Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,57
angry, I understand. I know you can’t marry me.”
“If you think that, then you don’t know me very well. It was your father’s tragedy,” he said, “not to know you.”
Later, when they had taken the horses to the stables, he told her it was customary in Hungary for a formal marriage proposal to be made no fewer than five times. He had used up one, although it wasn’t as formal as it should have been. Four proposals remained. He would keep asking until he got the answer he wanted.
* * *
After their marriage, Miklós and Natalia spent a week in Trieste. It was foggy, and it rained, and the streets shone with a gray light. Miklós was writing an article on James Joyce’s years in Trieste. In the morning they went out, and he conjured James Joyce from the stones, looking just as he did in his photographs, tall and spare and literary, nearsighted and bespectacled. Miklós photographed the exterior of apartment buildings where Joyce had lived and street corners where, perhaps—who could say?—he might have stood. Miklós photographed the hospital where Nora Barnacle had given birth to a son in a charity ward. Miklós had Natalia stand in front of the hospital, in her black skirt and black stockings, pretending to be Nora Barnacle and smiling, which Natalia said Nora wouldn’t do, not if she’d just given birth in a charity ward. But Miklós said the average newspaper reader liked to be reassured that life had its moments.
He read Ulysses to her from the first volume of the three-volume German translation he’d purchased at the bookshop in Pest. She loved listening, especially to the descriptions of food, everything fried in butter, seasoned with pepper. Greasy fingers, belches. Life was sensual. It was meant to be sensual and rich and verging on excess at all times. Miklós told her that James Joyce had said of Trieste, “It is the city that sheltered us.” Trieste, little more than a day’s drive from Hungary, had always seemed apart from the rest of the world’s turmoil, he said. But that was Habsburg Trieste, whereas now Trieste was ruled by the Italian Fascists.
In 1930, Miklós rented an apartment in Berlin Mitte, the city’s central district, convenient to everything. A pattern was established, in which six months of the year were spent in Hungary and six months in Berlin. The contrast between one life and the other was marked, and yet Natalia could not say which she liked better. The first winter in Berlin, she contacted Martin Becker. Days before her marriage, she had written to him and had received in reply a letter in which his congratulations were muted, but he had been explicit in describing his hurt that she had, as he put it, “unilaterally ended their relationship.” When they met at the Café Kranzler one morning, he told her she had broken his heart. But he smiled as he spoke and eagerly imparted the news that he was soon to marry a young woman called Sophia, who lived in his hometown of Blankenburg.
In January 1933, von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor of Germany. The Press Law of October 1933 stated that journalists had to be Aryan and could not be married to a non-Aryan and were required to belong to the Reich Press Association. Although these anti-Semitic laws did not directly affect Miklós, he was angered by them, as well as depressed, and resigned from Ullstein Verlag, which had been taken over by Eher Verlag, the Nazi-controlled publishing house. He did some work for newspapers in Budapest. He wrote a novel that was based on his brother’s life and dealt with the war. Natalia thought it his best work.
In 1934, Zita was arrested and held at the Reich Main Security Office at 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, near Potsdamer Platz. She was released, but had been beaten, her arm broken. Beatriz would have taken Zita to safety in Buenos Aires, but if she lived that far away, she’d never see her grandson. Krisztián was two years old in 1934. Zita adored him. Four years later, in 1938, she and Zita did leave Germany and a year later Germany invaded Poland. Great Britain and then France declared war on Germany. At the castle, Rozalia turned the radio off when a newscast began and burned the newspapers in the library fireplace, sometimes before Natalia had a chance to read them.
Part
Two
O century! O sciences! It is a delight to be alive, even if not yet in tranquility.