Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,58

rope and prepare yourself for banishment.

—ULRICH VON HUTTEN, 1518

Chapter Eleven

PRAGUE, 1941

Anna was gathering chestnuts from the grass beneath the tree in the garden of her family’s house in Malá Strana, the Lesser Quarter, in Prague. It was November; a light frost silvered the grass, and fog drifted up from the river, muting the sound of people walking past on the other side of the garden wall. Her father, Julius, had told her once that trees transmogrified, over time, into animals, rooted and sightless, yet sentient, in their way. If he believed this, then she did too. She sensed the chestnut tree gazing at her with its inner eyes. The chestnuts, with their burred outer skins, nipped at her fingers, like small forest animals. She filled the basket and took it upstairs to the kitchen. Sora, who before she came to them had worked in Italy and knew exactly what to do with sweet chestnuts, spread them out on newspaper and left them for a week to ripen, so that the starch in the fruit could develop into sugar. Then they painstakingly peeled away the outer casings, and the chestnuts were roasted in the oven and then ground into a coarse flour, which Sora used to bake a dense, moist Italian cake called castagnaccio. The arrival of this cake at the table was an event in Anna’s family. It marked the drawing in of the days, the approach of winter.

The last winter; the last taste of castagnaccio. That evening her father, who was an artist, pushed back his chair, picked up his sketch pad, and drew the scene, including the partly demolished Italian cake on a Bohemian-crystal plate. He drew Anna’s mother, Magdalena, as she turned to say something to Franz, who had a fork in his hand. Anna’s cousin Reina was about to pour coffee—or ersatz coffee, wartime coffee, occupation coffee, whatever it was—from a carafe into Franz’s cup. Anna had rested her head on her mother’s shoulder and was listening to her mother and Franz. Her father drew himself, sketch pad balanced on his knee. Candles burning, small pools of light, cake crumbs on the tablecloth.

Her father’s paintings were in private collections in Prague, Vienna, London, Paris, and New York, and in art galleries in those cities and others. His portrait of President Tomáš Masaryk, while not as well known as the portrait by Oskar Kokoschka, had been a favorite of the president, who had hung it on his office wall.

Her mother was a specialist in diseases of the blood. Many of her patients were referred to her by doctors in other towns, in the countryside. Anna imagined these patients rising before daylight, traveling by train sometimes hundreds of kilometers. Often, they hung around on the pavement outside the house, delaying the moment when they would have to admit to the doctor that they were unwell, probably with nothing, a passing fatigue, trouble sleeping, no appetite. Anna had seen them lighting cigarettes, checking their watches. They came inside, meticulously wiped their feet on the doormat, hung coats and hats on the coatrack, glanced at the pendulum clock in the corner. They gazed for a moment at a painting on the wall by Anna’s father, of three men fishing for carp on the banks of the Vltava. It was in a highly realistic style her father had since repudiated, but Anna liked it, and she’d heard her mother’s patients remark that they could almost smell the river and feel the mist on their faces. Anna fancied herself invisible, watching the patients from the fourth step up on the staircase, where she believed she was hidden from sight. If her brother, Franz, saw her there, he asked what she was doing, sitting in a cold draft. She wanted to explain how happy she felt, part of the house’s activities and close to her mother, yet separate, almost incorporeal. She wasn’t always alone, either. Sometimes her friend Rosa sat with her, and they watched everything together.

* * *

Anna’s father’s father owned gypsum mines near the Neckar River. His parents had expected Julius to study chemistry and work in the family business, as his older brother, Anna’s uncle Rupert, had done, but instead he came to Prague to study art with Alphonse Mucha and to see Prague’s distinctive art nouveau and cubist architecture. In all of Europe, there were no other examples of cubist architecture. How, he had wondered, could he live anywhere else? Alphonse Mucha wasn’t in Prague when he arrived; he