Train to Budapest

by Dacia Maraini

  In fact, he had never approved of any of her life choices. Not even her decision to enrol at a school of journalism immediately after she graduated in Law. ‘What has Law to do with journalism?’ he would say. Then he criticised her when she started working for a pittance for a provincial paper. ‘A trashy rag full of tittle-tattle, and you’re getting less per hour than a waitress.’ It was true, but it wasn’t easy for a girl to find work. She was satisfied. They had a long discussion about it.

  Now that he was dead memories, some of them comic ones, of the life they had shared came back to her in bursts. The kitchen at Via Alderotti with its rusty gas rings that sometimes got blocked and which he blew on as if to dust them, how he was the one who always let the milk boil over and block the holes the gas came out of. The refrigerator he was so proud of (it was one of the first) that made a sound like a cat in love, and how he would come into the kitchen determined to chase away ‘that damned cat!’ ‘But Papà, it’s the fridge making that mewing noise.’ ‘Don’t be silly, fridges can’t mew.’ But the fact was their refrigerator with its big convex door did mew from time to time. And he was always the one who did the cooking. He only knew how to make a few dishes, but he made them well: soup with rice and peas, fried cutlets with egg and breadcrumbs ‘alla milanese’, and a boil-up of stale bread, red cabbage, potatoes, garlic, oil and black pepper.

  They would eat in silence, listening to music on the radio. He hated the pop songs of the day like ‘Mamma’, or ‘Se vuoi goder la vita’ and ‘Ba, ba, baciami piccina’. He loved opera: Il Trovatore and La Traviata but also Don Pasquale and Manon. He knew whole arias by heart and would sing them at the top of his voice while beating leather to soften it. Two or three times he bought tickets for the Pergola Theatre and they had gone there to hear opera live. One evening, she can still remember it, it was La Traviata. They were in the gallery and following everything from on high. Amara, leaning out over a low painted wall that prevented her from stretching her legs, had watched a massive woman running about on the stage pursued by a man called Alfredo. To her they had seemed scarcely believable, comic and ridiculous. But her father had been moved. As they went out she confessed she had been bored and he had answered that like all young people she was ignorant and insensitive to beauty. But he said this without malice, as a simple fact you couldn’t do anything about.

  Another time it was Tosca, and she was deeply impressed by the reconstruction of Castel Sant’Angelo. The stage was dominated by an enormous plaster angel with outspread wings and sword in hand, balancing on one foot as if about to take flight. Tosca was a slim, agile singer, and she had enjoyed listening to her arguing with Scarpia when he was trying to blackmail her. At the end Amara had seen her throw herself off the battlements, leaping into space. Leaning out dangerously over the little gallery wall, she had also been able to see beyond the stones of the castle a thick mattress, on which Tosca landed with an acrobatic dive. When Amara clapped in admiration, her father gave a couple of nods thinking she was admiring Puccini’s music.

  A timid knock on her door. From the rustle of clothing she realised it must be Frau Morgan.

  ‘I’m not in to anyone!’ she cried from the bed.

  ‘Do you need a doctor, Frau Sironi?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘But surely you should eat something? Some good potato soup?’

  ‘No, leave me in peace!’

  ‘But you’ve been shut up here since yesterday, Frau Sironi. Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to call the doctor?’

  Since yesterday? She had never noticed the passing of time. She had been lying on the bed unsleeping without even managing to read, something most unusual with her. At one point she had heard herself talking. The little man had appeared before her, young and carefree, the lock of hair always falling across his fine brow, to tell her about his last trip to Monte Morello, and how he climbed Poggio all’Aia.

  ‘But, Papà, do you still play with your trains?’

  Her father, ridiculous in plus-fours and with a sly smile beneath his rakish moustache, started telling her about the new model locomotives now on sale.

  ‘You really should see the Rivarossi 691, a masterpiece! Or the Coccodrillo, the 6/8s!’

  ‘How can you know the names of engines when you’re dead, Papà?’

  Her father smiled behind his moustache.

  ‘Are you teasing me?’

  ‘Try the new Rivarossi. Just couple her to a few coaches and let her go. You’ll see! Wow!’

  Meanwhile Frau Morgan has slipped a note under her door. Hans wants to meet her at a bar called the Coffee House on Schweighofergasse. ‘I’ll expect you at three. Please come! Yours, Hans.’

  Isn’t it ridiculous that he is still addressing her formally when they’ve been friends for months? Suddenly she finds him grotesque, incomprehensible, irritating. I never want to see him again, she tells herself, and falls into a deep sleep.

  54

  Sitting in the Coffee House on Schweighofergasse, Amara is waiting for Hans. Outside large slow snowflakes are lightening the grey air of a December morning. Her stomach has contracted. She is not hungry. She has crunched a pretzel bought in the street and is now tasting heavily sugared tea. After her two days of seclusion everything seems new and different. The coloured festoons hanging across the windows for Christmas speak to her of mourning rather than impending festivities. And the trees with red rag balls hanging from their branches and silver balls made from cigarette wrappings hurt her eyes with their senseless glitter.

  She slowly sips the tea they have placed before her: a little paper bag darkening hot water in a tall glass with a metal handle. After Budapest life in Vienna seems luxurious: peaceful crowded streets and clean well-kept fruit shops where shiny bright apples sit tidily in their boxes behind windows adorned with flowers that reach out invitingly from their vases. Every time a customer comes into the bar a tinkling is heard. In and out go men protected by hats and long coats and women by berets and galoshes against the snow. They sit down at tables of unvarnished wood and order a beer, a white coffee, a tea or a glass of wine. They have the air of people who are thinking of love and business, not war.

  But wait, the door has trilled again. A man has come in. She recognises his threadbare coat the colour of a dead leaf, and the shirt open at his long thin throat. There is an affectionate smile on his dry lips.

  He sits down beside her, timid and morose. He doesn’t ask her how she is. For a while he doesn’t say a word.

  ‘I thought you’d gone back to Florence.’

  ‘I didn’t want to see anyone.’

  ‘Your father’s death?’

  ‘How did you know about that?’

  ‘Frau Morgan told me. I phoned several times.’

  ‘So you knew I hadn’t left.’

  ‘I knew.’

  Amara looks at him as she lifts the hot tea to her lips. This man has infiltrated himself into her life and little by little, timidly and almost unnoticed, has spread his roots. How deeply?

  ‘Well, what shall we do?’

  ‘Let’s go and see the house in Schulerstrasse. They’re expecting us.’

  ‘Who are?’

  ‘Ex-consul Schumacher and his wife Helga.’

  ‘The people now living in the Orenstein apartment?’

  ‘Exactly. Even if it seems they left it after getting it as a gift from the government then later took it back.’

  ‘What sort of people are they?’

  ‘Germans. He was in the Nazi diplomatic service. That’s all I know.’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  Amara and Hans catch a tram, then another, walk down part of the Kärntnerstrasse, enter the short Singerstrasse and cross Stephansplatz to reach Schulerstrasse. They stop for a minute or two to look at the building where the Orenstein family lived before they were deported to the ghetto at Łódź and then probably to Auschwitz. It is a large building from the early years of the century. Ten or twelve floors; pretentiously decked with Ionic
pillars, windows with fake Gothic architraves and a gigantic main door reached by a flight of marble steps shaped like a half moon.

  They go up the steps to face a locked door decorated with legendary and historical scenes. They look for the name on its brass plate. They find it and ring. A female voice invites them to come in.

  The door opens suddenly to reveal a courtyard full of ornamental plants. On the right another entrance leads to a lift in wrought iron and glass. Hans and Amara slip into the great space which closes with a puff and slowly begins to climb. Frosted glass windows with designs in white on white reveal the stairs as they unroll elegantly floor by floor.

  At the fifth floor, the lift halts with a dry hiss and they get out. They ring the bell. The door opens silently. On the threshold is a handsome woman with violet rouge, grey waved hair, and a fox fur thrown carelessly over a very elegant blue and grey wool dress.

  ‘Please come in.’

  Extremely polite, she leads them into a luxurious drawing room with long purple velvet curtains, Persian carpets to soften the floor, and armchairs and sofas covered in white linen and strewn with coloured cushions.

  ‘Do sit down,’ she invites them in a melodious voice. She is like a thirties film star. When she moves her blue and grey skirt dances round calves sheathed in transparent seamed stockings.

  ‘So you are friends of the Orensteins …’ she begins lightly.

  ‘Well, I never knew them, but Signora Maria Amara Sironi, who is Italian, was a close friend of Emanuele, the son of Karl and Thelma Orenstein who owned this building before …’ Hans looks around with embarrassment. He does not know whether to continue or not. But Frau Schumacher seems not at all put out.

  ‘Yes, I know that before us the Orenstein family lived here. When the government assigned this apartment to us we were living in Tokyo. My husband is a diplomat. He goes where he is sent, as I’m sure you understand. We had a large house and garden and, can you believe it, ten dogs. My husband loves dogs. Do you love dogs, Signora Sironi?’

  ‘Yes,’ answers Amara in embarrassment. She cannot understand why this woman wants to keep the conversation on such a mundane and pointless level. At the same time she looks round thinking Emanuele lived here. Perhaps he once huddled with a book in the very armchair she is sitting on now. She can almost see him.

  ‘It was just before Christmas, like now. We’d decorated the tree for our daughters Andrea and Margarethe. Wilhelm had already joined us,’ continues Frau Schumacher undaunted, without making sure her two guests are following her. ‘We were about to sit down at table. Our wonderful cook, Michiko, had roasted the stuffed turkey in the way my husband likes. Our dear butler, Yunichiro, brought me a letter. I opened it expecting Christmas greetings. Instead I read that the government was ordering us transferred within the week to Vienna to attend to administrative affairs, a move apparently decided by the Führer himself. So, instead of celebrating Christmas we had to pack our things. When we arrived we were told that the Reich’s department for administrative affairs was not yet ready and that we must move into an apartment, a fine one certainly, but not what we had expected. We didn’t even know that a family of Jews were living in our lodgings. We were assured the proprietors would move out within a few days and this is what happened. The house was in excellent condition, I have to admit that Frau Orenstein had kept it beautifully. There were flowers everywhere and elegant carpets and even valuable paintings. We would have preferred unfurnished accommodation; we already had so many possessions of our own. But the Foreign Ministry wanted us to take it just as it was, fully furnished with pictures, carpets and everything. Do you see those three men in dark blue against an azure background? It seems that Herr Orenstein probably bought that painting from the artist himself. Ottone Rosai, 1923. They say that Herr Orenstein was very well known as an industrialist in Italy, in fact they’ve told me that he owned a very fine villa in Florence, in the Rifredi district; and that unexpectedly, and, I have to say, most inadvisedly, he had decided to transfer his family to Vienna to reoccupy his house here, without considering the risks they would run.’

  ‘But did you never ask yourself where the Orensteins had gone, when they left a furnished house complete with carpets on the floor, pictures hanging on the walls and flowers on the tables?’

  ‘I would imagine they moved to another house. Or returned to Florence, to their beautiful villa at Rifredi. I’ve heard that they had dogs too and gave them German names, isn’t that strange? I mean, to call a dog Wolfgang or Heinrich, I do wonder whether that might not have been a little disrespectful towards humans … But unfortunately I never met the Orensteins. When we moved in here they had already gone. We lived here for nearly a year. Then we had to go back to Berlin. And there, in the bombing raids, we lost everything. Almost the only thing that was left of our house was the walls. The roof fell in and the whole block burned for a day and a night. Meanwhile my husband reached retiring age. So we decided to go back to Vienna where we had lived so well. Luckily the bombs had spared the old Orenstein house, so we were able to move in again. For a time an SS officer and his family had lived here, decent people who knew how to keep the apartment just as it was. Then he and his wife fled to Argentina leaving their small children here. I believe a grandmother took them. Anyway, the house was free so we moved back.’

  Amara would have liked to ask many questions, but the woman gives them no chance to speak. She seems to want to tell them about Tokyo, about their houses and their dogs. Even about the apartment they are living in now, but as if the property had come to them in a normal way, through a contract. But Amara knows from Emanuele’s letters that the house was confiscated fully furnished. Something about this elegant, self-confident woman, so utterly impervious to all questions, intimidates her. Only at the end does she decide to confront her, trying to be as laconic as possible.

  ‘Frau Schumacher, I have a letter from Emanuele Orenstein in which he says that you knew the family,’ she finds the courage to say.

  ‘Oh, you should pay no attention to an over-excited child.’

  Amara wonders how she can know he was an over-excited child if she never met him, but prefers not to argue and to let her talk.

  ‘All the Jews whimpered at that time that they were being thrown out of their homes. In fact they were selling them for a good price and heading for places where bombs were unlikely to fall. This was very astute of them. Because their houses often ended up in ruins. But by then they had sold them. Do you see how cunning that was?’

  ‘You said yourself that this house was not bought but was assigned to you.’

  ‘Yes indeed, by the State, as is normal for diplomats. But the State had bought it from the Orensteins, I’m sure of that, and it will have cost a pretty penny. But why dig up these sad things from the past? The war was an ugly time for us all, Frau Sironi. We ourselves lost a son of twenty-two, killed on a bombing mission to Stalingrad. And you are still thinking of that child Emanuele Orenstein! Who today would be … what? Twenty-two?’

  ‘Twenty-eight.’

  ‘He too will have died fighting. The best of German youth died in the war, my dear signora, and the same is true of the best Austrian youth; they fought side by side. Best to erect a stone over the past and begin again, believe me. When I heard my son Wilhelm was dead, I too wanted to die. And then, for years, I tried to find his remains, but never could. But do you know what my daughter Margarethe once said to me. Mama, you are more concerned with the dead than with those who are living with you. And I realised she was right: I was neglecting my husband and our two daughters to run after my dead boy. Since then I’ve built a little cemetery in my heart, where I constantly take fresh flowers, but I no longer search for his body to give him a burial worthy of our name. He is buried inside me and that should be enough, don’t you agree?’

  She is full of dignity and seems deeply sincere. Amara and Hans look at each other, discouraged. It is quite clear to them that they will get nowhere at all with this woman who
has erased every doubt and every question from her past.

  ‘Not every Austrian fought in the war, Frau Schumacher, some were shut up in extermination camps,’ says Amara in a low voice.

  ‘And is that not the same thing? You die how you die. War is a huge obscenity and causes damage everywhere. No one is best and no one is the winner. We are all equal in the face of death.’

  ‘Is your husband dead?’ asks Hans to gain time and to find another way of trying to get her to say something about the Orensteins.

  ‘My husband is alive. He’s in another room. Would you like to meet him?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  Elegant and unembarrassed, Frau Schumacher rises from the sofa, and with great strides of her slim legs that set her blue and grey skirt dancing and her high heels tapping lightly on the floor, she opens a door and disappears.