Dacia Maraini: Train to Budapest

‘Are we friends?’ he asks from time to time, stopping in the middle of the road with one foot on the ground and the other on the pedal, as if seized by sudden fear.

‘Friends in life and death!’ she answers, repeating a formula they often use between themselves and which undoubtedly comes from one of the adventure books they’ve read together. Most of all they love sea stories. Ones in which a small boy (unfortunately small girls aren’t expected to get into difficulties of this kind) goes to sea as a cabin boy and everything imaginable happens to him. Like the very young Redburn whom Melville describes as an awkward and naïve adolescent. The first time he is sent aloft up the mainmast to unreef the sails, he is seized by vertigo and grabs the shrouds so as not to fall, while the sailors on the bridge laugh with scorn and amusement. Another book they read with their four eyes tells of a ship wrecked on a desert island. In the disaster everyone is killed except one young adventurer who explores the island and learns how to survive, fighting ferocious animals at night and wandering about by day in search of water and food. He invents a language of his own that enables him to communicate with the clouds and the stones, sews clothes together with strands of grass and learns to swim like a fish.

‘I’ve got a plan,’ says Emanuele in a mysterious voice.

‘What plan?’

‘A secret. You mustn’t tell anyone.’

‘You can’t think I’m a spy!’

‘I’ve found out how to fly.’

‘Like the birds?’

‘Like the birds.’

‘But how?’

‘You need two light wings. And a small structure of wood that must be very strong but weightless. I know how to do it.’

‘Did you find it in a book?’

‘Just trust me.’

‘But what if we fall?’

‘We won’t fall if we follow the logic of flight.’

‘And how is it done?’

‘Shhh, they’ll hear us.’

When he squeezes her hand like that her tummy feels as hot as if a little stove was boiling inside it. She knows he can feel how hot the stove is too but they’ve never discussed it. He’s the most mysterious child I’ve ever known, little Emanuele. He doesn’t like chatter, except when he’s writing, then he lets himself go. He knows lots of words, like someone who reads a lot and memorises the most difficult expressions for things. ‘He writes like a professor,’ Mamma Stefania says of him with admiration. ‘A know-all!’ comments Papà Amintore. Amara watches him walking confidently but cautiously, his grazed knees nimble, his supple back straight, expressing at the same time fear and defiance.

The first love of her life. She knows that now. She has told herself so at night as she watches the reflection of the street-lamp on her window. She has repeated it again and again: I love Emanuele and he loves me. And they will go on loving each other whatever happens because you can’t choose who you meet; you just have to accept it as destiny, and once it’s happened it’s happened for all time.

‘My mother, dear Miss Maria Amara, was tall, fair and strongly built. A woman who befriended her in prison told me that after only a few days in the camp the centimetre of hair sticking up on her head after she had been shorn, and the down on her arms and her eyelashes, turned white. Like the girl in the Chinese fable. Do you know the legend of the woman with white hair?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you. A young peasant girl, in the days of the great estates, was persecuted by her master who wanted to force her to make love with him. Mei-Mei, that was her name, left home and ran away to the mountains so as not to have to give in to the fat proprietor who considered it his right to lie with the adolescent peasant girls on his estate. Everyone was in despair; they spent months searching for her and in the end assumed she must be dead. But one person never stopped looking for her: her mother Ching, the only person who still believed she was alive. For this reason she went on waiting for her daughter in the constant hope of seeing her return. Then one day, looking for mushrooms in the forest on the Jan Tzse mountain, Ching came on a wild young woman in ragged clothes. She had long white hair like an old woman and her hands were covered with cuts and wrinkles. At first the mother didn’t recognise her daughter. But Mei-Mei recognised her mother and hugged her. She explained that for three years she had been living in a cave and eating plants. Ching told her they could go home now because the master was dead. But Mei-Mei looked like an old woman; how could she find a husband with that spooky long white hair?’

The train starts swaying more violently. Amara instinctively braces herself so as not to be thrown from one side of the carriage to the other. The young Polish mother is so intent on rocking her baby that she doesn’t notice. Her hair is parted in the middle and tied at her neck with a red ribbon. A few strands have escaped and fallen untidily round her ears. She has a tiny mouth. There is something crazy about her. Why does she never for an instant take her eyes off her little baby? Why does she purse her lips as though terrified of the slightest breath of wind? Why does she never meet the eyes of her fellow travellers? Why does she keep slipping a hand in among the folds of her skirt to find a lemon-coloured sweet that she puts into her mouth, only to spit it timidly out again into a small handkerchief that she then folds and puts away in her pocket?

The two men have fallen asleep, the one with the gazelles huddled up with his head propped against the window; while the other has slithered down in his seat with his legs wide apart and his head lolling on his chest.

Amara silently pulls the package of Emanuele’s letters out of her father’s suitcase and lays it in her lap. She can’t resist the temptation to read them again, as she has already done so many times since Emanuele disappeared. She has left the envelopes at home to save a little space. The pile of pages covered in tiny rounded handwriting smells of dust and coal. She imagines him writing them, especially the last ones, by the light of an oil lamp with a pencil squeezed between dirty fingers. But this is one of his first letters and it breathes an air of everyday serenity.

Vienna. December ’39

Mamma has a new dress I like very much with storks flying against a clear sky. When she walks the storks move, opening their wings and starting to rise. When I grow up I want to be a pilot. I told Papà this but he laughed in my face. He says I’ll be an industrialist like him. We own a business, he says, you have to begin thinking about that. Papà doesn’t know how to put on his tie. He twists about in front of the mirror and pulls funny faces. In the end he calls to Mamma for help. And with her tongue between her teeth, she makes him a perfect knot.

There are no trees to climb here, Amara my love. We’re living in a flat in the centre of the city. From my window I can see a big grey building with friezes sculpted in stone. I can see vases displayed on balconies. I can see closed curtains. I’ve never managed to catch a head looking out of those windows. How I wish I could be with you in Florence, where people lean out from their balconies and call up from below, like in a village. In the morning I get up at seven and eat with Papà. Mamma sleeps till ten. Our nanny, Mariska, makes us fine breakfasts: fresh yoghurt with sliced banana on top, hot milk laced with coffee, slices of toast spread with fresh butter and jam she has made herself. Every day she complains that because it’s wartime she can’t get the ingredients to make food the way she wants. And Papà has to give her more and more money for buying things at the market.