Midnight Train to Prague

by Carol Windley

  In March her father’s atelier was searched by two SS officers or Gestapo—he wasn’t sure which, as both men wore plain clothes. They went through his filing cabinets and took away many of his paintings, including a portrait of Anna’s mother and another portrait, of Anna and Franz when they were about fourteen and seven, and the portrait of the merchants’ children her father had completed just after Ivan and Marta’s wedding.

  Anna’s father said the SS officers had questioned him about his technique, his use of color, and so on. Franz thought the men were quite possibly attached to the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the task force headed by Alfred Rosenberg, with the authority to find and confiscate art, primarily from the art collections of wealthy Jews but also from other sources, including museums and national galleries in occupied countries: Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands. The organization had been renamed, he thought, but the theft of art continued.

  The men did not return, and her father was not arrested, but for a time he avoided returning to his atelier, and instead worked sitting in an armchair at home, a sketch pad on his knee, drawing in pencil a series of figures with misshapen, tuberous heads, ribs like spokes, twisted hands, huge eyes, dilated pupils. The drawings, which her father sometimes went over in pen and ink, reminded Anna of Robert Hooke’s etchings in Micrographia, except these were not magnified images of microbes or fleas; they were human, their humanity apparent in the eyes and the contorted ligaments of the neck. Not a blade of grass or a wisp of cloud anchored them to the world. She thought the drawings allowed her father to work without actually working; they were a way of seeing without seeing. But she hated those drawings, and when her father left them lying around, she gathered them up and hid them in a drawer in the credenza, underneath lace tablecloths. As far as she knew, her father never missed the drawings or searched for them.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Natalia left the castle early, at dawn, leaving a note propped up on the kitchen table for Rozalia. It was very brief, that note, and said only that she’d be away for a few days. The less Rozalia knew, obviously, the safer she would be. Or so Natalia hoped. The Bugatti made its usual horrendous racket as she backed it out of the garage, but no one was awake, with the possible exception of Vladimír, and he would not hear anything from the stables. For the first part of the drive she worried that a breakdown, a punctured tire, would stop her, or soldiers at a military checkpoint would force her to turn around, but she got to Budapest without incident. At the garage where Miklós had always taken the Bugatti for repairs, she paid the owner, Mr. Barta, in cash, in advance, to store the Bugatti for three weeks, which should, she said, give her lots of time. If anything happened and she didn’t come back, he could either keep the car or sell it. Mr. Barta said he would never sell Count Andorján’s Bugatti. He drove her to the train station, where she saw men in the uniform of the Royal Hungarian Army and other men, not in uniform, wearing yellow armbands identifying them as Jews, who had been conscripted to the labor battalions and would be sent to the front. In winter they would not have warm clothing. They were not given helmets or weapons.

  Hungary was at war with Russia. And with Yugoslavia. Hungary had declared war on the United States of America. Hungary was at war with everyone except Hitler and the Third Reich. The Hungarian parliament had brought in anti-Semitic laws based on Germany’s Nuremberg Laws, and these laws made it illegal for Jews to own property and banned Jewish students from attending university and barred Jews from the professions and forbade marriage between Jews and Christians. The regent, Vice-Admiral Horthy, a self-declared anti-Semite, a man for whom Natalia had never had much respect, had, out of expediency, advocated caution in appropriating Jewish businesses and industries, so as not to damage to Hungary’s economy. Such hypocrisy, such opportunism. She was ashamed of her adopted country and ashamed of her German birth.

  The Sinti men living on her land—it was hers too now; she thought of it as hers—had been sent to labor camps in the Carpathians or ordered to clear land mines in war zones: a death sentence. The women and children were transported to collection centers near the Austrian border and from there to concentration camps in Germany. Rozalia had taken a gun to the Sinti encampment on the estate and had threatened to shoot the soldiers ordering the Sinti people into trucks. I will shoot, she had shouted at them. They had aimed their rifles at her; they had called her a crazy old bird. Natalia had made her promise she wouldn’t try anything like that again, in anyone’s defense. It wouldn’t help if she got herself killed. Ah, but think of the satisfaction I would have, said Rozalia, who had to get in the last word.

  * * *

  Natalia checked into a hotel on Celetná Street in Prague. She used the name Faber, Frau Faber. She and Miklós would be reunited within days, she thought, but this did not happen. She had brought very little with her and had to rinse her clothes in the bathroom sink, just as she used to do for Beatriz, and place them on the radiator, in the sun, to dry. There was a vase of highly scented purple lilacs on the dresser, and in this heady atmosphere she emptied her purse on the bed and counted her money and kept arriving at a different total, but she could see just by looking at it that it wouldn’t last for long. She had registered at the hotel without producing a passport or other document, saying it was in a piece of luggage the train had misplaced. A not very believable excuse, and yet the woman at the front desk had accepted it, for now. She knew that without identification papers she ran the risk of being questioned by the Gestapo.

  Rather than eating at a restaurant, she bought food from a small shop, where the proprietor, a Turkish man named Danyal Aslan, always gave her sesame-seed cookies and chatted with her about the fine weather and the ducks he’d seen on the river or the glorious full moon the night before. He kept day-old newspapers for her. Gratefully, she read them in her hotel room, at first searching for her husband’s byline, for reports from the Eastern Front that could have been written by him, but then she realized the newspaper was an official Nazi Party organ. But the smell of the ink, the smudges on her hands reminded her of Miklós, and she could almost see him sitting at a table with a cup of coffee, writing or reading a newspaper. Mr. Aslan’s wife, Milena, was Czech; they lived in an apartment behind their shop and had two children, a boy and a girl. Natalia mentioned to Mr. Aslan that she had to find somewhere cheaper than a hotel to live, and he said, as it happened, he had a house for rent, if she was interested. She told him the truth: she couldn’t afford much in the way of rent. He called his wife to mind the shop and took Natalia to his house, which was on Zlatá Ulička, the Golden Lane, near the Hradčany (the castle district). Since 1939, Prague Castle had housed the Reich’s administrative headquarters. The presence of SS and Gestapo so close to Mr. Aslan’s house was a serious detriment, but the low rent compensated for this. Besides, Franz Kafka had lived here for a year with his sister, and Miklós had been here, and those things would surely be a protective influence.

  She moved in the next day. On the table she placed her breviary and Rozalia’s tarot cards, which she had put in her suitcase, thinking, perhaps, that they might serve as a disguise, a prop, a talisman. She placed her hand on the cards and thought of Rozalia and felt tearful, and then she thought of returning home with Miklós, driving up to the castle, the sun bright on its butter-colored walls. This small house on Zlatá Ulička she shared with mice and rats, nocturnal in their habits, and spiders that showed up at any hour, day or night. There was a smell of mildew, ashes, rust.

  At night she lay awake on a narrow, hard bed, wondering where Miklós was sleeping and whether he had dry, warm clothes and enough to eat, and whether he was on his way to Prague. She thought of their last day together, before he’d left for the Russian front. It was October then, the birch trees turning from green to gold, a blue haze from wood fires lying along the hills. She begged him not to go. Winter in Russia, she had thought. Winter with the Red Army and German warplanes strafing them and cannon fire and grenades exploding a
nd snipers with rifles. How skilled men were at devising ways to kill one another, she said, and when he merely smiled, she got angry and swore at him, and then she threw her arms around his neck. He wiped her tears away with his hand and repeated what he always said: he was a journalist; a journalist had a responsibility to bear witness; he had to go to the front lines and speak to the soldiers, the ordinary fighting men; otherwise people would read only the official lies, the official bullshit, the propaganda that came from the Reich press chief’s office.

  He had done enough already, she kept saying. In 1939, he’d been in Warsaw, under German aerial bombardment. In 1937, he’d gone to Spain to report on the fighting between the Republicans and General Franco’s Nationalists. In Berlin, in 1939, he’d been arrested, beaten, hospitalized. She knew of this only when he came home and she saw the scar above his eye. But, as he said, he had survived. In Russia, though, in a war like this, what kind of chance would he have? Tell me that, she had said.

  Someone he knew, a journalist, would meet him in Budapest and would drive him through Romania to the Black Sea, where he would be taken by boat to Sevastopol and from there across the Sea of Azov to Rostov. So he had told her. From Rostov he would take a train—if trains were running—to Kursk and from there to Moscow. He would travel with fake credentials, his bona fide papers and press card concealed in the lining of his greatcoat. If necessary, he would get permission to travel with the Red Army from Stalin himself. Stalin, whom he detested. But he had friends in Moscow who would be willing to act as intermediaries.

  “Stalin has thrown those friends of yours in prison,” she said.

  “Not all,” he said. He promised to be back in a year. He would write to her. If the war dragged on, if things looked bad, they could meet in Prague, he said, and go to Spain and from Spain to Portugal, and they would book passage on a boat to Argentina, where Beatriz and Zita would give them sanctuary.

  On their last night, she lay in his arms and watched the moon sail behind a thin, opalescent cloud. She heard the wind in the trees. A night bird singing. Wolves howling, clocks ticking. Near dawn she fell asleep, and when she woke, he was gone.

  At the convent school the nuns had taught her: conjugal love is a totality—all the elements of the person enter this totality. It is a unity that involves body, heart, and soul.

  She missed Rozalia. She could see her, the way she would sit in a high-backed chair, small, bent, huddled darkly in sweaters and shawls, clutching her glass of pálinka, singing her mournful songs. The black coach of sorrow, she sang. Angels have taken you, and never will they return you. Natalia had asked her not to sing that song, it was too sad, and Rozalia had raised her eyes and gathered her shawl around her and said, But it is true, it is out there, the black coach of sorrow, waiting.

  In the last letter from Miklós, dated February 12, 1942, sent from Moscow, he had reminisced about being with her in Prague during “that beautiful May of 1942.” He must have meant 1932—she imagined him writing by the light of a kerosene lamp, shells exploding, artillery fire, the wind howling around an army tent, if he had the shelter of a tent. But he was a newspaperman, precise with dates; he would never make such an error. He was sending her a message in code: she was to meet him in Prague this year, this spring. And she was here, looking for him in bookshops, tobacconists, barbershops. She returned many times to the Café Imperial and the Café Arco, on Hybernská, just to look in the door, but the only patrons seemed to be SS men too involved with devouring shanks of lamb and meat-filled pastries to notice her. She spent more than she could afford on a meal of noodles and spiced beef at the Café Europa in Wenceslas Square. It was so good; she enjoyed every bite and felt the muscles in her neck and back begin to relax for the first time since she had arrived in Prague. She fell into a pleasant fantasy, picturing Miklós coming in, sitting down, and lighting a cigarette. Smiling at her, saying darling to her, and telling her they were soon going home. Or to Portugal, to South America. And they would begin again, he said, reaching for her hand. She saw it all clearly. And then a darker image intruded, would not be pushed away. Her husband lying on a Russian battlefield, with blood on his coat, his arms flung wide, frost on his hair and face, on his eyelids.

  Throughout the city she saw men who, at first glance, from a distance, could have been Miklós. A bespectacled man in a rumpled khaki jacket reading a newspaper, his dark hair silvered at the temples. A man on the street in front of her giving his pocket an abstracted pat, a gesture so reminiscent of Miklós she quickened her step—but it was not him, it was never him.

  Life was so tenuous! How long was a life? Forty years, sixty? Less than five years? She had a malady of the spirit: tristezza. In three days it would be her son’s birthday, his ninth birthday. László Krisztián. Krisztián, they called him. His hair was blond, like hers; he had his father’s dark eyes, and he was, as Natalia and Miklós said, either full steam ahead or fast asleep in his bed. We can’t keep up with him, he’s wearing us out, they said. He was nearly four years old, never sick a day in his life. Then came late March 1936, a cold month, blustery, raining constantly, the ice breaking up on the river, cracking like thunder, the fields sodden. Rozalia said it was dangerous weather; germs got carried on the wind, and you breathed them in. Krisztián wanted to know: Am I breathing them in now? An old wives’ tale, Natalia told him. What was an old wives’ tale? A story, she said. A story that is not based on fact and is very often wrong. Krisztián had nodded, satisfied. At the school they shut the door on the bad weather, the malign March air. The children took off their wet boots and put on slippers. Krisztián sat beside Katya’s daughter, Alena. They were so small, so eager to learn; they could read everything, and had memorized the words to all the songs. They spoke Hungarian and German. They played together; they fell asleep in the kitchen, in Rozalia’s rocking chair, curled up like kittens.

  That March morning, in the schoolroom, Natalia was reading to the class, and Alena began complaining that her head hurt, her throat was sore. She said she was going to throw up, and she did, she was sick on the floor, and Krisztián stared at her and said, Ugh. Natalia felt Alena’s forehead; she was burning up. Rozalia told Natalia to take Krisztián home and send Katya for Alena. Natalia was to bathe Krisztián and change his clothes, and she did, even though he protested that no one had a bath twice in one day. Yes, sometimes they did, she assured him. She scrubbed him all over and washed his hair and dressed him in clean clothes from the inside out and sent him down to Magdolna, in the kitchen, while she washed her own face and changed her dress. She held her son on her knee and let him have whatever he liked for lunch, but he must eat it all, so that he could grow big and strong. And when he had finished even his liver dumplings, about which he was decidedly ambivalent, Magdolna gave him a big portion of dark, sweet chocolate. He put his arm around Natalia’s neck and pressed bits of the chocolate into her mouth and asked if Alena would be better in the morning, and Natalia said yes, she would be better.

  Katya’s daughter recovered in time, but the illness left her profoundly deaf. Natalia bargained with God: deafness, yes; a long convalescence, yes, she would accept that. She remembered the fear surrounding a case of meningitis at the convent. She would not let Dr. Urbán diagnose that sickness. A mother should not let her child die. If a mother lost her child, then the mother should also die; she believed that. Miklós had rushed home from Berlin; he was there with her, sitting beside their child’s bed. At the last, Miklós was the one who had to take their lifeless son from her arms; she would not give him up, he would get cold, she said, colder than he was.

  The doctor gave her an injection; she tried to remain in a place where food, oxygen, and love were unnecessary. Miklós spoke to her from a great distance, from an unearthly place, and when she opened her eyes and saw how thin he was, how swollen and bruised his eyes, she got up, an automaton, a shell, and resumed some kind of life for his sake. He said, “There is no easy way out, my love, and no remedy for the pain.”

 
; In the weeks that followed, they sat in the library, in the desolate light of evening. Miklós drank whiskey; he kept getting up to pour more into his glass. He drank, and he smoked one cigarette after another. She worried about his health and his agnosticism. Her faith was battered and poor, but it was there, somewhere. She could not bear to think of him deprived of the grace and consolation of Heaven, of the clemency of saints, or of the hope that such things could be. She brought him coffee and sat beside him and then jumped up to open a window and then again to let the dog in when he scratched at the hall door and then to put a piece of wood on the fire. She made him seasick, Miklós said, reaching for her hand, pulling her down beside him on the sofa. A midnight lethargy kept them there, two spirits in an empty castle that breathed around them like something sentient, unquiet.

  Remembering, she felt tearful, shaky; everything looked gray to her. Was it despair or hunger? The meal at the Café Europa had been days ago. At Mr. Aslan’s shop she bought a half loaf of rye bread, using cash, paying under the counter. He asked her to wait and disappeared through the door to his apartment. When he returned, he handed her a brown paper parcel. No charge, he said. He took risks for her; he was a good friend.

  On the streets of Prague fear hung in the air like smog. It seemed to her that a false, forced energy animated the Wehrmacht soldiers, the SS, the Gestapo—a dull, mean light flicking off them like phosphorus. She kept out of their way. But she heard them accosting people, cursing, ridiculing, lashing out. Sometimes they seemed to be following her. She kept an even step, looked neither left nor right, didn’t cease her vigilance until she entered a leafy park, where she sat on a bench and unwrapped the parcel Mr. Aslan had given her. A hard-boiled egg in its shell and six sugared dates. She ate two of the dates. She talked to Krisztián. Tell me, she said, should I go home? No, stay, wait for Papa, her son replied. She heard him; sometimes she could hear him.