Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,42
envision such a society.
She read a few pages of Louise Bryant’s Six Red Months in Russia. John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World. Suddenly, by common impulse, we found ourselves on our feet, beginning in smooth lifting unison the Internationale.
Zita would understand these books. She had been in Russia when the revolution began. Zita, in a fur-trimmed coat, like Anna Karenina, her hands concealed in a fur muff, stepping up into a troika, giving orders to the driver. Natalia was imagining this; she did not know where Zita had been in 1917. But she suspected that when the dust had settled, when the Bolsheviks had ousted the established order of generals and landowners, and the counterrevolutionaries and insurgents had gone to wage war in the east, Zita would have reappeared to help build a new society, a new order.
How wonderful, if everything could work out for the best, for everyone. Natalia pictured the countess’s workers cooking communal meals in the castle’s spotless kitchen. Children scampering up and down the halls. Sinti families roasting wild boar on spits in the fireplaces, singing exuberantly. The countess would be scandalized, although perhaps less so than Beatriz, if she were forced to share her immaculate villa in Zehlendorf with anyone, high or low born.
In a corner of the tower room there was the narrow, rumpled bed where Miklós slept if he worked late. She smoothed the blankets and picked up the pillow and buried her face in it and then put it on the bed. She sat at the desk and surveyed the four-cornered world outside the windows. In order to practice typing, she had started writing about her days at the castle, helping the countess with the school, learning to cook complicated dishes that involved a great deal of butchering. The countess wanted to teach her to use a gun. She refused to hunt; she couldn’t kill anything. From the desk she could see clouds racing past in the sky and wet, messy snow falling with the rain. Winter, and she was still here.
Miklós had left his copy of The Castle on the desk. Natalia opened it. A piece of paper fluttered out, and when she unfolded it, she read her own name, as she’d typed it at the Hotel Meunier. She could see, faintly, where Miklós had erased the error she’d made, changing her name from Natalia to Natalie. She slipped the paper into the book and placed the book on a shelf.
Chapter Eight
In the village the countess had the shoemaker measure Natalia’s foot for riding boots and a pair of what she called serviceable walking shoes. A few doors away, the tailor was sewing a riding habit of fawn-colored jodhpurs and a dark brown fitted jacket with a velvet collar. She went behind a screen to try it on, and then the tailor stabbed pins into it, and the countess pulled at the waistband and said Natalia was like a willow wand, and it would have to be taken in again. Later, in the café across the street, the countess told her the tailor had been a Communist, a supporter of Béla Kun, and she had refused to speak to him for years. The shoemaker had three marriages to his name, each wife having succumbed to some insignificant illness—delicate as flowers, he liked them.
“Countess, I want to reimburse you for the boots and shoes and the riding habit,” Natalia said. The countess waved a hand in the air; it was a pleasure to do this for Natalia. She and Vladimír had chosen a mare for her. Ilka was a docile, pretty horse, but she would be insulted if Natalia didn’t have the proper accoutrements for riding. The countess eyed the plate of petits gâteaux and chose a confection of chocolate and almond paste. “Have one,” she said. “They’re very nice.” Two women came in and greeted the countess, who introduced Natalia as a distant relative visiting from Berlin. When the women had gone, she said, “Those old gossips. They don’t need to know everything.”
* * *
In the fall, the countess opened her nursery school in an untenanted worker’s cottage near the river. It was a single room, heated with a round tiled stove. On the wall there was an enormous portrait of the wedding of the last king of Hungary, Karl IV, and his consort, Queen Zita. Every morning, before prayers, the countess instructed the children to bow their heads to this portrait. As many as fifteen children attended, sometimes