Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,87

plaque inscribed with the doctor’s name.

* * *

After leaving Magdalena’s patient at the door to the surgery, Julius went upstairs and poured himself a glass of wine and stood at the door to the balcony. Every day he was driven to Schloss Jungfern, the acting Reich protector’s residence, to paint a portrait of the man. It was not a commission he had sought or wanted. Today Frau Heydrich had told him the acting Reich protector would be late arriving for the sitting. He was at Wallenstein Palace, finalizing preparations for a concert in honor of his late father, the composer Richard Bruno Heydrich, whose Concerto in C-minor was to be the program’s centerpiece. She said someone would bring him coffee. They were near a window, and Julius could see prisoners working in the garden. They were guarded by Gestapo with dogs. One of those men so cruelly stripped of individuality, clad in ill-fitting prison garb, subjected to constant surveillance and mistreatment, could be his friend Dr. Shapiro. The thought caused him to flinch. He turned back to a scene that seemed almost as improbable as the one outside the window. Coffee was being served to him in fine china on a silver tray by a pretty young Czech girl in a maid’s black dress and white apron, with a fluted white cap on her blond hair. The men who had driven him to the Schloss stood outside on the terrace smoking. He set out his brushes and tubes of paint. Madder Rose, Venetian Red, Manganese Blue, Lapis Lazuli. Malachite. He squeezed Cobalt Blue onto his palette. It was made from minerals mined in Bohemia and—this was an odd story, odd enough to have some basis in fact, he supposed—the mines were said to be inhabited by ghosts. He believed it. He thought the ghosts were in the tubes of Cobalt Blue as well. He used the paint sparingly to give the Reich Protector’s ice-cold gray eyes a touch of blue, so that, as requested, they conformed more closely to the Germanic ideal.

He worked for an hour, and then Heydrich came into the room, accompanied by his secretary, a plump young man in an SS uniform clutching a sheaf of telegrams and correspondence. They raised their arms in a Nazi salute and snapped out, Heil Hitler. He was occupied with tubes of paints and brushes and did not return the salute. Heydrich went to stand beside a lacquered occasional table. On the table there was a glass bowl filled with white rhododendron flowers. It was a terrible thing, to paint the portrait of a man you detested. Julius was forty-two. Heydrich was thirty-eight. He wore a Totenkopf ring on his right hand. The death’s-head ring; the SS sword; the Iron Cross, first class; the silver oak leaves on the collar. Flemish White to highlight the high cheekbones, the bridge of the thin nose. A tincture of blackness had seeped into the palette, something he, the artist, had no power to control. Inspired by Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, in which, depending on the angle from which it was viewed, a skull appeared, Julius painted a tiny skeleton in the folds of the window draperies. It grinned at him as he worked. Unless you knew where to look, you’d never see it.

There were days when he got home from Schloss Jungfern so depressed, he considered ending it all. The relief of giving up! Diogenes had killed himself by simply refusing to breathe. If it was that easy, would he do it? Probably not. How could he leave Magdalena alone?

He went out onto the balcony and looked down at the street. The woman the Nazi driver had nearly struck was walking in one direction just as Sora and Anna appeared from another. He waved to them. Then, in the kitchen, he rinsed his wineglass and put it on the counter.

Magdalena came upstairs and said, “Do you remember, Julius, the girl I told you about, who looked after Franz on the train? The most extraordinary thing: she was my last patient of the day. Can you imagine? ‘Natalia?’ I said. ‘Dr. Schaefferová,’ she said, ‘I knew I would see you again one day.’ She is now Frau Natalia Faber; her husband is somewhere on the Eastern Front. At least, that is what she told me, but from the expression in her eyes, I think perhaps it was not quite the truth. She consulted me about an elderly friend of hers. I told her I