Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,35

Perhaps at the same hour. She looked at the lake, narrowing her eyes at its brilliance in the sunlight, and thought it was as if fate had caught them all in a net and pulled the threads tight.

“I could stay here tonight and take the train to Prague in the morning,” she said.

“You could, if that’s what you want. I have an alternative idea. Why not stay at my home, as my mother’s guest, while I drive to Dubrovnik. Chances are, I’ll track Zita and Frau Faber down within a day or so. Then you and your mother can travel home together. But the decision is yours.”

“I don’t want to impose on your mother.”

“She would be delighted.” He placed a few coins on the table. As they walked to the car, she thought: Maybe fate is what happens when you cease to resist, when you make up your mind to trust life.

* * *

That was how it came true: her dream of driving very fast in an open car. Not all that fast, though, because once they left the paved streets in Keszthely, the dirt roads and dust prohibited speed. Natalia’s hat wouldn’t stay on her head, so she held it on her lap and let the wind blow her hair around. After a while, the count asked how she was doing. She smiled, not trusting herself to speak. She felt the kind of happiness that had dark edges and slipped too easily out of her grasp and was instantly replaced by the fear that she had no right to it. She was glad when the count stopped at a village, where they spent a pleasant hour at a tearoom and then strolled around, stretching their legs. In a small park she stood at his side while he paid his respects to a bronzed statue of a Hungarian poet, a native son who had, according to the inscription the count read to her, married, fathered eight children, and died in this village a quarter of a century earlier, in 1902. Count Andorján said while the poet had never traveled, and his education had consisted of a few years at a small seminary, his writing conveyed a profound understanding of human nature, and his themes were universal.

They got back into the car, and an hour or so later the count slowed and pointed out Kastély Andorján in the distance. She thought it resembled a French château or one of the grand villas on the Grosser Wannsee more than a castle, with turrets and spires and drawbridges, like Schloss Neuschwanstein, for example. It did, however, dominate the landscape, up there on its hill, and it had, on one side, a tower with a circular copper roof that glinted fiercely in the sun. She clasped her hands tightly in her lap. The count did not speak again until he slowed the car as they entered the village of Németújvár. His father, he said, had sworn that the village, with a population of two hundred souls, was the geographical center of Europe, which annoyed his mother, who claimed that her village, in the northwest, had that distinction. “Neither of them was correct,” he said.

Németújvár resembled all the villages they’d driven through that day, and yet, because it was the count’s village, Natalia thought, it seemed to have something the others lacked. The houses glowed in the strong sunlight; chickens scrabbled in the dirt; washing billowed on clotheslines. There were a few shops, a store with a gas pump, a restaurant. The count waved as he passed some people on the road, but he did not stop. Beyond the village he turned left onto a long and narrow drive bordered on either side by linden trees. He drove over a stone bridge and came to a circular gravel drive in front of the castle. A woman stood in the portico. A servant, Natalia assumed by her dress. Her iron-gray hair hung in a thin, whiplike braid over one shoulder. But the count went directly to this woman and bent to kiss her cheek. Natalia, standing beside the car, heard her say, “Two visits in one month. I am honored. You’ve brought someone with you, I see.”

“Mother,” the count said. “I’d like you to meet Fräulein Faber, from Berlin. She’ll be our guest for a few days, while her mother is in Dubrovnik.”

“Fräulein Faber,” the countess said. “Come here, let me look at you.” She held Natalia’s hands firmly for a moment. Then they went through