Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,32

well known. It’s only in the last two years that his books have been published in Germany. He’s unlike anyone else. Here, try this and tell me what you think.” He pulled his copy of The Trial out of the pile on the corner of the desk and gave it to her. My God, he thought, what are you doing, Miklós? Was The Trial suitable reading material for a girl of seventeen or eighteen? But if she read Thomas Mann, she should be quite at ease with Franz Kafka.

They rode the lift to the lobby and walked across the lawn to the lake. On the pier, a man was playing a tárogató. Miklós and his brother used to play a tárogató. They took lessons from the wife of a worker on the estate but never learned how to make real music, only noise that gave their mother a headache. “She was always threatening to run away with the queen of the Gypsies. She meant her friend, a wealthy Sinti woman who lived part of the year on the estate. We were gullible children; we believed her,” he told Natalia.

“When I was a child,” he went on, “my family stayed here in winter. The lake never freezes. No matter how bitter the weather, the water is warm enough for bathing. I remember sleigh rides in the snow and white swans on the water, in clouds of mist. I asked my mother if the swans were real. She said they were real enough to make a good dinner.”

Natalia laughed. “Zita said your home is not far from here.”

“Not far. I was there recently, two days ago, in fact.” He asked if she would like an iced drink. From the hotel veranda they’d have a good view of the pier and the hotel grounds. They could watch for her mother.

“Thank you, but I don’t think my mother is here. And thank you for lending me this book. I can read it while I sit with Frau Brüning.”

He watched her walking away in her blue dress and white hat. Then he wandered across the lawn, found a vacant bench from which he could see the road behind the hotel, and sat down. He opened his notebook and wrote:

Here at Lake Hévíz, you drink six or seven glasses of eau fraiche a day. You dine on steamed trout and stewed prunes, take an evening constitutional, and in the morning exercise, play tennis, swim in the therapeutically radioactive water. You see people nervously checking their pulse, and at dinner you overhear these same people discussing their digestion and other bodily functions you’d prefer to know nothing about. You are not like them. Not yet, anyway. You close your eyes against the light of the sun, which shines with more intensity in Hungary than anywhere else in all of Europe, and what you see, in a dazzling afterimage, is a beautiful girl dancing at the water’s edge, at dusk, in a cloud of fireflies.

Chapter Seven

Dr. Heilbronn had diagnosed a hemoptysis, a slight coughing up of blood that could have many causes, some quite benign. “He was trying to ease my mind,” Julia said. “Everyone is so good to me. Do you know, your mother gave me a charm to say: ‘Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.’ Tous les jours, à tous points de vue, je vais mieux en mieux. In French it sounds less dogmatic, don’t you think? Or more so?”

Natalia refilled Julia’s glass with water from a pitcher on her bedside table and smoothed her pillows. She bent to kiss her good night. Julia averted her face. “I don’t mind about germs,” Natalia said, holding Julia’s hand. “Go,” Julia said, laughing. “Go and enjoy the rest of the evening.”

She sat on the grass near the lake and opened the book the count had lent her. Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested. The pages smelled of the count’s tobacco. After the sun had set, and there was not enough light for reading, she went up to her room. Just after midnight Beatriz summoned her by tapping on the wall between their rooms. When Natalia opened the connecting door, Beatriz was sitting on the edge of her bed, a long filmy scarf, a new scarf, around her neck. She was stroking it as if it were alive, and indeed, it clung to her hands like a treasured pet,