Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,80
hoped to God he didn’t have fleas. She let him have the bed in the bedroom and tried to sleep on the sofa. The man she had resuscitated? revived?—whose name she did not even know—coughed all night. In the morning, she put out the remainder of the bread and the cheese, which had gone hard, for breakfast. She sliced the hard-boiled egg in half and shared it with him. Feeding two people on nothing—how was that to be accomplished? She boiled water and poured it into the metal washtub in the washroom and gave him one of the towels supplied by Mrs. Aslan. He reappeared some time later, with his coat buttoned up to the chin, and thanked her for her hospitality and said he would be on his way. For today, she said, he should stay.
She told him her name was Faber, Natalia Faber. He gave his name as Max Nagy. He was on his way to Budapest, where he had been born. Over the next few days, he told her how he came to be lying on the ground in a park.
For twenty-five years Max Nagy had been employed as head gardener on an estate in Pomerania, where he’d had his own cottage, a cat, a songbird in a cage. And the soil! The soil would grow anything. He was trained as an agronomist, a profession that suited him—he smiled—down to the ground. He would have stayed happily in Pomerania for the rest of his life, but what a person wanted was of no consequence in this world. Two years ago SS officers had come and ordered him to leave with them for Poland, where he was to work at an agricultural facility being built by a Nazi, Heinrich Himmler. Himmler, a chicken farmer before his current role as a top Nazi, intended to establish the world’s most advanced agricultural research station. This was near the Polish town of Oświęcum; in German, Auschwitz. Himmler lost interest in the agricultural project, and when Germany invaded Russia in June 1941, the facility became a prisoner-of-war camp. The prisoners, Polish and Russian soldiers, were beaten, starved, left to die of exposure and thirst, so many crammed into a few meters of space they could not sit or even crouch down to rest.
Since he had seen all this, Max Nagy said, he’d thought the Nazis would never let him get away alive, but they had reassigned him to an estate in Brandenburg owned by a Junker family, where his job was to oversee Polish slave laborers. He had to fill production quotas. The German army needed to be fed. Germany needed food. On the estate they grew barley, wheat, and potatoes. Among the workers there was a lot of sickness. People died and were replaced by more slave laborers from the east, who in turn succumbed to overwork, malnutrition, and disease. It was not in his nature, nor should it be in anyone’s nature, to order people to labor from dawn to nightfall when they were ill and weak. One day he was sent to the train station to pick up a shipment of seed potatoes. He watered the horse and gave it a bag of oats, and he walked away. He slept in fields and in forests. He stole fruit and vegetables. Sometimes a farmer gave him a meal and a dry place to sleep or a ride in a hay wagon or a truck.
“You walked from Brandenburg to Prague?” Natalia said.
“Yes, I walked,” he said, and began to cough and could not stop.
* * *
She found a piece of cardboard in the street and brought it back to Zlatá Ulička. She wrote on it: PERSONAL FORTUNES TOLD and a price in crowns—a small amount, anyone could afford it. She placed it in the window. Mr. Nagy raised his eyebrows at her. We have to eat, she said. She told Mr. Nagy that if someone came to have their fortune told, he was to go immediately to the bedroom, close the door, and not make a sound. To her surprise, clients soon arrived at her door. Almost always they were women, and they were pleased to receive predictions of good health, pleasant journeys, fortuitous meetings, romances. One or two readings a day gave her a small income, with which she bought food for herself and Mr. Nagy, as well as candles and a cheap pottery candlestick holder to lend a more convincing atmosphere.
One afternoon two German women, wives of SS officers,