Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,118

to see Emil and Maximilian and tell them about Anna. Miklós was happy to meet them. They talked for hours, about the war and about what was going to happen in Czechoslovakia.

* * *

As they reached the castle, snow began to fall, and when Natalia and Miklós got out of the car, the clouds parted, and moonlight glinted on the copper roof of the tower. She had pictured returning home in summer, the horses in the paddock, cows and sheep grazing in the fields. Fields of lavender and poppies. But there were no animals in the fields, and the fields were white with snow, and there was no sign of Rozalia. The doors were bolted, the windows shuttered; no smoke came from the chimneys. And such silence, broken only by the cry of an owl and then a dog barking. Miklós had to break in through a window in the room where the agricultural accountant used to manage the estate’s accounts. Then he opened the kitchen door to let Natalia in. She lit a candle. They went up to the second floor and found Rozalia in her bedroom, in bed, beneath a pile of blankets and quilts. “Rozalia?” Natalia said. “It’s us, it’s Natalia and Miklós. Are you awake? Rozalia, can you hear me?”

She took Rozalia’s wrist and felt for a pulse. Rozalia’s eyes flew open, and she swore at Natalia. She struggled to sit up in the bed. She brought a knife out from under her pillow. Miklós took it from her. Natalia found a chair and sat beside the bed. She felt the countess’s forehead. “When did you last eat?” she said.

“God knows. Every now and then Katya brings me something.”

Miklós lit a fire in the kitchen stove, and Natalia heated a can of soup. She toasted some bread they had brought with them from Prague.

They ate on trays in the countess’s bedroom, with a small fire burning in the grate and the wind blowing dry snow against the window. Natalia thought that in the morning she would get to work and scrub the place clean or at least clean the rooms they used. What had happened here? she wondered. Later, Rozalia told them that in October of 1944, the Germans had arrived and moved into the castle. To begin with, she said, there must have been ten or eleven of them. “Only one had any manners; he was a gentleman, but the others I think were from the lowest levels of society, even if they called themselves officers.” They emptied her storehouse of food. Finally, only two were left, and they showed no sign of leaving. “In the end,” Rozalia said, “I had to get rid of them.”

“You got rid of them?” Miklós said.

“Do you see them, Miklós? Do you?” she said to Natalia. “Look behind the doors; look in the cupboards. You won’t find them.”

“Where did they go?” Miklós said warily.

“They’re buried behind the horse barn,” Rozalia said. “They stole my rifles, so that I couldn’t shoot even a rabbit or a sparrow for food, and they slashed the tapestries out of their frames and stole my jewelry, even the diamond and ruby necklace I inherited from my mother. I had hidden László’s pistol, his Steyr automatic from the other war, down in the cellars. And the clips, I had kept them, too. After all that time, I was astonished when the Steyr fired. But I was always a good shot, wasn’t I, Miklós? I wish I’d thought to shoot the Russians who came here and took my horses. They sent my horses to Russia, the bastards.”

She and two men from the workers’ cottages buried the Germans, she said.

“How many, did you say? How many Germans?” Miklós asked.

“Only those two. The others left earlier, as I said. I imagine the Russians finished them off. Not that the Russians are any better, but at least I didn’t have to look at their ugly faces over my breakfast table.”

When spring came, Miklós dug up the ground. He found two corpses. Two corpses in SS uniforms. He covered them over again.

Their rifles, Rozalia said, were with the skulls in the ossuary.

* * *

In 1945 the coalition government in Hungary appropriated large private landholdings, dividing them into parcels of land that were given to the tenant farmers or to people who had never in their lives owned land. Once, Miklós had considered his estate a burden; now he said he felt unjustly robbed of his property. He smiled as he