Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,68

insect. ‘Your bug is dead,’ they kept saying. ‘Your bug is dead.’”

After the reception, Anna and her father walked across the bridge to his atelier, which was on a narrow, curved street in Malá Strana. He lit a fire in the tiled stove. He showed her a portrait he was finishing of a brother and sister, three and five years old. The portrait had been commissioned by the children’s father, a merchant who had moved with his family to Zürich to escape the Nazis. Anna’s father didn’t know whether the portrait and its owner would ever be united, he said, but he intended to get it completed, nevertheless.

While her father worked, Anna sketched the wedding guests with a stick of charcoal. She drew her mother and father arm in arm, and Franz and Reina, and Aunt Vivian and Uncle Tomáš. The farmer from Zürau, who’d delivered the farm goods to her house, was in her drawing too, if not in life, standing at the side of the bridge in his greatcoat; she labored over the folds of the coat, trying to suggest the straightness of the back, the length of arm. Ivan she sketched beside Marta. He was better-looking in real life, it was true. She drew a strand of pearls around Marta’s neck. She drew herself, her braided hair, winter coat, stockings, and patent leather shoes.

Her father said that years from now, she would look at her drawing and remember the marriage, the reception, the taste of the food, bits of conversation. It would all come back to her; she would live it again, in her memory. Art, he said, made life not only more human but, in a sense, eternal.

* * *

September of 1941 began hot and sultry; in the afternoons, clouds built up in the sky over Western Bohemia, and by evening, lightning flashed in the distance and the sound of thunder could be heard. But, as Sora said, it wasn’t the weather that made everyone feel like quarreling with their own fingernails. It was seeing Gestapo and SS officers on the streets, swastika flags flying from Prague Castle, machine-gun emplacements on street corners, edicts from Reich protector Baron von Neurath’s office on lampposts, in shop windows. The Reich protector had been recalled to Berlin, and another high-ranking Nazi was to take his place, but still for a time the edicts continued to be signed by Neurath. Lists of people who’d been arrested and those who’d been executed appeared in columns in newspapers or were read out on Radio Prague.

At the end of September, on the feast day of Saint Wenceslas, Anna attended Mass at Saint Vitus Cathedral with her parents. Then they stood on the street outside the cathedral and watched the ecclesiastical procession that conveyed the saint’s relics over the Charles Bridge to Wenceslas Square. The Czech police ordered people to get back and stop talking, to shut up, but the crowd had started singing the Czech national anthem, which was forbidden by the Nazis. “This is a beautiful country, the Czech country, my homeland,” they sang. The police formed a cordon and forced the crowd back against a wall. Anna nearly fell when someone pushed her, not intentionally, she was sure. Someone else was shoved to the pavement, a man, who immediately stood, embarrassed, and brushed off his jacket, retrieved his hat. She hated seeing people lose their dignity; it made her want to fight back, but that was impossible. Her mother took her arm, and they started walking home and met up with Anna’s father and her uncle Emil, who had his two-year-old son, Jan, on his shoulders. Franz and Reina arrived almost at the same time, and Franz said he and Reina had seen a man accosted by the security police and beaten with batons and called a dirty Bolshevik, a filthy Jew. This happened, Reina said, in front of the man’s wife and two children. She lit a cigarette and leaned against the trunk of the chestnut tree and wouldn’t come into the house, where everyone gathered at the kitchen table and talked about the war.

“Will England bomb us?” Reina said. She stood for a moment in the door and then came in and sat beside Franz at the table.

“No, President Beneš is in London; the English are on our side,” Emil said.

Anna’s mother lifted Jan onto her knee and wiped his sticky hands and mouth with her handkerchief. Franz said he should have gone to England with Sora’s son, Jiri,