14
In the train with the man with the gazelles. On the way to Vienna. Amara had packed her suitcase in a hurry. She was happy to leave Kraków and her room at the Hotel Wawel with its brown wallpaper, the corridor with its smelly threadbare moquette, and the bathroom with its red and yellow tiles and seatless lavatory bowl. The Russian train moves slowly on its widely spaced rails. They have slept in a twin-bed compartment because the single ones were all taken. The table which folds against the wall at night is raised by day and covered with an immaculate white cloth. Hanging above is a lamp with a crimson shade surrounded by gilded pendants that tinkle lightly at each lurch of the train. The beds form a pair, not one above the other as in the trains she is used to, but side by side, with military covers and very clean sheets that smell of perfumed soap. The white curtains have a gilded trimming. An extremely ancient train perhaps once reserved for luxury passengers, but now within the reach of all.
While Amara was undressing Hans had gone out and she did the same when he took off the jumper with the flying gazelles and the white shirt he hung on a clothes-hook along with his corduroy trousers. He put his worn-out shoes side by side under his bed with his socks rolled up inside them. Amara came in to find him sitting in his pyjamas on the edge of his bunk, cigarette in hand. To avoid embarrassment they scarcely looked at each other and slept back to back. The train stopped twenty times during the night, puffing and panting, gurgling and hissing. Men’s voices could be heard in the corridor exchanging information in Czech. They slept little and badly. In the morning, tired and drowsy, they reached Vienna. At last they had arrived. At six the conductor knocked on their door. Did they want coffee? They did. It turned out to be an improbable violet colour and smelled of burned sawdust. But it was hot and they drank it at a single gulp.
‘Vienna is a city offended and wounded by war. There are many ruins, but some intact corners too,’ says Hans. ‘I can take you to a clean if humble boarding-house run by a woman I know, Frau Morgan.’
At the Pension Blumental Amara is faced with choosing between two rooms: a very noisy large one facing the road, and a smaller and more modest one that overlooks a yard and rooftops covered with pigeons. Which would Frau Sironi prefer? Amara decides on the smaller one. Silence before luxury. Frau Morgan helps her carry her luggage to her room. Soon after she knocks and places on the bedside table a small vase containing a scented rose.
‘I have a garden the size of a handkerchief but it’s full of flowers. I’ve sown mint, mallow, chives and rhubarb too. From the mint I also make liqueur, and from the rhubarb tarts. One day I’ll let you taste one.’
Frau Morgan seems anxious to please. Even so, Amara leaves her suitcase open, in case Frau Morgan might like to assess her moral status from the condition of her underwear.
In the afternoon Hans takes her to the Maria Theresia Platz museum, the Kunsthistorisches gallery with its endless rooms full of masterpieces. It is not long since the great paintings were once more hung on its walls and people again began coming from all over the world to admire the ever-popular works of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Brueghel, Rubens and Dürer. Hans and Amara stop in front of one particular painting, as if under a kind of spell. The work of an unfamiliar modern artist. A large, spacious picture, in which people swarm like ants. The huge canvas depicts a day in a Nazi concentration camp. On one side an armoured train is steaming in, on the other huts are set obliquely, of a naïve yet at the same time profoundly wise design. You can make out the beds, though to describe them as beds would be an abuse of language; they are wooden shelves each holding at least five inmates, with no mattresses, covers or pillows, with nothing at all. In the foreground is a morning roll call. It is known that these took hours, with the prisoners forced to stand in the cold wearing only striped pyjamas, their bare feet in clogs. Two or three hours of torture, depending on how many inmates there were to count. In another place, right against the barbed wire, dozens of corpses lie piled up like refuse. People who died in the night and will be dragged roughly by their arms and legs to a common pit by their still living fellow prisoners.
All this is seen from a certain distance, as if the painter has been viewing the camp through binoculars from a window a hundred metres away. A lugubrious collective vision yet at the same time intense and radiant. The bodies have been painted with quick, firm lines, in which white and black alternate and run into one another. There is something very cruel yet at the same time affectionate in this presentation of a monstrous and ferocious daily existence as everyday normality. The painter seems to have had intimate knowledge of these camps. He seems to have reproduced with his eyes closed his memory of those numbed and mutilated bodies.
A bell rings. An attendant passes, rapidly waving a hand as if to indicate closing time. Hans and Amara go down the infinite stairs of the museum to a tiny eating-place, where they sit down at a table covered with a waxed cloth. They order Hungarian goulash, the cheapest thing on the menu, which is written in chalk on a blackboard hanging on the wall.
‘Would you like a beer?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Impressive, that picture.’
‘But that’s all we looked at. We missed my beloved Vermeer.’
‘We’ll come again.’
‘Who do you think painted that camp?’
‘Someone who must have known it from the inside.’
‘Don’t you think a painter might have imagined it and described it without having been an inmate there?’
‘Not with that precision of detail.’
‘So for you art is only direct reportage?’
‘I think so.’
‘How would you compare that to Goethe or Dante?’
‘Goethe tells ominous fables. Dante invents. No one believes in his Inferno. It’s the delirium of a catastrophical mind. What enchants is his language.’
‘And Sebastopol for Tolstoy?’
‘Tolstoy lived through that war; he was there, even if only as an observer.’
‘What about Manzoni and the seventeenth century?’
‘When a writer writes about something not experienced directly, he sets in motion the artifice of the imagination. An artifice that remains indigestible to the reader.’
‘So we should throw away half the literature of the world. And nearly all modern painting.’
‘The Vermeer you love so much describes his own world, his time, his spaces.’
‘And Rembrandt’s Saul?’
‘Painters love mythology, but they have a trick. They make it into direct reportage by introducing their wives and children. Saskia is there in all Rembrandt’s paintings. That’s how he constructs his mythology. But in the long run tricks are boring.’
‘So according to you no one can tell a story unless they have lived it directly.’
‘No, what I’m saying is that imagination leads to fables and fables to mental regression. Nothing can have as much force as what you have lived in your own skin.’
‘Then you want artists to be egocentric narcissists. With any outward-looking perspective on the world, on past times, or on faraway stories, becoming a profanation and a crime.’
‘I wasn’t talking of crimes. Let’s leave those to Stalin who sent so many artists to their deaths because they presented a sad and contradictory reality that he disliked. But even if they had painted the optimistic and triumphalist world he wanted from them, they would still have been capable of eventually changing their minds, so he got rid of them before they even had time to regret being his friends.’