Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,77

then, the birch trees turning from green to gold, a blue haze from wood fires lying along the hills. She begged him not to go. Winter in Russia, she had thought. Winter with the Red Army and German warplanes strafing them and cannon fire and grenades exploding and snipers with rifles. How skilled men were at devising ways to kill one another, she said, and when he merely smiled, she got angry and swore at him, and then she threw her arms around his neck. He wiped her tears away with his hand and repeated what he always said: he was a journalist; a journalist had a responsibility to bear witness; he had to go to the front lines and speak to the soldiers, the ordinary fighting men; otherwise people would read only the official lies, the official bullshit, the propaganda that came from the Reich press chief’s office.

He had done enough already, she kept saying. In 1939, he’d been in Warsaw, under German aerial bombardment. In 1937, he’d gone to Spain to report on the fighting between the Republicans and General Franco’s Nationalists. In Berlin, in 1939, he’d been arrested, beaten, hospitalized. She knew of this only when he came home and she saw the scar above his eye. But, as he said, he had survived. In Russia, though, in a war like this, what kind of chance would he have? Tell me that, she had said.

Someone he knew, a journalist, would meet him in Budapest and would drive him through Romania to the Black Sea, where he would be taken by boat to Sevastopol and from there across the Sea of Azov to Rostov. So he had told her. From Rostov he would take a train—if trains were running—to Kursk and from there to Moscow. He would travel with fake credentials, his bona fide papers and press card concealed in the lining of his greatcoat. If necessary, he would get permission to travel with the Red Army from Stalin himself. Stalin, whom he detested. But he had friends in Moscow who would be willing to act as intermediaries.

“Stalin has thrown those friends of yours in prison,” she said.

“Not all,” he said. He promised to be back in a year. He would write to her. If the war dragged on, if things looked bad, they could meet in Prague, he said, and go to Spain and from Spain to Portugal, and they would book passage on a boat to Argentina, where Beatriz and Zita would give them sanctuary.

On their last night, she lay in his arms and watched the moon sail behind a thin, opalescent cloud. She heard the wind in the trees. A night bird singing. Wolves howling, clocks ticking. Near dawn she fell asleep, and when she woke, he was gone.

At the convent school the nuns had taught her: conjugal love is a totality—all the elements of the person enter this totality. It is a unity that involves body, heart, and soul.

She missed Rozalia. She could see her, the way she would sit in a high-backed chair, small, bent, huddled darkly in sweaters and shawls, clutching her glass of pálinka, singing her mournful songs. The black coach of sorrow, she sang. Angels have taken you, and never will they return you. Natalia had asked her not to sing that song, it was too sad, and Rozalia had raised her eyes and gathered her shawl around her and said, But it is true, it is out there, the black coach of sorrow, waiting.

In the last letter from Miklós, dated February 12, 1942, sent from Moscow, he had reminisced about being with her in Prague during “that beautiful May of 1942.” He must have meant 1932—she imagined him writing by the light of a kerosene lamp, shells exploding, artillery fire, the wind howling around an army tent, if he had the shelter of a tent. But he was a newspaperman, precise with dates; he would never make such an error. He was sending her a message in code: she was to meet him in Prague this year, this spring. And she was here, looking for him in bookshops, tobacconists, barbershops. She returned many times to the Café Imperial and the Café Arco, on Hybernská, just to look in the door, but the only patrons seemed to be SS men too involved with devouring shanks of lamb and meat-filled pastries to notice her. She spent more than she could afford on a meal of noodles and spiced beef at the