Free Train to Budapest by Dacia Maraini Page B

ration. Then one morning he fell to the ground. No one stopped. No one picked him up. When someone dies, they die. We know the gravediggers will come in the evening and take the body to the cemetery. Every day my father risks his life trying to get a pass. He runs this way and that with the forged passports in his underclothes trying to find a way out. A mouse in a cage. I know we’ll never reach America as he hopes. He paid so much for those passports but they’ll end up like the eggs, empty and useless, fit only to throw away. But he’s obstinate. Now all he has left is a single valuable earring of my mother’s, hidden inside a pillowcase. An earring with precious stones with which he hopes to bribe someone to let us through, maybe at night, to make our way to the station. Two mornings ago they took Uncle Eduard away. He went out to look for a piece of coal. It was early in the morning and nobody seemed to be about. He had often done this. He thought he was safe because no lorries could be heard anywhere near. But there was one round the corner with its engine switched off and as soon as they saw him they told him to get in. He tried to run away but two bursts of gunfire landed at his feet. He wasn’t hit but he stopped and climbed into the lorry with a heavy heart. Since then we’ve heard nothing. Stefan who lives in the corner house told us about it.

10
    Kraków. Returning absent-mindedly to the Hotel Wawel, Amara doesn’t see the partly rolled carpet, trips and crashes to the floor. A young porter with red hair runs to her rescue. ‘Are you all right? Sorry about the carpet, we were just moving it out of the way.’ Then she hears him shouting at a boy in trousers that are too big for him bargaining over other rolled-up carpets piled on a hoist.
    ‘There’s a letter for you,’ says the porter after checking that she hasn’t broken anything or needs medical attention. He hands her a buff envelope with the key to her room.
    My dear Saviour … Amara reads and rereads again but nothing makes any sense. Saviour from what? The letter is indeed addressed to her, but she doesn’t recognise the sender’s name: who’s Hans Wilkowsky? She reads on: I have such a vivid memory of your ears . Why particularly your ears, who knows. They seemed to me like two unbelievably graceful pink shells. Perhaps I remember them because I was trying so hard to make sure the profound and sincere sound of my voice would reach you through them.
    Now she remembers: the train to Prague. They had stopped at the frontier. The man with gazelles on his jumper. The guarantee she signed in such a hurry. The sound of the locomotive in the night. And next to him the other man with fur armbands, the mother with the young baby, and the smell of smoked herrings and birchbark.
    I trusted you and you trusted me. You saved me from two days of bureaucratic torture. I reached Poznan´ safe and sound. I found my daughter Agnes had just given birth to a beautiful boy who will be called Hans like me. The child looks like my mother. I told you in the train my mother Hanna was Hungarian and Jewish, and died in the Treblinka concentration camp. My father is half Austrian and half Polish. I’m not sure the two young people did the right thing in coming together as a couple but, I assure you, they were really beautiful: a girl with honey-coloured hair, very long legs and a crystal-clear soprano voice, and a tall dark young man with shining eyes and a playful and well-formed mind. Tadeusz and Hanna. I have here a photograph of my parents at Graz. She is wearing a long light-coloured skirt and a pair of lace-up sandals; he has a jacket with wide sleeves and a pair of shoes with spats. They met in the first years of the twentieth century. My father was studying music at the famous conservatory at Vác. He wanted to be an orchestral conductor. My mother had studied singing in Budapest and had won a scholarship to Vác to follow a course at the conservatory which