Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

‘But, Papà, do you still play with your trains?’

Her father, ridiculous in plus-fours and with a sly smile beneath his rakish moustache, started telling her about the new model locomotives now on sale.

‘You really should see the Rivarossi 691, a masterpiece! Or the Coccodrillo, the 6/8s!’

‘How can you know the names of engines when you’re dead, Papà?’

Her father smiled behind his moustache.

‘Are you teasing me?’

‘Try the new Rivarossi. Just couple her to a few coaches and let her go. You’ll see! Wow!’

Meanwhile Frau Morgan has slipped a note under her door. Hans wants to meet her at a bar called the Coffee House on Schweighofergasse. ‘I’ll expect you at three. Please come! Yours, Hans.’

Isn’t it ridiculous that he is still addressing her formally when they’ve been friends for months? Suddenly she finds him grotesque, incomprehensible, irritating. I never want to see him again, she tells herself, and falls into a deep sleep.

Sitting in the Coffee House on Schweighofergasse, Amara is waiting for Hans. Outside large slow snowflakes are lightening the grey air of a December morning. Her stomach has contracted. She is not hungry. She has crunched a pretzel bought in the street and is now tasting heavily sugared tea. After her two days of seclusion everything seems new and different. The coloured festoons hanging across the windows for Christmas speak to her of mourning rather than impending festivities. And the trees with red rag balls hanging from their branches and silver balls made from cigarette wrappings hurt her eyes with their senseless glitter.

She slowly sips the tea they have placed before her: a little paper bag darkening hot water in a tall glass with a metal handle. After Budapest life in Vienna seems luxurious: peaceful crowded streets and clean well-kept fruit shops where shiny bright apples sit tidily in their boxes behind windows adorned with flowers that reach out invitingly from their vases. Every time a customer comes into the bar a tinkling is heard. In and out go men protected by hats and long coats and women by berets and galoshes against the snow. They sit down at tables of unvarnished wood and order a beer, a white coffee, a tea or a glass of wine. They have the air of people who are thinking of love and business, not war.

But wait, the door has trilled again. A man has come in. She recognises his threadbare coat the colour of a dead leaf, and the shirt open at his long thin throat. There is an affectionate smile on his dry lips.

He sits down beside her, timid and morose. He doesn’t ask her how she is. For a while he doesn’t say a word.

‘I thought you’d gone back to Florence.’

‘I didn’t want to see anyone.’

‘Your father’s death?’

‘How did you know about that?’

‘Frau Morgan told me. I phoned several times.’

‘So you knew I hadn’t left.’

‘I knew.’

Amara looks at him as she lifts the hot tea to her lips. This man has infiltrated himself into her life and little by little, timidly and almost unnoticed, has spread his roots. How deeply?

‘Well, what shall we do?’

‘Let’s go and see the house in Schulerstrasse. They’re expecting us.’

‘Who are?’

‘Ex-consul Schumacher and his wife Helga.’

‘The people now living in the Orenstein apartment?’

‘Exactly. Even if it seems they left it after getting it as a gift from the government then later took it back.’

‘What sort of people are they?’

‘Germans. He was in the Nazi diplomatic service. That’s all I know.’

‘Let’s go.’

Amara and Hans catch a tram, then another, walk down part of the Kärntnerstrasse, enter the short Singerstrasse and cross Stephansplatz to reach Schulerstrasse. They stop for a minute or two to look at the building where the Orenstein family lived before they were deported to the ghetto at Łódź and then probably to Auschwitz. It is a large building from the early years of the century. Ten or twelve floors; pretentiously decked with Ionic pillars, windows with fake Gothic architraves and a gigantic main door reached by a flight of marble steps shaped like a half moon.

They go up the steps to face a locked door decorated with legendary and historical scenes. They look for the name on its brass plate. They find it and ring. A female voice invites them to come in.

The door opens suddenly to reveal a courtyard full of ornamental plants. On the right another entrance leads to a lift in wrought iron and glass. Hans and Amara slip into the great space which closes with a puff and slowly begins to climb. Frosted glass windows with designs in white on white reveal the stairs as they unroll elegantly floor by floor.

At the fifth floor, the lift halts with a dry hiss and they get out. They ring the bell. The door opens silently. On the threshold is a handsome woman with violet rouge, grey waved hair, and a fox fur thrown carelessly over a very elegant blue and grey wool dress.

‘Please come in.’

Extremely polite, she leads them into a luxurious drawing room with long purple velvet curtains, Persian carpets to soften the floor, and armchairs and sofas covered in white linen and strewn with coloured cushions.

‘Do sit down,’ she invites them in a melodious voice. She is like a thirties film star. When she moves her blue and grey skirt dances round calves sheathed in transparent seamed stockings.

‘So you are friends of the Orensteins …’ she begins lightly.

‘Well, I never knew them, but Signora Maria Amara Sironi, who is Italian, was a close friend of Emanuele, the son of Karl and Thelma Orenstein who owned this building before …’ Hans looks around with embarrassment. He does not know whether to continue or not. But Frau Schumacher seems not at all put out.

‘Yes, I know that before us the Orenstein family lived here. When the government assigned this apartment to us we were living in Tokyo. My husband is a diplomat. He goes where he is sent, as I’m sure you understand. We had a large house and garden and, can you believe it, ten dogs. My husband loves dogs. Do you love dogs, Signora Sironi?’

‘Yes,’ answers Amara in embarrassment. She cannot understand why this woman wants to keep the conversation on such a mundane and pointless level. At the same time she looks round thinking Emanuele lived here. Perhaps he once huddled with a book in the very armchair she is sitting on now. She can almost see him.

‘It was just before Christmas, like now. We’d decorated the tree for our daughters Andrea and Margarethe. Wilhelm had already joined us,’ continues Frau Schumacher undaunted, without making sure her two guests are following her. ‘We were about to sit down at table. Our wonderful cook, Michiko, had roasted the stuffed turkey in the way my husband likes. Our dear butler, Yunichiro, brought me a letter. I opened it expecting Christmas greetings. Instead I read that the government was ordering us transferred within the week to Vienna to attend to administrative affairs, a move apparently decided by the Führer himself. So, instead of celebrating Christmas we had to pack our things. When we arrived we were told that the Reich’s department for administrative affairs was not yet ready and that we must move into an apartment, a fine one certainly, but not what we had expected. We didn’t even know that a family of Jews were living in our lodgings. We were assured the proprietors would move out within a few days and this is what happened. The house was in excellent condition, I have to admit that Frau Orenstein had kept it beautifully. There were flowers everywhere and elegant carpets and even valuable paintings. We would have preferred unfurnished accommodation; we already had so many possessions of our own. But the Foreign Ministry wanted us to take it just as it was, fully furnished with pictures, carpets and everything. Do you see those three men in dark blue against an azure background? It seems that Herr Orenstein probably bought that painting from the artist himself. Ottone Rosai, 1923. They say that Herr Orenstein was very well known as an industrialist in Italy, in fact they’ve told me that he owned a very fine villa in Florence, in the Rifredi district; and that unexpectedly, and, I have to say, most inadvisedly, he had decided to transfer his family to Vienna to reoccupy his house here, without considering the risks they would run.’