Train to Budapest (45 page)

‘This fish soup,’ says Hans, dipping his spoon into it. ‘It’s really good, you must tell me how you make it.’

‘Put some garlic in a pan with a little oil and parsley, and as soon as it turns golden, slip in the fish, cleaned and cut up but complete with the heads which are the tastiest part, then pour on boiling water and let it cook for a long time. Then …’ But Hans won’t let him finish. The recipe immediately bores him.

‘But how can this Maggie from South Dakota have learned how to cook fish soup Neapolitan-style?’ he asks with curiosity, sucking the eye of a scorpion fish.

‘Before she and I got together she spent a few months with a man from Naples. Even introduced me to him. His name was Salvatore, or Salvo, and he worked in an Italian restaurant on Heistergasse, near the station. A beautiful boy, with very black hair and light eyes. He had good manners and was an excellent cook. He said the northern countries drove him mad. I think he wanted a child too. In that respect they were on the same wavelength. But one day he vanished without a word. So Maggie from South Dakota attached herself to me because I comforted her. I’m good at comforting people, oh yes, I’m the best comforter in Austria.’

The three laugh as they thrust spoonfuls of hot soup into their mouths. Every now and then, a dangerous fishbone appears, transparent and as sharp as a needle, but the three are unperturbed, pulling out the bones with their fingers and laying them on the side of their plates. The peppery soup also contains little squares of crisp bread soaked in a fragrant sauce. Sheer delight.

Horvath fetches a bowl of warm water for their fingers and drops into it two slices of fresh lemon. Hans fills their glasses with wine.

‘Müller Thurgau ’46. Ten years old this month. It’ll either be exquisite or vinegar. Let’s find out …’

Fortunately the wine hasn’t turned to vinegar though it has taken on a rather disquieting brownish colour and leaves an occasional black clot on the tongue, but it has a good flavour of wood and must. Bells are ringing somewhere. It’s nearly ten o’clock. Outside snow is spinning down out of a black sky, sticking to the windowpanes, sliding and drifting on the roofs. Inside, the room is cosy, as the wood-burning stove sends out waves of warmth. The wine attacks the palate and infiltrates the nose with its oaken fragrance.

As soon as they have finished the warm strudel and cream, Amara gives the two friends her presents: for Horvath, a book listing every library in the world that can be consulted free by phone. So the write-up claims and Horvath leafs through it with interest. For Hans a record of Verdi’s
Rigoletto
, the opera her father Amintore so loved.

Horvath has brought an electric-blue beret for Amara and a new knapsack for Hans. While Hans has a portable typewriter for Amara; it is called Lettera 22 and is new on the market from Olivetti. For Horvath he has a pair of American naval shoes, in an attractive dark blue, with cloth uppers to enable the feet to breathe and heels well supported by leather and India rubber.

‘I know you’ll never wear them,’ says Amara, watching Horvath turn them in his hands and inspect them from every angle.

‘How about some excellent apricot grappa!’

‘Gerard Haemmerle Schnapps. A special Christmas offer.’

The three friends drink sitting round the stove, in the warmth of a peaceful evening on the last day of the year 1956, remembering the uprising in Budapest and the friends they have left behind.

‘I’ve had a letter from Ferenc,’ says Hans, pulling out a folded sheet of squared paper. ‘They haven’t even got proper writing paper.’

‘Will you read it to us?’

‘That’s why I brought it.’

Dear Hans, I’m in Miskolc at my sister’s. All’s calm here. We’re buried in snow. They say it’s twenty years since the last time it was so cold and there was so much snow. I wanted to go back to Budapest to put a flower on Tadeusz’s grave, but moving about is dangerous. Every street, every corner, every cossroads is garrisoned and if you can’t produce a hundred pieces of paper and a hundred permits they throw you in prison. We breathe a lurid atmosphere of clean sweep. Slander has become State truth. And woe betide you if you don’t accept that. Yesterday it said in the paper that Nagy and his friends had plotted a coup together with foreign imperialists and internal counter-revolutionary forces. ‘Do you know what this means? That very soon he’ll be tried and sentenced to death. Kádár is now worse than Rákosi, whom we hated so much for becoming a pawn of the Soviets with his free use of political police and torture. The radio constantly repeats that the insurgents were working to restore to power the great landed proprietors, Horthy’s fascists and the old capitalists. And who is to blame? Those who helped the insurgents. That is to say, practically every single Hungarian citizen: students, workers, imtellectuals, teachers, professionals. In effect they’ve started collective trials and sentences are falling on people like snow. All the directors of the factory Councils have been arrested. The Revolutionary Committee of Intellectuals started at the Petőfi Circle has been dissolved. The sentences handed down are extremely severe: nearly always death. Those who are spared end up without a proper trial or any specific accusation in the concentration camps Nagy closed. These are being reopened in their dozens throughout the land. Even a mere suspicion will land you inside for six months, easily extended to twelve merely by an administrative decision. But can they gag an entire nation? The ÁVH with their hated uniforms, badges and cudgels have started circulating again. And they hit people. They hit anyone who gets under their feet … Though Hungarians must have very hard heads, because resistance is continuing; desperate, sporadic, improvised but continuous. In a factory at Debrecen the other day all the workers came out on strike. The police arrived by the lorryload, arrested the leaders and carried them off to prison. A hundred or so other workers presented themselves next day in front of the prison to demand that their comrades be freed. Little by little the crowd grew bigger. By midday a thousand people had gathered. They were unarmed and did no more than shout. Do you know what Kádár’s soldiers did? They fired on the crowd, indiscriminately and without warning. Fifty dead and more than a hundred wounded. Anywhere a crowd forms, the police come and fire directly at the people. On 12 December Kádár instituted special tribunals for political crimes. And what particularly saddens me is that on 8 December, at the Eighth Congress of the Italian Communist Party, the Soviet intervention in Hungary was approved, thus isolating the voices of any dissidents. The papers have been singing the praises of Italy in a big way these last few days. Tell Amara, if she doesn’t already know it. This is the way the wind is blowing in this country. Oh, I forgot the censorship, which sticks its nose in everywhere and blacks out letters, even personal ones. If I had posted this to you I would now be in prison awaiting trial for high treason. Luckily I found a friend who has a friend coming to Vienna with all his permits in place and I gave the letter to him. We may be taking a risk, but I want you to know what’s happening and tell the world about it. Tell Amara to publish it in her paper. Say hello to Horvath. With all best wishes from Ferenc.

57

Amara, Hans and Horvath are walking along the Wiedner Hauptstrasse. It’s half-past nine in the morning but not a soul can be seen in the street. Only a few drowsy figures sweeping up broken glass and collecting waste paper, cigarette ends and beer cans. At Horvath’s the evening before they ate and drank happily, with a toast at midnight while the city exploded with shots: fireworks that were a sinister reminder of the sounds of war. At one each returned home to sleep. But the explosions, drunken shouts and the dull sound of bottles thrown from windows continued till dawn.

Now the city is struggling to wake up. There is a smell of coffee, and here and there singing from behind closed windows. Soon the New Year concert will begin. The 1st of January 1957 opens on a cold but sunny morning. The three friends walk arm in arm, making a comic sight as they avoid the broken bottles, fried potato cartons and tin stars that fill the street. Two men and a woman. An elderly youngster, as his friends call him, with white hair cut short, dark trousers stopping short of his bare ankles, and huge feet enclosed in sandals. Next to him a small girl with nut-brown hair in a light blue coat, her red beret pulled well down on her head, her eyes half-shut against the cold. On her right another ageing youth, his thick brown hair streaked with grey tending to fall across his brow above intense and inquisitive chestnut eyes.

But where are they going so early in the morning on New Year’s Day, trampling the remnants of the previous night’s celebrations, in a Vienna still sleeping under the benevolent hand of the sun?

They do not speak. Each seems sunk in his or her own thoughts. But there is a subtle understanding in their linked arms. An understated and perhaps not even fully conscious friendship that has grown with time.

Reaching Karlsplatz they stop. The street they are looking for
cannot be far away. They cross Ressel Park followed by a cat, its tail erect like a flag. But the moment they show signs of coming close it runs off severe and proud, tail scything the air.

Here’s Brücknerstrasse. They follow the numbers: one to 32; 18 must be somewhere in the middle. A street that has more or less survived the bombs. Only two houses destroyed, their yards ready for rebuilding. Stacks of bricks covered with snow, a crane waiting for good weather to get back to work. A digger. A cement-mixer. All abandoned under the snow.

Number 18 is a red-brick house with a fringe of icicles hanging from its low roof.

‘Here we are.’

‘Sure? I can’t see any number.’

‘This is it, he even described it to me.’

‘Are you absolutely sure we’ve got the right day?’

‘Of course, don’t worry. He won’t eat you.’

Hans presses the bell. No answer. He tries again. A woman’s voice from above. The three raise their heads to see an open window and a woman with two blonde plaits wound round her ears signing to them to come in. They push open the small gate and find themselves before a door of dark wood bearing a green ring covered with little silver bells.

When the door is opened all the little bells start tinkling together, each with a different sound. The woman with the blonde plaits gives a little bow of invitation and precedes them up some steep steps. The three follow. She seems extremely young, with an adolescent face above a solid, massive body. She climbs rapidly. On reaching the top she disappears down a small corridor to one side leaving them alone in a small sitting room panelled in light-coloured wood. On the rust-coloured wall-to-wall carpet are a small sofa and two small armchairs covered with white cotton decorated with obtrusive pink elephants and light-blue tigers.

They stand for a minute or two in the entrance uncertain what to do, then the door before them opens and the man they had met before comes in.

Peter Orenstein holds out his hand in his familiar clumsy and graceless manner. He seems to have changed since the last time they met. He is now wearing clean clothes, a fine red velvet shirt and an open grey wool cardigan. On his feet are plush slippers
and under his arm a book. But his head is hairless, the hole in his cheek distorts his face and his parted lips reveal a set of dentures. He offers a sardonic grin.

‘So you’ve moved, Herr Orenstein?’

‘This is not my house, but my wife’s. You’ve met her, Brunhilde, she’s very timid. I come here when I want to see the child. And I have to say, she welcomes me with great courtesy. As she welcomes my friends. What can I offer you? I think Brunhilde keeps the drinks in here.’ He bends to open a small cupboard of painted wood, pulls out a pot-bellied bottle with no label and pours into their glasses some white liquid diluted with water from another bottle.

‘A little Pernod?’

He offers each of them a glass, and empties his own in a few gulps then refills it with quick, furtive movements.

‘We would like to bring you our best wishes for a happy New Year, Herr Orenstein. Please excuse us for calling on you during a holiday but Frau Amara has to go back to Italy and before she goes she would like to have back the letter she left in your hands.’

‘It was I who chose the day for your visit.’

‘Yes, but today is New Year’s Day.’

‘That means nothing to me. For me holidays are a mere accident.’

‘Well, that’s all right then.’

‘When you came before there were two of you, now there are three,’ remarks their host slyly.

‘This is our friend Horvath. We have no secrets from him. We were together at Budapest during the uprising. We all risked our lives together.’

‘Oh yes, those awful friends of Horthy who tried to bring off a
coup d’état
.’

‘That’s not how it was. Perhaps you have been misinformed. We were there. It was a popular uprising.’

‘The Soviets have done an excellent job putting them back in their place.’

Amara wants to argue, but Hans squeezes her elbow. They are there to understand and get the letter back, not to dispute politics.

‘Herr Orenstein, last time you said that Emanuele Orenstein was yourself. Why did you say that?’

The man looks at them as though he doesn’t understand. Meanwhile he has gulped down another glass of Pernod. Amara notices his hands are shaking as he pours the alcohol.

‘Because it’s true,’ he finally says, grimacing like a puppet.

‘But Emanuele was born in 1928 which would make him twenty-eight today. Excuse me, but how old are you?’

‘Mind your own business,’ says the man, suddenly offended.

Now his eyes are shining brightly. With stained, bony fingers he continues to pour Pernod, without even asking the others if they want more.

‘Signora Maria Amara Sironi, who has been looking for you for months, would like to know a little more. Otherwise please tell us if you know nothing and we will leave you in peace.’

‘Signora Amara, whom I knew as a child, is very sure of herself. Where does this presumption come from?’