‘Isn’t that too reductive?’
‘I remember a story once told me by a friend who was a sculptor. It seems that one day, at the celebrations at a great provincial factory in the Soviet Union that had achieved maximum productivity, a famous painter brought along a work that had been commissioned from him: he had been asked to paint the factory at work, in a happy festive atmosphere with several Stakhanovites receiving prizes. Stalin himself had been invited to the celebrations and although he had not promised to come, he arrived unexpectedly in a helicopter from Moscow, creating enthusiasm and panic. The painter was terrified of showing his enormous new canvas. Even though he had put into it everything expected of him: the workers, the machinery, the prize-giving, and even a beautiful big symbolic figure of Father Stalin with a benevolent smile on his lips.’
‘The painter had agreed to do all this?’
‘Not voluntarily, but he had no choice. If he’d refused, he would have risked death. That was the climate of the times.’
‘And was Stalin happy?’
‘He spent a long time studying the painting he’d commissioned, smiling with gratification as he noted that all his requirements had been met to the letter; he even liked the portrait of himself, something that didn’t happen too often. He appreciated the fact that he had been beautified and presented as taller than he actually was, and surrounded by a halo of light that made him look almost divine. The painter, watching the dictator gradually running his gaze from one part of the picture to another and nodding with satisfaction, felt excited, almost euphoric. But suddenly he saw Stalin look surprised and worried. The great Father of his Country lifted a finger and pointed to a figure at one side, the silhouette of a worker standing with his arms folded: ‘And who is this?’ Everyone stared in consternation. Who was that man so obviously not working? ‘Why isn’t he working like all the others? Comrade, are you trying to create an incentive to strike? What do those folded arms and that self-satisfied face tell anyone who looks at the picture? You have included a saboteur in this representation of a model factory for exhibition at the Eighteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!’ The terrified artist stammered the reason the worker in question was just smiling and doing nothing more was because he was gazing at the great Father Stalin. But Stalin wasn’t listening. Next day the painter was arrested at his house by two police officers and taken off to prison.’
‘What a sad story.’
‘The story of an era. And we haven’t finished with it yet.’
15
‘Sleep well?’
‘Sickening dreams.’
‘Better than lying awake.’
‘What shall we do this morning?’
‘What about looking for Orensteins in the phone book?’
‘Done already. I found a Theodor Orenstein. Does that mean anything to you?’
‘I’ve looked too. I found another. Name of Elisabeth.’
‘I called this Theodor. He’s a painter and lives in a little street near Stephansplatz, off Bäckerstrasse in the city centre.’
‘Did you make an appointment?’
‘He’s expecting us at ten.’
Theodor Orenstein receives them in stained coloured trousers and a woollen blue and black check shirt. He seems happy to see them, even if they have clearly interrupted his work on a large painting propped against the wall that features angels flying over a huddle of reddish roofs.
The man with the gazelles offers to translate but the painter is determined to speak Italian. In fact, it really seems he wants to take the chance to practise a language grown rusty in his memory. He says he’s happy to meet them, that he loves Italy, and that he would like a clearer picture of what they want from him.
He listens attentively to the story of the Emanuele Orenstein whose fate is the object of the young Italian woman’s investigation. Meanwhile he offers them a glass of beer and some olives ‘from Greece’. He is a man of about forty. Apparently living alone. His tiny studio flat opens onto an equally minute and lovingly cultivated garden. The room is divided by a curtain behind which can be glimpsed a bed with a red coverlet. There is little furniture: a simple shelf, a rough table covered with a confusion of brushes and small tubes of paint, a bench by the wall and two rush-seated chairs cluttered with rags. A huge radio set dominates the corner under the window. On top of the radio, stretched like a pasha on a yellow cushion, an enormous white cat follows them with its eyes without moving a muscle. Amara swallows a mouthful of beer, nibbles an olive, and asks the painter whether he has ever had a relative called Emanuele Orenstein.
The man smiles at them, blue eyes prominent in his beard-darkened face. Before answering he drains a couple of glasses of light, frothy beer. No, he has never heard the name Emanuele spoken in his family, but then there are many Orensteins in Vienna and they are all related. Can they show him a photograph? Amara brings out the familiar faded picture of Emanuele as a child from when they played together in Florence. The painter studies it in silence. Then shakes his head. The photograph rings no bell with him. His Italian is halting and slow but correct. He has visited Italy a number of times, he tells them, and is familiar with the museums of Florence and Rome. But he hasn’t been back for years.
‘And during the war?’ Amara ventures timidly, afraid to waken painful memories.
Theodor Orenstein studies them thoughtfully, as if asking whether these strange visitors who have appeared from nowhere are worthy of hearing what he has to say. He scratches his head nervously. Then, slowly, he starts his story. His voice, initially timid and awkward, gradually gains in fluency and confidence. A soft, visionary voice that like his own painting manages gracefully to combine strange insubstantial weightless bodies with the concrete quality of roofs in a sleeping city.
When war broke out Theodor was living in Vienna with his parents in Krügerstrasse, near the State Opera. The house no longer exists. It was destroyed by bombs during the terrible raids of 1944. The building he is living in now has only recently been refurbished and belongs to the Vienna Artists’ Association. He has been painting for years, and they have allotted him one room, that luckily has a handkerchief of a garden in which he has planted potatoes, courgettes and tomatoes, though these have little colour because so little sun reaches them and in winter the ground freezes.
In Krügerstrasse he and his parents had a large apartment with five rooms, in which seven people lived: father, mother and three brothers besides himself, and an old deaf aunt.
His father was a civil servant. An honest state employee who got up for the office each day at dawn, taking a tram which dropped him within a hundred metres of the Post Office.
The man with the gazelles listens attentively to the painter’s tale. Amara looks from one to the other. They are so different physically, yet they resemble each other: they both have the ceremonious manner which strikes her so forcibly in Austrians. Superficially awkward, timid too perhaps because they have been taught to sublimate their feelings; slow to take fire, but once heated, capable of blazing passions. Polite and sometimes ironic if with a rather roundabout sort of irony, not always comprehensible to those who do not know them.
Another beer? Amara watches the painter pour the clear liquid, filling his own glass right to the brim. It is rather sour, this good Bavarian beer, leaving you with a dry tongue like after eating bitter fruit.
The family felt more Austrian than many who had come from elsewhere, the painter doggedly continues. They had lived in Vienna for centuries, they thought and dreamed in German; they belonged to the city, it was their way of life. Yet the day came when they were described as strangers, even condemned as enemies and shut up in a concentration camp.