Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,66
who were more than willing to sell her certain commodities under the counter: a five-kilo bag of white sugar, a tin of baker’s yeast, a slab of dark chocolate. Anna, Reina, and Franz ate the chocolate slowly, savoring it. Sora baked bread and vanilla cookies and used the last of the chestnut flour to bake the Italian cake castagnaccio.
Anna and Franz lit the candles in the candelabra on the dining room table. Anna slid into the chair beside Aunt Vivian, who told amusing anecdotes about the SS wives who came into her shop to buy hats. Reina said the same wives patronized the bookshop, stocking up on romance novels and snooping for banned titles they could report to their Nazi husbands. Some of her customers had chauffeurs to carry their purchases out to their cars, Aunt Vivian said. It made her want to slap their faces. “The wives or the chauffeurs?” Franz said. Aunt Vivian laughed and said, Both.
Franz put Mozart on the gramophone: Eine kleine Nachtmusik; Anna’s father said the grace, giving thanks for the generosity of Reina’s family and the fine meal they were about to enjoy. Then he uncorked the wine and poured a glass for everyone, even Anna.
On their way to dinner, Ivan said, a few flakes of snow had begun to fall.
“Didn’t I tell you?” Uncle Tomáš said. “Didn’t I predict snow?”
Anna’s mother said, “Ivan, your face has healed nicely. The scar is almost invisible. Such a shame it happened. Most of those SS men had the benefit of a good upbringing and should know better. But thank the Lord it turned out all right.”
Sora said she must apologize for the dumplings, which she’d concocted of millet flour and starch, in lieu of potatoes. “The brown sauce is a disguise and a panacea rather than a sauce.”
When Franz repeated what he’d heard on the BBC news—that in the Winter War, as it was known, Finns equipped with nothing more than snowshoes and rifles were decimating the heavily armed Soviet forces—Uncle Tomáš interrupted. He continued to be employed as an accountant in the Reich Protectorate Office at the Hradčany, he said, but as a Czech his position was precarious. He had learned it was wiser not to discuss politics or the war. There followed a silence, and Anna’s father laughed and said, it would be a quiet evening then, since they’d lost the ability to talk about anything else.
Franz and Ivan began to discuss a play they had acted in, Karel Čapek’s R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots. They’d had minor roles, as two of the robots. Ivan’s mother had kept his costume, he said. Franz said he’d returned his costume to the drama department at the university and regretted not having taken photographs. Anna remembered his costume of gold and silver foil, his face and his hands painted gold. The play was about a scientist, Dr. Rossum, who had engineered the production of robots from vats of blood cells and nerve fibers. The robots were biologically similar to humans and intended as an endless supply of cheap labor. The robots, however, continued to evolve, becoming in time ever more human, autonomous beings, who, in the end, killed their human masters and established a new society in which there were no masters and slaves, but only equal and free people.
A warning and a prophecy, Franz said. Čapek had written the play in 1920. Thirteen years later, the Nazis began imprisoning their own people in concentration camps at Dachau, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen. The Nazis did not hide what they were doing. The industrialists in Germany were pleased to have a source of free labor. Čapek had lived long enough to know what was going on.
“I think we are back to discussing politics,” Magdalena said. “My favorite of Čapek’s works is Talks with T. G. Masaryk. I would have liked more in those talks about his meeting with Charlotte Garrigue in Leipzig. It all happens in a few paragraphs, and then suddenly she returns home to America, and he sails after her. They are married and return to live in Prague. Dr. Masaryk said his wife was American, but she became ‘morally and politically Czech.’”
“It is the same for me,” Aunt Vivian said. “I think of myself as completely Czech.”
“Charlotte Masaryk is my hero,” Reina said.
The play R.U.R. made him think, Anna’s father said, of Heinrich von Kleist’s essay on the marionette theater. “Didn’t Kleist propose that puppets embodied more grace than humans?”
“Yes,” Franz said. “Kleist suggested that since a puppet’s