Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

‘No, in hospital but not at the point of death as he’d led me to believe.’

‘I bet he asked you to go back and live with him again.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I can guess.’

‘That was it, exactly.’

‘And you said no?’

‘Did you guess that too?’

‘I imagine you wouldn’t want to.’

‘What do you think I want?’

‘I don’t know. Nor do you, for that matter. Or rather: you want to find your Emanuele. That’s clear enough. But more mysteriously, you’re after something else.’

‘What?’

‘I’m not sure. Maybe an Amara you don’t know.’

‘And what have you been doing these last few days?’

‘Gone on with the search.’

‘And?’

‘I went to have a look at the Schulerstrasse house where the Orensteins lived. A family of ex-Nazis live there now. Not bad from an anthropological point of view. Then I went to ferret about in the city archives. I found another Orenstein. Name of Peter. I’ve made an appointment with him for tomorrow. Can you come?’

‘That’s what I came back for.’

‘I had hoped you came back for me.’

‘I returned to go on with the search.’

‘I take that back, I’m sorry.’

‘Well, where shall we start?’

‘With Peter Orenstein. Our appointment’s for tomorrow at ten. Okay?’

Returning to Pension Blumental, Amara finds Frau Morgan cleaning the stairs. She has tied her ample skirts at the ankle with elastic as though about to mount a bicycle. She is extremely polite but somehow inscrutable. Difficult to know what she’s thinking. She puts on a professional smile, then forgets herself and seems to become a child again. The expression in her big nut-brown eyes is at the same time disconcerted and bored, as if she’s surprised by the world and its peculiarities but forcing herself to accept it for what it is. Amara wonders what she did during the war. She uses her unavoidable entry into the reception area to sign the guestbook and try to get Frau Morgan to talk. Her eye falls on the framed photograph of a handsome man in military uniform.

‘My husband Franz,’ says Frau Morgan, following Amara’s gaze. Her smile freezes on her lips.

‘Is he dead?’

‘Killed in the war, like so many others. Shall I help you to your room with your suitcase?’

‘No thank you, I’ll manage on my own.’

Frau Morgan dries her hands on the dark green apron over her skirt. She’s wearing comic Turkish-style slippers with turned-up toes.

‘Have any letters arrived for me?’

‘No post for Signora Sironi.’

She says this in Italian as if to show that she too loves the land of sun and knows a word or two of its language. She stands stock-still, not daring to dismiss Amara.

‘D’you mind if I sit here a moment before I go up to my room?’

‘Not at all, please do. Would you like some coffee?’

‘That would be nice.’

Amara sits down and looks around. Rather a wretched home: two rooms with a half-window overlooking the street. Yet everything is in its place and as genteel as possible with doilies, little white cushions, lilac wallpaper with tulips on it, glass ornaments and fake carnations. A huge radio set is enthroned on a chest of drawers, and from the centre light with its yellow lace shade hangs a spiral of sticky paper covered with little black flies.

‘A good thing this building survived the bombs.’

‘It was damaged. But we fixed it.’

‘Have you always lived here?’

‘Yes, my husband inherited it.’

‘He was a handsome man, I can tell from the photo. Which year did he die?’

‘Right at the beginning of the war. Shot down as a pilot in October ’39.’

‘Unlucky.’

‘Twenty-five years old.’

‘Children?’

‘None.’

‘And you never married again?’

‘Where would I find a husband? All the men died in the war, Frau Sironi. Only us women were left.’

Amara looks at her curiously. After the first few hostile moments, Frau Morgan seems to have relaxed a little. Perhaps she doesn’t mind talking about herself, being asked questions. She is always alone. It occurs to Amara she could start an article for her paper with Frau Morgan’s statement ‘All the men are dead’. What happened to the widows, daughters and sisters of those soldiers killed in the war?

‘How have you managed to survive?’

‘I divided the rooms up and started a pension. Only four rooms but it’s enough to keep me going.’

‘Did you ever hear anything about the concentration camps?’

‘Certainly not. I knew the Jews were shut up in ghettos.’

‘But a time came when the ghettos were evacuated and destroyed. Didn’t you ever ask yourself what happened to all those Jews?’

‘I had other things to think about, Frau Sironi. I had to find something to eat, survive the bombing and search for water because all the mains in the district had been blown up.’

‘And when did you discover that the Jews in the camps had been gassed?’

‘After the war. A disgrace. It was no accident the Nazis went into hiding. Luckily my Franz was in the Luftwaffe. He was never in the SS.’

‘Can you remember anything of the time when the cities were overrun by gangs of thugs? When slogans denouncing the Jews went up in the shops?’

‘It’s all different now, but at that time there was an enthusiasm, a confidence, a joy in being alive that made all these little things though admittedly dissonant seem unimportant.’

‘Dissonance unimportant? If a singer sings out of tune with the orchestra, the audience boos and whistles.’

‘It was a country in love with a new era, you understand … no, you wouldn’t understand … a country on fire with a new pride and boldness after a long history of humiliation. We were all drunk. And when you’re drunk you don’t see the details, you see everything wholesale, you’re exultant, ready to do anything for the idol of the moment.’

‘Drunk with hatred for a people whose only fault was to exist?’

‘We believed the Jews did business, speculated, stole, wanted to destroy our country. Hitler said they wanted a world war so they could eliminate the Aryan race. That’s what was in all the newspapers and they kept on repeating it again and again.’

‘Did you never think it might be propaganda?’

‘Drunks are happy to drink bad wine too. They can’t tell the difference between that and good wine.’

‘Was that how your husband Franz thought as well?’

‘We all thought like that. It was a common attitude. And if you didn’t think like that you were in trouble.’

‘So there were a few people who didn’t think like that?’

‘Just a few but they were thought mad. Love is exclusive and looks for absolutes.’

‘Do you think Nazism was born out of love?’

‘A sick love that soon turned into tyranny. I know that from my own experience. What could have persuaded a little girl like me to cram herself into a uniform covered with buttons and run to rallies and raise my arm rhythmically in honour of Hitler? How could they convince me to march with thousands of other students, sticking our legs straight up in the air? Love, only love and pride in our country. And the voice of the Führer had more power than any whip, a powerful spirit that burned our throats and made the blood race in our veins.’

‘So you were a committed Nazi!’

‘I can admit that now it’s all in the past.’

‘The binge is over. And then?’

‘You wake up and say: how could I ever have believed all that? How could I? Even if I, Dorothea Morgan, never did anything, but let others do it all, that’s sometimes even worse. How could I never have seen the abyss we were hurling ourselves into?’