‘Budapest, Amara, wake up!’
Outside, the intermittent light of yellow street lamps and a voice booming from a loudspeaker. The engine snorts, ready to start again. Horvath is lifting her luggage down from the rack.
‘Thanks.’
Hans pulls on the sweater with the running gazelles. His fingers rake the hair back from his brow. More than ever he looks like a child grown old before his time, with grey stubble on his cheeks, and a mouth pouting with sleep and hunger.
‘Where are all the soldiers?’
‘Got off before us.’
‘Did you pick up the book that slipped down on the seat beside me?’
‘I’ve got everything. Let’s go.’
In her state halfway between sleep and waking everything seems new and astonishing: why are those girls in white shirts with badges on their hats standing to attention before the train? Singing in melancholy voices to welcome some bigwig. And whose are those suitcases that shine like gold in the early morning sun, piled up in the station entrance hall? And where is that exquisite smell of freshly made coffee coming from, and that mixed smell of apple tart and dirty latrines?
‘I’d like some coffee’
‘Me too.’
‘The shutters are still down on the bars. D’you know what time it is?’
‘Seven?’
‘No, five.’
‘Then where can that smell of coffee be coming from?’
‘Some private house.’
The three set off, gloomily stretching themselves, lugging their large and small bags along the platform among the cigarette ends.
‘Look, the river!’
A great dark serpent that unwinds slow and powerful before them. It has a majestic air. Above them stands Vajdahunyad Castle, grey stone glowing in the early sun, beautiful and proud.
‘Your father isn’t meeting us?’
‘I told him not to. We’ll take a taxi. But first let’s find some coffee.’
The first place they find open is a milk shop. A tall sturdy woman is rolling up the blind. She switches on the light and watches them come in weighed down by their luggage, faces contorted. She smiles with amusement, and moves quickly behind the counter to put some milk on to heat.
35
Hans’s father has generously decided to put all three of them up. The man with the gazelles and Horvath are to sleep in the living room and Amara in the kitchen; while Hans’s father Tadeusz and Ferenc Bruman share the main bedroom.
Tadeusz Wilkowsky has a talent for making cakes. He has set aside some hard bread and combined with pieces of apple and raisins and lard bought in the Sunday market, he has concocted an excellent strudel which crumbles the moment you touch it, though not the smallest bit is wasted. His friend Ferenc, after the dessert and a small glass of homemade apple brandy, delights them on this first evening, when he takes up his violin to play Bach’s Chaconne, as though filling the house with an austere song of welcome.
Everyone has his or her own story to tell. Horvath talks about his experience at Stalingrad and his work as a librarian in Vienna, Hans describes his curious activities as a surrogate father for brides, and Amara remembers little Emanuele who she is sure is still alive and whom she will sooner or later find. She is unable to stop herself reading one of the boy’s letters aloud. The men smoke in silence thinking of who knows what. They would like to help her, they say. But how? Each proposes a different plan: go back to Auschwitz and check the new lists. Or make a thorough search of his home in the Łódź ghetto even if there can’t possibly be anything left of it after the long allied bombardment. Why not study the newspapers of the time? Or ask special permission to rummage in the SS archives. And what about that Peter Orenstein who claims to be the Emanuele they are looking for?
‘In my opinion he’s a swindler.’
‘I think so too.’
No one has any confidence in the self-proclaimed Emanuele Orenstein. Particularly Amara whose senses refuse in the most categorical manner possible to recognise him. It isn’t him, she says firmly, it absolutely can’t be him. A person may change, but only up to a certain point. Something must always remain of what he was before, even if he was a child then and is now a man.
Yet she still harbours a doubt and every now and then wakes in the night with her heart in her mouth, thinking she has got it all wrong. What if it really is Emanuele? And if he is hiding simply because he is afraid he will not be accepted? Can affection depend so much on appearances? What if someone can be so completely transformed by painful experiences that they even destroy the memory of the person they once were? Is it a particular body one loves, or a being undergoing transformation?
They argue it out, four men and one woman, in that tiny apartment in Budapest, unaware of the deadly wave about to burst on their heads. The city sleeps and wakes again with steady, laborious rhythms. Everything seems calm. Their home on Magdolna utca is certainly a mess but friendly and peaceful; it only becomes noisy when all five sit round the table to eat a dish concocted by Tadeusz. They see themselves as part of an unchanging story, in the mysterious epoch that has followed an atrocious war, struggling with the same shortages as all the other inhabitants of this sad and subdued city.
Instead, without suspecting it in the least, they are on the lid of a boiling saucepan. A pan about to explode as day by day they wait for visas for Poland, write articles on the tedium and restrictions of communism, cook pork and potato pies, down tankards of Soproni beer and chatter about this and that, while they think up unrealistic schemes for discovering a child swallowed up by history.
‘There’s an electric atmosphere in the city,’ repeats old Tadeusz. But no one is listening.
‘What did you find at the market today,’ Horvath asks him.
‘Some nuts. Some rice. A hectogram of butter for eighty-three forints. I even found a piece of soap and that’s a miracle because for months there’s been no soap anywhere in Budapest.’
‘Bread?’
‘No bread. Hard-tack biscuits.’
‘What, like yesterday? They’re disgusting.’
‘That’s all there is.’
‘You should have got to the market earlier.’
‘Then why don’t you go? It’s always me that has to do the searching.’
‘I can’t, you know that.’
‘Because you’re asleep, that’s why.’
‘Stop squabbling, Father. Did you buy a paper?’
‘No one buys newspapers here. Just to read the voice of the Party always saying the same things? It’s not worth a penny.’
‘There must be something about the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.’
‘Not a thing. All secret.’
‘But it was on the radio: the secret text of Khruschev’s speech has even been published in the New York Times.’
‘Nonsense. When the Russians say secret, they mean secret. They have a sort of diabolical, maniacal, obsessive passion for secrets. So many secrets they don’t even know what they think themselves because they’ve lost the key to their own thoughts.’
‘A secret mother who gives birth to a secret son who in his turn marries a very secret bride, who after nine months gives birth to a top secret son, and so on.’
‘But this time something has leaked out. The secret has gone into circulation and flown all the way to New York. Isn’t that extraordinary?’
‘If true, it would be the beginning of the end for communism. You can’t have communism without secrets.’
‘Enough secrets to make a tomb.’