,” he said. “It’s good,” he said, handing the camera back to Miklós. “Someday I would like to own a Leica.”
They walked in a park, watched children feeding bread crumbs to ducks on a pond, and then sought refuge from the heat in an art salon exhibiting the work of avant-garde artists from 1900 to the present. Natalia studied a group of three paintings, three scenes of people at sidewalk cafés. Men in fedoras and double-breasted summer suits, patent leather shoes, wide gold rings on slender hands; women in pastel dresses, their faces long and narrow, big-eyed, with pointed chins. Their smiles seemed contemptuous. Or distrustful. Vigilant. Interspersed, a few misfits: dour characters; crafty, suspicious eyes, hands that seemed to grasp at the air. The artist’s name, printed on a card pinned to the wall, was Julius Schaeffer. He had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and at an academy in Prague, where he’d lived since 1919. A coincidence? Could the artist Julius Schaeffer be related to Dr. Schaefferová and the little boy, Franz, on the train?
They had lemonade at a café and then sat on the steps of Saint Matthias Church, and Miklós told her about living in Budapest when he and his brother, László, were students at the university, and how before that, when they were children, they had come to Budapest with their parents and had stayed at the New York Palace Hotel. Even as a child he had loved hotels, while László had always wanted to know how long until they were going home. Once, while their parents lingered over dinner, he and László had run races in the corridor, and he, trying desperately to beat his older brother, had run headlong into a marble pillar and knocked himself out. When he opened his eyes, he believed for a moment that he had killed himself and was in heaven, which had long, gleaming corridors, gilded ceilings, and lavish chandeliers, just like the New York Palace Hotel. But, he said, that beautiful establishment had been damaged in the war and was closed for repairs. Instead, they went to his second-favorite café in Budapest, where there were red tablecloths on the tables and waiters in short black jackets and a piano player wearing a flesh-colored sequined gown and ballet slippers. They ate steamed Lake Balaton trout and a creamy risotto with parsley and mushrooms, followed by coffee, dark chocolate, sugared almonds, and fresh fruit. While they were talking, Miklós reached over and wiped chocolate from the corner of her mouth with his napkin.
They left Budapest after sunset, as stars were appearing in a sky of mauve, violet, and indigo. The air smelled of warm, freshly tilled earth and summer foliage. Natalia took off her hat and let the wind blow her hair around. Miklós stopped for a farmer herding sheep across the road with his dog. “What kind of dog is that?” Natalia said. “It looks more sheeplike than the sheep.”
It was a puli, Miklós said, a Hungarian sheepdog. He and László had once had a puli named Georg, a ferocious animal with an aggressive streak. It had savaged a man’s dog in the village and had had to be put down. After that, he and his brother had not wanted another dog.
Something was wrong with the motorcar; steam was pouring out from under the hood. Miklós pulled over. He got out and walked once around the car. He opened the hood. Then he said it was a blown head gasket or a faulty radiator hose. He would walk into the village and borrow a pail of water. “Don’t go anywhere,” he said. When he got back, he started the Bugatti and instructed her to keep her foot on the gas pedal while he poured water into the radiator. He was no mechanic, he said, but they would hope for the best. It was almost two in the morning by the time they reached Kastély Andorján. They sat in the car, listening to the overheated engine ticking as it cooled down. She started to open the door, when Miklós put his hand on her shoulder. She turned, he kissed her. His hand brushed her cheek, he smiled, kissed her again and then drew back and said he was sorry, he shouldn’t have done that. In reply, she kissed his mouth. A long kiss. Should she then apologize? Would it go on like that,
first a kiss and then an apology? She would like that.
When she got to the portico, she remembered the parcels in the car. He would bring them to the kitchen. Go inside, out of the cold, he said. Everything will be different now, she thought, everything will be changed, and she did not sleep, thinking of him and how she loved him and how it was all right, now, to admit this to herself. But in the morning, when she went to the kitchen, he scarcely looked up from his newspaper, except to say good morning. “Good morning,” she said. He excused himself, saying he had work to attend to, and took the newspaper and a cup of coffee up to the tower room. The next day, he arranged for the Bugatti to be shipped to a garage in Budapest. Then he sat outside reading Sarfatti’s biography of the Italian Fascist dictator, in preparation for an upcoming trip to Italy, where he had been granted an interview with Mussolini. Margherita Sarfatti was certainly not an unbiased biographer, he said to Natalia when she came out to tell him dinner was being served. Sarfatti, he said, was Mussolini’s closest adviser and friend, his publicist and propagandist.
* * *
Mr. Petrus, the veterinary surgeon, stood in the kitchen, eating Magdolna’s still-warm plum cake from a plate he held in his hand, while informing the countess that his earlier diagnosis was confirmed: Trajan had congestive heart failure and fatal locomotor disease. These were serious, irreversible conditions, he said.
Naturally, Rozalia said, health declined in a horse Trajan’s age. One expected it. But Trajan was fundamentally sound, his lameness sporadic, the pain treatable.
“If it was my horse, I know what I’d do,” Mr. Petrus said.
“Perhaps we need a second opinion, Mr. Petrus.”
“By all means, if that’s what you want. But soon, Countess, or your horse will go on suffering.”
“Very well,” Rozalia said after a moment. “If that is how it is.” She asked Natalia for her walking stick, saying, “I suppose I am next to be put down for lameness.”
Midnight Train to Prague Page 11
