Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,23

market, the figures in her ledgers grew correspondingly bold and fat, like the biblical ears of corn. It was possible to predict how the numbers were likely to behave in the future, both on the page and in the world, she explained to her parents, who ran their fingers down the immaculate columns in the ledgers and demanded: Who taught you this? How did you come to know this?

She thought she’d made herself indispensable to them, and yet they shipped her off to Berlin, to Fritz and Liesel.

“Why are you telling me this?” Natalia said.

Did Natalia not understand? Beatriz demanded. The truth, the whole truth, was that Alfred was the only one who had ever loved her—imperfectly, but still, he had loved her. And now he was gone.

She got off the bed, letting the wet compress fall onto the rug. Natalia picked it up and took it to the sink, and when she turned, her mother came and pressed her damp cheek to Natalia’s and said she wouldn’t change anything, because she had Natalia, they had each other.

Natalia moved away.

She ran a hot bath for her mother and unpacked her nightgown, robe, and slippers, her toiletries; she remade the bed, smoothing the pillows and folding down the covers. She closed the shutters on the windows. Then she went to her own room and did not sleep all night.

* * *

Lake Hévíz, circular, sapphire blue, ringed by green lawns and birch groves, delighted Beatriz. Her room at the Hotel Magnolia had a view of the lake, a bed with a firm mattress, a bathtub she could soak in, and a vanity table that held her makeup and hairbrushes and the mask she wore at night over her eyes. There was a connecting door Natalia tried to keep closed, but Beatriz threw it open so they could talk to each other as she got dressed in the morning. She told Natalia her schedule: at nine o’clock every morning she had an appointment at the spa’s hydrotherapy pool, followed by a session with a Polish masseuse, and then, at eleven, she and the other spa patients sat on the pier and waiters rolled out tea trolleys and served herbal infusions and mineral water—stimulants like coffee and tea weren’t exactly forbidden, but they were discouraged. After lunch, she could dabble in watercolors or weave a straw basket at the craft house, if she had the patience, which she did not. She preferred to take a dip in the lake, although she was allowed only ten minutes in the water. Then she had to shower and dry off with one of the spa’s fluffy white towels. These precautions were due to the lake’s radioactive properties, which, while therapeutic, carried a minuscule risk of harm. The Vienna-trained spa doctor, Joachim Heilbronn, told her he had not personally seen any ill effects from bathing in the lake; it would do her nothing but good. Dr. Heilbronn recommended that she practice Émile Coué’s method of auto-suggestion, silently repeating, at fixed intervals, Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better. A surprisingly effective nostrum, Beatriz said. Her nerves were steadier, the headaches less severe, and she was sleeping for eight or nine hours every night. When she spoke to anyone, she referred to herself as a widow.

In the dining room at the Hotel Magnolia, Natalia and her mother shared a table with a young woman from Berlin, Frau Brüning, who wore her hair in an Eton bob and was only a few years older than Natalia. She said her doctors in Berlin had diagnosed a shadow on her lung and had ordered a rest cure of at least twelve months at a Swiss sanatorium. But how could she endure a year away from home? And then there was the expense to consider. Her husband, Herr Brüning, owned a stationery store in Berlin, on Unter den Linden, and when one of his customers recommended Dr. Heilbronn’s clinic at Lake Hévíz, her husband had arranged everything, and here she was. “I’m determined to get well, for his sake, but every day the nurse weighs me, and I don’t seem to have gained an ounce.”

“You could try eating your breakfast,” Beatriz said, pointing her fork at Frau Brüning’s potato pancakes and sausages. “In thirty minutes,” she went on, “I have an appointment at the hydrotherapy pool, for my subaqualis tractis treatment. They suspend you in warm water, to relieve the pressure on your spine. It makes you a tiny bit