Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,26

dug a small cavity in a fig tree’s clay pot. When they’d buried the bird, the count brushed dirt from her fingers. “I’m sorry that happened,” he said. She took her hand back and wiped it on her dress. They stood in silence for a moment. She was aware of the exotic foliage exuding pungent vapors, the smell of damp earth, sunlight falling through the glass roof. The count said, “Rest in peace, little bird.” They went out to the lobby, where Fräulein Kuznetsova and Julia were seated on a couch near a potted palm. Fräulein Kuznetsova stood and said, “It didn’t survive? Songbirds like that, their hearts are not strong.” She said how nice it was to have met Frau Brüning and Fräulein. The count said, yes, it had been a pleasure. He shook Frau Brüning’s hand and asked that she remember him to Herr Brüning. They all wished one another well, spoke of perhaps meeting again, and Natalia and Julia walked out of the hotel into a day languid with heat, dazzling with light.

* * *

Natalia asked her mother if they could, in any way, help Julia.

“We can pray for her,” Beatriz said absently, not looking up from the postcard she was addressing to Herr Saltzman.

“We could give her money for a rest cure at a sanatorium.”

“Natalia, here’s the thing. Money isn’t like eggs, where you can give your neighbor three out of your dozen, so she can bake a cake. It is more like the Eiffel Tower, which can rise a long way into the air only because of a solid foundation. If the last few years have taught me anything, it is to build a carefully structured edifice out of secure investments and then leave it alone.”

“How is money real,” Natalia said, “if it can’t be made use of?”

“Believe me, it’s real.” Beatriz handed Natalia the postcard and asked her to run it downstairs to the front desk. “In any case, you’re helping Julia by going for walks with her, and I helped her by arranging a consultation with Dr. Heilbronn. He listened to her chest and took an X-ray. ‘It is not asthma or bronchitis,’ he said. ‘It is pulmonary tuberculosis, at a more advanced stage than the doctors in Berlin led you to believe, Frau Brüning.’ He said a year at a sanatorium at Davos or somewhere like that was indeed the best treatment, but whether Julia takes his advice or not is, frankly, up to her. She and her husband are not destitute. It is a matter of priorities, isn’t it?”

“What about our priorities?” Natalia said. Beatriz did not reply. On her way through the lobby, Natalia gave the clerk at the front desk the postcard and a letter she’d written to Margot Brückner, who was her closest, and perhaps only, friend in Zehlendorf. As soon as she was outside, walking beside the lake, she wanted to go back and retrieve the letter from the clerk. Lake Hévíz is lovely, she had written,

but to be honest, I wish I were spending the summer at home and going sailing with you and Hermann on the Grosser Wannsee. It is beautiful here, but everyone seems to be convalescing from some nervous or physical disorder and taking life very slow. I have made friends with someone, but she is quite ill with consumption and needs to rest a lot. Margot, something strange has happened to me. I saw my father on the train to Prague. I mean, I really did see him, after believing he’d died when I was an infant. He passed away on the train, of a heart attack, I believe. The kind of thing that happens only on the screen or in novels happened to me in real life. I’m still trying to understand, but I will never understand. Margot, you will have to keep this news to yourself. I hope you’re well. I miss you and I am sending you my blessings and also please give my regards to your parents and your brother.

She walked as far as a birch grove and threw the sweater she’d brought with her on the grass and kicked off her shoes. She was Odette, in Swan Lake, dancing beside a lake formed by her mother’s tears; she was Odile, the witch, pirouetting, which was not easy on uneven ground. Someone was standing on the lakeshore, maybe thirty-five meters away. He was watching her. Even in the indistinct light she recognized Count Andorján. A match flared as