Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,110

he’d been in Warsaw. Then he’d been in Łódź. In February, he filed a story from Poznań. That was six months ago, Natalia thought. “If you see him, if you hear news, any word, would you please let me know?” She wrote her name and the telephone number of the house on Cäcilienallee on a slip of paper and gave it to the person who seemed to be in charge.

While they were in Zehlendorf, Natalia showed James her mother’s villa.It seemed strange, to be standing there, in the garden of what had been her home. She remembered the day in 1934 when they came to see Zita, just after the Gestapo had released her and she was recovering from her injuries. James Grant was watching her and she turned and told him how Zita had been imprisoned and beaten by the Gestapo.

“She had a compound fracture of the arm; her face was bruised. When Miklós and I saw her, she had a plaster cast on her arm and she was drowsy from the Luminal her doctor had given her for pain. My husband talked to her about hiring a lawyer. ‘The lawyers are all Nazis now,’ she said. ‘Well, that’s not true,’ she added. ‘But these days you almost feel left out if you aren’t picked up and interrogated.’”

Natalia remembered Hildegard carrying a tea tray into the room, and then Beatriz pouring the tea and announcing quite casually that she and Zita were thinking again of leaving Germany to live in Buenos Aires. “You and Natalia can’t stay here, either,” she said to Miklós. “Not with the child.”

“This is where my work is,” Miklós said.

“You think you can file stories from a prison cell?” Beatriz said.

“I can’t leave my mother alone in Hungary,” he said.

“Bring her too,” Beatriz said. “Bring her to Buenos Aires. The climate would do her good.”

Natalia remembered she’d been listening to this exchange while she knelt on the floor, playing toy soldiers with Krisztián: Napoleon at Austerlitz, the French general and his troops fighting the armies of the tsar of Russia and the Habsburg emperor. She combed her son’s fine, blond hair with her fingers. Firmly he pushed her hand away. Her beautiful Krisztián, with his translucent skin and blond curls, his stubborn willful mouth. The way he would laugh, his head back, his eyes crinkling. She could never punish him; if he did anything wrong, he made her laugh. Before he was two years old, he knew who he was. He looked sometimes disapprovingly at his parents and grandmothers; even Rozalia couldn’t get away with a thing around Krisztián.

That day, at Beatriz’s house, he plucked a French cavalry officer from the fray and carried it to his father. Then he leaned against Zita’s knee and touched the cast on her arm.

“You must be gentle with Zita’s sore arm, that’s a darling,” his grandmother said.

“As if this little lamb could hurt me,” Zita said.

“It’s time for his nap,” Natalia had said.

They should have gone to Argentina that year. But Beatriz and Zita had kept delaying their departure and then when they did sail to Argentina, in 1938, it was too late for Natalia and Miklós. They couldn’t leave Rozalia. They couldn’t leave the castle, which held so many memories of their son. It pained her, to think that if they had left, maybe Krisztián would not have contracted a fatal illness. And Miklós would not have gone into a war zone. She would not have been sent to a concentration camp, and right now, at this moment, she and her husband would not be separated.

James asked her if she was all right. He got her to move into the shade of a tree. He gave her his parents’ address in Seattle. “If you would like to write to Anna,” he said.

“Yes, I would like to do that,” she said, putting the folded slip of paper in her dress pocket.

“There’s something I should tell you,” she said, as they walked back to his car. “Perhaps you know already that Anna has family in Prague? I believe she has grandparents in Heidelberg as well. Her father’s parents; they’re German. And there was an uncle and his family, also in Heidelberg. Did Anna tell you about them?”

“No,” James said. He stopped. “I’m shocked. As far as we knew, she had no relatives living. I don’t know what to say. It’s my fault. I feel horribly negligent.”

“Anna went through too much and doesn’t know who to trust. If I’m in