Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

‘And the two men have stayed together?’

‘They’ve gone on in the same way, but without the domestic cheerfulness that had made for such a happy atmosphere; they are perhaps quieter and more peaceful now. They’ve learned to buy non-iron shirts and fast foods. My father still chops wood and Ferenc still looks after the kitchen. Most recently they’ve bought a motorcycle with a sidecar and go roaring about the place, all kitted out in goggles and airmen’s helmets.’

Amara is still sleeping when Frau Morgan climbs the stairs and calls: ‘A phone call for you, Frau Sironi.’ Amara puts on her slippers and goes downstairs yawning. The telephone on the wall is cleaned every morning with huge wads of cotton wool steeped in alcohol by the hard-working Frau Morgan. Amara recognises the voice at once. Hans, the man with the gazelles. In her mind that’s how she sees him, as though the gazelles are stamped on his chest and, even without his sweater, are leaping and running towards the future. Hans tells her breathlessly he has just read in the paper about an archive discovered in an underground SS shelter near the camp at Auschwitz. Why not go and study these new lists? They contain a large number of names, written up by hand complete with days of arrival and everything.

‘We have to go there, Amara. I’ll go and buy tickets. I’ll pass by to pick up your passport for the visas towards ten, okay?’

Amara says yes. She turns to see Frau Morgan with a cup of coffee especially for her. By now she has developed a taste for their investigations and addresses her lodger in a conspiratorial tone.

‘News, Frau Sironi?’

Amara would like to tell her about the man passing himself off as Emanuele but who doesn’t resemble him in the least and is in any case much too old. But she makes no mention of that meeting which still seems unreal. Instead she tells her about the new lists discovered in the SS shelter and of the trip they are going to make to Poland as soon as they have the necessary visas.

But the police are getting suspicious. What are these two up to going backwards and forwards between Vienna and Kraków? They are interrogated separately. Amara has to spend hours and hours waiting on a bench while they interrogate Hans, then it is her turn to face the usual questions to which she replies wearily, trying not to let it get on her nerves too much. But the police hold all possible or imaginable cards in their hands. Since the two are not commercial travellers, no one can understand why they are constantly asking permission to cross the border. Amara being a journalist doesn’t make things any better. What does she want to write? What is the ideological line of her paper? Et cetera, et cetera.

‘Come back in two days.’

‘But in two days we’ll have lost our train reservation.’

‘You can make another.’ Amara tries to explain that she has been sent by an independent Italian newspaper to write about the countries of Eastern Europe. She pulls out permits, her journalist’s card, her passport. But the police are inflexible.

‘Come back in two days.’

For Hans it’s even worse. What is he really after, this half-Jewish, half-Hungarian, half-Austrian man, half journalist and half not, half music teacher and half student, wanting permission to travel to Poland? Does he not understand that we’re in the middle of a full-scale cold war? That the border is closed? That urgent, important reasons are needed for anyone to be allowed to travel? That the reasons they are giving seem to make no sense? That rubber-stamps and visas issued by the government of Austria are not valid for Poland, or even for Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the countries they want to pass through in order to reach Kraków? The fact that his mother was Hungarian and died in a Nazi concentration camp is irrelevant. So is the fact that his father is a musician living in Budapest. How can it possibly be of any interest to the frontier administration that the young lady is travelling with him — and is she married or not? — if married, where is her husband? Or is she separated? And where does she want to go?

There is simply no end to the questions, and every time a new official appears they have to start again at the beginning. Hours and days pass like this. They spend the first night with the police, sitting on a bench. At about four in the morning a kind and very young policeman, moved by pity, brings them hot tea and a blanket. At nine the interrogation begins again. Then, at one, an officer in a torn uniform tells Amara she can go back to the pension, but that the man, Hans Wilkowsky, must stay with the police.

‘But why?’

‘Madam, please go. You’re lucky we aren’t repatriating you to Italy. As soon as we have all the information we need we’ll release you. If we get it. If we’re satisfied with it. Meanwhile please go back to the Pension Blumental. We’ll be in touch.’

So she was dismissed. She left the police with her clothes crumpled and her hair stuck to her cheeks after a night sleeping against the dirty wall of the waiting room, with her feet gone numb inside her shoes.

Frau Morgan greeted her with an enigmatic smile.

Amara went up to her room and stretched on her bed trying to read a book and forget all that wasted time. Next morning there was a knock on her door.

‘You’re wanted on the phone, Frau Sironi.’

She ran down the stairs, hoping anxiously that it was Hans. She felt lost in Vienna without him.

‘They’ve withheld my passport.’

‘Then what can we do?’

‘They’ve only given me a permit to Kraków and back, passing through Budapest. That should be enough to reach Auschwitz.’

‘And our time-expired tickets?’

‘I managed to change them. It cost a bit. See you at Figlmüller’s in an hour?’

Figlmüller’s, once just a beer cellar, now a fourth-class restaurant, is full of smoke. The menu for the day is nailed to the wall on a piece of cardboard. Pork crackling with beans, sauerkraut and sweet-cooked potato.

Amara has sat down by a window marked with greasy fingerprints and traces of long-dried rain. Outside there’s a boy playing in the middle of the square with a dog, making it jump and run round in circles. He picks up a stone and throws it to the far end of the square. The dog rushes off, picks up the stone in its mouth and brings it back wagging its tail at the child, who wipes his nose on the sleeve of a patched and faded red sports shirt. The dog drops the stone right in front of the boy’s down-at-heel shoes; the boy bends to pick it up and solemnly throws it again towards the flower beds at the far end of the square. The dog shoots off like an arrow, runs around with its nose to the ground, finds the stone, picks it up and runs back, leaping over obstacles like a hare. Enchanted, Amara watches this game that could go on for ever. A game of sudden loss and rediscovery, of going away and returning. Who knows why it gives so much pleasure to both boy and dog? The repetition of a familiar action? The freedom of a chase that leads nowhere and is thus entirely gratuitous and pointless? The joy of two creatures acting in unison on opposite sides of the square? The sheer pleasure of being able to flex one’s muscles? There’s something insane about repetition. But it can also bring great peace. Aren’t lullabies based on repetition? And magic spells and prayers? The more often one repeats a gesture the less one understands it. And in that failure to understand lies the mystery of a game that imitates the mysteries of the universe.

But look, there’s a tall figure crossing the square between the boy and the dog with rapid, joyful steps. Hans. A man who is winning, it occurs to her. But winning over what? Certainly not over poverty. Over the cold? No. Over love? Not that either. Over life? Perhaps; over the meagre, angry life of the post-war years that promises so little for the future. He has on his usual sweater with the running gazelles. His elderly boy’s head sits firmly on his thin neck. His light-brown hair with its occasional streak of grey is slipping softly across his broad brow. A sudden surge of affection drives her to wave a hand timidly in his direction. But Hans doesn’t notice her through the dirty glass. Entering with firm steps he looks round; sees her sitting in the corner, smiles and goes over to her.