Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,3

week at a resort on the North Sea. They walked great distances on the sand and went swimming when the water wasn’t too cold. In the afternoons they sat on the hotel veranda, watching seabirds skim the waves while fishing boats and freighters sailed past, far out at sea. By ten every night, Natalia retired to her room to read and was asleep before midnight, only to be awakened a short time later by Beatriz, throwing herself down on the bed beside her. She talked about the sore losers at cards, the handsome pianist who stared at her while he played Schubert, the young man with the eyes of a poet, who in fact was a poet and recited his sonnets to her from memory. The poet had spent some time in Buenos Aires and was thrilled to hear she’d been born there. She’d told him, and now she had to tell Natalia all over again, how her parents had emigrated to Argentina in 1879. They’d arrived in a new country with nothing and had built up a prosperous exporting business, working twelve-, sixteen-hour days, which hadn’t left much time for their daughter. Her father would say, Where is the little nuisance, and her mother would say she hadn’t seen her, even though Beatriz was right there, in front of her.

“You know, Natalia, that I never saw my mother and father again, after coming to Germany? Your grandparents Dorothea and Einhard März died in a cholera epidemic and are buried in the Recoleta cemetery in Palermo, which is like a city unto itself, a vast, strange, and rather ugly city of tombs. One day the residents of the Recoleta will arise, and they will all be reunited in Paradise. Isn’t that how it goes?”

“That is our hope, Mama. Were you and my father married, when your parents passed away?”

“I think so. Yes, I’m sure we were.”

“Tell me about my father.”

“I’m too sleepy, my darling.”

“Just one thing.”

“Your father was born in Königsberg.”

“Yes, I know. But I’d like to hear something new.”

“Oh, you are a little nuisance too.” Beatriz sighed. Alfred’s father and grandfather were cabinetmakers, she said. Their furniture was of such a high quality, it was coveted by Europe’s royal houses. A grand duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin commissioned a four-poster bed of such immensity a team of six horses was required to transport it to his castle. “One day, and this would have been around 1885, Alfred’s father cut his hand on a saw, or an adze, some implement, anyway, and within forty-eight hours he was dead of blood poisoning. The factory, the family home, and all the money went to Alfred’s uncle, while Alfred and his mother were left with nothing, not even, ironically, a stick of furniture.”

But Alfred made a new life for himself. He became an importer of specialty goods from Eastern Europe: bolts of silk, furs, tinned caviar, Russian firearms, oranges from the Crimea, spices. He knew what people liked. He brought these commodities into Germany and sold them at a substantial profit. Truly he was a self-made man. She and Alfred were struck from the same mold; they didn’t let anyone get the better of them.

“What was my father like as a person?”

“As a person? Well, he skied in Thuringia in winter, and in summer he sailed on Grosser Wannsee. He smoked a pipe. In general, he found people disappointing and claimed to have no great expectation of anyone. He insisted on having his meals served on time. He was fond of his dog, Rufus. He liked the opera. Not the dog, I don’t mean. What kind of music the dog liked, I wouldn’t know. Alfred loved listening to Brahms, Chopin, Tchaikovsky. Sad music. Look on the bright side, I would say, and he’d say, Why must there be a bright side? He inherited his melancholia from his Russian family, not that I ever met any of them. They didn’t acknowledge your birth with a word of congratulations, let alone a gift. Natalia, I’m exhausted. I’m going to my room now.”

Natalia, unable to fall back asleep, listened to the sea rush-ing in along the shore and thought of the three photographs of Alfred Faber her mother kept in an embossed leather album in her desk. Three only. In one, taken in 1910, the year of Natalia’s birth, Alfred Faber stood in the Tiergarten, beside a perambulator, only the scalloped edge of a shawl visible, no sign of the infant within. In another, he stood outside the

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