Train to Budapest (22 page)

As she is about to leave, Amara sees him lift his head with a sly flash of mischief and fix his eyes on her as if he had known she was there all the time and had deliberately ignored her. His smile spreads affectionately. Putting down his spoon he waves. ‘Ciao, Stefania!’ he calls loudly, then turns back to his soup without giving her another look.

26

Who knows why the train is such a familiar friend. It carries her, enfolds her and protects her. Imposes a rhythm on her thoughts. Never a discordant rhythm, thinks Amara, sucking the end of her pencil as she turns the pages of Conrad. The sliding door opened and Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin came in. A young man dressed entirely in black, his tight jacket making him look thinner than he really is. His ravaged yet naïve smile pushing him towards the precipices of the world. How familiar that man has been to her! Perhaps more familiar than Nastasya Filippovna or even Aglaya. The splendour of meekness. The inexpressible wonder of idiocy and compassion. Is not that the reason she has followed him step by step? For the way Myshkin, the idiot, runs into his future almost by chance and is marked for life by it. He sees Nastasya for the first time in a portrait, as happens with fateful premonitions. A portrait that has fallen into his hands by chance. When she herself enters headlong, throwing open one door and pushing another, the idiot can’t summon up the courage to speak to her. She doesn’t even notice him. She takes him for a servant and throws her fur to him, running off at high speed. In that running, in that careless indifference, the whole relationship between Myshkin and Nastasya is outlined. A relationship composed of cruelty on one side and silent expectation on the other. A relationship that will make them into friends and enemies, mutual slaves and unhappy lovers. Leading them to the murderous night in which the idiot finds himself once again with Rogozhin, the man who has killed the woman he loves, and they discuss absurd things at the bedside of the little dead woman. Only the little marble foot looking on from under the sheet reminds us that someone has murdered an innocent and perverse girl. They talk and talk, all night long. Is this what friendship between men is? Myshkin, inspired by absolute and thus irrational compassion, utterly pure and therefore
splendid, considers Rogozhin even more his friend, despite the delicate corpse of the infatuated girl lying there between them as proof of the irrationality of love.

The train makes every reflection serpentine, humble, wise. Thought assumes the cadence of the wheels and rhythmically works through ideas as if kilometres of reflections must be traversed. Indeed, the train may carry the idea of dragging or pulling away,
traîner
as the French say. Is that where the word ‘train’ comes from? She immediately gets out the little etymological dictionary she always carries with her. The word is from the Late Latin ‘trenum’, a cart for transporting things. But the most astonishing thing is that ‘trenum’ derives in its turn from the Greek word ‘threnos’ meaning ‘funeral chant’. Which comes first, the cart carrying the provisions for the army or lamentation for the death of a hero? It would be logical to start with war and the impedimenta and provisions and weapons necessary for the soldiers and go on later to funeral lamentations for the deaths of so many young men. But no, the Greek word comes before the Latin one. The contradictions of a language with so many ancestors, all different. She likes to think the train recalls supplies for war but at the same time also carries an ability to console and sing songs for the dead. In the end, every train moves towards the realm of the dead, bearing ideas and meditations that feed on themselves. This is how she likes to think of it, this smoky train travelling through fields still full of land mines and through bombed cities and woods that have given refuge to desperate fugitives, as it heads slowly for Vienna.

Her father Amintore loved trains. Although he travelled very little himself, on Sundays he would set out on the floor a complicated system of rails and make miniature trains run on them, perfect copies of trains from various past periods, accurately copied from old rolling-stock and from old locomotives with fine long snouts, even with make-believe steam puffing from their chimneys.

Amintore had never liked real travel. After military service as an Alpinist in the Cadore Mountains, he had been sent to ‘civilise’ black people in Ethiopia, coming home wounded. That had been enough. No, for their honeymoon he took her mother Stefania to Venice. After that horrible act of violence she had insisted on getting married immediately. She couldn’t bear to live alone any
longer. Her parents had died young. She was alone in the great house in Piazza Dalmazia. They could have lived together in her parents’ apartment, but Stefania had preferred to adapt herself to the little house in Via Alderotti, near Villa Lorenzi and the park where one day the little Amara would spend so much time running and playing with Emanuele.

How often Amintore had told her about that trip to Venice! The idea of streets of water had made a profound impression on him. ‘You wear shoes and walk on asphalt, but in fact you’re surrounded by water. You go up on a little bridge and see greenish waves forming beneath you, you go down stairs and see water following you, you get into a boat and the current of liquid goes with you. It was as if I was made of water myself too, liquefied, without a skeleton, moving like a stream.’

They had been to see a glass factory at Murano. Astonished and delighted like a child, her father Amintore, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, had witnessed the transformation of a huge drop of liquid glass into a solid bulbous vase. He had learned something from that wonderful metamorphosis: was it not the same with their own bodies that started almost liquid and then grew solid, at first shining new only to grow gradually more cracked and fragmentary, to end up broken and thrown away? Even human thoughts, at their birth, often have a miraculous transparency, a luminous liquidity that gradually becomes more opaque and worn out. This is true of religions too, and even of nations. Perhaps even his love for the lovely Stefania would undergo the same transformation; from a limpid and joyous liquid to something familiar and opaque, unrecognisable? So he sadly asked himself, carrying in his mind the image of that glass melting and running and slithering, dissolving only to coagulate like a precious memory as soon as it was held away from the fire. It was an image of the power and fragility of the universe. He had talked about this to his daughter, often, remembering that trip to Venice that had been one of the few memorable events in his humble life as a cobbler. He had discovered the consistency of water outside a bottle or bucket. He had joyfully followed things that run, that silently modify themselves in the purity of matter. And he had thought of his own spirit as having become a broken glass. He had so much longed for a strong young hand to grab it with tongs and put it back in the fire
to make it liquid again, mobile and ready to take on new shapes. Why do we stay in a predictable form, always the same? he had asked his little daughter, certain she would not understand, but hoping she might remember something of his words.

The memory of all those Sundays sitting on the floor with her father Amintore, busy with his model trains, return to her memory as the train draws her towards the future. Perhaps it is from this, from the imaginary journeys her father took, that she derives her love of trains. Who knows! With a few rapid movements the young Amintore would move aside the two shabby armchairs and the bench that stood round the table. He would close the table’s gate-legs and push it against the wall, clearing a space for his trains to run. He claimed it was for her that he set out his railway, but he himself was the real enthusiast. Hurrying to buy new model engines as soon as they came out. Spending hours coupling carriages to make up trains. Learning the name of every steam or electric locomotive in the world.

How often he had dragged her when she was little to the railway museum near the station, where obsolete rolling-stock was preserved! He had hoisted her up into one of those ancient steam engines that looked like something from a Buster Keaton film, especially his most famous one,
The General.
A film her father told her about and which she saw many years later with Luca at the Chaplin Club. An adventurous and indomitable train hurling itself over mined bridges and racing like a maddened horse past fields and meadows and cities, staking out a road between forests and mountains.

Did these mobile toys represent journeys Amintore could have made but never did make? There would have been enough money for occasional expeditions across the border. But something always stopped him. Perhaps the ugly experience of 1935 in Ethiopia, where he discovered poverty and sickness and was forced to shoot at people for whom he felt no dislike. Sometimes Amara would find him bending over a map, busily planning a journey that would have taken them far away. He would apply for passports, set aside money for their tickets and choose what clothes to take, but at the last moment something always stopped him. Their suitcases, standing ready, would remain mysteriously empty. He preferred familiar local expeditions to Monte Morello and its peaks: Poggio
dell’ Aia which reached 950 metres amid pines, oaks and silver firs; Poggio Casaccia, and Poggio della Cornachiaccia which he loved best of all, for its view of the Vaglia valley.

27

She sees him from a distance raising his hand. And there are the gazelles, running across his chest. This cheers her up. She had asked him to wear the same sweater as when they met on the first journey, from Vienna to Kraków. Coming near him, she meets the bergamot fragrance he has put on for her. He has a blissful smile and a little bunch of wild flowers in his hand.

‘Your husband?’

‘He’s fine.’

‘So he just wanted you back for love.’

‘I don’t know about love, but he certainly wanted attention.’

‘So he wasn’t ill at all?’

‘No, in hospital but not at the point of death as he’d led me to believe.’

‘I bet he asked you to go back and live with him again.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I can guess.’

‘That was it, exactly.’

‘And you said no?’

‘Did you guess that too?’

‘I imagine you wouldn’t want to.’

‘What do you think I want?’

‘I don’t know. Nor do you, for that matter. Or rather: you want to find your Emanuele. That’s clear enough. But more mysteriously, you’re after something else.’

‘What?’

‘I’m not sure. Maybe an Amara you don’t know.’

‘And what have you been doing these last few days?’

‘Gone on with the search.’

‘And?’

‘I went to have a look at the Schulerstrasse house where the Orensteins lived. A family of ex-Nazis live there now. Not bad
from an anthropological point of view. Then I went to ferret about in the city archives. I found another Orenstein. Name of Peter. I’ve made an appointment with him for tomorrow. Can you come?’

‘That’s what I came back for.’

‘I had hoped you came back for me.’

‘I returned to go on with the search.’

‘I take that back, I’m sorry.’

‘Well, where shall we start?’

‘With Peter Orenstein. Our appointment’s for tomorrow at ten. Okay?’

Returning to Pension Blumental, Amara finds Frau Morgan cleaning the stairs. She has tied her ample skirts at the ankle with elastic as though about to mount a bicycle. She is extremely polite but somehow inscrutable. Difficult to know what she’s thinking. She puts on a professional smile, then forgets herself and seems to become a child again. The expression in her big nut-brown eyes is at the same time disconcerted and bored, as if she’s surprised by the world and its peculiarities but forcing herself to accept it for what it is. Amara wonders what she did during the war. She uses her unavoidable entry into the reception area to sign the guestbook and try to get Frau Morgan to talk. Her eye falls on the framed photograph of a handsome man in military uniform.

‘My husband Franz,’ says Frau Morgan, following Amara’s gaze. Her smile freezes on her lips.

‘Is he dead?’

‘Killed in the war, like so many others. Shall I help you to your room with your suitcase?’

‘No thank you, I’ll manage on my own.’

Frau Morgan dries her hands on the dark green apron over her skirt. She’s wearing comic Turkish-style slippers with turned-up toes.

‘Have any letters arrived for me?’

‘No post for Signora Sironi.’

She says this in Italian as if to show that she too loves the land of sun and knows a word or two of its language. She stands stock-still, not daring to dismiss Amara.

‘D’you mind if I sit here a moment before I go up to my room?’

‘Not at all, please do. Would you like some coffee?’

‘That would be nice.’

Amara sits down and looks around. Rather a wretched home: two rooms with a half-window overlooking the street. Yet everything is in its place and as genteel as possible with doilies, little white cushions, lilac wallpaper with tulips on it, glass ornaments and fake carnations. A huge radio set is enthroned on a chest of drawers, and from the centre light with its yellow lace shade hangs a spiral of sticky paper covered with little black flies.

‘A good thing this building survived the bombs.’

‘It was damaged. But we fixed it.’

‘Have you always lived here?’

‘Yes, my husband inherited it.’

‘He was a handsome man, I can tell from the photo. Which year did he die?’

‘Right at the beginning of the war. Shot down as a pilot in October ’39.’

‘Unlucky.’

‘Twenty-five years old.’

‘Children?’

‘None.’

‘And you never married again?’

‘Where would I find a husband? All the men died in the war, Frau Sironi. Only us women were left.’

Amara looks at her curiously. After the first few hostile moments, Frau Morgan seems to have relaxed a little. Perhaps she doesn’t mind talking about herself, being asked questions. She is always alone. It occurs to Amara she could start an article for her paper with Frau Morgan’s statement ‘All the men are dead’. What happened to the widows, daughters and sisters of those soldiers killed in the war?