Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,72

hand at her throat. “I hope it’s not true.”

“Of course it’s not true,” Herr Doktor Voss said.

Anna took War and Peace upstairs to her room and read in bed, her feet on a hot-water bottle Irmgard had brought her. Prince Andrei marched to war; Napoleon Bonaparte entered Vienna. As she read she could hear Fritz crying in his parents’ room and thought with a shudder of Marie-Antoinette’s niece’s baby buried in the cellar.

* * *

By morning, snow lay in drifts in the yard and against the doors. Herr Schulte went out early to shovel a path for Irmgard, so that she could feed the chickens and the cows. After breakfast, Anna’s mother carried Frau Voss’s baby around the sitting room while his mother slept in a chair. Anna and her father played chess with the carved walrus-tusk pieces. Anna put her father’s king into checkmate. She asked if he had let her win. He said, no, she had played a better game. Then, as he set the pieces back on the board, he told her they were going home earlier than planned. “We are?” she said. He put a finger to his lips. “Yes,” he said. He lowered his voice. “In the morning. If the road is cleared, and we don’t have another snowstorm, God forbid.” She nodded. In the morning they were going to leave, she kept repeating to herself. But that night it snowed heavily, and by morning the road to the station was, Herr Schulte reported, impassable. After breakfast, Anna put on her coat, hat, gloves, and boots, and went outside and tramped up and down on the path Herr Schulte had once again cleared between walls of snow. The cold penetrated her coat, and she started shivering, and when she turned to go back to the inn, she saw Captain Kessler at the window, watching her.

Dinner that night was roast pork, Spätzle, and sauerkraut, followed by a dessert of stewed winter apples sprinkled with brown sugar. Captain Kessler lit a cigarette and said that winter weather brought back good memories of when he went mountain climbing with his father, who was an Alpine guide. The Jungfrau, the Eiger, Mont Blanc. Up on the peaks, there was no room for a false step. The only sounds were made by ice shifting and cracking, wind scouring the peaks. The higher he climbed, the lonelier it got, and that suited him.

If his medical practice allowed him time, Dr. Voss said, he would pursue mountain climbing. He skied, though, every winter. Except this one, he supposed.

The captain turned to Anna’s father. “And what is it you do, Herr Schaeffer?”

“I am an artist. I teach art.”

“Interesting. I studied architecture at university.” He brushed a crumb off the tablecloth. “I had a professor who admired your work. You are Julius Schaeffer, is that right? You are a portraitist?”

“Portraits, yes, and landscapes. And graphic design.”

“You have painted in the modernist style, I understand.”

“Yes, some of my art is modernistic, as you say.”

Two conversations were going on at once. Anna heard Frau Voss telling her mother that from the age of four months, little Fritz could grip her fingers and pull himself to a standing position. At the same time, Anna was listening to the SS captain telling her father that good art taught people to value their way of life. “Don’t you think so yourself, Herr Schaeffer?” he said. “More and more, I think offensive artwork by Jews and Bolshevists, and those under their influence, is an attack on German morals and German values. I am referring to artists like Max Ernst, Otto Dix, Käthe Kollwitz, George Grosz. Modern German masters. They’ve had their day. They’re finished.”

He didn’t know if they were finished or not, Anna’s father said. They would always be an important—an essential—part of history.

“That kind of history is also finished,” Captain Kessler said. “You know Elk Eber’s painting The Dispatch Courier? That is a fine work.”

“But perhaps it gives a romanticized view of war,” Anna’s father said. “Otto Dix’s war paintings are painful to look at, but they are honest. I was there, in France, at the Somme, at Verdun, as was Dix. War is destructive, a tragic waste of life. Young men die, innocent noncombatants die. There’s no point in pretending otherwise, is there?”

“You know so much, Herr Schaeffer,” the captain said coldly. “But like so many, you know nothing.”

Herr Schulte hovered uneasily with the coffeepot. The lights flickered and went out. Herr Schulte recommended adjourning to the sitting