Train to Budapest (24 page)

Hans is so engrossed in his story that he doesn’t notice the door
behind them beginning to open. Amara jumps up, terrified. Hans goes on talking about his father the conductor and his mother Hanna who died of want in Treblinka concentration camp in 1944. Meanwhile a long head with sparse grey hair looks out and watches them, eyes wide with surprise.

‘Who are you?’

At last Hans is aware of the man. He leaps up and gives an automatic military salute, for no apparent reason clicking his heels and lifting his hand to the peak of his cap.

‘We’re looking for Peter Orenstein.’

‘I am he. What do you want?’

The man doesn’t ask them in. On the contrary, he closes the door behind himself, and looks suspiciously at them. His eyes are puffy and his eyelids wrinkled, and he has one cheek disfigured by a deep hole as if someone has excavated it with a knife; his mouth is drawn tight by mean lips that barely cover little false teeth.

‘What do you want from Peter Orenstein?’

‘The lady you see beside me,’ starts the man with the gazelles in his usual formal manner, putting himself at something of a disadvantage, ‘is an Italian lady, a Signora Maria Amara Sironi, and she has come to Vienna to look for traces of a childhood friend, called Orenstein like yourself.’

‘Emanuele Orenstein,’ adds Amara, looking the man straight in the eye as if to emphasise that they haven’t come to swindle or rob him, but only to find out what they can from someone who might be a relative. But Peter Orenstein seems not to understand. Perhaps he has been asleep. He rolls up his eyes and knits his brows crossly.

‘I know no Emanuele Orenstein,’ he says finally, trying to control a shrill voice that tends to pepper what he says with nervous little cries.

‘Very well, we’ve obviously made a mistake. I’m sorry. Please forgive us for disturbing you.’

‘But why are you trying to find this Emanuele Orenstein?’ says the man, who no longer seems so anxious to get rid of them. Has he grown curious?

‘He was a childhood friend. We used to play together.’

‘Where?’ asks the man, screwing up his eyes.

‘In Florence, Via Alderotti; does Villa Lorenzi mean anything to you?’

‘Come in.’

The man pulls out his keys and opens the door again. Who knows what made him change his mind? He seems more trusting now. He stands aside and welcomes them in. Indoors, there’s a smell of horses. All the windows are fast shut. The house is dark and full of dark heavy furniture. As if made for a larger house then brought here and pushed against the walls so as not to take up too much room. Two faded yellow velvet curtains hang from the high windows of the sitting room, the only light things in that dark house. The sofas may once have been yellow too, but they are now grey and stained.

‘Come in, please sit down,’ says the man in a conciliatory voice, going into the kitchen to find something to drink. He comes back balancing a bottle of liqueur and three mismatched glasses on a small tray.

‘Well, what happened to this Emanuele Orenstein?’ says the man, pouring sticky liqueur into the glasses. Goodness knows how long since that bottle was last touched; its glass neck is encrusted with deposits of whitish sugar.

‘In 1939 the Orenstein family decided to return to Vienna. This is what Signora Sironi finds difficult to understand and it makes no sense to me either. There is no logic in what they did. Letters reached Amara from Vienna. She can show you one if you like. She always carries them with her. First the Orensteins lived in a large house they owned, on Schulerstrasse. Then they were thrown out and taken to the ghetto in Łódź together with other Jewish families. A few more letters reached Signora Sironi from the ghetto; the post still seems to have been working to begin with. Then nothing. But after the war she was sent an exercise book containing other letters written in the ghetto when Emanuele still had a pencil but no more envelopes or money for stamps.’

‘Why not let the lady speak for herself?’ says Peter Orenstein crossly.

‘Her German is not very good. I’m here to help her.’

‘I understand Italian.’

The man fixes his gaze on Amara, smiling mysteriously. The story seems to interest him.

‘The lady suspects Emanuele Orenstein must have been transported to Auschwitz because many of those who were in the Łódź
ghetto ended up there,’ persists the man with the gazelles with a regretful smile.

‘And has she been to Auschwitz to check the registers?’

‘Yes, I’ve been there. But I didn’t find anything.’

‘And you think he might still be alive?’

‘Possibly. I hope so.’

‘Another drop of gentian liqueur? I made it myself.’

Amara says, no, thank you. It’s too sweet for her. And there’s something stale about it that she doesn’t like. Now the man behaves strangely, rubbing his hands together and opening his eyes wide. He fills his own glass, gulps the liqueur down and pours some more. He licks up the last drops, hanging his tongue out of his mouth like a dog. He obviously knows something, but what?

‘May I see that letter, Frau Sironi?’

Amara pulls the letters from her bag. By now they are crumpled and fading but still carefully preserved in a large envelope wrapped in transparent cellophane. She extracts one from the envelope and hands it to the man who takes it with trembling hands. He lifts it to his eyes and reads greedily.

In the semi-darkness, Amara detects a glitter. Tears are rolling down his cheeks.

‘I was that child,’ he says, lifting a wet face to Amara. The man with the gazelles starts in his chair. Amara sits as if turned to stone. Not only from the revelation, but because this man claiming to be her childhood friend is so utterly unrecognisable. How can there be nothing, absolutely nothing, in him of the Emanuele she once knew? Where is the smooth blond hair? The kind smile? The lively, affectionate eyes? The man facing her is like an angry owl, staring at her with obvious distaste, as he moves his dead lips like a horse over his false teeth.

‘I don’t recognise you …’ says Amara in embarrassment. Her only thought is to run away from this house and this man who is clearly fooling her, she has no idea why but he is clearly fooling her.

‘Let’s leave it at that. I’m tired,’ says the self-proclaimed Emanuele, changing his tone.

‘But why do you call yourself Peter?’ asks Amara.

‘It’s a long story. I don’t feel like going into it at the moment. Anyway, I’ve closed the door on that past. Now please go away. Go!’

29

That evening, sitting at a table at the Figlmüller beerhouse, the man with the gazelles and Amara ask themselves about that strange meeting with Peter Orenstein who claimed to be Emanuele Orenstein. But if he doesn’t resemble Emanuele in any way? And in any case, he must be much older than twenty-eight; he looks at least forty-five. Amara lifts to her lips the good draught beer an elderly waiter has placed before her, but she doesn’t feel like drinking.

After claiming to be the Emanuele they are looking for, the man to all intents and purposes threw them out of the house. Amara had no time to ask him the questions on the tip of her tongue. She had no chance to clarify, understand or ask anything. Still weeping and panting, the man had taken them to the door saying he wanted to be alone. Out of tact, dazed and perplexed, they left without asking anything more, and without even retrieving the letter that Amara always liked to have with her.

‘We must go back for the letter.’

‘And to ask more questions. He can’t get away with it like that, leaving everything in doubt.’

‘We need to find out why he’s pretending to be what he isn’t.’

‘But the furniture was very much like the Orenstein family furniture. Fake sixteenth-century, with small carvings in dark wood. Expensive items from Florence, made for a large house with plenty of room in it.’

‘But how can he have aged so much? He looked at least fifty.’

‘With the face of a hungry wolf.’

‘He must be an impostor who wants to get something out of passing himself off as somebody else.’

‘That hole in his cheek …’

‘We don’t look like rich people. What can he hope to gain?’

‘But those tears, Hans, they seemed real enough.’

‘If what he says is true, your Emanuele has turned into a monster. Either that or the man’s a speculator. A clever actor.’

‘Could a concentration camp reduce a young man to such a state?’

‘Anything can happen, even to the extent of turning a child into an old man.’

‘But did you notice his hair? Almost bald and what’s left of it was white. How can a man of twenty-eight have a head like that? The war ended eleven years ago. There’s been time enough to get over it.’

‘It is strange.’

‘I don’t understand a thing, Hans. What shall we do?’

‘We must go back. He’s got to explain his name to us and much more.’

‘And we must get that letter back.’

‘The letter, yes.’

They look at each other. Amara bursts out laughing, but it is sad, nervous laughter. Hans lifts the tankard of fresh beer to his lips and drinks, closing his eyes and throwing back his head. Amara drinks too. Everything is getting complicated if also a little grotesque.

‘But if it really does turn out to be him, what will you do, Amara?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Do you think you would still love him?’

‘Yes of course, but not what we met.’

‘You must have realised he would be different from the person you remembered.’

‘Different but not unrecognisable. This is a different person, Hans, someone else. It frightens me. He even has a different name. It can’t be him.’

‘Anyone who escaped from the concentration camps has to be different from other people … as if he had died and risen again.’

‘Died and risen again?’

‘That friend of my father’s I was talking about, the principal violin of the Budapest Academy who was engaged for a series of concerts in Vienna: Ferenc Bruman. He spent two years in Africa with his father who was a diplomat. He used to tell a strange story about how they once ran into a tribe from the north of the Ivory
Coast. Hunters who went naked apart from a cache-sexe of leaves, with a knife in their belts and a long spear always in their hands. When the two came into these people’s village, a man had just died. Next morning all the village elders gathered in the shade of a large mango tree. They had placed the dead man, all washed and clothed, against the tree and all crouched round him. Then one of the men started questioning him: Why have you died? What killed you? Who will you leave your spear to? And so on. At each question the elder pulled the dead man by the sleeve, and they understood his reply from the way his head moved, and everyone knew what he was trying to say. Well, I think Emanuele Orenstein is dead and we’re questioning a substitute according to some archaic magic rite. We need to understand what this dead man is trying to tell us, like the Africans in the northern Ivory Coast.’

‘I don’t believe he’s trying to tell us anything. More likely trying to hide something from us, Hans. But what?’

‘I wish I could discuss it with my father. He has an extraordinary eye for people and never gets things wrong.’

‘Your father’s still alive?’

‘Seventy-six, but like a young man. He lives in Budapest. I’d like you to meet him. A wise, lucid man. He chops the firewood for his stove every day.’

‘Did he never marry again after your mother’s death?’

‘He lived a couple of years with a girl my age. But she got bored and left him. Now he lives on his own. No, to be honest, with a friend, the principal violin of the Budapest Academy orchestra, Ferenc Bruman, the one I’ve just been telling you about, remember? The man who was saved with him the time they talked about music on the day of the great bombing raid on Vienna. The afternoon the Academy collapsed and they survived unscathed while everyone else was killed or wounded. Now he teaches music and earns enough to buy his daily food and fill his evening pipe. They’re like a married couple, him and Ferenc, they quarrel a lot but get on well enough. They’ve had a small flat assigned to them in Budapest, right in the centre, near the Corvin cinema, in Magdolna utca. I’d love to introduce you to them both: Ferenc, an excellent violinist, and Tadeusz, a man of great talent, generous and cultured. I’d really like you to meet them. After the raid they’d survived by talking about music they disappeared, then met
again a few years after the war. Ferenc was playing the violin in the street. My father could no longer find an orchestra to take him on as its conductor, so he started teaching. They decided to set up house together. First with the girl I was telling you about, Odette. She was a bit on the plump side but had a pretty face and they both liked her. Best of all she was cheerful, with a sort of open, childlike cheerfulness that did the two old men good. I’m not exactly sure but I think she probably shared her favours between them. In return they let her have a fine room and a huge bed with a flowered chintz cover, bought her a rather bald rabbit fur, lit a stove every day to keep her warm and made sure she didn’t go short of food. She thanked them by doing the ironing and looking after the housework. Ferenc did the cooking and my father chopped the wood. I think it was a good life for all three. I hardly ever went to see them, but when I did I found them cheerful, active and full of ideas. My father got it into his head to teach Odette opera. He said she had a good voice and got her to practice every day. In my opinion she couldn’t sing in tune, but it was lovely to see them doing things together; they played together and she sang. Naturally the piano was aborted before it could even be born. Odette got bored with vocal exercises, found a young man who wanted to marry her and disappeared one morning without a word.’

‘And the two men have stayed together?’

‘They’ve gone on in the same way, but without the domestic cheerfulness that had made for such a happy atmosphere; they are perhaps quieter and more peaceful now. They’ve learned to buy non-iron shirts and fast foods. My father still chops wood and Ferenc still looks after the kitchen. Most recently they’ve bought a motorcycle with a sidecar and go roaring about the place, all kitted out in goggles and airmen’s helmets.’