Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,127
were here, Aunt Vivian wrote, I would be happy.
Come to America, Anna suggested in a letter to Aunt Vivian, who was not her aunt but her great-aunt and had been born in Chicago; why shouldn’t she come back?
Dearest child, Aunt Vivian replied, her life was in Prague. All her memories were there and her friends and her shop. Besides, at her age, how could she start over?
Even now, in her seventies, Aunt Vivian kept her millinery shop open. Under Communism, she said, she designed plainer, more serviceable hats of fabric tough as asbestos, and they sold surprisingly well to the wives of Soviet officials.
Anna, who rarely wore a hat, wished she owned at least one of her aunt’s creations. Something dashing, pre-Communist, in velvet, with a little dotted veil.
Why had the tree been cut down? She had loved that tree. Every autumn she had gathered the chestnuts that fell to the ground and carried a basketful to the kitchen, and Sora made the Italian cake and sometimes marron glacé, which Anna’s mother loved.
Anna considered writing to Natalia, but she didn’t have an address, and so she bought school exercise books at a drugstore and wrote in those. When she’d filled every page of one book, she began another. They were for her, these books; more than for Natalia, even if it was Natalia she addressed. She wrote:
Are you “happy,” Natalia? I hope you are. I think I am, sometimes. In America, happiness exists; it is a constitutional right or perhaps more of an obligation.
I study, read, take piano lessons from Mr. Grant’s sister, who teaches piano in her living room. I’m learning to roller-skate.
Natalia, when I left that camp near Hanover, I flew on a USAF plane to New York City, and from there I flew across the continent to Seattle. It was July 9, 1945, and in America on that day there was a solar eclipse. It became cold and dark; I waited for bombs to explode, for the sound of antiaircraft fire, for a rocket to strike the plane. The stewardess cautioned me against looking directly at the sun, but I did look, and I saw the corona like a crown of thorns. Then the plane flew on into a second, dazzling awakening.
She can write to Natalia now at a new address Aunt Vivian sent. The sight of the address in West Berlin reminds her of the months she lived beside the Kleiner Wannsee with Dr. Haffner, who wasn’t a bad person, and Frau Haffner, who was. She remembers the children. She pictures Jean-Marc in the garden, laboring in the hot sun on a wartime garden so that the Haffner family could enjoy fresh vegetables.
Next year, she will be there, in Germany, when James takes her to see her father’s parents, her Oma and Opa in Heidelberg. She is a little afraid of the feelings the reunion will evoke, on both sides. But she has a while to prepare herself.
A letter came from Natalia. She and her husband are well; they have a son named Franz. It gave Anna a painful start, when she saw the name. Then she thought her brother would have liked to know a child was named in his honor.
Natalia sent Anna a parcel. Like her great-aunt’s letters, she keeps it but doesn’t open it. She knows it contains Dr. Shapiro’s manuscript and her father’s paintings of her as Marica, the resourceful princess who understood that salt could at times be valued higher than gold.
She and Natalia continue to correspond. You’ll be interested to know, Anna tells her, in a letter, that Reina lives in Waukegan, Illinois, is studying to be a teacher, and is now an American citizen. Her friends from Prague, Ivan and Marta Lazar, live in Chicago. Ivan is working at a restaurant and taking courses at the university, in order to qualify as a teacher there. He and Marta have two children, a boy and a girl. Anna continues:
Last summer I saw Reina, when she and Ivan and Marta drove all the way to Seattle. I hadn’t seen her since 1942 and that was more than ten years ago. She hasn’t changed, or she has, she has achieved what she wanted, a new life in the United States, and it gives her a look of serenity, of completeness, although she says she is only partly herself without Franz. To be honest, I wanted Reina to be less happy than she was. But why should I begrudge her some happiness? While they were here, James’s parents put on a barbecue for them. We stayed out after dark, with electric lights in paper lanterns and the air scented with those night-blooming flowers, phlox, I think they’re called, and always beneath the lighthearted conversations about books, movies, football, the weather, are the unsaid words of grief, the unspoken names. You know, Natalia. The names you can’t say except when you’re alone, and then only silently, and sparingly, as if you’re taking a tincture of something that could be either healing or harmful in larger doses, and you’re afraid to find out which it is.
She almost crosses that out but leaves it.
On the street, after walking to the mailbox, Anna is caught in a brief downpour. Almost as quickly as the rain begins the clouds part, the sun shines, mist rises from the wet street, droplets of rainwater glisten on rhododendron leaves. Her heart lifts. The world is, she thinks. The world is beautiful and good. For this time, this moment, this seems to her a reliable truth. As she reaches the Grants’ house, she sees James parking his car in the driveway. He gets out and sees her. She waves, he waves back, smiling, and then he stands there, waiting.