Train to Budapest (16 page)

That warm September day, Amara and Emanuele had pedalled laboriously up the Montorsoli road as far as Ceppetto church and then along the Scollini side-road until they reached the de’ Seppi spring. There they tied their bicycles to the trunk of a maple with reddening pointed leaves. They walked along a path among the limes and pines, which widened at a certain point into a small but very green secluded patch of grass. There they had taken their omelette sandwiches from their rucksacks and had eaten them greedily in the shade of those pointed leaves oscillating in the sun. Mamma Thelma had been so thoughtful as to slip into her son’s pack at the last minute two peeled cucumbers and a little paper twist of salt. They had devoured these too, and drunk some water from their bottles. Then they had stretched out in the sun with their heads in the shade of the dancing leaves. They did not speak or put their arms round each other. They did not even look at each other. But during those few glorious minutes they felt themselves a single being, indivisible. Their hands touched by accident and stayed clasped together while their eyes closed in bliss. Amara remembered it as a moment of absolute happiness.

Now in bed in a Viennese pension during the cold war Amara asks herself whether sex excludes love. Whether the union of two bodies brings something peremptory and immediate that tends to invade the delicate realm of feeling and brutally blast everything sky-high. How can continuity, constancy and understanding be reconciled with the lazy immediacy of sex? Why had she felt so content and happy with a deliciously full amorous happiness precisely at that moment when she and Emanuele had lain head to head on a meadow rich with new grass, under the dancing leaves of a maple fluttering in the wind of a Florentine summer? Was this the ecstasy of chaste love, as taught by the church? The kind of love St Clare and St Francis may have experienced long ago in thirteenth-century Assisi? Can it be that sexual love breeds something violent that corrupts every long-term project? Something self-satisfied that tends to use habit to destroy any exaltation of what is new? The very habit that lies at the heart of a shared life: the joy of doing the same things together, of planning the future, of feeling permanently and continuously united at every moment, day after day, hour after hour; how can that be reconciled with the satiety, with the nausea of repetition, with the need for novelty
erotic love demands? Not easy to answer such questions. Also because desire had already been there, knocking impatiently for admittance to her childish belly.

Amara turns on the light. Her pillow is bunched up on one side and slithering away on the other, emaciated and flattened. She has not yet managed to get used to these Austrian beds with their concave pillows that let her head sink unsupported. She picks up the book she has been reading,
Northanger Abbey
. It was Jane Austen who gave rise to her reflections on sexuality and love. If she compares her to another woman writer more than a generation younger, Emily Brontë, she finds precisely this difference. Jane Austen always stops short of the sexual act. On the threshold of a marriage that it is assumed will be happy, though this is not investigated. But Emily Brontë does not stop outside the bedroom door. And that bedroom is the source of all the pain and suffering of a heart in love. Jane Austen is a happy, playful writer; Emily Brontë dramatic and angry. One shares the eighteenth-century grace of Mozart. The other has already passed on to the deeply felt visions of a dark romantic thinker like Beethoven.

Probably Amara would never have been here in Vienna, in the company of her eccentric travelling companion, searching for traces of Emanuele, if she had never experienced with him that love as complete in itself as an egg: radiant, perfectly formed, warm and full of life. Like the egg of Eurynome, the ancient goddess of the Pelasgians, which long nurtured inside itself all the forests of the world, all the seas, all the lakes and rivers, all the mountains and fields and birds and fish imaginable. Every living thing was enclosed in that egg, condensed into a tiny space. Only the warmth of the mother’s body made the growth of the seas and the mountains possible until, as they grew, they broke the egg and spread throughout the universe, creating the Earth in all its beauty and variety.

19

Time to get up, Amara! She hurriedly pulls her legs out of the sheet which has wound itself round her waist during the night. The smell of coffee rising from lower floors urges her on. Her appointment with the man with the gazelles is at eight and she’s still dreaming.

Today it’s the turn of Elisabeth Orenstein, a name found in the telephone book. Could she be one of Emanuele’s relatives?

Half an hour later, Amara and the man with the gazelles climb the grey stone steps to a mansion in Secession style. The great door before them has windows covered with tropical flowers and birds of paradise. A fine house still strangely intact amid the rubble of the war.

They press a button that sets off a bell worthy of a convent full of nuns. They hear hurried steps, then the handle turns and the door opens. On the threshold is a woman of average height with smiling sky-blue eyes, ruffled grey hair and hands stained with what they will later realise is glue. She already knows what they are looking for and seems happy to see them. She welcomes them into the living room and invites them to sit on small armchairs upholstered in corduroy and protected by coarse white sheets. With a quick youthful movement, she sits down cross-legged on the carpet as if used to practising yoga. Two sturdy freckled calves emerge from beneath her crumpled blue skirt.

‘What can I do for you?’

Amara is about to speak, but the man with the gazelles is too quick for her. He clearly feels it his duty to smooth her path. He tells their hostess about Emanuele Orenstein, a son of Austrian Jews who lived many years in Florence before returning out of a mistaken sense of patriotism to Vienna just when the Nazis were stepping up their persecution of his race. Amara still has many letters from the little boy of that time who wrote to her almost every day. And after the war she received in the post a school
exercise book containing letters he had not been able to send her. The last of these is dated May 1943 and seems to have been written in the ghetto at Łódź. His friend Maria Amara believes young Emanuele must have been transported to Auschwitz because that is what usually happened to Jews from the Łódź ghetto. That is why she is here, trying to find him alive or dead, above all because she constantly dreams that Emanuele is speaking to her, asking her to come to him. Meanwhile she would like to know if you, Elisabeth Orenstein, are related to Emanuele, and whether you ever met him or know what happened to his family.

The woman seems overwhelmed by all this information. She says yes, she did know Emanuele’s parents, the engineer Karl Orenstein and his second wife Thelma Fink. But she was not related to them. She remembers hearing many discussions in the Jewish community about people who came back and she always thought their case the most striking. Others had returned from abroad during the thirties but with more reason. But that a Jewish family, however rich, should return to Vienna in the worst years of Jewish persecution had seemed exceptionally rash even to the most optimistic. Remember that most Austrian Jews, particularly the better-off ones, had already left, mostly for the United States or Palestine or Latin America. She had heard of very few travelling in the opposite direction. Though there were a few and none more striking than Karl and Thelma Orenstein. It is just possible they might be distant relatives of hers, but she has never been much interested in family relationships.

Elisabeth’s mother died young. As soon as the Nazi persecutions started, her father took her with him to Holland. Just before the Nazi invasion they moved on to Palestine. There they worked hard, helping to develop the first kibbutzim. Her father, an electrotechnical engineer, applied himself to cultivating the land. Elisabeth herself collected tomatoes and drove a tractor up and down the arid furrows. They dug wells in the desert to find water for the fields. Difficult years, full of hardship but also of intense enthusiasm. Every day people arrived from all over the world and were kindly received. Everyone worked uncomplainingly in the fields as if their energy would never be exhausted. The energy of a rediscovered land, of a new nation rolling up its sleeves and building its own homes, farms, industries and schools.

Amara sympathetically watches this generous woman talking without reserve about her past. Like Emanuele’s own story, a typical story of European Jews; full of variety, complexity and problems and containing both winners and losers.

‘How come you didn’t stay in Palestine?’ asks the man with the gazelles.

‘Something got spoilt with the passing of time. First constant disputes with the Palestinians whose land however legitimately we had taken away from them. The United Nations approved it and had legalised our invasion, but it was an invasion all the same and this the Palestinians were not willing to accept. On the other hand, where else could Jews who had been expelled from their homes in Europe go? Madagascar had been suggested, a project of Hitler’s that came to nothing because the British navy made access to the African island impossible. And so we had to learn to use force. Militarism became stronger than the will to rebuild the land of our fathers. What had started as a wonderful duty to defend and construct turned into a senseless war against people poorer and more radically displaced than ourselves. Rather than mitigating and improving our difficult relations with the Palestinians as we had initially hoped, other Arab nations made things worse by stoking up the fire and planning to annihilate us, just like Hitler. So defending ourselves became first a necessity and then a neurosis. Who did the land belong to? To Jews with religious roots fishing in the historical waters of cities like Jerusalem and Haifa, or to the Palestinians who had cultivated it for centuries and made their homes there? And we who had lost millions of our brothers and sisters in the Nazi gas chambers, had we any right to a refuge there? We who had worked from our first arrival to transform abandoned deserts into flowering gardens, what were we to do? Let ourselves be thrown out a second time? Arms have grown daily more important, as have soldiers, generals and war heroes. My belief was that security should not start with rifles, but with the building up of a new relationship with our neighbours, with whom we needed to learn how to share the land. Ours had been a painful nomadic history, but now we wanted to settle in one place at last and cultivate our land in peace. At first this spirit of peaceful conquest and good neighbourliness did exist. Then it was somehow lost. Certainly the Arab world did nothing to encourage
conciliation, but rather did everything possible to make the friction between us and the Palestinians bitterer than ever. They never raised a finger to encourage the creation of two autonomous and friendly neighbouring states. They have shouted so violently that Israel must be destroyed and the Jews eliminated that the Israeli people have come to think only in terms of defence and making preparations for war. That was not the ideal of those of us who have always been pacifists. Others wanted peace too, but they were in danger of being condemned as traitors to their own land. In short, life became difficult. Which is why we left Israel and why we are here now. In any case, German was our language and our mountains are here in central Europe; how could we ever forget our mountains?’

Elisabeth smiles as she speaks. The sky-blue eyes grow wider in her pale face. There is something sincere about her, something gentle, and yet at the same time she is clearly a fighter. She stands up and slaps her forehead with her hand. ‘But where are my manners, I haven’t offered you anything,’ she says cheerfully, going into the kitchen, soon returning with a huge plate of fresh fruit and glasses of iced tea.

‘Please try to remember something more of the family of Karl and Thelma, if you can,’ presses the man with the gazelles who seems to have taken the search for Emanuele so much to heart as to have made it almost his own.

Amara bites into an apple. Her eyes follow Elisabeth’s solid body as it moves lightly through her luminous house. When she let them in she had told them her work was making new bindings for antique books. In fact, spread everywhere are large volumes with newly reconstructed parchment covers, and slender books in red and brown leather covers. And jars of glue, balls of string and fine cord, bobbins of sewing-thread, rolls of paper in all colours and sheets of parchment stretched between strips of wood and presses of every size.

‘Is this where you make the new bindings for your books?’

‘This is the only room I have for work and receiving people. My bedroom is upstairs. Out there on the balcony I grow Italian basil and honeysuckle. This was once a great house inhabited by a Wehrmacht officer, a certain Captain Hoffman. He had fifteen rooms and I don’t know how many servants. After the war it was
divided into a lot of tiny apartments. I live in this one. In the other rooms there’s a railwayman and his family, and a postal worker with two delightful twins who often come to see me when I’m making chocolate cake. I make it specially for them. Though it’s not easy to find cocoa powder these days. And when you do find it, it’s so expensive, too much for my pocket.’

The man with the gazelles keeps mentioning Emanuele but it seems Elisabeth has little more to add. ‘It gets really cold here in winter. The windows don’t close properly and there’s no money for new ones. I have a coal stove, but the coal’s in the cellar and I have to climb up and down the stairs with buckets that dirty my hands and clothes. Sometimes the water is cut off and the electricity fades and surges and blows out the bulbs. When I complain they tell me we’re living in a difficult post-war period. But the war finished eleven years ago. The trouble is the city’s filling with people and there isn’t enough energy for everyone.’

And Emanuele? Why does she avoid mentioning him? Is there something she doesn’t want to say or can’t say?