Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,95

his sister’s library had escaped confiscation by the Nazis. His voice broke. How could he go on living without Magdalena and Julius and Franz?

That night Natalia wrote to Miklós. Dearest, when you read this, you will be at home. If it happens that we don’t find each other again, will you, for my sake, remember how happy we were, how happy you made me? I have many memories and they are all of you, of your smile, your tenderness. My darling, you are my life. Ich liebe dich.

She wrote a note to Rozalia and placed it with the letter in an envelope and addressed it.

In the living room, Reina raised a wineglass to her. “Don’t look at me like that, Frau Faber,” she said. “They’re not getting the liquor. When this is gone, there’s beer in the pantry. There’s sherry, liqueurs, cognac in the credenza. Let me get you a glass of something. Wine? Red or white?”

“Red, please,” Natalia said. Reina poured the wine, gave Natalia a glass, and sat on the sofa with her feet up on the coffee table. She abhorred her own instinct for survival, she said. The way she kept breathing, eating, sleeping disgusted her. She was no different from the sheep on her parents’ farm.

“Didn’t you say you had a farm, Frau Faber?” she asked. “I know so little about you. Only that you tell fortunes that miss the mark. Franz and Magdalena talked about meeting you on a train. I was quite jealous of you. I told Franz and Aunt Magdalena you’d be old and ugly by now, but you are beautiful, just as they said.”

She got up and tried to uncork another bottle of wine and dropped the corkscrew on the floor.

Natalia picked it up and uncorked the wine bottle, saying that her mother-in-law had taught her the knack.

“I propose a toast to your mother-in-law. Here’s to her good health.” Reina took a drink.

She talked about the summers when Franz had stayed at the farm in Zürau. They would go outside at night and lie on the grass looking up at the sky. Franz knew the names of the constellations. When she was fifteen, she told him they would marry one day. It is written in the stars, she said. Oh, is it? he had said, laughing at her.

“Le cousinage est un dangereux voisinage. So I read in a Tolstoy novel.” She spilled her glass of Cointreau on the rug. “I’m not cleaning it up,” she said. “And neither are you. Anyway, I don’t think I like Cointreau.”

“My mother-in-law is fond of an herbal liqueur that tastes of wet moss and aniseed,” Natalia said. “She claims it’s medicinal.”

“Do you have a husband, Frau Faber, as well as a mother-in-law?”

“Yes,” Natalia said.

“Where is he? Not in Prague, I assume. In Russia? A German soldier? I hope not, Frau Faber.”

“My husband is a journalist. He went to Russia to talk to the soldiers on the front lines.”

Reina stared at her. She filled two clean wineglasses and gave one to Natalia.

Sora made scones for breakfast. Reina took an analgesic tablet for the headache she had from drinking too much the night before. Natalia helped Sora pack food from the refrigerator and cupboards into a hamper, and they went around the house looking for things to take with them. They lined up suitcases in front of the door. Anna picked hers up and started going upstairs with it.

“Anna, this is a time for pragmatism,” Reina said as she left for work. “You are just going to have to do what we think is best for you.” She bent to kiss Anna’s cheek.

“Your breath stinks,” Anna said.

Vivian Svetlová arrived and said they were coming with her, to her apartment. Emil had telephoned to tell her his wife, Adriana, was ill, not seriously, but she needed quiet, apparently, and he’d asked that Anna and Reina stay overnight with her, which, to her, was a pleasure, she said. Natalia and Sora, too; they were very welcome.

The SS officer arrived. He took the door key from Sora. He looked at the portfolio in Anna’s arms and said it seemed a large object for a small girl “What is it you have there?”

“My drawings, from school,” Anna said, not raising her eyes.

“I have a sister about your age. She, too, likes to draw and paint.”

Natalia’s eyelid twitched. My God, we look guilty, she thought. The door opened and a woman she presumed was the SS officer’s wife came in. She stared at