Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,63
of Czechoslovakia began, Franz had tried to convince their parents to emigrate to England or Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. Anywhere out of harm’s way. Their mother had said she couldn’t abandon her patients. Their father had believed that if they remained quiet, reasonably obedient, never calling attention to themselves, they would be all right. And so they stayed. In 1940, Reina and Franz began volunteering to assist Jewish people with obtaining visas and exit permits from a new office overseen by an Austrian Nazi named Adolf Eichmann. Anna suspected Franz and Reina were helping in more illicit ways as well. They belonged to a Czech hikers’ club that, as was generally known, functioned as a cover for partisans and secretly published anti-Nazi pamphlets and met at secret locations after dark to set up portable radio transmitters that beamed the BBC’s Overseas Service to radios in Prague. Listening to these broadcasts was forbidden, punishable by execution, but how could the Nazis know what was going on in your living room, if you kept the shutters closed and the curtains drawn? Even Anna’s parents listened, the radio turned down so low that exiled president Edvard Beneš spoke to them from London in the sibilant whispers of someone underwater.
* * *
Rosa left Prague in the same month that Anna’s cousin Reina came to live in Prague to attend university. Reina had grown up on her parents’ farm in Zürau. Her mother was Anna’s aunt Gisele. Her half aunt, really, since her mother and Aunt Gisele were half sisters. Anna had adored her cousin, and when she visited the farm, she had followed Reina around, watching as she cleaned out barns and chicken coops, scythed grass, and helped her mother in the house and with the younger children. But the Reina who arrived in Prague had changed. She dressed in silk blouses and tailored skirts she had made herself from patterns Aunt Vivian Svetlová had mailed to her. Her curly auburn hair was in a smooth twist at the back of her head. Occasionally she smoked a cigarette. She got a part-time job at the bookshop where Franz worked. They went to coffeehouses together, met with fellow students and professors, discussed literature, philosophy, poetry—but politics, never. Not, Franz said, with SS officers at the next table listening. At least, one of them listened, a tall man no older than Franz, perhaps also a university student. He seemed conversant with Kant; perhaps he’d studied Kant before ditching any conception of a moral imperative. Perhaps he knew more on any given subject than Franz and his friends, but he was what he was, that SS officer; he had made his choice. For the first time, Franz said, he realized he could kill another man in defense of his family and his homeland. No, he could not, Anna’s mother had said. And he must never repeat what he’d said to anyone, ever. A thoughtless word, a wrong look, would be interpreted by the Nazis as sedition, a crime punishable by death. Franz had said it himself, she pointed out: they lived in a police state. At the hospital she’d seen boys younger than Franz who had been beaten and tortured by the Gestapo. She saw their parents waiting in hospital corridors to learn whether their sons had any chance of recovering from their injuries, if they would ever be the same again.
* * *
At first, when Reina came to live with them, she and Anna shared Anna’s bedroom, which was large enough for two beds, two wardrobes, a dressing table, and a desk for Reina. A muslin curtain on a rail separated Anna’s side of the room from Reina’s side. Immaculate in her appearance, Reina scattered clothes, shoes, books, and half-finished term papers everywhere on the floor. She read late at night, her lamp shining directly—deliberately?—in Anna’s eyes. She walked in her sleep but denied having got out of bed during the night. One night, Anna woke and found Reina in the hall, at the top of the stairs, swaying unsteadily. Anna took her hand, and Reina turned and slapped her face. Reina let Anna guide her back to the bedroom and got back into bed, still asleep. Anna lay awake, her face stinging. In the morning, when she looked in the mirror, she saw a faint bruise on her cheek. At breakfast, her mother said, “Anna, let me look at you. Are you sleeping well?”