Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,122

these terrible wars, she wondered, to destroy and destroy, in the manner of a child kicking aside beloved toys he’d grown tired of, in favor of new bricks and mortar, a new way of living in this difficult world?

* * *

Dr. Ferenczi stood waiting for her at the end of the corridor. The nurses had told her he wanted to talk to her. Countess Andorján, he said, and his tone alarmed her. She knew what he was going to say. There was a deterioration in Miklós’s condition. There was nothing else they could do. At first Dr. Ferenczi’s actual words didn’t get through to her. He said, “Countess Andorján, we have been giving your husband two new drugs. He seems to be responding well.”

These were very new, very promising drug therapies to treat tuberculosis, he said. The newer drug, streptomycin, had entered human clinical trials in the United States only a year previously. It was not yet approved for use, and it wasn’t being manufactured. It was in the nature of a miracle that he had received a small supply of streptomycin. Another drug was para-aminosalicylic acid. In Sweden, this drug had cured a female patient in the final stages of tuberculosis. Cured her, Dr. Ferenczi repeated. The two drugs, used in combination, appeared to be highly efficacious. His colleague Dr. Janssen had obtained the second drug from his brother, a doctor in Stockholm. The streptomycin had come from a friend of Dr. Ferenczi in London. The treatment would take fifty days, and Miklós would have to remain in the hospital for some time. There could be serious side effects, but in his opinion, the risks were worth it. Overall, Dr. Ferenczi said, there was reason for optimism.

* * *

Hungary at the end of the war was not a good place for them. They knew this, they had discussed it, but even after Miklós was able to leave the hospital, they did not make any definite plans. She was going to have a child. Rozalia was unwell. In addition, they had unfinished business at the castle. When the ground thawed, in the early spring of 1948, Miklós and Vladimír exhumed the German soldiers’ corpses and doused them with kerosene and burned them. Later they moved what was left of the bones down to the ossuary. Natalia went with them, to say a prayer, because somewhere these men had had families, parents, perhaps wives, children. Vladimír’s flashlight illuminated the Greek lettering on the wall. She stared at it. The gods cannot count and know nothing of arithmetic. A cold little observation, she thought, and seemingly irrefutable. She shuddered. Miklós put his arm around her. They went up out of the cellar to the kitchen, and Miklós and Vladimír drank vodka. No one must ever know, they said, and Rozalia, hearing them, said she would do it again, if necessary, and think nothing of it.

Natalia, washing dishes at the sink, thought of Gudrun. She wondered whether Gudrun was still in England, and if she and her children were doing well in their new life. She had a sudden, vivid picture of Gudrun in the garden outside the house in Dahlem, with her small bunch of parsley, speaking haltingly of what had happened to her when the Russian army had occupied Berlin, in May 1945. Natalia could still hear the terror and shame in Gudrun’s voice as she recounted the things she had gone through, the terrible things she had seen.

Natalia wiped and put away the dishes, moving slowly between the worktable and the cupboard. She remembered the hours of work she and Gudrun had put in, in the kitchen of the house requisitioned by the Americans. How many meals had they cooked and served? She remembered filling endless tureens with vegetables, roasting meat, mashing potatoes. That such mundane tasks had to be done with such wearying regularity had sometimes annoyed her, but she had also believed that the work was, in a way, sacramental. To feed the hungry, give shelter to the homeless, was a holy act. It was just that there were so many hungry people. Displaced people. While everyone in that house had been well fed, outside its doors people had nothing. It troubled her to remember this.

But she was selfish. She wanted peace, sanctuary, untroubled days slipping past like rosary beads. She had a debilitating fear that somewhere, not far away, the war was still being fought. Phantom armies were massed at borders, waiting for the order to begin