Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,112

his came to their table and asked Gudrun for a dance. “Yes, okay,” she said.

Soon the others got up to dance. George Tanner asked Natalia if he could get her a drink. “No, thank you,” she said. “I’m fine.” He went to the bar and came back with a beer for himself and a glass of white wine for her. She felt annoyed and grateful at the same time. She let the glass sit there, untouched.

“When my brother and I were young,” he said, “our parents brought us to Europe on vacation. This would have been the summer of 1921 and again in 1923. The first trip, I was thirteen—an impressionable age—and everything I saw impressed me deeply. We stayed in Paris for three weeks and then visited Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. When I finished university, I lived for a year in Paris. I wanted to see Budapest but never got there. Tell me about your life in Hungary.”

“Well, we live in a castle. Picture a French château. That’s what it looks like. It has a cellar full of bones. Skeletons.”

“What?” George said, laughing.

“We grow grapes and wheat and barley and raise horses that are directly descended from the horses of Andalusia kept in the private stables of the Habsburgs in Vienna, according to my mother-in-law. In the spring, when a foal is born, my mother-in-law takes a bottle of plum wine to the stables, and she and the groomsman and the stable hands toast the health of the foal. We have a school on the estate. A kindergarten, really.”

A fight had broken out on the dance floor. A soldier had punched another soldier in the nose, and there was a lot of blood. A crowd gathered, and men separated the combatants. A janitor with a bucket and mop was summoned to scrub the floor. The dancing went on, and the saxophonist played a solo, something dolorous, smoky, like the atmosphere. Americans held German women in their arms and drew them closer, and they kissed. It was like a film, Natalia thought. One of those Dadaist films she and Martin Becker used to like so well. Soon the camera would follow the couples out into the night. They would find a place, a room somewhere or a sheltered spot beneath a tree, to make love. All over Berlin it was like that.

“Go on, have a dance,” Gudrun said, leaning over to touch Natalia’s arm. Gudrun was drinking crème de menthe; her mouth was green.

* * *

Natalia got permission from the lieutenant general to telephone Beatriz in Buenos Aires. She listened as a Spanish-speaking operator spoke to a woman Natalia didn't know, a servant, perhaps. She had a call for Beatriz Faber, the operator said to this woman, and then Beatriz was on the line.

“Can you hear me, Mother? It’s Natalia. This is Natalia. Can you hear me?”

“Don’t shout, please,” her mother said briskly. “Who did you say you were? You aren’t Natalia. My daughter is dead. She’s been dead for three years.”

“Mother,” Natalia said. “I’m in Dahlem.”

“Hold on a moment.”

Natalia heard her mother speaking to someone.

“Mother, for God’s sake. It’s me, Natalia.”

“Natalia? Is it you? We thought you were dead. I had Masses said for you. Wait a minute. Zita wants to know if Miklós is with you.”

“No, he’s not here,” Natalia said. “Mother, I need your help. Can you send me some money? I have nothing, only what I get doing laundry for the Americans.”

“Listen, you and Miklós must get on a ship to Buenos Aires. Every day Nazis are coming to South America. Did you know that? They get as far as Spain, and someone takes their money and gets them passage on a steamer. The Rat Line. That’s what the newspapers call it.”

“I can’t leave Berlin, not yet,” Natalia said. “But I still need money.”

She’d ask at her bank, Beatriz said. The bank would know what to do. She took the address and the telephone number where she could reach Natalia.

“Is our house still there, in Zehlendorf? Have you seen it?”

“Yes,” Natalia said. “It’s still there.”

“Now listen to me. I will send money, but you must use it to come here. You and Miklós. You have to promise me, right now.”

“Yes, I promise.”

Beatriz kept her word. She telephoned to let Natalia know she had to open an account at the Deutsche Bank. The Deutsche Bank operated under the authority of the United States Department of the Treasury, and George vouched for her, providing proof of her identity,