Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

The man smiles at them, blue eyes prominent in his beard-darkened face. Before answering he drains a couple of glasses of light, frothy beer. No, he has never heard the name Emanuele spoken in his family, but then there are many Orensteins in Vienna and they are all related. Can they show him a photograph? Amara brings out the familiar faded picture of Emanuele as a child from when they played together in Florence. The painter studies it in silence. Then shakes his head. The photograph rings no bell with him. His Italian is halting and slow but correct. He has visited Italy a number of times, he tells them, and is familiar with the museums of Florence and Rome. But he hasn’t been back for years.

‘And during the war?’ Amara ventures timidly, afraid to waken painful memories.

Theodor Orenstein studies them thoughtfully, as if asking whether these strange visitors who have appeared from nowhere are worthy of hearing what he has to say. He scratches his head nervously. Then, slowly, he starts his story. His voice, initially timid and awkward, gradually gains in fluency and confidence. A soft, visionary voice that like his own painting manages gracefully to combine strange insubstantial weightless bodies with the concrete quality of roofs in a sleeping city.

When war broke out Theodor was living in Vienna with his parents in Krügerstrasse, near the State Opera. The house no longer exists. It was destroyed by bombs during the terrible raids of 1944. The building he is living in now has only recently been refurbished and belongs to the Vienna Artists’ Association. He has been painting for years, and they have allotted him one room, that luckily has a handkerchief of a garden in which he has planted potatoes, courgettes and tomatoes, though these have little colour because so little sun reaches them and in winter the ground freezes.

In Krügerstrasse he and his parents had a large apartment with five rooms, in which seven people lived: father, mother and three brothers besides himself, and an old deaf aunt.

His father was a civil servant. An honest state employee who got up for the office each day at dawn, taking a tram which dropped him within a hundred metres of the Post Office.

The man with the gazelles listens attentively to the painter’s tale. Amara looks from one to the other. They are so different physically, yet they resemble each other: they both have the ceremonious manner which strikes her so forcibly in Austrians. Superficially awkward, timid too perhaps because they have been taught to sublimate their feelings; slow to take fire, but once heated, capable of blazing passions. Polite and sometimes ironic if with a rather roundabout sort of irony, not always comprehensible to those who do not know them.

Another beer? Amara watches the painter pour the clear liquid, filling his own glass right to the brim. It is rather sour, this good Bavarian beer, leaving you with a dry tongue like after eating bitter fruit.

The family felt more Austrian than many who had come from elsewhere, the painter doggedly continues. They had lived in Vienna for centuries, they thought and dreamed in German; they belonged to the city, it was their way of life. Yet the day came when they were described as strangers, even condemned as enemies and shut up in a concentration camp.

His mother had always worked as a dressmaker. She went into the houses of well-off people to mend and patch, to raise or lower the hems of skirts. She earned enough to supplement her husband’s meagre salary. They had closed their eyes and noses to the rising stink. A stink of racist intolerance, of cultural hatred, of persecution. In their hearts they nurtured a sacrosanct conviction that no one, for any reason whatever, would ever be able to deprive them of the right to identify themselves as Austrians, living in their own country and their own city.

But one morning a dozen SA men arrived and took over their apartment, forcing them to leave with a few personal effects in a couple of suitcases. They were forced to leave behind the expensive linen sheets with embroidered monograms that had been a wedding present to Frau Magdalena, the damask curtains inherited from grandmother Bernstein, the gold-rimmed plates, by now discoloured and chipped, given at their marriage by the Levi uncles of Linz, and the fine silver cutlery from their Vogel cousins who had emigrated to Paris in the last century.

With those two pathetic suitcases they had been loaded onto a train that took them to Poland. They were not downhearted. They were on their way to work camps, the Nazis told them, and in this belief they climbed into the wagons, almost comforted by the prospect of leaving a life that had no longer been a life since the restrictions started: confined to the house by a curfew from eight in the evening, and with no access to Aryan shops, no school, and no cinema. They were sure they would be put to work: clearing snow, digging trenches, looking after tramway crossings. They would get by.

Theodor Orenstein, meanwhile, had managed to escape before his family were deported. Being an agile and slender boy, he had hidden in a lorry full of coal that, in return for a large sum of money (the last of the family funds) had taken him far from Vienna.

He had wandered the Austrian countryside, avoiding mopping-up operations and suspicious peasants, until he came to the Polish border. There he evaded the frontier guards and, still walking, reached Darłowo on the Baltic coast. A ship was ready to take him to Sweden, but it sank and threw him up instead on the Danish island of Bornholm, which was occupied by the Germans.

‘I was lucky,’ he says again and again, ‘I was incredibly lucky.’

In the little village of Rønne he found work mending fishing nets, and lived secretly like this till the end of the war. No one realised he was a Jew, or if they did suspect it, they kept quiet. His main worry had been the fate of his parents and little brothers: what had happened to them? Were they alive? How could he find them?

Amara watches him closely, hoping to find something of Emanuele in that shadowed face with its ingenuous eyes, that slightly emaciated body.

‘Would you like some bread and cheese? I have some excellent Camembert.’

Without waiting for an answer, Theodor Orenstein goes confidently into his tiny kitchen, opens a cupboard and takes out a round loaf wrapped in a coloured cloth. He cuts it into slices and places three cubes of strong-smelling Camembert on a clean plate with a leaf of fresh mint. ‘More beer?’ he asks anxiously, but forgets to fetch the bottle. A little more Camembert? Amara says no, thank you, she isn’t hungry. And maybe they should be on their way back to the Pension Blumental, it’s getting late. But the painter Orenstein has more to say.

Don’t they want to hear the story of his parents? Don’t they want to hear how that ended? He can’t possibly let them go so easily. It’s as if he hasn’t spoken for years. He is so delighted they’ve come that he seems to have forgotten the large painting he was working on with its angels over the roofs.

His mother and his father and the younger children, God preserve them in glory, vanished completely. Aren’t they curious? Didn’t they come because they wanted to know about Orensteins living in Austria? When he managed to get back to Vienna, he found their house had been bombed. The stub ends of flats were still there as if to remind the world that people had once lived in them. Shreds of greasy stained wallpaper still hung from surviving fragments of wall, with broken windows still miraculously attached to their hinges, uprooted doors and the remains of ceilings that had collapsed in a sea of rubble.

He can still remember how he sat down in the midst of those ruins, trying to remember the exact location of the house he had shared with his mother and father. ‘My mother was a strong woman, able to devote herself to a hundred initiatives, but she did not understand the Nazis at all. She thought they were just trying to create a bit of order. She thought their hatred for the Jews was only a passing whim, and that they would come to have second thoughts about it. Were they not all Austrians, the SS no less than the Jews? Had they not been taught together in the same schools, Jews and non-Jews alike, and when the Kara Mustafà and his Turks had been expelled from Austria in 1683, had they not all partied and drunk together for nine days on end? Where on earth can this volcanic hatred have come from? They had forced Andrea, a neighbour who owned a shop selling exercise books and toys for children, to put a notice in her window reading: JEWS, TRAITORS! What had they betrayed and how? Those armed guards were surely only hotheads spreading terror from sheer youthful high spirits and love of power. Did they not speak of a superman with the right to distinguish the purebred from those of inferior status? But there were only a few of these people, wild and fanatical. Most of the Viennese she knew were quiet folk who asked no more than to be allowed to live and let live, to work and start families, and to look forward to a respectable old age once they had saved enough money to buy themselves a house and a small garden. That was how most people in the city thought.