Train to Budapest

by Dacia Maraini

  Now the soldiers doze, lulled by the slow regular rhythm of the wheels. One snores with his head propped on a companion’s shoulder. They have thrown their rifles onto the netting racks that hang above their wooden benches. It isn’t easy to sleep. The seats are hard and hunger is gnawing at them. Amara watches the countryside fill with shadows beyond the dirty window. A delicate bluish mist descends on the landscape, hiding trees and fields and even a little river running beside the track punctuated by black and white stones. The moon is closer now and has become more human, hinting at an unfocused smile. Through the dirty window Amara can make out the small figure of woman walking fast. Strange: either the train has slowed down, or the woman is running or rather flying. She tries to see the woman’s face but it is hidden by a cascade of nut-brown hair leaping and dancing in time with her steps. There is something familiar about the woman. Her strong, rapid step, her rebellious head, her long muscular arms are those of … there can be no doubt about it, her mother Stefania! How can it have taken Amara so long to realise it? The beautiful young Stefania, long dead but now more alive and active than ever. Where are you going? asks Amara with her mouth closed. Stefania doesn’t turn to look at her but seems delighted simply to be running beside the train. She is completely engrossed in her flight as if in some childhood contest. Amara timidly reaches out a hand to knock on the glass window with her knuckles. Finally Stefania lifts her head. She has the most beautiful big eyes but they do not see Amara. She can’t recognise me because the glass is so dirty, Amara tells herself. She goes on knocking discreetly on the window. Stefania smiles, but more to herself than to Amara. Where are you going, Mamma? Stop a moment, sit down with me. But in that instant her mother vanishes, leaving only her smile. The smile of the moon hanging there in the dark. You always cheat me, Mamma, you always have cheated me, like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. You slip off without speaking to me, not a single word, stop, say something to me! She tries to remember how it was when her mother bent over her when she was a child and hummed the tune of the wordless chorus from Madam Butterfly. Her mother was so beautiful that it hurt Amara’s eyes to look at her. And her voice rose from her throat like a tender breath of air. Why did you go away so soon? Then she sees her, covered with soil and blood, being raped by that friend of the lover who wanted to punish her. Papà has told me about it but don’t be ashamed, it wasn’t your fault. She sees Stefania move her hand to her bleeding legs and spit with rage. She sees her run towards a stream and crouch to wash the blood off her thighs. This is not what I wanted, says a well-dressed young man watching from behind a tree. I didn’t want it to end like this. I only wanted a light punishment, not a massacre. But Stefania turns her back and walks off, determined never to see him again. Will you go and report him? Do that, Mamma Stefania, please do that! But at that moment a whistle pierces her ear and she feels a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Budapest, Amara, wake up!’

  Outside, the intermittent light of yellow street lamps and a voice booming from a loudspeaker. The engine snorts, ready to start again. Horvath is lifting her luggage down from the rack.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Hans pulls on the sweater with the running gazelles. His fingers rake the hair back from his brow. More than ever he looks like a child grown old before his time, with grey stubble on his cheeks, and a mouth pouting with sleep and hunger.

  ‘Where are all the soldiers?’

  ‘Got off before us.’

  ‘Did you pick up the book that slipped down on the seat beside me?’

  ‘I’ve got everything. Let’s go.’

  In her state halfway between sleep and waking everything seems new and astonishing: why are those girls in white shirts with badges on their hats standing to attention before the train? Singing in melancholy voices to welcome some bigwig. And whose are those suitcases that shine like gold in the early morning sun, piled up in the station entrance hall? And where is that exquisite smell of freshly made coffee coming from, and that mixed smell of apple tart and dirty latrines?

  ‘I’d like some coffee’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘The shutters are still down on the bars. D’you know what time it is?’

  ‘Seven?’

  ‘No, five.’

  ‘Then where can that smell of coffee be coming from?’

  ‘Some private house.’

  The three set off, gloomily stretching themselves, lugging their large and small bags along the platform among the cigarette ends.

  ‘Look, the river!’

  A great dark serpent that unwinds slow and powerful before them. It has a majestic air. Above them stands Vajdahunyad Castle, grey stone glowing in the early sun, beautiful and proud.

  ‘Your father isn’t meeting us?’

  ‘I told him not to. We’ll take a taxi. But first let’s find some coffee.’

  The first place they find open is a milk shop. A tall sturdy woman is rolling up the blind. She switches on the light and watches them come in weighed down by their luggage, faces contorted. She smiles with amusement, and moves quickly behind the counter to put some milk on to heat.

  35

  Hans’s father has generously decided to put all three of them up. The man with the gazelles and Horvath are to sleep in the living room and Amara in the kitchen; while Hans’s father Tadeusz and Ferenc Bruman share the main bedroom.

  Tadeusz Wilkowsky has a talent for making cakes. He has set aside some hard bread and combined with pieces of apple and raisins and lard bought in the Sunday market, he has concocted an excellent strudel which crumbles the moment you touch it, though not the smallest bit is wasted. His friend Ferenc, after the dessert and a small glass of homemade apple brandy, delights them on this first evening, when he takes up his violin to play Bach’s Chaconne, as though filling the house with an austere song of welcome.

  Everyone has his or her own story to tell. Horvath talks about his experience at Stalingrad and his work as a librarian in Vienna, Hans describes his curious activities as a surrogate father for brides, and Amara remembers little Emanuele who she is sure is still alive and whom she will sooner or later find. She is unable to stop herself reading one of the boy’s letters aloud. The men smoke in silence thinking of who knows what. They would like to help her, they say. But how? Each proposes a different plan: go back to Auschwitz and check the new lists. Or make a thorough search of his home in the Łódź ghetto even if there can’t possibly be anything left of it after the long allied bombardment. Why not study the newspapers of the time? Or ask special permission to rummage in the SS archives. And what about that Peter Orenstein who claims to be the Emanuele they are looking for?

  ‘In my opinion he’s a swindler.’

  ‘I think so too.’

  No one has any confidence in the self-proclaimed Emanuele Orenstein. Particularly Amara whose senses refuse in the most categorical manner possible to recognise him. It isn’t him, she says firmly, it absolutely can’t be him. A person may change, but only up to a certain point. Something must always remain of what he was before, even if he was a child then and is now a man.

  Yet she still harbours a doubt and every now and then wakes in the night with her heart in her mouth, thinking she has got it all wrong. What if it really is Emanuele? And if he is hiding simply because he is afraid he will not be accepted? Can affection depend so much on appearances? What if someone can be so completely transformed by painful experiences that they even destroy the memory of the person they once were? Is it a particular body one loves, or a being undergoing transformation?

  They argue it out, four men and one woman, in that tiny apartment in Budapest, unaware of the deadly wave about to burst on their heads. The city sleeps and wakes again with steady, laborious rhythms. Everything seems calm. Their home on Magdolna utca is certainly a mess but friendly and peaceful; it only becomes noisy when all five sit round the table to eat a dish concocted by Tadeusz. They see themselves as part of an unchanging story, in the mysterious epoch that has
followed an atrocious war, struggling with the same shortages as all the other inhabitants of this sad and subdued city.

  Instead, without suspecting it in the least, they are on the lid of a boiling saucepan. A pan about to explode as day by day they wait for visas for Poland, write articles on the tedium and restrictions of communism, cook pork and potato pies, down tankards of Soproni beer and chatter about this and that, while they think up unrealistic schemes for discovering a child swallowed up by history.

  ‘There’s an electric atmosphere in the city,’ repeats old Tadeusz. But no one is listening.

  ‘What did you find at the market today,’ Horvath asks him.

  ‘Some nuts. Some rice. A hectogram of butter for eighty-three forints. I even found a piece of soap and that’s a miracle because for months there’s been no soap anywhere in Budapest.’

  ‘Bread?’

  ‘No bread. Hard-tack biscuits.’

  ‘What, like yesterday? They’re disgusting.’

  ‘That’s all there is.’

  ‘You should have got to the market earlier.’

  ‘Then why don’t you go? It’s always me that has to do the searching.’

  ‘I can’t, you know that.’

  ‘Because you’re asleep, that’s why.’

  ‘Stop squabbling, Father. Did you buy a paper?’

  ‘No one buys newspapers here. Just to read the voice of the Party always saying the same things? It’s not worth a penny.’

  ‘There must be something about the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.’

  ‘Not a thing. All secret.’

  ‘But it was on the radio: the secret text of Khruschev’s speech has even been published in the New York Times.’

  ‘Nonsense. When the Russians say secret, they mean secret. They have a sort of diabolical, maniacal, obsessive passion for secrets. So many secrets they don’t even know what they think themselves because they’ve lost the key to their own thoughts.’

  ‘A secret mother who gives birth to a secret son who in his turn marries a very secret bride, who after nine months gives birth to a top secret son, and so on.’

  ‘But this time something has leaked out. The secret has gone into circulation and flown all the way to New York. Isn’t that extraordinary?’

  ‘If true, it would be the beginning of the end for communism. You can’t have communism without secrets.’

  ‘Enough secrets to make a tomb.’

  ‘Enough tombs to make a cemetery.’

  The men laugh. Amara watches them tenderly. She asks herself how she can have ended up in this strange city, in the sole company of men, in a foreign country, in such a tiny home that they constantly stumble over one another. Yet they get on well, despite the scarce food cooked in the most extraordinary ways because of the lack of butter and oil, listening to the radio in a language of which she is only now beginning to understand an occasional word.

  ‘We must get hold of a copy of the American paper.’

  ‘It’s the only thing they were talking about yesterday at the Petőfi Circle.’

  ‘You went to the Petőfi Circle without telling me.’

  ‘Just happened to be passing by.’

  ‘What were they saying?’

  ‘The place was packed as tight as an egg. You couldn’t even stand against the walls.’

  ‘Were they discussing the Khrushchev report?’

  ‘The Khrushchev report, just that. Which according to the Party should have remained secret. And instead, there it was all over the biggest of the capitalist newspapers, completely mad!’

  ‘But what does this report say? Anything we don’t already know?’

  ‘Perhaps we did know, but when one of them says it, it all adds up.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning that Stalin falsified the trials, that he forced his enemies to make confessions under torture, that he had them shot for no reason. First his opponents, then his friends and collaborators, and on and on, the friends of his friends and those who collaborated with his collaborators.’

  ‘But they can’t say such things about our great and valiant father Stalin,’ says Tadeusz, pretending to wipe away tears. A pantomime. The others laugh.

  ‘And what are they saying about Hungary?’

  ‘That the country’s dead.’

  ‘The Petőfi Circle doesn’t seem in the least bit dead. You should have heard them!’

  ‘Were they shouting?’

  ‘No, not in the least. But you could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. And some were saying straight out it’s time we declared our independence.’

  ‘Well, today there’s to be a demonstration at the university. Let’s go there.’

  ‘To look for trouble?’

  ‘I’m going.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘And me.’

  ‘And me.’

  36

  A hall with long windows at the university. The doors have been thrown open, but it is impossible to get in or out because so many people are crowded together there. Even on the stone balustrades there are youngsters crouching to listen with their heads thrust through the iron grilles. But it is difficult to hear much. There are no microphones, and even though the speakers are shouting, their voices are easily lost in the mass of bodies. Yet poorly dressed girls and boys, wearing high boots for protection from the universal mud on this day of autumnal rain, are listening with great seriousness to whoever gets up to speak on the platform. Some voices penetrate the hum of the crowd, others don’t. Confusion. Meanwhile more people crowd in from the surrounding streets, from Baross, from József körút, from Üllői.

  At last a megaphone is passed from hand to hand over the heads of the assembled students and citizens to reach the platform. Now, amplified by the megaphone, the clear and resonant voice of a young man manages to reach even beyond the large crowded hall.

  ‘Soviets out of Hungary!’ he yells to universal applause. Some whistle, but happily. Some stamp their feet and raise both arms in a gesture of defiance. ‘Soviets out of Hungary!’ The shout spreads round the hall. Meanwhile there is movement near the door. The crowd squeezes up silently to make room for a boy to move forward dragging his feet in shoes that are too big for him. He holds a flag on a heavy pole resting on his narrow shoulder. Everyone turns towards the flag; there is something new and amazing about it. In place of the red star and hammer and sickle it has a hole in it through which the frescoed ceiling of the hall can be seen. Never before has the Hungarian flag been stripped of a symbol so cumbersome yet at the same time in everyone’s view so lethal.

  The effect of this mutilated symbol is extraordinary. Some cheer. Some shout and raise their hands towards the flag. Others weep openly, without shame.

  ‘But aren’t those two policemen?’ asks Tadeusz, turning to his son’s friends. Hans sees two police officers standing quietly smiling as they watch the crowd yelling against the Soviets. Something unthinkable before. What has happened to the Brother Party and the Father Country and all their pretensions and crude suggestions?

  Now the man with the gazelles translates the speaker’s words for Amara: ‘One: Autonomy for Our Country. Two: Free Elections. Three: Restoration of political parties. Four: Formation of a new government under Comrade Imre Nagy. Five: Exit from the Warsaw Pact. Six: Revision of the economic and political relations between Hungary and the Soviet Union. Seven: Freedom for all political prisoners. Eight: Abolition of the ÁVH secret police. Nine: Restoration of free trade. Ten: All criminal officials of the Stalin and Rákosi eras to face a tribunal. Eleven: An end to compulsory kolkhozisation …’

  The voice ends in a shout. Someone else snatches the megaphone and yells something incomprehensible. Many people whistle. Some raise their hands and shout ‘Go, go.’ Others form a chorus that chants: ‘One, Autonomy. Two, Free Elections. Three, Free Franchise. Four, Nagy and New Government. Five, Out of Warsaw Pact. Six, Public Trial for ÁVH officials …’

  ‘W
hat’s the ÁVH?’ asks Amara.

  ‘Rákosi’s secret police. Terrible. Ferocious. Spying on people every moment of their lives. Anyone could be denounced at any moment, thrown into jail for nothing. Tortured, executed by shooting. Dissidents sent to concentration camps to die of privation. Rákosi worked through them too. He introduced Stalin’s pronouncements in the schools. Even saying the word liberty became treason.’

  A rapid movement in the crush of bodies forces them back dangerously towards the wall. A group of students is trying to leave the hall, pushing back all those standing in the doorway, forming a wave that hurls the latest arrivals down the stairs, among them Amara and Hans. Where’s Horvath? asks Hans. He’s vanished; goodness knows where he is. But Tadeusz and the violinist have disappeared too, thrust aside by the overflowing crowd.

  Hans takes Amara’s hand to pull her away from the mob. The streets have become crowded. A spontaneous demonstration is spreading from Múzeum körút, led by women in coats with headscarves tied under their chins. Followed by men in hats and raincoats with threadbare elbows. An air of dignified poverty and a powerful will to protest. All are holding up their with two fingers extended and the others folded down. V for victory? Amara moves close to Hans. The crowd frightens her a little. She is afraid of being squashed at any moment. But the bodies have a miraculous capacity to move very close, as if glued together, without getting hurt. They carry the smell of their homes wherever they go. A smell of pickled cabbage and of cheap meat boiled many times to make it tender and extract a broth to last a week, of onions cooked in ashes, of lye, of cheap cigarettes, of unwashed hair because there is no shampoo or soap, of rotten teeth, garlic and paprika. ‘The smell of freedom,’ says Hans, sniffing the air, ‘I have not smelled it for such a long time.’