Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,94
on the German cities of Cologne, Essen, and Bremen, and on the cities of Lübeck and Rostock in the north.
Reina said the Allies would win the war. It couldn’t be any other way; their suffering, the suffering of the world, had to mean something, didn’t it? Franz used to quote Schopenhauer: For the power of truth is incredibly great and of unspeakable endurance.
Natalia wondered how much truth could be endured. A little? This much? And then this additional notch, another turn of the screw?
* * *
One evening Emil Svetla stood in the Schaeffers’ living room and, first touching his handkerchief to his upper lip, said he had something very unpleasant to say and they must prepare themselves. This house, their house, had been confiscated by the Reich and was to become the property of an SS officer. An hour ago, he had received this information.
“No one is taking my home from me,” Reina said. Franz’s home; her husband’s home.
“Reina and I won’t go,” Anna said.
“When?” Reina said.
“Soon. You have five days.” Emil said he would leave now and give Anna and Reina time to come to terms with the situation.
“Now he will wash his hands, like Pontius Pilate,” Reina said.
“It’s not his fault,” Anna said.
Natalia could see that Anna was fighting to control herself, her hands tightly clutched together, her thumbnail gouging at the skin on her finger. Reina said, Not this, not this, and she said she hated God, she hated everyone. Sora went to put on the kettle. Natalia saw her stirring Veronal into Anna’s tea, and then she stirred a few grains into the other cups as well.
At six the next morning, Reina left for work at the printing press. Later, Anna went downstairs to her father’s studio and came back with an art portfolio of gray cardboard. She knelt on the living room floor, opened the portfolio, and took out a typed manuscript, which she gave to Natalia. It belonged to a man who had been sent to Theresienstadt, Anna said. Her father had been working on illustrations for the manuscript. “Read it,” Anna said. “Then I’ll show you the paintings.”
The story was a moral fable, familiar to Natalia from her childhood. Salt had more worth than gold; love exceeded both in value. Generations of children cut their teeth on this fable, believed in its lesson, and yet spent their lives acting as if the opposite were true.
The portfolio held the watercolor sketches Anna’s father had been doing to illustrate the story; Anna had posed for him as the Princess Marica. In the paintings, she was wearing the white dress she’d worn when she’d come to Zlatá Ulička with Reina for a tarot card reading. Her hair was loose and crinkled from her braids. She wore sandals on her bare feet. The paintings were beautiful, but Natalia hated to see Anna depicted lost in a forest, cast out of her home, foraging for food as the shadowy forms of wolves and bears lurked in the trees. The paintings were a father’s last images of his beloved daughter and simultaneously a daughter’s last memories of her beloved father.
Anna took the paintings from Natalia and placed them with the manuscript in the portfolio, which she closed and tied shut with red strings. She had started assembling in the entrance hall downstairs a collection of items: her mother’s framed medical degrees and her microscope and stethoscope, her grandfather’s onyx pen stand and his Bible. An illustrated magazine from before the turn of the century featuring an article on Anna’s grandmother, “the first expert woman skier in Western Bohemia.” A tortoiseshell box her mother had used for her hairpins and her gold hair combs. Her parents’ rings and watches. Several half-completed canvases, notebooks, sketch pads. Franz’s philosophy books. A play by Karel Čapek, heavily marked up by Franz in red ink.
Anna asked her uncle Emil whether the piano could be moved to his house. “My darling child, it is not possible,” Emil said.
“We can’t leave my mother’s piano for them to play. I won’t leave the piano.” She turned and fled upstairs.
“None of us will get over this,” Emil said to Natalia. “Little Jan has nightmares; my daughter, Elena, refuses to go to Mass. How do you respond to a child of ten who says she will believe in God when God believes in her?”
He picked up Vicki Baum’s novel Grand Hotel and said now anything written before 1939 was like a message from a vanished civilization. He wondered how