Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,96
Natalia with her little bright sparrow’s eyes and said, “Oh, look, Karl-Heinz, it is the fortune-teller.” Karl-Heinz and the sparrow would live in the Schaeffers’ house, Natalia realized. They would use the furniture and the utensils and sleep in the beds, and even though it was an atrocity and a blasphemy, nothing would stop them from doing this. You will receive good news, the tarot had predicted, Natalia remembered. Not the tarot; she was the one who had thoughtlessly made that prediction, she told herself, and felt hot blood rush to her face. Aunt Vivian took the portfolio from Anna and held it under her arm and said good day to the SS officer and his wife, who had gone past them up the stairs and could be heard in the kitchen, clattering around in her high-heeled shoes. Aunt Vivian had the bearing of an empress. She stood very straight and smiled at the SS officer as if they were meeting at a social event, a garden party, maybe, and at the same time she conveyed her disgust, as if the SS officer, with his scrubbed-clean face and immaculate uniform, stank, as if he were a pile of fresh manure deposited on the street by a cart horse.
At Vivian Svetlová’s apartment, they drank tea, ate biscuits, and chose neutral topics of conversation, such as Vivian’s hat designs, the fabric she had managed to buy in spite of shortages, and, of course, the weather, which they observed from the windows. Natalia felt safe there. Then, after a few days, she remembered that she had left Zlatá Ulička without telling Mr. Aslan, and she owed him the last month’s rent. She couldn’t pay him, but she could at least explain. On her way to his shop, a car pulled over; a man in a civilian suit and another in a Gestapo uniform got out, and the Gestapo officer took hold of her arm and opened the car and said, “Get in, Frau Andorján.”
* * *
They brought her to the old bank vaults in the cellars of Petschek Palace. A Gestapo agent tapped his pen on a manila folder. He glanced at her and opened the folder and went through a few pages of a report she supposed was on her. She was told to sit on a chair in front of this man’s desk, and a lamp was positioned to shine in her eyes. The man at the desk blew cigarette smoke in her face. There was a kind of humming noise in the air, possibly from a ventilation system. Another man came in, letting a door swing shut with a clang behind him.
This second man placed a hand on the back of the chair she was seated in and leaned over her. “Well, Countess Andorján,” he said. “We are interested in why you are here in Prague instead of in Hungary. Why are you telling fortunes? Isn’t that an odd occupation for a countess? But then, you aren’t just a countess, are you? You are the wife of a traitor. Isn’t that so? We know that Count Andorján is a Communist. We know he is a traitor to Germany.”
“My husband is not a Communist. He never was.”
They knew her name, her date of birth, her birthplace, the date of her marriage. It wasn’t information they wanted, she knew that. They liked to break people, destroy their minds first and then their bodies. She was taken to a cell and left for several days. Then she was taken out and interrogated again. They kept repeating that her husband was a spy. A Communist, a Bolshevik, a traitor. Karl-Heinz came in and sat across from her at a plain wooden table. The other man came back. Or was this someone new? This is the fortune-teller, Karl-Heinz said. This is the woman who sits in the Golden Lane and tells lies for money, so don’t expect to get the truth from her. The other man said, let me see your hands, Countess Andorján. Or should I say Frau Faber? Do you prefer one name over another? He held her by the wrist. “Open your fingers,” he said.
This was what she learned about pain: it made you unknowable to yourself. The soul receded, grew less, gazed dismissively on the body. She saw the fever in the torturer’s eyes; the longing, almost erotic. Another SS officer came in. An appreciative audience, she could see. The second man spoke with Karl-Heinz at the far end of the