Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,34

given instructions for her trunk to be shipped to Berlin.

Before she went to bed, Natalia packed a suitcase, unpacked it, and then put everything she’d taken out in again. Beneath the window, in the pavilion, the orchestra was tuning up. They began to play something beautiful, plangent, sorrowful, and Natalia went to the window to listen. Why should she obey a directive from a woman she scarcely knew? She was free, wasn’t she? Free to do whatever she wanted. She could stay at Lake Hévíz, return to Zehlendorf, get a job in an office, do anything. The problem was that freedom and indecision began to feel very much alike.

To her surprise she slept well and woke early. She bathed, washed and dried her hair, dressed in the blue skirt and lawn blouse she’d worn on the trip to Prague, and wished she did not look quite so much like a schoolgirl. A bellhop came to collect her suitcase. She went to Julia’s room on the second floor and slipped a note under the door, letting her know she’d had to leave unexpectedly.

In the lobby, while she waited for the count, she picked up a Berlin newspaper and read that the floods in the Erzgebirge on July 9 had claimed more than two hundred lives, and property losses had exceeded seventy million marks. Commander Byrd, returning to the coastal village of Ver-sur-Mer in France, had been greeted as a hero. The villagers had presented him with charts and flight records recovered from his plane. He had kissed every baby in the village, as well as one woman in her eighties. Natalia flipped over the newspaper and saw an article with the byline Miklós Andorján, a story about Russian Jewish émigré families that had settled in Kreuzberg after the revolution. The count came in, and she placed the newspaper on a coffee table. He carried her suitcase to the car and held the door for her. At the train station in Keszthely, he handed her a list of telephone numbers where he could be reached and asked her to let him know when she’d arrived in Zehlendorf. She boarded the train and sat near a window. The coach was hot and smelled of coal dust and stale tobacco and perspiration from countless travelers. Beatriz had told her the trains in Hungary were relics of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The once-luxurious velvet seats and curtains and the braided-gold pull cords were worn and dusty, the gilt trim tarnished, the opulence spoiled and forgotten. She waited, feeling hot and uncertain. She wiped the palms of her hands on her skirt. If the train didn’t start to move soon, she would get off. If it didn’t start in thirty seconds, twenty seconds, ten seconds, she would leave, and she did; she got out and went to where the count was standing on the platform.

“My mother would want me to wait for her,” she said. They both knew this wasn’t true. Count Andorján asked the stationmaster to retrieve Natalia’s suitcase from the train. Then they got into the car and he drove to a café not far from Lake Balaton with a view of the water and sailboats with their sails furled. The count asked for coffee and biscuits filled with bacon and cheese. Natalia hadn’t eaten breakfast and realized she was actually ravenous. She spread lashings of sweet butter on a warm biscuit. The coffee was phenomenally strong; it made her ears ring. The count lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. He tore a leaf off a spindly lime tree in a terra-cotta pot beside the table and twisted it by the stem, let it fall to the ground.

“I should have stayed on the train,” she said.

“There are always more trains,” he said

A woman was walking past. She bore a superficial resemblance to Beatriz—blond, wavy hair, slender figure, pretty but nothing as pretty as Beatriz. Tears came to Natalia’s eyes. The count looked at her. “It’s nothing, a little grit from the wind,” she said.

“I blame myself,” he said. “I knew, or should have, that Zita suffered some residual effects from what happened in the Erzgebirge. Did she tell you? She nearly drowned, you know, and one does not easily recover from an event like that.”

She had not known. The floods in the Erzgebirge happened on July 9 and 10; she and Beatriz had left Berlin on July 10. So Zita Kuznetsova had almost drowned on the same day that Alfred had died.