Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

‘But how did you come to be a librarian?’

‘I spent so much time in the village library that I became everybody’s friend and when the old librarian died I asked if I could take his place. I was satisfied with very little and was good with the archives. They accepted me. They could see I was a serious worker and after a few years I was transferred to Vienna to restore this old library which had been bombed.’

‘I’d like a copy of your book,’ says Hans who has brought the book with him and is turning it in his hands.

‘I’ll make you a present of it. I’m sorry I can’t offer you an armchair so you can read more comfortably. The city has been almost entirely rebuilt but libraries are last on the list; what does it matter if part of the building is in a state of collapse, if there is no room for any more books or if there is no heating? Not many people want to read when they have to spend their days trying to find a little coal, or something to put into their mouths. And the few who do come in never stay precisely because it is so cold and we are short of chairs.’

Finally, half-closing his eyes, he asks them in a humble voice as if afraid of being indiscreet, what they are looking for in Vienna.

Hans explains. Horvath looks at them in wonder.

‘It’s extraordinary, this fidelity to memory,’ he says with a mixture of admiration and disquiet. ‘I realise it’s difficult … even if the Nazis did keep registers, in the end they destroyed them all. Or nearly all of them. You say some new ones have been found?’

‘It seems so.’

‘Then why have the allies not appropriated them?’

‘That’s just what we want to find out. We’re waiting for our visas.’

‘You’ll have to wait a long time. Unless I come with you. I need to look for some books in Kraków. It’s easier for a librarian to get a visa for a short trip to look for books. You can come with me.’

Amara looks at him apprehensively. How to curb his enthusiasm? And how can such a journey by a Hungarian, an Austrian and an Italian to the kingdom of the dead be organised?

‘You’ll see, I can be useful to you,’ he says, with a smile on his lips that suddenly makes him young and beautiful.

‘But … and the library? Who will look after it while you’re away?’

‘It’s time the secretary came back to work. She’s already been off for months on maternity leave. I’ll put everything in her hands and take a few days off. I haven’t had a holiday for years.’

Such a strange trio. Horvath, Hans and Amara, on the train to Kraków. But at the last moment they decide to go via Hungary. Hans has written to tell his father he would like to pay him a visit. And his father has answered happily that he’s looking forward to it. And Horvath would like to put a flower on his sister’s grave and see if anything is left of the house where he lived as a child.

At Hegyeshalom, at the border, the engine shuts down completely. It will be a long wait, which was predictable. Many get out to look for a coffee at the bar which has already been stripped bare by the previous train; it has nothing left to offer except little bags of camomile from the Ukraine, loose powdered sweets that look as if they have been sitting in their glass jar since before the war, and Russian cigarettes, the ‘papiroskas’ the soldiers despise partly because they are Russian but also because they consist almost entirely of paper, and what little tobacco there is in them stinks of sawdust.

The frontier guards search the carriages. They stop suspiciously in front of the foreigners. Hans particularly alarms them: his origins are too heterogeneous, his journeys up and down Eastern Europe excite mistrust. Amara’s papers are in order but what is an Italian woman doing on a ramshackle train from Vienna to Kraków via Budapest? Luckily Horvath is there, with his ascetic air and ability to speak both excellent Hungarian and German. He is even able to speak polished Russian to the Soviet supervisors who are always present at the frontiers. With Olympian calm and a permanent smile, Horvath explains slowly and simply who they are and where they are going. To look for books for a new library in Vienna. Hungarian books for Hungarian readers living in Austria. The guards are dumbfounded. Who is this old man with such an authoritative air who travels for days to go and look for books? There’s certainly something about him to instil respect. And they withdraw without comment.

The three are taken to the station offices and searched by the gloved hands of inscrutable guards. Their passports are taken away. Their bags are opened, rummaged in and examined with comic pedantry. A small bottle of water scented with Parma violets that Amara has in her bag is uncorked and sniffed by first one soldier then another, then by yet a third. The little bottle is passed from hand to hand almost as if it might contain liquid explosive. But in the end Amara realises that these young guards, two of whom are women, are motivated less by suspicion than by a morbid curiosity about the products of the West; they finger the underclothes and open the blouses and shake out the skirts as if to say: just look at the bourgeois pretensions of the West. But when all’s said and done, what’s it all about? Nothing to speak of.

The three friends are hungry. But there is nothing to eat. They have spent a whole day in the train, and consumed the provisions they prudently brought with them. They never imagined there would be so many stops, so much waiting, and so many obstacles before they reached Budapest.

In the evening the train starts again. A fragment of moon is hanging like an icicle over a potato-shaped mountain. Dogs are barking far away. Horvath is cold. He pulls a chequered blanket from his cardboard suitcase and drapes it round his shoulders.

‘Aren’t you hungry?’

‘Cold.’

‘I’m hungry.’

‘Me too.’

‘Shall I see if I can find something?’

‘You won’t find anything. The train’s full of starving people.’

At Győr the carriages fill with Hungarian soldiers from Czechoslovakia who laugh, eat and fool around. Apart from one who is weeping in a corner because he has lost his best friend. But not in war, as Horvath will report later with his mania for getting into conversation with everybody. A soldier called Bilo has died of typhus after drinking contaminated water. The happy brigade is on its way from East Germany to Szeged. They have been at work on frontier defences. ‘War? Rubbish,’ says one boy, stuffing an enormous omelette roll into his mouth. ‘There are no more wars in the world, and there never will be any more. All wars are over. And that’s a fact.’ The youngsters cheer. One pulls from his knapsack a flat bottle in a lovingly crafted red wool cover and lifts it to his mouth. Someone shouts and reaches out a hand. The boy passes the bottle. Pálinka, the commonest form of plum brandy. Others open their own knapsacks and take out bottles of every shape. All neatly covered in coloured covers crocheted by solicitous mothers and wives. ‘To warm you when you feel cold,’ they will have said as they dressed the little glass bottle or aluminium or pewter flask.

But in no time at all the carriage is an encampment of shouting and singing drunks. One vomits out of the window. Another gets a friend to start delousing him.

‘Couldn’t we move to another carriage?’ suggests Amara tentatively.

‘But where? Can’t you see the whole train’s full? There are people stretched out in the corridors.’

The train stops several times in open countryside. Peasant women in flowered cotton headscarves approach the carriages, at first shyly then more and more shamelessly, to sell hard-boiled eggs, dried figs and little wild apples. And the young soldiers stretch out their arms to bargain and shout, finally buying an egg for eight or a basket of plums for twenty. The women haggle too from below, but more softly. They are afraid of rebukes or fines from the railway police.