Эндрю Миллер - Oxygen

It was not, of course, the money – that would come later – and when he had looked inside it, locked into one of the toilets on the train, he had found it to contain nothing but a dozen newspapers – Le Monde Diplomatique – and two large white bath towels, presumably for the sake of bulk. In Vienna he kept it with him, depositing the blue bag at left luggage and taking a taxi to the Opera House, killing time in Kärntner Strasse, Singer Strasse, the Hoher market. Several times he paused to watch the street in a store window, trying to catch from out of the animated sheen of passers-by a glimpse of any figure that stopped when he stopped, but the only persistent face, the only face his trick surprised into a guilty stillness (a face like milk splashed on dark wood), was his own.

At 12.30 he returned to Westbahnhof and took a seat in the station restaurant, a table between a pillar and a large pot plant, from where he had a clear view of the glass and steel doors. There were still twenty-five minutes before the rendezvous, but this time he did not intend to be startled by an unseen approach, as he had been at the station in Paris, turning to find a face too close to his own, a stare like a policeman’s, a voice reciting, ‘Françoise said to give you this,’ in an accent he was starting to be familiar with.

The waitress came, a plump girl, profoundly bored, and stood beside him with her pad of paper. He had no appetite – the fag of tramping with the holdall through a hot city he had little affection for had triggered a nagging headache – but he selected something at random from the menu and ordered a bottle of Kaiser beer. She brought the beer immediately. It was cold and it seemed to do him some good. He relaxed a little, closing his eyes, trying to come to terms with the fact that he was here at all – in Vienna! – when in a saner, more orderly world he would be at his desk in Paris, picking at lines of dialogue and starting to wonder what there might be in the fridge for lunch.

The rhythms of the train were in his blood still, a sensation distantly familiar to him, for he had once known the night train well. Four or five times a year he had taken it to visit his mother and Uncle Ernö. ‘The Orient Express’ – an exotic name for a conveyance that was neither luxurious nor even particularly fast. Six berths to a compartment, eleven compartments to a car, and along the length of the carriage a narrow corridor where people smoked and leaned at the windows, gazing moodily at dark blue fields and the lights of strange towns.

And there was always some incident, some curious encounter. On this trip he had spent an hour somewhere in Eastern France calming the fears of a red-haired American girl who had heard, or perhaps read in one of those tedious guidebooks no one seemed capable of leaving home without, that there were criminal gangs who sprayed knockout gas into the sleeping cars in order to rob, or even to murder, the unconscious passengers. His English – unused since San Francisco – was shaky, and she spoke nothing else, but with the help of some schnapps he had at last succeeded in making her see the absurdity of her fears, though privately he suspected that farther to the east (Romania?) such gangs did indeed exist, for these were desperate times.

Once the girl was asleep, and the Frenchman on the berth below her ceased to grind his teeth, László had stretched out on his own bunk, and thought back to to his last journey on the Orient Express, the winter of 1989, when he had come to Vienna to watch his mother die. János had flown in from New York (where his marriage to Patty was ending in the divorce courts), and the pair of them had carried on a three-day vigil at their mother’s bedside in the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, János muttering in László’s ear about justice and love and private detectives, while László watched the February snow, silver and dark, building drifts on the sill of the narrow window above his mother’s head.

It was the type of end that people call ‘peaceful’: the old woman, skeletal after months of wasting, suddenly absent, the breath gone out of her mouth, her eyes shut like a pharaoh’s. A brief, apparently untroubled translation. But at the instant of her going he had been shaken by the sense that in that cramped and curtained space at the end of the ward something revelatory had taken place, sacred even, and he had clutched at it in the hope that his grief could be meaningful, a noble effort to reconcile himself to the will of the transcendent. But the moment didn’t stay. He was too much of the materialist, brought up on dialectics, the True Path, the Victory of Socialism. He had no grounding in religion, no child-learned texts with which to dress the moment up in language, no consoling images of souls in flight. So her death, like that other, earlier death, in Budapest, had remained untransfigured, and merely what it was: an enigma that outstared reason, and left him for a while in a perfection of loneliness that had frightened him badly.

Afterwards, when the formalities were done, the papers signed and the porters had taken her to the morgue (a little flower of bruises on her wrist where the drip needle had been), the brothers had clung to each other in the corridor outside the ward, two middle-aged men, unshaven, raw-eyed, foreigners in a rage with death, while either side of them the nurses went about their business, walking on soft-soled shoes that seemed to make no noise at all.

‘Bitte?’

His food had arrived: a slab of pork surrounded by a mess of green which, consulting the menu, he discovered to be creamed spinach. He picked up his fork, afraid that it would look suspicious if he made no attempt to eat what he had ordered, but after the first mouthful he decided that it would look more suspicious to eat such food, and he pushed aside his plate, glancing up from the table at the very instant his contact emerged through the swing-doors.

She had cut and dyed her hair (auburn) and was dressed in faded jeans and a man’s blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, but there was no mistaking her: Emil’s friend, though shorn of that aura of severity which, in Paris, had shivered from her skin like smoke. She looked now like someone’s favourite niece – his, perhaps! – smiling and crossing to his table with a confident swing of the hips. Over her shoulder she carried a bag identical to his own, though from the tautness of the strap, the way she lowered it carefully to the floor beside his chair, it was evidently much heavier.

She kissed his cheeks. ‘You had a good trip?’

‘Thank you,’ he said.

She sat opposite him and lit a cigarette. When the waitress came she ordered a Coke.

‘You should eat,’ she said, looking at his plate.

László shrugged. ‘The heat…’

‘There may be a storm later,’ she said.

‘You think so?’

He would have liked to have known what the rules were here, whether he was to assume they could be overheard, despite the fact there was no one at the tables either side of them, and there was music, the inevitable dreary waltz, seeping from speakers hidden in the walls. He thought they should have given him some training in Paris. He didn’t want to make a fool of himself.

He leaned towards her. ‘Will you be coming with me?’

‘No,’ she said. Then with a trace of her old impatience, ‘Of course not.’

She drank her Coke and crushed an ice cube between her teeth. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘The Budapest train leaves at fourteen-twenty. When you reach the city you will stay at the Hotel Opera on Révay utca. Do you know it?’

‘I know the street. Near the Basilica.’

‘Correct.’

‘And what do I do there?’

‘You go sightseeing.’

‘For how long?’