Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,93
for herself, perhaps?”
Anna said she wanted to stay with Reina and Sora. And with Natalia. For one thing, how would her parents find her, if she left? Emil and Maximilian exchanged a glance. Emil said the decision could be made another day.
That night Natalia was in Anna’s room—she and Sora took turns sitting with the girl while she slept—when Anna sat up in bed, and asked, “When someone dies violently, does the violence remain in their souls and keep them from going to Heaven? Does God forgive them? Are they innocent in His eyes?”
“Yes, they are completely innocent,” Natalia said. “They are the ones God loves the most.”
Anna said it was her fault. At the inn in the mountains, in winter, a man told her how he killed people. Even children. “He said if I told anyone, he would harm my family. If I had been braver, I would have told my parents, and they would have listened to me. We would have emigrated to England or somewhere, and my parents and my brother would be alive.”
“No, Anna. Listen to me. It is not your fault.” Natalia held Anna’s hand. She stayed with her until Sora came, and then she went and sat in the dark in the living room. The next day, Anna wanted to see her mother’s rose garden. Natalia went outside with her. Anna picked dead leaves off the rose bushes and crushed them in her hands. Natalia watered the roses, and she and Anna began pulling weeds out from around the roots of the rose bushes. Anna knocked over the pail of water, and it soaked Natalia’s shoes, and seeing this, Anna sank to the ground and buried her face in her arms and sobbed. But it’s nothing, Natalia said, kneeling beside her. Anna got up and ran to the house. Natalia followed, carrying her wet shoes inside. Sora loaned her a pair of shoes, brown, with thick rubber soles, like the serviceable shoes Rozalia had the cobbler make for her. Natalia looked at her skinny bare legs and her feet in these shoes, and she and Sora laughed and then stared at each other in dismay, horrified at their levity.
* * *
Reina had placed votive candles on the credenza, in front of a photograph of her and Franz on their wedding day. Beside it, there was a studio portrait of Franz on his eighteenth birthday. Another photograph, of Magdalena and Julius, had been taken on the Ringstrasse in Vienna. There was a photograph of a young woman in a long pinafore dress standing in a garden. Natalia thought it was Reina. Sora told her the woman in the photograph was Dr. Schaefferová’s stepmother, Eva Svetlová. Doesn’t Reina look like her, though? Sora said. Eva died when Reina’s mother was born. Dr. Schaefferová had lost her own mother, and it was hard on her to lose Eva too.
“She has a beautiful smile,” Natalia said.
“Dr. Schaefferová thought the world of her. She was a botanist. Before she married Mr. Svetla, she worked at the horticultural institute in Troya with her brother, who was also a scientist, an agronomist, I think Magdalena said.”
Natalia became very still. “Do you know his name?” she asked.
“Eva’s brother? Let me think. Yes, his name was Nagy. Maximilian Nagy. Dr. Schaefferová’s uncle Max.”
Why had Mr. Nagy not said anything? Silence, these days, was a protective strategy. Protective on both sides. She knew that. Even now, she did not reveal to Sora that she and Mr. Nagy were acquainted. But what a secret! Then she thought about how Franz had helped Max Nagy without knowing the man was his mother’s uncle. And yet, in their brief meeting, they had right away liked each other and Max, who was so wary of everyone, had put his trust completely in Franz.
In the evening, Reina fiddled with the radio dial, tuning in the BBC’s Overseas Service broadcasting in Czech. They sat very close to the set, with the sound down low, crackly with static. The Red Army was retreating from German forces in the Crimea; the German U-boat offensive against British and American ships in the Atlantic continued unchecked; the Luftwaffe had attacked the Black Sea Fleet. The Wehrmacht had taken Sevastopol; Germany’s Panzer army was advancing on Stalingrad; in the Pacific the Allies were sustaining heavy losses. Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel had captured Tobruk and was in striking distance of Alexandria. None of the news was good, although there were carefully worded reports of Allied bombing raids