Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

‘But did you never ask yourself where the Orensteins had gone, when they left a furnished house complete with carpets on the floor, pictures hanging on the walls and flowers on the tables?’

‘I would imagine they moved to another house. Or returned to Florence, to their beautiful villa at Rifredi. I’ve heard that they had dogs too and gave them German names, isn’t that strange? I mean, to call a dog Wolfgang or Heinrich, I do wonder whether that might not have been a little disrespectful towards humans … But unfortunately I never met the Orensteins. When we moved in here they had already gone. We lived here for nearly a year. Then we had to go back to Berlin. And there, in the bombing raids, we lost everything. Almost the only thing that was left of our house was the walls. The roof fell in and the whole block burned for a day and a night. Meanwhile my husband reached retiring age. So we decided to go back to Vienna where we had lived so well. Luckily the bombs had spared the old Orenstein house, so we were able to move in again. For a time an SS officer and his family had lived here, decent people who knew how to keep the apartment just as it was. Then he and his wife fled to Argentina leaving their small children here. I believe a grandmother took them. Anyway, the house was free so we moved back.’

Amara would have liked to ask many questions, but the woman gives them no chance to speak. She seems to want to tell them about Tokyo, about their houses and their dogs. Even about the apartment they are living in now, but as if the property had come to them in a normal way, through a contract. But Amara knows from Emanuele’s letters that the house was confiscated fully furnished. Something about this elegant, self-confident woman, so utterly impervious to all questions, intimidates her. Only at the end does she decide to confront her, trying to be as laconic as possible.

‘Frau Schumacher, I have a letter from Emanuele Orenstein in which he says that you knew the family,’ she finds the courage to say.

‘Oh, you should pay no attention to an over-excited child.’

Amara wonders how she can know he was an over-excited child if she never met him, but prefers not to argue and to let her talk.

‘All the Jews whimpered at that time that they were being thrown out of their homes. In fact they were selling them for a good price and heading for places where bombs were unlikely to fall. This was very astute of them. Because their houses often ended up in ruins. But by then they had sold them. Do you see how cunning that was?’

‘You said yourself that this house was not bought but was assigned to you.’

‘Yes indeed, by the State, as is normal for diplomats. But the State had bought it from the Orensteins, I’m sure of that, and it will have cost a pretty penny. But why dig up these sad things from the past? The war was an ugly time for us all, Frau Sironi. We ourselves lost a son of twenty-two, killed on a bombing mission to Stalingrad. And you are still thinking of that child Emanuele Orenstein! Who today would be … what? Twenty-two?’

‘Twenty-eight.’

‘He too will have died fighting. The best of German youth died in the war, my dear signora, and the same is true of the best Austrian youth; they fought side by side. Best to erect a stone over the past and begin again, believe me. When I heard my son Wilhelm was dead, I too wanted to die. And then, for years, I tried to find his remains, but never could. But do you know what my daughter Margarethe once said to me. Mama, you are more concerned with the dead than with those who are living with you. And I realised she was right: I was neglecting my husband and our two daughters to run after my dead boy. Since then I’ve built a little cemetery in my heart, where I constantly take fresh flowers, but I no longer search for his body to give him a burial worthy of our name. He is buried inside me and that should be enough, don’t you agree?’

She is full of dignity and seems deeply sincere. Amara and Hans look at each other, discouraged. It is quite clear to them that they will get nowhere at all with this woman who has erased every doubt and every question from her past.

‘Not every Austrian fought in the war, Frau Schumacher, some were shut up in extermination camps,’ says Amara in a low voice.

‘And is that not the same thing? You die how you die. War is a huge obscenity and causes damage everywhere. No one is best and no one is the winner. We are all equal in the face of death.’

‘Is your husband dead?’ asks Hans to gain time and to find another way of trying to get her to say something about the Orensteins.

‘My husband is alive. He’s in another room. Would you like to meet him?’

‘Well, yes.’

Elegant and unembarrassed, Frau Schumacher rises from the sofa, and with great strides of her slim legs that set her blue and grey skirt dancing and her high heels tapping lightly on the floor, she opens a door and disappears.

‘They have even appropriated the Rosai picture, have you noticed?’ says Hans in a low voice.

On the white wall right in front of them hangs a large canvas showing three men in worker’s caps, in a moment of rest from their work. A picture that evokes a distant world, telling of the friendship of three stone-breakers, sitting down for a chat and a smoke beside the heavy flagstones that they will use to pave the street. A fugue of colours containing light blue, green and sea-blue to enchant the eye.

‘And isn’t that a De Chirico?’

‘Good lord! I really think it is.’

They both go up close to the little canvas with its clean colours, showing a triangular town square and, behind a clear arch, an approaching railway engine belching smoke from its large chimney.

‘Wonderful.’

Amara can’t stop herself going to the window. She wants to see if the pancake-seller Emanuele described in one of his first letters is still there. The stall and the itinerant salesman have gone. But the clockmaker whose clocks all tell different times is still there, on the pavement opposite. Amara’s heart misses a beat.

Then the door opens and Frau Schumacher reappears pushing a wheelchair. Consul Schumacher is a tall, good-looking man with fine features and brilliantined hair. He occupies the wheelchair as if sitting on a throne. Under his elegant silk dressing gown can be glimpsed the striped trousers of a pair of pyjamas also undoubtedly of silk. At his throat is a frothy white scarf. He has just been shaved and is smiling like a child, with confidence and genuine warmth. As he advances he spreads a powerful scent of lavender.

‘I knew Emanuele Orenstein,’ he says at once, contradicting his wife who looks at him with irritation. ‘An extremely sensitive little boy, extremely sensitive. I think he must have suffered a good deal at having to leave his home, but at that time the rules were absolute: no Jew could keep an apartment like this is in the centre of Vienna. I heard they were transported to the ghetto at Łódź. Where they are said to have led a life of dignity, even if obviously deprived of the comforts they were used to … most unsuitable, I have to say, especially for the Orenstein family who had been used to every convenience. But I also heard that later they were able to get passports and returned to Florence where, I understand, they had a beautiful house, in the Rifredi district if I’m not mistaken. Civilised people. I heard no more after that, but I believe they may have ended up in Israel.’

‘They were killed, both Herr Karl Orenstein and Frau Thelma. The only one we know nothing about is their son Emanuele. Signora Sironi here believes he must have survived. We are wondering how to find him.’

‘Emanuele’s last letter is dated May 1943,’ adds Amara, looking firmly at the consul. She is beginning to realise that behind that air of infantile innocence is hidden a monstrous talent for dissimulation.