Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,76

camps in the Carpathians or ordered to clear land mines in war zones: a death sentence. The women and children were transported to collection centers near the Austrian border and from there to concentration camps in Germany. Rozalia had taken a gun to the Sinti encampment on the estate and had threatened to shoot the soldiers ordering the Sinti people into trucks. I will shoot, she had shouted at them. They had aimed their rifles at her; they had called her a crazy old bird. Natalia had made her promise she wouldn’t try anything like that again, in anyone’s defense. It wouldn’t help if she got herself killed. Ah, but think of the satisfaction I would have, said Rozalia, who had to get in the last word.

* * *

Natalia checked into a hotel on Celetná Street in Prague. She used the name Faber, Frau Faber. She and Miklós would be reunited within days, she thought, but this did not happen. She had brought very little with her and had to rinse her clothes in the bathroom sink, just as she used to do for Beatriz, and place them on the radiator, in the sun, to dry. There was a vase of highly scented purple lilacs on the dresser, and in this heady atmosphere she emptied her purse on the bed and counted her money and kept arriving at a different total, but she could see just by looking at it that it wouldn’t last for long. She had registered at the hotel without producing a passport or other document, saying it was in a piece of luggage the train had misplaced. A not very believable excuse, and yet the woman at the front desk had accepted it, for now. She knew that without identification papers she ran the risk of being questioned by the Gestapo.

Rather than eating at a restaurant, she bought food from a small shop, where the proprietor, a Turkish man named Danyal Aslan, always gave her sesame-seed cookies and chatted with her about the fine weather and the ducks he’d seen on the river or the glorious full moon the night before. He kept day-old newspapers for her. Gratefully, she read them in her hotel room, at first searching for her husband’s byline, for reports from the Eastern Front that could have been written by him, but then she realized the newspaper was an official Nazi Party organ. But the smell of the ink, the smudges on her hands reminded her of Miklós, and she could almost see him sitting at a table with a cup of coffee, writing or reading a newspaper. Mr. Aslan’s wife, Milena, was Czech; they lived in an apartment behind their shop and had two children, a boy and a girl. Natalia mentioned to Mr. Aslan that she had to find somewhere cheaper than a hotel to live, and he said, as it happened, he had a house for rent, if she was interested. She told him the truth: she couldn’t afford much in the way of rent. He called his wife to mind the shop and took Natalia to his house, which was on Zlatá Ulička, the Golden Lane, near the Hradčany (the castle district). Since 1939, Prague Castle had housed the Reich’s administrative headquarters. The presence of SS and Gestapo so close to Mr. Aslan’s house was a serious detriment, but the low rent compensated for this. Besides, Franz Kafka had lived here for a year with his sister, and Miklós had been here, and those things would surely be a protective influence.

She moved in the next day. On the table she placed her breviary and Rozalia’s tarot cards, which she had put in her suitcase, thinking, perhaps, that they might serve as a disguise, a prop, a talisman. She placed her hand on the cards and thought of Rozalia and felt tearful, and then she thought of returning home with Miklós, driving up to the castle, the sun bright on its butter-colored walls. This small house on Zlatá Ulička she shared with mice and rats, nocturnal in their habits, and spiders that showed up at any hour, day or night. There was a smell of mildew, ashes, rust.

At night she lay awake on a narrow, hard bed, wondering where Miklós was sleeping and whether he had dry, warm clothes and enough to eat, and whether he was on his way to Prague. She thought of their last day together, before he’d left for the Russian front. It was October