Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

‘If I get better, fine, I’ll come with you. But if I die I’d rather be burned in the street than left in some icy morgue and used for experiments.’

‘What are you saying!’

‘Do you promise me?’

‘I promise you.’

‘You know, my mother died of pneumonia too.’

‘What was your mother like?’

‘Very small and thin, but with a smile everyone liked. I can still remember her hair reaching down to her bony shoulders. She never grew up. Perhaps that’s why she died young. She was a schoolgirl all her life, the sort you meet in the street with books under her arm. Always reading. She would burn the soup because she was buried in a novel, she would forget everything. Even me: once when I was five, she set me on a seat in a tram and started reading. When we reached our stop she got out with the book still under her nose, leaving me on the seat. I went round and round the tram route. Till finally it got dark and someone took me to the police. That’s what my mother was like. And I’ve inherited a bit of her absent-mindedness.’

‘You are extremely absent-minded, Horvath. But come to that, so am I.’

Horvath laughs for them both. Now he is no longer grasping her arm with tense, spasmodic fingers, but caressing the back of her hand.

‘You know, I loved my mother and her hair so much I’ve never been able to love any other woman.’

‘A bit like me with Emanuele,’ says Amara, wanting to draw away from his rough, feverish hand. But out of kindness, she doesn’t.

‘Tell me more about your mother,’ she says.

‘She never ate much. So little, in fact, that my father would say: remember you’re not a little bird, you’re a woman. And she would laugh. She just wasn’t hungry. But I knew if there were any pickled gherkins in the house they would vanish in a flash. She had a passion for gherkins in vinegar. They weren’t often to be seen in our house, they were too expensive. But occasionally someone would give us a jar. And she would eat the lot. ‘You haven’t left even one for me,’ my father would grumble. And she would shake her hair, mortified. I myself didn’t like pickled gherkins at all. Once for her birthday I bought her a kilo of them from a very fashionable delicatessen in the city centre. I wrapped them and tied the packet with a red bow. Do you know, that evening she ate them all, every single one. Of course she was ill in the night. She had stomach pains and threw up all the gherkins. My father made her a camomile tisane. Then she fell asleep with her head on his shoulder, on the sofa. He didn’t dare move for fear of waking her. I think they loved each other very much. Or perhaps not. But it seemed like it to me. When my mother died my father wasn’t there. She was in hospital with pneumonia and asked for her husband but he was far away at work and didn’t think her illness was serious enough for him to come back. Then, only a year after she died my father married again, a stupid woman full of airs I could never stand.’

Horvath would have liked to say more, but the nurse interrupts them because it’s time for supper. Broth made from a cube with a little semolina in it. Which the patients consume avidly. They aren’t given so much as a slice of bread. Bread is for the healthy, for those who have to shoot and organise, to run from one end of the city to the other.

Meanwhile the boy with amputated legs has died from loss of blood. They couldn’t stop the bleeding. It is still dripping through the mattress forming a pool that is growing darker and darker. Amara tries not to look at the boy, who has died in silence, but with his face contracted by the strain of fighting the pain. His neck muscles are tense cords and his closed fists lie abandoned by his sides.

Horvath has swallowed his soup. He asks if there’s anything else. But that’s all the supper the hospital can allow the sick.

Time to go. Soon they’ll be closing the doors. Even if the closing is merely symbolic because at all hours of the night ambulances arrive, and even tricycles like the one she saw in Corvin Lane, unloading the more or less severely wounded.

‘I really am hungry,’ says Horvath in her ear when she bends down to kiss him goodnight.

‘Tomorrow I’ll bring you some bread I’ve made myself. It’s a bit flat, but edible even so.’

‘Will you bring me a little sugar too? Here they give us tea without sugar.’

‘If I can find any.’

‘I’m afraid you won’t. In the whole of Budapest there’s no more than a teaspoonful of the stuff. In my opinion the Russkies are trying to make the point that without them we’re screwed.’

At that moment the door opens and two elderly women come in dragging by the arms a Russian soldier with his uniform in rags. Blood is draining from his nose and mouth. His head is thrown back. His hair is short and blond like ears of corn and his head is that of a child.

‘What’s this one doing here,’ shouts the nurse György, known to all for his rough manners, ‘we haven’t enough room for our own people. Take him back where you found him!’

‘But he’s only a little boy! He needs help!’

‘I’ll never treat a Soviet soldier. Just let him die.’

‘Don’t be such a swine, György. Have pity!’ says one of the women, drying hands wet with blood on the corners of the big squared scarf that covers her head.

‘Do they have any pity for us when they go shooting in our houses? Do they have pity when they occupy our streets with their damned tanks?’

‘It’s not his fault! He’s only a child and God knows where he comes from!’

‘Just leave him there and I’ll have a look in a minute.’

Next morning Horvath unexpectedly returns to the flat. Amara opens the door and sees him before her. The same ankle-length trousers, the same dark-blue beret, the same sparse white hair over neck and shoulders.

‘But you have to be cured then!’

‘They needed the bed. Sent me away.’

‘We’ll look after you. Considering what they gave you …’

‘I’m sorry. But I really didn’t know where to go.’

Tadeusz teases him, affectionately draping the blanket round his shoulders and making him a cup of dark and tasteless Chinese tea. Ferenc has been lucky enough to find half a kilo of sugar.

‘Please put in plenty.’

‘How many spoonfuls — two, three, four?’

‘Ten. I’ve seen too many people die in the last few days. Let me console myself with a little sugar, I seem to have cemeteries for eyes.’

Although old Tadeusz says nothing and is as polite as ever, Amara feels communal life is getting strenuous for the two owners of the flat. It is getting more difficult daily to find enough food for everyone. The house is always messy and dirty. It’s impossible to find wood for the stove. Coal is expensive and it’s getting colder. Ferenc has had the idea of stopping the draughts pouring in through the rickety old windows by forcing rolls of cotton wool into the cracks. Effective, but it means you can’t open the windows. The result is a stuffy stagnant smell that hits you when you come in from outside. How can five people live in such a tiny space?

Amara discusses it with Hans who agrees they should leave. But how can they without permits?

‘How about trying again with that bald man at the Béke hotel?’

‘Eight hundred forints for a permit is crazy. Do you know how much a worker earns in a month? Four or five hundred. And in any case we haven’t the money.’

‘Couldn’t your father lend it to us?’

‘He’s already helped me so often in the past. I don’t want to exploit him. And then everyone’s afraid of the future. What’s going to happen? No one can say. Anyone with a little money or a bit of gold keeps tight hold of it.’