Midnight Train to Prague

by Carol Windley

  When she got back to her little house, she set out the tarot cards. The Empress resembled Beatriz in a Grecian robe designed by Coco Chanel. Here was Zita Kuznetsova, Queen of Wands, signifying adventure, ambition; but when reversed she became a saboteur exacting vengeance: a clever adversary. Here was the Magician, haloed with the symbol for infinity, an uroboros knotted around his waist. Infinite recurrence; inescapable fate. The Wheel of Fortune, and the Chariot of Fire: together meaning an unforeseen event? The Star card could connote a loss of direction.

  Superstitious nonsense, wholly, utterly, Natalia thought, and yet, and yet.

  * * *

  One day she found a dead man lying on the ground in the park. He was nothing but skin and bones—his face pale, mottled, his lips dry and slack. His coat was dirty, and he did not smell very nice. No one else saw; she could walk away. But as she knelt to feel for a pulse in his neck, he moaned, his eyelids fluttered. She helped this dead-and-then-alive man to his feet. She picked up his knapsack and led him over to a bench. She said he should have something to eat. “Nein,” he protested. “It would do you good,” she said. “Nein,” he repeated.

  She brought him back with her to her rented house and brewed a pot of tea and gave him bread and cheese and the remaining sugared dates. He chewed slowly, a hand in front of his mouth. She hoped to God he didn’t have fleas. She let him have the bed in the bedroom and tried to sleep on the sofa. The man she had resuscitated? revived?—whose name she did not even know—coughed all night. In the morning, she put out the remainder of the bread and the cheese, which had gone hard, for breakfast. She sliced the hard-boiled egg in half and shared it with him. Feeding two people on nothing—how was that to be accomplished? She boiled water and poured it into the metal washtub in the washroom and gave him one of the towels supplied by Mrs. Aslan. He reappeared some time later, with his coat buttoned up to the chin, and thanked her for her hospitality and said he would be on his way. For today, she said, he should stay.

  She told him her name was Faber, Natalia Faber. He gave his name as Max Nagy. He was on his way to Budapest, where he had been born. Over the next few days, he told her how he came to be lying on the ground in a park.

  For twenty-five years Max Nagy had been employed as head gardener on an estate in Pomerania, where he’d had his own cottage, a cat, a songbird in a cage. And the soil! The soil would grow anything. He was trained as an agronomist, a profession that suited him—he smiled—down to the ground. He would have stayed happily in Pomerania for the rest of his life, but what a person wanted was of no consequence in this world. Two years ago SS officers had come and ordered him to leave with them for Poland, where he was to work at an agricultural facility being built by a Nazi, Heinrich Himmler. Himmler, a chicken farmer before his current role as a top Nazi, intended to establish the world’s most advanced agricultural research station. This was near the Polish town of Oświęcum; in German, Auschwitz. Himmler lost interest in the agricultural project, and when Germany invaded Russia in June 1941, the facility became a prisoner-of-war camp. The prisoners, Polish and Russian soldiers, were beaten, starved, left to die of exposure and thirst, so many crammed into a few meters of space they could not sit or even crouch down to rest.

  Since he had seen all this, Max Nagy said, he’d thought the Nazis would never let him get away alive, but they had reassigned him to an estate in Brandenburg owned by a Junker family, where his job was to oversee Polish slave laborers. He had to fill production quotas. The German army needed to be fed. Germany needed food. On the estate they grew barley, wheat, and potatoes. Among the workers there was a lot of sickness. People died and were replaced by more slave laborers from the east, who in turn succumbed to overwork, malnutrition, and disease. It was not in his nature, nor should it be in anyone’s nature, to order people to labor from dawn to nightfall when they were ill and weak. One day he was sent to the train station to pick up a shipment of seed potatoes. He watered the horse and gave it a bag of oats, and he walked away. He slept in fields and in forests. He stole fruit and vegetables. Sometimes a farmer gave him a meal and a dry place to sleep or a ride in a hay wagon or a truck.

  “You walked from Brandenburg to Prague?” Natalia said.

  “Yes, I walked,” he said, and began to cough and could not stop.

  * * *

  She found a piece of cardboard in the street and brought it back to Zlatá Ulička. She wrote on it: PERSONAL FORTUNES TOLD and a price in crowns—a small amount, anyone could afford it. She placed it in the window. Mr. Nagy raised his eyebrows at her. We have to eat, she said. She told Mr. Nagy that if someone came to have their fortune told, he was to go immediately to the bedroom, close the door, and not make a sound. To her surprise, clients soon arrived at her door. Almost always they were women, and they were pleased to receive predictions of good health, pleasant journeys, fortuitous meetings, romances. One or two readings a day gave her a small income, with which she bought food for herself and Mr. Nagy, as well as candles and a cheap pottery candlestick holder to lend a more convincing atmosphere.

  One afternoon two German women, wives of SS officers, came for a reading. They giggled and said they’d had too much wine with lunch. She lit the candle and shuffled the tarot cards. They said she did not look like a fortune-teller. What was her name? Frau Faber, Natalia said.

  The women were both named Frau Ursler; their husbands were brothers, officers of such distinction within the Schutzstaffel that even though they were close relatives, they were posted to the same unit in the same city. A rare privilege, the younger Frau Ursler said, giggling behind her hand.

  “And where is your husband, Frau?” the younger Frau Ursler asked. She had the bright, inquisitive eyes of a sparrow. Natalia said her husband was in the Wehrmacht, on the Eastern Front.

  “My father and brother, too,” said the older Frau Ursler. “It is nerve-racking, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is,” Natalia said.

  The sparrow wore a tailored two-piece dress, and her hands were beautifully manicured, while the other Frau Ursler had a raw-looking scratch on the back of her hand, perhaps made by a pet cat, or by a brooch pin as she rushed to attend to her children or husband. Her pale eyes swam behind the lenses of her glasses. Natalia touched a card and said, You must take care of your health. Yes, she hadn’t been sleeping well, the woman confided.

  A constellation of favorable cards on either side of the Ace of Wands suggested an addition to the sparrow’s family, to her delight. Commendations for the SS husbands, travel, new acquaintances, an increase in wealth. The sparrow wanted something more specific. Natalia turned up three cards in succession: the Emperor, Ezekiel’s Chariot, and the Devil. Der Teufel. A violent death. Catastrophe, ruination. Quickly she reshuffled the cards and said the reading was finished. Her clients, unaware that the final spread of cards did not predict anything good, rose, laughing at their unsteadiness, and opened their handbags and added a generous tip to her fee.

  She could not go through an ordeal like that again. A repulsive thing to do, invading someone’s thoughts, pretending lies were real. Mr. Nagy crept out of the bedroom, his face ashen, damp with sweat, and sat at the table, across from her. He had a fit of coughing. She gave him a glass of water and said she was sorry he’d had to stay for such a long time in that little room.

  He said, “They were German, weren’t they, those women? Their husbands were SS men?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  It was untenable, he said, this situation. He thought she was mad to invite them in and also mad to believe in tarot cards. He thought she would know better than that, he said sternly. He could never thank her enough for all she had done, but he had to prepare himself to leave. Quite soon, he expected, he would be fit enough to continue his journey to Budapest.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Anna’s father had known Dr. Cornelius Shapiro since coming to Prague in 1919. Dr. Shapiro was a professor at the Charles University, a patron of the arts; he had been an enthusiastic
supporter of Julius’s career. When Dr. Shapiro came to the house one day in April, however, he said it was merely to say goodbye and to ask a small favor of Julius. That morning he had received an order to report to the train station at seven a.m. tomorrow, to be transported to the ghetto at Theresienstadt. His wife was not coping well with this, Dr. Shapiro said. She was Lutheran, Danish, and would have to continue alone in the effort to gain exemptions for their sons, who, having one Jewish and one Christian parent, were classified as Mischlinge and might be left with their mother in relative safety or might be sent to a camp. He had a favor to ask: Would Julius keep the manuscript of a story he had written? He had hoped to commission Julius to do the illustrations, but now, of course, that was impossible. Anna’s father sent her to put the kettle on. She made tea and brought teacups and the teapot on a tray to the living room. Her father poured a cup for Dr. Shapiro, who sat smoking a cigarette and drinking his tea, with one hand on the envelope that held his manuscript. He had ideas in mind for his book’s illustrations, he said, and talked about the merits of linocuts or woodcuts as opposed to pen-and-ink drawings with watercolor washes, in the style of Arthur Rackham, whose illustrations for Alice in Wonderland delighted him even more than those of John Tenniel. Having produced Arthur Rackham, John Tenniel, and Lewis Carroll, England could never produce a Hitler, he said. Not even France, with its history of anti-Semitism and xenophobia, could have produced Hitler. Prague had not been free of anti-Semitism, no place was, it seemed, but it had been a good home to him and his parents before him.

  His little tale was not Alice in Wonderland, he said; it was merely a retelling of a very old Slovenian folktale called “Salt over Gold,” collected in the nineteenth century by the Czech writer Božena Nĕmcová.

  “Three sisters are asked to tell their father, the king, how much they love him,” he begins. “The youngest, like King Lear’s daughter Cordelia, cannot ‘heave her heart into her throat,’ and finally says that she loves her father more than salt. Which enrages him, just as Cordelia’s silence enraged Lear. Freud proposes that the youngest daughter’s silence represents death, but in my story, as in Nĕmcová’s version, the youngest daughter triumphs over death. She embodies, indeed, a life-affirming principle. In fact, I began to worry as I studied various versions of the folktale that I had missed a crucial and darker interpretation. Now I understand all too well; the darkness was there all the time. When, like the young girl in the story, you have lost your family and home, and in my case also the right to practice the profession you love, to walk in a park, to read a newspaper at a café—all of your gold, in other words—when all of that is gone, only salt remains, an essential compound without which there cannot be life. That is the evil genius of the Nazis: to take away even the salt of life.”

  Anna’s father said he would like to offer Dr. Shapiro sanctuary in their home. Dr. Shapiro would have his own room, a typewriter, books; he could work undisturbed; his family could visit in secret. If necessary, he could go up to the attic, which was quite habitable; they would put a mattress up there and bring him his meals, and when it was safe to do so, he could come downstairs. Dr. Shapiro said, Julius, one prison is much like another. When he was leaving, he said, “If you want to see what the heroine of my little tale looks like, you have only to look at Anna. She is exactly as I picture Marica.”

  Early the next morning, Anna’s father went to the train station, but the police kept him from approaching the boarding area, and he was unable to find Dr. Shapiro.

  Theresienstadt was sixty kilometers north of Prague, near the Elbe River. A former military garrison, it had been built by Emperor Joseph II and named in honor of his mother, the archduchess, Empress Maria Theresa. Gavrilo Princip, the young man who belonged to Free Bosnia and assassinated the archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, precipitating the 1914 war, had been imprisoned there. Acting Reich protector Reinhard Heydrich had designated Theresienstadt a ghetto for Czech Jews over the age of sixty-five and for those who were war veterans or had been distinguished or influential in some sphere of life. Anna remembered Franz saying that this attempt by the Nazis to present a prison as some sort of retirement home or holiday camp fooled no one.

  There is too much cruelty, Anna thought. Her head ached, her eyes bothered her. Her mother took her to an optician for an eye examination and to another doctor, who drew blood from her arm, listened to her heart, and tested her reflexes. She was in good health, the doctor said. A little nervous, maybe. She should try to get more sleep.

  Fear kept her from sleeping. Fear and a feeling that at the back of her neck she had a small wound where the SS captain had placed his hand. He had not really shot her, but sometimes she felt as if he had, as if fear could inflict as mortal a wound as a bullet. If so, she surely had a dangerous injury. She looked at Dr. Shapiro’s manuscript on the coffee table in the living room. Franz had read it, her father had read it. Anna ran her fingers over the title page. She hesitated, retreated, came back, and then one day she sat down and began to read:

  Long ago, there was a king who ruled over a vast and prosperous kingdom. This kingdom was richly endowed with mountains, rivers, fertile plains, a wealth of precious minerals beneath the ground. In season the land produced barley, corn, and wheat. The orchards and vineyards flourished. The king was respected by his subjects; his soldiers ardently pledged their loyalty to him; his retainers and servants, down to the merest scullery maid in the royal kitchens, obeyed his every wish, often before the king himself was entirely aware of what he wished for.

  But it was a king’s nature never to feel entirely satisfied, never to accept that he had a sufficiency of anything. Especially love.

  And so the king summoned his three daughters into his presence and commanded them to tell him how much they loved him.

  The king was resplendent in a scarlet tunic and silk hose of forest green, a cape lined with ermine over his broad shoulders, a sword in a jeweled scabbard buckled around his waist. On his plump white hands he wore rings set with diamonds and lapis lazuli and bloodred rubies. He regarded the three royal princesses, whose names were Branimira, Danjana, and Marica, and he said, “Tell me, each in your own way, how much you love me.”

  The oldest daughter, Princess Branimira, curtsied and smiled her bewitching smile. Simply put, she loved the king more than gold, she said. More than all the gold in the kingdom.

  The king beamed. To be loved more than gold meant something to him.

  The second daughter, Princess Danjana, knelt before her father, her long chestnut-brown hair spilling over her shoulders, and said she loved him more than the sun and the earth and the stars. More than Heaven! More than God!

  Really? said the king, with a wry smile. More than God?

  Yes, Princess Danjana said. Yes, she did love him more than God. She loved him more than gold and more than the flowers she would pick on her wedding day for her bridal wreath: rosemary for remembrance, cowslip for grace, and violets for steadfastness.

  Graciously, the king inclined his head. Her reply, he said, was poetic; it pleased him.

  He beckoned to his youngest daughter. “What about you, my child? What do you say?”

  A father should not have favorites among his children. A king learned impartiality, or he should learn it. But he was human, after all. He loved Marica not more than gold, since gold was essential to the administration and success of his kingdom, and he would be lost without it, but he loved her as much as gold. He had told her so, he was sure, on many occasions. Gently, he chided his youngest daughter to speak up. And yet she remained silent, her eyes downcast.

  At last, her head meekly bowed, she spoke:

  “I love you, sir, more than salt,” said Princess Marica.

  “Salt!” repeated the king, his eyes narrowing. Her answer was like a knife thrust between his ribs, directly into his heart. His little Marica, his darling, his treasure, had betrayed him. He trembled with rage. His cooks, he said angrily, seasoned his soup with salt, and somet
imes they used too heavy a hand and ruined his meal. Fishermen salted their catch to keep it fresh for the royal table. His groomsman put out salt for his horses and for the wild deer he hunted. Salt was everywhere; it was—it was as common as salt. It was nothing.

  He swept his arm through the air. “Go,” he thundered at Marica. “Your sisters have answered as royal daughters ought to answer. But you! Ingrate! Traitor! Viper! I never want to see your face again.”

  The Princess Branimira knelt before the king and begged him to forgive Marica. “She is young,” Branimira said. “She didn’t know what she was saying.” Princess Danjana wept. But the king was adamant. He forbade Marica to take anything with her. “Get out of my sight,” he thundered.

  Marica curtsied to her father, the king. She looked up at him, her eyes swimming in tears. But she obeyed his command. Clad in only a simple gown and a plain wool cloak, with sandals on her bare feet, she walked to the castle’s outer doors. She walked across the drawbridge over the moat and kept going until she passed the border of her father’s kingdom. She was in a land she had never seen before. As night fell, she became lost in a dark forest, where she took shelter beneath a tree. In the morning she woke and looked up at the sky between the fir branches. Why hadn’t she answered her father’s question as her sisters had? Why hadn’t she prevaricated? Because, she thought, she knew her answer was the only one she could give.

  She brushed fir needles and leaves from her dress. She ate berries from a bush and drank from a stream. Days passed, and sometimes she couldn’t find anything to eat, and she became weaker and felt her life ebbing away. At last, she lay on the forest floor, clasped her hands on her breast, closed her eyes, and said a prayer, thinking she would not wake again. But at dawn she heard birds singing in the trees, and everything was as it had been, except that a woman appeared and knelt beside her and took her hand. This woman wore a plain gown of homespun gray wool; her snow-white hair curled around her head like an aura.