Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,125

miles, over eleven thousand kilometers, and would take almost two days each way. It would be better to fly to New York from Berlin and then fly to Seattle, the way Anna did in 1945. She would love to see Anna. She mailed her father’s art portfolio to her. She remembers the house in the Golden Lane, the tarot cards; every day, and this is true, every day she remembers Dr. Schaefferová.

“Come, sit with Tante Zita,” Zita says, holding out her arms. This is after lunch. Beatriz is in the kitchen, talking to Maria about dinner. Zita sits Franz on her knee and reads Curious George books to him.

A few days ago, Zita said to Natalia, “Franz looks so much like Krisztián. The resemblance startles me sometimes.”

Her words hurt Natalia, who had looked away. “Yes,” she had said. She got up and walked out into the garden, where Desirée was just coming back through the iron gate in the garden wall, carrying a tray covered with a napkin, the remains of Professor Dray’s midday meal.

Franz has his father’s dark hair and gold-flecked brown eyes. He has her pale skin and dislikes the sun hat she makes him wear. She keeps squashing it down firmly on his head, and he keeps pulling it off and throwing it on the ground. Only if she tells him it makes him look like an explorer will he acquiesce and then only for a limited time. He is interested in insects and in the solar system. When they first arrived in Buenos Aires, Miklós showed him the Río de la Plata, the widest river in the world. “It shines like silver,” Miklós said, “and that is why it is named the Río de la Plata.” Franz was interested to know that his Oma’s cook, Maria, sometimes cooks for them fish that used to swim in the Río de la Plata. Natalia tells him about the carp his namesake, Franz Schaeffer, caught in the Vltava. And how Magdolna cooked trout caught fresh daily in Lake Balaton. She tells him the Danube is the longest river in Europe, flowing from its source in Bavaria through Hungary to the Black Sea. A tributary of the Danube runs past the house where he was born. She tells him how mountain streams in the Erzgebirge can turn into dangerous torrents and how his father once saved Tante Zita’s life when she almost drowned.

“Zita drowned?” Franz says.

“No. Your papa saved her,” Natalia says.

On that day, Natalia thinks but does not say, on that same day, Franz’s grandfather died on the train to Prague. Miklós says she must tell Franz; she owes it to her son not to conceal the truth. The truth, strangely, is that here in Argentina she often thinks of Alfred Faber. In the bedroom where she and Miklós are sleeping, she woke and saw someone standing beside the bed, staring at her. She gasped and sat up, waking Miklós, who said no one was there, she was dreaming.

In bright sun the villa casts a deep, precisely outlined shadow over the garden. As Natalia walks into this shadow to get out of the bright sun, a figure seems to appear on the balcony above her. Slim, delicate, inquisitive Fräulein Hoffman. Natalia feels as if she knew her, grew up with her, listened to her lessons on anatomy and taxonomy. In the library, Beatriz showed her the governess’s writing table, collecting jars, scalpels, spirit lamp. The governess’s resentment at this intrusion casts a small fiery light on the wall, stirs cold ashes in the fireplace.

Beatriz is sitting on the edge of the fountain, watching Franz sail a toy boat. Beatriz gave him the boat. She spoils him and says she is really spoiling herself, because she loves buying him things. Toys, clothes, anything, everything. “Franz,” she says, holding out her arms. “Give Oma a kiss.” The boat bumps against the fountain’s stone rim, and Franz gives it a gentle push to safety. The water splashes; the toy boat rocks unsteadily, nearly capsizes, but settles on the water as if it were sailing on the broad surface of the Río de la Plata.

Chapter Twenty-One

What Anna learned was this: her memories were part of her, rooted and immutable, like her eye color, the shape of her hands, her predilection for dark chocolate and piano music. It would happen like this: at a grocery store while picking up a quart of milk and a loaf of bread, in the lab preparing plant material