Train to Budapest (12 page)

‘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.

His mother had always worked as a dressmaker. She went into the houses of well-off people to mend and patch, to raise or lower the hems of skirts. She earned enough to supplement her husband’s meagre salary. They had closed their eyes and noses to the rising stink. A stink of racist intolerance, of cultural hatred, of persecution. In their hearts they nurtured a sacrosanct conviction that no one, for any reason whatever, would ever be able to deprive them of the right to identify themselves as Austrians, living in their own country and their own city.

But one morning a dozen SA men arrived and took over their apartment, forcing them to leave with a few personal effects in a couple of suitcases. They were forced to leave behind the expensive linen sheets with embroidered monograms that had been a wedding present to Frau Magdalena, the damask curtains inherited from grandmother Bernstein, the gold-rimmed plates, by now discoloured and chipped, given at their marriage by the Levi uncles of Linz, and the fine silver cutlery from their Vogel cousins who had emigrated to Paris in the last century.

With those two pathetic suitcases they had been loaded onto a train that took them to Poland. They were not downhearted. They were on their way to work camps, the Nazis told them, and in this belief they climbed into the wagons, almost comforted by the prospect of leaving a life that had no longer been a life since the restrictions started: confined to the house by a curfew from eight in the evening, and with no access to Aryan shops, no school, and no cinema. They were sure they would be put to work: clearing snow, digging trenches, looking after tramway crossings. They would get by.

Theodor Orenstein, meanwhile, had managed to escape before his family were deported. Being an agile and slender boy, he had hidden in a lorry full of coal that, in return for a large sum of money (the last of the family funds) had taken him far from Vienna.

He had wandered the Austrian countryside, avoiding mopping-up operations and suspicious peasants, until he came to the Polish border. There he evaded the frontier guards and, still walking, reached Darłowo on the Baltic coast. A ship was ready to take him to Sweden, but it sank and threw him up instead on the Danish island of Bornholm, which was occupied by the Germans.

‘I was lucky,’ he says again and again, ‘I was incredibly lucky.’

In the little village of Rønne he found work mending fishing nets, and lived secretly like this till the end of the war. No one realised he was a Jew, or if they did suspect it, they kept quiet. His main worry had been the fate of his parents and little brothers: what had happened to them? Were they alive? How could he find them?

Amara watches him closely, hoping to find something of Emanuele in that shadowed face with its ingenuous eyes, that slightly emaciated body.

‘Would you like some bread and cheese? I have some excellent Camembert.’

Without waiting for an answer, Theodor Orenstein goes confidently into his tiny kitchen, opens a cupboard and takes out a round loaf wrapped in a coloured cloth. He cuts it into slices and places three cubes of strong-smelling Camembert on a clean plate with a leaf of fresh mint. ‘More beer?’ he asks anxiously, but forgets to fetch the bottle. A little more Camembert? Amara
says no, thank you, she isn’t hungry. And maybe they should be on their way back to the Pension Blumental, it’s getting late. But the painter Orenstein has more to say.

Don’t they want to hear the story of his parents? Don’t they want to hear how that ended? He can’t possibly let them go so easily. It’s as if he hasn’t spoken for years. He is so delighted they’ve come that he seems to have forgotten the large painting he was working on with its angels over the roofs.

His mother and his father and the younger children, God preserve them in glory, vanished completely. Aren’t they curious? Didn’t they come because they wanted to know about Orensteins living in Austria? When he managed to get back to Vienna, he found their house had been bombed. The stub ends of flats were still there as if to remind the world that people had once lived in them. Shreds of greasy stained wallpaper still hung from surviving fragments of wall, with broken windows still miraculously attached to their hinges, uprooted doors and the remains of ceilings that had collapsed in a sea of rubble.

He can still remember how he sat down in the midst of those ruins, trying to remember the exact location of the house he had shared with his mother and father. ‘My mother was a strong woman, able to devote herself to a hundred initiatives, but she did not understand the Nazis at all. She thought they were just trying to create a bit of order. She thought their hatred for the Jews was only a passing whim, and that they would come to have second thoughts about it. Were they not all Austrians, the SS no less than the Jews? Had they not been taught together in the same schools, Jews and non-Jews alike, and when the Kara Mustafà and his Turks had been expelled from Austria in 1683, had they not all partied and drunk together for nine days on end? Where on earth can this volcanic hatred have come from? They had forced Andrea, a neighbour who owned a shop selling exercise books and toys for children, to put a notice in her window reading: JEWS, TRAITORS! What had they betrayed and how? Those armed guards were surely only hotheads spreading terror from sheer youthful high spirits and love of power. Did they not speak of a superman with the right to distinguish the purebred from those of inferior status? But there were only a few of these people, wild and fanatical. Most of the Viennese she knew were quiet folk who asked
no more than to be allowed to live and let live, to work and start families, and to look forward to a respectable old age once they had saved enough money to buy themselves a house and a small garden. That was how most people in the city thought.

‘How could these good Viennese citizens, local people she knew and had always greeted, suddenly change? What had happened to make them turn away when they saw her approaching? How could they pretend they didn’t know what was happening to people arrested in the street for no apparent reason? Thrown out of their shops and homes, robbed, beaten and stripped of everything they possessed?

‘Many believed and repeated among themselves that this treatment was not meant for Jews in general but only for dangerous communists who wanted to abolish private property: everything you have, house and garden, a ring, a car, a book, away with it, away with the lot, give it to the working class, that’s what they said, but what did everyone else have to do with the communists? People had always been on the side of law and order. Had they not conscientiously voted for Dollfuss and his Christian Social Party in 1932? Yet it had been this same trusted Dollfuss who in ’33 outlawed every political party except the Patriotic Front. How could this have happened? Even so, surely someone would sort these hotheads out. They said Hitler believed in order, and that when he came to power he would deal with these fanatics and restore harmony. Why not trust him?

The mother of the painter Theodor Orenstein had believed with many other Austrian Jews that all the buffoonery would come to an end in the firm grip of a collective conscience. Someone would awake from this sleep of reason, and giving a great guffaw of laughter would shake off the stupid fanatics who were trying to ruin a country that had lived for so long at peace with itself and others.