Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,73

room. “Everyone together in one room,” he said, “that’s the way. Frau Schulte will light candles. We will add wood to the fire. We have no need to worry.” Frau Schulte and Irmgard went around lighting coal-oil lamps. Second Lieutenant Krause leaned back in his chair and rested his right foot on his left knee. “You’ve had it easy in Prague, haven’t you?” he said to Anna’s father. “No bombing raids, no food shortages to speak of. No enemy air attacks, full employment. Living in paradise, I’d say.”

He began to sing:

When the Prussians they marched against Prague,

’Gainst Prague, the beauteous town,—

they took up in camp a position,

They brought with them much ammunition.

He said his grandfather had taught him that song. “The Czechs lost the Battle of White Mountain; Prussia won. So history repeats itself. When will the Slavs learn, I would like to know?”

“Now you have woken my son,” Dr. Voss snapped.

“There’s something wrong with that baby,” Krause said. “He’s always bawling. Is he sick?”

“No, he is not sick. My son is in the pink of health.”

“Children need a firm hand,” Krause said. “When I was a nipper my mother read me the poems of Heinrich Hoffmann. Disobedient children get burned alive. Their hands are cut off. No, the thumbs are cut off, I believe. My mother said it could happen to me if I didn’t behave. You Czechs will suffer the same fate, I’m telling you. Baron von Neurath isn’t there now to coddle you. The acting Reich protector, Reinhard Heydrich, will keep you in line. He will cut off your thumbs, if you like.” He stabbed the air with his pocketknife.

“For Christ’s sake, would you shut up,” the captain said.

“That’s a hell of a storm out there,” Krause said.

The captain shielded his eyes. “How long will this last?” he asked Herr Schulte, who said the electricity would get restored soon. Most of the generators were in the Sudetenland and any breakages in the system would get priority treatment.

The next day, Anna sat reading War and Peace by the light of a coal-oil lamp in the sitting room. Her mother and father were upstairs, getting ready for dinner, as were Herr Doktor Voss and Frau Voss. The baby must have been asleep, and the house was quiet. Captain Kessler came in and sat across from her. Irmgard walked in with a tray of coffee and bread and cheese. She had unpinned her hair and curled the ends and wore lipstick and rouge. The captain closed his eyes. Irmgard asked him: Would he like cream and sugar in his coffee? Yes, he said. He would do it himself. Irmgard put down the sugar tongs. The captain opened his eyes when she had gone. He asked, “How old are you, Anna?”

“Twelve,” she said. “I will be thirteen in March.”

“And my age is twenty-two.”

The same age as Franz, she thought. She got up, holding her book to her chest. He told her to stay where she was and said she looked pretty in the lamplight. He enjoyed her company, in the midst of this tedium, being trapped indoors. The storm, being shut up with that idiot Krause. He was used to being out in the elements. As an Alpine guide, he said, his father spent winters away from home. When he was about Anna’s age, his mother got bored, being left on her own with the children, and she moved to Berlin. “She took my brothers and sister with her, and I lived with my father until I went to university, where I studied, among other things, the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, and I remember being very impressed with something he said. So impressed, in fact, that I committed his words to memory.

“‘An atmosphere’—this is what Nietzsche wrote—‘an atmosphere of inexhaustible meaningfulness emanates from architecture.’ Perhaps those are not his exact words, but you get the idea, don’t you, Anna? It is my belief our Führer has an innate understanding of this. He has a grand vision, a truly great vision, of Berlin as the world’s preeminent metropolis. Germania, it is to be named. Germania: a city of inexhaustible meaningfulness. When the war ends, and it will, within months, I will go back to architecture school and finish my degree, and I will work on this project, the construction of Germania. First, it seems that I have to walk through a lot of shit. Excuse me, Fräulein. A lot of excrement, shall I say? I honestly can’t think of another way of