Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,71
it’s good, Magdalena.”
They were hiking up a mountain within spitting distance, as her father said, of the farm Anna’s grandfather had once owned, the farm where her mother had lived as a child. Anna’s grandmother, Katharina Svetlová, the first woman skier in Bohemia, had been the subject of a magazine story, and Anna’s mother had kept the magazine, which featured a photograph of Katharina on her skis, ski poles in her hands, wearing a quilted swansdown jacket with a nipped-in waist and puffed sleeves, and an ankle-length skirt. The photograph was taken here, at Waldfrieden.
From a high, thin cloud, a small shower of dry snowflakes whirled down, ceased, mysteriously filled the air again. An owl flew out of a tree. Anna’s father said they had to keep moving or they’d freeze and turn into statues. Magdalena stamped around, laughing. She said she was not going back to the Gasthaus. She was absolutely not going there. She wanted to know which way was south. Or west. Where was Switzerland from here? How far? “Come with me,” she said, holding her hands out to Anna and Julius and saying they could stay or come with her, and she began walking away.
“Magdalena,” called Anna’s father. But Magdalena kept plowing her way through the snow. Anna’s father ran after her and brought her back to where Anna was standing. Her mother was laughing.
“Oh well,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow I’ll try again. The thought of one more night chez Schulte with the Voss family is almost more than I can bear. What do you think we’re having for supper?” she added. “Poison toadstools? Pan-fried newts?”
As they approached the Gasthaus, they saw that Herr Schulte was driving away in his Mercedes. He rolled down the car window and waved at them and then accelerated up the drive, the wheels slipping on ice and snow. Irmgard, sweeping snow off the front step, said her father was going to pick up new guests at the train station.
Later, Anna sat by the fireplace reading War and Peace, which she had taken from a shelf in the library across the hall. She used to read Martina’s books in the Nesthäkchen series, by Else Ury, when she was here, but the books were no longer in the library. They were children’s books, too young for her, really, but she wouldn’t mind reading something undemanding. She had started War and Peace three times already. She remembered how she and Martina would curl up on the sofa happily reading about Else Ury’s Annemarie Braun, the “nestling,” the baby of the family, who, like Anna, had blond braids, and whose father, like Anna’s mother, was a doctor.
She heard Herr Schulte’s car returning from the train station, followed by the slamming of car doors and then voices in the hall. The new guests did not appear, however, until dinner that evening. They were two men in the field-gray uniform of the Waffen-SS. Herr Schulte introduced them. The tall blond man was Hauptsturmführer Karl Kessler. The other man was Untersturmführer Walther Krause. Captain Kessler did not eat but pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette. Frau Voss waved her hand at the captain’s cigarette smoke. Her husband frowned at her. Attempts at conversation faltered, and as soon as the meal was over everyone moved to the living room for coffee. Second Lieutenant Krause asked for wine, and then he said he would maybe prefer a glass of schnapps, while Herr Schulte was at it. The captain went over to the gun cabinet. “Do you have ammunition for these firearms?” he asked. “If the enemy got their hands on these guns, they would shoot your head off your shoulders, Herr Schulte.”
“The gun collection belonged to the Czechs, as I said. I doubt if those old firearms would work anymore, to be honest.”
“They’re valuable. They should be cleaned and polished.”
The inn, Herr Schulte said, as he added wood to the fire, had once been a hunting lodge frequented by the nobility, hence the gun collection. So the stationmaster, who fancied himself an amateur historian, had told him. A Bavarian archduke had shot the stag mounted on the wall. Furthermore, according to the stationmaster, a niece of Marie-Antoinette of France had stayed at Waldfrieden after the queen’s husband went to the guillotine in 1793 and had given birth to an infant that had survived only a day and was buried either near the chalet or in the dirt floor in the wine cellar.