Night Train to Lisbon Read online

Your job is still open, you should know that. I’ve taken over some of the teaching; for the rest, we’ve found students as substitutes, even for Hebrew. As for the financial aspect, you’ll be sent the necessary papers by the school administration.

  What should I say in conclusion, dear Gregorius? Perhaps simply this: we all wish that your trip really takes you where you want to go, outside and inside.

  Yours,

  Werner Kägi

  P.S. Your books are in my cabinet for safekeeping. In practical matters, I have one more request: at some time – no hurry – would you let me have your keys?

  Kägi had added by hand: Or would you like to keep them? Just in case?

  Gregorius sat there a long time. Outside it grew dark. He wouldn’t have thought that Kägi would write him such a letter. A long time ago, he had seen him in the city with the two children and everything seemed to be fine. He liked what Virginie Ledoyen had said about his clothes and he had misgivings when he looked down at the trousers of the new suit he was wearing. Blunt, yes. But uncouth? And aside from Natalie Rubin and maybe Ruth Gautschi, which girl students missed him?

  He had returned because he wanted to be back in the place where he knew his way around. Where he didn’t have to speak Portuguese or French or English. Why did Kägi’s letter make this plan, the simplest of all plans, suddenly seem so difficult? Why was it now more important to him than a while ago in the train that it was night-time when he went down to Bubenbergplatz?

  An hour later, when he stood in the square, he had the feeling he couldn’t touch it any more. Yes, even though it sounded strange, that was the right word: he couldn’t touch Bubenbergplatz any more. He had already walked around the square three times, had waited at the traffic lights and looked in all directions: towards the cinema, the post office, the war memorial, the Spanish bookshop where he had come upon Prado’s book, straight ahead at the tram stop, at Heiliggeistkirche and the Loeb department store. He had stood still, closed his eyes and concentrated on the pressure his heavy body exerted on the pavement. The soles of his feet had become warm, the street seemed to come towards him, but the feeling persisted: he no longer succeeded in touching the square. The streets and buildings, the lights and sounds, of the square with its decades of familiarity no longer managed to reach him, to bridge this final gap and present themselves to his memory as something he not only knew, knew by heart, but as something he was, had always been. Only now did it dawn on him that he was no longer the same person.

  The persistent, inexplicable gap was in no way like a protective shield. Instead, it made Gregorius panic; it was the fear that in losing the familiar things he had evoked to recapture himself he was also losing himself. He was experiencing much the same thing here as he had at dawn in Lisbon, only more perniciously and much, much more dangerously, for while there had been Bern as well as Lisbon, there was nowhere to replace the lost Bern. With his eyes on the solid yet receding ground, he bumped into a passer-by and for a moment everything was spinning. He grasped his head with both hands as if to hold on to it, and when he was calm and collected again, he saw a woman glance back at him, in her look a question of whether he might be in need of help.

  The clock on Heiliggeistkirche now showed eight o’clock and the traffic had subsided. The cloud cover had thinned and you could see the stars. It was cold. Gregorius went through the Kleine Schanze and on to the Bundesterrasse. Excited, he saw the moment approaching when he could turn on to the Kirchenfeldbrücke, as he had done every morning for decades at a quarter to eight.

  The bridge was closed until early the following morning while tramlines were being repaired. ‘There’s been a bad accident,’ a passer-by explained when he saw Gregorius staring bewildered at the sign.

  Feeling that he was making a habit of it he entered Hotel Bellevue and went into the restaurant. The subdued music, the waiter’s light beige jacket, the silver tableware. He ordered something to eat. The Balm of Disappointment. ‘He had often joked,’ João Eça had said of Prado, ‘that we humans regard the world as a stage for the acting out of our wishes. He considered this illusion the origin of all religion. “None of it is true,” he used to say. “The universe is simply there, and it’s completely indifferent, really completely indifferent to what happens to us.”’

  Gregorius took out Prado’s book and looked for a heading with the word cena. By the time his meal arrived, he had found what he was looking for:

  CENA CARICATA. COMICAL STAGE. The world as a stage, waiting for us to present the important and sad, funny and meaningless dramas of our imaginations. How touching and charming it is, this idea! And how unavoidable!

  After Gregorius left the hotel he walked slowly to Monbijou and from there over the bridge to the Gymnasium. It had been many years since he had seen the building from this direction and it seemed strange to him. He had always entered it through the back door but now the main entrance was in front of him. Everything was dark. The church bell rang nine thirty.

  He saw a man park his bicycle, unlock the main door and disappear inside the building. It must be Burri, the major, he decided. Gregorius knew that he sometimes came in the evening to prepare a physics or chemistry experiment for the next day. The light went on in the lab at the back of the building.

  Without a sound, Gregorius slipped inside. He had no idea what he wanted here. On tiptoe he sneaked up to the first floor. The classroom doors were locked and the high door to the auditorium couldn’t be opened either. He felt locked out, even if, obviously, that made no sense at all. His rubber soles squeaked softly on the linoleum. The moon shone through a window. In its pale light he looked at everything as he had never looked at it before, not as a teacher and not as a student either. The door handles, the banister, the students’ lockers. Despite their familiarity he looked at them now as if seeing them for the first time. He put his hand on the door handles, felt their cool resistance and crept along the corridor like a big, sluggish shadow. On the ground floor, at the other end of the building, Burri dropped something and the sound of smashing glass reverberated through the hall.

  One of the classroom doors yielded. Gregorius entered the room where, as a student, he had seen the first Greek words on the blackboard. That was forty-three years ago. He had always sat at the back on the left and he sat in that seat now, too. Back then, Eva, Unbelievable, sat two rows in front of him, her red hair in a ponytail, which she would swish from side to side. Beat Zurbriggen, who had been his benchmate, had often fallen asleep in class, and was teased about it. Later, they found out that this was due to a metabolic disorder that killed him in his youth.

  When Gregorius left the classroom, he knew why it was so strange to be here: he was viewing the school through the eyes of a former student, forgetting that for decades he had walked through the corridors as a teacher. How could one, as a teacher, forget what it was like to be a student?

  Downstairs, Burri ran through the hall cursing. The door he slammed had to be the door to the staffroom. Now Gregorius heard the main door slam shut. The key was turned. He was locked in.

  It was as if he woke up. But it was no awakening into the teacher, no return to Mundus, who had spent his life in this building. The alertness was that of the secret visitor who hadn’t managed to touch Bubenbergplatz earlier that evening. Gregorius went down to the staffroom, which Burri in his anger had forgotten to lock. He looked at the chair where Virginie Ledoyen always sat. I must say, I must say: somehow I miss him.

  For a while, he stood at the window and looked out at the night. He pictured O’Kelly’s pharmacy with the words IRISH GATE inscribed on the glass of the green-gold door. He went to the phone, called Inquiries and asked to be connected to the pharmacy. He felt like letting it ring all night in the empty, brightly lit pharmacy, until Jorge had slept off his drunkenness, entered the shop, and lit his first cigarette behind the counter. But after a while the engaged signal came and Gregorius hung up. When he called Inquiries again, he asked for the Swiss Embassy in Isfahan. A foreign
, hoarse male voice answered. Gregorius hung up. Hans Gmür, he thought, Hans Gmür.

  Next to the back door, he climbed out of a window and dropped to the ground. Momentarily he blacked out and held on to the bicycle stand to steady himself. Then he went to the annexe and approached the window from which he had once climbed during a Greek lesson. He saw Unbelievable turn to her benchmate to point out the unbelievable event. Her breath stirred the other girl’s hair. The eyes with the squint seemed to expand and the freckles seemed to increase her look of amazement. Gregorius turned away and walked towards Kirchenfeldbrücke.

  He had forgotten that the bridge was closed. Annoyed, he went through Monbijou. As he came to the Bärenplatz, midnight was striking. Tomorrow morning was market day, and that meant market women and cashboxes with money. Books I stole. Books mustn’t cost anything, that’s what I thought then and still do, he heard O’Kelly say. He went on towards Gerechtigkeitsgasse.

  In Florence’s flat, there was no light showing. She never went to bed before one o’clock. Had never gone to bed any earlier. Gregorius crossed to the other side of the street and waited behind a pillar. The last time he had done that was more than ten years ago. She had come home alone and her step had been tired, listless. When he saw her coming now, she was with a man. You really might buy something new for a change. After all, you don’t live alone. And Greek isn’t enough for that. Gregorius looked down at his new suit: he was better dressed than the other man. When Florence stopped under the street lamp he was shocked: she had grown grey in the intervening years. And although in her mid-forties, she was dressed as if she were at least fifty. Gregorius felt anger rise in him: hadn’t she ever been back to Paris? Had her sloppily dressed companion who looked like a neglected tax clerk, deadened her sense of elegance? Afterwards, when Florence opened the window upstairs and leaned out, he was tempted to emerge from behind the pillar and wave to her.

  Later, he went over to the doorbell. Florence de l’Arronge was her maiden name. If he interpreted the order of the bells correctly, her name was now Meier. He wasn’t even worth a y. How elegant the doctoral student had looked back then, sitting in La Coupole! And how dowdy and worn the woman looked now! On the way up to the railway station and on to Länggasse, he felt a mounting anger that he understood less with each step. It subsided only when he stood before the shabby house where he had grown up.

  The door was locked, but a piece of cloudy glass was missing from it. Gregorius put his nose to the opening: even today it smelt of cabbage. He looked for the window of the room where he had written Persian letters on the board. It had been enlarged and had acquired a new frame. It had made his blood boil when his mother imperiously called him to eat while he was excitedly reading the Persian grammar. He saw the sentimental novel by Ludwig Ganghofer on her bedside table. Kitsch is the most misleading of all prisons, Prado had noted. The bars are covered with the gold of simplistic, unreal feelings so that you mistake them for the pillars of a palace.

  That night, Gregorius didn’t sleep much and the first time he woke up, he didn’t know where he was. He had rattled many doors of the Gymnasium and climbed through many windows in his dreams. When the city woke up in the morning and he stood at the window of his flat, he was no longer sure if he really had been in Kirchenfeld.

  In the editorial offices of the big Bern newspaper, they weren’t very helpful and Gregorius missed Agostinha of the Diario de Noticias in Lisbon. An advertisement from April 1966? Reluctantly, they left him alone in the archive and by noon he had found the name of the industrialist who had once sought a tutor for his children in Isfahan. There were three Hannes Schnyders in the phone book, but only one a licensed engineer. An address in the Elfenau.

  Gregorius went to the house and rang the bell with the feeling of doing something completely absurd. The Schnyders in their impeccable villa apparently considered it a welcome change to drink tea with the man who had almost become their children’s tutor thirty years ago. The two of them were approaching eighty and spoke of the wonderful times under the Shah when they had become rich. Why had he withdrawn his application all that time ago? A boy studying ancient languages – that would have been exactly what they were looking for. Gregorius spoke of his mother’s illness and changed the subject.

  How was the climate in Isfahan? he asked. Hot? Sand storms? Nothing you needed to be afraid of, they said, laughing, at least not when you had a house like they had. And then they brought out photos. Gregorius stayed until evening and the Schnyders were amazed and pleased at his interest in their memories. They gave him a book about Isfahan.

  Before he went to bed, Gregorius looked at the photographs of mosques of Isfahan and listened to the Portuguese language course. He fell asleep feeling that both Lisbon and Bern had failed him. And that he no longer knew how it was when a place didn’t fail you.

  When he woke up at about four, he felt like calling Doxiades. But what could he have said to him? That he was here but not here? That he had used the the telephone in the staffroom of the Gymnasium to act out his crazy wishes? And that he wasn’t even sure it had all really taken place?

  To whom, if not the Greek, could he have told that? Gregorius thought of the strange evening when they had tried calling each other by their Christian names.

  ‘My name’s Constantine,’ the Greek had said suddenly during the chess game.

  ‘Raimund,’ he had replied.

  There had been no ritual confirmation, no raised glasses, no handshake; they hadn’t even looked at each other.

  ‘But that’s mean of you, Raimund,’ said the Greek as he fell into Gregorius’s trap.

  It didn’t sound right, and Gregorius had the impression that they both felt it.

  ‘You shouldn’t underestimate my meanness, Constantine,’ he said.

  For the rest of the evening, they avoided that form of address.

  ‘Good night, Gregorius,’ said the Greek in parting, ‘sleep well.’

  ‘You too, Doctor,’ said Gregorius.

  That was as far as it went.

  Was that a reason not to tell Doxiades about his floating confusion as he stumbled through Bern? Or was the distancing closeness between them precisely what was needed for such a tale? Gregorius dialled and hung up on the second ring. Sometimes the Greek had this rough way typical of taxi drivers in Thessaloniki.

  He took out Prado’s book. As he sat reading at the kitchen table with the Venetian blind pulled down, as he had two weeks before, he had the feeling that the sentences the Portuguese aristocrat had written in the attic room of the blue house helped him to be in the right place: neither in Bern nor in Lisbon.

  AMPLIDÃO INTERIOR. INTERNAL EXPANSE. We live here and now, everything before and in other places is past, mostly forgotten and accessible as a small remnant in disordered slivers of memory that light up in rhapsodic contingency and die out again. This is how we are used to thinking about ourselves. And this is the natural way of thinking, when it is others we look at: they really do stand before us here and now, no other place and no other time, and how should their relationship to the past be thought of if not in the form of internal episodes of memory, whose exclusive reality is in the present of their happening?

  But from the perspective of our own inside, it’s quite different. We’re not limited to our own present, but, expanded far into the past. That comes through our feelings, especially the deep ones, those that determine who we are and how it is to be us. For these feelings know no time, they don’t know it and they don’t acknowledge it. It would naturally be false if I said: I am still the boy on the steps in front of the school, the boy with the cap in his hand, whose eyes strayed to the girls’ school hoping to see Maria João. Naturally it is false; more than thirty years have passed since then. And yet it is also true. The heart pounding at difficult tasks is the heart pounding when Senhor Lanções, the maths teacher, entered the classroom; in the anxiety about all authorities, my bent father’s words of authority resonate; and if the twinkling look of a
woman strikes me, it takes my breath away as every time, from school window to school window, my look seemed to meet Maria João’s. I am still there, at that distant place in time, I never left it, but live expanded in the past, or out of it. It is present, this past, and not simply in the form of brief episodes of flashing memory. The thousand changes that have driven time – measured by this timeless present of feeling, they are fleeting and unreal as a dream, and deceptive as dream images: they delude me into believing that I, a doctor that people come to with their pains and cares, possess fabulous self-confidence and fearlessness. And this anxious trust in the look of those who seek help forces me to believe in it as long as they stand before me. But as soon as they’re gone, I’d like to shout: I’m still that scared boy on the school steps, it’s absolutely irrelevant, really a lie, that I sit in the white coat behind the mighty desk and give advice, don’t be deceived by what, in ridiculous superficiality, we call the present.

  And not only in time are we expanded. In space, too, we stretch out far over what is visible. We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place; we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there. We go to ourselves, travel to ourselves, when the monotonous beat of the wheels brings us to a place where we have covered a stretch of our life, no matter how brief it may have been. When we set foot for the second time on the platform of the foreign railway station, hear the voices over the loudspeaker, smell the unique odours, we have come not only to the distant place, but also to the distance of our own inside; to a perhaps thoroughly remote corner of our self which, when we are somewhere else, is completely in the dark and invisible. Otherwise, why should we be so excited, so outside ourselves when the conductor calls the names of the places, when we hear the screech of the brakes and are swallowed up in the suddenly appearing shadow of the railway station? Otherwise, why should it be a magical moment, a moment of silent drama when the train comes to a complete halt with a final jolt? It is because, from the first steps we take on the strange and not strange platform, we resume a life we had interrupted and left, when we felt the first jolts of the moving train. What could be more exciting than resuming an interrupted life with all its promises?