Train to Budapest (43 page)

‘Who are?’

‘Ex-consul Schumacher and his wife Helga.’

‘The people now living in the Orenstein apartment?’

‘Exactly. Even if it seems they left it after getting it as a gift from the government then later took it back.’

‘What sort of people are they?’

‘Germans. He was in the Nazi diplomatic service. That’s all I know.’

‘Let’s go.’

Amara and Hans catch a tram, then another, walk down part of the Kärntnerstrasse, enter the short Singerstrasse and cross Stephansplatz to reach Schulerstrasse. They stop for a minute or two to look at the building where the Orenstein family lived before they were deported to the ghetto at Łódź and then probably to Auschwitz. It is a large building from the early years of the century. Ten or twelve floors; pretentiously decked with Ionic pillars, windows with fake Gothic architraves and a gigantic main door reached by a flight of marble steps shaped like a half moon.

They go up the steps to face a locked door decorated with legendary and historical scenes. They look for the name on its brass plate. They find it and ring. A female voice invites them to come in.

The door opens suddenly to reveal a courtyard full of ornamental plants. On the right another entrance leads to a lift in wrought iron and glass. Hans and Amara slip into the great space which closes with a puff and slowly begins to climb. Frosted glass windows with designs in white on white reveal the stairs as they unroll elegantly floor by floor.

At the fifth floor, the lift halts with a dry hiss and they get out. They ring the bell. The door opens silently. On the threshold is a
handsome woman with violet rouge, grey waved hair, and a fox fur thrown carelessly over a very elegant blue and grey wool dress.

‘Please come in.’

Extremely polite, she leads them into a luxurious drawing room with long purple velvet curtains, Persian carpets to soften the floor, and armchairs and sofas covered in white linen and strewn with coloured cushions.

‘Do sit down,’ she invites them in a melodious voice. She is like a thirties film star. When she moves her blue and grey skirt dances round calves sheathed in transparent seamed stockings.

‘So you are friends of the Orensteins …’ she begins lightly.

‘Well, I never knew them, but Signora Maria Amara Sironi, who is Italian, was a close friend of Emanuele, the son of Karl and Thelma Orenstein who owned this building before …’ Hans looks around with embarrassment. He does not know whether to continue or not. But Frau Schumacher seems not at all put out.

‘Yes, I know that before us the Orenstein family lived here. When the government assigned this apartment to us we were living in Tokyo. My husband is a diplomat. He goes where he is sent, as I’m sure you understand. We had a large house and garden and, can you believe it, ten dogs. My husband loves dogs. Do you love dogs, Signora Sironi?’

‘Yes,’ answers Amara in embarrassment. She cannot understand why this woman wants to keep the conversation on such a mundane and pointless level. At the same time she looks round thinking Emanuele lived here. Perhaps he once huddled with a book in the very armchair she is sitting on now. She can almost see him.

‘It was just before Christmas, like now. We’d decorated the tree for our daughters Andrea and Margarethe. Wilhelm had already joined us,’ continues Frau Schumacher undaunted, without making sure her two guests are following her. ‘We were about to sit down at table. Our wonderful cook, Michiko, had roasted the stuffed turkey in the way my husband likes. Our dear butler, Yunichiro, brought me a letter. I opened it expecting Christmas greetings. Instead I read that the government was ordering us transferred within the week to Vienna to attend to administrative affairs, a move apparently decided by the Führer himself. So, instead of celebrating Christmas we had to pack our things. When we arrived
we were told that the Reich’s department for administrative affairs was not yet ready and that we must move into an apartment, a fine one certainly, but not what we had expected. We didn’t even know that a family of Jews were living in our lodgings. We were assured the proprietors would move out within a few days and this is what happened. The house was in excellent condition, I have to admit that Frau Orenstein had kept it beautifully. There were flowers everywhere and elegant carpets and even valuable paintings. We would have preferred unfurnished accommodation; we already had so many possessions of our own. But the Foreign Ministry wanted us to take it just as it was, fully furnished with pictures, carpets and everything. Do you see those three men in dark blue against an azure background? It seems that Herr Orenstein probably bought that painting from the artist himself. Ottone Rosai, 1923. They say that Herr Orenstein was very well known as an industrialist in Italy, in fact they’ve told me that he owned a very fine villa in Florence, in the Rifredi district; and that unexpectedly, and, I have to say, most inadvisedly, he had decided to transfer his family to Vienna to reoccupy his house here, without considering the risks they would run.’

‘But did you never ask yourself where the Orensteins had gone, when they left a furnished house complete with carpets on the floor, pictures hanging on the walls and flowers on the tables?’

‘I would imagine they moved to another house. Or returned to Florence, to their beautiful villa at Rifredi. I’ve heard that they had dogs too and gave them German names, isn’t that strange? I mean, to call a dog Wolfgang or Heinrich, I do wonder whether that might not have been a little disrespectful towards humans … But unfortunately I never met the Orensteins. When we moved in here they had already gone. We lived here for nearly a year. Then we had to go back to Berlin. And there, in the bombing raids, we lost everything. Almost the only thing that was left of our house was the walls. The roof fell in and the whole block burned for a day and a night. Meanwhile my husband reached retiring age. So we decided to go back to Vienna where we had lived so well. Luckily the bombs had spared the old Orenstein house, so we were able to move in again. For a time an SS officer and his family had lived here, decent people who knew how to keep the apartment just as it was. Then he and his wife fled to Argentina leaving their
small children here. I believe a grandmother took them. Anyway, the house was free so we moved back.’

Amara would have liked to ask many questions, but the woman gives them no chance to speak. She seems to want to tell them about Tokyo, about their houses and their dogs. Even about the apartment they are living in now, but as if the property had come to them in a normal way, through a contract. But Amara knows from Emanuele’s letters that the house was confiscated fully furnished. Something about this elegant, self-confident woman, so utterly impervious to all questions, intimidates her. Only at the end does she decide to confront her, trying to be as laconic as possible.

‘Frau Schumacher, I have a letter from Emanuele Orenstein in which he says that you knew the family,’ she finds the courage to say.

‘Oh, you should pay no attention to an over-excited child.’

Amara wonders how she can know he was an over-excited child if she never met him, but prefers not to argue and to let her talk.

‘All the Jews whimpered at that time that they were being thrown out of their homes. In fact they were selling them for a good price and heading for places where bombs were unlikely to fall. This was very astute of them. Because their houses often ended up in ruins. But by then they had sold them. Do you see how cunning that was?’

‘You said yourself that this house was not bought but was assigned to you.’

‘Yes indeed, by the State, as is normal for diplomats. But the State had bought it from the Orensteins, I’m sure of that, and it will have cost a pretty penny. But why dig up these sad things from the past? The war was an ugly time for us all, Frau Sironi. We ourselves lost a son of twenty-two, killed on a bombing mission to Stalingrad. And you are still thinking of that child Emanuele Orenstein! Who today would be … what? Twenty-two?’

‘Twenty-eight.’

‘He too will have died fighting. The best of German youth died in the war, my dear signora, and the same is true of the best Austrian youth; they fought side by side. Best to erect a stone over the past and begin again, believe me. When I heard my son Wilhelm was dead, I too wanted to die. And then, for years, I tried to find
his remains, but never could. But do you know what my daughter Margarethe once said to me. Mama, you are more concerned with the dead than with those who are living with you. And I realised she was right: I was neglecting my husband and our two daughters to run after my dead boy. Since then I’ve built a little cemetery in my heart, where I constantly take fresh flowers, but I no longer search for his body to give him a burial worthy of our name. He is buried inside me and that should be enough, don’t you agree?’

She is full of dignity and seems deeply sincere. Amara and Hans look at each other, discouraged. It is quite clear to them that they will get nowhere at all with this woman who has erased every doubt and every question from her past.

‘Not every Austrian fought in the war, Frau Schumacher, some were shut up in extermination camps,’ says Amara in a low voice.

‘And is that not the same thing? You die how you die. War is a huge obscenity and causes damage everywhere. No one is best and no one is the winner. We are all equal in the face of death.’

‘Is your husband dead?’ asks Hans to gain time and to find another way of trying to get her to say something about the Orensteins.

‘My husband is alive. He’s in another room. Would you like to meet him?’

‘Well, yes.’

Elegant and unembarrassed, Frau Schumacher rises from the sofa, and with great strides of her slim legs that set her blue and grey skirt dancing and her high heels tapping lightly on the floor, she opens a door and disappears.

‘They have even appropriated the Rosai picture, have you noticed?’ says Hans in a low voice.

On the white wall right in front of them hangs a large canvas showing three men in worker’s caps, in a moment of rest from their work. A picture that evokes a distant world, telling of the friendship of three stone-breakers, sitting down for a chat and a smoke beside the heavy flagstones that they will use to pave the street. A fugue of colours containing light blue, green and sea-blue to enchant the eye.

‘And isn’t that a De Chirico?’

‘Good lord! I really think it is.’

They both go up close to the little canvas with its clean colours,
showing a triangular town square and, behind a clear arch, an approaching railway engine belching smoke from its large chimney.

‘Wonderful.’

Amara can’t stop herself going to the window. She wants to see if the pancake-seller Emanuele described in one of his first letters is still there. The stall and the itinerant salesman have gone. But the clockmaker whose clocks all tell different times is still there, on the pavement opposite. Amara’s heart misses a beat.

Then the door opens and Frau Schumacher reappears pushing a wheelchair. Consul Schumacher is a tall, good-looking man with fine features and brilliantined hair. He occupies the wheelchair as if sitting on a throne. Under his elegant silk dressing gown can be glimpsed the striped trousers of a pair of pyjamas also undoubtedly of silk. At his throat is a frothy white scarf. He has just been shaved and is smiling like a child, with confidence and genuine warmth. As he advances he spreads a powerful scent of lavender.

‘I knew Emanuele Orenstein,’ he says at once, contradicting his wife who looks at him with irritation. ‘An extremely sensitive little boy, extremely sensitive. I think he must have suffered a good deal at having to leave his home, but at that time the rules were absolute: no Jew could keep an apartment like this is in the centre of Vienna. I heard they were transported to the ghetto at Łódź. Where they are said to have led a life of dignity, even if obviously deprived of the comforts they were used to … most unsuitable, I have to say, especially for the Orenstein family who had been used to every convenience. But I also heard that later they were able to get passports and returned to Florence where, I understand, they had a beautiful house, in the Rifredi district if I’m not mistaken. Civilised people. I heard no more after that, but I believe they may have ended up in Israel.’

‘They were killed, both Herr Karl Orenstein and Frau Thelma. The only one we know nothing about is their son Emanuele. Signora Sironi here believes he must have survived. We are wondering how to find him.’

‘Emanuele’s last letter is dated May 1943,’ adds Amara, looking firmly at the consul. She is beginning to realise that behind that air of infantile innocence is hidden a monstrous talent for dissimulation.

‘I really believed they returned to Florence,’ insists the consul, smiling sweetly.

‘Have you ever looked for them? Have you ever tried to make contact with them?’

‘Well no, actually not. We Germans were not allowed to have relations with Jews. And I was still a member of the diplomatic corps despite our change of home. It would not have been at all possible for me to …’

‘You know that all the Jews deported from Vienna to Łódź ended up in the death camp at Auschwitz?’

‘If you say so, I believe it. But we knew nothing at the time. The Orensteins, and many like them, rich Jewish indutrialists, were said to have sold their houses for a good price before the buildings were bombed by the British and Russians. It said so in all the newspapers. Some repeated this with admiration. They always know where the money is, these people, don’t they?’ he added with a malicious little smile.

Amara blushed with anger. How can he allow himself to repeat the vile, stupid propaganda put about by the SS at the very moment they were plundering Jewish homes? But not wanting to interrupt the conversation which might lead to some useful bit of news, she forces herself to keep quiet.

‘And how was Frau Orenstein when you met her,’ she asks, pretending to be stupid.

‘Very well. A beautiful woman of about forty. They had this one son of whom they were very fond. Every morning they would go and play tennis nearby, father and son. Or so I heard. Even when the bombing started they could be seen going out in their shorts with their racquets. Nothing seemed to frighten them. They were passionate about their tennis.’