Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,116

was brightly lit, and as they entered, a nurse walked past them, pushing a patient in a wheelchair. Natalia stared at the patient, a young man with blond hair, his right arm bandaged, amputated at the elbow. Near an elevator two doctors conferred in Russian. A Red Army officer appeared and introduced himself to George. He took them to an office at the end of the corridor. He offered them chairs in front of a desk. He switched on a desk lamp, sat down, picked up a telephone, and spoke into it in Russian. Not once did he look at Natalia. She heard footsteps outside in the corridor. The Russian officer stood, went to the door, opened it, and three men came in, a doctor, an army officer, and a patient in a dressing gown and pajamas. This patient was tall and thin; his head was shaved, and he looked very ill. She took a step toward him. Her heart was hammering against her ribs, and she kept thinking she was going to pass out. “Natalia,” the patient said. He held out his arms, and she walked into his embrace. He placed his hand gently on the side of her face. He had tears in his eyes. They said one another’s names; they breathed the names, as if in naming they could make it true, that they had found each other.

He had been with General Zhukov’s army, that was true enough, Miklós told Natalia, when they were left alone in the office for a few minutes. She held Miklós’s hand. He told her his jacket had been stolen in Łódź, and whoever was wearing the jacket, that was the man who had been struck by an army vehicle and buried in an unmarked grave near the Oder River. Miklós had been told that a priest at the church near the graveyard had taken his wallet out of the coat when the body was brought to his church. He had given it to a Russian journalist.

“Yes, and the Russian gave it to an English journalist, and he brought it to me,” Natalia said.

It was winter, Miklós said, and he’d removed a greatcoat from a German soldier’s corpse and was wearing it when he reached Germany. The Americans refused to listen when he said he was not an SS officer and threw him into a prisoner-of-war camp near Munich. The American guards waited with a rather uncivil degree of impatience for him and the other prisoners, German Wehrmacht soldiers, to die of starvation. One of the prisoners, a genuine SS officer, cut a hole in the wire fence, and he and Miklós crawled out and walked away. Near Leipzig they parted company, and Miklós made his way to Berlin. In the Russian sector he met people he’d known at the newspaper before the war. They took him to a canteen called the Seagull, where the Soviets provided coffee and hot food. He had blackouts. He had a fever, an infection in his leg, in a wound caused by the barbed wire at the prisoner-of-war camp when he escaped. The Russians put him in the hospital in Steglitz. The hospital required information: name, date of birth, where he lived. He filled out the forms; they told him he was using a false name. The name you’re using, they said, is the name of a dead man.

What were they to do now, he asked her. He didn’t know if he was ready to leave Berlin yet. Natalia thought longingly of going home to the castle, where, in her mind, nothing had changed since 1942, and she could feed Miklós fresh eggs and cream and butter.

Gently he traced the scars on her hands. She had been a prisoner too, she said, and please, don’t ask her why, because she didn’t know why. Then, and later, she told Miklós very little of the previous three years, when she’d been at what became known as one of the worst of the German concentration camps. Anyway, any reference to her arrest and the internment camp, and he became very quiet, very still, and asked her why in God’s name she had left home in the first place. Because you weren’t there, she said.

When, three weeks later, Miklós was discharged from the hospital, he stayed with Natalia at the Americans’ house, and his health improved a little, day by day. He talked to Zita Kuznetsova on the telephone. She and Beatriz continued to encourage them to book passage on