Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,61

Ivan and had started to walk toward him, when a Gestapo officer pushed a woman hard enough to knock her down. She had got in his way or something. Franz had thought she was dead, but she began to move, and he got there in time to help her to her feet. Ivan was picking up the woman’s groceries and putting them in her shopping bag. He said to the Gestapo guy, Why did you have to push her, why did you have to do that? In reply, the Gestapo officer took his rifle off his shoulder and smashed it against Ivan’s face.

“So now,” Franz said, “blood is pouring down Ivan’s face, and the Gestapo officer is shouting at him to produce his identity card, and the woman is crying. And along comes another Gestapo, who wants to know what’s going on. The first one gave Ivan’s card back, and at the same time a car pulled up and they got in and drove away. I brought Ivan here, and Mother patched him up.”

“The Gestapo took down Ivan’s name and address?” Anna’s father said.

They looked at Ivan’s identity card, yes, Franz said. But they hadn’t asked Franz for his identity card. They didn’t know who he was or where he lived.

Ivan said he’d caused enough trouble; he would go home.

“Ivan, you should stay with us tonight,” Anna’s mother said. “In the morning I would like to examine your wound.”

Ivan had started to get up. He sank back into the chair. He was pale, and a violently purple bruise had spread across his cheek and nose. His eye was swollen shut. Ivan was a teacher at the Royal Gymnasium. He wrote poetry that was published in important literary journals. And there he sat, with that terrible wound to his face. Anna looked away. The evening sun, level in the sky, illuminated the room, with its comfortable blue velvet sofas and chairs and Bechstein piano and the credenza that had belonged to Anna’s grandmother, Katharina Svetlová. But outside the house, out there in the streets of Prague, someone like Ivan could be grievously injured for no reason, for doing something any decent human would do. Understanding how this could be was beyond her.

The next day, Franz went to the school where Ivan taught and told the headmaster Ivan had been called home to Český Krumlov to be with his father, who was ill. Franz had no qualms about lying to protect his friend. He repeated the same story to Ivan’s landlady when he stopped to feed Ivan’s cat and water the plants. As far as he could make out, no one had been to the house in the past twenty-four hours asking questions. They were safe, he thought. But Ivan learned later that the Gestapo had questioned the headmaster at his school and had sent two men to interrogate Ivan’s father, who unwittingly corroborated Franz’s story. The elder Mr. Lazar had, in fact, been ill and was just beginning to recover when the Gestapo came to his door. Mr. Lazar, an engineer at the hydroelectric dam on the Elbe River near Český Krumlov, told Ivan he wasn’t going to take any shit from the Gestapo. He had looked them in the eye and had said, yes, his son had been there to help him out when he was at death’s door with ’flu. By now, his son would be back in Prague. Then he had a fit of coughing and didn’t cover his mouth, and they had backed away, big men, big heroes, afraid of a few germs.

The Gestapo seemed to give up at that point, Franz said. But it illustrated the lengths they’d go to, to punish even a minor offense.

* * *

The occupation of Czechoslovakia by the German Reich had begun March 15, 1939, when the German army marched into Prague, and Hitler appeared at a window in Prague Castle. It was snowing that day, and it was Anna’s tenth birthday. She hated that her birthday, for the rest of her life, would be linked to the day when Czechoslovakia ceased to be a sovereign nation and became the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. She tried not to know what was happening, and for a time everything was unchanged, at least in her family. She knew, vaguely, that Hitler had appointed a German from Württemberg, Baron von Neurath, as Reich protector. Neurath immediately censored the free press and imposed the Nuremberg Laws, and that Anna could not pretend she didn’t