Capus Alex - A Price to Pay

A Novel

ALEX CAPUS

Translated by

John Brownjohn

mile Gilliron

18851939

Laura dOriano

19111943

Felix Bloch

19051983

I like the girl. It pleases me to picture her sitting in the open doorway of the rearmost carriage of the Orient Express with the glittering silver waters of Lake Zurich gliding past her. It could be early November 1924, I dont know the exact date. She is thirteen years old, a tall, thin, rather gawky girl with a small but deeply incised furrow above her nose. Her right leg is drawn up, her left dangling over the step into space. Shes leaning against the door frame, swaying to the rhythm of the rails with her fair hair fluttering in the wind. For protection from the cold she clutches a woollen blanket to her chest. The notice board on the side of the carriage reads Constantinople-Paris, and emblazoned above it are some brass lettering and the companys emblem incorporating the royal lions of Belgium.

She is using her right hand to smoke cigarettes that quickly smoulder away in the airstream. Its not unusual for children to smoke where she comes from. Between cigarettes she sings snatches of oriental songs Turkish lullabies, Lebanese ballads, Egyptian love songs. She wants to be a singer like her mother, but a better one. She will never enlist the help of her legs and cleavage on-stage, the way her mother does, nor will she wear a pink feather boa or be accompanied on the piano by individuals like her father, who always keeps a tumbler of brandy on top of the piano and winks and performs a glissando whenever her mother flashes her garter. She wants to be a genuine artist. She has a big, expansive feeling in her chest and will some day lend expression to it, she knows that for sure.

Her voice is still thin and hoarse, she knows that too. She can hardly hear herself as she sits on her step and sings. The wind snatches the melodies from her lips and bears them off into the turbulence behind the last carriage.

It is three days since she boarded the blue, second-class carriage in Constantinople with her parents and her four siblings. Since then she has spent many hours sitting in the open doorway. Inside the compartment with her family its stuffy and noisy, and outside its mild for the time of year. During those three days on her step she has sniffed the scent of Bulgarian vineyards and watched hares cavorting in the stubbly wheat fields of Vojvodina, waved to Danubian bargees who responded with blasts on their hooters, and, in the suburbs of Belgrade, Budapest, Bratislava and Vienna, glimpsed weary men in vests sitting in front of their plates in the dimly-lit kitchens of soot-stained tenement buildings.

When the wind blows the smoke from the locomotive to the right she sits in the left-hand doorway, when it veers she changes sides. Once, when a conductor shooed her back into the compartment for safetys sake, she made a show of obeying, but as soon as hed gone she opened the door again and resumed her seat on the step.

On the third evening, shortly before Salzburg, the conductors had gone from compartment to compartment to announce an unscheduled change of route: the train would turn off after Innsbruck and skirt Germany to the south by going through Tyrol and Switzerland. Now that Franco-Belgian troops had marched into the Ruhr, it was almost impossible for the Franco-Belgian Orient Express to follow its usual route via Munich and Stuttgart. The Reichsbahns dispatchers were deliberately misrouting it or refusing the locomotive coal and water, and at stations the police made all the passengers get off and conducted night-long passport controls, and even when they were finally allowed to proceed, the stations exit was often obstructed by an abandoned cattle or timber wagon which no one in the whole of Germany had authority to shunt into a siding without the formal consent of its legal owner, and obtaining this through official channels could be extremely time-consuming.

It had grown cold and dark once they entered Tyrol, where menacingly converging walls of rock towered skyward on either side of the track. When the girl would have had to lie on her back to see the stars in the night sky, she retired to the compartment and lay down to sleep in the cosy fug exuded by her family. Early next morning, however, when the train eventually crossed the Arlberg and picked up speed on the downward run, she returned to her step with the woollen blanket. She watched the valleys widen and the mountain peaks recede, giving way, as the sun rose, first to villages and streams, then to towns and rivers, and finally to lakes.

Her parents have long been accustomed to their daughters headstrong ways. She used to sit outside on the step even as a little girl. It must have been between Tikrit and Mosul, during their second or third Baghdad tour, that she had first made her way along the corridor for a better view of the cranes on the banks of the Tigris. On the return journey she had sat on the step again, refusing to be parted from the sight of mosquito-infested paddy fields or steppes and mountains blushing in the sunset. She has always sat on her step ever since, whether travelling up the Nile delta from Alexandria to Cairo, or on board a narrow-gauge train in the Lebanese mountains, or in transit from Constantinople to Tehran. She always sits on the step, watching the world go by and singing. She occasionally allows one of her siblings to sit beside her, but only for a while; then she insists on being alone again.

At Kilchberg the scent of chocolate fills her nose as the massive, majestic Lindt & Sprngli factory glides past behind her. A few sailing boats are cruising on the lake and a paddle steamer is lying alongside a landing stage. The morning mist has dispersed, the sky is pale blue. The countryside has yet to experience a frost, so the fields on the opposite shore are too green for the time of year. The city looms up out of the haze at the apex of the lake. The track traces a long curve and merges with four, eight, twenty other tracks that converge from all directions, draw parallel, and ultimately debouch into Zurichs central station.

It is quite possible that, as she entered the city in November 1924, the girl caught the eye of a young man who often used to sit on the loading platform of a grey, weather-worn goods shed, watching the trains pull in and out and ruminating on the future course of his life. In my minds eye he kneads his cap in his hands as the Orient Express passes him and catches sight of the girl in the doorway of the rearmost carriage, who eyes him with casual interest.

The youth doesnt really fit with the loading platform and the goods shed. He certainly isnt a shunter or a porter. Hes wearing knickerbockers and a tweed jacket, and his shoes gleam in the late autumn sunlight. His regular features testify, if not to a carefree childhood, at least to one devoid of disasters. His complexion is clear, and his eyes, nose, mouth and chin are arranged at right angles like the doors and windows of a house. His brown hair is neatly parted. A bit too neatly, perhaps.

She sees that his eyes are following her, and that hes looking at her the way a man looks at a woman. It is only recently that men have begun to look at her like that. Most of them quickly grasp how young she is and avert their gaze in embarrassment. This youth doesnt seem to notice. She finds him appealing. He looks strong but not aggressive. No fool, either.

He raises a hand in greeting and she reciprocates. She doesnt wave it in a girlish way, nor does she coquettishly waggle all five fingers just casually raises her hand, like him. He smiles and she smiles back.