Train to Budapest by Dacia Maraini

Author:Dacia Maraini [Dacia Maraini]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908129086
Publisher: Arcadia Books
Published: 2011-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

30

Amara is still sleeping when Frau Morgan climbs the stairs and calls: ‘A phone call for you, Frau Sironi.’ Amara puts on her slippers and goes downstairs yawning. The telephone on the wall is cleaned every morning with huge wads of cotton wool steeped in alcohol by the hard-working Frau Morgan. Amara recognises the voice at once. Hans, the man with the gazelles. In her mind that’s how she sees him, as though the gazelles are stamped on his chest and, even without his sweater, are leaping and running towards the future. Hans tells her breathlessly he has just read in the paper about an archive discovered in an underground SS shelter near the camp at Auschwitz. Why not go and study these new lists? They contain a large number of names, written up by hand complete with days of arrival and everything.

‘We have to go there, Amara. I’ll go and buy tickets. I’ll pass by to pick up your passport for the visas towards ten, okay?’

Amara says yes. She turns to see Frau Morgan with a cup of coffee especially for her. By now she has developed a taste for their investigations and addresses her lodger in a conspiratorial tone.

‘News, Frau Sironi?’

Amara would like to tell her about the man passing himself off as Emanuele but who doesn’t resemble him in the least and is in any case much too old. But she makes no mention of that meeting which still seems unreal. Instead she tells her about the new lists discovered in the SS shelter and of the trip they are going to make to Poland as soon as they have the necessary visas.

But the police are getting suspicious. What are these two up to going backwards and forwards between Vienna and Kraków? They are interrogated separately. Amara has to spend hours and hours waiting on a bench while they interrogate Hans, then it is her turn to face the usual questions to which she replies wearily, trying not to let it get on her nerves too much. But the police hold all possible or imaginable cards in their hands. Since the two are not commercial travellers, no one can understand why they are constantly asking permission to cross the border. Amara being a journalist doesn’t make things any better. What does she want to write? What is the ideological line of her paper? Et cetera, et cetera.

‘Come back in two days.’

‘But in two days we’ll have lost our train reservation.’

‘You can make another.’ Amara tries to explain that she has been sent by an independent Italian newspaper to write about the countries of Eastern Europe. She pulls out permits, her journalist’s card, her passport. But the police are inflexible.

‘Come back in two days.’

For Hans it’s even worse. What is he really after, this half-Jewish, half-Hungarian, half-Austrian man, half journalist and half not, half music teacher and half student, wanting permission to travel to Poland? Does he not understand that we’re in the middle of a full-scale cold

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