‘Come in, please sit down,’ says the man in a conciliatory voice, going into the kitchen to find something to drink. He comes back balancing a bottle of liqueur and three mismatched glasses on a small tray.
‘Well, what happened to this Emanuele Orenstein?’ says the man, pouring sticky liqueur into the glasses. Goodness knows how long since that bottle was last touched; its glass neck is encrusted with deposits of whitish sugar.
‘In 1939 the Orenstein family decided to return to Vienna. This is what Signora Sironi finds difficult to understand and it makes no sense to me either. There is no logic in what they did. Letters reached Amara from Vienna. She can show you one if you like. She always carries them with her. First the Orensteins lived in a large house they owned, on Schulerstrasse. Then they were thrown out and taken to the ghetto in Łódź together with other Jewish families. A few more letters reached Signora Sironi from the ghetto; the post still seems to have been working to begin with. Then nothing. But after the war she was sent an exercise book containing other letters written in the ghetto when Emanuele still had a pencil but no more envelopes or money for stamps.’
‘Why not let the lady speak for herself?’ says Peter Orenstein crossly.
‘Her German is not very good. I’m here to help her.’
‘I understand Italian.’
The man fixes his gaze on Amara, smiling mysteriously. The story seems to interest him.
‘The lady suspects Emanuele Orenstein must have been transported to Auschwitz because many of those who were in the Łódź ghetto ended up there,’ persists the man with the gazelles with a regretful smile.
‘And has she been to Auschwitz to check the registers?’
‘Yes, I’ve been there. But I didn’t find anything.’
‘And you think he might still be alive?’
‘Possibly. I hope so.’
‘Another drop of gentian liqueur? I made it myself.’
Amara says, no, thank you. It’s too sweet for her. And there’s something stale about it that she doesn’t like. Now the man behaves strangely, rubbing his hands together and opening his eyes wide. He fills his own glass, gulps the liqueur down and pours some more. He licks up the last drops, hanging his tongue out of his mouth like a dog. He obviously knows something, but what?
‘May I see that letter, Frau Sironi?’
Amara pulls the letters from her bag. By now they are crumpled and fading but still carefully preserved in a large envelope wrapped in transparent cellophane. She extracts one from the envelope and hands it to the man who takes it with trembling hands. He lifts it to his eyes and reads greedily.
In the semi-darkness, Amara detects a glitter. Tears are rolling down his cheeks.
‘I was that child,’ he says, lifting a wet face to Amara. The man with the gazelles starts in his chair. Amara sits as if turned to stone. Not only from the revelation, but because this man claiming to be her childhood friend is so utterly unrecognisable. How can there be nothing, absolutely nothing, in him of the Emanuele she once knew? Where is the smooth blond hair? The kind smile? The lively, affectionate eyes? The man facing her is like an angry owl, staring at her with obvious distaste, as he moves his dead lips like a horse over his false teeth.
‘I don’t recognise you …’ says Amara in embarrassment. Her only thought is to run away from this house and this man who is clearly fooling her, she has no idea why but he is clearly fooling her.
‘Let’s leave it at that. I’m tired,’ says the self-proclaimed Emanuele, changing his tone.
‘But why do you call yourself Peter?’ asks Amara.
‘It’s a long story. I don’t feel like going into it at the moment. Anyway, I’ve closed the door on that past. Now please go away. Go!’
29
That evening, sitting at a table at the Figlmüller beerhouse, the man with the gazelles and Amara ask themselves about that strange meeting with Peter Orenstein who claimed to be Emanuele Orenstein. But if he doesn’t resemble Emanuele in any way? And in any case, he must be much older than twenty-eight; he looks at least forty-five. Amara lifts to her lips the good draught beer an elderly waiter has placed before her, but she doesn’t feel like drinking.
After claiming to be the Emanuele they are looking for, the man to all intents and purposes threw them out of the house. Amara had no time to ask him the questions on the tip of her tongue. She had no chance to clarify, understand or ask anything. Still weeping and panting, the man had taken them to the door saying he wanted to be alone. Out of tact, dazed and perplexed, they left without asking anything more, and without even retrieving the letter that Amara always liked to have with her.
‘We must go back for the letter.’
‘And to ask more questions. He can’t get away with it like that, leaving everything in doubt.’
‘We need to find out why he’s pretending to be what he isn’t.’
‘But the furniture was very much like the Orenstein family furniture. Fake sixteenth-century, with small carvings in dark wood. Expensive items from Florence, made for a large house with plenty of room in it.’
‘But how can he have aged so much? He looked at least fifty.’
‘With the face of a hungry wolf.’
‘He must be an impostor who wants to get something out of passing himself off as somebody else.’
‘That hole in his cheek …’
‘We don’t look like rich people. What can he hope to gain?’
‘But those tears, Hans, they seemed real enough.’
‘If what he says is true, your Emanuele has turned into a monster. Either that or the man’s a speculator. A clever actor.’
‘Could a concentration camp reduce a young man to such a state?’
‘Anything can happen, even to the extent of turning a child into an old man.’
‘But did you notice his hair? Almost bald and what’s left of it was white. How can a man of twenty-eight have a head like that? The war ended eleven years ago. There’s been time enough to get over it.’
‘It is strange.’
‘I don’t understand a thing, Hans. What shall we do?’
‘We must go back. He’s got to explain his name to us and much more.’
‘And we must get that letter back.’
‘The letter, yes.’
They look at each other. Amara bursts out laughing, but it is sad, nervous laughter. Hans lifts the tankard of fresh beer to his lips and drinks, closing his eyes and throwing back his head. Amara drinks too. Everything is getting complicated if also a little grotesque.
‘But if it really does turn out to be him, what will you do, Amara?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Do you think you would still love him?’
‘Yes of course, but not what we met.’
‘You must have realised he would be different from the person you remembered.’
‘Different but not unrecognisable. This is a different person, Hans, someone else. It frightens me. He even has a different name. It can’t be him.’
‘Anyone who escaped from the concentration camps has to be different from other people … as if he had died and risen again.’
‘Died and risen again?’
‘That friend of my father’s I was talking about, the principal violin of the Budapest Academy who was engaged for a series of concerts in Vienna: Ferenc Bruman. He spent two years in Africa with his father who was a diplomat. He used to tell a strange story about how they once ran into a tribe from the north of the Ivory Coast. Hunters who went naked apart from a cache-sexe of leaves, with a knife in their belts and a long spear always in their hands. When the two came into these people’s village, a man had just died. Next morning all the village elders gathered in the shade of a large mango tree. They had placed the dead man, all washed and clothed, against the tree and all crouched round him. Then one of the men started questioning him: Why have you died? What killed you? Who will you leave your spear to? And so on. At each question the elder pulled the dead man by the sleeve, and they understood his reply from the way his head moved, and everyone knew what he was trying to say. Well, I think Emanuele Orenstein is dead and we’re questioning a substitute according to some archaic magic rite. We need to understand what this dead man is trying to tell us, like the Africans in the northern Ivory Coast.’