‘Are we friends?’ he asks from time to time, stopping in the middle of the road with one foot on the ground and the other on the pedal, as if seized by sudden fear.
‘Friends in life and death!’ she answers, repeating a formula they often use between themselves and which undoubtedly comes from one of the adventure books they’ve read together. Most of all they love sea stories. Ones in which a small boy (unfortunately small girls aren’t expected to get into difficulties of this kind) goes to sea as a cabin boy and everything imaginable happens to him. Like the very young Redburn whom Melville describes as an awkward and naïve adolescent. The first time he is sent aloft up the mainmast to unreef the sails, he is seized by vertigo and grabs the shrouds so as not to fall, while the sailors on the bridge laugh with scorn and amusement. Another book they read with their four eyes tells of a ship wrecked on a desert island. In the disaster everyone is killed except one young adventurer who explores the island and learns how to survive, fighting ferocious animals at night and wandering about by day in search of water and food. He invents a language of his own that enables him to communicate with the clouds and the stones, sews clothes together with strands of grass and learns to swim like a fish.
‘I’ve got a plan,’ says Emanuele in a mysterious voice.
‘What plan?’
‘A secret. You mustn’t tell anyone.’
‘You can’t think I’m a spy!’
‘I’ve found out how to fly.’
‘Like the birds?’
‘Like the birds.’
‘But how?’
‘You need two light wings. And a small structure of wood that must be very strong but weightless. I know how to do it.’
‘Did you find it in a book?’
‘Just trust me.’
‘But what if we fall?’
‘We won’t fall if we follow the logic of flight.’
‘And how is it done?’
‘Shhh, they’ll hear us.’
When he squeezes her hand like that her tummy feels as hot as if a little stove was boiling inside it. She knows he can feel how hot the stove is too but they’ve never discussed it. He’s the most mysterious child I’ve ever known, little Emanuele. He doesn’t like chatter, except when he’s writing, then he lets himself go. He knows lots of words, like someone who reads a lot and memorises the most difficult expressions for things. ‘He writes like a professor,’ Mamma Stefania says of him with admiration. ‘A know-all!’ comments Papà Amintore. Amara watches him walking confidently but cautiously, his grazed knees nimble, his supple back straight, expressing at the same time fear and defiance.
The first love of her life. She knows that now. She has told herself so at night as she watches the reflection of the street-lamp on her window. She has repeated it again and again: I love Emanuele and he loves me. And they will go on loving each other whatever happens because you can’t choose who you meet; you just have to accept it as destiny, and once it’s happened it’s happened for all time.
3
‘My mother, dear Miss Maria Amara, was tall, fair and strongly built. A woman who befriended her in prison told me that after only a few days in the camp the centimetre of hair sticking up on her head after she had been shorn, and the down on her arms and her eyelashes, turned white. Like the girl in the Chinese fable. Do you know the legend of the woman with white hair?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you. A young peasant girl, in the days of the great estates, was persecuted by her master who wanted to force her to make love with him. Mei-Mei, that was her name, left home and ran away to the mountains so as not to have to give in to the fat proprietor who considered it his right to lie with the adolescent peasant girls on his estate. Everyone was in despair; they spent months searching for her and in the end assumed she must be dead. But one person never stopped looking for her: her mother Ching, the only person who still believed she was alive. For this reason she went on waiting for her daughter in the constant hope of seeing her return. Then one day, looking for mushrooms in the forest on the Jan Tzse mountain, Ching came on a wild young woman in ragged clothes. She had long white hair like an old woman and her hands were covered with cuts and wrinkles. At first the mother didn’t recognise her daughter. But Mei-Mei recognised her mother and hugged her. She explained that for three years she had been living in a cave and eating plants. Ching told her they could go home now because the master was dead. But Mei-Mei looked like an old woman; how could she find a husband with that spooky long white hair?’
The train starts swaying more violently. Amara instinctively braces herself so as not to be thrown from one side of the carriage to the other. The young Polish mother is so intent on rocking her baby that she doesn’t notice. Her hair is parted in the middle and tied at her neck with a red ribbon. A few strands have escaped and fallen untidily round her ears. She has a tiny mouth. There is something crazy about her. Why does she never for an instant take her eyes off her little baby? Why does she purse her lips as though terrified of the slightest breath of wind? Why does she never meet the eyes of her fellow travellers? Why does she keep slipping a hand in among the folds of her skirt to find a lemon-coloured sweet that she puts into her mouth, only to spit it timidly out again into a small handkerchief that she then folds and puts away in her pocket?
The two men have fallen asleep, the one with the gazelles huddled up with his head propped against the window; while the other has slithered down in his seat with his legs wide apart and his head lolling on his chest.
Amara silently pulls the package of Emanuele’s letters out of her father’s suitcase and lays it in her lap. She can’t resist the temptation to read them again, as she has already done so many times since Emanuele disappeared. She has left the envelopes at home to save a little space. The pile of pages covered in tiny rounded handwriting smells of dust and coal. She imagines him writing them, especially the last ones, by the light of an oil lamp with a pencil squeezed between dirty fingers. But this is one of his first letters and it breathes an air of everyday serenity.
Vienna. December ’39
Mamma has a new dress I like very much with storks flying against a clear sky. When she walks the storks move, opening their wings and starting to rise. When I grow up I want to be a pilot. I told Papà this but he laughed in my face. He says I’ll be an industrialist like him. We own a business, he says, you have to begin thinking about that. Papà doesn’t know how to put on his tie. He twists about in front of the mirror and pulls funny faces. In the end he calls to Mamma for help. And with her tongue between her teeth, she makes him a perfect knot.
There are no trees to climb here, Amara my love. We’re living in a flat in the centre of the city. From my window I can see a big grey building with friezes sculpted in stone. I can see vases displayed on balconies. I can see closed curtains. I’ve never managed to catch a head looking out of those windows. How I wish I could be with you in Florence, where people lean out from their balconies and call up from below, like in a village. In the morning I get up at seven and eat with Papà. Mamma sleeps till ten. Our nanny, Mariska, makes us fine breakfasts: fresh yoghurt with sliced banana on top, hot milk laced with coffee, slices of toast spread with fresh butter and jam she has made herself. Every day she complains that because it’s wartime she can’t get the ingredients to make food the way she wants. And Papà has to give her more and more money for buying things at the market.
The train sways. Now the young mother is asleep with her daughter in her arms. But even in sleep she doesn’t relax. She grasps her child as though they might take her away at any moment.
The man with fur armbands seems to be having disturbing dreams because he keeps thrashing about, still stretched out in his seat. He has taken off his shoes. His big feet are enclosed in woollen socks threadbare at the heel. But the man with gazelles on his chest has woken up and is reading in a corner, his book close to his face. There is very little light, but he persists. His face shows intense concentration
, almost as if he has forgotten where he is and who he is travelling with.
Amara pulls out another letter.
Why don’t you come here to Vienna too? Yesterday I went for a gallop on a lion with a red mane. At one point I kicked his sides so hard he took off and flew, but my father said that’s enough so he came down again all crestfallen. He’s irritable these days, Papà. He says the business isn’t going well. The SS are constantly under our feet. And they want to give the orders, he says. Mutti has promised to sew me a pair of wings with real feathers for Christmas. Why don’t you come and see me for Christmas? I like the apple tart here in Vienna, but not the ice creams. They don’t have good ice cream here, not like in Florence. What’s good here is the cream. Almost as good as in Florence. Do you remember that day in the Cascine when we ate four wafers with cream and then we ordered a fifth and you dropped it in the bushes? I’m waiting for you, Emanuele.
The train moves off again. The new day has started, young and sunny. They are running through the middle of a birch wood. The tall slender white trunks flash past. When the man with the gazelles disappears to the toilet the traveller from Kladno with the fur armbands opens his eyes, turns towards Amara and says mysteriously: ‘That man must be a spy. You should never have acted as his guarantor. They’ll catch up with you. They’ll take away your passport.’
‘But I’m Italian. And I have a permit.’
‘These days anyone crossing the boundary between the two worlds is suspect. Don’t you know about the cold war? No one can avoid it. You also could be a spy.’
‘What sort of spy?’
‘The West needs information about the East. And the East needs information about what you call the “free” world.’ The man smiles, showing bright red gums.
‘So you could be a spy too.’
‘Of course. Who says I’m not?’ He sneers, his eyes still dull and very sad.
‘May I ask you something: why do you wear those fur armbands?’
‘Rheumatism in my wrists. My hands get paralysed if I don’t keep them warm. Satisfied? But maybe that’s not true at all. Maybe I tried to cut my wrists and want to hide the scars.’
There is something disquieting about this man who says things and then immediately contradicts them.
Now the woman is walking up and down the corridor with her baby, humming a lullaby. The child whimpers feebly with a low, tentative sound.
‘May I offer you some coffee?’ says the man with fur armbands. ‘I’ve got a thermos full. Let’s make the most of it now we’re alone in the compartment. If I’d offered it to the others too my thermos would be empty by now.’
‘I don’t drink coffee, thank you.’
‘Of course as an Italian you know what real coffee is. In fact all I have is a very poor Polish substitute. But still, it’s hot. You’re sure you don’t want any?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘A biscuit, then?’
‘A biscuit, yes, thank you.’
‘Terrible Soviet biscuits. But they do help fill the stomach. They know how to make missiles, do our Soviet friends, excellent ones, but they don’t know much about biscuits. Biscuits are a luxury, missiles a necessity, don’t you agree? Always bearing in mind the nationalist point of view, of course. Defending ourselves from the West, defending ourselves from your butter and ginger biscuits, that’s what communism is all about.’
The man laughs, throwing two biscuits at once into his mouth. There’s something simultaneously brutal and subtle about him. He seems to get enormous fun out of surprising her.
‘Did you know about Comrade Stalin? He died three years ago, alone, sozzled with drink, terrified and out of his mind. I don’t think it was living people he was afraid of, so much as the ghosts of the friends he’d had murdered. He saw an enemy in every shadow. Even his wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, was driven to kill herself in ’32. And to think everyone thought him a good family man. Or better still, a father to every Soviet citizen, no, to every communist the world over. Did he not seem like a good, fatherly peasant? In fact he was a lunatic with criminal instincts. Perhaps not unlike Peter the Great … In fact, I tell you, Peter the Great, in some ways, was more understanding and indulgent than Stalin … Did you know that Tsar Peter had a passion for pulling out his subjects’ teeth and would chase his courtiers down the palace corridors to do it? But there’s nothing wrong with my teeth, the wretch he had managed to catch would protest. Just one tooth, what’s that to you, then you’ll feel better, the Tsar would reply. But they all took to their heels. Did you know that? Just think of the courtiers running about all over the place! What a laugh! When he died, they found a sack full of teeth under his bed. Did you know that?’
Amara looks at him in consternation. Armbands seems to have no interest whatever in any response from her. He continues undaunted, despite the presence of the man with the gazelles who has returned to the compartment and is now combing his disordered hair with the window as a mirror.
‘My father got two years in prison,’ went on Armbands, ‘because he knew English and organised an exhibition of European painters. Accused of espionage. Locked up in prison, tortured. My mother was careful to distance herself from him, because the political police were after her. She was trapped into saying he secretly entertained American spies at home. Everyone round him believed the accusations, including my grandfather and grandmother. He instantly became an enemy of the State and as such had to be punished. Great Father Stalin couldn’t be wrong. communist Thought in its infinite greatness couldn’t be wrong. The worst possible criminals took advantage of the wonderful illusion.’
‘And didn’t you believe in it?’ asked the man with the gazelles.
‘Of course I did. Like you, like everyone else.’
‘I believed in utopia, but not in the practice of communism. I’m half Jewish and I won’t stay anywhere where they persecute Jews. Stalinism wasn’t kind to the Jews, remember.’
‘Though the first tank to enter the death camps was Soviet.’
‘But some of the worst persecution of Jews took place in Poland, with Stalin’s consent.’
‘That was what we believed in then … I ask myself, what the hell did we believe in?’
‘A new, just world, with no masters or slaves … a world where the weak would be protected and defended, where no one would be able to buy the body and soul of another person … To each according to his need. Isn’t that what we believed in?’
‘To each according to his need, what crap! And who decides what I need?’
‘The Party,’ says the man with the gazelles, smiling. ‘That’s the trouble, my friend. Once they start building pyramids, there’s no hope. Imagine a pyramid of innocent and generous people tightening their belts for the sake of their country, while at the top of the pyramid a well-fed man is waving a red flag with a gold star on it. And so many have died for that flag, honestly and sincerely, in the belief they were making a sacrifice for liberty.’
‘Whereas in fact they devoted their best energies to the will of others, to idolatry and dictatorship, is that what you’re saying?’
‘But even that was better than dying in the name of abuse of power, race hatred and worship of the superman, don’t you agree?’
‘Delusion bites, with the teeth of a shark.’
‘Yet there’s still a difference between that and governing by invading other countries and insisting on the supremacy of your own race, plundering and sacking and putting to death the weakest and those who have worked for equality.’
‘But unsuccessfully, my friend, this is the problem. What’s the use of a theory of equality and justice if both are then destroyed?’
‘But I must insist that there’s a difference between an ideology of death and an ideology aiming at freedom for all.’
‘Freedom? Who was ever free under Stalin? And who is this stupid cold war setting free? In the West, dreadful crimes are being committed in the name of freedom. You’re a Jew: just think of the Rosenbergs! And t
he American atomic bomb on Japan! And what sort of justice is being done in the East? The most disgusting things: think of the Stalinist massacres. A quarter of the Russian people were imprisoned or killed to humour the obsessions of a maniac. Is that what you call liberty?’
‘Don’t take me for a Stalinist. I’m thinking of all those who sacrificed themselves for the promise of a better world. Those who gave their lives freely for communism, without being driven by murderous fury or theories of racial selection as the Nazis were. People who simply wanted a classless world. It wasn’t their fault they were deceived and manipulated and sent off to be stupidly slaughtered. People like my wife’s father Amos, who kept a portrait of Stalin in his modest home in Budapest, I knew him well: a mild and kindly man, exceptionally honest. He worked hard all his life. He believed in communism as a system that had helped men to be equal and to be brothers. He never hurt a fly. But I despised his neighbour Béla Lukacs who was a spy. He was paid for denouncing a poor tenant who had accepted a phone call from abroad. He believed in nothing. He was a Stalinist out of self-interest.’
But Amara could not follow the two men any further because they suddenly switched from German to Polish. Not deliberately to cut her out, but in the excitement of the discussion.
4
Vienna. January 1940
Dear Amara, yesterday we went for an outing on the Danube with our teacher. We skated on the frozen water. I had a pair of brand-new wings with me, very wide and solid but the teacher wouldn’t let me climb the hill. Then we sat in a sort of improvised tent and ate Prague ham and fresh cheese with black bread and salted gherkins. The child Kitty asked me if I’d like to be her fiancé but I said I already have a fiancée, who lives in Florence and I’m going to marry her when I’m eighteen. Do you remember my promise? Papà says I’ll change my mind but I don’t think so. Mamma gave me a hug and printed a fine red mouth on my cheek. I didn’t realise at the time but when I got to school they teased me: ‘Who’s been kissing you, Emanuele? What an enormous mouth your fiancée has … It covers half your cheek. How will you manage kissing a fiancée with such a big mouth?’ The child Kitty was angry. I explained that it was my mother who’d kissed me but they didn’t believe it. Now they call me ‘the boy with the bigmouth fiancée’.
Train to Budapest Page 2