Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

The train for Vienna. The man with the gazelles is sitting opposite Amara. Horvath is reading with his nose in his book. The engine is whistling and puffing. It is an old steam goods train, adapted for passenger use: its steel floor lined with linoleum, the seats wooden, heavy and very uncomfortable. Above their heads netting racks bulging with bundles of various sizes.

Amara has a book open in front of her. But her eyes refuse to stay on the page, constantly lifting to look at the dirty windows, behind which the countryside slowly passes, sometimes hidden by clouds of black smoke. Birches, snow-covered firs, more birches, beeches, oaks with heavy white branches. The wide fields seem so light as to be suspended in mid-air. The eye sweeps across a whiteness that unites earth and sky. The outside world has assumed contours as smooth, delicate and soft as a child’s skin.

The last days in Budapest were feverish. Dr János Szabó, perhaps feeling guilty for having been unable to save his friend Tadeusz, took charge of the burial. The cemetery was in chaos; no one any longer knew anything of graves and plots. So he had the great idea of digging a ditch in the Gyal forest some twenty kilometres from Budapest. They borrowed a van and loaded it with the body wrapped in a sheet, together with spades and shovels.

They took it in turns to dig, starting with Ferenc. To grasp the shovel, he put down his violin, shut in its black case, beside him on the snow. Hans rolled up his sleeves and despite the cold opened the buttons of his plush-lined cotton shirt. Horvath, wearing in honour of the occasion the now darned and hence multicoloured stockings Tadeusz had given him, was as usual in sandals made from strips of leather, like an innocent blue-eyed St Francis ready to talk to the birds. Amara too, squeezed into her little blue coat, her red beret on her head and in dark blue woollen gloves, struck the frozen soil with the pick. The deeper they dug, the softer the earth became. Finally Hans jumped into the grave to shovel out the mud, piling it on top of the snow.

They even found some flowers. Or rather, Ferenc did, paying a ‘fortune’ as he put it to a florist who had reopened his shop ‘to survive’. Goodness knows where those giant tulips had come from, their red petals seeming to tremble in the cold on that freshly dug grave filled in with earth and snow.

By midday they were back at home. They drank some wine that Ferenc had kept for special occasions. In honour of Tadeusz, he said through his tears. A good fermented wine straight from Italy, he guaranteed, in fact from Sicily. But the label was in Polish. They smoked ill-smelling cigarettes made from shag sold in the street at half a forint per gram. They devoured some ginger biscuits, also from Ferenc’s mysterious cupboard which was always kept locked. But Dr Szabó didn’t stay with them to enjoy the Sicilian wine. He said goodbye to everyone, and as he was leaving Ferenc gave him a cap that had belonged to Tadeusz. ‘You wear it, he won’t need it any more. It’s good quality wool.’ Dr Szabó took the cap and turned it round in both hands, sniffing it as if searching for the smell of his dead friend. Then he slowly pressed it down on his head and went out without another word.

The burst water pipes were repaired by Hans who borrowed a blow lamp and some solder. But nothing could be done about the windows because they had no glass. They blocked them as best they could with waxed cloth while Ferenc stuck his rolls of cotton wool into the corners to shut out draughts.

It was clear to them all that they couldn’t go on staying in the building. Ferenc talked about going to Miskolc where he had a sister. Horvath wanted to go back to Vienna. The man with the gazelles and Amara too saw Vienna as a refuge. But without visas it would be difficult for them to leave.

For days on end they lived on peaches in syrup, the only thing to be found in the State shops which had opened their doors again. These shops also sold horrible ash-coloured shoes, sweaters as full of thorns as a blackberry bush, soap that dissolved too rapidly in water, and tubes of toothpaste which were somehow already half empty. They had plenty of second-hand army greatcoats, and strange crocheted berets from China, their brother country, with whom Russia and therefore Hungary also had been having a tempestuous relationship but with whom the new government, following Mao’s visit and Khrushchev’s revelation of his hostility to Stalin, was doing business. It was said that Mao had been one of those to insist on the Soviet repression of Hungary. As had Tito who had seemed to support Nagy in the first days of the revolt. This had also been the attitude of Togliatti, representative of the biggest and most prestigious Communist Party in Europe; in fact it was said among other things that he had been most ferocious in his condemnation of the ‘counter-revolutionary’ Hungarian insurgents, who in his view must be ‘squashed without pity’.

Neither the State shops nor the reorganised ordinary shops had any bread or fresh milk. Only cans of condensed milk stamped with large words in Czech, and dried meat in the form of the twisted batons given to soldiers in the trenches. And great quantities of peaches in syrup from Yugoslavia, a sign of new brotherly relations with a country that until a month ago had been their fiercest enemy.

Hans and Amara made their way every day to the Hotel Béke, he to search for the bald man who had offered them permits for Austria, she to try to dictate ‘live’ articles to Italy. But the bald man could not be found and the telephone lines only worked in fits and starts. Even so Amara did manage to dictate two long articles, if with the interruptions it must have taken her three hours. All the same she was late and the paper had already had the news from international agencies.

They had opened Tadeusz’s will; he had left two thousand forints to his son Hans, and to Ferenc his furniture, books and maps and a valuable drawing by Munch that he had himself inherited from his father. Hans ran to the Hotel Béke and this time did find the bald Alain who in exchange for two thousand forints gave him three tickets and three permits for Vienna.

So here they are now. Horvath has completely recovered from his pneumonia despite the cold and lack of medicines and the general discomforts of the time. He walks happily through the train chattering to people of all kinds. He is no longer wearing the long darned socks but has reverted to his friar’s sandals and the half-mast trousers that leave uncovered his extremely thin ankles and their network of bluish veins. Only one innovation: he has cut his white hair which was getting in his way. His eyes shine on either side of his long nose. Even Hans seems younger. The death of his father sobered him. But in compensation, the responsibility of looking after the house and the effort of going out in the cold to look for firewood and of touring the whole city on foot, has made him dry and tough. The light-brown lock of hair still falls over his brow,

At this moment he is relaxed, smiling at Amara as if newly recovered from a serious illness. His face is pale but confident. He too is happy to have escaped from the trap of Budapest, to be able once more to face a normal life. After all, it is still not long since the end of the war, and to land in the midst of another war was an almost unbearable surprise.

The morning of the day before, the two of them had sat down together at the little table. Hans had taken hold of her hands and asked her what she planned to do. She thought for a bit. Then answered perhaps a little too firmly: ‘I want to go on searching for Emanuele …’

‘All right. Let’s do that. But it’ll be harder to go back to Auschwitz now. They’ve got more strict about the borders. They won’t even let you through as an Italian.’