Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,65

children the hot springs had been discovered when the emperor Charles V’s hunting dog fell in the scalding water and had to be rescued. This story was almost certainly apocryphal, she added, and then had to explain to the children that the word meant something that might or might not be true. Magdalena asked whether the poor dog had drowned. No, Eva said, the dog was—he was a water spaniel. Eva had a dog called Bruno, a Russian wolfhound. She promised Magdalena she could meet Bruno someday. Magdalena invited Eva and Max to come home with them, and her father said, yes, they must visit his farm very soon. But it was a year later before Eva and Max came to the farm. They stayed for two weeks. The year after that, they stayed for a month and brought with them Bruno, the Russian wolfhound. And the year after that, František Svetla and Eva Nagy married. Max Nagy spent a few weeks every summer at the farm. He collected soil samples and later analyzed them at the Pomological Institute, mailing the results to his brother-in-law. One summer, he gave Magdalena and Emil two handsome Belgian rabbits with dusky-blue fur, liquid-brown eyes, and razor-sharp claws.

A son, Maximilian, was born to František and Eva, and two years later, a daughter, Gisele. But here Anna’s grandfather faltered. Anna always wanted to say, “Don’t tell me. Tell the story in a new way, with a better ending.” But no one could undo the past. Three days after giving birth to her daughter, Eva became ill with a fever and died. She was buried in the churchyard beside Katharina Svetlová. Bruno quit eating, and he too died, and in the night, while the children were sleeping, František dug a grave for him not far from the churchyard fence.

Within the year, František sold his farm and moved to Prague with the four children. He had let Max know and had given him his new address. Max visited them in Prague once and later wrote to say he’d taken a job managing an estate in Pomerania. That was the last Anna’s grandfather heard from him.

The house her grandfather bought in Prague, where Anna’s mother and her brother, Emil, and their half siblings, Maximilian and Gisele, had lived, was the house Anna’s family lived in.

Did she know about the Belgian rabbits? Anna asked Reina one morning. Did she know about the rabbits her uncle Max brought to their grandfather’s farm in Western Bohemia? Reina, filling the kettle at the kitchen sink, turned off the tap and said no, she knew nothing about Belgian rabbits and didn’t especially want to. Her parents raised rabbits. They were pests, in her opinion, and had to be treated constantly for fleas and tapeworm. And she wasn’t all that fond of rabbit meat, either.

“You have to understand what it was like for me,” Reina said. “All my life, I had to share a bedroom with at least one of my sisters, and sometimes all three of us slept in the same room. On a farm you work all day, and yet the chores never get done.”

She would never go back to the farm. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to get married. Franz had given her Charlotte Garrigue Masaryková’s Czech translation of John Stuart Mill’s Subjection of Women to read. “I agree with him. With John Stuart Mill, I mean. Without female equality, no society can hope to succeed. Franz says that is a self-evident truth. I intend to have a profession, like Aunt Magdalena. Not in medicine, though, because I can’t bear to be around sick people.” She took the teacups to the sink and rinsed them. “Are we friends, then, Anna?”

“We are cousins,” Anna said. “And, yes, friends too.”

* * *

In January, a farmer—a neighbor of Reina’s parents—came to Anna’s house with a delivery of two dozen eggs and a large parcel of meat wrapped in butcher’s paper and tied with string. He wore a long overcoat, the collar turned up, and a cap low on his forehead, very incognito. Anna had been too surprised to ask his name or even thank him. Franz carried the parcels, which were from Reina’s parents, up to the kitchen, and Sora unwrapped them. Anna’s father said they must share this unexpected bounty. He telephoned Magdalena’s aunt and invited her and her husband to dinner. Then Franz invited Ivan and Marta. Sora, whose late husband had owned a greengrocery, still had friends in the trade