Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,91
the table, bent over, arms folded, thinking she was going to be sick. She told herself she had no right to feel such pain. He did not belong to her, that boy.
She walked to the river and thought how simple an act, to go into the water and drown. The water dazzled her; her eyes burned; her foot inched closer to the stone edge of the embankment. Then she thought of Miklós. She could hear him telling her not to do it. That’s not the answer, he said firmly.
Franz was a partisan, a member of the home-front resistance, Reina told her. He had set up portable radio transmitters used by the parachutists to maintain contact with headquarters in London. He learned the codes, knew how to unscramble messages. He kept the machine operational. The partisans had no real training in counterintelligence or espionage; not one of them knew how robust the Reich’s surveillance system was. How could they know the Gestapo drove around in vans equipped with radio-signal detectors? Even if they did know, they would have carried on with the resistance. And then, in a sudden Gestapo sweep, most of the partisans were arrested. “Franz was at work at the munitions factory when they came for him,” Reina said. “They took him to the Petschek Palace prison. He was given a mock trial at a summary court and taken from there to the Kobylisy rifle range and shot. I wish they would get on with it and arrest me too. We thought fighting fascism in here,” she said, tapping her head, “would constitute a form of resistance, a noble form, because then you don’t get covered in their filth, you don’t have blood on your hands, but we were wrong. We should have fought back with everything we had.”
Reina pulled her scarf roughly off her hair, shook out the hairpins, combed her hand through her hair. She lit a cigarette. At the time of his arrest, she and Franz had been married for two weeks. Now she was a widow. And Dr. Schaefferová and her husband had been taken to Petschek Palace for questioning. She kept reminding herself that her uncle Julius had been questioned once before and released. He and her aunt would be released this time, too, she said. She was all right as long as no one asked her how she was holding up, but it was very hard on Anna.
“Frau Faber,” she said, “you look exhausted. I’ll show you where you are to sleep.”
She stubbed her cigarette out in an ashtray and took Natalia to a room at the end of the hall. She gave her a nightgown and a robe, and when she’d said good night and had gone, Natalia undressed and got into bed. Her head was full of images: Reina coming into the house in Zlatá Ulička and telling her she had to pack up and come with her. Her own hands shaking as she threw things into the suitcase she’d brought from home. Reina taking the suitcase and leading her through lightless streets to the tall house with its plaque that said MAGDALENA SCHAEFFEROVÁ. And then, as she remembered Reina unlocking the front door, she must have fallen into a deep sleep.
In the morning Natalia had the incomprehensible luxury of getting into a bathtub and using a bar of scented soap. She washed her hair and dried it with a towel and got dressed. How wonderful to feel clean again. But when she looked in the bathroom mirror, she saw a woman with a gaunt face, dark shadows under her eyes, thin colorless lips. On the outside, she looked just the way she felt inside. She went back to the bedroom where she’d slept. There was a bird singing in a tree outside the window. On the walls, which were white, there were watercolor paintings of Prague scenes. A white translucent vase was on the dressing table. She sat on the bed and closed her eyes, thinking of Dr. Schaefferová and remembering the first time she saw her, on the train to Prague. For that brief moment, her life and Dr. Schaefferová’s life had intersected. And now she was in the doctor’s home, and the doctor was in prison. She opened her eyes. Franz had arranged for Max Nagy to travel on a transport truck headed for Budapest to pick up a shipment of food to feed the German Wehrmacht. Perhaps it was Reina who had asked Franz to do this.