Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,19

country, his family, and the Andorján land. It was what he was born to. And yet he’d encouraged Miklós to pursue his dream of working as a journalist, because, he’d said, life was too precious to be wasted.

László, his beloved brother, dead in a Serbian field hospital hours after the cessation of hostilities in 1918. He had to lean against the balustrade. He felt on the edge of breaking down. Tomorrow he could be back in Berlin, things still unresolved between him and Zita. He looked at the Vltava shining in the dawn light and saw the other river, swollen, bursting its banks. He saw Zita, her hair streaming water, pale and shaking, coughing up water. The dead laid out on the village high street.

People were crossing the bridge; the day was beginning.

He returned to the hotel, trying to enter the room without a sound, but Zita was awake. Where had he been, she wanted to know. And what was the time?

“I went for a walk. It’s early, half six. Did you sleep well?”

“Yes, I think so,” she said. “At first, when I woke up, I didn’t know where I was.”

He sat on the edge of the bed. She looked at him for a long moment. Then she put her arms around his neck and drew him to her and kissed him. “You’re cold,” she said, her hand on the side of his face. “Here, lie down.”

He hesitated. He lay down. She rested her head on his chest. She slid a hand inside his shirt. He buried his face in her warm hair, tucked a strand behind her ear, so that he could see her eyes, her lovely eyes. I love you, he began to say, and she placed her hand over his mouth. I belong to you, he wanted to say. An hour, two hours later, she retrieved her nightgown from the floor and slipped it over her head. He held out his hand; she smiled and went away. When he woke, she was standing beside the bed, dressed in Frau Kappel’s blouse and skirt. She showed him the borrowed clogs on her feet and said they gave her a nice sense of sobriety and stability. That morning they had breakfast at a café in the Old Town. Zita no longer had any desire to return to Berlin. “Once you have set your mind on something,” she said, “it is better to see it through, isn’t it?” This, he said, was also his belief.

They finished breakfast and went to the Bugatti. Zita put on dark glasses and a wide-brimmed hat she tied under her chin. Somewhere, she said, she must try to find a scarf to replace the one she’d lost on the road near Leipzig.

Chapter Five

Natalia wrung out a towel in the handbasin in Beatriz’s hotel room and placed it on her mother’s forehead. She shook a tablet from a vial and held it out on her palm. Beatriz swallowed, grimaced, and said it left a bad taste in her mouth. Natalia got her a glass of water. She moved a chair beside the bed and sat down where Beatriz could see her. She said, after a moment, that she would like to hear the truth about the man on the train.

“Natalia, wanting to be happy is not a sin. As for the truth, I have been honest with you. Alfred Faber is not ‘the man on the train.’ He is your father. We met when I was seventeen and Alfred was in his late twenties. He came to my uncle Fritz’s house early in the morning along with several other men, friends of my uncle’s, who were leaving to hunt chamois in the Austrian Littoral. I remember how, when we were introduced, Alfred and I simply stood there staring at one another. Love can happen like that, and when it does, it’s the most profound experience. Nothing equals it. Alfred wasn’t handsome; he wasn’t the man I’d imagined falling in love with. He had the kind of fair complexion that ages prematurely, and he was nervous. He kept smoothing his hair, touching his mouth, adjusting his necktie, as if to reassure himself of his own existence. Weeks after we met, I received a note from him suggesting we lunch together at the Imperial Hotel. Soon, we began to see each other regularly, whenever he was in Berlin. He happened to be in the same business as my parents, which gave us something to talk about. He admired