Biedermeier console table. She adjusted her cloche hat on her pale blond hair. She was wearing a new lilac traveling suit and a blouse with a jabot at the neck. Was the blouse too fussy for a train journey? she asked Natalia. What did she think? The jabot was perfect, Natalia said. Yes, her mother’s medications were in her purse, and no, she had not forgotten their passports or money for incidental expenses. Precisely at eight, as he had promised, Herr Saltzman arrived to drive them to the Anhalter Bahnhof. Natalia helped him carry their suitcases out to his car. In the night, a rainstorm had flooded parts of Berlin, and traffic was congested. Herr Saltzman, although a new and rather nervous driver, managed to get them to the station early, with plenty of time, he said, to cross the street to the Hotel Excelsior for coffee and a bite to eat.
“Oh, Erich, that’s a lovely idea,” Beatriz said. “But you know me. I like to settle in at the station before boarding the train.”
On the pavement a violinist was playing Beethoven’s “Ode an die Freude.” Beatriz held her hat against a sudden gust of wind and sang: Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt! This kiss is for the whole world!
“Write to me, Beatriz,” Erich Saltzman said, tipping the porter who came to take the luggage from him. “Write every day. Do you promise?”
“Yes, Erich, not every day, but I’ll drop you a line when I can.”
Erich Saltzman, his eyes moist, said, “Natalia, you’re a sensible girl; take good care of your mother for me, won’t you?”
Yes, she would, she promised. Uncle Erich, she had been taught to say, when she was younger. Be good to Benno, Natalia wanted to remind him, but he had turned away and was walking, very stolid and upright, back to his automobile.
On any given day, a newspaper had once enthusiastically reported, half of Europe moved through the Anhalter Bahnhof, and every six minutes a train departed from the glass-roofed train shed in a cloud of black smoke. Beatriz stood inside the station, entranced, watching as people greeted friends or relatives, or bid them farewell, sometimes tearfully. Parents could be heard chiding fractious children. Luggage got lost and reclaimed; the heels of clerks and porters rang with authority on the marble floors. Then there was the drawing-room elegance of the Anhalter: oil paintings, potted palms, crystal chandeliers. Beatriz impulsively bought a sprig of lily of the valley from a flower seller and asked Natalia to pin it to her lapel, and somehow, between that moment and the next, Beatriz vanished. Natalia couldn’t go looking for her, in case they missed each other. When at last her mother emerged out of the crowds, she explained breathlessly that she’d seen someone she knew, but it turned out to be someone else, a stranger. But then, she said, people en masse always tended to resemble other people, didn’t they? The scent of lily of the valley was giving her a headache, she said, and Natalia unpinned the flower from her mother’s collar and dropped it in a waste bin. Their train was delayed by an hour, and then they had to search through several coaches before finding a compartment with two empty seats. A young man stood and offered his window seat to Beatriz. She thanked him with such a radiant smile he blushed. He sat beside Beatriz and read, or pretended to read, while glancing surreptitiously at her. Not unaware of this attention, Beatriz slowly removed her gloves and hat and ran her fingers rather sensuously through her hair.
Natalia sat across from the young man, between a stout woman in a mustard-colored wool-flannel dress and a gentleman who was reading the Berliner Morgenpost. The front page, she could see, was devoted to coverage of Commander Byrd’s arrival in Paris, where he had been honored by the president of the Third Republic, whose name she couldn’t remember. There it was, beneath his photograph: Gaston Doumergue. He had a nice smile, she thought. Charles Lindbergh had won the transatlantic race in May, flying the Spirit of St. Louis solo from New York City to Paris in thirty hours. His rival Commander Byrd ran out of petrol and had to ditch his aircraft in the sea off the coast of France. He and his crew were fished out of the water, the newspapers said, by the villagers of Ver-sur-Mer.
Near Leipzig, Natalia caught sight of an open motorcar racing along on the