Elisabeth smiles as she speaks. The sky-blue eyes grow wider in her pale face. There is something sincere about her, something gentle, and yet at the same time she is clearly a fighter. She stands up and slaps her forehead with her hand. ‘But where are my manners, I haven’t offered you anything,’ she says cheerfully, going into the kitchen, soon returning with a huge plate of fresh fruit and glasses of iced tea.
‘Please try to remember something more of the family of Karl and Thelma, if you can,’ presses the man with the gazelles who seems to have taken the search for Emanuele so much to heart as to have made it almost his own.
Amara bites into an apple. Her eyes follow Elisabeth’s solid body as it moves lightly through her luminous house. When she let them in she had told them her work was making new bindings for antique books. In fact, spread everywhere are large volumes with newly reconstructed parchment covers, and slender books in red and brown leather covers. And jars of glue, balls of string and fine cord, bobbins of sewing-thread, rolls of paper in all colours and sheets of parchment stretched between strips of wood and presses of every size.
‘Is this where you make the new bindings for your books?’
‘This is the only room I have for work and receiving people. My bedroom is upstairs. Out there on the balcony I grow Italian basil and honeysuckle. This was once a great house inhabited by a Wehrmacht officer, a certain Captain Hoffman. He had fifteen rooms and I don’t know how many servants. After the war it was divided into a lot of tiny apartments. I live in this one. In the other rooms there’s a railwayman and his family, and a postal worker with two delightful twins who often come to see me when I’m making chocolate cake. I make it specially for them. Though it’s not easy to find cocoa powder these days. And when you do find it, it’s so expensive, too much for my pocket.’
The man with the gazelles keeps mentioning Emanuele but it seems Elisabeth has little more to add. ‘It gets really cold here in winter. The windows don’t close properly and there’s no money for new ones. I have a coal stove, but the coal’s in the cellar and I have to climb up and down the stairs with buckets that dirty my hands and clothes. Sometimes the water is cut off and the electricity fades and surges and blows out the bulbs. When I complain they tell me we’re living in a difficult post-war period. But the war finished eleven years ago. The trouble is the city’s filling with people and there isn’t enough energy for everyone.’
And Emanuele? Why does she avoid mentioning him? Is there something she doesn’t want to say or can’t say?
Amara continues to watch the woman who has gone back to sitting on the floor, crossing her legs with remarkable agility. Now she has also taken off her shoes and is massaging her feet which are covered with white cotton socks.
‘Can you really not remember anything more of this family that bears your own name? Surely people must have talked about them when they returned to the city of their ancestors in a time of total war?’
‘I was in Palestine,’ she answers thoughtfully. ‘We knew so little about what was happening in Vienna, perhaps we didn’t even want to know. Our horizons had changed completely and our problems were different. Even the books we read had changed: Tolstoy and Stefan Zweig had given way to the Bible and George Orwell. I know little or nothing of Karl and Thelma even if they may have been distant relatives. Someone even accused them of being paid German spies. It was the only explanation anyone could imagine for the choice they had made. A stupid, insane choice. It probably led to death for all of them.’
‘They could also have been arrested in Italy,’ Amara ventures to say. ‘In October 1943 the Jews of Rome thought they were safe because they had handed over fifty kilos of gold they had struggled to collect to an SS major called Kappler in exchange for an assurance of security. The Nazis had promised that once the gold had reached them the Jews of the Rome ghetto would be left in peace. Instead early on the morning of 16 October they came with cattle trucks and collected every Jew they could lay their hands on: women, children, old people, anyone who couldn’t get away. They were all deported to Auschwitz.’
‘But Karl and Thelma came from Florence. Perhaps it would have been easier for them to escape the Nazis?’
‘Three hundred and two were deported from Florence and the surrounding district. Does that seem little to you?’
‘But do you really think they were spying for the Nazis?’ persists Hans.
‘I don’t know. Their insistence on returning to Vienna in the midst of the deportations is too bizarre. They had a large house and expensive cars and servants. How can you explain it?’
Had she not claimed to know nothing about them? That she had been in Palestine? How did she know that they had a large house and a lot of servants? But neither the man with the gazelles nor Amara dares to contradict her. She seems so sure of herself. Clearly she believes Emanuele’s family sold themselves to the Nazis. But in return for what? In return for safety for themselves? How could they have trusted the Nazis? But could they have survived even if they had?
‘I have no more to tell you, dear Amara, dear Hans. I really do hope they weren’t spies because it would be a black mark against us all. How could they have joined the Nazis who had set themselves so ruthlessly to wipe us all out? To ensure safety for themselves? One or two did that, but they paid dearly for it. You couldn’t negotiate with the Nazis, you could only fight them. If they sweet-talked you it was only to squash you more effectively a moment later. Everyone knew that. Perhaps, having been living in Florence, they had never really known what the Nazis and their imitators, the fascists, were capable of.’
‘What would you advise us to do next in our search for traces of Emanuele? Who in any case can’t be held responsible for the decision his parents made.’
‘I’m sorry about little Emanuele. He’d be a handsome young man today.’
Amara starts. How can this woman know if he was handsome or ugly? Or is she saying this just for the sake of saying anything? Looked at more closely, she seems more enigmatic and impenetrable than she appeared at first. There is a shadow in her eyes that Amara cannot interpret. But she can guess from the contradictions and enigmatic silences that something is being left unsaid.