Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,99

on the sofa beside Anna, and the baby, on her knee, began to scream. The parents returned home. Dr. Haffner slapped Josef and told him to settle down and took the baby from Anna. Frau Haffner, her eyes glassy and her cheeks flushed with excitement, kept saying what an honor it was, what a privilege, to hear Dr. Goebbels. Where there was no hope, he had given hope. “Didn’t he, Andreas?” she said, turning to her husband for confirmation.

Baldur should have been there, she said, to see the young men who had been wounded in the war. Some were in wheelchairs, attended by nurses, but as soon as they’d convalesced, they would return to the fighting. “Their courage moved me to tears,” she said. “From now on, we must all be as courageous. Total war means total victory. Isn’t that so?”

Dr. Haffner was of the opinion that Anna should be going to school. Frau Haffner disagreed, but Dr. Haffner enrolled Anna at his daughters’ school. Anna thanked Dr. Haffner, and his wife said it was Germany she should thank.

Frau Haffner volunteered at a hospital for convalescent soldiers. She sacrificed some of her cast-iron cooking pots to be melted down for weapons. When the Reich government recommended foraging in the woods for wild plants to augment the reduced food rations, Frau Haffner took Anna with her to a park, where they gathered figwort and dandelion greens and dug wild garlic out of the ground. None of the Haffner children liked eating these plants, and Heinrich gagged and threw up at the table, and Frau Haffner went into hysterics, thinking she had poisoned him.

A foreign laborer, a young man from France, was sent to the Haffner house to dig and plant a victory garden. The young man’s name was Jean-Marc; he was eighteen. He had been studying at the Sorbonne, but then came the invasion and occupation of Paris in June 1940. His brother had been killed in the fighting. And now Jean-Marc was a prisoner, a laborer for the Germans.

Frau Haffner let Anna take Jean-Marc sandwiches and a flask of water at midday. When his hands blistered, she brought him into the house and washed off the dirt and applied ointment and bandages. He told her he had never in his life gardened or, for that matter, done any form of physical labor, nor did he particularly want to. His smile was gentle, rueful. Like her, Jean-Marc hoped to become a scientist, a chemist. She told him she had an uncle who was a chemist. She too wanted to be a scientist, she said, and Jean-Marc said, yes, that’s good, that’s wonderful, and they smiled at one another.

In the Haffners’ pretty garden they saw a family of quail crossing the grass in single file, and a scarlet tanager in a tree. The trees and shrubberies in the garden were lush and refulgent, and then in contrast there was this patch of dark, newly dug-over ground. Anna scooped up some dirt and showed Jean-Marc its denizens: earthworms, millipedes, snails. She picked out a beetle dazed by the light; it crawled around in her palm, its wings trembling. Being so close to the lake, she said to Jean Marc, the ground was fertile, rich.

It was true: the garden Jean-Marc planted produced an exuberant crop of beans, beets, carrots, garlic, onions, turnips. These vegetables had a subtle, indefinable flavor, because, Anna believed, they had taken in something of Jean-Marc’s goodness. She had committed to memory his parents’ address in Paris, and he had memorized her uncle Emil’s address in Prague, so that one day, when they got through this, they would meet under better circumstances. He had at first assumed she was a daughter of the Haffner family; she had quickly set him straight. She was Czech, she said. He asked about her family, and she wanted to tell him, but the words would not come, the words were forbidden to her. Anna, he said, gently. He bent and kissed her, lightly, on the parting in her hair.

* * *

In November 1944, the Royal Air Force intensified bombing raids on Berlin. Liquid incendiary bombs containing asphalt, magnesium, and rubber fell on Berlin, and the city burned. Phosphorus bombs ignited fires that could be extinguished only with sand, and there was never enough sand. People running from burning buildings fell victim to a second wave of bombers dropping incendiary bombs. In air-raid shelters that escaped a direct hit, there existed the very real danger of