Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

When her husband told her he had fallen in love with a woman younger than herself she had been hurt, but had said nothing. By now she had got to know Luca, and she knew he only required the preliminaries of love. The rest did not interest him. He liked to stroke, smell and kiss his beloved, and whisper sweet nothings into her ear. He was so convincing that women were not just deceived but trapped and fascinated. In time, thinking over his constant absences and escapes, Amara realised that the closer their relationship became, the more he needed to run away and find new bodies to caress. He was too much in love with love to dedicate himself fully to any one woman. To him, lasting commitment was unbearable imprisonment. She never understood why he had ever asked her to marry him. Perhaps for once he had believed the caresses would last. Or perhaps he had seen marriage as a way of not falling in love, so that as soon as he had felt there was a danger he might fall in love he had hurried to propose to her, just as Swann, that sophisticated creation of Proust, proposes to Odette in the firm belief that marriage will kill desire. Who knows? He was a man who knew how to listen and be tender, and he drove women mad.

The fact that she had seen through him in no way diminished the intensity of her delusion. She may never have believed in his love, but she had certainly believed in his caresses. And when his caresses were absent she dreamed of his hands. Large hands with broad, flat fingers, the balls of his thumbs sensitive, always warm, his palms dry and smooth. He knew how to caress without wanting to possess, without wanting to press on to the relief of a quick orgasm. He would start with her face: ploughing her forehead with his fingers like a tired field, smoothing and dividing her hair, letting it slip like water through his hands. Then her mouth and neck, where his thumbs would slowly search out her veins and press them lightly as if to feel the slow flow of her blood. Then her shoulders which he released from their many burdens with delicate little taps. He would fill his hands with her breasts and sometimes suck them as if to reach milk closed inside. Then he would warm her sides and belly, pressing them gently with the heat of his closed fists. He would skim lightly over her sex because the moment had not yet come for that secret nucleus of naked flesh. Then he would pass down her back pressing as he counted each individual vertebra, in sheer wonder at the architecture of bone on which the physical equilibrium of the body depends. Then her legs and feet, first separating her toes before bringing them together again in a warm, affectionate gesture; running his knuckles over the arches of her soles, knocking against her mercurial restlessness in tribute to the grace of her walking.

His caresses were an end in themselves, possessed of an angelic sensuality. She had loved them for that. But in order to caress, Luca needed to feel a dedication that could not last. It was not his ambition to transform this ceremony of delights into a permanent habit. And practising the daily routine carelessly was not even conceivable. A perfectionist cannot be expected to turn into a slipshod repeater of predictable gestures when it comes to the adorable art of caressing.

In fact his caresses were over after barely a year of marriage. And with the end of his caresses, something changed in his character. Tenderness gave way to resentment, a subtle brutality that insinuated itself into his words and gestures. Had this been the meaning of his caresses? To use the intelligence of his hands to restrain a cruelty hidden in some part of his soul? Maybe. But he had been generous and she was grateful to him for that.

In the train with the man with the gazelles. On the way to Vienna. Amara had packed her suitcase in a hurry. She was happy to leave Kraków and her room at the Hotel Wawel with its brown wallpaper, the corridor with its smelly threadbare moquette, and the bathroom with its red and yellow tiles and seatless lavatory bowl. The Russian train moves slowly on its widely spaced rails. They have slept in a twin-bed compartment because the single ones were all taken. The table which folds against the wall at night is raised by day and covered with an immaculate white cloth. Hanging above is a lamp with a crimson shade surrounded by gilded pendants that tinkle lightly at each lurch of the train. The beds form a pair, not one above the other as in the trains she is used to, but side by side, with military covers and very clean sheets that smell of perfumed soap. The white curtains have a gilded trimming. An extremely ancient train perhaps once reserved for luxury passengers, but now within the reach of all.

While Amara was undressing Hans had gone out and she did the same when he took off the jumper with the flying gazelles and the white shirt he hung on a clothes-hook along with his corduroy trousers. He put his worn-out shoes side by side under his bed with his socks rolled up inside them. Amara came in to find him sitting in his pyjamas on the edge of his bunk, cigarette in hand. To avoid embarrassment they scarcely looked at each other and slept back to back. The train stopped twenty times during the night, puffing and panting, gurgling and hissing. Men’s voices could be heard in the corridor exchanging information in Czech. They slept little and badly. In the morning, tired and drowsy, they reached Vienna. At last they had arrived. At six the conductor knocked on their door. Did they want coffee? They did. It turned out to be an improbable violet colour and smelled of burned sawdust. But it was hot and they drank it at a single gulp.

‘Vienna is a city offended and wounded by war. There are many ruins, but some intact corners too,’ says Hans. ‘I can take you to a clean if humble boarding-house run by a woman I know, Frau Morgan.’

At the Pension Blumental Amara is faced with choosing between two rooms: a very noisy large one facing the road, and a smaller and more modest one that overlooks a yard and rooftops covered with pigeons. Which would Frau Sironi prefer? Amara decides on the smaller one. Silence before luxury. Frau Morgan helps her carry her luggage to her room. Soon after she knocks and places on the bedside table a small vase containing a scented rose.

‘I have a garden the size of a handkerchief but it’s full of flowers. I’ve sown mint, mallow, chives and rhubarb too. From the mint I also make liqueur, and from the rhubarb tarts. One day I’ll let you taste one.’

Frau Morgan seems anxious to please. Even so, Amara leaves her suitcase open, in case Frau Morgan might like to assess her moral status from the condition of her underwear.

In the afternoon Hans takes her to the Maria Theresia Platz museum, the Kunsthistorisches gallery with its endless rooms full of masterpieces. It is not long since the great paintings were once more hung on its walls and people again began coming from all over the world to admire the ever-popular works of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Brueghel, Rubens and Dürer. Hans and Amara stop in front of one particular painting, as if under a kind of spell. The work of an unfamiliar modern artist. A large, spacious picture, in which people swarm like ants. The huge canvas depicts a day in a Nazi concentration camp. On one side an armoured train is steaming in, on the other huts are set obliquely, of a naïve yet at the same time profoundly wise design. You can make out the beds, though to describe them as beds would be an abuse of language; they are wooden shelves each holding at least five inmates, with no mattresses, covers or pillows, with nothing at all. In the foreground is a morning roll call. It is known that these took hours, with the prisoners forced to stand in the cold wearing only striped pyjamas, their bare feet in clogs. Two or three hours of torture, depending on how many inmates there were to count. In another place, right against the barbed wire, dozens of corpses lie piled up like refuse. People who died in the night and will be dragged roughly by their arms and legs to a common pit by their still living fellow prisoners.