Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,64

you sleeping?”

“Why, what has Anna been telling you?”

“Nothing,” Anna said.

“Aunt Magdalena,” Reina said, “I am very grateful to be living here, but to be honest, sharing a bedroom with Anna is impossible. If I read at night, I disturb her. She hides my books, my clothes. I can’t find anything. She’s always watching me. I have no privacy whatsoever.”

“That’s not true,” Anna said. “Anyway, if I didn’t watch you, you would fall down the stairs and break your neck.”

Later, her mother told Anna that sleepwalking wasn’t all that unusual in young women Reina’s age. “Could it be she’s homesick, I wonder,” her mother said. “Perhaps she misses her family more than she lets on. Be especially nice to her, won’t you?”

She was nice to Reina, nicer than Reina deserved. In the morning, she brought her coffee in bed. She collected apple cores and used coffee cups from Reina’s bedside table, picked her clothes up off the bedroom floor and took them to Sora to be laundered.

“Where’s my sweater, the dark blue one with silver buttons?” Reina demanded, slamming a drawer shut.

“It’s there, in the drawer. Look again.”

“You have no business touching my things, Anna.”

“Then pick up after yourself.”

“Don’t be rude, Mousekin,” Reina said.

“My name is Anna.”

“I know what your name is, Mousekin.”

Anna’s parents decided to let Reina move into the bedroom that had belonged to Anna’s grandfather. “A year ago, even six months ago,” Anna’s mother said, “it would have been too soon, but it seems a shame not to use the room.”

It should be her or Franz moving into that bedroom, Anna thought. Reina had never known their grandfather as well as they had. She had never fished with him from the riverbank or walked with him across the Charles Bridge to Wenceslas Square to have ice cream at a café. Their grandfather’s name was František Jacobus Maria Svetla. He had thick silver hair and a mustache and wore high collars and three-piece suits. As a young lawyer, he had been employed in Vienna at the court of the Emperor Franz Joseph. He had told Anna that Franz Joseph began work every morning at five o’clock, and at the end of the day the emperor dusted off his own desk with a camel-hair brush he kept for that purpose. What a punctilious man he had been, her grandfather had said; what a shining example to his subjects.

When, in the last year of his life, illness had kept her grandfather confined to his bed, Anna would sit with him, and he would tell her about his land in Western Bohemia. His one regret was that he would never again see his fields of sugar beets. His orchards. The timber house he had built with his own hands for Katharina, his first wife, who had died of a hemorrhage of the brain when Anna’s mother was six and her brother, Emil, was four. In the spring following their mother’s death, Anna’s grandfather had taken his children to Karlsbad. Every morning they bathed in the hot springs and in the afternoons strolled around the town, sometimes falling into step behind a young couple that kept stopping to poke around in flowerbeds, apparently hunting for insects, leaves, snails, moss growing on a stone. When he encountered them in the lobby of the hotel where they were all staying, he said good day and commented on the weather. One evening, he invited them (he had learned they were brother and sister) to join him and the children at their table.

Max and Eva Nagy were from Hungary. They lived and worked in Troja, near Prague. Eva had fair hair and blue-gray eyes and was soft-spoken and rather shy, but not as shy as her brother. Max had a square, ruddy face and tended toward stoutness; he was by profession a soil specialist. Eva had a degree in botany. She told Magdalena and Emil that trees, mosses, flowering plants, millipedes, and sparrows coexisted in a mutually beneficial environment, sharing sunlight and moisture and nutrients in the soil. She amused them with stories about timid field mice, pugnacious beetles, and frugal ants. On their walks, she held insects in her hand for Magdalena and Emil to see up close. She taught them more than their father felt entirely comfortable with about the mating habits of the voles that burrowed into gardens.

They hiked up a hill and stood gazing down at Karlsbad’s festively colored buildings and at the Teplá River flowing past in the valley. Eva told the