Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,46

father, Natalia. You can see it in that photograph over there, on the table. Weren’t they alike, Miklós, even in character?”

“Yes, they were,” he said.

Rozalia began to reminisce about vacations they’d taken years before, in Karlsbad, in Prague, in Vienna. Snowshoeing in winter, fishing in summer. Winter sleigh rides at Lake Hévíz. Did Miklós remember?

Miklós turned and smiled at his mother. He said he had been thinking the other day of how he and László used to take their father’s Royal Enfield motorcycle, without permission, and ride through the village.

“Yes, I remember. Hellions, you were. They roared through the countryside, Natalia, like brigands, outlaws. I didn’t know them in those years. It was a shame, because as infants they were good-natured, lovely boys, but they grew into demons. They played the tárogatá out on the terrace at such a volume, and with such gross ineptitude, that they curdled the cows’ milk in the pasture. I threatened to run away with the Queen of the Gypsies. Do you remember, Miklós? László knew I was bluffing, but you, Miklós, were a credulous child. If I claimed the sky was saffron yellow, you would run outside to look.”

“Sometimes before a storm the sky was yellow,” he said.

“Me, you mean; I was the storm,” the countess said. “But you were the ones who went away. You went away.” She set her glass on a table. Her head nodded. Natalia looked at Miklós. “Come, Mother, before you fall asleep,” Miklós said. He gave Rozalia his hand, helping her out of the chair, and Natalia held her other arm, and the three of them went upstairs. In her room, Rozalia fell asleep on the bed in her clothes, and Natalia covered her with a quilt. In the hall, she and Miklós said good night.

* * *

In the kitchen the next morning, Natalia, helping with the preparations for lunch, let the knife slip as she sliced into a yellow onion and cut herself. Rozalia plunged her hand into a bowl of soapy water. The wound bled; the water turned pink and then red, and Rozalia said she would need stitches to close it. No, she kept saying; she didn’t need stitches. Did she want her hand to turn septic? Miklós said, when he came into the kitchen. He took her to the doctor’s house in the village, where they waited an hour for Dr. Urbán to return from what he described as a difficult confinement, but mother and twin sons were doing well, he said. He put five stitches in Natalia’s hand and told her to keep it elevated and out of water. In a week, the stitches could come out.

Miklós took her to the café and ordered tea, which he said would be better than coffee for shock.

“I’m not in shock,” she said.

“Still, it will calm you,” he said.

“I am calm,” she said. Beneath the calmness, though, she felt shivery and also mortified at having been careless at such a simple task.

The waitress brought two large pieces of chocolate-lavender cake. “Why are you even working in the kitchen?” Miklós said. “You’re our guest. My mother is taking advantage of you.”

“No, she is wonderful to me, truly.”

In a few days, he said, he had to make a trip to Budapest to pick up an order at a bookshop. Would she like to go with him?

Yes, she would like that very much, she said, and she took a forkful of lavender cake and said it did, indeed, taste delicious.

* * *

Three days later, they were in Pest, on the Chain Bridge, looking down at the Danube and the upturned faces of passengers on the deck of a riverboat. It was high summer; people were in a festive mood. She and Miklós walked back across the bridge to a stationery store in Pest, where Miklós bought a bottle of Pelikan Tinte ink and a typewriter ribbon in a round Pelikan tin, and she bought chalk and paper for the school. Then, at the bookshop, Miklós picked up his order: the first German translation, in three volumes, of Ulysses, by James Joyce. Also Margherita Sarfatti’s biography of Benito Mussolini. He remembered that she had been reading Thomas Mann and bought her Buddenbrooks. They lunched at the Café Gerbeaud on thin crêpes filled with meat and mushrooms. She thought they looked very well together, Miklós in a light linen jacket, and she in a blue voile dress with a low waist and slightly flared skirt, which had been sewn for her