Train to Budapest (42 page)

Before she went up Frau Morgan handed her a card from Susanna:
Where are you? Give some sign of life
.
Lots of love and best wishes
! As though she hasn’t been in Italy for years. As though she has been crossing a desert in the dark. ‘A shadow insatiable of splendid appearances, of frightful realities; a shadow darker than the shadow of the night,’ as Conrad puts it. No one would believe her. Now that she has returned to the everyday world, everything seems different, everything paradoxically predictable and banal.

There is also a letter from Sister Adele. Amara opens it with feverish fingers. Something falls at her feet. She bends to pick it up: a photograph. It is her father Amintore as a young man. On a ledge in the mountains. He must have been scarcely twenty years old. A sunny day, cloudless. He is alone, up on a rocky ridge, on a peak at the top of a smooth perpendicular wall. Suspended in space, like a worker at the top of a skyscraper, calm, legs bent, one elbow on his knee, seen in profile, facing the horizon. A small man with regular features, with smooth black hair, a high forehead, prominent cheekbones, and big strong hands like the artisan that he was.

Dear Amara, your father died last night in his sleep. I don’t think he suffered. His last words were for your mother, Stefania. He called her several times. For days he had recognised no one, not even me, though I was his daily companion. We dressed him in his best suit, the formal blue one, and new shoes, and smoothed down his still abundant hair with water. His expression was relaxed, not contorted at all. He died a beautiful death, even if we are sorry he could not receive Extreme Unction. But I believe Christ will have been indulgent and ready to open his arms to a man who had for so many years been the prisoner of a severe illness, by now almost completely blind, but a man with a good heart who never harmed a fly. I enclose a photo I found among his papers. I’ve put all his possessions in a box: his striped rug, his dressing-gown, his watch, some letters and books, a photo of your mother and some other small things, and closed and sealed the lot. I’ll give the box to you next time you are in Florence. I’ve thrown away his slippers because they were in a terrible state, even if he was so attached to them and insisted on wearing them although we had given him a new pair.

I tell you sincerely that I am sorry he has gone, even if towards the end he had become very demanding to look after; he had to be fed like a child and have things put into his hands, because he couldn’t see any more. Mostly he would sit with his head bowed and a sad expression on his face. Only one word would ever get any response from him. The name Stefania. When he heard it he would raise his head and smile. The smile of a child, really moving. I am sure he never stopped loving her, even when he hardly understood anything else. And this made him dear to me, because he was a loyal man and I have not known many loyal men.

All the sisters from the care home were there at his funeral. They loved him despite the fact he was so self-absorbed and latterly cantankerous. His gentle spirit inspired love. He was a courteous man and he trusted the sisters without reserve or suspicion.

When you are back, come and see us and I’ll give you the box and show you his grave in the cemetery near our House. With my very best wishes, Sister Adele.

When she has finished the letter, Amara sits down on the bed with a sense of emptiness. She feels no pain, only a sort of meaningless exhaustion. Her legs are inert, incapable of walking, her arms lie by her sides unable to raise themselves, her head is stiff and will not turn on her neck, while her eyes stare fixedly into space.

Making an enormous effort she tries to take in her hand the photograph of Amintore on the ledge. She can’t do it. Then, she doesn’t know how, she finds it shining in the palm of her hand. Such a strong, agile youngster; how can he ever have been transformed into the mere shadow of a man with misty eyes and snot on the end of his nose? It is as if nature amuses herself by torturing human bodies, altering and deforming them. So you think this is you, with your figure, your face and your eyes? Well, I shall show you that it isn’t, and that you aren’t even someone else. You are only evidence of my power, which can stretch you, squash you, make you swell or smash you to pieces at my whim. Bodies that have been supremely beautiful, self-confident, cloaked in a kind of resplendent eternity, bodies that have played, leaped, loved, laughed and enjoyed, suddenly find themselves bent, deformed, dull and wrinkled, defeated by the world even though still alive and capable of feeling desire.

She and her father lived together for several years after Stefania died. Once, wanting to surprise her, he cut out some satin and made her a pair of shoes with upturned points, like the slippers of a princess from fairyland. ‘I’ve made these for you,’ he said, putting them on the table next to the schoolbooks and closing his big strong hands over her delicate little ones with such yearning that she could never forget it. Nothing more than a simple paternal gesture, but as if he was saying: I’m entrusting you with your own future; live it well because it’s the only one you have.

Amintore had never accepted her love for Emanuele. ‘Too rich. A spoilt brat,’ he had said watching him walk down the street in his
expensive but ill-cared-for clothes. Plus-fours made from English wool, a cashmere jumper. ‘He’s a houndstooth’ her father would say, grimacing with contempt, ‘a houndstooth and foie gras.’ She had no idea what the words meant, but supposed they symbolised wealth.

Nor had Amintore approved in the least of the departure of the Orenstein family for Vienna at the most dangerous moment in the persecution of the Jews. ‘She’s mad, that Thelma Fink. A fine woman, a woman of spirit I agree, but what on earth can have induced her to throw herself into the lion’s jaws? She’s a miserable unfortunate woman, I tell you, and she’ll come to a bad end. She and that weird son who hangs round her.’ He would repeat this whenever he found her writing letters to Emanuele after the Orensteins had left for Vienna, or when the post brought a yellow envelope from him with a postage stamp of the Reich. He had never approved of her years of watching out in anticipation for the postman. Nor did he understand or share in her despair when no more letters came. ‘What’s happened to your houndstooth then?’ he would ask, sniggering. But though he knew the Jews were being persecuted, it never crossed his mind that such rich and powerful people as the Orensteins might end up in a concentration camp. Nor had he ever approved of her marriage to Luca Spiga, the man of the caresses. He did not like the house where they went to live after their marriage, so full of books and records but with no proper bed. They had slept on a mattress on the floor between a wall and a wardrobe.

In fact, he had never approved of any of her life choices. Not even her decision to enrol at a school of journalism immediately after she graduated in Law. ‘What has Law to do with journalism?’ he would say. Then he criticised her when she started working for a pittance for a provincial paper. ‘A trashy rag full of tittle-tattle, and you’re getting less per hour than a waitress.’ It was true, but it wasn’t easy for a girl to find work. She was satisfied. They had a long discussion about it.

Now that he was dead memories, some of them comic ones, of the life they had shared came back to her in bursts. The kitchen at Via Alderotti with its rusty gas rings that sometimes got blocked and which he blew on as if to dust them, how he was the one who always let the milk boil over and block the holes the gas came out
of. The refrigerator he was so proud of (it was one of the first) that made a sound like a cat in love, and how he would come into the kitchen determined to chase away ‘that damned cat!’ ‘But Papà, it’s the fridge making that mewing noise.’ ‘Don’t be silly, fridges can’t mew.’ But the fact was their refrigerator with its big convex door did mew from time to time. And he was always the one who did the cooking. He only knew how to make a few dishes, but he made them well: soup with rice and peas, fried cutlets with egg and breadcrumbs ‘alla milanese’, and a boil-up of stale bread, red cabbage, potatoes, garlic, oil and black pepper.

They would eat in silence, listening to music on the radio. He hated the pop songs of the day like ‘Mamma’, or ‘Se vuoi goder la vita’ and ‘Ba, ba, baciami piccina’. He loved opera:
Il Trovatore
and
La Traviata
but also
Don Pasquale
and
Manon
. He knew whole arias by heart and would sing them at the top of his voice while beating leather to soften it. Two or three times he bought tickets for the Pergola Theatre and they had gone there to hear opera live. One evening, she can still remember it, it was
La Traviata.
They were in the gallery and following everything from on high. Amara, leaning out over a low painted wall that prevented her from stretching her legs, had watched a massive woman running about on the stage pursued by a man called Alfredo. To her they had seemed scarcely believable, comic and ridiculous. But her father had been moved. As they went out she confessed she had been bored and he had answered that like all young people she was ignorant and insensitive to beauty. But he said this without malice, as a simple fact you couldn’t do anything about.

Another time it was
Tosca
, and she was deeply impressed by the reconstruction of Castel Sant’Angelo. The stage was dominated by an enormous plaster angel with outspread wings and sword in hand, balancing on one foot as if about to take flight. Tosca was a slim, agile singer, and she had enjoyed listening to her arguing with Scarpia when he was trying to blackmail her. At the end Amara had seen her throw herself off the battlements, leaping into space. Leaning out dangerously over the little gallery wall, she had also been able to see beyond the stones of the castle a thick mattress, on which Tosca landed with an acrobatic dive. When Amara clapped in admiration, her father gave a couple of nods thinking she was admiring Puccini’s music.

A timid knock on her door. From the rustle of clothing she realised it must be Frau Morgan.

‘I’m not in to anyone!’ she cried from the bed.

‘Do you need a doctor, Frau Sironi?’

‘No!’

‘But surely you should eat something? Some good potato soup?’

‘No, leave me in peace!’

‘But you’ve been shut up here since yesterday, Frau Sironi. Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to call the doctor?’

Since yesterday? She had never noticed the passing of time. She had been lying on the bed unsleeping without even managing to read, something most unusual with her. At one point she had heard herself talking. The little man had appeared before her, young and carefree, the lock of hair always falling across his fine brow, to tell her about his last trip to Monte Morello, and how he climbed Poggio all’Aia.

‘But, Papà, do you still play with your trains?’

Her father, ridiculous in plus-fours and with a sly smile beneath his rakish moustache, started telling her about the new model locomotives now on sale.

‘You really should see the Rivarossi 691, a masterpiece! Or the Coccodrillo, the 6/8s!’

‘How can you know the names of engines when you’re dead, Papà?’

Her father smiled behind his moustache.

‘Are you teasing me?’

‘Try the new Rivarossi. Just couple her to a few coaches and let her go. You’ll see! Wow!’

Meanwhile Frau Morgan has slipped a note under her door. Hans wants to meet her at a bar called the Coffee House on Schweighofergasse. ‘I’ll expect you at three. Please come! Yours, Hans.’

Isn’t it ridiculous that he is still addressing her formally when they’ve been friends for months? Suddenly she finds him grotesque, incomprehensible, irritating. I never want to see him again, she tells herself, and falls into a deep sleep. 

54

Sitting in the Coffee House on Schweighofergasse, Amara is waiting for Hans. Outside large slow snowflakes are lightening the grey air of a December morning. Her stomach has contracted. She is not hungry. She has crunched a pretzel bought in the street and is now tasting heavily sugared tea. After her two days of seclusion everything seems new and different. The coloured festoons hanging across the windows for Christmas speak to her of mourning rather than impending festivities. And the trees with red rag balls hanging from their branches and silver balls made from cigarette wrappings hurt her eyes with their senseless glitter.

She slowly sips the tea they have placed before her: a little paper bag darkening hot water in a tall glass with a metal handle. After Budapest life in Vienna seems luxurious: peaceful crowded streets and clean well-kept fruit shops where shiny bright apples sit tidily in their boxes behind windows adorned with flowers that reach out invitingly from their vases. Every time a customer comes into the bar a tinkling is heard. In and out go men protected by hats and long coats and women by berets and galoshes against the snow. They sit down at tables of unvarnished wood and order a beer, a white coffee, a tea or a glass of wine. They have the air of people who are thinking of love and business, not war.

But wait, the door has trilled again. A man has come in. She recognises his threadbare coat the colour of a dead leaf, and the shirt open at his long thin throat. There is an affectionate smile on his dry lips.

He sits down beside her, timid and morose. He doesn’t ask her how she is. For a while he doesn’t say a word.

‘I thought you’d gone back to Florence.’

‘I didn’t want to see anyone.’

‘Your father’s death?’

‘How did you know about that?’

‘Frau Morgan told me. I phoned several times.’

‘So you knew I hadn’t left.’

‘I knew.’

Amara looks at him as she lifts the hot tea to her lips. This man has infiltrated himself into her life and little by little, timidly and almost unnoticed, has spread his roots. How deeply?

‘Well, what shall we do?’

‘Let’s go and see the house in Schulerstrasse. They’re expecting us.’