Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,109

thick, richly patterned carpets on polished oak floors, elegant plaster cornices around the ceiling, brass wall sconces beside the fireplace. There was a Bechstein grand piano with a bust of Beethoven on it, a gramophone, a tall pendulum clock that showed the phases of the moon, and on a shelf above a cabinet, a glass skull. Beside the skull were opera glasses and a stuffed songbird on a ceramic stand. A bookcase held books by Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Schiller, newer authors such as Vicki Baum and Ernst Jünger and Thomas Mann, and, she noticed, a novel by Arthur Schnitzler—all writers that had been banned by the Nazis. There were the two volumes of Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes, which of course brought to her mind Martin Becker on the train to Prague all those years before. Had he survived? She hoped so. On a lower shelf of the bookcase were gramophone recordings of Schubert, Beethoven, Wagner. Götterdämmerung. Der fliegende Holländer.

So this family listened to Wagner, hung romantic, sentimental oil paintings of peasants toiling in fields on their walls, read Schiller and Goethe, but also had a collection of modern novels, books that had been banned by the Nazis, right there on their bookshelves. Perhaps they’d supported the Nazis and perhaps not. Perhaps they deserved to have their house taken over by the Americans and perhaps not.

She got a cold stare from the glass skull. Once a curio, now—overtaken by the war—a horror.

A car turned into the drive, stopped, and two men in U.S. Army uniform got out. She drew back from the window and went to the kitchen and scrubbed potatoes and cut up carrots, and then, when she and Gudrun were having a cup of tea, Mike Rose came in to tell them that Lieutenant General George Tanner would be staying at the house. “Come and meet him when you’ve finished your tea,” he said.

There were suitcases in the hall. In the living room the lieutenant general had spread a red swastika flag on the sofa and was sitting on it, smoking a pipe and drinking cognac. He stood, his pipe in his hand, and shook hands with Natalia and Gudrun and asked if they would like a drink.

“No, thank you,” Natalia said.

“Yes, that would be nice,” Gudrun said.

The lieutenant general’s aide-de-camp, Major Stevens, handed Gudrun a drink. The lieutenant general sat on the sofa. Fair hair, a narrow, intelligent face, narrow eyes. A very direct gaze. “Your name, again?” he asked Natalia.

“Natalia Andorján,” she said.

“Hungarian?” the lieutenant general asked.

“My husband is Hungarian,” she said.

“Frau Andorján was a prisoner in a concentration camp near Hanover,” Mike Rose said. “I believe she’s recovering well, now, though, sir. Isn’t that so, Frau Andorján?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, thank you.”

“Good, that’s good,” Lieutenant General Tanner said, taking a lighter out of his uniform pocket and relighting his pipe.

Within a few days, typewriters and filing cabinets had been moved into the sitting room. Telephone lines were installed. In Bavaria, Natalia learned, Lieutenant General Tanner had been in charge of a German-language newspaper published by the U.S. Army, the Bayerischer Tag. Now he was assembling the equipment and resources to publish a similar newspaper in Berlin, a German-language newspaper aimed, it was said, at the intelligent reader who needed a little encouragement, a nudge in the direction of accepting a free, democratic Germany with strong economic and political ties to the United States. An American information control office was being set up on Milinowskistrasse, in Zehlendorf. At the former Ullstein Verlag building in Tempelhof, a printing press had been recovered and repaired.

The lieutenant general employed the glass skull as a paperweight. He played Wagner on the record player. He often reclined on the sofa, his feet up on the swastika flag—the modest spoils of war, he said—while writing rapidly in a stenographer’s notebook. At first he intimidated her. She felt more at ease with him when she learned he was, in civilian life, a journalist, like Miklós. They were all journalists or newspapermen in some capacity, these Americans assigned to publishing a newspaper. She wondered whether anyone at the American information office knew anything of her husband, she said to James Grant, and one afternoon he took her to the house on Milinowskistrasse. A Polish newspaperman there said in German that Miklós Andorján had filed reports with the Associated Press from Stalingrad and Moscow and, more recently, from western Poland. Count Andorján had been with the Russian Forty-Seventh Guards Tank Division. In January,