Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,78

Café Europa in Wenceslas Square. It was so good; she enjoyed every bite and felt the muscles in her neck and back begin to relax for the first time since she had arrived in Prague. She fell into a pleasant fantasy, picturing Miklós coming in, sitting down, and lighting a cigarette. Smiling at her, saying darling to her, and telling her they were soon going home. Or to Portugal, to South America. And they would begin again, he said, reaching for her hand. She saw it all clearly. And then a darker image intruded, would not be pushed away. Her husband lying on a Russian battlefield, with blood on his coat, his arms flung wide, frost on his hair and face, on his eyelids.

Throughout the city she saw men who, at first glance, from a distance, could have been Miklós. A bespectacled man in a rumpled khaki jacket reading a newspaper, his dark hair silvered at the temples. A man on the street in front of her giving his pocket an abstracted pat, a gesture so reminiscent of Miklós she quickened her step—but it was not him, it was never him.

Life was so tenuous! How long was a life? Forty years, sixty? Less than five years? She had a malady of the spirit: tristezza. In three days it would be her son’s birthday, his ninth birthday. László Krisztián. Krisztián, they called him. His hair was blond, like hers; he had his father’s dark eyes, and he was, as Natalia and Miklós said, either full steam ahead or fast asleep in his bed. We can’t keep up with him, he’s wearing us out, they said. He was nearly four years old, never sick a day in his life. Then came late March 1936, a cold month, blustery, raining constantly, the ice breaking up on the river, cracking like thunder, the fields sodden. Rozalia said it was dangerous weather; germs got carried on the wind, and you breathed them in. Krisztián wanted to know: Am I breathing them in now? An old wives’ tale, Natalia told him. What was an old wives’ tale? A story, she said. A story that is not based on fact and is very often wrong. Krisztián had nodded, satisfied. At the school they shut the door on the bad weather, the malign March air. The children took off their wet boots and put on slippers. Krisztián sat beside Katya’s daughter, Alena. They were so small, so eager to learn; they could read everything, and had memorized the words to all the songs. They spoke Hungarian and German. They played together; they fell asleep in the kitchen, in Rozalia’s rocking chair, curled up like kittens.

That March morning, in the schoolroom, Natalia was reading to the class, and Alena began complaining that her head hurt, her throat was sore. She said she was going to throw up, and she did, she was sick on the floor, and Krisztián stared at her and said, Ugh. Natalia felt Alena’s forehead; she was burning up. Rozalia told Natalia to take Krisztián home and send Katya for Alena. Natalia was to bathe Krisztián and change his clothes, and she did, even though he protested that no one had a bath twice in one day. Yes, sometimes they did, she assured him. She scrubbed him all over and washed his hair and dressed him in clean clothes from the inside out and sent him down to Magdolna, in the kitchen, while she washed her own face and changed her dress. She held her son on her knee and let him have whatever he liked for lunch, but he must eat it all, so that he could grow big and strong. And when he had finished even his liver dumplings, about which he was decidedly ambivalent, Magdolna gave him a big portion of dark, sweet chocolate. He put his arm around Natalia’s neck and pressed bits of the chocolate into her mouth and asked if Alena would be better in the morning, and Natalia said yes, she would be better.

Katya’s daughter recovered in time, but the illness left her profoundly deaf. Natalia bargained with God: deafness, yes; a long convalescence, yes, she would accept that. She remembered the fear surrounding a case of meningitis at the convent. She would not let Dr. Urbán diagnose that sickness. A mother should not let her child die. If a mother lost her child, then the mother should also die; she believed that. Miklós had rushed home from Berlin;