Train to Budapest (4 page)

‘Is he dead?’ she had asked in a tiny voice.

‘He’ll be fine in ten days or so.’ Then, as if aware of her for the first time, the doctor pulled her by the hand towards the stairs. ‘He needs rest now,’ he added hurriedly, cleaning his hands on a wad of cotton steeped in alcohol. ‘Come on, go home, off you go!’

Amara headed quickly for the door. As she turned to say goodbye to the sick boy she saw him give a slight smile. There was in that exhausted face a desperation greater than the body that contained it, deeper and more relentless than the illness at that moment serving him as a shield. He had used his feeble power as
a child to attempt a last opposition to that foolish departure in the direction of death. Although probably well aware he could not escape and that, weak and exhausted as he was, he would have to follow his energetic parents who, victims of who knows what impetuous leap of Teutonic patriotism, had decided to return to Austria to ‘face the enemy together at home’. Both felt entirely Austrian. For them, being Jewish was a fact of culture and religion that in no way interfered with their belonging to the country in which they had been born and grown up and in which they had their roots. Besides, they were used to being respected and admired for the intelligent use generations of their families had made of money, and for the loyal and faithful manner in which for a century they had served the Austrian state in these parts.

That smile was the last thing she had seen of him. A smile of grieving love. A smile of fear but of promise too. As though he wanted to say: I’m here, and even if I move I’m not moving. I’m waiting for you.

Instead it had been she who had waited, for days, weeks, months and years. Most often in the branches of the Villa Lorenzi cherry tree. That was where she liked best to wait. Perched on a branch, half blackbird half child. She had grown into a girl, then a woman. But she had never stopped waiting for him. Whenever she could she climbed the cherry tree with a book in her hand. She would read, content to stare at the branches. Every now and then she would raise her eyes and study the dusty little path along which she had so often seen Emanuele come, hopping and skipping in his sandals and kicking the dust up round his knees.

5

The bus drops Amara right in front of a tower she has often seen in photographs. A rail track overgrown with grass passes under her feet on its way to penetrating a massive building and high gateway crowned by the square tower with a long narrow loophole under its roof. Auschwitz. She steps through the damp morning grass, wetting her shoes. On the horizon are birch trees with shining leaves. New trees and new earth everywhere. As if the will to forget is emanating from the earth itself. An atmosphere of enigmatic peace resting on what still remains of the horror.

Then she walks along a soil path, towards the great gate of the main camp with the famous phrase in wrought-iron letters WORK SETS YOU FREE. A delicate script in capital letters, subdued and dark against the clear sky, framed by two metal strips for insubstantial, reassuring emphasis. The parallel strips are not brutal, but seem to follow an almost subtle path, broken in the middle by the dancing leap of a small arch. ARBEIT MACHT FREI. Along the camp the sun caresses the steel barriers, curved at the top, that hold metal nets and still taut barbed wire. The effect of the dark bars is softened by the many little white ceramic caps whose purpose was to maintain and control the electric current passing through the wire. The buildings that survived the mines with which the Germans did their best to hide their places of death, now have their doors wide open. A few tourists in coloured jackets move peacefully in and out with cameras and notebooks, hats pressed down to shield their heads from the sun.

‘Through me you come into the grieving city, through me you come among the lost people.’ Dante’s words come spontaneously to mind as she climbs the stone steps to the main entrance. From the warmth outside she passes into a damp and disquieting darkness. This was one of the camp’s clearing and assembly stations. A white arrow indicates the entrance to this sinister museum of memory.

Amara passes down a long corridor, its walls decorated with thousands of photograph portraits side by side, each protected by a sheet of glass and a slim wooden frame. Under each head is a name. Identification photographs that show the faces of men and women caught in a moment of confusion and total loss of all affection. At this very moment when their identity was fixed on paper, they were about to lose it. From that instant, a process would have begun to depersonalise them not only physically and psychologically, reducing them to bodies without gender or flesh, mere ghosts consumed by terror and the ferocious laws of survival, their names replaced by a number on an arm.

The expressions on their faces show they have not yet fully understood where they are and what is about to happen to them. They know their prospects are not good, that they have left behind all security and power of ownership. A strange and cruel process, this photography, bearing witness to the insane precision of the Nazis as they pedantically catalogued each new admission. A mania that lacerated the heart of the system of punishments of the Reich. The SS knew perfectly well they were acting as assassins and bandits and tried to conceal their crimes by exterminating those who had witnessed them. Even so they were unable to stop themselves cataloguing, registering and recording on paper names and dates that were to be unequivocal testimony to these crimes.

Amara examines the faces on the wall, one by one, slowly, trying to hear them speak to her. She has almost forgotten that the one face she is looking for is Emanuele’s. These portraits are vivid proof of what it means to arrive in a camp after long days in an armoured train. They also tell of people not yet marked and wounded by camp life. People who have only just left their homes and their cities. People whose cheeks still carry the bloom of a normal life when they were still able to delight in an exam passed, a walk in the woods, or a letter sent by a distant love.

They have passed day after day crammed in a train with no food or drink, sitting side by side on the floor without toilet or water, forced to perform their natural needs in front of everyone. But their eyes still have a touch of confidence. They think they have reached a work camp, brutal perhaps but ready to give their thirsty bodies a home. They think they will have to work hard like others they have seen here dressed in pyjamas with vertical stripes. But
they know nothing of the gas chambers, nothing of the fear which will transform them into living dead, or ‘muselman’ as they are called in the camp or, if they are selected to work for the guards, will transform them into ferocious and treacherous slave-drivers, often even forced to kill their own brothers.

There are workers’ faces among these photographs, prematurely marked by hard toil: peasants in patched shirts, family women with discoloured headscarves. Poor Jews from the villages of Eastern Europe: Germans, Poles and Hungarians. And contrasting with them are the refined faces of prosperous citizens: girls with light fair hair and school-uniform collars, boys with proud frowns and open-neck shirts, old men in jackets with velvet lapels, eyes staring in astonishment.

As Amara turns away from the last portrait she realises more than an hour has passed without her coming across either the face or name of Emanuele Orenstein.

‘Are these all the photographs of the prisoners?’ she asks a guard who has been watching her. ‘No, miss,’ he answers in broken English. ‘To begin with they photographed everyone, writing down first name and family name, date of birth and place of origin. Then they stopped. So many arrived they had no time to register them all.’

Amara has noticed some Italian names among the multitude of Germans and Poles: Ascoli, Padova, Levi, Roberti, Canepa, Sereni. In one corner, in capital letters, is a long list of the numbers deported in Europe: Poland 3,000,000, the Soviet Union 1,100,000, Slovakia 71,000, Hungary 550,000, Bohemia 80,000, Lithuania 140,000, Germany 165,000, the Netherlands 102,000, France 75,000, Latvia 71,000, Yugoslavia 60,000, Greece 60,000, Austria 65,000, Belgium 28,000, Italy 8,000, Estonia 1,500, Norway 762, Romania 350,000.

Vienna. April ’40

Hitler and Mussolini have shaken hands at the Brenner Pass. Mamma has shown me the photo published in all the papers. ‘See what good friends we are with Italy,’ she said. ‘No need to worry about the business at Rifredi even if Papà says they’re virtually taking it from us. We have occupied Denmark and Norway,’ says Mutti. ‘Showing the world how strong we are. In fact, we’re firmly in the saddle,’ she insists. She’s happy. But I’ve no idea what saddle she’s talking about. A saddle on a flying horse? A friend of Papà in Florence has sent him a book by a young poet called Eugenio Montale. In the evening, after supper, Papà read us a poem from the book, the title of which is
Cuttlefish Bones
. I didn’t understand much. But now and then a phrase struck me: ‘A gloomy air weighs/ on an undecided world’ it says in a poem called ‘Sarcophagi’, and I seemed to see a black cloud descending very slowly on our roofs bringing scary long shadows. ‘Now let your step be/ more cautious’ says another poem, and I looked at Mutti with apprehension: her steps are far from cautious, in fact they’re headlong. Will she be able to hear this young Italian poet?

I’m building a wonderful machine, Amara my love, to bring me to you. My inspiration has been the little planes the Wehrmacht have developed from studying the relationship between the wingspan of a seagull and the body which navigates the sky. The weight of its body including intestines, breathing apparatus and reproductive organs relates perfectly to the span of its wings which have to be three times more voluminous. Do you understand the secret? It’s all there in that proportion. And I’m working to achieve the same result. If only you could see my room, it’s full of sheets of paper covered with numbers. And there are pieces of wood and boards of every kind, with cords, string, iron and copper wire all over the place, on the bed and the chairs. Mamma says all this mess prevents her tidying the room. But she doesn’t get angry unlike Papà who just dismisses the whole thing as ridiculous. Deep down she’s happier if I stay at home to work on my plane than if I go out.

On my way back from school yesterday I saw that a huge poster had appeared right at the corner of our house. A man with a repulsive face and thick dark hair over a low forehead and hairs growing out of a curved nose. He is reaching out a claw to grasp the throat of an Austrian soldier over the words ‘The Jewish Bolshevik has his eye on you. Give him a chance and he’ll wring your neck. Act while you still have time!’ ‘What does Bolshevik mean?’ I asked Mamma, and she laughed. ‘Stupid rubbish,’ she said, ‘stupid propaganda by a few blockheads.’ But Papà is worried. ‘I’m Jewish but I’m no Bolshevik,’ he says. ‘Listen, tonight I’ll go and pull that abomination down.’

6

Other arrows point the way to other rooms. Bare floors made of inferior tiles worn down by visitors’ feet. Suddenly Amara finds herself facing a mountain of dusty shoes. ‘But, Mum, can dead people walk?’ comes a voice from low down in front of her. A plump little boy is sucking a strawberry-coloured lollipop as he contemplates the sad pile of shoes long since reduced to a uniform shade of faded grey.

Shoes of every variety and size: big shapeless men’s shoes, little high-heeled women’s shoes, slippers, ankle-boots, tiny lace-up shoes for children; moccasins, bootees, clodhoppers, mules, galoshes, leggings, sandals, tight-fitting topboots, babouches.

Amara tries to fit the photographed faces in the corridor to the shoes piled at random before her. And fails. She can’t make herself imagine bodies moving in those shoes hardened by time, their creases penetrated by dust. Single shoes that have lost their partners, scratched ankle-boots that may once have been red but are now almost black; lace-up shoes without laces that poke out tired tongues.

It is only when her eye is arrested by a down-at-heel shoe for a little boy that something stirs in her imagination. Beyond the greasy-fingered glass that divides the visitor from the mountain of private possessions, she can see the bare legs of a little boy in well-worn shoes. And next to him the robust ankles of a countrywoman. The woman is walking with difficulty, her knees wide apart. Why? Ah yes, she is pregnant, the baby heavy in her swollen belly. The little boy in his brand-new blue shoes skips lightly ahead, almost as if following some internal rhythm of his own. Now and then he stumbles and nearly falls, but recovers and hurries on, a little butterfly happy with the simple joy of being alive. The rest, men and women, follow in a crowd, their footsteps ever more confident. Thousands of feet on the move. But where are they going?

Vienna. September ’41

Mamma has sewn a beautiful yellow star on my jacket. She says I must always stay in sight of her. She has a star too. And Papà. I’ll wear the star if you sew me my wings, I told her. So she did this on condition that I don’t take off that mark of identification, because it’s dangerous to do so. And what’s more, please don’t try to fly out of the window, she added. I won’t. I shall throw myself off the barn at the Weisenbergs’ house where we are going on a country outing on Sunday. I’ve already worked out how to collect hay and pile it on the ground so that if I fall … but I won’t fall. This could be the real thing, don’t you think? And then I’ll fly to you. To be on the safe side, keep your window open. I’ve read that there’s a certain kind of glue strong enough to resist the wind, the cold and the heat of the sun. It’s made with caoutchouc from the trees of the Ivory Coast, mixed with the resin of Siberian firs. I’ve asked for it everywhere but no one seems to know anything about it. So I shall make it myself. A cement strong enough to hold together the pieces of wood to which the long cloth arms of the aircraft will be tied. But where can I find caoutchouc and the resin of Siberian firs? Can you get me any caoutchouc? I remember once in Florence we came on a dark little store in Via dei Calzaioli, d’you remember? We went down four steps that stank of cat’s piss, and came to a little shop with a tiny little man sitting on a stool gluing bits of leather together to make boxes, book-covers and belts. Remember? You were fascinated by the way he spoke, like Gepetto in Pinocchio. He had a little blond wig too. Maybe he was losing his hair. Or perhaps he really was Gepetto and didn’t want to be recognised. But Pinocchio himself wasn’t there. And this man, instead of working with wood, was using leather and skin: tanning, smoothing and tinting. Do you remember you said to me, ‘What a wonderful smell this glue has!’ And the man lifted his head in surprise. ‘People usually say stink,’ he said and you started to laugh. ‘What’s this fine glue made from?’ And he answered, ‘Caoutchouc from the Ivory Coast,’ Do you remember? Get some and send it to me. I really need it. My darling little Amara, I think of you all the time, I never even for a moment stop thinking about you. If I shut my eyes I can feel myself squeezing your hand. You always have nice warm hands, and I love it when you grab my hands which are too big and always so cold. I dream of kissing you. Isn’t it funny? When we were together all the time we hardly ever kissed and now I’m far away I never think of anything else! I can feel my mouth coming closer and closer to yours, closer and closer, till I can feel the warmth of your breath; then I shut my eyes and can’t see you any more but I can feel the tenderness of your top lip on the skin between my mouth and my nose and I’m so satisfied I wake up all sweaty and happy.