Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,13

did complain of some discomfort, right here, in his chest—something he ate went down the wrong way. He was never sick, never. Isn’t there something you can give him? An injection? A stimulant?”

“It was very quick, Frau. I’m certain Herr Faber won’t have suffered.”

“Herr Faber?” Natalia said.

“I will bring you a glass of water, Frau,” said the assistant conductor.

“We can’t leave him, like this, alone. I will stay with him.”

“Are you a relative, Frau?” the assistant conductor asked.

“No, not a relative. But we are very close, very dear friends. He would want me to stay with him,” Beatriz said. She requested that the assistant conductor send for a priest. “Alfred would want a priest,” she said.

Chapter Four

July 9, 1927. Flash floods following a cloudburst in the Erzgebirge transformed the tranquil Müglitz and Gottleuba rivers into furious torrents during the night, inflicting severe damage on homes, shops, factories, and farms. Train travel in the immediate area has been indefinitely suspended. There is no word on when telephone and telegraph communication will be restored. Herr Manfred Schirrmeister, mayor of B____, on the banks of the Gottleuba, estimated the death toll there alone at thirty, and this could rise, as there are people still unaccounted for. Had he not gone door-to-door at midnight raising the alarm, Herr Schirrmeister said, the number of fatalities would have been higher. The Reichswehr and local police forces continue to carry out rescue operations. They have set up temporary shelters and are providing hot meals to the villagers. By early afternoon, the floodwaters began to recede. No further storms have been forecast for the region in the coming days.

From a telephone kiosk in the hotel lobby, Miklós dictated this report to the night desk at the newspaper and then went to the dining room, where Zita was waiting for him. They ordered dinner but were too tired and overwrought to eat. He lit a thin Egyptian cigarette. Zita was wearing an embroidered Chinese silk jacket with wide sleeves. She told him that when she went under the water, she’d had a sort of vision, like a film projected on her mind. She was transported back to a day in 1917, when Aleksandr Kerensky had become prime minister and was giving her and her father a private tour of the Winter Palace. “Kerensky wanted to show us that the Romanovs’ exclusive property now belonged to the people, to the peasants and soldiers and even, I suppose, to me and my father. But mostly, we could see, it belonged to Aleksandr Kerensky, who was conducting the affairs of the provisional government at the desk of Alexander the Second and sleeping in Tsar Nicholas’s bed and eating off the tsar’s fine china. Some called Kerensky ‘our new emperor.’ Alexander the Fourth, they said of him, and the epithet was not unwarranted. Still, he had my respect. My father and I truly believed he could save Russia. Poor Kerensky. Poor everyone, in fact. Russian soldiers were fighting Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they were dying, thousands had died that winter. In Petrograd, malnourished children and women were fighting over a moldy onion, a scrap of bread. And there I was, a proper little grand duchess, drinking coffee in the Malachite Room with the head of the provisional government. I was willing to die for Kerensky. I had no fear of death. But today, I was afraid. I told myself, well, Zita Kuznetsova, you’ve had a good life; who needs to live forever? But drowning—that is not the death I would have chosen.”

He would not have let her drown, Miklós said.

“So many drowned,” she said. “That poor child. I can’t stop seeing her. She was just a baby.”

He added a splash of brandy to their coffee.

“If we leave now,” Zita said, “we can be in Berlin in three hours.”

“In the morning you might feel differently.”

“I won’t,” she said. “A vacation, what a crazy, bourgeois idea. What an indulgence. I dislike vacations intensely.”

“Yes, we both do, don’t we?” Miklós said, and Zita drew back and said she didn’t know what he liked or disliked. A young man came into the dining room, went to the piano, and began playing one of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies. Rippling notes, highly emotive crescendos.

Zita narrowed her eyes. “I can’t take Liszt tonight. I’m ex-hausted. I have to get to sleep.”

They said good night at the door to Zita’s room. Miklós went down the hall to his own room, where he stood at the window watching stars appearing in