Train to Budapest (23 page)

‘How have you managed to survive?’

‘I divided the rooms up and started a pension. Only four rooms but it’s enough to keep me going.’

‘Did you ever hear anything about the concentration camps?’

‘Certainly not. I knew the Jews were shut up in ghettos.’

‘But a time came when the ghettos were evacuated and destroyed. Didn’t you ever ask yourself what happened to all those Jews?’

‘I had other things to think about, Frau Sironi. I had to find something to eat, survive the bombing and search for water because all the mains in the district had been blown up.’

‘And when did you discover that the Jews in the camps had been gassed?’

‘After the war. A disgrace. It was no accident the Nazis went into hiding. Luckily my Franz was in the Luftwaffe. He was never in the SS.’

‘Can you remember anything of the time when the cities were overrun by gangs of thugs? When slogans denouncing the Jews went up in the shops?’

‘It’s all different now, but at that time there was an enthusiasm, a confidence, a joy in being alive that made all these little things though admittedly dissonant seem unimportant.’

‘Dissonance unimportant? If a singer sings out of tune with the orchestra, the audience boos and whistles.’

‘It was a country in love with a new era, you understand … no, you wouldn’t understand … a country on fire with a new pride and boldness after a long history of humiliation. We were all drunk. And when you’re drunk you don’t see the details, you see everything wholesale, you’re exultant, ready to do anything for the idol of the moment.’

‘Drunk with hatred for a people whose only fault was to exist?’

‘We believed the Jews did business, speculated, stole, wanted to destroy our country. Hitler said they wanted a world war so they could eliminate the Aryan race. That’s what was in all the newspapers and they kept on repeating it again and again.’

‘Did you never think it might be propaganda?’

‘Drunks are happy to drink bad wine too. They can’t tell the difference between that and good wine.’

‘Was that how your husband Franz thought as well?’

‘We all thought like that. It was a common attitude. And if you didn’t think like that you were in trouble.’

‘So there were a few people who didn’t think like that?’

‘Just a few but they were thought mad. Love is exclusive and looks for absolutes.’

‘Do you think Nazism was born out of love?’

‘A sick love that soon turned into tyranny. I know that from my own experience. What could have persuaded a little girl like me to cram herself into a uniform covered with buttons and run to rallies and raise my arm rhythmically in honour of Hitler? How could they convince me to march with thousands of other students,
sticking our legs straight up in the air? Love, only love and pride in our country. And the voice of the Führer had more power than any whip, a powerful spirit that burned our throats and made the blood race in our veins.’

‘So you were a committed Nazi!’

‘I can admit that now it’s all in the past.’

‘The binge is over. And then?’

‘You wake up and say: how could I ever have believed all that? How could I? Even if I, Dorothea Morgan, never did anything, but let others do it all, that’s sometimes even worse. How could I never have seen the abyss we were hurling ourselves into?’

‘So all those dead, tormented people were simply the result of an enormous obscene collective binge?’

‘When you’re drunk you don’t know what you’re doing. We were blind drunk and in love with a criminal. That can happen, you know, just ask any psychologist. People of good family who would never hurt a fly, people who care about their country and the future of their children, can be blinded by love for a man, ready to surrender their own will to his, out of admiration for a word that exalts and seduces. To surrender their own future, even life itself, to an assassin to do what he likes with. That’s how it was with me, but I assure you with millions of others it was just the same. Millions of poor people who had nothing to gain from Nazism. It wasn’t fear, indignation or greed that pushed them towards racism, even if many did enrich themselves shamefully by grabbing everything from those poor families who went to the extermination camps. But we didn’t know that then. We thought they’d been taken away to do forced labour. Most people didn’t speculate or steal, they just saw themselves as taking part in a great moment of history. We’d gone to war against people who threatened Austria and the Germanic peoples. Who wanted to crush us totally and kill us, and we were fighting them. It was no more than self-defence.’

‘But who was it who wanted to destroy the Germanic nations? Communists? Homosexuals? Gypsies? Jews? The sick? The crippled? Who was it precisely?’

‘In war people die. You can’t mourn every death, every casualty. I could have been killed myself from one moment to the next. Like my Franz. I cried for days and days. Then one morning I said: Dorothea, this weeping means nothing, it’s egoistical. You’re crying
because of a personal insult, when the country is triumphantly raising its head to face the whole world and demand respect, love, and obedience.’

‘And when did you become aware that all this was an aberration, Frau Morgan?’

‘Just after the war, when the newspapers began saying how things really were and we saw the photographs. Who could have imagined they gassed those poor children and threw them into crematorium ovens? It was monstrous.’

‘There are some who say you didn’t want to know the truth.’

‘Italy also had a tyrant, and he was loved and followed too. When did you find out how things really were?’

‘I was a child. I was in love with Emanuele Orenstein, not with any tyrant. Then he left for Vienna with his family and I never saw him again. I’m here to find out whether he died in a camp or survived.’

‘This is why you’re here, Frau Sironi? I hope you find him.’

‘Please forgive me if I’ve upset you with all my questions. But I’m inquisitive and trying to understand.’

‘It’s so long since I last spoke of those times. It needed a foreigner to come here and call up distant feelings we’re perhaps ashamed of. As if we’d woken after a massive binge and vowed never to drink again.’

‘Do you think the people of Austria have vaccinated themselves against every form of Nazism?’

‘For myself I would say yes. But you never know. Perhaps more should be said about it. Discussion in the schools.’

‘Is it shame that stops people discussing it, or are they afraid of meeting ghosts too depressing to face?’

‘There’s nothing worse than coming to your senses after a mistaken love. For the first time you see the person as he really is and ask yourself how you could ever have trusted such a person, how you could ever have put your future in his hands. Now we see him as a monster with an ugly voice, the eyes of a lunatic and the gestures of a madman. But at the time we even thought him beautiful! Even kind! Even fascinating! We were all in love with him.’

‘Titania falls in love with the head of an ass. Just because Puck has squirted a little magic juice in her eyes! Is that how you think love comes about, Frau Morgan?’

‘For me, yes. Love is utterly blind and incapable of reasoning. Do you know why we fall in love with a particular person?’

‘Preferably because we like the way he thinks and reasons, how he speaks and moves, and for his smell and his voice and his hands and his eyes.’

‘Well, to me Hitler had beautiful hands, shining eyes and profound thoughts and moved like a cherub. I don’t know about his smell because I never got near enough to find out. But let’s say that sometimes a scent of roses and violets came from far off that surprised even me. The smell of my country celebrating, of my country victorious.’

‘I imagine the smell of defeat must have swept away the smell of roses and violets.’

‘Defeat smells of putrid flesh.’

Amara sees Frau Morgan suddenly sit down with her hands in her lap, breathing heavily as if from running up the stairs. But she does not seem unhappy, only tired.

28

At ten in the morning the man with the gazelles and Amara are at Peter Orenstein’s door ringing a bell whose hoarse sound echoes through an apparently empty house.

No one comes to open, not even after they ring a second and a third time.

‘But he arranged to see us at ten,’ says Hans.

‘What shall we do? Shall we wait?’

‘Let’s wait a little longer.’

After ringing several more times, Amara and Hans sit down outside on the top step waiting for any sign of life. Perhaps the master of the house has gone out and will be back soon. Perhaps he’s fallen asleep. Or changed his mind. All they can do is wait patiently.

This morning the man with the gazelles has a nice smell of carnation-scented soap. In her mind Amara goes back over what Frau Morgan said. How important is the smell of a person close to you? Frau Morgan was aware of the Führer’s smell of roses and violets from kilometres away. To what extent do we invent smells?

Hans talks of his mother, the resolute Hanna Paduk, a Hungarian Jew who died in the Treblinka camp. She wore her long curly blonde hair in braids round her head. ‘She was funny, she walked like a young goose because of flat feet. But her voice was not that of a goose, it was the most beautiful and expressive voice I’ve ever heard. When I was little she used to sing me to sleep with folk songs:
Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf! Dein Vater ist ein Schaf, Die Mutter ist im Pommerland, Pommerland ist abgebrannt, Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf
. Do you know what that means?
Sleep baby sleep
,
Your
father’s just a sheep, Your mother’s in Pomerania-land, Pomerania’s all burned down, Sleep baby sleep.

‘Her voice bewitched me. I would force myself to stay awake so I could go on listening. But she would be in a hurry to get away. I
would hold her hand tight and beg her: sing more! And she would sing, soft and low close to my ear so as not to disturb the others. Her breath smelled of onions. I don’t know why my poor mother always ate onions. Perhaps they were the only vegetables available in the market at that time. I ate boiled onions too, and I have to say they were excellent. But I couldn’t smell my own breath. I could smell hers. It was sourish and sweet at the same time. Onions and words, onions and fluent notes. I would have happily lived like that for ever. There’s something perverse about growing up, developing strong teeth, hairs on one’s chest, a moustache, corns on one’s feet. Why do we grow? It’s so stupid.’

Hans is no longer looking at her. He is speaking as if alone, eyes half closed, barely moving his lips. Telling of his mother, the sweet Hanna rejected by her own kitchen. The marvellous singing bird, who faced with her oven had no idea what to do. She would forget to stir the stew, add too much salt or too much pepper and overcook the vegetables; in her hands rice became food for chickens and the meat was always scorched. She didn’t even know how to buy at the market. During the war, when food was rationed but you could buy on the black market, she would return home happily to her husband after tracking down two sausages which then turned out to be full of worms, or place on the table a fine melon that was rotten inside. One day she brought some extremely green pears, so hard that neither teeth nor the blade of a knife could penetrate them. Let’s put them on the window ledge till they’re ripe, she said in her soft, musical voice. So they were spread on the balcony and watched. But those spiteful pears, so unerringly chosen by clumsy Hanna, quietly turned from wooden to rotten with nothing in between. Not only that, but they began to leak a stinking liquid and had to be thrown in the dustbin, where not even stray dogs would give them a glance.

Hanna read a lot and her husband Tadeusz teased her for liking modern novels. He himself was a musician of great distinction who for ‘major historical reasons’, in his own words, had failed even before beginning his career as an orchestral conductor. At most he was occasionally allowed to conduct an orchestra of young students at the Vienna Academy. But one morning while they were rehearsing the alarm sounded. He continued conducting as if it was nothing; there were far too many alarms, and in
his candid opinion the people who controlled the sirens overdid things. Perplexed, the musicians looked at each other and went on playing. But when they heard hissing sounds followed by explosions, they grabbed their instruments and headed for the shelters. Tadeusz was left alone – well, not entirely alone, because the principal violin stayed with him, a very tall young man with curls on his collar and clear, smiling eyes. They began discussing music: ‘My father has always remembered that morning and that conversation. He says he never talked with more passion, more freedom or more joy with any of his musicians. They scarcely noticed that a bomb had destroyed half the building. But the hall of the Academy had miraculously survived and they had gone on talking about music until someone came in, injured and covered with dust, searching for refuge in the only part of the building that was still intact. Some other musicians were carried in on stretchers, and the entrance hall of the Academy rapidly became an improvised hospital with stretcher-bearers running from one side to the other. The wounded were settled on the floor on the red padded carpets that served for sound insulation during rehearsals, while the dead were piled in the corridor next to the area where the violins, double basses, horns and flutes were stored. Nearly all the musicians who had taken refuge underground were injured. Two were dead: the pianist, a father of three small children, and the timpanist, a sturdy athletic young man whose muscles and ready smile had been envied by all. The others were lying there on the floor, one with a broken arm, one with shattered legs, one with bleeding ears, moaning quietly in childish voices. The conductor, Tadeusz, and the principal violin, Ferenc Bruman, became instant nurses, helping to strip off the orchestra’s clothes and holding them while their injuries were disinfected and bandaged, and helping them to swallow pills administered by medical students who had run over from the nearby School of Medicine after the explosion and collapse of the shelter. These were mere boys who applied to the letter what they had learned from books in their first months at the School: that splints were needed for broken bones, alcohol for wounds that must first be cleaned with soap and water, and stitches made with needle and suture thread for superficial wounds. But where could they find splints and needles and thread for sutures?