‘We have to go there, Amara. I’ll go and buy tickets. I’ll pass by to pick up your passport for the visas towards ten, okay?’
Amara says yes. She turns to see Frau Morgan with a cup of coffee especially for her. By now she has developed a taste for their investigations and addresses her lodger in a conspiratorial tone.
‘News, Frau Sironi?’
Amara would like to tell her about the man passing himself off as Emanuele but who doesn’t resemble him in the least and is in any case much too old. But she makes no mention of that meeting which still seems unreal. Instead she tells her about the new lists discovered in the SS shelter and of the trip they are going to make to Poland as soon as they have the necessary visas.
But the police are getting suspicious. What are these two up to going backwards and forwards between Vienna and Kraków? They are interrogated separately. Amara has to spend hours and hours waiting on a bench while they interrogate Hans, then it is her turn to face the usual questions to which she replies wearily, trying not to let it get on her nerves too much. But the police hold all possible or imaginable cards in their hands. Since the two are not commercial travellers, no one can understand why they are constantly asking permission to cross the border. Amara being a journalist doesn’t make things any better. What does she want to write? What is the ideological line of her paper? Et cetera, et cetera.
‘Come back in two days.’
‘But in two days we’ll have lost our train reservation.’
‘You can make another.’ Amara tries to explain that she has been sent by an independent Italian newspaper to write about the countries of Eastern Europe. She pulls out permits, her journalist’s card, her passport. But the police are inflexible.
‘Come back in two days.’
For Hans it’s even worse. What is he really after, this half-Jewish, half-Hungarian, half-Austrian man, half journalist and half not, half music teacher and half student, wanting permission to travel to Poland? Does he not understand that we’re in the middle of a full-scale cold war? That the border is closed? That urgent, important reasons are needed for anyone to be allowed to travel? That the reasons they are giving seem to make no sense? That rubber-stamps and visas issued by the government of Austria are not valid for Poland, or even for Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the countries they want to pass through in order to reach Kraków? The fact that his mother was Hungarian and died in a Nazi concentration camp is irrelevant. So is the fact that his father is a musician living in Budapest. How can it possibly be of any interest to the frontier administration that the young lady is travelling with him – and is she married or not? – if married, where is her husband? Or is she separated? And where does she want to go?
There is simply no end to the questions, and every time a new official appears they have to start again at the beginning. Hours and days pass like this. They spend the first night with the police, sitting on a bench. At about four in the morning a kind and very young policeman, moved by pity, brings them hot tea and a blanket. At nine the interrogation begins again. Then, at one, an officer in a torn uniform tells Amara she can go back to the pension, but that the man, Hans Wilkowsky, must stay with the police.
‘But why?’
‘Madam, please go. You’re lucky we aren’t repatriating you to Italy. As soon as we have all the information we need we’ll release you. If we get it. If we’re satisfied with it. Meanwhile please go back to the Pension Blumental. We’ll be in touch.’
So she was dismissed. She left the police with her clothes crumpled and her hair stuck to her cheeks after a night sleeping against the dirty wall of the waiting room, with her feet gone numb inside her shoes.
Frau Morgan greeted her with an enigmatic smile.
Amara went up to her room and stretched on her bed trying to read a book and forget all that wasted time. Next morning there was a knock on her door.
‘You’re wanted on the phone, Frau Sironi.’
She ran down the stairs, hoping anxiously that it was Hans. She felt lost in Vienna without him.
‘They’ve withheld my passport.’
‘Then what can we do?’
‘They’ve only given me a permit to Kraków and back, passing through Budapest. That should be enough to reach Auschwitz.’
‘And our time-expired tickets?’
‘I managed to change them. It cost a bit. See you at Figlmüller’s in an hour?’
Figlmüller’s, once just a beer cellar, now a fourth-class restaurant, is full of smoke. The menu for the day is nailed to the wall on a piece of cardboard. Pork crackling with beans, sauerkraut and sweet-cooked potato.
Amara has sat down by a window marked with greasy fingerprints and traces of long-dried rain. Outside there’s a boy playing in the middle of the square with a dog, making it jump and run round in circles. He picks up a stone and throws it to the far end of the square. The dog rushes off, picks up the stone in its mouth and brings it back wagging its tail at the child, who wipes his nose on the sleeve of a patched and faded red sports shirt. The dog drops the stone right in front of the boy’s down-at-heel shoes; the boy bends to pick it up and solemnly throws it again towards the flower beds at the far end of the square. The dog shoots off like an arrow, runs around with its nose to the ground, finds the stone, picks it up and runs back, leaping over obstacles like a hare. Enchanted, Amara watches this game that could go on for ever. A game of sudden loss and rediscovery, of going away and returning. Who knows why it gives so much pleasure to both boy and dog? The repetition of a familiar action? The freedom of a chase that leads nowhere and is thus entirely gratuitous and pointless? The joy of two creatures acting in unison on opposite sides of the square? The sheer pleasure of being able to flex one’s muscles? There’s something insane about repetition. But it can also bring great peace. Aren’t lullabies based on repetition? And magic spells and prayers? The more often one repeats a gesture the less one understands it. And in that failure to understand lies the mystery of a game that imitates the mysteries of the universe.
But look, there’s a tall figure crossing the square between the boy and the dog with rapid, joyful steps. Hans. A man who is winning, it occurs to her. But winning over what? Certainly not over poverty. Over the cold? No. Over love? Not that either. Over life? Perhaps; over the meagre, angry life of the post-war years that promises so little for the future. He has on his usual sweater with the running gazelles. His elderly boy’s head sits firmly on his thin neck. His light-brown hair with its occasional streak of grey is slipping softly across his broad brow. A sudden surge of affection drives her to wave a hand timidly in his direction. But Hans doesn’t notice her through the dirty glass. Entering with firm steps he looks round; sees her sitting in the corner, smiles and goes over to her.
He’s wearing motorcyclist’s gauntlets even though he sold his motorcycle years ago. On top of the gazelles he has a waterproof jacket slung over one shoulder.
‘What can a citizen of the West want in a city of the East? Why can’t Mr Hans Wilkowsky stay at home? What is all this coming and going? What can he hope to find in the camp at Auschwitz? And why is he taking with him Mrs Maria Amara Sironi Spiga, an Italian from Florence? I explained it a hundred times,’ says Hans, sipping a large cup of milky coffee, ‘but they seem incapable of understanding.’
Amara has propped her elbows on the little table cut from a single piece of wood, and is listening with a worried expression.
‘My transparency alarms them. They asked me so many questions that by now they know everything there is to know about my life. But nothing satisfies them. They’re as suspicious as monkeys. Just wait and see, they’ll interrogate Frau Morgan. And we can expect a visit to your room in the Pension Blumental. They’ll go through everything then put it all back as it was. Their conscience isn’t clear. I told them repeatedly that we’re searching for traces of a child who disappeared in ’43. And that you are also writing articles for an Italian paper. Who knows what they think can be hidden behind that.
They’re probably following us now. Listening to every word we say. But why should we care?’
‘Do you really mean they could be spying on us at this very moment?’
‘Possibly. How could all those guards and secret service agents make a living, if not from the existence of people like you and me who refuse to stay quietly at home but insist on travelling from city to city in pursuit of a child now grown up, who just possibly may have survived the war?’
‘And my permit?’
‘You’ll have to wait. They won’t say anything definite. Maybe two days, maybe five. There are things they have to check. I expect they’ll have phoned the police in Florence about you. And they’ll have rummaged through the whole of my past to find out who I am and what I want. For a bureaucrat it’s difficult to understand that anything can ever exist for no particular reason. There’s no obvious reason why I should come with you on your search for Emanuele Orenstein, there’s no obvious reason at all for your search, and there’s no reason they can understand for why you should want to go to Auschwitz again.’
‘Well, there is a reason. We’re going to study the new lists of arrivals at the camp.’
‘But that makes no sense to them. Too vague, too sentimental. It has to be a front for something else.’
‘What on earth can they suspect? They won’t find anything and in the end they’ll get tired.’
‘Let’s hope so.’
‘Shouldn’t you be writing for your paper? Make the most of the chance. I’ll take you to see the Belvedere Gardens.’
‘No, no gardens. I want to write about Vienna and the cold war. How the people are living and what they’re thinking.’
‘I’ll help you if you like.’
‘Have you no work of your own you should be getting on with, Hans?’
‘I did. But I’ve lost it. I’ll manage, though.’
‘How?’
‘Well, for example, by being a father to brides at the altar. So many men have died and someone has to take their place. I can perform. I have my own tailcoat. And I know how to smile nicely. People always say: you seem too young to be her father, but it’s wonderful how you and your daughter are as alike as two peas in a pod!’
He laughs, throwing back his head. Amara notices two gaps between his side teeth. Seeing her looking at his mouth, he shyly cups his hand under his nose.
When an hour later Amara returns to the Pension Blumental, Frau Morgan, red in the face, stops her before she can go upstairs. ‘You have caused me to suffer two hours of interrogation this morning.’
Amara apologises. But what can they have been asking? Frau Morgan looks askance, uncertain what, if anything, to say. All the fear caused by the war and the Nazi terror is coming to the surface again. We must all keep our mouths shut, Frau Morgan seems to be saying with her slightly squinting eyes that are looking simultaneously above and to one side of Amara’s face. Always mind your own business and keep clear of other people’s. Especially foreigners; you always have to keep them at arm’s length, because they only bring trouble.
‘They turned your room upside down, I warn you,’ adds Frau Morgan brusquely, heading for the stairs.
‘Never mind. I’ll sort that out.’
‘I’ve done it already. I just left a few papers on the floor because I wasn’t sure where to put them.’
‘I have no secrets, Frau Morgan. There’s nothing hidden in my room.’
‘But they don’t believe that. If only you know how many questions they asked me. And then they accused me of civil disobedience for taking two hours to report your name to the police.’
‘It’s the cold war, Frau Morgan.’
‘If I was you, I’d be furious. And they took away a packet of letters.’
‘They’ll find it very difficult to decipher them, and they’ll discover they’re only letters from my father, written down by Sister Adele. And from my husband Luca Spiga, who wants us to start living together again. Not very interesting, don’t you think?’
‘I don’t like the police and I don’t want them in my house, Frau Sironi. I’m very sorry but I must ask you to pack your bags. I don’t want them suspecting me. I have a boarding-house to run, you understand, and my good name to protect.’
‘As soon as my visas for Kraków and Budapest come through I’ll be on my way. I promise. But please can I stay two more days? You won’t see the police again, they’ll be too busy trying to decipher all those letters written in Italian. Just two days, all right? Then I’ll go.’
Frau Morgan half-closes her eyes, thinking things over. Her lips grow stiff and thin. She is clearly torn between sympathy for the young Italian who has always paid so promptly for her room, and fear of the police and what the neighbours may say when they realise she is herself being investigated. Then she bows her head in a less than enthusiastic gesture of assent.
31
The library should open at nine but today things are not as they should be. The doors are closed, and even when Amara and the man with the gazelles knock, nobody answers. They sit down on the steps that lead up to the great door decorated with historical scenes, and share a bunch of September grapes.
He is wearing a green shirt and beneath its gaudy collar the sweater with the running gazelles can be seen. She has on a light-blue raincoat and pink beret that give her the look of a high-school student.
They stand in silence watching the people pass. There’s still a lot of poverty around. Many people are wrapped in heavy patched coats, either too long or too short, with sweaters in dark colours so as not to show the dirt. Anyway, who has access to hot water? And soap is too expensive. Tired early-morning faces, resentful from having slept badly and too briefly, and knowing they must now face an exhausting and humiliating day. The young run; they have cheap clothes and second-hand army boots. The old move slowly in long handmade scarves and synthetic cloth caps.
‘How can this man and his gazelles make a living just by leading young brides to the altar as if they were his daughters, playing at being their father?’ asks Amara, pointing at the herd of gazelles running in orderly procession towards the future.
Hans turns his suntanned face towards her. The light-brown lock of hair slips over his brow. He screws up his ash-grey eyes with the patient gesture of one who must explain the inexplicable.
‘The house I live in is my own, my grandfather left it to me. I give music lessons, like my father. To his pupils. I inherited them with the house’ – when he smiles he takes on the malicious look of a child embarrassed by having to talk to others and planning to distract their attention with cunning little stratagems – ‘with that and the weddings I get by.’
‘I’m lucky too. I write for a provincial paper. It doesn’t have masses of readers but the few it does have think about what they read. They pay me on the nail. And I can write what I like.’
‘Do you keep a diary?’
‘No.’
‘I do.’
‘Will you let me read it one day?’
‘Maybe.’
Looking up Amara sees an elderly man advancing on them: he is extremely thin with long legs. His violet-coloured jacket hangs from his shoulders, his black trousers are covered with stains and he has two folders under his arm. He climbs the steps slowly. His trousers are too short. They ride up at each step exposing thin ankles lined with thick blue veins that stand out in relief, his two long broad feet confined in rubber sandals. His fine, modest face is surrounded by white hair, balding yet also thick, that forms a halo round his skeletal head. He is like a tired, perplexed Old Testament prophet laboriously climbing the steps to paradise, but not worried about getting there quickly.
Amara and the man with the gazelles get up and follow him up the steps. Finding his keys, he pushes open the great dark wooden door; they follow him in.
The spacious entrance hall smells of mould.
‘Sir and madam would like?’
‘Can we visit the library?’
‘It opens at ten.’
‘It says nine outside.’
‘I arrive at ten. The secretary comes when she feels like it. She’s supposed to be here at nine but at the moment she’s off work.’
‘Well, it’s nearly ten. Can we come in?’
‘Write your names here. Show me your papers. Leave your umbrellas and bags, if you have any.’
The old man sits down exhausted after pushing towards them a large exercise book with scuffed pages.
It’s a venerable local library with tall windows, long worm-eaten tables and uniform wooden chairs, though some have broken backs and stuffing coming out of their seats in tufts.
Amara and Hans go to the catalogue. Not much on the concentration camps, as if there could be nothing to say about facts so near in time and so inexplicable. On the other hand, not even the library’s readers seem anxious to know more. The books standing upright side by side seem never to have been touched, opened or consulted. They are chilly to the touch and their pages uncut. Undoubtedly there are more documents to be found in the libraries of the camps.
Amara reads their titles, pulls out a volume or two, puts them back in their places. More than anything, they are historical explanations. Few accounts by witnesses. Few novels or stories of the camps.
She sees Hans crouched on the floor, deep in what looks like a new volume.
‘What are you reading?’
‘Witness accounts of the siege of Stalingrad.’
Train to Budapest Page 20