Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

‘But he didn’t say they all ended up crucified,’ remarks Horvath sarcastically.

‘Professor Erderly, in his turn, maintained that the Magyars have always been forced to submit to lords and masters, but have always fought tenaciously to get rid of them. Now we are showing ourselves equally couragious in rebuilding a sadly run-down country with no functioning economy, a country forced by its allied masters to concentrate everything on arms rather than the development of agriculture, and on heavy industry rather than on the services necessary to improve the condition of human life. But we are not interested in a policy of power. We want peace and neutrality …’

‘They always repeat the same things,’ remarks Horvath, ‘but they are right. They are perfectly right. I too repeat the same things about my fever, about my pneumonia. A sick people repeats itself ad nauseam until it regains its health.’

Now a female voice recites in slow, soft cadences a poem by Nâzım Hikmet:

They were sad, my love

they were happy, full of hope

they were courageous and heroic

your words,

they were men .

Horvath loves poetry. You need only remember that his modest luggage contains two volumes of poetry, Rilke and Walt Whitman.

‘Under Rákosi, that stuff would have landed you straight in prison,’ remarks Ferenc, before withdrawing to play his violin.

Horvath is wearing some knee socks Hans found for him on a stall. They are well worn and faded, but warm. When the man with the gazelles brought them, wrapped in a piece of newspaper, Horvath jumped for joy. But then, when he opened the parcel and took a good look at them, it was obvious they were so threadbare on the heels as to be useless. Amara darned them for him with wool of a different colour, but what matter? — the important thing was to keep warm. Thanks to the bottomless contents of Ferenc’s cupboard, which even contained needles of every possible size and several balls of wool.

‘Will you tell me something about your Emanuele?’ says Horvath suddenly, turning down the radio which was now playing nothing but trivial little marches.

‘I’ve told you about him so often, Horvath, you must be bored with the subject.’

‘We are here for him, Amara.’

‘The real reason we’re here is to see Hans’s father and his violinist friend Ferenc.’

‘In passing, on the way to Auschwitz. Remember?’

‘Of course I remember.’

‘I know, it’s not our fault Budapest was struck by an earthquake the moment we arrived.’

‘What d’you want to know?’

‘Why you have loved him so much and kept this love alive for so many years.’

‘I don’t know what to tell you, Horvath. Why do we love someone? I don’t know. And the more you love the less you know why. Have you never loved anyone?’

‘Oh yes. But I’ve always been rejected. I’ve never known reciprocated love.’

‘But you were a handsome boy. And you’re still a handsome man, Horvath.’

‘Don’t be silly, Amara. I’m an old wreck.’

‘I know some very ugly men who have been much loved. But why do you think your love was never returned?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe I was afraid. If a woman fell in love with me, I ran off.’

‘So you were the one who didn’t want reciprocated love.’

‘It could be. I wanted something more every time. A more beautiful woman, or a more intelligent or more sensitive one. The one I had seemed dull and boring. I made love to her for a few months, then got bored.’

‘A sort of Don Giovanni, then?’

‘I never found a woman I was completely happy with. As soon as I got to know her better, my arms dropped to my sides.’

‘So you never fell in love.’

‘Yes, but only for a month, or at most two. I had loves that struck me like lightning. That warmed my heart. Then they came to an end, but the warmth stayed with me. Maybe that’s how it is. I like living in the warmth of memory. The actual person gets in the way of my dedicating myself to that warmth. You and I probably resemble one another more than you think, Amara. You too live on memories and your heart is still warm from a fire that died years ago. Like the stars we can still see in the sky even though they exploded and expired millennia ago. It’s the light that travels on. And we live in that light.’

‘Yes, perhaps we are alike, Horvath.’

‘That’s why I asked you to tell me about him.’

‘Would you like me to read you his letters?’

‘You’ve already read them to me many times. And I don’t want to hear about the ghetto at Łódź and people dying of hunger. Tell me something about Rifredi and life when you were children.’

‘One morning we went out together with our bicycles. We went up into the hills. Took a narrow country road. And pedalled energetically up slopes covered with rocks. The Florence countryside was so beautiful. There were broad beans in flower, and potatoes with rich green leaves, in among hundreds of poppies of an unbelievable red. And on we went, flying ahead on those bicycles, scattering the stones, hurling ourselves into the valleys, climbing the hills beyond, it was a huge joy. Suddenly, round a curve, we came on an enormous cow. Calm and extremely beautiful, and with no intention of moving. Our brakes, you know, weren’t very effective. I threw myself into the beans to the right and Emanuele into the dried-up bed of a sort of stream to the left. The cow raised her head and looked at us in surprise. We got up all covered with scratches and bumps. Emanuele had hurt his thigh and torn the left shoulder of his shirt. I had taken the skin off both my knees which were bleeding badly, and hurt my temple; I had ridden slap into a large sharp rock. But do you know what Emanuele did instead of swearing at the cow? He sat down beside me and licked the wound on my forehead, saying saliva was a disinfectant. I closed my eyes and left him to it. His tongue was so large and rough that I convinced myself it was the cow. Even today I think I must have really been stunned and unaware of the cow coming up to me and licking the gash on my forehead, as dogs sometimes do when they have a wound.’

‘Was it Emanuele or the cow?’

‘I don’t know. It could have been him.’

‘Did you make love?’

‘We never did, Horvath. We were too young. And also very prudish and easily embarrassed. We thought sexual love was something for grown-ups.’

‘And even now you still live in the memory of that cow’s tongue on the wound on your forehead. Amara, frankly, I think you’re in a worse state than I am.’

Amara and Horvath laugh together. At that moment the man with the gazelles comes in, carrying his father, like Anchises, on his back.

‘What’s happened?’

‘He got hit by a bullet in his side.’

Hans lays his father down on Amara’s camp bed in the kitchen and starts taking off his sweater. Under that he finds another pullover, and under that yet another.

‘But how many pullovers are you wearing, Father?’

Tadeusz laughs. Hans laughs too. Ferenc has noticed nothing. He goes on playing the violin shut up in the bedroom. Amara bundles up the pullovers for the wash. On Tadeusz’s white skin is a hole with a black border. No blood. But there is something sinister about that hole in his flesh.

‘It’s nothing. Could you get some alcohol please, Amara, it’s in Ferenc’s cupboard.’

At that moment Ferenc comes into the room with his violin on his arm. He sees the wound and throws himself onto Tadeusz, embracing him as if he were dying.

‘It’s nothing, Ferenc, just a bullet that needs to be removed.’

‘We’ll get you to the hospital.’

‘Wait. Call János. Let’s try him before going near that hell of a hospital.’