Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,31
They would live like that, rooted to their scrap of earth, until the autumn frosts came along and demolished them.
He yearned to hold Zita. He wanted to know that their lovemaking in Prague had been the beginning of a reconciliation and more: marriage, a life together. He needed to say this to her. But once again the moment seemed to slip away. They gathered up the picnic hamper and rug and clambered back up the embankment to the Bugatti.
* * *
In the hotel’s dining room he breakfasted on coffee and toast while reading The Castle. How strangely Kafka’s story resonated with him: the absent nobleman, who had absconded out of apathy or fear or negligence, or all three, leaving his castle exposed to the malign curiosity of the villagers. Not that the villagers of Némétújvár were malign, or not generally so, but they were certainly curious. He knew that. The unspoken question he got from them was: How long do we have to put up with an absent aristocrat, a useless, do-nothing Count Westwest like you?
Zita came into the dining room. “Don’t get up,” she said. His car was parked in the way of a delivery van; if he gave her the ignition key, she’d move it. “It’s only a matter of a few meters,” she said. He handed her the key and went back to reading. A waiter refilled his cup with coffee. On a shelf above a fireplace, a row of sailing ships constructed of seashells from the Adriatic, or so the hotel manager had told him, seemed to sail through the air around him. He thought: How could the Bugatti be in the way of anything? He had parked nowhere near the hotel’s service entrance. He signed the chit for his breakfast and went out a side door to the street. His car was nowhere in evidence. What a clever trick. Zita had absconded with his car. He thought of accidents, breakdowns, the car running out of petrol. Rock-throwing youths. A woman alone, lost. He lit a cigarette. He watched the empty road, willing the Bugatti to appear.
Fräulein Faber was walking toward him. “Frau Brüning is ill,” she said. “She is very ill and has asked to see my mother, but at the spa I was told my mother keeps missing her appointments. I thought perhaps I’d find her here, with Fräulein Kuznetsova.”
“I’m sorry, I haven’t seen your mother. Is Frau Brüning alone?”
“Dr. Heilbronn sent a nurse to her.”
“Good. And has anyone contacted Herr Brüning?”
“No. Not yet, but Dr. Heilbronn will telephone him today.”
“Frau Faber may have gone on a drive with Zita,” he said. “But perhaps she is somewhere here. Shall we walk around the hotel grounds and see if we can spot her? First, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to run this book up to my room.”
Not once on the way up the stairs did it occur to him that it was inappropriate to take the Fräulein to his room, nor did he realize, until he’d opened the door, that he had left his suitcase open on the floor, its contents spilling out on the rug, and had piled books and newspapers on the coffee table. The little desk he was working at was covered with folded newspapers and writing paper. He saw Fräulein Faber looking at the typewriter and asked whether she knew how to type. No, she did not, she said, but she would like to learn one day. “It’s an excellent skill to have. Here, come and sit down,” he said. He wound a sheet of paper onto the platen and showed her how to position her fingers on the keys. Just type your name, he said. Tentatively, she depressed a key. “Don’t worry,” he said, “you can’t damage it.”
She made a single error, changing Natalia to Natalie. He rubbed it out with a little eraser on a wheel and brushed the paper clean. She corrected the mistake and said it looked strange, her name on a page like that.
“It does indeed. Seeing my own name on the page never fails to alarm me.”
“But at least it is your name,” she said. He looked at her, mystified. He asked her what she liked to read. She thought a moment before saying she had just finished reading a story by Thomas Mann called “A Man and His Dog.”
“I know the story. Mann is good. He has a devilish turn of phrase, doesn’t he? I’m reading Franz Kafka, a Czech writer, not yet