by Daša Drndic
Then, during and after the Great War, some leave Trieste to be killed, some leave to kill themselves, some leave in search of a better life. Others arrive because they have nothing better in mind. Because that is how it is with cities, they flow on eternally, this way or that, so books say.
Francesco Illy, an accountant of Hungarian extraction and a soldier for Austro-Hungary, spent the first part of his war service along the Soča, then in and around Trieste. The war ended, Illy looked around and said, This is a wonderful city. I will learn Italian, so he went about selling first cocoa, then coffee. People just sit there, downing the black stuff, he said, as if they were Turks. Francesco invented an espresso machine so he could achieve it all: to serve all those leisurely customers. We’ll call the little machine the “illetta”, he said, after which the empire of fragrances and tastes opened its doors to him. Today one of his descendants, Riccardo, otherwise known as Sonnenschein, waves his red flag from time to time at raving right-wing Trieste, olè! Time for a revolution.
Il Caffè San Marco on Via Battisti serves its first guests in January 1914. During the war it is completely demolished and only in 1920 do the coffee drinkers come back. Saba stops in, so does Giotti, and Svevo the merchant, also known as Ettore Schmitz, comes by. Joyce no longer sits at the Caffè Pasticceria Pirona, but the cakes and wine are still Viennese, and the coffee is Illy. After having made the rounds of several such spots, which seem to be peaceful innocent gathering places to Florian, the proprietor of Caffè degli Specchi at the Piazza Unità tells him, Come tomorrow at seven. The Tedeschi family are living in a flat at Via Daniele, a short and dark street, and the church of Santa Maria Maggiore is close by, which is handy for family attendance at Mass.
Haya is six years old and recalls little of Trieste from this time. She remembers her father Florian as he inches, legs rigid, between the tables, holding his tray high above his head, as if collecting the rain. She remembers how she waits for Florian to finish his shift at Caffè degli Specchi in Piazza Unità on Sundays, so they can go for ice cream at an ice-cream stand, because the ice cream there is cheaper. She remembers a family, dressed in finery, dignified somehow, and she remembers how she wants to live in a family like that. Haya observes the woman in her dark striped suit with a cloche hat perched on her head, taking a little mirror from her purse that catches the rays of the sun, and how the lady smiles at her sons in a way that Ada has never smiled at her. Haya watches the boys in their little blue suits and wants to ask them What language are you speaking? She wants to say to them, I am Haya and I can sing to you in Slovenian if you like:
The gentleman doesn’t smile at his sons, because he is reading the paper. He has white hands. He has a moustache and an elegant grey suit with a sheen. The boys drink hot chocolate and Haya suddenly wants some, too. She’d like to sip hot chocolate at the Caffè degli Specchi in Piazza Unità, and swing her feet and admire the brand-new patent leather shoes she doesn’t have. Haya remembers her surprise and her curiosity, Who are they? Then, just as when a mirror slips from the fingers, the image shatters. A man from a neighbouring table rises to his feet, the chair tips over, he takes two marching steps, stands behind the man who is reading the newspaper and shouts, he shouts terribly loudly, and he is scowling and his eyebrows are tangling into writhing leeches, and his mouth opens into a small tomb that flashes and all the while he is holding a large cup of coffee in the air as if he were at the Olympics preparing to heave a hammer that looks like a bomb but isn’t, it is a white porcelain coffee cup from the Caffè degli Specchi on Piazza Unità full to the brim with aromatic Illy coffee, then he swings and the cup smacks the gentleman below the shoulder and the black liquid starts to steam and soak into the grey suit—to get warm? to hide?—leaving a large, dark, wet splotch.
Schiavo! howls the person who flung the cup. Schiavo, qui si parla solo italiano! The boys jump to their feet, pull out handkerchiefs, dip them in the water from their father’s glass and mop his back. The coffee flees, sheds its aroma, spreads around the man’s belt, trickles down his right trouser leg and wriggles to the ground like a small dead snake. On the light grey suit an image is left resembling a squished cow pat.
One damp Trieste evening, as Florian Tedeschi strolls along the deserted sluices, staring with horror at the empty belly of the port, nearly touching the sundering of the city which joins with his own sense of fragmentation, which, this rift of his, this schism, sinks perilously into rigidity like the calcified spine of an elderly stroller, he catches himself repeating, to the beat of his footsteps: vorrei dirvi, vorrei dirvi,
one, two,
vorrei dirvi,
I am a businessman,
not a waiter,
I am a soldier,
in every businessman,
in every soldier
hides an ache from which the soul cracks like frozen glass.
Florian Tedeschi turns into Via San Nicolò and stops at Number 30, where the sign Libreria Antiquaria Umberto Saba still stands today, but Umberto Saba is no longer in Trieste and there is a ribbed iron curtain drawn over the display window of the bookshop.
Tell me about a life and everything
that happens in it
in murky madness
of vainly discordant voices
says Florian Tedeschi staring at the tips of his waiter’s shoes.
Words exhaust themselves
he says
I remember everything, but understand nothing.
Time has shrunk like a jumper rinsed in hot water.
It is getting tight.
The next day, on 15 November, 1932, Florian Tedeschi goes to a branch office of the Banca di Napoli and to a friend from his army days, Luciano Grauer, says: Get me out of here.
In the 1930s there are about five thousand Jews living in Trieste who quickly leave the city, particularly after 1938. One of the four centres in Italy for the study of the Jewish Question is in Trieste, hard at work “profiling” the Italian nation, so Jews start scattering in every direction. Those who stay are captured efficiently by the Nazis and transported to camps all over Europe. Of the more than seven hundred Trieste Jews who are herded on to the freight cars of the trains that pull regularly into Trieste train station, fewer than twenty return after the war. The Tedeschis get out in time without even realizing it.
In late November, the Tedeschi family sail on the ship Ganga, or it may have been the Marco Polo, arranged through an association known as the Società Adriatica, from which a sticker remains, from this Adriatic association, the Adriatic ocean liner, whatever, and the sticker is remarkably preserved, torn no doubt, which was later lost without trace, travelling on its own to a world Haya never knew. from an item of family luggage, no doubt, which was later lost without trace, travelling on its own to a world Haya never knew. The Tedeschis arrive in Naples. For Haya, Naples is an image of blurred colours that mean peace of mind. There are no outlines, here and there a spark.
Paula and Orestes are born. Florian works at the Banca di Napoli. Ada follows Enrico Caruso as he sings “O, sole mio”, and she cooks and washes and cooks and washes, and feeds fish and pasta to her children. After dinner Haya listens to Leoncavallo with her father Florian, Pagliacci is always in fashion, now especially when Gigli is singing, one of Mussolini’s favourites. Every 12 December the family go out to the square where the Giornata della Madre e del Fanciullo is celebrated, when the names are announced of the twenty-three most reproductively active mothers in Italy, each with at least fourteen sons, and the mothers are received at a ceremony and given a modest award by Mussolini and the Pope. One year their neighbour Amalia wins with her eighteen sons, but little red-haired Rita is not part of the competition, as if she were not even there. Life is beautiful. The house is roomy. There are oranges in the garden. The children are given a donkey called Kroo. There are many joyful photographs. Their mother Ada is wearing a white hat, tipped to the right in all the pictures. They ride bicycles. Papa Florian goes to work in a suit. One evening
Ada cries as she takes off her wedding ring. Florian removes his wedding ring, too, but doesn’t cry. We’ve been ordered to, he says. Haya wraps in a yellow flannel cloth the silver coat of arms of Gorizia that had hung in her grandfather Bruno Baar’s winery, so Ada says, and which they had brought with them on the long trek to the camp where it had served them, flipped over, as a bread board. I will not give them Marisa’s earrings, Ada says. Florian shouts, You must. With a red-hot needle Ada pierces Haya’s ears, though her hands are trembling. This is all I have of Mother’s. There isn’t even a grave, she says, and so it is that the earrings with their wreath of tiny, poorly burnished, grimy diamonds do not go to Mussolini. Haya has been wearing them for seventy-two years. There, as if they’ve shrunk, she says and touches her ear lobes. Then she says Enough for today and goes to bed.
She dreams – the corpse opens like a book. it flips open by itself, like a magic box, and in it are tiny diamonds, a multitude of tiny diamonds like flakes of dead skin – light. then, like a river, they flow. in the corpse which refuses to die, in that now genderless dead person, everything is still except the light which flees. the lack of smell. an embalmed erasure. the skin on the face of the corpse is taut, the eye sockets dry and empty. the skull shows through the dried parchment envelope, in the open mouth the teeth are growing, they get whiter and longer. haya looks into the belly and sees her face in the thousands of miniature surfaces of colourless precious stones, distorted and multiplied
That year, 1935, a quarter of a million Italians donate their gold and silver for a better future, for the happy days to come. In Rome 250,000 wedding rings are collected; 180,000 in Milan. Benedetto Croce gives up his senator’s medal; the Cardinal of Bologna, Nassali Rocca, donates his bishop’s chain; and Pirandello, his Nobel Prize medal. A total of 33,622 kilograms of gold is amassed. That same year Mussolini gives three million gold francs to Albania with a promise of additional economic support to follow.
That year, 1935, the slogan “Buy Italian!” is pushed; an autarky is born; imported goods and foreign businesses disappear. Italy cleanses its digestive tract, feeds on purgatives, gloats with self-satisfaction, blossoms in its little corral.
Two years later the demographic campaign reaches its peak. Mussolini writes a cheque for 700 lire, a good month’s wages at the time, to every young man who decides to marry. The administration creates new jobs and welcomes in its embrace child-bearing Italians, pint-sized studs. Fecund mothers, those with at least seven sons, receive a cheque for 5,000 lire and a life-insurance policy. This is a time of wholesale fornication.
MINCULPOP is born, the Ministry of Popular Culture, and with it new dictionaries, orthographies, patriotism; the use of foreign phrases is banned, and they are replaced by Italian surrogates. Maxim Gorky is dubbed Massimo Amaro, but he is swiftly removed from the libraries and bookshops; Louis Armstrong becomes Luigi Fortebraccio, and Benny Goodman is Beniamino Buonuomo; shortly thereafter MINCULPOP bans all jazz performance and broadcasts.
Life in the Tedeschi family goes on. For Haya it is altogether ordinary, completely forgettable, as ordinary life is, until the day when, at the beginning of the school year in September 1938, her teachers Nella Negri, Amato di Veroli, Samuel Tagliacozzo, Massimo Pavoncello and Viola Sass do not show up to teach Geography, Mathematics, History, Italian and Physical Education. Until the day when Florian, after dinner, whispering in a conspiratorial hush, as if about to say something obscene, declares, We are Jews, and she asks, What does that mean?
So many shocks, so many tragedies, for centuries, with this meaningless fact that people hide even from themselves, or, conversely, of which they boast, as if it determines who they are and what they are, as if faith and blood are in and of themselves a blessing or a curse. She, Haya, has always felt nothing along those lines, or maybe just a little about being someone’s daughter or sister, someone’s mistress, someone’s friend, which does not imply unconditional devotion to those closest to her. She has always been somehow weightless, free of the heavy burden of mother tongues, national histories, native soils, homelands, fatherlands, myths, that many of the people around her tote on their backs like a sack of red-hot stones. Like little Sisyphuses they lug this wretched and perilous load through life, these clusters of tuberculosis and syphilis germs, these elusive, invisible, and oh so infectious containers of putrescence, they even leap into the containers voluntarily, choke on the sewage sludge in their own fermented excrement, imagining, perhaps, that they are duty-bound to do so, thereby expressing their gratitude that they are still here, as if they have been spared. Haya thinks back to a dwarf tree by the road, a diminutive tree with a round crown of violet-hued blossoms, much like a bright child’s cap as it stands there alone and smiles. That little tree is like a kiss, she whispers. Borders and identities, our executors. Married couples who sow wars, vast upheaval and death.
Instead of her lost faith, Haya, like Kosovel, believes in darkness.
If you had at least been killed for reasons of honour; if you had fought for love or to forage food for your little ones. But no. First they hoodwinked you, then they slew you in war. What do you want me to do with this France which you, like I, it seems, helped survive? What do we do with it, we who lost all our friends? Ah! If it had been to defend the rivers, the hills, the mountains, the sky, the winds, the rain, I would have said: “Gladly, I concur, this is our job. Let’s fight! All our life’s joy is in the fact that we live here.” But we defended a false name for it all. When I see a river, I say “river”; when I see a tree, I say “tree”; I never say “France”. There is no such thing, Jean Giono says, although he has been dead for thirty years.
A few months before the school principal fires him, in 1938, Amato di Veroli, Haya’s favourite school teacher, brings to class his friend, the mathematician Renato Caccioppoli.* It is May. Naples smells of “Santa Lucia”, freshly washed bed linen and lemons. Haya is fifteen. Professor Caccioppoli has a handsome face. Professor Caccioppoli’s fingers are stained with tobacco and he is thirty-five. He hops around as he talks. He grins. If you are afraid of something, measure what you are afraid of and you’ll see it is but a trifle, Professor Caccioppoli says. You will see, your fear is nearly nothing, almost too small to measure.
This is when Hitler starts out on his journey; the newspapers are full of Hitler. They speak of Hitler in history classes, in maths they talk of Hitler, in gym class they talk of Hitler. Hitler arrives in Rome, then comes to Naples; excitement runs high. Four trains follow Hitler’s train carrying five hundred foreign diplomats, generals, agents, party leaders and journalists, all in uniform, one uniform or another, an entire little army. Hitler is in a foul mood. He often scowls. He suffers from stomach pain, mostly gas, so he is forever gulping Mutaflor, prescribed by his faithful companion Dr Morell, but he takes scant joy in his encounter with “the little man”, King Vittorio Emmanuele. And so, as he is depressed, on his trip to Rome Hitler pens a will. He leaves the Party his personal effects, Berghof, his furniture and paintings, and to Eva Braun, his sisters, his other relatives, secretaries and servants, he leaves tidy sums from the sales of Mein Kampf.
At the border crossing by the little town of Brenner, the inhabitants greet Hitler’s five trains with enthusiasm; they wave banners, fling flowers on to the train carriages and smile, though it is difficult to say why (they smile). There are Italian soldiers here too, many Italian soldiers, and Fascist troops. A specially rehearsed orchestra plays both anthems, and the Duke of Pistoia, in the name of the king, holds a brief speech in which he tells the Germans how glad the Italians are to see them, and how very welcome they are in their beautiful country. The houses along the railway line are decked with banners sporting slogans that tout German-Italian friendship. The landscape is quaint, the many colours blinding.
Hitler does not enjoy himself in Rome. He is driven to the royal palace in a coach instead of a car, to a dinner with the queen, who sits next to him and to whom he says not one word; and, furthermore, he is irri
tated by the huge crucifix she wears around her neck, so he stares at her bosom. The king spreads all sorts of stories about Hitler’s odd habits, and reveals that during his first night there Hitler asks for a woman to be sent to his room, so that she can tuck him into bed as if he were a child.
A great military and naval review is prepared in Naples—that should brighten Hitler’s spirits. It is 5 May, 1938. The bay is full of submarines and torpedo boats. School has been cancelled. The pupils are ordered to join in the welcoming throng, to wave and shout. Haya says, I am not going. Ada and Florian say, That is imprudent. All of us will go.