Hans stops at a kiosk to buy a bag of dried fruit. In among the figs and apricots are some cherries, shrivelled but extremely sweet and with a wild smell. The man with the gazelles pays for the bag and passes it to his companion who picks out the dried cherries and puts them in her mouth one by one. The bitter flavour reminds her of the tree she used to climb with Emanuele when they were children in the garden of the Villa Lorenzi at Rifredi. Can you stop time for love? Can you force a mystery? Can you take a secret by surprise to rescue it from the folds of the past? You have embalmed love, a voice says inside her, you can’t just snatch a dead body from the silence of the past. It’s not allowed, and you know it. But the desire to go on searching is stronger than every other consideration. The desire to hear that voice, to see that body again, is pulling her towards a future she knows will be full of dangers and delusions, like when the knights set off to fight the seven-headed dragon. But despite her fear and the uncertainties, she can’t resign herself. Is this a serious fault?
‘Don’t you want to hear how the story of King Krak ended?’ asks Hans, interrupting her thoughts.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘One morning a young cobbler called Szewczyk Dratewka appeared before the king and said he could solve the problem. When the king looked at him he saw a thin youth with an emaciated face dressed in rags, and shook his head. The boy said he would use no swords or lances but only his brain. Studying him more closely, the king saw sky-blue eyes full of fun and realised the boy was intelligent. So he asked him what he needed. A sheep and a kilo of sulphur, said the boy. Puzzled, the king gave him what he had asked for. Szewczyk killed the sheep and disembowelled it, replacing its innards with the sulphur, then sewed up its skin and placed it at night in front of the dragon’s cave. It looked like a live animal grazing the riverbank. In fact this is what the dragon thought when he woke up and came out of his cave, so he crept up silently, grabbed the sheep and swallowed it in a single mouthful. But he soon began to feel thirsty. So he went down to the banks of the Vistula and began drinking. He drank so much and swallowed so much that he swelled up like a huge bladder. Withdrawing to his cave he slept for three days and nights in the hope of getting rid of all the water in his sleep. But he awoke thirstier than ever. So he went back to the river and drank and drank again, until his body became a great ball, an enormous globe full of water, and when he yawned his skin, which could not hold so much water, split and exploded. The villagers felt an enormous shock that shook the earth and frightened their livestock. When they ran to see what had happened they found the dragon blown into a thousand pieces near the cave at the foot of Wawel Hill. Who did this? they asked in astonishment. I did, said the young cobbler and everyone gazed at him in bewilderment and admiration. The king sent for his daughter, gave her to the boy in marriage and handed over half his kingdom.’
Amara smiles. ‘Was it really the cobbler who did it?’ she asks tenderly, remembering her father Amintore.
‘An uneducated but remarkably ingenious cobbler.’ There is something tender and happy in the voice of the man with the
‘Who told you this story?’
‘It’s an old legend. It’s more important to know how to tell stories than to know how to use your fists my mother used to say, and I know now she was right.’ He smiles with his lips together. His laugh is restrained and vigilant, the laugh of a man who has learned always to keep himself under control, both in joy and in pain.
An anonymous room, shabby little brown leatherette armchairs, a glass-topped table with some dog-eared magazines whose pages look as if they have been constantly turned by bored hands. A big dirty window. A cage-like structure with inside it a woman in uniform, her face soporific and gloomy. Why are police stations all over the world so similar, shabby and anonymous, never welcoming?
They have to wait, not because there’s a queue, but because various officials haven’t yet arrived. This the sleepy-looking official explains, indicating the little leatherette armchairs whose cushions carry the imprint of the backs and bottoms of all those who have passed hours waiting for a passport or a certificate or power of attorney.
Finally a door opens and it’s their turn. The man of the gazelles talks quietly, in sophisticated and perhaps rather literary Polish. The police officer fixes him with a blank look but is nonetheless politely serious and attentive. Hans repeats what Amara has told him: ‘This lady, an Italian from Florence called Maria Amara Sironi, is trying to trace a childhood friend of hers, a certain Emanuele Orenstein. We know that at one time he was living in Italy, but in 1939 the family returned to Vienna to live in a large building they owned on Schulerstrasse. In 1941 they were ejected from their apartment and sent to the Łódź ghetto. Early in 1943 something happened that Emanuele did not have time to enter in his diary. We don’t know what it was, but we can imagine. He must have been loaded onto a train to Auschwitz, or so it seems. After 1942, all Jews in the Łódź ghetto were sent to Auschwitz. No more has been heard of him.’
‘How do you know all this, Dr Wilkowsky?’ asks the policeman, perhaps growing a little more interested in the story, seduced by Hans’s beautiful voice.
‘The Signora Maria Amara Sironi here present had letters from Vienna and later from the Łódź ghetto before Emanuele vanished. His last letters are in the form of a diary written in pencil in a black exercise book hidden in a hole and discovered after the war. A simple schoolbook with pages ruled in squares for doing sums, which some charitable person, perhaps even Emanuele Orenstein himself, posted to this lady at an address written inside it. We presume he was deported to a concentration camp. The nearest was Auschwitz, so he probably ended up there. But although Signora Sironi has been to the camp and examined the archives, she could not find his name.’
‘And how do you think I can help you after thirteen years?’
‘At Auschwitz they told her that some of the camp documents have been transferred to police archives here. We would like permission to study them.’
‘Water under the bridge, Signora Sironi. The dead are dead; let sleeping dogs lie — you know the proverb?’ translates Hans reluctantly.
‘Out of more than a million Jews deported to Auschwitz, six thousand survived to be liberated. Emanuele could have been among them.’
‘They disposed of the children immediately. Please remind your Italian friend of that. It is unlikely any child survived.’
‘But Emanuele was fifteen and seemed older than his years, and he was strong too, used to running and climbing trees. They may have kept him alive to work.’
‘All things are possible. But unlikely.’
‘Do you really have these documents? The lady is not only here to look for this boy. She also has to write articles for her newspaper. May we show you her press card?’
‘Don’t bother. I know nothing,’ answers the policeman in an undertone, immediately translated by Hans who in this instance shows himself an excellent interpreter. Amara feels the policeman is lying. Why would he not want her to poke her nose into the archives of the SS? Were there secrets the authorities preferred not to reveal to the inquisitive? Or was it that they couldn’t accept her as a journalist, only as a woman looking for a man, or rather a child, who vanished many years ago?