Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,119

said this. Most of the people around here didn’t want the land, he said; they wanted industrial jobs in Budapest. Steady work, regular pay, that was what they wanted, Miklós said. But the Germans had dismantled the factories in Budapest and had trucked the components to their own country, so everyone would have a long wait for those jobs. Natalia saw that the peasants, a term she’d never heard Miklós use before, were quite happy to move onto the estate. They put up houses; their woodsmoke seasoned the night air, and their lighted windows made a kind of community. The Hungarian republic was declared on February 1, 1946. That spring, Miklós and Natalia plowed a patch of ground and planted vegetable seeds. They cut firewood; they cleaned out the henhouse, and Miklós brought home a rooster and a dozen speckled hens. So they had fresh eggs, wild strawberries, fresh milk, from Magdolna’s farm, and bread Natalia baked every morning.

Rozalia had good days, when she got up from her bed and sat in the kitchen, or wandered around the garden, her braid hanging down from under her headscarf. Then there were days when she did not get up but stayed huddled in bed with a hot-water bottle to ease the pain in her back. The doctor who came to see her told Natalia she had a compression fracture of the spine. She was also suffering congestive heart failure, he said. The doctor’s name was Benedek Imre. He had taken over Dr. Urbán’s practice. The Germans had sent Dr. Urbán to a Wehrmacht field hospital, and he had not come home. Dr. Imre told Natalia he had graduated from medical school in Budapest in 1941.

While he was talking to her, at the castle, they heard Miklós coughing. “My husband has been ill,” said Natalia. Dr. Imre, preparing to leave, had picked up his medical bag. Now he put it down on the hall table and said perhaps he should examine her husband.

“I don’t think he’ll let you,” she said. Dr. Imre said, perhaps another time then, and went away in his old two-seater car.

Natalia saw that Miklós was losing weight and had a fever that waxed and waned, but anything, she told herself, could cause a fever: a touch of flu, a chest cold. It could be anything. She wasn’t feeling well either.

Miklós wrote an article on the Soviet Cominform, an organization that, as far as Natalia could understand, united Communist parties in Eastern Europe, France, and Italy. What did she think of his article, he asked, and she said it was very good: thoughtful, not provocative, very balanced.

How it pleased her, to see Miklós working at his desk in his tower room. Sometimes while she was hand-washing clothes or stirring soup made with potatoes and onions they had grown themselves, she remembered the first time she climbed the stairs to the tower room and how there, in the windows, like a vast tapestry, had been the Hungarian landscape and the wide Hungarian sky. She remembered the sense it had given her of flying, and that reminded her of Zita’s story of the monk who escaped his mortal body and ascended to the stratosphere and looked down at the forests and rivers. Then she thought of her dog, Bashan. She remembered throwing sticks into the river for him and the way he bounded into the water, his long curls swirling around him, and that she and Miklós had kissed beside the river. It seemed long ago; it seemed like no time at all had passed.

* * *

Natalia and Miklós talked about going back to Berlin to live. Miklós was eager to begin working for a newspaper again. And he could foresee the day when leaving Hungary would be difficult, if not impossible. The Communists were likely to take over the government in Hungary. The world was dividing itself into East and West, into them against us, once again. So it would be wise to get out while they could.

In Berlin, Miklós said, they could rent a house with enough room for Rozalia to live with them.

Rozalia said she wasn’t deaf; she could hear what her son was plotting.

Miklós hired men from the village to do heavy work in the garden he had planted. Natalia fed the chickens and gathered eggs. Katya came every day to help Natalia with the cooking and cleaning, the laundry. Sometimes her daughter, Alena, was with her. Katya taught Natalia some sign language so that she could communicate