Why shouldn’t I be able to write about this? What if a few people guess whom I mean by Petra or Katja? Take the statement that it’s better to buy a chicken in Vienna than Berlin, since chickens in Vienna still have their claws on, and the claws tell you if a chicken has actually scratched around in a chicken yard — do I have to approve of such statements, even if they’re yours? I don’t claim you’re to blame for my mugging. Of course, a person can always be a little to blame somehow.
Silence. As if someone has pulled the plug, the heater stops rumbling, all noises cease, the train starts to roll again, almost soundlessly, a few hundred meters, puts on the brakes — Hegyeshalom. Pansies in concrete buckets. Hegyeshalom, border station. Hegyeshalom! I close my eyes, picture myself at the end of the world, and finally I get it: There are no customs agents at Hegyeshalom anymore.
“It would probably be good for both of us,” Petra said, “if we don’t see each other for a while.” That was the end, the separation, I understood at once. And I also understood how pointless it was to protest. She made our farewell so easy! No arguments, no recriminations, just this “don’t see each other for a while.” How drunk I was with this unexpected freedom, and how stunned that it was all over between us.
Our stop in Hegyeshalom — there are no customs agents now — lasts three minutes. The heater rumbles on again, the train pulls out, rolls over the border. The free son of a free country, I feel nothing, my soul does not soar in jubilation.
An hour later the EC 24 pulls into Vienna West Station, on time, platform 7. With a blue folder and an empty bottle in my shoulder bag, I wait until others have boarded. I wait until the platform is almost deserted. I know what it looks like when Petra — or would it be better to call her Katja after all — hurries toward me with long strides, breaks into a run for the last few yards, and raises her shoulders just before she hugs me.
At ten to one, I walk through the entrance building of the Museum Quarter, a passage that reminds me of hospitals and barracks and worse. Abandon all hope. As for what I’m going to say to Katja, I’m even less sure now than I was when I started out. Besides, I still have that song from the taxi running through my head—“And all the bells are scolding.… It was a lovely day.…” I know, it’s not “scolding,” or “lovely” either, but I can’t help it.
In fact I feel ridiculous with my blue folder in my bag. Yes, I feel like an infant — as if I’m overtaxing my abilities to choose a destination myself, as if I can maintain my composure only if I’ve been invited, asked to give a performance, with follow-up questions. I’m standing in the middle of the courtyard of the Museum Quarter. I have no idea what there is to see here. My cell phone buzzes a message. For a brief moment I hope I’ll be able to escape my meeting with Petra or Katja. T-Mobile bids me welcome to Austria.
When I look up I see Katja in the middle of the entrance. We smile and look to one side or at the ground, then our eyes meet again. She has short hair, her hands are in her coat pockets, she has gained weight. We kiss each other on the cheeks, like old friends. “Servus, my dear,” she says. “You look tired.”
Katja climbs a set of steps ahead of me, I follow and watch the hem of her coat above the hollows of her knees, her calves, the red spots on her heels left by her old-fashioned pumps. “Here?” she asks, as if I had made a suggestion. I nod. El Museo, it’s almost empty, a kind of IKEA restaurant. Katja opens her coat, I reach to help her out of it. Katja is pregnant. She smiles. I congratulate her. I am seething with jealousy, there is no love in me. We sit down.
I want to ask her who the father is. I bend down and extract the blue folder from my bag. I feel like a subpoena server who is not about to be derailed by sociability.
“So why are you in Budapest?”
The waitress and waiter look like brother and sister filling in for their parents on Sunday. They are both pudgy in the same sort of way, she’s a blond, his hair is black, his round head reminds me of a mole.
I hear myself say Esterházy.
“Oh, you mean Péter?” she says with a smile and lays a hand on her belly. So they know each other. I should have known. Of course they know each other. He’s probably had her give him a massage. There is no love in me.
I hear myself say Kertész, I hear myself say Konrád and Nadás, when I actually ought to be dropping very different names, but I’m boasting, boasting nonstop, I’m insufferable. I’m digging a hole to jump into.
Katja is paging through the menu, I follow the movements of her eyes. I try to signal the waitress, but she’s busy clearing tables. The mole appears. I point to Katja. She’d like an apple juice, an apple juice and water, no, nothing to eat, really nothing. I order a seafood salad, a white wine, and water. “Effervescent white, perhaps?” the mole asks with a smug Viennese lilt.
“It’s very good,” Katja said. Okay then, for all I care, effervescent white.
Once we’ve ordered we gaze at each other as if everything has already been said and we can leave now. I say that Vienna was suddenly just around the corner.
Yes, Katja says, Budapest is a just stone’s throw away.
The mole arrives. I have to make another selection. This time I order the skewer of prawns for sixteen euros, the most expensive item on the menu.
Katja has now leaned back, one hand on the table. Her fingers move, she’s actually drumming the tabletop. I make some remark, and it feels like I’m squeezing the last glob out of a tube of toothpaste.
Katja splays her fingers and examines her nails. For a moment it seems absurd to be this close to Katja and not be allowed to touch her.
“Are you two married?” I ask.
“For over a year now,” she says. I would love to ask if she already knew him while we were together.
“Excuse me,” she says, gets up and heads for the toilet. Two men observe her rear end. One of them turns around to me, our eyes meet.
Katja and I make small talk. She sips at her apple juice, I drink my effervescent white and say it’s fine, a good recommendation. In Budapest, I say, the exchange rate is now 1 to 250, and can stay that way as far as I’m concerned. I say that in Café Eckermann an espresso — a really very good espresso with milk and mineral water — costs 240 forints.
A half hour later I wave the mole over. “It will be right out,” he says. “Right out.”
“I’m not an impatient guy,” I say, “but I don’t understand why just a skewer …” Except for the two men the restaurant is empty. I finish my effervescent white, reach for my glass of water.
“And?” the traveler asks, laying his left hand on the blue folder. “What are you working on right now?”
“Just translations,” she says.
“And your new volume of poetry, when’s it due out?”
She shrugs.
He sips at his water.
“I’m not writing,” Katja says. “I haven’t written for three years now.” And after a pause: “Maybe I did something wrong, and this is my punishment.” Suddenly Katja looks like she’s about to read one of her poems.
“What are you supposed to have done wrong?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Are you afraid I’ll write something about us?”
“To be honest …” Our traveler smiles. Or is it more the face of a whiny little boy? And then it happens, maybe out of embarrassment, maybe out of weakness, maybe because he’s putting all his trust in the power of confession. He admits that he boarded the train because of two stories, because of “Official Report” by Imre Kertész and “Life and Literature” by Péter Esterházy, which both describe a train trip from Budapest to Vienna — that is to say, in the case of Kertész, in the direction of Vienna. He admits that the fruitful idea of traveling two or three hours to Vienna arose out of the hope of assisting his own imagination and providing direction to the unflagging impetus of his creative spirit (motus animi continuus), of affording it an opportunity to soar in jubilation. Just as Esterházy alludes to Kertész’s story, he wanted to allude to both stories and produce something like a comparative drama of railroad stations. Each sentence of his models seemed to him as significant as an antiphon in a liturgy, so that, or so he believed, he needed only to insert, sentence by sentence, his own observations and memories in order to experience something of the world as it is today, of the changes of the last few years, yes, something about his own generation as well. For Kertész had elevated (or better: bumped up, boosted) the story of his customs experience to an interpretation of life itself. (Please, do take the time to read the reason why a customs agent confiscated his passport on April 16, 1991, ordering him to leave the train at the border station in Hegyeshalom.) He likewise wanted to confront this customs agent, to invoke within himself and as if in a vision — damn literature! — the official report of Imre Kertész. I close my eyes, our traveler wanted to write, and see myself at the end of the world and finally comprehend: It’s this Hegyeshalom! For decades the Hegyeshalom of Imre Kertész, this wretched filthy Podunk, was seen as the symbolic way out—in hoc signo vinces. Hegyeshalom! I can still see him pointing to the crest of Svábhegy from his apartment balcony only yesterday evening. I still see him, he wanted to write, see his big, hunched, heavy figure, the anti — Michael Kolhaas, who does not seek his truth, because his truth has found him. I saw his sentences, each one by itself — big, hunched, heavy sentences — swaying inexorably toward the final naked insight.…