Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,29

wild.”

They climbed down a shallow embankment, and he trampled the grass smooth before spreading out the plaid rug he’d brought from the car. Zita knelt and undid the leather straps on the picnic hamper the hotel kitchen had prepared for them. She took out plates, utensils, vacuum jars of cold chicken and cucumber in sour cream, chilled butter, olives, a loaf of bread. He uncorked the wine. “To vacations,” Zita said, raising her glass.

He had returned late the previous night from two days spent with his mother. Within an hour of his arrival, he told Zita, his mother had ordered two horses saddled up, so that they could ride around the estate. She had pointed out recent improvements, including a new artesian well, an expansion to the vineyard, a refurbished horse barn. From memory she gave him the annual net proceeds from the sale of milk and butter, mutton, field crops, grapes, and the sale of two of her prize Andalusian horses. She reminded him that the estate was not a trivial enterprise; it required constant oversight. At her age, she couldn’t carry on alone indefinitely. Did he want his land to fall into disrepair, end up on the auction block? Not only the people they employed, but the entire village, depended on him, she had said, jabbing his arm with the handle of her riding crop.

“She is blackmailing you,” Zita said.

“No, no, she’s entitled to think of me as a disappointment.”

His mother had prepared his favorite meal for dinner: spicy gulyás, and fogas, which the fishmonger in the village had guaranteed had been caught that morning in Lake Balaton. With the fish, they had noodles, floury potato scones, asparagus in cheese sauce. And after, dessert: mákos guba, bread pudding with crème anglaise and poppy seeds. Every ingredient, with the exception of the poppy seeds, which were supplied by the greengrocer in the village, and the Lake Balaton fogas, had been grown or produced on their land, his mother emphasized, as she refilled their wineglasses with wine made from grapes picked in their own vineyard. She uncorked a new bottle. When it was empty, she produced a decanter of plum brandy. She outdrank him and remained lucid and sober. At this, Zita laughed. He did not repeat the exchange that had followed between him and his mother, who had said, “You are still with that Russian woman?”

“Her name is Zita,” he had replied.

“I know her name. She has the same name as our Empress Zita. That should mean something to her.”

“I’m not sure it does.”

“Nevertheless,” his mother said, “I will pray for her.”

The kitchen had smelled of beeswax, wild thyme, and something else. Vanilla beans, dried rosemary. The scents of his childhood.

Before he went to bed that night, his mother had asked him to look at a damp patch on the wall in the second-floor hall. “What I can’t understand is why the dampness should be here and not nearer the floor or the ceiling. It’s odd, isn’t it?” She had pressed her fingers to the wall. “Feel it yourself. It’s soft, like clay.”

He had scratched the spot with his thumbnail and had felt something, or nothing. He would hire a carpenter to come in and inspect it, he said, and she had demanded to know when that would be. Soon, he said. This summer, his mother said, before the harvest. And you will need to be here, she said. You cannot hire a carpenter and oversee the work from Berlin.

“That was what she said, then, and later, when I was getting ready to leave.”

“You are a journalist, not a house builder,” Zita said.

He closed his eyes and saw an afterimage of brilliant green sky and red grass. He dug his fingers into the soil, the soil of Hungary.

In 1925, he remembered, he had taken Zita to meet his mother for the first and, as it turned out, the only time. It was autumn, the days clear and cold. His mother had arranged a hunt, inviting the village doctor and his wife to take part, along with Vladimír, his mother’s groom, and a count and countess who lived in Budapest but were also local landowners. On the hunt Zita had shot an eight-point stag that stood transfixed as she took aim, as if it understood the inevitability of its demise. The stag was removed from the forest on a pallet pulled by a team of dogs. That was how his mother did things: in the manner of her father and