Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,43
only five or six, depending on the weather and how many Sinti children arrived at the door accompanied by a parent or grandparent. Natalia hung the children’s coats on a row of hooks and handed out slates and chalk. She taught the children to count, using dried beans from the kitchen and chestnuts and acorns she collected from beneath the trees. Eins, zwei, drei, she said, in German, and the children made her repeat it in Hungarian: egy, kettő, három. The countess arranged beans on a sheet of white paper in the shape of a face with two eyes and an upturned mouth and said, This is me, and the children became giddy with delight. At eleven o’clock, Katya came to the door with buttered bread or cookies and a flask of milk for the children. While the children ate, Natalia made up stories, or retold old stories, to amuse them.
Once there was a farmer who had a chicken that laid golden eggs, so that he wanted for nothing. But a robber began stealing these golden eggs, and no matter how early the farmer got up, or how late into the night he kept watch, he could not catch the thief. Then one day a stranger came and said, if the farmer gave him three golden eggs, the thievery would cease at once. And it did stop. The stranger took his booty and ran away and was seen no more. Once again, the farmer found golden eggs nestled among the brown eggs in the henhouse, and he and his wife prospered all their long lives.
Or, a young wife who desired a child of her own sewed a cloth doll with button eyes, and a witch came to the open window of her workroom and said she could cast a spell to turn the doll into a real, living infant. But there was a price to pay: this infant would vanish unless the wife promised never again to speak a word. The wife agreed to the witch’s terms, and at once the doll became a rosy-cheeked infant with eyes as black and merry as the doll’s button eyes. The young wife tricked the witch by singing to her child in a voice of such purity that the witch, secretly listening, was beguiled and undid her evil spell. The infant grew to be a fine young man and often said his mother’s voice was the sweetest sound in the world.
The countess, who tried not to let the children see her using a cane, held on to Natalia’s arm as they walked from the school back to the castle. She said it would please her to be called by her given name, Rozalia. “Since my husband died, no one uses my name, and it’s a pretty name, it means rose. The rose that blooms in summer and when autumn comes is devoured by worms.” She laughed. “Natalia, tell me, is there a young man, a sweetheart, waiting for you in Berlin?”
“No,” she said. “No one is waiting.”
“Good,” the countess said. “You have no reason to hurry home, then.” Frankly, she had never cared for Berlin. Munich she could tolerate, it had substance, a distinct flavor, like a robust stew, and Dresden was cultured, refined. But as for Berlin—Berliners took themselves too seriously; Germans she thought emotional and easily offended. “Hungarians, thanks be to God, have a native sense of propriety tempered with good humor. You will not find a Hungarian who does not enjoy his own society.”
“I am German,” Natalia pointed out.
“Ah, Natalia,” she said. “All young girls belong to their own glorious principality.”
* * *
The first castle built on the estate had burned to the ground a century ago, leaving only a cellar of unknown provenance, Rozalia told Natalia. It was, she said, impossible to describe and Natalia must see it for herself. When they had descended a narrow and steep flight of stone steps and had arrived, via a long corridor, at a cellar with an uneven stone floor and fire-blackened oak beams, Rozalia gave Natalia a candle to hold and removed an iron key from a hook in the wall. She unlocked a low, arched door that swung open on creaking hinges, exactly like a prop in a Fritz Lang film. Rozalia made Natalia go in ahead of her. Natalia knew what she was seeing, and yet it shocked her to know the castle’s foundations contained human remains. Arm bones; finger bones that seemed to move, to beckon; skulls with