‘And when did you get home?’
‘Three years later, at the end of the war. My hair had gone completely white and I was full of parasites. I had to delouse myself very thoroughly. But like all the poor I had parasites in my stomach: a bulging belly full of voracious worms that devoured everything I ate. But by now I was less exhausted and skeletal and was even beginning to put on weight. When I got back to my village they said, ‘Hi, Horvath, welcome home! We thought you were dead.’ And when they saw I was putting on weight they said, ‘We can see it’s not quite true that you starved at Stalingrad!’ No one realised that three years had passed since those horrors. But that didn’t matter to me. That was for the others. And that’s how I got the idea of collecting letters sent home by soldiers who didn’t survive. I went to see people and gathered together a large number of letters. I wrote letters to people myself and went to a lot of trouble. Then the library here helped me to publish the book. I’m glad it interested you. I’ll give you a copy. I’ve got heaps of them. Not many people want them. It seems the voices of the dead are of no interest. I deliberately put it up there in full view in the hope people might look at it. But no one touches it. You’re the first to have opened it and read it. For this I’d like to offer you a coffee. Come with me to my den.’
33
Moving with agility on his long thin legs, the elderly Horvath leads them to a little room almost too small to contain three people.
‘My kitchen, my living room, my lumber room, my study and my thinking corner. Please make yourselves at home.’
But where? There’s only one chair and it’s occupied by a pile of books. The table is piled with papers and magazines. But Horvath will not admit defeat; he runs out, opens the head librarian’s office and returns with two wooden folding chairs.
‘In any case the head librarian never appears. The secretary has just had a baby so it stands to reason she’s off work. Busy breastfeeding. But I can’t understand how the head librarian ever got his job. Anyway, he’s only interested in politicking. Hardly anyone ever comes to the library and I look after everything.’
As he speaks, he pulls down from a shelf three ceramic mugs with hook-shaped handles. Lighting a gas ring, he puts on a small pan filled with water from the tap. He opens an American army tin of soluble coffee, puts a spoonful in each mug and when the water boils he pours it into the cups. The coffee foams and spatters.
‘A little milk too?’
Amara and Hans say no. But he still extracts a tube of condensed milk from a shelf full of books and squirts it like toothpaste into the boiling coffee.
‘All done. Unfortunately there’s no sugar. But the milk is sweet. It’s the only way I have of sweetening coffee.’ He laughs. His teeth are broken and stained.
‘But what are you two doing here, what are your names?’
Amara and Hans tell him. And as they sip the bitterish coffee flavoured by the ancient pan that has boiled everything from onions to cabbage, potatoes and the occasional pork chop, they tell him their experiences. Horvath, who seemed so annoyed to have had to open the door to them that morning, is now cheerful and sociable. He presses them to have more coffee and tells his own story, without excessive modesty.
‘I toured half Europe collecting these Stalingrad letters. You will say: how can you have toured Europe when you haven’t a penny to your name? But I’m good at chatting to people, I get them involved and they invite me to lunch or dinner, they ask me to spend the night at their homes. Even a railwayman became so passionately interested in the idea of the book that he let me travel free in his cab, pretending I was a railwayman too.’
‘How many had you collected by the time you finished?’
‘A hundred or so, I think, I’ve never counted them. Every now and then another reaches me, even now. The word has got around. Someone may remember the bombardment of 10 January. Someone else that of 31 January when the Russians captured more than fifteen thousand Germans. Then somebody might want to describe in detail how he managed to get home and how it took him a year, perhaps, wandering about, stopping to work for this person or that, taking cows to pasture to earn a pittance and then continuing his travels, always on foot, with the aim of reaching his own village.’
‘So you never went back to Hungary?’
‘I did go back. But the house had fallen down and my people were all dead. There was no place for me. I decided to come here to Austria, and worked for five months on a farm near the border. But they wouldn’t let me across the frontier without a permit and I had no papers; I’d lost everything when I was wounded. All those hours under two dead bodies. I always remember them with gratitude; they saved my life. One night I had to go out because a cow was in labour and I couldn’t find the vet. She mooed and mooed and couldn’t get the calf out. So I started pulling its legs and while I pulled I talked gently to the cow who was nervous, until she quietened down and I finally got her offspring out. I was covered in blood but the calf was born and the mother was safe and sound. Look, you should have been an obstetrician, I said to myself, you have the right hands for it. My boss was so pleased he gave me some money, enough for me to be able to buy myself a passage across the border. I was quickly taken past the barbed wire at night and into the snow-covered mountain forest. Which way should I go? I asked my guide, but he held out his hand: first you pay. I paid him. And he immediately turned his back on me without even saying goodbye. Which way? I asked in desperation and he said, Go down to the valley. And so I did but after the first valley there was another then yet another. And I didn’t know whether I was going straight or crooked or where I was. I walked for a night and a day through a snowstorm with nothing to eat or drink. Then I saw a cave and slipped inside and found some wolves who looked at me as though I was a creature from another planet. I must have looked strange with my torn and dirty trousers, two blankets round my shoulders, enormous sandals made from a couple of American tyres, and white hair standing on end. The wolves gave me a wide berth and let me sleep; I couldn’t go any further. Next day I started walking again. There was no visible horizon; it was snowing continuously with a blizzard blowing. I had no idea where I was or where I was heading. Finally I came on a hovel and knocked, terrified that I’d find a forest ranger or police officer who would want to send me back to Hungary. Instead I found a countrywoman who was helping a she-goat to give birth. She made room for me at her side. Strange, don’t you think? From a calf to a kid. My life was hanging on a thread of maternity. Two corpses had saved me from being killed and two newborn animals saved me from freezing to death. The kindly countrywoman gave me a little milk from the she-goat and I was so unbelievably happy that I fell asleep there beside her. I stayed for three days and nights in that hut with no idea where I was, delirious with a high fever. The peasant woman, whose name was Herta, visited me and brought me milk. I was exhausted and my fever got worse but I was not about to die, I did know that. On the fifth day I felt better. This time when Herta brought me milk she kissed me and unbuttoned my flies and said, Look how well you are, you’re ready for love. So that’s what we did, there among the little goats. Herta seemed happy and so was I. I asked her rather carefully where we were. She spoke a strange dialect I could barely understand, but she explained, with the help of marks on the ground, that we were in Hungary, in the woods near Répcelak. I believed her; I had no reason not to. But it wasn’t true. The fact was that all the local men were dead and my Herta thought herself a queen because she had found a man for herself. She wanted to keep me. That was why she lied. In fact I was already in Austria, in the mountains round Sopron, near the Neusiedler See and the Hungarian border. She knew I wanted to get to Austria, so kept me isolated, promising that as soon as I was strong enough she would help me across the border herself. So I stayed in that freezing hovel, kept warm by the goats, for more than three months. I knew I depended on her. I didn’t know the area which was all forest and on my own I would have been lost. I was afraid they’d stop me at the frontier and
I believed the Hungarian guide had tricked me. Instead it was the woman who was fooling me. But she was sweet, my Herta. Methodical and reliable. She would bring me food: bread, an egg, a piece of fresh cheese. We would kiss till our lips were sore. We would make love, then she would leave again. Have you got a husband? I asked her once. She shook her head. If she’d had one he was dead. Any children? She gave an inscrutable smile. I would have liked to go to her home and meet her family, but she didn’t want that. She wanted me entirely for herself, hidden in that hovel in the woods with the goats. But after three months I was bored and felt trapped, and told her with some force I was not prepared to go on living like a mouse. She nodded very seriously. That evening she brought me a knapsack with fresh bread, dried meat, a piece of cheese and a small bottle of brandy. We kissed as we always did and made love more passionately than ever. Then she left and I never saw her again. I had no idea which way to go. But I could see a village in the distance in the forest, clinging to a steep hillside. I headed for it assuming it must be a Hungarian village. I was afraid and walked slowly, thinking things over in my mind. On the road I met a peasant and when I spoke to him I understood at once that my Herta had deceived me. We were in Austria, no doubt about it. I burst out laughing; the peasant didn’t understand. I laughed and laughed and he looked at me strangely. I asked him whether he had any work for me. I told him I was a vet, that I was good at helping cows to give birth. He took me with him and gave me fresh clothes and something to eat. He understood I was someone who had escaped but that didn’t matter to him. A free vet was more interesting. So I used the tiny library in the village and started studying books on medicine. And eventually I made it. I’ve learned so much from books. For that I love them and will always love them.’
‘But how did you come to be a librarian?’
‘I spent so much time in the village library that I became everybody’s friend and when the old librarian died I asked if I could take his place. I was satisfied with very little and was good with the archives. They accepted me. They could see I was a serious worker and after a few years I was transferred to Vienna to restore this old library which had been bombed.’
‘I’d like a copy of your book,’ says Hans who has brought the book with him and is turning it in his hands.
‘I’ll make you a present of it. I’m sorry I can’t offer you an armchair so you can read more comfortably. The city has been almost entirely rebuilt but libraries are last on the list; what does it matter if part of the building is in a state of collapse, if there is no room for any more books or if there is no heating? Not many people want to read when they have to spend their days trying to find a little coal, or something to put into their mouths. And the few who do come in never stay precisely because it is so cold and we are short of chairs.’
Finally, half-closing his eyes, he asks them in a humble voice as if afraid of being indiscreet, what they are looking for in Vienna.
Hans explains. Horvath looks at them in wonder.
‘It’s extraordinary, this fidelity to memory,’ he says with a mixture of admiration and disquiet. ‘I realise it’s difficult … even if the Nazis did keep registers, in the end they destroyed them all. Or nearly all of them. You say some new ones have been found?’
‘It seems so.’
‘Then why have the allies not appropriated them?’
‘That’s just what we want to find out. We’re waiting for our visas.’
‘You’ll have to wait a long time. Unless I come with you. I need to look for some books in Kraków. It’s easier for a librarian to get a visa for a short trip to look for books. You can come with me.’
Amara looks at him apprehensively. How to curb his enthusiasm? And how can such a journey by a Hungarian, an Austrian and an Italian to the kingdom of the dead be organised?
‘You’ll see, I can be useful to you,’ he says, with a smile on his lips that suddenly makes him young and beautiful.
‘But … and the library? Who will look after it while you’re away?’
‘It’s time the secretary came back to work. She’s already been off for months on maternity leave. I’ll put everything in her hands and take a few days off. I haven’t had a holiday for years.’
34
Such a strange trio. Horvath, Hans and Amara, on the train to Kraków. But at the last moment they decide to go via Hungary. Hans has written to tell his father he would like to pay him a visit. And his father has answered happily that he’s looking forward to it. And Horvath would like to put a flower on his sister’s grave and see if anything is left of the house where he lived as a child.
At Hegyeshalom, at the border, the engine shuts down completely. It will be a long wait, which was predictable. Many get out to look for a coffee at the bar which has already been stripped bare by the previous train; it has nothing left to offer except little bags of camomile from the Ukraine, loose powdered sweets that look as if they have been sitting in their glass jar since before the war, and Russian cigarettes, the ‘papiroskas’ the soldiers despise partly because they are Russian but also because they consist almost entirely of paper, and what little tobacco there is in them stinks of sawdust.
The frontier guards search the carriages. They stop suspiciously in front of the foreigners. Hans particularly alarms them: his origins are too heterogeneous, his journeys up and down Eastern Europe excite mistrust. Amara’s papers are in order but what is an Italian woman doing on a ramshackle train from Vienna to Kraków via Budapest? Luckily Horvath is there, with his ascetic air and ability to speak both excellent Hungarian and German. He is even able to speak polished Russian to the Soviet supervisors who are always present at the frontiers. With Olympian calm and a permanent smile, Horvath explains slowly and simply who they are and where they are going. To look for books for a new library in Vienna. Hungarian books for Hungarian readers living in Austria. The guards are dumbfounded. Who is this old man with such an authoritative air who travels for days to go and look for books? There’s certainly something about him to instil respect. And they withdraw without comment.
The three are taken to the station offices and searched by the gloved hands of inscrutable guards. Their passports are taken away. Their bags are opened, rummaged in and examined with comic pedantry. A small bottle of water scented with Parma violets that Amara has in her bag is uncorked and sniffed by first one soldier then another, then by yet a third. The little bottle is passed from hand to hand almost as if it might contain liquid explosive. But in the end Amara realises that these young guards, two of whom are women, are motivated less by suspicion than by a morbid curiosity about the products of the West; they finger the underclothes and open the blouses and shake out the skirts as if to say: just look at the bourgeois pretensions of the West. But when all’s said and done, what’s it all about? Nothing to speak of.
The three friends are hungry. But there is nothing to eat. They have spent a whole day in the train, and consumed the provisions they prudently brought with them. They never imagined there would be so many stops, so much waiting, and so many obstacles before they reached Budapest.
In the evening the train starts again. A fragment of moon is hanging like an icicle over a potato-shaped mountain. Dogs are barking far away. Horvath is cold. He pulls a chequered blanket from his cardboard suitcase and drapes it round his shoulders.
‘Aren’t you hungry?’
‘Cold.’
‘I’m hungry.’
‘Me too.’
‘Shall I see if I can find something?’
‘You won’t find anything. The train’s full of starving people.’
At Győr the carriages fill with Hungarian soldiers from Czechoslovakia who laugh, eat and fool around. Apart from one who is weeping in a corner because he has lost his best friend. But not in war, as Horvath will report later with his mania for getting into conversation with everybody. A soldier called Bilo has died of typhus after drinking contaminated water. The happy brigade is on its way from East Germany to Sze
ged. They have been at work on frontier defences. ‘War? Rubbish,’ says one boy, stuffing an enormous omelette roll into his mouth. ‘There are no more wars in the world, and there never will be any more. All wars are over. And that’s a fact.’ The youngsters cheer. One pulls from his knapsack a flat bottle in a lovingly crafted red wool cover and lifts it to his mouth. Someone shouts and reaches out a hand. The boy passes the bottle. Pálinka, the commonest form of plum brandy. Others open their own knapsacks and take out bottles of every shape. All neatly covered in coloured covers crocheted by solicitous mothers and wives. ‘To warm you when you feel cold,’ they will have said as they dressed the little glass bottle or aluminium or pewter flask.
But in no time at all the carriage is an encampment of shouting and singing drunks. One vomits out of the window. Another gets a friend to start delousing him.
‘Couldn’t we move to another carriage?’ suggests Amara tentatively.
‘But where? Can’t you see the whole train’s full? There are people stretched out in the corridors.’
The train stops several times in open countryside. Peasant women in flowered cotton headscarves approach the carriages, at first shyly then more and more shamelessly, to sell hard-boiled eggs, dried figs and little wild apples. And the young soldiers stretch out their arms to bargain and shout, finally buying an egg for eight or a basket of plums for twenty. The women haggle too from below, but more softly. They are afraid of rebukes or fines from the railway police.
Train to Budapest Page 22