‘But why?’
‘Madam, please go. You’re lucky we aren’t repatriating you to Italy. As soon as we have all the information we need we’ll release you. If we get it. If we’re satisfied with it. Meanwhile please go back to the Pension Blumental. We’ll be in touch.’
So she was dismissed. She left the police with her clothes crumpled and her hair stuck to her cheeks after a night sleeping against the dirty wall of the waiting room, with her feet gone numb inside her shoes.
Frau Morgan greeted her with an enigmatic smile.
Amara went up to her room and stretched on her bed trying to read a book and forget all that wasted time. Next morning there was a knock on her door.
‘You’re wanted on the phone, Frau Sironi.’
She ran down the stairs, hoping anxiously that it was Hans. She felt lost in Vienna without him.
‘They’ve withheld my passport.’
‘Then what can we do?’
‘They’ve only given me a permit to Kraków and back, passing through Budapest. That should be enough to reach Auschwitz.’
‘And our time-expired tickets?’
‘I managed to change them. It cost a bit. See you at Figlmüller’s in an hour?’
Figlmüller’s, once just a beer cellar, now a fourth-class restaurant, is full of smoke. The menu for the day is nailed to the wall on a piece of cardboard. Pork crackling with beans, sauerkraut and sweet-cooked potato.
Amara has sat down by a window marked with greasy fingerprints and traces of long-dried rain. Outside there’s a boy playing in the middle of the square with a dog, making it jump and run round in circles. He picks up a stone and throws it to the far end of the square. The dog rushes off, picks up the stone in its mouth and brings it back wagging its tail at the child, who wipes his nose on the sleeve of a patched and faded red sports shirt. The dog drops the stone right in front of the boy’s down-at-heel shoes; the boy bends to pick it up and solemnly throws it again towards the flower beds at the far end of the square. The dog shoots off like an arrow, runs around with its nose to the ground, finds the stone, picks it up and runs back, leaping over obstacles like a hare. Enchanted, Amara watches this game that could go on for ever. A game of sudden loss and rediscovery, of going away and returning. Who knows why it gives so much pleasure to both boy and dog? The repetition of a familiar action? The freedom of a chase that leads nowhere and is thus entirely gratuitous and pointless? The joy of two creatures acting in unison on opposite sides of the square? The sheer pleasure of being able to flex one’s muscles? There’s something insane about repetition. But it can also bring great peace. Aren’t lullabies based on repetition? And magic spells and prayers? The more often one repeats a gesture the less one understands it. And in that failure to understand lies the mystery of a game that imitates the mysteries of the universe.
But look, there’s a tall figure crossing the square between the boy and the dog with rapid, joyful steps. Hans. A man who is winning, it occurs to her. But winning over what? Certainly not over poverty. Over the cold? No. Over love? Not that either. Over life? Perhaps; over the meagre, angry life of the post-war years that promises so little for the future. He has on his usual sweater with the running gazelles. His elderly boy’s head sits firmly on his thin neck. His light-brown hair with its occasional streak of grey is slipping softly across his broad brow. A sudden surge of affection drives her to wave a hand timidly in his direction. But Hans doesn’t notice her through the dirty glass. Entering with firm steps he looks round; sees her sitting in the corner, smiles and goes over to her.
He’s wearing motorcyclist’s gauntlets even though he sold his motorcycle years ago. On top of the gazelles he has a waterproof jacket slung over one shoulder.
‘What can a citizen of the West want in a city of the East? Why can’t Mr Hans Wilkowsky stay at home? What is all this coming and going? What can he hope to find in the camp at Auschwitz? And why is he taking with him Mrs Maria Amara Sironi Spiga, an Italian from Florence? I explained it a hundred times,’ says Hans, sipping a large cup of milky coffee, ‘but they seem incapable of understanding.’
Amara has propped her elbows on the little table cut from a single piece of wood, and is listening with a worried expression.
‘My transparency alarms them. They asked me so many questions that by now they know everything there is to know about my life. But nothing satisfies them. They’re as suspicious as monkeys. Just wait and see, they’ll interrogate Frau Morgan. And we can expect a visit to your room in the Pension Blumental. They’ll go through everything then put it all back as it was. Their conscience isn’t clear. I told them repeatedly that we’re searching for traces of a child who disappeared in ’43. And that you are also writing articles for an Italian paper. Who knows what they think can be hidden behind that. They’re probably following us now. Listening to every word we say. But why should we care?’
‘Do you really mean they could be spying on us at this very moment?’
‘Possibly. How could all those guards and secret service agents make a living, if not from the existence of people like you and me who refuse to stay quietly at home but insist on travelling from city to city in pursuit of a child now grown up, who just possibly may have survived the war?’
‘And my permit?’
‘You’ll have to wait. They won’t say anything definite. Maybe two days, maybe five. There are things they have to check. I expect they’ll have phoned the police in Florence about you. And they’ll have rummaged through the whole of my past to find out who I am and what I want. For a bureaucrat it’s difficult to understand that anything can ever exist for no particular reason. There’s no obvious reason why I should come with you on your search for Emanuele Orenstein, there’s no obvious reason at all for your search, and there’s no reason they can understand for why you should want to go to Auschwitz again.’
‘Well, there is a reason. We’re going to study the new lists of arrivals at the camp.’
‘But that makes no sense to them. Too vague, too sentimental. It has to be a front for something else.’
‘What on earth can they suspect? They won’t find anything and in the end they’ll get tired.’
‘Let’s hope so.’
‘Shouldn’t you be writing for your paper? Make the most of the chance. I’ll take you to see the Belvedere Gardens.’
‘No, no gardens. I want to write about Vienna and the cold war. How the people are living and what they’re thinking.’
‘I’ll help you if you like.’
‘Have you no work of your own you should be getting on with, Hans?’
‘I did. But I’ve lost it. I’ll manage, though.’
‘How?’
‘Well, for example, by being a father to brides at the altar. So many men have died and someone has to take their place. I can perform. I have my own tailcoat. And I know how to smile nicely. People always say: you seem too young to be her father, but it’s wonderful how you and your daughter are as alike as two peas in a pod!’
He laughs, throwing back his head. Amara notices two gaps between his side teeth. Seeing her looking at his mouth, he shyly cups his hand under his nose.
When an hour later Amara returns to the Pension Blumental, Frau Morgan, red in the face, stops her before she can go upstairs. ‘You have caused me to suffer two hours of interrogation this morning.’
Amara apologises. But what can they have been asking? Frau Morgan looks askance, uncertain what, if anything, to say. All the fear caused by the war and the Nazi terror is coming to the surface again. We must all keep our mouths shut, Frau Morgan seems to be saying with her slightly squinting eyes that are looking simultaneously above and to one side of Amara’s face. Always mind your own business and keep clear of other people’s. Especially foreigners; you always have to keep them at arm’s length, because they only bring trouble.