Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,114
to leave,” George said. “Of course not. Why would we?” As it happened, he said, he needed an assistant in his office. Would she be interested? He needed someone to proofread and type up articles that were to be translated from English to German, for publication in the U.S. Army’s German-language newspaper, Neue Zeitung. Yes, she would like to type up those articles, she said; she would like to give it a try at least. George smiled and said, when she was ready, they would get started, then.
* * *
The new laundress was Martha, a seventeen-year-old with a pallid face and gray eyes, hostile eyes; she never smiled. Martha didn’t like Natalia, and Natalia didn’t care for Martha, but it was almost refreshing to encounter something no more lethal than ordinary human antipathy. The new cook, Helga, was brisk and efficient. Helga’s twenty-year-old son had been killed at Stalingrad in 1943. Her husband had been blinded by a shell explosion at Verdun in 1918.
Natalia was beginning to learn of events in Hungary during the last year of the war. In October the regent, Miklós Horthy, had tried to negotiate an armistice with the Allies. The Nazis then kidnapped his son, locked Horthy up in Bavaria, where he remained imprisoned, and placed the fascist Arrow Cross Party in control of Hungary. This gave Hitler what he was desperate to get hold of: the oil fields near Lake Balaton. It allowed Eichmann to begin the brutal mass transportation of Hungarian Jews to concentration camps. She heard from the Americans about the siege of Budapest. The Hungarians and the Russians fought the Waffen-SS on the streets of Budapest and the Luftwaffe and the Soviet air force carried on relentless bombing campaigns. The civilian population sought refuge in the caves beneath Buda Castle, which had been equipped with a functional hospital staffed with doctors and nurses. Food became scarce, down there in the caves, by the end, and people were starving. God knows how many died during the siege. She remembered Max Nagy and wondered whether he’d survived.
She rinsed her teacup in the sink and went to the sitting room, where George was at his desk. He lit a cigarette and handed her a folder full of newspaper articles.
She sat at the typewriter and got to work, proofreading stories that had been translated from English to German. She recognized propaganda when she read it. George said it was called reeducation, not propaganda. Newspapers, Miklós always said, had an obligation to use their power responsibly, because truth and lies could be equally persuasive in print, if presented with authority. The same message repeated in the newspaper, in the editorial column, and on the front page began to seem true, even if untrue and completely without merit.
“Germany was a liberal democracy before Hitler, you know,” she said to George Greaves. “Even before the Weimar Republic, Bismarck brought in accident insurance, medical insurance, laws protecting workers’ rights. People here aren’t as uninformed as you think.”
“They aren’t uninformed, but they’re traumatized,” he said.
“Not so traumatized they won’t sneer at propaganda,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow at her.
On one side there was democracy and on the other communism, he said. Truman and Stalin each had a corner of Germany in his hands, and they were pulling hard in opposing directions.
“The Americans should feed people, then, instead of starving them,” Natalia said. “The Russians are shipping food to Berlin, meat and grain and vegetables. They bake fresh bread every day and give it out free. Eisenhower is saying Germans should be punished by going hungry. Do you see the difference? You know what Stalin says? He says dictators like Hitler come and go, but the German people will remain forever. That, frankly, is what people want to hear.”
Silence from George. And then he said, mildly, “I expect you’re right.”
She bent over her work. The typewriter was a Mercedes. Miklós owned both a Mercedes typewriter and a Mercedes car, not quite as grand or as new as the one the lieutenant general drove. She liked the Bugatti, but it was old, an old car. It ran sometimes, and sometimes the motor seized up. She was a sedate driver, very cautious. She had to be, because her husband wasn’t a good passenger. Keep your hands on the steering wheel, he kept saying. Don’t go so fast, he said. I’m not, she said. It had been what now, three years since she had driven a car, and that was on the day she