Probably Amara would never have been here in Vienna, in the company of her eccentric travelling companion, searching for traces of Emanuele, if she had never experienced with him that love as complete in itself as an egg: radiant, perfectly formed, warm and full of life. Like the egg of Eurynome, the ancient goddess of the Pelasgians, which long nurtured inside itself all the forests of the world, all the seas, all the lakes and rivers, all the mountains and fields and birds and fish imaginable. Every living thing was enclosed in that egg, condensed into a tiny space. Only the warmth of the mother’s body made the growth of the seas and the mountains possible until, as they grew, they broke the egg and spread throughout the universe, creating the Earth in all its beauty and variety.
19
Time to get up, Amara! She hurriedly pulls her legs out of the sheet which has wound itself round her waist during the night. The smell of coffee rising from lower floors urges her on. Her appointment with the man with the gazelles is at eight and she’s still dreaming.
Today it’s the turn of Elisabeth Orenstein, a name found in the telephone book. Could she be one of Emanuele’s relatives?
Half an hour later, Amara and the man with the gazelles climb the grey stone steps to a mansion in Secession style. The great door before them has windows covered with tropical flowers and birds of paradise. A fine house still strangely intact amid the rubble of the war.
They press a button that sets off a bell worthy of a convent full of nuns. They hear hurried steps, then the handle turns and the door opens. On the threshold is a woman of average height with smiling sky-blue eyes, ruffled grey hair and hands stained with what they will later realise is glue. She already knows what they are looking for and seems happy to see them. She welcomes them into the living room and invites them to sit on small armchairs upholstered in corduroy and protected by coarse white sheets. With a quick youthful movement, she sits down cross-legged on the carpet as if used to practising yoga. Two sturdy freckled calves emerge from beneath her crumpled blue skirt.
‘What can I do for you?’
Amara is about to speak, but the man with the gazelles is too quick for her. He clearly feels it his duty to smooth her path. He tells their hostess about Emanuele Orenstein, a son of Austrian Jews who lived many years in Florence before returning out of a mistaken sense of patriotism to Vienna just when the Nazis were stepping up their persecution of his race. Amara still has many letters from the little boy of that time who wrote to her almost every day. And after the war she received in the post a school exercise book containing letters he had not been able to send her. The last of these is dated May 1943 and seems to have been written in the ghetto at Łódź. His friend Maria Amara believes young Emanuele must have been transported to Auschwitz because that is what usually happened to Jews from the Łódź ghetto. That is why she is here, trying to find him alive or dead, above all because she constantly dreams that Emanuele is speaking to her, asking her to come to him. Meanwhile she would like to know if you, Elisabeth Orenstein, are related to Emanuele, and whether you ever met him or know what happened to his family.
The woman seems overwhelmed by all this information. She says yes, she did know Emanuele’s parents, the engineer Karl Orenstein and his second wife Thelma Fink. But she was not related to them. She remembers hearing many discussions in the Jewish community about people who came back and she always thought their case the most striking. Others had returned from abroad during the thirties but with more reason. But that a Jewish family, however rich, should return to Vienna in the worst years of Jewish persecution had seemed exceptionally rash even to the most optimistic. Remember that most Austrian Jews, particularly the better-off ones, had already left, mostly for the United States or Palestine or Latin America. She had heard of very few travelling in the opposite direction. Though there were a few and none more striking than Karl and Thelma Orenstein. It is just possible they might be distant relatives of hers, but she has never been much interested in family relationships.
Elisabeth’s mother died young. As soon as the Nazi persecutions started, her father took her with him to Holland. Just before the Nazi invasion they moved on to Palestine. There they worked hard, helping to develop the first kibbutzim. Her father, an electrotechnical engineer, applied himself to cultivating the land. Elisabeth herself collected tomatoes and drove a tractor up and down the arid furrows. They dug wells in the desert to find water for the fields. Difficult years, full of hardship but also of intense enthusiasm. Every day people arrived from all over the world and were kindly received. Everyone worked uncomplainingly in the fields as if their energy would never be exhausted. The energy of a rediscovered land, of a new nation rolling up its sleeves and building its own homes, farms, industries and schools.
Amara sympathetically watches this generous woman talking without reserve about her past. Like Emanuele’s own story, a typical story of European Jews; full of variety, complexity and problems and containing both winners and losers.
‘How come you didn’t stay in Palestine?’ asks the man with the gazelles.
‘Something got spoilt with the passing of time. First constant disputes with the Palestinians whose land however legitimately we had taken away from them. The United Nations approved it and had legalised our invasion, but it was an invasion all the same and this the Palestinians were not willing to accept. On the other hand, where else could Jews who had been expelled from their homes in Europe go? Madagascar had been suggested, a project of Hitler’s that came to nothing because the British navy made access to the African island impossible. And so we had to learn to use force. Militarism became stronger than the will to rebuild the land of our fathers. What had started as a wonderful duty to defend and construct turned into a senseless war against people poorer and more radically displaced than ourselves. Rather than mitigating and improving our difficult relations with the Palestinians as we had initially hoped, other Arab nations made things worse by stoking up the fire and planning to annihilate us, just like Hitler. So defending ourselves became first a necessity and then a neurosis. Who did the land belong to? To Jews with religious roots fishing in the historical waters of cities like Jerusalem and Haifa, or to the Palestinians who had cultivated it for centuries and made their homes there? And we who had lost millions of our brothers and sisters in the Nazi gas chambers, had we any right to a refuge there? We who had worked from our first arrival to transform abandoned deserts into flowering gardens, what were we to do? Let ourselves be thrown out a second time? Arms have grown daily more important, as have soldiers, generals and war heroes. My belief was that security should not start with rifles, but with the building up of a new relationship with our neighbours, with whom we needed to learn how to share the land. Ours had been a painful nomadic history, but now we wanted to settle in one place at last and cultivate our land in peace. At first this spirit of peaceful conquest and good neighbourliness did exist. Then it was somehow lost. Certainly the Arab world did nothing to encourage conciliation, but rather did everything possible to make the friction between us and the Palestinians bitterer than ever. They never raised a finger to encourage the creation of two autonomous and friendly neighbouring states. They have shouted so violently that Israel must be destroyed and the Jews eliminated that the Israeli people have come to think only in terms of defence and making preparations for war. That was not the ideal of those of us who have always been pacifists. Others wanted peace too, but they were in danger of being condemned as traitors to their own land. In short, life became difficult. Which is why we left Israel and why we are here now. In any case, German was our language and our mountains are here in central Europe; how could we ever forget our mountains?’
Elisabeth smiles as she speaks. The sky-blue eyes grow wider in her pale face. There is something sincere about her, something gentle, and yet at the same time she is clearly a fighter. She stands up and slaps her forehead with her hand. ‘But where are my manners, I haven’t offered you anything,’ she says cheerfully, going into th
e kitchen, soon returning with a huge plate of fresh fruit and glasses of iced tea.
‘Please try to remember something more of the family of Karl and Thelma, if you can,’ presses the man with the gazelles who seems to have taken the search for Emanuele so much to heart as to have made it almost his own.
Amara bites into an apple. Her eyes follow Elisabeth’s solid body as it moves lightly through her luminous house. When she let them in she had told them her work was making new bindings for antique books. In fact, spread everywhere are large volumes with newly reconstructed parchment covers, and slender books in red and brown leather covers. And jars of glue, balls of string and fine cord, bobbins of sewing-thread, rolls of paper in all colours and sheets of parchment stretched between strips of wood and presses of every size.
‘Is this where you make the new bindings for your books?’
‘This is the only room I have for work and receiving people. My bedroom is upstairs. Out there on the balcony I grow Italian basil and honeysuckle. This was once a great house inhabited by a Wehrmacht officer, a certain Captain Hoffman. He had fifteen rooms and I don’t know how many servants. After the war it was divided into a lot of tiny apartments. I live in this one. In the other rooms there’s a railwayman and his family, and a postal worker with two delightful twins who often come to see me when I’m making chocolate cake. I make it specially for them. Though it’s not easy to find cocoa powder these days. And when you do find it, it’s so expensive, too much for my pocket.’
The man with the gazelles keeps mentioning Emanuele but it seems Elisabeth has little more to add. ‘It gets really cold here in winter. The windows don’t close properly and there’s no money for new ones. I have a coal stove, but the coal’s in the cellar and I have to climb up and down the stairs with buckets that dirty my hands and clothes. Sometimes the water is cut off and the electricity fades and surges and blows out the bulbs. When I complain they tell me we’re living in a difficult post-war period. But the war finished eleven years ago. The trouble is the city’s filling with people and there isn’t enough energy for everyone.’
And Emanuele? Why does she avoid mentioning him? Is there something she doesn’t want to say or can’t say?
Amara continues to watch the woman who has gone back to sitting on the floor, crossing her legs with remarkable agility. Now she has also taken off her shoes and is massaging her feet which are covered with white cotton socks.
‘Can you really not remember anything more of this family that bears your own name? Surely people must have talked about them when they returned to the city of their ancestors in a time of total war?’
‘I was in Palestine,’ she answers thoughtfully. ‘We knew so little about what was happening in Vienna, perhaps we didn’t even want to know. Our horizons had changed completely and our problems were different. Even the books we read had changed: Tolstoy and Stefan Zweig had given way to the Bible and George Orwell. I know little or nothing of Karl and Thelma even if they may have been distant relatives. Someone even accused them of being paid German spies. It was the only explanation anyone could imagine for the choice they had made. A stupid, insane choice. It probably led to death for all of them.’
‘They could also have been arrested in Italy,’ Amara ventures to say. ‘In October 1943 the Jews of Rome thought they were safe because they had handed over fifty kilos of gold they had struggled to collect to an SS major called Kappler in exchange for an assurance of security. The Nazis had promised that once the gold had reached them the Jews of the Rome ghetto would be left in peace. Instead early on the morning of 16 October they came with cattle trucks and collected every Jew they could lay their hands on: women, children, old people, anyone who couldn’t get away. They were all deported to Auschwitz.’
‘But Karl and Thelma came from Florence. Perhaps it would have been easier for them to escape the Nazis?’
‘Three hundred and two were deported from Florence and the surrounding district. Does that seem little to you?’
‘But do you really think they were spying for the Nazis?’ persists Hans.
‘I don’t know. Their insistence on returning to Vienna in the midst of the deportations is too bizarre. They had a large house and expensive cars and servants. How can you explain it?’
Had she not claimed to know nothing about them? That she had been in Palestine? How did she know that they had a large house and a lot of servants? But neither the man with the gazelles nor Amara dares to contradict her. She seems so sure of herself. Clearly she believes Emanuele’s family sold themselves to the Nazis. But in return for what? In return for safety for themselves? How could they have trusted the Nazis? But could they have survived even if they had?
‘I have no more to tell you, dear Amara, dear Hans. I really do hope they weren’t spies because it would be a black mark against us all. How could they have joined the Nazis who had set themselves so ruthlessly to wipe us all out? To ensure safety for themselves? One or two did that, but they paid dearly for it. You couldn’t negotiate with the Nazis, you could only fight them. If they sweet-talked you it was only to squash you more effectively a moment later. Everyone knew that. Perhaps, having been living in Florence, they had never really known what the Nazis and their imitators, the fascists, were capable of.’
‘What would you advise us to do next in our search for traces of Emanuele? Who in any case can’t be held responsible for the decision his parents made.’
‘I’m sorry about little Emanuele. He’d be a handsome young man today.’
Amara starts. How can this woman know if he was handsome or ugly? Or is she saying this just for the sake of saying anything? Looked at more closely, she seems more enigmatic and impenetrable than she appeared at first. There is a shadow in her eyes that Amara cannot interpret. But she can guess from the contradictions and enigmatic silences that something is being left unsaid.
‘You could go and see their house. I have an old telephone book from the forties I kept merely from curiosity. I’ll get it for you. Have a look. If the building wasn’t bombed, someone there might remember Karl and Thelma and little Emanuele better than I can. Maybe they were seen leaving in lorries like so many others, or in a limousine, as would be fitting for those who were rich and respected.’
‘We know where they lived, in Schulerstrasse.’
‘There you are then,’ concludes Elisabeth with a kindly smile.
There seems nothing more to say. She watches them with generous eyes that nevertheless contain a hint of farewell. The man with the gazelles senses what is about to follow, and after ceremoniously kissing the hand of the binder of antique books he heads for the stairs.
Back at the Pension Blumental Amara finds a letter waiting for her. Who can have written to her in Vienna, at the address of a pension she has told no one about? She hurriedly opens the envelope. The handwriting at once brings to mind her ex-husband. It is in fact from him.
Dear Amara. I got your address from the newspaper. I don’t want to disturb you, I know you’re on a work assignment, but I’m in hospital and would like to talk to you. Before I go I’d like to say a few things. Forgive me for interrupting your journey. But it’s only because I’m in such bad shape that I’m doing it. I shall probably not leave this hospital alive. I’ve read some of your articles from Poland. Congratulations. I need to see you one last time, please do as I ask, here’s some money for the journey, I hope no one steals it, I’ve put it between two sheets of paper so no one can see it. Waiting anxiously for you, your Luca.
Amara opens the windows of her room, which smells stuffy, and thinks of the beautiful slim body of Luca Spiga. In hospital? How can she have known nothing about it? Logic tells her he’s probably blackmailing her, but a gut feeling is urgently pressing her to rush to the sick man’s bedside. Before she has even had time to wash her hands she finds herself thinking how to change the ticket she had already reserved and what to put in her suitcase. She will come back, she knows she must do that, but how long will she ha
ve to be away? Reason tells her to wait, to think things over, to find out more before leaving. But instinct has already made her pull down her case from on top of the large wardrobe, and open drawers large and small to start collecting together her things.
20
Three p.m. The train to Italy. With a bag bought at the last minute, into which she has hastily thrust her nightdress, some underclothes, the exercise book in which she drafts her articles and two books. She has left her father Amintore’s suitcase with her jumpers, skirts, blouses and shoes in the care of Frau Morgan. It was not easy to tell the man with the gazelles that she was about to rush away.
‘If you are separated from your husband why hurry to him the moment he calls for you?’
‘He’s ill, in hospital. He wants to see me before he dies. I’d be a monster not to go.’
‘I think you’re making a mistake, just when we’ve discovered something definite.’
‘There’s nothing definite, Hans. We’re all at sea.’
‘We were about to go and see where Emanuele lived. I’ve already phoned the woman who is caretaker there. The building survived, it wasn’t destroyed by the bombs. They were expecting us tomorrow morning.’
Train to Budapest Page 13