Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

‘Listen, I won’t have you insulting the signora …’

‘Shut up, you idiot! … As for you, woman, who do you think you are, you birdbrain! We’re all cut from the same cloth, every one of us. Those who went through the war and those who didn’t. Those who have been in a death camp and those who haven’t. Shit is shit everywhere, even when it hides under camelhair coats and felt hats.’

‘All right, we’ll go …’

‘Beginning to smell the stink of burning, are you? In a hurry to get away at the first whiff of shit, just like all the others, gentlemen with sensitive noses; well-dressed, well-fed gentlemen …’

He lifts the bottle to his lips again, but it’s empty. Moving calmly, hands holding his armpits tight in a huge effort to control his shaking, he opens the cupboard again with a kick, pulls out another bottle that looks like whisky, holds it up to the light and sees that it’s half full. Then he lifts it straight to his mouth.

‘Now you two get out, you two drunks … get lost. I need to talk face to face with the Signorina Maria Amara Sironi here present.’

Hans bends his head in resignation. He takes Horvath by the arm and they move away. But Amara notices that they leave the door ajar and she sees them peeping through the gap. Hans signs to her not to be afraid, he will intervene if she is attacked.

Peter walks backwards and forwards. He takes Amara by the shoulders and forces her to sit down on the sofa. He suddenly becomes much calmer.

‘I’m not the person you’re looking for, and I never will be. So go away and leave me in peace.’

‘Why won’t you tell me what’s happened, Emanuele, I’ll believe you.’

‘Don’t treat me like an imbecile. You’re not prepared to believe I really am Emanuele.’

‘Your father and mother …’

‘Died in the ghetto at Łódź, you know that because I wrote to you about it.’

‘And you …’

‘I’ve died and come back to life several times. Once it was tuberculosis. I don’t know how I was cured, maybe it wasn’t really tuberculosis but just my lungs spitting blood in desperation. I thought my life would end at Łódź. But I was reserved for something better: the drawing rooms of Dachau. There I died again.’

‘So it was to Dachau they took you?’

‘To Dachau, yes madam, a magnificent holiday location … even with sulphurous waters and a brilliant medical facility ideal for conducting experiments.’ He laughs and coughs, spitting.

‘And how did you survive?’

‘Always greedy for information, Amara, most bitter Amara. Digging and digging away like an old tapir … Always anxious to stick your nose in the shit so you can say: oh no, that’s not me, I don’t know that shit. That’s what you want, isn’t it? But I’ve been in it up to my hair, get that into your head, you silly little Florentine cunt! And stop looking down on me with that superior air.’

‘I’m trying to understand.’

‘There’s nothing to understand, stupid girl, nothing to understand … Just things that are so real that they seem unreal, so real that they become sublime in their unreality. You will never understand, never …’

He stops and balances on one foot so that it seems he must fall full length from one moment to the next. But he recovers and again grabs the neck of the bottle. But this one is empty too. His eyes are shining with a livid, sinister light. Amara wonders whether it might not be better to go and leave him in peace. She seems only to have been able to dig up ancient, unbearable agonies. But when she gets up to go he takes her by the arm and forces her down on the sofa again.

‘Since you’re here I want you to know, little princess on the pea, I want you to know everything then you can go and fuck yourself wherever you like. And stop crushing my balls! Who asked you to look for me, eh? Who gave you permission to come ferreting about in this loathsome city trying to find out what happened to your beloved and incredibly stupid young friend Emanuele Orenstein? He’s dead, got that? Dead and buried, and you make a serious mistake in trying to revive him. Because the dead don’t speak, or if they do speak they spit, and if they spit they poison, remember that, you lousy little cow!’

Amara instinctively curls up, pulling her knees to her chin. She watches him, terrified and fascinated.

‘Now you must listen, I want you to listen with your whole body because there are things I’ve never said before and I shall never say again. I want a little piss and vomit to reach you and wreck your style as a little girl of a good family, bloody hell, which I can’t stand at all, are you listening?’

‘I’m listening.’

‘As soon as we got to Dachau, they separated us. My workmates from the ghetto at Łódź, my carpentry shop friends, boys like myself, were all bewildered and understood nothing. Four days crowded together in the train. So many things thought and said! We kept close so as not to lose sight of one another. But as soon as we got to Dachau, those ever well-dressed gentlemen, those guards in their well-ironed uniforms, immediately split us up. A rapid and drastic process of selection. All the crippled, short-sighted, lame, sick, under-sized, and particularly the children to one side, please! Hurry up, schnell ! The rest, a little bigger and capable of work, get moving, to the other side. Come on, what are you waiting for! I went spontaneously to the workers’ side, I knew how to make out I was older than I really was … intuition guided me but I was already thinking only of myself. I betrayed the others and left them to their fate without saying a word … I’d learned a thing or two in that bloody ghetto! The next day I realised I’d been right … Those on the right were immediately shut up in a lorry, made drunk on exhaust fumes and taken to Hartheim Castle … A good way to rescue them from the problems of life, don’t you think? I bet you don’t even know what Hartheim Castle is: a splendid place, with well-kept flower gardens, where the SS gassed thousands of people, principally Germans: the crippled, the sick, the lame, the mad. Project T4, heard of that? No, of course you haven’t. Memory is elusive and fleeting in people of your type. My friends never even reached the castle. They were killed at once, in the lorries. They died a disgusting death, writhing about in their vomit for a dozen minutes, climbing over each other to try to reach a bit of air, squashing the weakest, who cared a damn, so long as they could breathe. For what purpose? Just a few seconds more of life, among hundreds of others condemned to death in a hermetically sealed lorry into which poison gas was introduced through a huge pipe … But those who had moved instinctively to the left, like me, off to work, hop hop, easy-peasy! Too simple for complicated heads like yours, it was so straightforward and simple … Yet no one realised it, you see, not one of them, until it was too late. And me? How did you save yourself, I hear you ask? Just by work? Yes indeed, I worked half-naked with damaged hands and feet covered with chilblains in those damned clogs that were too broad and hard. I survived because I was strong in spite of my tuberculosis or whatever it was and having claimed to be older than I really was. I survived by stealing from everybody else. I became a daring and very clever young petty thief. I stole from the dead too. I was only caught once, when I couldn’t tear bread out of the hands of a dead man. I’d been watching him. I knew he had a dry crust hidden under his pyjamas. But he was dying. I spied on him. And the moment he breathed his last I climbed onto his pallet and grabbed his treasure, but his hand was closed so firmly round that piece of bread I could not get it off him. He was dead but he still wanted to keep it. Madness! I needed to break his fingers but that took time and in the meantime the trusty came in. I got such a whipping that day that I still have the scars. Want to see them?’