Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,98

the stove in her bed, which was in a small narrow room in the basement, beneath the kitchen.

At night, when she was alone, Franz sometimes appeared to her. He knew everything that had happened to her before she was sent here. The physical examination, the X-rays; having her head measured with calipers, her eye, hair, and skin color compared to crude charts. Then—and this Franz knew as well—she was given a card that stated she was suitable for “Germanization,” and he knew she’d had to leave Reina and her aunts and uncles against her will and that she was in Berlin, in a suburb just outside Berlin, living with the Haffner family, who fulfilled the requirements of having many children, six of them, like Goebbels and his wife, and of having a firm grasp of the nation’s ideology. Franz knew, also, that while she might look like Anna, walk around in Anna’s body, speak with Anna’s voice, the essential Anna-ness was gone and what remained was a stranger to her.

* * *

Dr. Haffner was not a medical doctor; he held a doctorate of philosophy in literature and had lectured at the Berlin University before taking work as an editor with the Reich’s domestic press division. Anna served him his breakfast in the dining room, when the children had finished eating. He spent a long time polishing his spectacles and then squinting at the lenses and polishing them again. It wouldn’t surprise him, he said, if the smudges were actually on his eyes, since his father had lost his sight to an inherited condition. And blind, of what use would he be to the Third Reich?

Every morning he ate one slice of toast and an egg in an eggcup shaped like a hen, standing on clawed chicken’s feet. He grimaced at his first taste of chicory coffee. He swallowed a small white tablet that gave him, he said, “some pep.” In the past year he had lost five kilograms, he said, tugging at his shirt collar to show her how loose it was. He used to do calisthenics and run in the park near his house, but his long hours at the office made such activities impossible.

“Do you know what it’s like in that cauldron?” he said. “No, of course you don’t. How could you?” Every hour, he said, fresh directives came from the press chief, Otto Dietrich, and each one had to be studied, made sense of, and obeyed, which meant a volley of telegraphed memos, often contradicting previous memos, had to be sent posthaste to newspaper editors all over Germany and the occupied territories in the east and in Belgium, Holland, and France. As a young man, he’d imagined writing something Proustian, on a vast and sublime scale, but the lightness of spirit essential to creation had been truly knocked out of him. Self-pity, however, was inexcusable, he said.

He could not pretend he knew nothing. He moved the saltcellar a millimeter on the tablecloth. “Sit down, Fräulein,” he said. “You make me nervous.” He said, one morning, that he didn’t feel good about some of the things that were going on. He tried to convey a sense of what it was he didn’t “feel good” about, without being specific. He put his hands flat on the table. Frau Haffner had joined the Nazi Party ten years earlier, he said, and her brother, Ernst, was in the SS, so he had to keep quiet. He had a brother-in-law who’d been in prison for months after voicing his criticism.

On the last day of January 1943, General Paulus and the Sixth Army of the Wehrmacht surrendered to the Red Army at Stalingrad. Out of a force of three hundred thousand men, only ninety thousand had survived, Dr. Haffner told Anna, and they were prisoners of the Red Army. He called it a devastating defeat, but Dr. Goebbels termed it a “misfortune.” After General Paulus had surrendered, Goebbels gave a speech to an invited audience at the Sportpalast and said, “Let the storm break loose.” He urged “total war,” which would of necessity be a long war but at the same time the shortest war, the shortest path to victory over Bolshevism. These were his words, which Anna heard in a radio broadcast she listened to with the Haffner children while their parents were at the Sportpalast. Baldur stood at attention in front of the radio. His brother Josef and his sisters marched around the room. They knocked over a table. Josef jumped