Train to Budapest

by Dacia Maraini

  The fact that she had seen through him in no way diminished the intensity of her delusion. She may never have believed in his love, but she had certainly believed in his caresses. And when his caresses were absent she dreamed of his hands. Large hands with broad, flat fingers, the balls of his thumbs sensitive, always warm, his palms dry and smooth. He knew how to caress without wanting to possess, without wanting to press on to the relief of a quick orgasm. He would start with her face: ploughing her forehead with his fingers like a tired field, smoothing and dividing her hair, letting it slip like water through his hands. Then her mouth and neck, where his thumbs would slowly search out her veins and press them lightly as if to feel the slow flow of her blood. Then her shoulders which he released from their many burdens with delicate little taps. He would fill his hands with her breasts and sometimes suck them as if to reach milk closed inside. Then he would warm her sides and belly, pressing them gently with the heat of his closed fists. He would skim lightly over her sex because the moment had not yet come for that secret nucleus of naked flesh. Then he would pass down her back pressing as he counted each individual vertebra, in sheer wonder at the architecture of bone on which the physical equilibrium of the body depends. Then her legs and feet, first separating her toes before bringing them together again in a warm, affectionate gesture; running his knuckles over the arches of her soles, knocking against her mercurial restlessness in tribute to the grace of her walking.

  His caresses were an end in themselves, possessed of an angelic sensuality. She had loved them for that. But in order to caress, Luca needed to feel a dedication that could not last. It was not his ambition to transform this ceremony of delights into a permanent habit. And practising the daily routine carelessly was not even conceivable. A perfectionist cannot be expected to turn into a slipshod repeater of predictable gestures when it comes to the adorable art of caressing.

  In fact his caresses were over after barely a year of marriage. And with the end of his caresses, something changed in his character. Tenderness gave way to resentment, a subtle brutality that insinuated itself into his words and gestures. Had this been the meaning of his caresses? To use the intelligence of his hands to restrain a cruelty hidden in some part of his soul? Maybe. But he had been generous and she was grateful to him for that.

  14

  In the train with the man with the gazelles. On the way to Vienna. Amara had packed her suitcase in a hurry. She was happy to leave Kraków and her room at the Hotel Wawel with its brown wallpaper, the corridor with its smelly threadbare moquette, and the bathroom with its red and yellow tiles and seatless lavatory bowl. The Russian train moves slowly on its widely spaced rails. They have slept in a twin-bed compartment because the single ones were all taken. The table which folds against the wall at night is raised by day and covered with an immaculate white cloth. Hanging above is a lamp with a crimson shade surrounded by gilded pendants that tinkle lightly at each lurch of the train. The beds form a pair, not one above the other as in the trains she is used to, but side by side, with military covers and very clean sheets that smell of perfumed soap. The white curtains have a gilded trimming. An extremely ancient train perhaps once reserved for luxury passengers, but now within the reach of all.

  While Amara was undressing Hans had gone out and she did the same when he took off the jumper with the flying gazelles and the white shirt he hung on a clothes-hook along with his corduroy trousers. He put his worn-out shoes side by side under his bed with his socks rolled up inside them. Amara came in to find him sitting in his pyjamas on the edge of his bunk, cigarette in hand. To avoid embarrassment they scarcely looked at each other and slept back to back. The train stopped twenty times during the night, puffing and panting, gurgling and hissing. Men’s voices could be heard in the corridor exchanging information in Czech. They slept little and badly. In the morning, tired and drowsy, they reached Vienna. At last they had arrived. At six the conductor knocked on their door. Did they want coffee? They did. It turned out to be an improbable violet colour and smelled of burned sawdust. But it was hot and they drank it at a single gulp.

  ‘Vienna is a city offended and wounded by war. There are many ruins, but some intact corners too,’ says Hans. ‘I can take you to a clean if humble boarding-house run by a woman I know, Frau Morgan.’

  At the Pension Blumental Amara is faced with choosing between two rooms: a very noisy large one facing the road, and a smaller and more modest one that overlooks a yard and rooftops covered with pigeons. Which would Frau Sironi prefer? Amara decides on the smaller one. Silence before luxury. Frau Morgan helps her carry her luggage to her room. Soon after she knocks and places on the bedside table a small vase containing a scented rose.

  ‘I have a garden the size of a handkerchief but it’s full of flowers. I’ve sown mint, mallow, chives and rhubarb too. From the mint I also make liqueur, and from the rhubarb tarts. One day I’ll let you taste one.’

  Frau Morgan seems anxious to please. Even so, Amara leaves her suitcase open, in case Frau Morgan might like to assess her moral status from the condition of her underwear.

  In the afternoon Hans takes her to the Maria Theresia Platz museum, the Kunsthistorisches gallery with its endless rooms full of masterpieces. It is not long since the great paintings were once more hung on its walls and people again began coming from all over the world to admire the ever-popular works of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Brueghel, Rubens and Dürer. Hans and Amara stop in front of one particular painting, as if under a kind of spell. The work of an unfamiliar modern artist. A large, spacious picture, in which people swarm like ants. The huge canvas depicts a day in a Nazi concentration camp. On one side an armoured train is steaming in, on the other huts are set obliquely, of a naïve yet at the same time profoundly wise design. You can make out the beds, though to describe them as beds would be an abuse of language; they are wooden shelves each holding at least five inmates, with no mattresses, covers or pillows, with nothing at all. In the foreground is a morning roll call. It is known that these took hours, with the prisoners forced to stand in the cold wearing only striped pyjamas, their bare feet in clogs. Two or three hours of torture, depending on how many inmates there were to count. In another place, right against the barbed wire, dozens of corpses lie piled up like refuse. People who died in the night and will be dragged roughly by their arms and legs to a common pit by their still living fellow prisoners.

  All this is seen from a certain distance, as if the painter has been viewing the camp through binoculars from a window a hundred metres away. A lugubrious collective vision yet at the same time intense and radiant. The bodies have been painted with quick, firm lines, in which white and black alternate and run into one another. There is something very cruel yet at the same time affectionate in this presentation of a monstrous and ferocious daily existence as everyday normality. The painter seems to have had intimate knowledge of these camps. He seems to have reproduced with his eyes closed his memory of those numbed and mutilated bodies.

  A bell rings. An attendant passes, rapidly waving a hand as if to indicate closing time. Hans and Amara go down the infinite stairs of the museum to a tiny eating-place, where they sit down at a table covered with a waxed cloth. They order Hungarian goulash, the cheapest thing on the menu, which is written in chalk on a blackboard hanging on the wall.

  ‘Would you like a beer?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Impressive, that picture.’

  ‘But that’s all we looked at. We missed my beloved Vermeer.’

  ‘We’ll come again.’

  ‘Who do you think painted that camp?’

  ‘Someone who must have known it from the inside.’

  ‘Don’t you think a painter might have imagined it and described it without having been an inmate there?’

  ‘Not with that precision of detail.’

  ‘So for you art is only direct reportage?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘How would you compare that to Goethe or Dante?’<
br />
  ‘Goethe tells ominous fables. Dante invents. No one believes in his Inferno. It’s the delirium of a catastrophical mind. What enchants is his language.’

  ‘And Sebastopol for Tolstoy?’

  ‘Tolstoy lived through that war; he was there, even if only as an observer.’

  ‘What about Manzoni and the seventeenth century?’

  ‘When a writer writes about something not experienced directly, he sets in motion the artifice of the imagination. An artifice that remains indigestible to the reader.’

  ‘So we should throw away half the literature of the world. And nearly all modern painting.’

  ‘The Vermeer you love so much describes his own world, his time, his spaces.’

  ‘And Rembrandt’s Saul?’

  ‘Painters love mythology, but they have a trick. They make it into direct reportage by introducing their wives and children. Saskia is there in all Rembrandt’s paintings. That’s how he constructs his mythology. But in the long run tricks are boring.’

  ‘So according to you no one can tell a story unless they have lived it directly.’

  ‘No, what I’m saying is that imagination leads to fables and fables to mental regression. Nothing can have as much force as what you have lived in your own skin.’

  ‘Then you want artists to be egocentric narcissists. With any outward-looking perspective on the world, on past times, or on faraway stories, becoming a profanation and a crime.’

  ‘I wasn’t talking of crimes. Let’s leave those to Stalin who sent so many artists to their deaths because they presented a sad and contradictory reality that he disliked. But even if they had painted the optimistic and triumphalist world he wanted from them, they would still have been capable of eventually changing their minds, so he got rid of them before they even had time to regret being his friends.’

  ‘Isn’t that too reductive?’

  ‘I remember a story once told me by a friend who was a sculptor. It seems that one day, at the celebrations at a great provincial factory in the Soviet Union that had achieved maximum productivity, a famous painter brought along a work that had been commissioned from him: he had been asked to paint the factory at work, in a happy festive atmosphere with several Stakhanovites receiving prizes. Stalin himself had been invited to the celebrations and although he had not promised to come, he arrived unexpectedly in a helicopter from Moscow, creating enthusiasm and panic. The painter was terrified of showing his enormous new canvas. Even though he had put into it everything expected of him: the workers, the machinery, the prize-giving, and even a beautiful big symbolic figure of Father Stalin with a benevolent smile on his lips.’

  ‘The painter had agreed to do all this?’

  ‘Not voluntarily, but he had no choice. If he’d refused, he would have risked death. That was the climate of the times.’

  ‘And was Stalin happy?’

  ‘He spent a long time studying the painting he’d commissioned, smiling with gratification as he noted that all his requirements had been met to the letter; he even liked the portrait of himself, something that didn’t happen too often. He appreciated the fact that he had been beautified and presented as taller than he actually was, and surrounded by a halo of light that made him look almost divine. The painter, watching the dictator gradually running his gaze from one part of the picture to another and nodding with satisfaction, felt excited, almost euphoric. But suddenly he saw Stalin look surprised and worried. The great Father of his Country lifted a finger and pointed to a figure at one side, the silhouette of a worker standing with his arms folded: ‘And who is this?’ Everyone stared in consternation. Who was that man so obviously not working? ‘Why isn’t he working like all the others? Comrade, are you trying to create an incentive to strike? What do those folded arms and that self-satisfied face tell anyone who looks at the picture? You have included a saboteur in this representation of a model factory for exhibition at the Eighteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!’ The terrified artist stammered the reason the worker in question was just smiling and doing nothing more was because he was gazing at the great Father Stalin. But Stalin wasn’t listening. Next day the painter was arrested at his house by two police officers and taken off to prison.’

  ‘What a sad story.’

  ‘The story of an era. And we haven’t finished with it yet.’

  15

  ‘Sleep well?’

  ‘Sickening dreams.’

  ‘Better than lying awake.’

  ‘What shall we do this morning?’

  ‘What about looking for Orensteins in the phone book?’

  ‘Done already. I found a Theodor Orenstein. Does that mean anything to you?’

  ‘I’ve looked too. I found another. Name of Elisabeth.’

  ‘I called this Theodor. He’s a painter and lives in a little street near Stephansplatz, off Bäckerstrasse in the city centre.’

  ‘Did you make an appointment?’

  ‘He’s expecting us at ten.’

  Theodor Orenstein receives them in stained coloured trousers and a woollen blue and black check shirt. He seems happy to see them, even if they have clearly interrupted his work on a large painting propped against the wall that features angels flying over a huddle of reddish roofs.

  The man with the gazelles offers to translate but the painter is determined to speak Italian. In fact, it really seems he wants to take the chance to practise a language grown rusty in his memory. He says he’s happy to meet them, that he loves Italy, and that he would like a clearer picture of what they want from him.

  He listens attentively to the story of the Emanuele Orenstein whose fate is the object of the young Italian woman’s investigation. Meanwhile he offers them a glass of beer and some olives ‘from Greece’. He is a man of about forty. Apparently living alone. His tiny studio flat opens onto an equally minute and lovingly cultivated garden. The room is divided by a curtain behind which can be glimpsed a bed with a red coverlet. There is little furniture: a simple shelf, a rough table covered with a confusion of brushes and small tubes of paint, a bench by the wall and two rush-seated chairs cluttered with rags. A huge radio set dominates the corner under the window. On top of the radio, stretched like a pasha on a yellow cushion, an enormous white cat follows them with its eyes without moving a muscle. Amara swallows a mouthful of beer, nibbles an olive, and asks the painter whether he has ever had a relative called Emanuele Orenstein.

  The man smiles at them, blue eyes prominent in his beard-darkened face. Before answering he drains a couple of glasses of light, frothy beer. No, he has never heard the name Emanuele spoken in his family, but then there are many Orensteins in Vienna and they are all related. Can they show him a photograph? Amara brings out the familiar faded picture of Emanuele as a child from when they played together in Florence. The painter studies it in silence. Then shakes his head. The photograph rings no bell with him. His Italian is halting and slow but correct. He has visited Italy a number of times, he tells them, and is familiar with the museums of Florence and Rome. But he hasn’t been back for years.

  ‘And during the war?’ Amara ventures timidly, afraid to waken painful memories.

  Theodor Orenstein studies them thoughtfully, as if asking whether these strange visitors who have appeared from nowhere are worthy of hearing what he has to say. He scratches his head nervously. Then, slowly, he starts his story. His voice, initially timid and awkward, gradually gains in fluency and confidence. A soft, visionary voice that like his own painting manages gracefully to combine strange insubstantial weightless bodies with the concrete quality of roofs in a sleeping city.

  When war broke out Theodor was living in Vienna with his parents in Krügerstrasse, near the State Opera. The house no longer exists. It was destroyed by bombs during the terrible raids of 1944. The building he is living in now has only recently been refurbished and belongs to the Vienna Artists’ Association. He has been painting for years, and they have allotted him one room, that luckily has a han
dkerchief of a garden in which he has planted potatoes, courgettes and tomatoes, though these have little colour because so little sun reaches them and in winter the ground freezes.

  In Krügerstrasse he and his parents had a large apartment with five rooms, in which seven people lived: father, mother and three brothers besides himself, and an old deaf aunt.

  His father was a civil servant. An honest state employee who got up for the office each day at dawn, taking a tram which dropped him within a hundred metres of the Post Office.

  The man with the gazelles listens attentively to the painter’s tale. Amara looks from one to the other. They are so different physically, yet they resemble each other: they both have the ceremonious manner which strikes her so forcibly in Austrians. Superficially awkward, timid too perhaps because they have been taught to sublimate their feelings; slow to take fire, but once heated, capable of blazing passions. Polite and sometimes ironic if with a rather roundabout sort of irony, not always comprehensible to those who do not know them.