by Daša Drndic
When I came back, Bruno Baar tells them, sometimes in the dark we’d hear the troops marching under the window and guns going past pulled by motor-tractors. There was much traffic at night and many mules on the road with boxes of ammunition on each side of their pack-saddles and grey motor trucks that carried men. In the fall the rains came. The vineyards were thin and there were mists over the river and clouds on the mountain and the trucks splashed mud on the road and the troops were muddy and wet in their short capes. The king came through at times. He lived in Udine and came out this way to see how things were going, and things went very badly. With the rain came the cholera. But it was checked, and in the end only 7,000 soldiers died of it.
Bruno Baar speaks, but again Haya asks him, What did you do during the war, Grandfather? And she says, You are making all that up. That is Hemingway’s story, not yours.
A story is a story, says Bruno Baar. It can be anyone’s.
But the story doesn’t go like that. It meanders.
Bruno Baar does not engage in battle. Any battle. Ever.
So it is with war, Haya Tedeschi says. There are civilians in war. They do not fight. Civilians live. Civilians do their best to go on as if nothing were happening. As if life were beautiful. As if they were children.
Gorizia is still slowly coming into its own in 1916. It is shelled by the Austrian Army, by a stern parent castigating a wayward child.
They are children of Austria, my grandfather and grandmother and my mother are children of Austria. Later, Austria abandons its children and they have to adjust, right? asks Haya Tedeschi.
So the shells are falling. Bruno, Marisa, Letizia, Ada and little Carlo run down to the cellar every time the shelling starts, when flour and sugar begin spraying from the kitchen shelves and the stone floor becomes an airy dough for Marisa’s crescent rolls and macaroons, over which the members of the household tiptoe, lightly, as if flying, as if on a cloud floating beyond time. It is October 1917—25 October, 1917—when Caporetto wages the final, twelfth, battle of the Soča. Marisa sweeps Carlo up, but does not make it to the door. A bullet zings through the window, ricochets off the stone mortar and pestle, still green inside from the pesto ground in it the day before, and comes to rest in the belly of the pale-complexioned woman in a blue and black dress with white polka dots.
Marisa is taken to Laibach, where else? Gorizia, formerly the Nice of the Monarchy, is still only an island, a blotch on the no-longer-sumptuous thighs of the Empire. Marisa struggles, semi-conscious, for three months. Bruno sends packages, because the hospital telegraphs: FOOD NEEDED URGENTLY. Letizia, Ada and Carlo muck about in the cold kitchen under clouds of flour and sugar rain, as if playing in sand and mud, making white worms and little bread rolls like pigeon shit when it splats out of the sky on to one’s arm, and these, nothing like Marisa’s crescent rolls and macaroons, they send to Laibach, but Marisa is already dead. Decades later, when the wars are over, at the Military Archive in Ljubljana Haya finds a yellowed page from the local papers with a news item about the death of an unknown Slovenian woman, who “to her last breath” was calling out for her children, Otroci moji! Otroci moji! and for someone named Ada, while the nurses with their caps resembling the spread wings of swans were helpless to do anything but shake their heads, say Hier spricht man Deutsch, and fly away.
No-one comes to visit Marisa. None of her family is left in Gorizia. Bruno, Letizia, Ada and Carlo leave on a refugee march towards southern Italy. Marisa dies in early 1918. She is buried in a common grave for the nameless at the cemetery in Ljubljana.
We left, Bruno says. We had to go to survive. Two hundred and twenty-five people died in the first seven months, he says.
Carlo is given a bar of dark chocolate, because he is small, nine. The others are given a half-loaf of bread. The column of refugees is a long one. They all walk single file. It rains for days. The roads are mud-soaked. Their legs ache. Their feet blister. In front of Bruno walks a man with a thick bandage around his neck. A plaster collar, rigid and brown with clotted blood. Bruno asks him whether he is wounded, and the man wheezes and gesticulates. Bruno cannot understand what the injured man is saying. He asks again. The man wheezes terribly. A bullet pierced his voice box, says a woman in front of the wheezing man who is walking. There are ten badly wounded people in the column, they are on stretchers. They aren’t moving. They do not move their heads. Maybe they are dead.
The column is setting off in the direction of Latisana, Udine, Padua, someone says. Bruno has no idea where. He is not familiar with Italy.
In Palmanova the streets teem with refugees. There is a great crush. They are all given cups of coffee. A woman lies, unconscious, in a wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow is pushed by a boy. The wheelbarrow rocks, tips. That woman will fall out, Letizia says. She’ll fall out and people will step on her, Ada says. The boy is wearing a brown, short-sleeved shirt. The rain pours down. Wo ist Mama? asks Carlo.
There is a huge cauldron of hot tea on the square. The cauldron sits on the square like a church, like a chapel. Around it gather muddy refugees in muddy tatters, silent. A German plane dips out of a grey cloud and hovers halfway up the sky. The plane sprays machine-gun fire through the crowd on the square. The soldiers and nurses keep doling out tea. A woman in a garden to the left of the square drops, and with her drops the child she is holding by the hand. The woman and child tumble among the wilting sunflowers, as if they are from Latisana, Latisana is full of sunflowers. The woman and child disappear behind the fence as if they are puppets in a puppet theatre, out of sight. The plane lands on the square, shot down by an Italian machine gun. The refugees step back from the tea cauldron. The pilot has been shot, too. He is a German pilot. Both his legs have bloomed like a bouquet of crimson roses whose petals are dropping in bunches, softly. A French soldier comes running over, shoves his face into the German pilot’s face and howls Vous êtes fou! The French soldier saw the woman and child fall among the sunflowers, which is why he is shouting. The Italians pull the pilot from the cockpit. It is a small plane, a three-seater, so the cockpit is cramped. While the Italian soldiers pull out the German pilot with his crushed legs, the French soldier comes even closer and shoots the German pilot in the forehead. The women working for the Red Cross stop doling out the tea. Empty tea cups swing from slender hands in the air like silver balls on a Christmas tree. New refugees stream into the city. The city is crowded with refugees who will move on the next day. There are carts pulled by oxen, there are donkey carts, people jouncing in them, eyes open, apparently alive. Others cling to their bundles as if they were newborn babes. The column leaves the town. The battlefields are not far off. There is shooting. An old, grey-haired village woman walks behind Bruno, straight and tall like a white flag on a mast, wrapped in serenity and severity. She trudges alone through mud that is getting deeper and thicker. This is not going to end well, she says. There are no more wounded in the column. Someone has unloaded them somewhere, at a hospital maybe. The rain comes pouring down. It is November 1917.
The road is blocked. The column crawls along for another three kilometres, then turns into a field all shiny with dampness and the wet. Someone says: This is a strategic point. Now the rain pelts. The field becomes a swamp. Bruno coughs. Carlo coughs. The mud is slippery between my toes, Ada says. There is no shelter, only the faraway sky. A doctor comes running out with his arms raised high, as if preparing to dive into the sea. Non ho i medicinali per i feriti! Trovatemi i medicinali! he shouts. Everyone is silent. The whole column is silent. When will the Germans come? asks Bruno. Wann werden die Deutschen kommen? No-one answers. Then an old man says: Das da ist mein Haus. Wenn ich weggehe, werde ich alles verlieren. Aber bleiben kann ich nicht... He gestures with an open hand, as if onstage, as if in some dramatic scene, he waves at a little grey hut over which the dark rainwater comes down so that the hut resembles a convict in a striped suit. The old man sobs.
Night falls. The column still has ten kilometres to Latisana. In Latisana the Baar famil
y board a refugee train for Bologna, which takes them southward. Meanwhile, young men from the newly defunct Monarchy, children who have gone to fight for their own liberty, languish in prisoner-of-war camps all over Europe.
At the camp the Baar family eat cold mutton goulash, which puts them off mutton for the rest of their lives. The goulash is covered in a layer of shiny, whitish fat, a miniature skating rink for the camp fleas and lice, on which Ada traces out with her finger the Italian words she is learning, until the cold, fatty surface cracks and the dark-red liquid from underneath spurts up. Ada dreams of Marisa: ada goes to the cemetery, she is happy she’ll see mama marisa, she tells the flower seller, make me a big bouquet with lots of branches. the flower seller asks, why the branches? i’ll leave them on a tree, ada says. mama comes down the hill over gorizia and shouts, wait for me, ada, wait for me!
Ada is no longer a child. When she gets back to Gorizia she will be eighteen.
The Austrian and German camps scattered around the former Monarchy are also full of refugees and prisoners of war. The Italian boys mostly dream of food, just as all those who have lost their liberty dream of food. Some sleep on straw mattresses, some have sheets. They send home testimonies, little pieces of the puzzle that make up the panorama of history, edge pieces, corner pieces, without which the picture can never be framed. But History has no interest in frames. History wants to remain open. So that it can be filled in and multiply. Emanuele from Sigmundsherberg writes asking for chocolate, warm socks and tobacco, he complains of the frozen bread which cannot be sliced at fifteen degrees below zero. Gerolamo writes that they steal chickens, since all they are given is rice. From a camp in Celle, Antonio requests Maggi bouillon cubes, butter, thread, needles, buttons, a mirror and a comb. Sandro wants ten packs of cigarettes and two packages of Maryland tobacco, ricotta cheese and eggs, a kilo of white flour, three kilos of ravioli and twenty-five lire. In the Ostffyasszonyfa camp, Guido would like basil pesto, while Nicolà asks for black beans, figs and dried pears with a few walnuts. Antonio urgently requires a kilo of butter, tomato juice, twenty tubes of soup concentrate, grated cheese, two kilos of rigatoni, five cans of fruit salad, condensed milk, he wants cookies with hazelnuts, fresh sheep’s cheese and a kilo of mostazzola. Aside from the jumpers Ruggero asks for, and the woollen socks, gloves, mufflers, a jacket and a cap (no smaller than a size 59), he craves dried mutton, while Luca from the lunatic asylum in Cogoleto writes out his existential hunger, his physiological and philosophical enlightenment, in broad strokes, asking for money, two pigs and a goat (for the milk), “because I am seriously ill”. So food, the compelling huckster, illusion-maker of belonging, of being special, of survival, of return, of redemption, spreads out a bed in the tomb of nostalgia for our hunger, our folly, as cure and as a way out. We obediently make ourselves comfortable in that endlessly terrifying space of existence, seeking what we already have.
Is not your time
as irreversible as that same river
where Heraclitus, mirrored, saw the symbol
of fleeting life? A marble slab awaits you
which you will not read. On it, already written,
the date, the city, and the epitaph.
Other men too are only dreams of time,
not indestructible bronze or burnished gold;
the universe is, like you, a Proteus.
Dark, you will enter the darkness that awaits you,
doomed to the limits of your travelled time.
Know that in some sense you are already dead.
Borges
The war ends and what is left of the Baar family returns to Gorizia, to the new border rife with invisible malignant cells resembling particles of atomic dust. Along that border, as along all borders, deep into the soil is thrust the steel axis of a Ringelspiel, a merry-go-round, a lively carousel doomed to repeat eternally the invidious drama of family sagas. History—that lying, traitorous mother of life—continues, logorrhoeically, to spin its tiresome story, secretly dreaming up new borderlands one after another. And a border, like every long, deep wound, even if it heals and does not turn into a wellspring of putrid stench, is streaked with proud scar tissue that separates the living from the dead. A border is a “land” of spirits howling as they seek a form to assume.
Ada finds a job in a stationery shop at the intersection of Seminario and Ascoli streets, near to what was once the Jewish ghetto. It is a small shop. From the ceiling hangs the dead Monarchy, so through the little shop spreads the past, burning down just as sticks of oriental incense gradually snuff out, turning into small mounds of light-grey ash. The shop has something of everything: newspapers in Italian, German and Slovenian, red and yellow sweets in thick jars through which the sun shines, capturing the sweets in its everlasting, loving embrace, chains for pocket watches, cheap cologne, tobacco from every place imaginable, an assortment of baubles, chocolates, razors, buttons, threads, pocket mirrors, combs that tuck into the pocket of a military uniform. Florian Tedeschi certainly has reason enough to frequent such a shop.
Gorica is now Gorizia, rather than Görz. Thus, Ada’s shop is visited more and more often by the soldier Florian Tedeschi, stationed at the garrison barracks on Via Trieste, at the east end of town, near the border with the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
The year is 1920. Politically and economically Italy is twisting and flapping like a flag snapping in a powerful gale. There are scuffles and clashes with police. Half a million workers take part in strikes that last nearly to the end of the year; 320 people are killed in the first six months. The harvest rots in the fields. The wine is bad. Ada has no idea of any of this, she thinks how she will unbraid her hair at precisely the moment when she catches sight of Florian Tedeschi crossing the street on his way to the door over which the little brass bell might announce the beginning of a new life, ding-a-ling. With her finger on the golden-yellow wooden countertop steeped in the fragrance of tobacco, the fragrance of honey and cherries, Ada traces out her future. A smile of close-held happiness and anticipation, rolled up in a ball, like the bell on the door, swings on her face. Though coming to them late, Ada is reading the plays, novels, poems and letters of Gabriele D’Annunzio, grand lover and seducer, a man barely five foot tall, a bald, one-eyed warrior with a little moustache like the tail of a frail swallow, a decadent with rotting teeth, a media manipulator, a pilot and a shyster, a cavalry officer, a champion of her Gorizia, a rumour addict and petty dictator, a Blackshirt. When the family comes home from the camp she happens upon all the books that had belonged to her mother Marisa who disappeared so mysteriously; there they are, untouched, on a shelf above the shelves with the walnuts and the flour for the macaroons. under the counter in the shop, out of view, Ada leafs quickly through a life that will pass her by. With her free hand, as she reads, she crumbles a slice of Gugelhupf purchased at the neighbouring bakery owned by Frau Arughetti, who forgot to leave town. Elusive images flick through Ada’s mind; she snatches at them, her breathing jagged, and the windows fog up at the La Gioia stationery shop in the winter evenings. For her—just as for virgins and mothers all over Italy into whose dark labyrinths of repressed lust strode that very same lover whom Paris greeted, ecstatically blind, arms and legs wide open—the borders between poetry and reality were erased with the smudge of a cheap eraser. Ada keeps the Toscanelli cigars, His favourites, in a special spot, under glass. Ah, all the actresses, duchesses, dancers; all the poets, journalists, singers and marquises whom He gets to know and love long after His first forays to local brothels at sixteen (when He pawned His grandfather’s watch); ah, Teodolinde and Clemenze, and Giselda Zucconi, and Olga Ossani; Maria Luisa Casati Stampa, amasser of exotic animals and bizarre furniture; oh, Ida Rubinstein, Isadora Duncan, the singer Olga Levi Brunner, and after her, the pianist Luisa Baccara, then wealthy American painter Romaine Goddard Brooks, who later comes out as a lesbian; then, oh Lord, celebrated Eleonora Duse; Elvira Natalia Fraternali Leoni, Contessa Natalia de Golubeff, who dies in 1941 f
rom alcohol and poverty (for whom Ada, long since married to Tedeschi, cared not at all); Maria Gravina Cruyllas di Ramacca, mother of four sons who bears Gabriele a daughter, Renata; Giuseppina Mancini Giorgi, 1908, committed to a mental hospital; and just then, in 1920, Parisienne Amélie Mazoyer, still a hot item. Morphine addict Alessandra Carlotti di Rudinì, dubbed Nike, is another of them: after her brother and children die she takes her vows and dies a Carmelite in 1931. And Maria Harduin di Gallese was there all along, of course, as D’Annunzio’s lawful wedded wife.
Ada reads Il trionfo della morte, La figlia di lorio, Canto novo, II piacere, L’innocente, Terra vergine, Le primavera della mala pianta, Il fuoco, so she has no time to read the newspapers, meanwhile in the little town of Fiume people are strutting around sporting their newly tailored black shirts, and D’Annunzio, “il deputato della belezza”, recites his poems from a balcony, champagne flows under the blaze of fireworks, and syphilis spreads. In July 1920 rats come pouring out of the Trieste sewers: there are squadristi crawling all over the city. They set fire to the building of the Slovenian National Home. Agrarian Fascism is born. Trucks packed with squadristi come to villages at night, twenty of them, a hundred. Armed with guns and revolvers, they surround the houses of members of the Farmers’ League and left-wing unionists and, systematically, one by one, order the head of each household to step out, and if they have to wait too long, they say: Don’t toy with us, we’ll set fire to your home with your wife and children inside, and then out he comes, and they tie him up, throw him into the truck, take him to a secluded spot and beat him senseless; then they leave him tied to a tree somewhere, unconscious and naked. Fascism sweeps the masses as if they were caught up at a football match. In her lovely light-blue jacket, in yellow stockings and petite yellow shoes, which many years later Florian will remember with longing, Ada often visits her lover at his barracks on Via Trieste on the east end of Gorizia, near the Yugoslav border. When she isn’t reading D’Annunzio and when her bare bottom isn’t rubbing against Florian’s army blanket, Ada is out on a bicycle, for bicycling is a healthy sport because it strengthens the calves. And so it is that a new joie de vivre creeps into Ada’s soul like a moth into a trunk of woollens. Those were the happy days in my life of suffering, Ada would say to Haya in 1943, and maybe in 1944, too.