Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,79

he was there with her, sitting beside their child’s bed. At the last, Miklós was the one who had to take their lifeless son from her arms; she would not give him up, he would get cold, she said, colder than he was.

The doctor gave her an injection; she tried to remain in a place where food, oxygen, and love were unnecessary. Miklós spoke to her from a great distance, from an unearthly place, and when she opened her eyes and saw how thin he was, how swollen and bruised his eyes, she got up, an automaton, a shell, and resumed some kind of life for his sake. He said, “There is no easy way out, my love, and no remedy for the pain.”

In the weeks that followed, they sat in the library, in the desolate light of evening. Miklós drank whiskey; he kept getting up to pour more into his glass. He drank, and he smoked one cigarette after another. She worried about his health and his agnosticism. Her faith was battered and poor, but it was there, somewhere. She could not bear to think of him deprived of the grace and consolation of Heaven, of the clemency of saints, or of the hope that such things could be. She brought him coffee and sat beside him and then jumped up to open a window and then again to let the dog in when he scratched at the hall door and then to put a piece of wood on the fire. She made him seasick, Miklós said, reaching for her hand, pulling her down beside him on the sofa. A midnight lethargy kept them there, two spirits in an empty castle that breathed around them like something sentient, unquiet.

Remembering, she felt tearful, shaky; everything looked gray to her. Was it despair or hunger? The meal at the Café Europa had been days ago. At Mr. Aslan’s shop she bought a half loaf of rye bread, using cash, paying under the counter. He asked her to wait and disappeared through the door to his apartment. When he returned, he handed her a brown paper parcel. No charge, he said. He took risks for her; he was a good friend.

On the streets of Prague fear hung in the air like smog. It seemed to her that a false, forced energy animated the Wehrmacht soldiers, the SS, the Gestapo—a dull, mean light flicking off them like phosphorus. She kept out of their way. But she heard them accosting people, cursing, ridiculing, lashing out. Sometimes they seemed to be following her. She kept an even step, looked neither left nor right, didn’t cease her vigilance until she entered a leafy park, where she sat on a bench and unwrapped the parcel Mr. Aslan had given her. A hard-boiled egg in its shell and six sugared dates. She ate two of the dates. She talked to Krisztián. Tell me, she said, should I go home? No, stay, wait for Papa, her son replied. She heard him; sometimes she could hear him.

When she got back to her little house, she set out the tarot cards. The Empress resembled Beatriz in a Grecian robe designed by Coco Chanel. Here was Zita Kuznetsova, Queen of Wands, signifying adventure, ambition; but when reversed she became a saboteur exacting vengeance: a clever adversary. Here was the Magician, haloed with the symbol for infinity, an uroboros knotted around his waist. Infinite recurrence; inescapable fate. The Wheel of Fortune, and the Chariot of Fire: together meaning an unforeseen event? The Star card could connote a loss of direction.

Superstitious nonsense, wholly, utterly, Natalia thought, and yet, and yet.

* * *

One day she found a dead man lying on the ground in the park. He was nothing but skin and bones—his face pale, mottled, his lips dry and slack. His coat was dirty, and he did not smell very nice. No one else saw; she could walk away. But as she knelt to feel for a pulse in his neck, he moaned, his eyelids fluttered. She helped this dead-and-then-alive man to his feet. She picked up his knapsack and led him over to a bench. She said he should have something to eat. “Nein,” he protested. “It would do you good,” she said. “Nein,” he repeated.

She brought him back with her to her rented house and brewed a pot of tea and gave him bread and cheese and the remaining sugared dates. He chewed slowly, a hand in front of his mouth. She