Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,115
left the castle to meet Miklós in Prague. She rested her hands in her lap, remembering.
“Are you all right?” George said.
Why did he and everyone else assume she was in mourning? Anxiety, she felt. Worry wore away at her nerves, it was true, but it was not the same as grief. She had no reason to grieve. Every day in Berlin, in Germany, everywhere in Europe, people were climbing out of cellars and attics after years of hiding. Soldiers walked for miles across muddy, ravaged fields, crossing borders obliterated by war. Somehow they survived, and at length, perhaps at the exact moment they were giving up—at that moment—they encountered a cousin, perhaps even a wife, a husband, or their own beloved child among hundreds of children at a refugee camp. The newspaper the Americans published was full of such inspirational accounts. James Grant, who went to the camps, said he’d witnessed these reunions himself.
George picked up his attaché case. He was going to the officers’ mess at the Grosser Wannsee, he said, and would see her later.
Natalia proofread and then typed up a story about General Patton, the military governor of Bavaria, going horseback riding with friends. She typed up a story on the appointment of a college professor from New York to oversee industrial development in the American zone of occupied Germany. She corrected a pronoun problem in a report on a fashion show in New York: the little black dress in which no one could go wrong was back in style; skirts were longer; sleeves were elbow-length, worn pushed up. She worked for a while and then heard Mike Rose talking to Helga in the kitchen. Yesterday Mike had brought a dog back to the house with him. Its hair was sparse and rough, its ribs visible. He washed it and fed it, and it had slept in the laundry room. Mike named it Truman—no surprise there, Natalia thought. He got an army doctor to give him a salve for the dog’s skin and something to kill the fleas. Helga complained that the salve smelled terrible and the dog kept getting under her feet. As if to prove her point, she stepped on Truman’s paw and he yelped. Mike cut a small slice of meat from a roast on a platter.
“Don’t feed that to the dog,” Helga said.
“I had a dog once,” Natalia said, kneeling beside Mike and petting Truman. She said, “My dog was a Hungarian puli. His name was Bashan.”
Chapter Nineteen
Natalia was in her room reading the novel by Arthur Schnitzler she had found in the living room when someone rapped lightly on the door. She got up. James Grant asked her to get her coat and hat. They were going somewhere. He would explain on the way. “Do you have rain boots?” he said, looking at her feet, and she said, no, she did not have rain boots. “It’s raining,” he said. “I know it’s raining,” she said. He looked at his watch. She made him wait in the hall while she brushed her hair and put on some lipstick.
She and James went downstairs, and James opened the front door. The air was mild; the damp grass smelled sweet. George was at the wheel of the Mercedes. She sat in the back. They drove to Steglitz, to a Red Army military hospital located on Unter den Eichen. Within a few weeks, George said, the hospital, which was in the American zone, would be handed over to the U.S. Army.
“You know Steglitz quite well, I imagine, Natalia,” James Grant said. “Yes,” she said. Margot and Hermann Brückner had belonged to a youth club in Steglitz, she remembered. She’d gone to the dances there with them.
The inane words of one of Mike Rose’s songs came to her mind:
I could swear that she was padded from her shoulder to her heel.
But then she started dancing, and her dancing made me feel
That everything she had was absolutely real!
Absolutely real. She was learning English from these silly little tunes. It wasn’t even a nice song, she thought.
At the military hospital they got out of the car, and George held an umbrella over her head as they walked to the main entrance. She was starting to feel afraid. Were they going to leave her here? Was she being handed over to the Russians?
“I’m not going in,” she said. “Not unless you tell me what’s going on.”
“Natalia, a patient in this hospital says his name is Miklós Andorján.”