Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

‘So all those dead, tormented people were simply the result of an enormous obscene collective binge?’

‘When you’re drunk you don’t know what you’re doing. We were blind drunk and in love with a criminal. That can happen, you know, just ask any psychologist. People of good family who would never hurt a fly, people who care about their country and the future of their children, can be blinded by love for a man, ready to surrender their own will to his, out of admiration for a word that exalts and seduces. To surrender their own future, even life itself, to an assassin to do what he likes with. That’s how it was with me, but I assure you with millions of others it was just the same. Millions of poor people who had nothing to gain from Nazism. It wasn’t fear, indignation or greed that pushed them towards racism, even if many did enrich themselves shamefully by grabbing everything from those poor families who went to the extermination camps. But we didn’t know that then. We thought they’d been taken away to do forced labour. Most people didn’t speculate or steal, they just saw themselves as taking part in a great moment of history. We’d gone to war against people who threatened Austria and the Germanic peoples. Who wanted to crush us totally and kill us, and we were fighting them. It was no more than self-defence.’

‘But who was it who wanted to destroy the Germanic nations? Communists? Homosexuals? Gypsies? Jews? The sick? The crippled? Who was it precisely?’

‘In war people die. You can’t mourn every death, every casualty. I could have been killed myself from one moment to the next. Like my Franz. I cried for days and days. Then one morning I said: Dorothea, this weeping means nothing, it’s egoistical. You’re crying because of a personal insult, when the country is triumphantly raising its head to face the whole world and demand respect, love, and obedience.’

‘And when did you become aware that all this was an aberration, Frau Morgan?’

‘Just after the war, when the newspapers began saying how things really were and we saw the photographs. Who could have imagined they gassed those poor children and threw them into crematorium ovens? It was monstrous.’

‘There are some who say you didn’t want to know the truth.’

‘Italy also had a tyrant, and he was loved and followed too. When did you find out how things really were?’

‘I was a child. I was in love with Emanuele Orenstein, not with any tyrant. Then he left for Vienna with his family and I never saw him again. I’m here to find out whether he died in a camp or survived.’

‘This is why you’re here, Frau Sironi? I hope you find him.’

‘Please forgive me if I’ve upset you with all my questions. But I’m inquisitive and trying to understand.’

‘It’s so long since I last spoke of those times. It needed a foreigner to come here and call up distant feelings we’re perhaps ashamed of. As if we’d woken after a massive binge and vowed never to drink again.’

‘Do you think the people of Austria have vaccinated themselves against every form of Nazism?’

‘For myself I would say yes. But you never know. Perhaps more should be said about it. Discussion in the schools.’

‘Is it shame that stops people discussing it, or are they afraid of meeting ghosts too depressing to face?’

‘There’s nothing worse than coming to your senses after a mistaken love. For the first time you see the person as he really is and ask yourself how you could ever have trusted such a person, how you could ever have put your future in his hands. Now we see him as a monster with an ugly voice, the eyes of a lunatic and the gestures of a madman. But at the time we even thought him beautiful! Even kind! Even fascinating! We were all in love with him.’

‘Titania falls in love with the head of an ass. Just because Puck has squirted a little magic juice in her eyes! Is that how you think love comes about, Frau Morgan?’

‘For me, yes. Love is utterly blind and incapable of reasoning. Do you know why we fall in love with a particular person?’

‘Preferably because we like the way he thinks and reasons, how he speaks and moves, and for his smell and his voice and his hands and his eyes.’

‘Well, to me Hitler had beautiful hands, shining eyes and profound thoughts and moved like a cherub. I don’t know about his smell because I never got near enough to find out. But let’s say that sometimes a scent of roses and violets came from far off that surprised even me. The smell of my country celebrating, of my country victorious.’

‘I imagine the smell of defeat must have swept away the smell of roses and violets.’

‘Defeat smells of putrid flesh.’

Amara sees Frau Morgan suddenly sit down with her hands in her lap, breathing heavily as if from running up the stairs. But she does not seem unhappy, only tired.

At ten in the morning the man with the gazelles and Amara are at Peter Orenstein’s door ringing a bell whose hoarse sound echoes through an apparently empty house.

No one comes to open, not even after they ring a second and a third time.

‘But he arranged to see us at ten,’ says Hans.

‘What shall we do? Shall we wait?’

‘Let’s wait a little longer.’

After ringing several more times, Amara and Hans sit down outside on the top step waiting for any sign of life. Perhaps the master of the house has gone out and will be back soon. Perhaps he’s fallen asleep. Or changed his mind. All they can do is wait patiently.

This morning the man with the gazelles has a nice smell of carnation-scented soap. In her mind Amara goes back over what Frau Morgan said. How important is the smell of a person close to you? Frau Morgan was aware of the Führer’s smell of roses and violets from kilometres away. To what extent do we invent smells?

Hans talks of his mother, the resolute Hanna Paduk, a Hungarian Jew who died in the Treblinka camp. She wore her long curly blonde hair in braids round her head. ‘She was funny, she walked like a young goose because of flat feet. But her voice was not that of a goose, it was the most beautiful and expressive voice I’ve ever heard. When I was little she used to sing me to sleep with folk songs: Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf! Dein Vater ist ein Schaf, Die Mutter ist im Pommerland, Pommerland ist abgebrannt, Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf . Do you know what that means? Sleep baby sleep, Your father’s just a sheep, Your mother’s in Pomerania-land, Pomerania’s all burned down, Sleep baby sleep.

‘Her voice bewitched me. I would force myself to stay awake so I could go on listening. But she would be in a hurry to get away. I would hold her hand tight and beg her: sing more! And she would sing, soft and low close to my ear so as not to disturb the others. Her breath smelled of onions. I don’t know why my poor mother always ate onions. Perhaps they were the only vegetables available in the market at that time. I ate boiled onions too, and I have to say they were excellent. But I couldn’t smell my own breath. I could smell hers. It was sourish and sweet at the same time. Onions and words, onions and fluent notes. I would have happily lived like that for ever. There’s something perverse about growing up, developing strong teeth, hairs on one’s chest, a moustache, corns on one’s feet. Why do we grow? It’s so stupid.’

Hans is no longer looking at her. He is speaking as if alone, eyes half closed, barely moving his lips. Telling of his mother, the sweet Hanna rejected by her own kitchen. The marvellous singing bird, who faced with her oven had no idea what to do. She would forget to stir the stew, add too much salt or too much pepper and overcook the vegetables; in her hands rice became food for chickens and the meat was always scorched. She didn’t even know how to buy at the market. During the war, when food was rationed but you could buy on the black market, she would return home happily to her husband after tracking down two sausages which then turned out to be full of worms, or place on the table a fine melon that was rotten inside. One day she brought some extremely green pears, so hard that neither teeth nor the blade of a knife could penetrate them. Let’s put them on the window ledge till they’re ripe, she said in her soft, musical voice. So they were spread on the balcony and watched. But those spiteful pears, so unerringly chosen by clumsy Hanna, quietly turned from wooden to rotten with nothing in between. Not only that, but they began to leak a stinking liquid and had to be thrown in the dustbin, where not even stray dogs would give them a glance.