Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,28

want to go, I am happy to travel on them,” Beatriz said. “I read in a newspaper that an English airliner now serves a complete dinner to its passengers. A strong stomach would be an asset, if not a prerequisite, don’t you think? And they’re predicting that in a few years’ time there will be regular commercial flights between Europe and America. It really is a new age, isn’t it?”

“It is, but haven’t we always dreamt of taking to the skies? When I was a child,” Zita said, “I saw paintings with an unusual perspective, as if the artist were sitting on a cloud. Fields of flowering flax, the tips of Siberian spruce, rivers winding through the steppe, tiny babushkas in headscarves holding children by their hands, children with their mouths hanging open, every detail miniaturized and yet precisely captured. These paintings were the work of a monk whose spirit left his body and flew around the sky. When he returned to his body, he painted what he’d seen on small blocks of wood. To possess one of his paintings brought happiness and a long life. So it was believed.”

“An enchanting story,” Beatriz said.

“In Russia—this is another Russian story, also concerning levitation,” the count said. “In Russia, animals and inanimate objects were so infected with revolutionary fervor they became unanchored from the ground. Entire buildings, churches, factories, apartment blocks. You could see them hovering above the frozen Moskva River. Empty overcoats and walking sticks and pet dogs flew about like birds. This phenomenon lasted for months, throughout the winter of 1917 and well into the spring of 1918.”

“It had nothing to do with the tsar’s liberated wine cellars, I’m sure,” Beatriz said, laughing.

Natalia said, “The revolution wasn’t really like that, though, was it? Not for everyone. People suffered, didn’t they? The tsar and tsarina and their children were murdered.”

“Yes,” Count Andorján said. “The murders were an act of brutality.”

“The revolution was ruthless,” Zita said. “But it was necessary. It was mandated by history.”

“My late husband’s family was Russian, on his mother’s side,” Beatriz said. “I was born in the Argentine and one day, it is my hope, I will return there. As I get older, I believe more and more that it’s important to rediscover your origins, in order to know who you are.”

“I can never go back to Petrograd,” Zita said. “Stalin would have me thrown into a labor camp.”

Later, in her room, Beatriz removed her Cartier bandeau and rubbed at the mark it had left on her forehead. Count Andorján obviously adored Zita Kuznetsova, but she did not feel the same way about him, she said. “What makes you think that?” Natalia said. “People give themselves away,” Beatriz said. “The expression in the eyes, the way the mouth is held, the shoulders, the hands, everything reveals a person’s true inner thoughts.”

Chapter Six

On a narrow dirt road south of Hévíz, Miklós stopped the Bugatti and changed places with Zita. He cautioned her that the engine was powerful, and the car had a tendency to oversteer. This, he said, is the speedometer, this is the oil pressure gauge, this adjusts the idling speed, this is for the carburetor jets. She waved him away, saying that a child could manage this machine. “I have found my métier, Miklós,” she said. “I want never to stop driving. Like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we’ll girdle the earth in forty minutes. What do you say, Miklós?”

“I say, keep your eyes on the road.” If he asked her to slow down, she sped up. If he said turn right, she veered left. He gripped the passenger-side door and held on. The wind brought tears to his eyes; the Bugatti’s motor coughed and missed a beat or two, then settled down. They passed a roadside religious shrine and a scattering of cottages. Three boys ran out of a yard and began throwing rocks at the Bugatti. Miklós half-stood and shouted at them. “This is not the time to slow down,” he said to Zita. She stepped on the accelerator. “No harm done, Miklós, they’re just boys. It’s a game to them, nothing personal. Sit down, would you, before you get hurt.”

A few kilometers on, she stopped the car and pulled over to the side of the road. This, she said, was where they would have lunch, in this pretty place, so pristine, the sky a silk canopy. She laughed. “I’m joking, it’s just a field some landowner has forgotten he owns and let go