cheeks were red, his eyes bright blue. He told them he had just completed a year’s clerkship at a law firm in Berlin and was on his way to Prague, where his maternal grandparents owned a jewelry shop in the Staré Mesto, or Old Town. His grandfather, a goldsmith, designed and made jewelry, Herr Becker informed them, holding out his right hand to show Beatriz the garnet ring his grandfather had given him on his twenty-first birthday.
“Your grandfather is an artist,” Beatriz said.
“He has a wonderful eye for design, doesn’t he? Frau Faber, I’d consider it an honor if you’d allow me to introduce you to my grandparents and show you and Fräulein Faber around Prague.”
“How kind of you, Herr Becker, but we’re leaving Prague early tomorrow morning. Another time, perhaps? Natalia, do you think we should order lunch? Will you have something too, Herr Becker?”
“Yes, why not? A good suggestion, Frau Faber.”
Beatriz ordered toast and liver pâté, Natalia had a salad, and Herr Becker talked while eating his soup. His father, like Spengler’s father, was a mining engineer. His parents and his brother lived in Blankenburg, another Spengler connection.
“Natalia and I stayed in Blankenburg this spring,” Beatriz said. “We were on our way to the Harz Mountains on a walking holiday. Except—in the Harz Mountains, I got lost and was alone up there all night, in the cold and dark.”
“Even in fine weather the mountains can be deadly. You were fortunate, Frau Faber.”
The train began to move; everyone cheered and then groaned in unison as it halted. Natalia and her mother, accompanied by Herr Becker, returned to their compartment. Natalia’s seatmate lit his pipe. She tolerated the fumes for as long as she could and then went out to the corridor, where, honestly, the air seemed no fresher. “Why in God’s name is this taking so long?” she overheard a man saying. “It can’t have anything to do with the floods, because the Elbe is not flooded. It doesn’t make sense to me.”
“The railway, not the weather, is to blame for this. We’d arrive in Prague faster if we walked.”
“Or crawled on our hands and knees,” someone said.
“In my day,” a man said, “there was a sense of obligation to people. There was courtesy, and there was efficiency.”
Natalia bumped into someone. “Excuse me,” she said. “The pleasure is all mine, Fräulein,” the man said, grinning. She hated him and everyone else on the train, without exception, including Herr Becker, who, mopping his face with a handkerchief, appeared at her side. “This is a beautiful area, is it not?” he said, looking at the spindly trees beside the track. Years ago, his father took him and his brother hiking somewhere near the Pravice Gate, on the border between Germany and Czechoslovakia. “As a boy I was overwhelmed by the Elbe Sandstone Mountains. Those monumental, towering rock formations! Once I saw an immense stone figure lean forward, as it were, and beckon to me with a giant hand. I have never told this to another soul, Fräulein Faber. Did you know that a hundred million years ago, those mountains were under a saltwater sea? Eons ago the action of water on sandstone sculpted those stones into the fascinating and terrifying shapes you see now. Can you think of anything stranger?”
“No, indeed not,” Natalia said, now amused by Herr Becker’s enthusiasm and his flushed, eager expression. She could hear the assistant conductor, who had just entered the coach, asking if anyone present was a doctor. We have a matter of some urgency, he repeated several times, standing on tiptoe, scanning the crowd. A man volunteered to fetch his wife, a trained nurse, and two men began to argue, one believing a certain passenger was a medical doctor, while the other maintained the man in question was a professor and an entomologist, and the study of insects had few, if any, similarities with that of human physiology. A young woman holding a small boy by the hand made her way to the assistant conductor. She was a doctor, she said. Her name was Dr. Schaefferová. “You said it was urgent?”
Natalia saw the assistant conductor’s confusion. The doctor was very young. She wore a pearl-gray suit and a white blouse with an oval enamel brooch at the collar; her blond hair was arranged in a gleaming coronet of braids. Everyone was looking at the doctor and the assistant conductor, who wiped his round red face with a handkerchief, put it in his pocket, and