Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,113
her address, and employment. When the funds were deposited in the new account, he drove her to the bank and stood at her side as she completed the paperwork.
She withdrew some cash and later gave some of it, nearly half, to the priest at a bombed church in Berlin.
* * *
Natalia was in the laundry room, measuring bleach into the washing machine, her face turned away to avoid the fumes, when Lieutenant General Tanner appeared at the door and said he’d like to speak to her. George, she meant. They had graduated to first-name terms.
“Yes?” she said.
“Not here. In my office,” he said. He held the door open, waiting. She screwed the top back on the bleach bottle and put it on a shelf. She removed her apron and hung it on a hook near the sink. In his office, the lieutenant general sat on the edge of his desk. He fiddled with the glass skull and then put it down on the papers. Another man came in and was introduced to her as Nigel Thorpe, a British newspaperman with the Manchester Guardian. What is going on here? Natalia thought. She watched as Nigel Thorpe placed a satchel on the floor near the hearth.
George Tanner cleared his throat. “Frau Andorján,” he said. “Frau Andorján, your husband, Count Andorján, died on or about April 5, as a result of a motor vehicle accident, on a road near a village on the Polish side of the Oder River.”
Nigel Thorpe picked up his satchel and withdrew from it a bulky envelope. He came over to Natalia and gave it to her. She opened the envelope, which was unsealed. Inside there was a wallet, which she took out and opened. It contained two items: her husband’s press card and a photograph of Natalia.
Two GIs were clattering down the hall. One said, “Man, it cost me forty bucks and two packs of cigarettes for a bottle of whiskey, can you believe it?”
Major Stevens closed the door.
Nigel Thorpe said he’d met a Russian journalist at a café in Berlin. The Russian told him of being in a village in Poland near the Oder River. He’d witnessed an accident. The Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov, had moved in with his unit, and there was a lot of activity. The weather was bad, and a truck skidded on a patch of snow and ice and hit a man walking on the road. He died instantly. He was identified by the press card in his wallet. Some of the villagers buried him. They gave his coat and wallet to a priest, and the priest gave the wallet to the Russian journalist, who was on his way to Berlin, thinking he might meet someone there who knew the owner of the press card.
Natalia slipped the photograph into her pocket. She left the wallet and the envelope on the desk and walked out of the room. She went through the kitchen and out to the garden. She took the photograph out of her pocket. She was nineteen, in a beaded shawl and long skirt, in Trieste. The city that sheltered us. She refused to cry; the wallet in itself was hardly conclusive. For fifteen years she had been married to a newspaperman. She knew what gave a report veracity, and this report of an accident involving her husband had, she told herself, no veracity.
Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world. That was Pascal, she thought.
She wouldn’t let Gudrun or anyone else offer sympathy. She was okay, she kept repeating, until she was sick of the words. She just wanted to get on with the laundry.
* * *
When he got home to the States, Mike Rose said, he was going to tune up his Chevrolet and trade it in for a new car, a Buick. Not new, but newer than the Chevy. He talked about his kids, the one who did well in the school, and the one who liked sports better than studying. She knew he was trying to distract her, and she was grateful, because sometimes it worked. They were all very kind to her. George told her they were hiring someone to take over the laundry. She admitted that, yes, she got tired, and she had burned her hand once, clumsily, on the iron, but she would rather do the laundry than sit alone with her thoughts. Did they want her to leave? she asked.