Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,124
in Buenos Aires. This quiet man with blue shadows under his eyes is in danger of being dismissed from his position. The Argentine president distrusts university teachers and despises higher education. Shoes, yes, books, no, is a popular government slogan, Zita tells them.
Before eating, Professor Dray wipes his fork on his table napkin. He drinks water but not coffee or wine.
After lunch, Miklós goes through the iron gate with Professor Dray, and they continue their conversation in the professor’s library.
Everything in the garden shimmers with an extraordinarily clear, luminous light: the sky, the magenta bougainvillea, the floribunda roses. Plants with leathery, spotted leaves, vining plants with orange flowers like small ecstatic trumpets. It doesn’t matter what you’ve been through, Natalia thinks, such profusion gives you hope. She’s forgotten her dark glasses in the house, and the bright sun hurts her eyes. Her eyesight is poor, from those years of malnutrition, of starving, of sickness. She has regular prescription glasses too, but there’s something appealing, salutary, about seeing the indistinct, hazy otherness of objects and landscapes.
This morning Zita took Miklós to her office at a publishing house and to have lunch with friends of hers: journalists and newspapermen and other writers. Natalia worries that Miklós will overtire himself. He needs to conserve his strength, and to do that, she thinks, he should not immerse himself in the political discussions Zita and her colleagues engage in for hours at a time. Natalia knows; she’s been to one of these lunches. She understands, sympathizes with people who feel they’re under siege. In fact, they are under siege, as Perón attacks newspapers, publishing houses.
“It doesn’t matter what hemisphere you’re in, what country,” Zita says, “it begins with censorship of the press, doesn’t it?” Perón admired Mussolini and Hitler and had allowed Nazi war criminals to find refuge in Argentina. Sometimes, in a shop or on the street, Natalia hears someone speaking German and stares, wondering whether the man buying a bag of apples or walking with his wife is one of them. Whether he held a gun, ordered men, women, children into cattle cars, slammed and bolted doors, authorized executions, beat people to death. It sickens her. But that’s how it is. That’s the world she lives in. All she wants to do is go home. She misses Rozalia, and so does her son, who a few days ago collapsed in a tearful rage on the living room floor and cried, “Wo ist meine Oma Rozzi?” Where is she? he kept saying. He can’t pronounce Rozalia; it comes out “Rozzi,” and so that’s what Natalia and Miklós call his mother too.
Franz’s tears upset Beatriz, who likes to think she’s his favorite grandmother. He has no trouble saying my name, she says. She comforts him with a dish of ice cream, bribes him with promises of playgrounds, shopping, the cinema. Stay a while longer, she says to Natalia and Miklós.
One day, at the lunch table, Beatriz says, “Zita and I are thinking of going back to Germany. We have a good life here, but times change, don’t they? Then there’s inflation. Land values go up and down, mostly down; you can’t possibly second-guess Argentina’s economy. Or any economy,” she added, helping herself to a triangular crabmeat sandwich from a plate Desirée places in front of her. “The villa needs repairs,” Beatriz says. “It’s falling down around us.”
“It will last for centuries,” Zita says.
“Why not stay an extra week or two?” Zita says to Miklós.
Miklós thanks her and says they’d like to, very much, but can’t leave his mother alone any longer.
“She has Hildegard,” Beatriz says.
Hildegard survived the Allied bombing of Hamburg and came back to Zehlendorf to help Natalia with Franz, and now it’s Rozalia she’s looking after. Trudy is in Poland with her husband and children. During the war, Erich Saltzman went into hiding in the home of a wealthy widow, and now he and the widow are married.
Natalia sees that her mother is on the edge of tears.
“We’ll come to see you soon, then,” Beatriz says, wiping her nose on her table napkin. “Zita still has a phobia about crossing the Atlantic by ship, but she enjoyed our flight to New York last year, didn’t you, Zita? I think it’s irrational to feel safer flying than on a ship. If a ship goes down, there are at least lifeboats.”
Natalia thought being in the Americas would mean she could fly to Seattle, but a travel agent told her the distance is six thousand nautical