Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,126

for microscopy, on a corner waiting for a bus, she would see a face, an apparition startling in its clarity, all sharp angles, skin paper-thin, parchment-colored, and she’d think: I know you. I am you.

Sometimes she dreamed she was at home, in Malá Strana, and the fortune-teller appeared, her pale hair shining in the moonlight. Rain glistened on the cobblestones. A cat ran past, a rat in its jaws. Lines of washing hung, damp, motionless, already grimy with coal dust. Broken windows, shards of glass on the street. Ragged children tossed a ball back and forth.

Life begins and ends in rivers, the fortune-teller said. There are gods that do not love us, she said.

Anna remembers those dreams. When she first came to Seattle to live with the Grants, she had the same dream night after night, and often she would wake feeling lethargic, numb. She forgot where she was and walked into walls, tripped, dropped glasses on the kitchen floor, and Mrs. Grant said not to worry and cleaned up the pieces. She would go to her room and shut the door, to avoid Mr. and Mrs. Grant’s concern, their desire to help. She must talk, they said, she mustn’t keep things bottled up inside. Would she consider seeing a doctor? A psychiatrist, they meant. But she didn’t want to talk if it meant relinquishing her memories, because without them, she was nothing.

She remembers her mother playing the piano and singing. Včernym lese ptaček zpiva. “In the black wood a little bird is singing.” Anna loved that song and always asked for another one. She asked her mother to sing “The Maiden and the Grass.” A maiden is gathering grass in a field. She fills her arms with grass because it is so fresh and green and sweet-smelling. I can’t stop myself, she cries, half laughing, to her lover.

In her head, Anna hears Dvořák’s Mnĕ zdálo se, zes umřela. “I dreamed last night that you were dead.” The song goes on, in her mother’s beautiful, soft voice. In my dreams you were dead, and I heard the death bells. Anna wants to listen, but she is going to die from this song. In the last verse, she remembers, a stone speaks from a grave.

Saxa loquuntur: the stones speak. The stones speak, but Anna is silent.

* * *

After the war, Anna’s aunt Vivian wrote to her in America. She saved the letters, a year’s worth, and when she felt she could at last reply without being overwhelmed by her emotions, she wrote back. She apologized for not replying sooner and said the letters were wonderful, they were a lifeline. She meant it. She tried to give the impression she was not unhappy, which was true. In time, she found the courage to ask whether her house had survived the war and what it looked like now. Aunt Vivian replied that, yes, her house was there, although following the election of the Communists in 1948, it had been divided into apartments. A factory foreman and his wife and their two children lived there, and a young couple, both teachers in the music faculty at the university. A Communist Party functionary occupied a suite of rooms on the second floor. A librarian lived on the third floor with two dachshunds left behind by their former owner, a German dentist, when he’d fled Prague.

On her way home from her millinery shop, Aunt Vivian wrote, she often met the librarian out walking the dentist’s sausage dogs. The librarian, who looked scarcely out of her teens, wore a shapeless wool coat and lace-up shoes. Her eyes were red-rimmed from the cold weather. Or from loneliness. Who didn’t suffer from it these days? The librarian had a litany of complaints: the music teachers played their piano late at night, with no consideration for anyone; the factory foreman let his children rampage on the staircase; a smell of cooking came from an open window: boiled fish, scorched potatoes; and worst of all, the party functionary, the official, whatever he was, had a grudge against her because dachshunds were a German breed of dog. Wasn’t that crazy? What did a little dog know of war?

The lovely old chestnut tree in the front garden had been cut down, Aunt Vivian regretted having to say, leaving a strange, empty place without shadows, without softness, if Anna knew what she meant.

The onionskin paper her aunt wrote on carried the scent of Prague: lilacs, factory smoke, river water in summer. If only you