Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,59
was in the United States, and so Anna’s father had studied at an art academy. He lodged at the home of Vivian and Tomáš Svetla and one day met their niece, Magdalena, a medical student at Charles University. Anna’s father told her that as soon as he saw Magdalena, he fell in love with her. In 1921 they were married in the church of Saint Nicholas in Republic Square, and then they lived with Magdalena’s father, in the house where Franz was born in 1923 and Anna in 1929. Anna’s mother opened her surgery, and her father affixed a polished brass plaque, inscribed MAGDALENA SCHAEFFEROVÁ, DOCTOR OF MEDICINE, on the wall beside the entrance to the house. Anna had lived in this house since her birth, and she had decided, when she was quite young, that it was where she wanted to spend her life, every year watching as the chestnut tree flowered, produced succulent sweet chestnuts, and in autumn shed its beautiful leaves on the grass.
* * *
Anna was doing homework at the table in the dining room. Her cousin Reina, who was staying with them, had promised to help her, but she kept getting up and wandering around, opening drawers in the credenza, taking out a spoon, examining it for tarnish—not that she would bother to clean it—and putting it back. At the same time, she was telling Anna about a quarrel she’d had with the owner of the bookshop where she worked. Someone’s order had been misplaced. She knew it wasn’t her fault. The bookshop was busy; mistakes got made. Everyone was reading forbidden Czech literature, every book they could get their hands on, in defiance of the Nazis. The printing presses were running day and night to keep up with the demand. Anna had seen it herself: people read as they walked; they read in cafés, on trams, in queues at the shops. Here I am, they were saying, defiantly. Here I am, reading a book by a Czech author working in the Czech language. What are you going to do about it? Reina sat down and bit her fingernails and then got up again and went out of the room and came back with one of Franz’s philosophy textbooks.
She flipped through the pages and said Franz was brilliant at philosophy, but it was her least favorite subject. “Nietzsche called other philosophers cabbage heads. He said the cabbage heads settled for a frog’s-eye view of life. Cabbages don’t have eyes, but it’s a nice simile, isn’t it? Or is it a metaphor? Or just an insult? A frog’s-eye view is a term in art. Your father would know it. It means from a limited perspective, from near the ground, as if you were a frog sitting on a lily pad. I have no intention of settling for a frog’s-eye view. As soon as this stupid war ends, I am going to America. Aunt Vivian says she’ll give me the addresses of her relatives in Chicago, who’ll be happy to put me up while I look for work. A lot of Czechs have emigrated to America. Half of Europe is there; the smart half, if you ask me.”
She picked at the sleeve of her sweater, which was black and lacy, intricate as a spider’s web, and then said she was going to take a bath, shampoo her hair, and do some sewing. “Listen,” she said. “I think Franz is home.” She went out, closing the door behind her.
Anna finished solving an algebraic equation and opened another book and began to take notes: The boiling point of water is one hundred degrees Celsius, and the melting point of ice is zero degrees Celsius. As water heats, it expands. Solids and liquids expand when heated and contract as they cool. Even a mountain responds to heat and cold in this way, the rocks contracting and expanding along fault lines. A calorie measures the energy required to raise the temperature of a gram of liquid by one degree Celsius. One fact led to another; one discovery opened the way to another. Anna’s ambition was to become a scientist like her mother and her uncle Rupert in Heidelberg, who formulated new medicines from dyes at one company while also carrying out tests for the family’s gypsum-mining business. There was another scientist in her family: her mother’s stepmother, Eva Svetlová, had been a botanist, and Eva’s brother, Maximilian Nagy, for whom Anna’s uncle Max was named, had been an agronomist.