Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,18

she had the émigré’s permanent sadness. Even when she was beside him, in bed, he sometimes felt she was far away, in Russia, in a birch forest, a pale being in eternally falling snow. He trudged after her, in the bitter cold, calling her name.

Zita was employed at Ullstein Verlag. She was editing a book on domestic life in Prussia at the time of the 1870 Franco-Prussian war. Later, when the book had gone to press, she told Miklós she and the author, a professor of history at the University of Cologne, had become lovers. That was not the right word, she said, because she did not love him. She liked him, respected his erudition. She spoke earnestly, choosing her words with obvious care, with intent, as if Miklós were deficient in understanding. Which, in fact, he was, since he at first refused to believe her and then thought he was going mad. He remembered how they’d argued and how, one night, Zita had run outside in her nightgown, and he had run after her and had brought her back to the apartment so that they could go on fighting, throwing things, smashing plates. Zita took an apartment near Alexanderplatz. He moved to the Adlon. There were other women. He felt something for them, some affection, perhaps, but they were not Zita. He ordered the Bugatti: another distraction. Back in Berlin, he saw Zita at the newspaper. She gravely handed him a note, in which she’d written, “You must know that what happened had nothing to do with you and me. I was fond of that professor from Cologne, he’s a good man, a fine person. I love you, Miklós. Do you get it?”

She quoted Lenin, who had written to his lover, Inessa Armand, “Fleeting intimacy and passion, too, may be dirty and may be clean.”

What was that supposed to mean?

He and Zita met, by custom and happenstance, at work, at restaurants, at the theater, alone and in the company of others. Zita remained his editor at Ullstein Verlag.

Then, in June, she came to his rooms at the Adlon and presented him with a brochure from Ullstein’s in-house travel bureau. She had been working too much; she couldn’t endure another summer in Berlin, and there was this place in Hungary, beside a thermal lake, in serene countryside.

Miklós knew the Hotel Meunier. He had stayed there as a child, with his brother and their parents. Always in winter, when his parents were not occupied with running the estate. He remembered sleigh rides, snow melting on the surface of the lake, which was always warm, always thirty-five degrees Celsius. Swans floating in clouds of mist. The scenes in the brochure were all of summer. On a pier outside the hotel, men and women, radiant in white, stood gazing at crimson water lilies floating on cerulean-blue water.

Zita worried that she wouldn’t fit in, a woman alone. Who would she talk to? What would she do all day? “Come with me. We would travel as friends, naturally, book separate rooms, share expenses.”

How long would that last, he and Zita as nothing more than friends? Her use of the plural pronoun disarmed him: We would travel. We would go on vacation.

He had said: “I will drive you there, in my motorcar. I’d like a chance to take it for a longish run.”

And they had set out, on a clear summer day, after a night of floods and storms, and there had been that moment when he had understood clearly that everything had changed, they had changed. A second chance.

He could not sleep. He got his jacket, his cigarettes and lighter, and opened the door. There, in the hall, was Zita, in a long white nightgown and bare feet. She’d had a bad dream, she said, and went past him and lay down on the bed and appeared to fall asleep. Or perhaps she had never woken properly. Tenderly, he covered her with a blanket. He left a lamp on and went out, walking as far as the Charles Bridge, where he stood staring down at the Vltava, its surface mottled, iridescent, like the skin of a fish. The statue of Saint John of Nepomuk regarded him with beneficence. The saint had been martyred by drowning in this river. As children, he and his brother, László, had believed they could see John of Nepomuk’s crown of stars glimmering in the water. László was devout, as a boy and as a man; he loved the church, his