Midnight Train to Prague

by Carol Windley

  Natalia proofread and then typed up a story about General Patton, the military governor of Bavaria, going horseback riding with friends. She typed up a story on the appointment of a college professor from New York to oversee industrial development in the American zone of occupied Germany. She corrected a pronoun problem in a report on a fashion show in New York: the little black dress in which no one could go wrong was back in style; skirts were longer; sleeves were elbow-length, worn pushed up. She worked for a while and then heard Mike Rose talking to Helga in the kitchen. Yesterday Mike had brought a dog back to the house with him. Its hair was sparse and rough, its ribs visible. He washed it and fed it, and it had slept in the laundry room. Mike named it Truman—no surprise there, Natalia thought. He got an army doctor to give him a salve for the dog’s skin and something to kill the fleas. Helga complained that the salve smelled terrible and the dog kept getting under her feet. As if to prove her point, she stepped on Truman’s paw and he yelped. Mike cut a small slice of meat from a roast on a platter.

  “Don’t feed that to the dog,” Helga said.

  “I had a dog once,” Natalia said, kneeling beside Mike and petting Truman. She said, “My dog was a Hungarian puli. His name was Bashan.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Natalia was in her room reading the novel by Arthur Schnitzler she had found in the living room when someone rapped lightly on the door. She got up. James Grant asked her to get her coat and hat. They were going somewhere. He would explain on the way. “Do you have rain boots?” he said, looking at her feet, and she said, no, she did not have rain boots. “It’s raining,” he said. “I know it’s raining,” she said. He looked at his watch. She made him wait in the hall while she brushed her hair and put on some lipstick.

  She and James went downstairs, and James opened the front door. The air was mild; the damp grass smelled sweet. George was at the wheel of the Mercedes. She sat in the back. They drove to Steglitz, to a Red Army military hospital located on Unter den Eichen. Within a few weeks, George said, the hospital, which was in the American zone, would be handed over to the U.S. Army.

  “You know Steglitz quite well, I imagine, Natalia,” James Grant said. “Yes,” she said. Margot and Hermann Brückner had belonged to a youth club in Steglitz, she remembered. She’d gone to the dances there with them.

  The inane words of one of Mike Rose’s songs came to her mind:

  I could swear that she was padded from her shoulder to her heel.

  But then she started dancing, and her dancing made me feel

  That everything she had was absolutely real!

  Absolutely real. She was learning English from these silly little tunes. It wasn’t even a nice song, she thought.

  At the military hospital they got out of the car, and George held an umbrella over her head as they walked to the main entrance. She was starting to feel afraid. Were they going to leave her here? Was she being handed over to the Russians?

  “I’m not going in,” she said. “Not unless you tell me what’s going on.”

  “Natalia, a patient in this hospital says his name is Miklós Andorján.”

  The foyer of the hospital was brightly lit, and as they entered, a nurse walked past them, pushing a patient in a wheelchair. Natalia stared at the patient, a young man with blond hair, his right arm bandaged, amputated at the elbow. Near an elevator two doctors conferred in Russian. A Red Army officer appeared and introduced himself to George. He took them to an office at the end of the corridor. He offered them chairs in front of a desk. He switched on a desk lamp, sat down, picked up a telephone, and spoke into it in Russian. Not once did he look at Natalia. She heard footsteps outside in the corridor. The Russian officer stood, went to the door, opened it, and three men came in, a doctor, an army officer, and a patient in a dressing gown and pajamas. This patient was tall and thin; his head was shaved, and he looked very ill. She took a step toward him. Her heart was hammering against her ribs, and she kept thinking she was going to pass out. “Natalia,” the patient said. He held out his arms, and she walked into his embrace. He placed his hand gently on the side of her face. He had tears in his eyes. They said one another’s names; they breathed the names, as if in naming they could make it true, that they had found each other.

  He had been with General Zhukov’s army, that was true enough, Miklós told Natalia, when they were left alone in the office for a few minutes. She held Miklós’s hand. He told her his jacket had been stolen in Łódź, and whoever was wearing the jacket, that was the man who had been struck by an army vehicle and buried in an unmarked grave near the Oder River. Miklós had been told that a priest at the church near the graveyard had taken his wallet out of the coat when the body was brought to his church. He had given it to a Russian journalist.

  “Yes, and the Russian gave it to an English journalist, and he brought it to me,” Natalia said.

  It was winter, Miklós said, and he’d removed a greatcoat from a German soldier’s corpse and was wearing it when he reached Germany. The Americans refused to listen when he said he was not an SS officer and threw him into a prisoner-of-war camp near Munich. The American guards waited with a rather uncivil degree of impatience for him and the other prisoners, German Wehrmacht soldiers, to die of starvation. One of the prisoners, a genuine SS officer, cut a hole in the wire fence, and he and Miklós crawled out and walked away. Near Leipzig they parted company, and Miklós made his way to Berlin. In the Russian sector he met people he’d known at the newspaper before the war. They took him to a canteen called the Seagull, where the Soviets provided coffee and hot food. He had blackouts. He had a fever, an infection in his leg, in a wound caused by the barbed wire at the prisoner-of-war camp when he escaped. The Russians put him in the hospital in Steglitz. The hospital required information: name, date of birth, where he lived. He filled out the forms; they told him he was using a false name. The name you’re using, they said, is the name of a dead man.

  What were they to do now, he asked her. He didn’t know if he was ready to leave Berlin yet. Natalia thought longingly of going home to the castle, where, in her mind, nothing had changed since 1942, and she could feed Miklós fresh eggs and cream and butter.

  Gently he traced the scars on her hands. She had been a prisoner too, she said, and please, don’t ask her why, because she didn’t know why. Then, and later, she told Miklós very little of the previous three years, when she’d been at what became known as one of the worst of the German concentration camps. Anyway, any reference to her arrest and the internment camp, and he became very quiet, very still, and asked her why in God’s name she had left home in the first place. Because you weren’t there, she said.

  When, three weeks later, Miklós was discharged from the hospital, he stayed with Natalia at the Americans’ house, and his health improved a little, day by day. He talked to Zita Kuznetsova on the telephone. She and Beatriz continued to encourage them to book passage on a ship to Buenos Aires. Zita said she would help Miklós find work at a newspaper. “I don’t speak Spanish,” he said. “How could I function as a journalist in a country where I don’t speak the language?” Zita told him he could learn Spanish, and he must be aware there were German-language newspapers in Buenos Aires. They had been in circulation since the nineteenth century. After the call, he repeated Zita’s words to Natalia and said it was too early to make any kind of plans, and if they went anywhere, he said, he thought it should be to England. He spoke English; he respected Clement Attlee, the new prime minister; he could live in Clement Attlee’s England. England, Natalia said, would not be practical, and Miklós said, no, it was not, and they began to plan their return home, to the castle.

  * * *

  In October they traveled to Prague on a night train. She was terrified, at the last minute, of boarding the train, of being enclosed, held captive. Miklós took her hand and on the train she rested her head on his shoulder, on the rough fabric of his coat, and listened to the other passengers shuffling around, coughing, settling down for th
e journey. It was past midnight when the train arrived at the Prague station. They checked into the hotel on Nerudova Street, where the concierge recognized Miklós and embraced him and kept calling him Count Andorján and beaming at Natalia. In the morning, she and Miklós walked around the city, marveling that it had been so little touched by the last six years of war. And yet the city, beautiful, shining in the pale autumn light, had transparencies, veils that parted, wavered, and she saw herself alone, stranded in a city under occupation by a brutal, murderous regime. She had to discipline her mind to remain in the present, in this moment. She and Miklós went shopping for warm coats and sweaters, because the weather had turned unseasonably cold. Miklós bought a car, a 1930 Škoda with a cracked windshield and a missing headlight. While he stayed at the hotel to read and rest, Natalia walked to Mr. Aslan’s shop. “It really is you, isn’t it?” Mr. Aslan said. She told him she had found her husband, and they were going home.

  Mr. Aslan was well, he said; his wife was well, and his children were, thank God, healthy, growing, both at school. He told her about the end of the war, the Russians coming in, the Germans defeated, and President Edvard Beneš returning from exile in England. And Beneš wanted all Germans out of Czechoslovakia. Germans who had lived and worked in Prague or anywhere in Czechoslovakia were ordered to leave. Those who failed to get out fast enough were shot. People who had become Reich Germans to protect themselves during the Nazi occupation now had to wear white badges that signified they were German, not Czech. It was a horrible thing to see, after what had happened under the Nazis. Some Germans were, believe it or not, Mr. Aslan said, sent to Theresienstadt, or to use the Czech name, Terezín. After the war, no one had room in their hearts for compassion. But Mr. Aslan believed it would come, things would return to normal. The important thing, he said, was that the brutality of the Nazis was never forgotten.

  He gave her sesame-seed cakes. He wished her well.

  After saying goodbye to Mr. Aslan, Natalia went to the millinery shop of Anna’s aunt Vivian. Aunt Vivian was sitting at a worktable, stretching dark red felt on a hat form. She kept moving her fingers over the fabric as she looked at Natalia. Natalia gave her Anna’s address in Seattle. “Anna is fine,” Natalia said. “She lives with a nice family over there, in the States. I know their son; he’s with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. It’s his parents who are taking care of Anna.”

  Aunt Vivian knew Seattle; she’d visited there once, when she was a girl.

  She wore a pincushion on her wrist; the glass heads on the pins shone as she moved her hands. She took off the pincushion and got up and went to a cupboard and took out the gray cardboard portfolio that contained the story of the princess who knew the worth of salt over gold. She gave it to Natalia, to send to Anna.

  Natalia and Miklós stayed overnight at Aunt Vivian’s apartment. She insisted on it. She wanted Natalia to see Emil and Maximilian and tell them about Anna. Miklós was happy to meet them. They talked for hours, about the war and about what was going to happen in Czechoslovakia.

  * * *

  As they reached the castle, snow began to fall, and when Natalia and Miklós got out of the car, the clouds parted, and moonlight glinted on the copper roof of the tower. She had pictured returning home in summer, the horses in the paddock, cows and sheep grazing in the fields. Fields of lavender and poppies. But there were no animals in the fields, and the fields were white with snow, and there was no sign of Rozalia. The doors were bolted, the windows shuttered; no smoke came from the chimneys. And such silence, broken only by the cry of an owl and then a dog barking. Miklós had to break in through a window in the room where the agricultural accountant used to manage the estate’s accounts. Then he opened the kitchen door to let Natalia in. She lit a candle. They went up to the second floor and found Rozalia in her bedroom, in bed, beneath a pile of blankets and quilts. “Rozalia?” Natalia said. “It’s us, it’s Natalia and Miklós. Are you awake? Rozalia, can you hear me?”

  She took Rozalia’s wrist and felt for a pulse. Rozalia’s eyes flew open, and she swore at Natalia. She struggled to sit up in the bed. She brought a knife out from under her pillow. Miklós took it from her. Natalia found a chair and sat beside the bed. She felt the countess’s forehead. “When did you last eat?” she said.

  “God knows. Every now and then Katya brings me something.”

  Miklós lit a fire in the kitchen stove, and Natalia heated a can of soup. She toasted some bread they had brought with them from Prague.

  They ate on trays in the countess’s bedroom, with a small fire burning in the grate and the wind blowing dry snow against the window. Natalia thought that in the morning she would get to work and scrub the place clean or at least clean the rooms they used. What had happened here? she wondered. Later, Rozalia told them that in October of 1944, the Germans had arrived and moved into the castle. To begin with, she said, there must have been ten or eleven of them. “Only one had any manners; he was a gentleman, but the others I think were from the lowest levels of society, even if they called themselves officers.” They emptied her storehouse of food. Finally, only two were left, and they showed no sign of leaving. “In the end,” Rozalia said, “I had to get rid of them.”

  “You got rid of them?” Miklós said.

  “Do you see them, Miklós? Do you?” she said to Natalia. “Look behind the doors; look in the cupboards. You won’t find them.”

  “Where did they go?” Miklós said warily.

  “They’re buried behind the horse barn,” Rozalia said. “They stole my rifles, so that I couldn’t shoot even a rabbit or a sparrow for food, and they slashed the tapestries out of their frames and stole my jewelry, even the diamond and ruby necklace I inherited from my mother. I had hidden László’s pistol, his Steyr automatic from the other war, down in the cellars. And the clips, I had kept them, too. After all that time, I was astonished when the Steyr fired. But I was always a good shot, wasn’t I, Miklós? I wish I’d thought to shoot the Russians who came here and took my horses. They sent my horses to Russia, the bastards.”

  She and two men from the workers’ cottages buried the Germans, she said.

  “How many, did you say? How many Germans?” Miklós asked.

  “Only those two. The others left earlier, as I said. I imagine the Russians finished them off. Not that the Russians are any better, but at least I didn’t have to look at their ugly faces over my breakfast table.”

  When spring came, Miklós dug up the ground. He found two corpses. Two corpses in SS uniforms. He covered them over again.

  Their rifles, Rozalia said, were with the skulls in the ossuary.

  * * *

  In 1945 the coalition government in Hungary appropriated large private landholdings, dividing them into parcels of land that were given to the tenant farmers or to people who had never in their lives owned land. Once, Miklós had considered his estate a burden; now he said he felt unjustly robbed of his property. He smiled as he said this. Most of the people around here didn’t want the land, he said; they wanted industrial jobs in Budapest. Steady work, regular pay, that was what they wanted, Miklós said. But the Germans had dismantled the factories in Budapest and had trucked the components to their own country, so everyone would have a long wait for those jobs. Natalia saw that the peasants, a term she’d never heard Miklós use before, were quite happy to move onto the estate. They put up houses; their woodsmoke seasoned the night air, and their lighted windows made a kind of community. The Hungarian republic was declared on February 1, 1946. That spring, Miklós and Natalia plowed a patch of ground and planted vegetable seeds. They cut firewood; they cleaned out the henhouse, and Miklós brought home a rooster and a dozen speckled hens. So they had fresh eggs, wild strawberries, fresh milk, from Magdolna’s farm, and bread Natalia baked every morning.

  Rozalia had good days, when she got up from her bed and sat in the kitchen, or wandered around the garden, her braid hanging down from under her headscarf. Then there were days
when she did not get up but stayed huddled in bed with a hot-water bottle to ease the pain in her back. The doctor who came to see her told Natalia she had a compression fracture of the spine. She was also suffering congestive heart failure, he said. The doctor’s name was Benedek Imre. He had taken over Dr. Urbán’s practice. The Germans had sent Dr. Urbán to a Wehrmacht field hospital, and he had not come home. Dr. Imre told Natalia he had graduated from medical school in Budapest in 1941.

  While he was talking to her, at the castle, they heard Miklós coughing. “My husband has been ill,” said Natalia. Dr. Imre, preparing to leave, had picked up his medical bag. Now he put it down on the hall table and said perhaps he should examine her husband.

  “I don’t think he’ll let you,” she said. Dr. Imre said, perhaps another time then, and went away in his old two-seater car.

  Natalia saw that Miklós was losing weight and had a fever that waxed and waned, but anything, she told herself, could cause a fever: a touch of flu, a chest cold. It could be anything. She wasn’t feeling well either.

  Miklós wrote an article on the Soviet Cominform, an organization that, as far as Natalia could understand, united Communist parties in Eastern Europe, France, and Italy. What did she think of his article, he asked, and she said it was very good: thoughtful, not provocative, very balanced.

  How it pleased her, to see Miklós working at his desk in his tower room. Sometimes while she was hand-washing clothes or stirring soup made with potatoes and onions they had grown themselves, she remembered the first time she climbed the stairs to the tower room and how there, in the windows, like a vast tapestry, had been the Hungarian landscape and the wide Hungarian sky. She remembered the sense it had given her of flying, and that reminded her of Zita’s story of the monk who escaped his mortal body and ascended to the stratosphere and looked down at the forests and rivers. Then she thought of her dog, Bashan. She remembered throwing sticks into the river for him and the way he bounded into the water, his long curls swirling around him, and that she and Miklós had kissed beside the river. It seemed long ago; it seemed like no time at all had passed.