Train to Budapest (3 page)

The train moves off again. The new day has started, young and sunny. They are running through the middle of a birch wood. The tall slender white trunks flash past. When the man with the gazelles disappears to the toilet the traveller from Kladno with the fur armbands opens his eyes, turns towards Amara and says
mysteriously: ‘That man must be a spy. You should never have acted as his guarantor. They’ll catch up with you. They’ll take away your passport.’

‘But I’m Italian. And I have a permit.’

‘These days anyone crossing the boundary between the two worlds is suspect. Don’t you know about the cold war? No one can avoid it. You also could be a spy.’

‘What sort of spy?’

‘The West needs information about the East. And the East needs information about what you call the “free” world.’ The man smiles, showing bright red gums.

‘So you could be a spy too.’

‘Of course. Who says I’m not?’ He sneers, his eyes still dull and very sad.

‘May I ask you something: why do you wear those fur armbands?’

‘Rheumatism in my wrists. My hands get paralysed if I don’t keep them warm. Satisfied? But maybe that’s not true at all. Maybe I tried to cut my wrists and want to hide the scars.’

There is something disquieting about this man who says things and then immediately contradicts them.

Now the woman is walking up and down the corridor with her baby, humming a lullaby. The child whimpers feebly with a low, tentative sound.

‘May I offer you some coffee?’ says the man with fur armbands. ‘I’ve got a thermos full. Let’s make the most of it now we’re alone in the compartment. If I’d offered it to the others too my thermos would be empty by now.’

‘I don’t drink coffee, thank you.’

‘Of course as an Italian you know what real coffee is. In fact all I have is a very poor Polish substitute. But still, it’s hot. You’re sure you don’t want any?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘A biscuit, then?’

‘A biscuit, yes, thank you.’

‘Terrible Soviet biscuits. But they do help fill the stomach. They know how to make missiles, do our Soviet friends, excellent ones, but they don’t know much about biscuits. Biscuits are a luxury, missiles a necessity, don’t you agree? Always bearing in mind the nationalist point of view, of course. Defending ourselves from the
West, defending ourselves from your butter and ginger biscuits, that’s what communism is all about.’

The man laughs, throwing two biscuits at once into his mouth. There’s something simultaneously brutal and subtle about him. He seems to get enormous fun out of surprising her.

‘Did you know about Comrade Stalin? He died three years ago, alone, sozzled with drink, terrified and out of his mind. I don’t think it was living people he was afraid of, so much as the ghosts of the friends he’d had murdered. He saw an enemy in every shadow. Even his wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, was driven to kill herself in ’32. And to think everyone thought him a good family man. Or better still, a father to every Soviet citizen, no, to every communist the world over. Did he not seem like a good, fatherly peasant? In fact he was a lunatic with criminal instincts. Perhaps not unlike Peter the Great … In fact, I tell you, Peter the Great, in some ways, was more understanding and indulgent than Stalin … Did you know that Tsar Peter had a passion for pulling out his subjects’ teeth and would chase his courtiers down the palace corridors to do it? But there’s nothing wrong with my teeth, the wretch he had managed to catch would protest. Just one tooth, what’s that to you, then you’ll feel better, the Tsar would reply. But they all took to their heels. Did you know that? Just think of the courtiers running about all over the place! What a laugh! When he died, they found a sack full of teeth under his bed. Did you know that?’

Amara looks at him in consternation. Armbands seems to have no interest whatever in any response from her. He continues undaunted, despite the presence of the man with the gazelles who has returned to the compartment and is now combing his disordered hair with the window as a mirror.

‘My father got two years in prison,’ went on Armbands, ‘because he knew English and organised an exhibition of European painters. Accused of espionage. Locked up in prison, tortured. My mother was careful to distance herself from him, because the political police were after her. She was trapped into saying he secretly entertained American spies at home. Everyone round him believed the accusations, including my grandfather and grandmother. He instantly became an enemy of the State and as such had to be punished. Great Father Stalin couldn’t be wrong.
communist Thought in its infinite greatness couldn’t be wrong. The worst possible criminals took advantage of the wonderful illusion.’

‘And didn’t you believe in it?’ asked the man with the gazelles.

‘Of course I did. Like you, like everyone else.’

‘I believed in utopia, but not in the practice of communism. I’m half Jewish and I won’t stay anywhere where they persecute Jews. Stalinism wasn’t kind to the Jews, remember.’

‘Though the first tank to enter the death camps was Soviet.’

‘But some of the worst persecution of Jews took place in Poland, with Stalin’s consent.’

‘That was what we believed in then … I ask myself, what the hell did we believe in?’

‘A new, just world, with no masters or slaves … a world where the weak would be protected and defended, where no one would be able to buy the body and soul of another person … To each according to his need. Isn’t that what we believed in?’

‘To each according to his need, what crap! And who decides what I need?’

‘The Party,’ says the man with the gazelles, smiling. ‘That’s the trouble, my friend. Once they start building pyramids, there’s no hope. Imagine a pyramid of innocent and generous people tightening their belts for the sake of their country, while at the top of the pyramid a well-fed man is waving a red flag with a gold star on it. And so many have died for that flag, honestly and sincerely, in the belief they were making a sacrifice for liberty.’

‘Whereas in fact they devoted their best energies to the will of others, to idolatry and dictatorship, is that what you’re saying?’

‘But even that was better than dying in the name of abuse of power, race hatred and worship of the superman, don’t you agree?’

‘Delusion bites, with the teeth of a shark.’

‘Yet there’s still a difference between that and governing by invading other countries and insisting on the supremacy of your own race, plundering and sacking and putting to death the weakest and those who have worked for equality.’

‘But unsuccessfully, my friend, this is the problem. What’s the use of a theory of equality and justice if both are then destroyed?’

‘But I must insist that there’s a difference between an ideology of death and an ideology aiming at freedom for all.’

‘Freedom? Who was ever free under Stalin? And who is this stupid cold war setting free? In the West, dreadful crimes are being committed in the name of freedom. You’re a Jew: just think of the Rosenbergs! And the American atomic bomb on Japan! And what sort of justice is being done in the East? The most disgusting things: think of the Stalinist massacres. A quarter of the Russian people were imprisoned or killed to humour the obsessions of a maniac. Is that what you call liberty?’

‘Don’t take me for a Stalinist. I’m thinking of all those who sacrificed themselves for the promise of a better world. Those who gave their lives freely for communism, without being driven by murderous fury or theories of racial selection as the Nazis were. People who simply wanted a classless world. It wasn’t their fault they were deceived and manipulated and sent off to be stupidly slaughtered. People like my wife’s father Amos, who kept a portrait of Stalin in his modest home in Budapest, I knew him well: a mild and kindly man, exceptionally honest. He worked hard all his life. He believed in communism as a system that had helped men to be equal and to be brothers. He never hurt a fly. But I despised his neighbour Béla Lukacs who was a spy. He was paid for denouncing a poor tenant who had accepted a phone call from abroad. He believed in nothing. He was a Stalinist out of self-interest.’

But Amara could not follow the two men any further because they suddenly switched from German to Polish. Not deliberately to cut her out, but in the excitement of the discussion.

4

Vienna. January 1940

Dear Amara, yesterday we went for an outing on the Danube with our teacher. We skated on the frozen water. I had a pair of brand-new wings with me, very wide and solid but the teacher wouldn’t let me climb the hill. Then we sat in a sort of improvised tent and ate Prague ham and fresh cheese with black bread and salted gherkins. The child Kitty asked me if I’d like to be her fiancé but I said I already have a fiancée, who lives in Florence and I’m going to marry her when I’m eighteen. Do you remember my promise? Papà says I’ll change my mind but I don’t think so. Mamma gave me a hug and printed a fine red mouth on my cheek. I didn’t realise at the time but when I got to school they teased me: ‘Who’s been kissing you, Emanuele? What an enormous mouth your fiancée has … It covers half your cheek. How will you manage kissing a fiancée with such a big mouth?’ The child Kitty was angry. I explained that it was my mother who’d kissed me but they didn’t believe it. Now they call me ‘the boy with the bigmouth fiancée’.

One morning Amara had waited for little Emanuele for hours under the Villa Lorenzi cherry tree which they liked to climb every day. But he never came. So she climbed the tree alone and filled her mouth with ripe cherries and spat the stones as far as she could, filling her cheeks with air. At the same time she watched the path to the villa.

She suddenly felt so lonely up on those branches in the midst of the light leaves with their wild, bitter scent. She stopped eating and suddenly burst into tears. To stop her tears she daringly hoisted herself higher, ever higher, balancing on the slender, rocking branches. But it had not been climbing to the top of the cherry tree that had consoled her so much as the sight of a blackbird sitting on a nearby branch, and she had begun watching it with curiosity. The bird’s attentive and fastidious expression transfixed her. She
was no longer herself, but became the blackbird. A fragile little Amara completely absorbed in her own destiny, as only an animal can be. She had understood that to survive as a blackbird you must be quick to anticipate anything that may happen, as birds do when they sense the imminence of a storm or an earthquake. It had never occurred to her that Emanuele might move away and surprise had snatched away her breath. Why had he not come? And how could she have not even imagined the possibility that he might not come?

With her pockets stuffed with cherries, her legs scratched and her face grubby, she had gone to look for him at his home. At the gate she had met his mother leaving in a hurry. ‘Emanuele’s had a fall. One of his usual flights from the roof of the garage. He’s hit his head. He’s not well and we have to leave, what bad luck. Go up if you like.’

His mother kissed her, then climbed into a great black car with its door held open for her by a uniformed chauffeur.

Amara climbed slowly to the upper floor and pushed open the door of Emanuele’s bedroom, where they had sometimes played together with puppets. She was hit by a strong smell of fevered body, of sweat and vomit and disinfectant. An intrusive disagreeable sweetish smell mingled with the delicate fresh scent of a little bunch of freesias stuck in a small vase on the bedside table. Emanuele was stretched on his back, face white as paper, his narrow shoulders in lilac and blue striped pyjamas, eyes shining and half-closed, as if his eyelids were heavy under his arching eyebrows. Amara moved forward on tiptoe, listening to the rumble of water boiling in a small pan on a spirit stove.

She stood in silence watching him and understood that she loved him with a love as unexpected as it was unalterable. A love that would last for ever, she was sure of it, because that little knot of nerves, muscles and blood that was Emanuele was part of her own body and nothing in the world would ever be able to keep them apart. She would have liked to tell him so, but his childish gaze was hidden under his eyelids. So she said nothing, just pulled the cherries from the pocket of her dress and put them on a corner of the great bed, hoping he would take one and lift it to his mouth. It would have been a sign of continuity. But little Emanuele, normally so greedy for cherries, never noticed the shiny round fruit lying near his feet. So, with awkward, timid movements she started
eating them herself, one after another, without ever taking her eyes off him.

At one moment she thought he smiled. But it may only have been a grimace of pain. She could hardly believe such deep, raucous breathing could emerge from such a small nose, from such delicate nostrils. ‘You’re like a dragon,’ she murmured. But he gave no sign that he had heard her voice.

As she was swallowing the last cherry, she saw the door open. She immediately identified the man who appeared as the doctor from the worn leather bag in his hand, the greasy hair slipping across his forehead, and the attentive yet blank look he turned on the sick boy. Without even noticing her presence, he began to auscultate Emanuele’s tiny chest after helping him to sit up and roughly unbuttoning his pyjamas.

Finally Emanuele opened his eyes and looked at her. With a look she had never seen in him before: a look of fear but at the same time of surrender, of abandonment to something stronger than his own will. Afterwards, having often thought about that look, she had convinced herself that it contained a premonition of a precocious end. Had he wanted to anticipate it with that leap into the void with two wings of cloth and wire? Or had his flight been a way of trying to escape a departure he foresaw would be disastrous? Had he been aware of the trap they were about to fall into?

A yellow liquid issued from his mouth and his eyes showed their whites as if he was tired of studying the outside world and wanted only to turn towards the muddy black well inside his sick body. The doctor helped him to lie down again, pulling the sheet up to his neck.