Train to Budapest (46 page)

‘Presumption?’

‘To know who I might or might not be.’

‘She has been looking for you for months. And it was you who said that Peter Orenstein and Emanuele Orenstein are the same person,’ interrupts Hans, trusting in logic.

‘Have you been to Dachau?’

‘No.’

‘Precisely.’

‘Why are you speaking in riddles, Herr Orenstein. What have you to do with that boy?’

‘I am that boy.’

‘Why are you teasing us, Herr Peter?’

They see him lean perilously over the carpet. At the last moment he saves himself by falling in a sitting position onto the sofa, leaning on one arm. Then he rises again painfully and stifles a retch. Grabbing the bottle with greedy fingers he lifts it straight to his mouth. The three watch in astonishment. They don’t know whether to tear the bottle from his hands, to help him, or to go away. Everything seems possible and impossible at the same time.

‘Are you Amara then? You don’t seem to me the same person at all. I think you’re trying to confuse me.’

‘The fact is we’re here to find out about Emanuele, not about Amara,’ says Horvath, beginning to lose patience. But Hans holds
him back. Perhaps, and Amara agrees, all this drinking will help to loosen a few knots, to draw out words buried for too long.

‘If you really were Amara, you would have come to look for me before now. What have you been doing all this time? What have you been up to? Are you married? Screwing some foul Florentine turd?’

‘Listen, I won’t have you insulting the signora …’

‘Shut up, you idiot! … As for you, woman, who do you think you are, you birdbrain! We’re all cut from the same cloth, every one of us. Those who went through the war and those who didn’t. Those who have been in a death camp and those who haven’t. Shit is shit everywhere, even when it hides under camelhair coats and felt hats.’

‘All right, we’ll go …’

‘Beginning to smell the stink of burning, are you? In a hurry to get away at the first whiff of shit, just like all the others, gentlemen with sensitive noses; well-dressed, well-fed gentlemen …’

He lifts the bottle to his lips again, but it’s empty. Moving calmly, hands holding his armpits tight in a huge effort to control his shaking, he opens the cupboard again with a kick, pulls out another bottle that looks like whisky, holds it up to the light and sees that it’s half full. Then he lifts it straight to his mouth.

‘Now you two get out, you two drunks … get lost. I need to talk face to face with the Signorina Maria Amara Sironi here present.’

Hans bends his head in resignation. He takes Horvath by the arm and they move away. But Amara notices that they leave the door ajar and she sees them peeping through the gap. Hans signs to her not to be afraid, he will intervene if she is attacked.

58

Peter walks backwards and forwards. He takes Amara by the shoulders and forces her to sit down on the sofa. He suddenly becomes much calmer.

‘I’m not the person you’re looking for, and I never will be. So go away and leave me in peace.’

‘Why won’t you tell me what’s happened, Emanuele, I’ll believe you.’

‘Don’t treat me like an imbecile. You’re not prepared to believe I really am Emanuele.’

‘Your father and mother …’

‘Died in the ghetto at Łódź, you know that because I wrote to you about it.’

‘And you …’

‘I’ve died and come back to life several times. Once it was tuberculosis. I don’t know how I was cured, maybe it wasn’t really tuberculosis but just my lungs spitting blood in desperation. I thought my life would end at Łódź. But I was reserved for something better: the drawing rooms of Dachau. There I died again.’

‘So it was to Dachau they took you?’

‘To Dachau, yes madam, a magnificent holiday location … even with sulphurous waters and a brilliant medical facility ideal for conducting experiments.’ He laughs and coughs, spitting.

‘And how did you survive?’

‘Always greedy for information, Amara, most bitter Amara. Digging and digging away like an old tapir … Always anxious to stick your nose in the shit so you can say: oh no, that’s not me, I don’t know that shit. That’s what you want, isn’t it? But I’ve been in it up to my hair, get that into your head, you silly little Florentine cunt! And stop looking down on me with that superior air.’

‘I’m trying to understand.’

‘There’s nothing to understand, stupid girl, nothing to
understand … Just things that are so real that they seem unreal, so real that they become sublime in their unreality. You will never understand, never …’

He stops and balances on one foot so that it seems he must fall full length from one moment to the next. But he recovers and again grabs the neck of the bottle. But this one is empty too. His eyes are shining with a livid, sinister light. Amara wonders whether it might not be better to go and leave him in peace. She seems only to have been able to dig up ancient, unbearable agonies. But when she gets up to go he takes her by the arm and forces her down on the sofa again.

‘Since you’re here I want you to know, little princess on the pea, I want you to know everything then you can go and fuck yourself wherever you like. And stop crushing my balls! Who asked you to look for me, eh? Who gave you permission to come ferreting about in this loathsome city trying to find out what happened to your beloved and incredibly stupid young friend Emanuele Orenstein? He’s dead, got that? Dead and buried, and you make a serious mistake in trying to revive him. Because the dead don’t speak, or if they do speak they spit, and if they spit they poison, remember that, you lousy little cow!’

Amara instinctively curls up, pulling her knees to her chin. She watches him, terrified and fascinated.

‘Now you must listen, I want you to listen with your whole body because there are things I’ve never said before and I shall never say again. I want a little piss and vomit to reach you and wreck your style as a little girl of a good family, bloody hell, which I can’t stand at all, are you listening?’

‘I’m listening.’

‘As soon as we got to Dachau, they separated us. My workmates from the ghetto at Łódź, my carpentry shop friends, boys like myself, were all bewildered and understood nothing. Four days crowded together in the train. So many things thought and said! We kept close so as not to lose sight of one another. But as soon as we got to Dachau, those ever well-dressed gentlemen, those guards in their well-ironed uniforms, immediately split us up. A rapid and drastic process of selection. All the crippled, short-sighted, lame, sick, under-sized, and particularly the children to one side, please! Hurry up,
schnell
! The rest, a little bigger and
capable of work, get moving, to the other side. Come on, what are you waiting for! I went spontaneously to the workers’ side, I knew how to make out I was older than I really was … intuition guided me but I was already thinking only of myself. I betrayed the others and left them to their fate without saying a word … I’d learned a thing or two in that bloody ghetto! The next day I realised I’d been right … Those on the right were immediately shut up in a lorry, made drunk on exhaust fumes and taken to Hartheim Castle … A good way to rescue them from the problems of life, don’t you think? I bet you don’t even know what Hartheim Castle is: a splendid place, with well-kept flower gardens, where the SS gassed thousands of people, principally Germans: the crippled, the sick, the lame, the mad. Project T4, heard of that? No, of course you haven’t. Memory is elusive and fleeting in people of your type. My friends never even reached the castle. They were killed at once, in the lorries. They died a disgusting death, writhing about in their vomit for a dozen minutes, climbing over each other to try to reach a bit of air, squashing the weakest, who cared a damn, so long as they could breathe. For what purpose? Just a few seconds more of life, among hundreds of others condemned to death in a hermetically sealed lorry into which poison gas was introduced through a huge pipe … But those who had moved instinctively to the left, like me, off to work, hop hop, easy-peasy! Too simple for complicated heads like yours, it was so straightforward and simple … Yet no one realised it, you see, not one of them, until it was too late. And me? How did you save yourself, I hear you ask? Just by work? Yes indeed, I worked half-naked with damaged hands and feet covered with chilblains in those damned clogs that were too broad and hard. I survived because I was strong in spite of my tuberculosis or whatever it was and having claimed to be older than I really was. I survived by stealing from everybody else. I became a daring and very clever young petty thief. I stole from the dead too. I was only caught once, when I couldn’t tear bread out of the hands of a dead man. I’d been watching him. I knew he had a dry crust hidden under his pyjamas. But he was dying. I spied on him. And the moment he breathed his last I climbed onto his pallet and grabbed his treasure, but his hand was closed so firmly round that piece of bread I could not get it off him. He was dead but he still wanted to keep it. Madness! I needed to break his fingers but that took time
and in the meantime the trusty came in. I got such a whipping that day that I still have the scars. Want to see them?’

Amara huddles up into herself. Something is collapsing inside her, reeling and drowning. Something sucking at her from the inside till she feels her face shrinking, her hands weakening, and her heart becoming a piece of calcified meat. Meanwhile he pulls up his shirt revealing ugly scars, red against his meagre white flesh. He strikes himself with flat, trembling fingers. Then angrily shoves his shirt back into his trousers.

‘But I must tell you the truth to the end or I shall suffocate. Even though I already know you won’t understand a damn thing … It wasn’t just by stealing that I saved myself. I accepted the attentions of an officer to escape selection for the experiments. Do you get that, you stupid little tart? Experiments were a speciality at Dachau. Very useful for the pharmaceutical firms. Did a new drug need testing? Abracadabra, we have just the right bodies for that here. No complaints, no arguments. Why not inoculate the enfeebled body of an inmate with blood infected with malaria? His temperature would immediately shoot up to forty or forty-one Celsius. And Dr Schilling, solicitous as always, would be on hand to make you swallow the new medicine to see if it might help cure you from malaria. One subject’s eyes would bulge from their sockets, another would be seized by convulsions and yet a third, the most fortunate, would go stone deaf but survive. And why not immerse a man in freezing water for ninety minutes to find out how to save any of their airmen who came down in the sea. Usually the victims died after an hour from cerebral haemorrhage. But in an attempt to bring them round, the doctor would give them injections in the femoral vein and in the belly and so forth. Most did not respond. Then as soon as they were dead, the hard-working camp doctors would open their cranium to find out what had happened. They’d find the brain soaked in blood and furthermore, something that surprised them, the heart transformed into an aubergine by the effort of trying to get oxygen. Dr Holzlohner was particularly able and occasionally even managed to restore the unfortunate victim to life. In his able hands the body would regain heat. But of course it would have suffered irreparable brain damage. So the drugs were useless. Who cared if eighteen out of twenty Jews died during these experiments? One survived, and
that was me. A phenomenon of resistance. Another doctor from Hamburg, you should have seen him, a really able type, courteous, shrewd, with small hands, a handlebar moustache, and good kind eyes, came from Buchenwald where he had specialised in homosexuals. He got hold of those wearing the pink triangle, made them take off their clothes, grafted under the skin of their bellies a gland full of male hormones and stood back to watch. In the morning he would interrogate them: have you dreamed about women? Eh, tell me, what were they like? They would tell him what he wanted to hear and he would happily send in medical reports in beautiful handwriting that claimed that his experiments for the elimination of homosexuality had been successful. But what he didn’t see was that around him, among the blond Aryan SS officers, there were dozens of homosexuals who amused themselves by picking out the best-looking young boys to use as slaves with duty as an excuse. Homosexuality was of course forbidden. Everything was forbidden in that place. But the officers knew how to bend the rules. I beg you, Herr Doktor, let him be no more than sixteen years old and in reasonable shape, he will have to keep the floor clean and look after the laundry. Herr Doktor would nod. But you had to show yourself clean, free of fleas and washed with soap or they were disgusted. I jumped into bed, actually not so much a bed as a latrine, but no matter. The thing was not to be caught and no place was safer than the latrines, which were flowing with dysentery. The SS never went there, they were afraid of soiling their uniforms. But the handsome Untersturmführer Rudolf Heinz did come there, at night, when no one else was about, to make love to me, you understand? I would have accepted this and more not to end up in that icy water again. Once you might survive, twice no. But d’you want to know the funniest thing? Coupling with the Untersturmführer served no purpose at all, because after a bit he got bored and passed me on indifferently to a friend of his, a medical officer who, not satisfied with the results obtained by Dr Schilling, was himself trying to discover an anti-malaria vaccine. Finding me in better condition than the others thanks to the scraps of food my friend Rudolf had secretly passed on to me, he injected me with infected blood. I became delirious with fever, my skin wrinkled and my teeth fell out. Doctor Müller was very fond of me; he was so happy I didn’t die like the others and ruin his
experiments. He wrote and wrote, long articles about his vaccine, using me and four other wretches as examples. But in the meantime I had become an old man at seventeen years of age, decrepit, bald, toothless and imbecile. I developed a festering abscess on my right cheek. Good, excellent, let’s try a new type of anaesthesia, let’s cut open the cheek and conduct an operation in acrobatic dentistry, that was how they put it. And here’s the result: a hole that constantly fills with mucus. I could hear planes passing over and bombs falling and I knew the war was nearly over. I had to survive, I just had to hold out … But what for? To bite into a slice of bread. Not just any old slice, no, a whole loaf, just for me, that was my dream. I didn’t give a damn about the others who were dying like flies, about those hanged each morning at dawn, or still arriving in the trains. We were laying new railway tracks in a hurry,
schnell schnell
you filthy swine, damn bloody Jews! We must hurry with these new tracks to take the trains straight to the undressing rooms. A brilliant idea, don’t you think? So that the moment they came out of the cattle trucks they could be stripped of everything, even their underpants, and the fittest ones be sent to work in pyjamas filthy with the shit and blood of those who had died. The rest would be either shot or gassed in lorries or sent on to another camp.
Schnell schnell
; no longer any time to cut off women’s hair or strip gold teeth out of the old, the allies were barely a hundred kilometres away and no witnesses must survive, you understand, not a single one. Meanwhile in the offices they were burning papers, you could detect the smell over and above that of the crematorium ovens. Eight humdred, nine hundred, a thousand bodies a day, were thrown into those ovens. Their problem was they couldn’t kill as fast as they needed to, so that with bayonets at our backs we were forced to drag the bodies of those just shot to a great ditch and throw petrol over them, for an SS officer to set fire to the lot with a burning torch. Some would still be moving, calling, slobbering or groping about. But if the rifles had not killed them, the fire would. What a grand spectacle: one more, one more,
schnell schnell
! What about that newborn baby saved and wrapped in a blanket? Throw it in the air so I can hit it in flight. Lagerführer Christopher Schöttle was an expert at clay-pigeon shooting. It would be easier still with a newborn child, wouldn’t it? Meanwhile the big guns could be heard getting nearer and nearer. Those who
understood German as well as I did could hear them discussing what to do with the surviving prisoners? Have Himmler’s orders arrived yet? What was that cretin waiting for before giving precise orders! But then one morning the order seemed to have arrived, the actual order written by Himmler that stated in so many words: kill the lot. No witnesses, is that clear? Not a single survivor to say what happened in the camps, that’s what the Führer wants. But how could thousands and thousands of people be killed in two or three days? There was no more petrol for firing the ovens. Meanwhile some officers had very quietly disappeared. There was no more ammunition for the machine guns and pistols, but the trainloads were still arriving and where to put the people they brought? How to dispose of them all. Then came another order: round them up and take them away. But away where? Where the hell you like, just away. By now the authorities were out in the open, they were nervous and discipline was suffering: all they wanted was dead people, more and more dead bodies. But didn’t the order contain anything else? Didn’t it explain where to take these damn Jews who were so pig-headed as to insist on continuing to stay alive? What did the order say? It said: since the allies are at the gates, and since it would take time to get rid of so many people, form up the remaining prisoners in fives and drag them to another camp, further away from the enemy front line. The death marches, do you know about them, little Alice in Wonderland? D’you know what they were? Luckily it was April by now, maybe that saved some of us: the temperature had risen five or six degrees, that was already something, wasn’t it? Our clothes were still the same, French elegance: striped pyjamas and clogs. But at least our feet were no longer enclosed in a grip of ice. We had air to eat and rainwater to drink. We just had to march and move quickly. If you stopped, even for a moment, if you sat down, you were instantly shot. I don’t know how I managed, I really don’t know. I kept walking and thinking: look, I must get as far as that post, just to that post and then I’m there. And at the post I said: come on, one more post, keep going, one more post and we’re there. That’s how I did it, post after post, hundreds of posts, blinded by sleep, twisted by hunger. Every so often I heard a shot. Some couldn’t make it, got out of step, or stopped a moment to catch their breath. Towards evening we would be given some soup: hot water with a
few beans in it. And then, if there was a stall and some hay, fine; if not, lie along the road in the ditch. We collapsed and fell asleep anywhere, one on top of another to keep warm. Many never rose again next morning. So much the better, one mouth less! I overheard one SS man say to another, where the fuck are we supposed to take them, have you any idea? And the other said: they’ll all die on the road anyway. But they hadn’t taken into account the will to live of a boy of seventeen.’